Weightless words

I am blessed with an inexhaustible optimism, and every moment I live feels as though it overflows with infinite meaning, provided I give it my undivided attention.That is why I read aloud like someone eating after a long fast, savoring every bite slowly. And now, having finally learned to handle the audio console—after tweaking the knobs of the irons for four long years, and no longer recording rumble and hiss—it strikes me as quite an achievement, one that still feels as fragile as it is surreal; until now, my performances were simply winged words scattered to the wind, given their ephemeral nature. That is to say, I am now capable of recording my dreams without anyone else’s help.Forty years ago now, as beach days drew toward the end of summer, the coarse sand of these coastal latitudes required no towels, and the suffocating heat had given way to fair weather, I used to read Gustave Flaubert aloud to a girl who had come to visit me. For a soundtrack, I had only the murmur of the waves.Even back then, I was resolved to follow in the footsteps of the old masters, to write relentlessly for the rest of my days—which is hardly the same thing as merely stringing words together. In fact, I had already been writing poetry since 1980, though I now realize they were actually love songs.Like the rock songs I was listening to at the time. I say this without the slightest petulance, because when I began reading true poets, I immediately realized they did not write to sound “pretty”; rather, they wrote words with weight, in the manner of sculptors carving marble, stripping away everything superfluous from the words until, from a raw block extracted from the quarries of Carrara, they brought forth the wonders of Michelangelo Buonarroti.Unless you think them—unless you make them your own—words can find themselves reduced to the murmur of the waves. That was precisely why I had chosen Flaubert’s Novembre to entertain the correspondent who had actually come to say goodbye, having found the love of her life.Novembre is considered a work of juvenilia in the French writer’s canon, written when he was twenty and still steeped in the Romantic movement soon to be displaced by Realism. In fact, Novembre was published in 1928, nearly fifty years after his death. Like any true-to-form juvenilia, the magnificent writer Flaubert would later become is right there, devoid of the slightest artifice, pure and raw literary talent.The plot could not be simpler: a sexual initiation tailored to the era he inhabited—that is, at the hands of a prostitute who charges him nothing for her services, swept up, perhaps, by the ardor of the young protagonist. Though this last detail, clearly, is another romantic fantasy.Flaubert was such an inveterate whoremonger that he ended up consumed by syphilis. That walrus mustache of his mature years seen in all his portraits—he is, after all, an icon of French literature—was actually grown to conceal the teeth he lost to the mercury cure, those blue pills that wrecked his gums. But this biographical detail stirs no pity in me; if anything, pity is what one ought to feel for those poor prostitutes.Eulalie Foucaud, fifteen years his senior, initiated the young and reckless Flaubert at the Hôtel Richelieu in Marseille in 1840 while waiting for a ship to carry her to French Guiana, where her husband, a colonial official, awaited her. Perhaps all too aware of the severe hardships awaiting her, she feasted upon the jeune écrivain, who was likewise waiting for a ship to carry him to Corsica.Marseille in 1840 was the gateway to the Mediterranean for Frenchmen enduring the harshness of continental cold, naturally and effortlessly inviting relaxation. What is more, the lovers met at summer’s end, a time when farewells in the port city—heading toward destinations as exotic as they were sunlit—disposed one to all manner of sexual adventures.It is said that Eulalie was smitten with the jeune écrivain and wrote him letters he didn’t even deign to answer—perhaps caught up with the prostitutes of Corsica, insufferable in his erotomaniac delusion, beyond any doubt. Furthermore, her marital peace came to an early end in French Guiana, as her husband passed away a year after arriving.Gustave Flaubert’s romantic fantasy, for its part, transformed his rite of passage into a first-person novella under twenty thousand words. Naturally, he renamed Eulalie Foucaud simply Marie—a courtesan rather than the young mother he balled—whose backstory she narrates herself, following the classic story-within-a-story framework. Though I like to think that, in truth, the lovers surrendered to quiet confidences between acts of unbridled passion; after all, not everything is meant to be a sexual postcard.Marie, much like the immortal Madame Bovary would be years later, fell prey to her runaway romantic imagin