Gini Alhadeff Reads from André Breton's ’Nadja’

In this episode of Private Life, the writer, translator, and editor Gini Alhadeff reads excerpts from Mark Polizzotti’s recent translation, for NYRB Classics, of André Breton’s 1928 surrealist novel, Nadja. Blending autobiography and fiction, this abidingly strange book recounts, analyzes, and remembers Breton’s brief love affair with the eponymous young woman in 1920s Paris.  

Alhadeff is the author of a memoir, The Sun at Midday (1997), and a novel, Diary of a Dijinn (2003), and the translator of a number of Italian novels, including I Am the Brother of XX, by Fleur Jaeggy, and The Road to the City, by Natalia Ginzburg. 

To find Mark Polizzotti’s translation of Nadja by André Breton and other NYRB Classics, visit our book imprint at nyrb.com. Subscribe to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963. 

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Jarrett Earnest

Jarrett Earnest has contributed essays to the New York Review of Books on artists ranging from Tom of Finland to Jack Whitten. He is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (2018) and Valid Until Sunset (2023) and has edited several collections of criticism, including volumes of Dave Hickey and Peter Schjeldahl as well as artist's writings by Nayland Blake and Jesse Murry. His curatorial projects include the acclaimed 2019 exhibition "The Young and Evil" at David Zwirner gallery, New York.

What is Private Life: A New York Review Podcast?

Private Life is a podcast from The New York Review, hosted by contributor Jarrett Earnest. Each episode offers intimate, in-depth conversations with distinguished voices from across the literary landscape—about their lives, their work, and the ideas that shape both. Along the way, they revisit pieces from the The New York Review of Books's robust sixty-year archive (some episodes of the podcast will feature newly recorded readings of these classic essays) to situate arguments within contemporary culture. The show also includes discussions of titles from our book publishing arm, New York Review Books, featuring talks with translator Mark Polizzotti on Andre Breton's surrealist masterpiece Nadja and musician Richard Hell on the re-issue of his novel Godlike. Other early episodes find Joyce Carol Oates ruminating on true crime, while Darryl Pinckney opens up about the perils of memoir and his formative friendship with essayist Elizabeth Hardwick. 

Private Life is a personable, expansive invitation for longtime subscribers and a new generation of readers alike to connect with the past, present and future of The New York Review. 

This is Private Life, a New York Review Podcast. I’m Jarrett Earnest. Today’s episode is a reading from Mark Polizzotti’s new translation of André Breton’s Nadja from 1928, published last year as an NYRB Classic. This excerpt is taken from the middle of the book, where Breton recounts a sequence of encounters with the mysterious Nadja herself. It is read by Gini Alhadeff.

Nadja by André Breton

Last October 4, at the end of one of those completely idle and dreary afternoons that I have a knack for spending, I found myself on rue Lafayette. After pausing for a moment at the stall outside the Humanité bookshop and buying Trotsky’s latest volume, I pushed on aimlessly toward the Opéra. The offices and shops were starting to empty, the doors of buildings up and down the street were closing, people on the sidewalks were taking their leave, and it was growing more crowded. Somewhat unconsciously, I studied the faces, the clothes, the bearings: it was not yet these folks who would wage the Revolution. I had just crossed the intersection whose name I don’t know, in front of a church. Suddenly, when she is still perhaps ten paces from me, coming in the opposite direction, I see a young woman, very poorly dressed, who also sees me or had seen me. She walks with head held high, unlike all the other pedestrians. So slight that her feet barely touch the ground. An imperceptible smile might be playing about her lips. Curiously made up, like someone who, having begun with the eyes, didn’t have time to finish, leaving the rims of those eyes so dark for a blond. The rims, not the lids. (Such a dazzling effect can be obtained, and obtained only, if you carefully run the eyeliner pencil under the lid, at the waterline. It is interesting to note in this regard that Blanche Derval in the role of Solange, even seen from up close, did not appear to be wearing makeup. Does this mean that I value what is barely tolerated in the street but recommended in the theater only if one disregards its being forbidden in one case and mandatory in the other? Perhaps.) I had never seen such eyes. Without a moment’s hesitation, I speak to the stranger, all the while, I freely admit, expecting the worst. She smiles, but very mysteriously, and, I would say, “knowingly,” even though I wouldn’t have thought so at the time. She claims to be going to a hairdresser’s on boulevard Magenta (I say “claims” because she later admitted she wasn’t going anywhere). She tells me somewhat insistently about the difficulties she’s having with money but mainly, it seems, as an excuse and explanation for the considerable shabbiness of her outfit. We stop at a café near the Gare du Nord. I look at her more closely. What can be going on in those eyes that is so extraordinary? What is reflected in them, that mix of obscure distress and luminous pride? This is also the enigma posed by the confession she starts making to me, without asking for anything more, with a confidence that might (or might not?) be misplaced. In Lille, the city she comes from and that she left only two or three years before, she knew a student who loved her and whom she might have loved. One day, she decided to leave him when he least expected it, “so as not to hold him back.” That’s when she came to Paris, from where she wrote to him at longer and longer intervals without ever giving out her address. Nevertheless, about a year later they ran into each other here in the city, to their mutual surprise. Taking her hands, he couldn’t help saying how much she had changed and, staring at those hands, he was amazed to see how well manicured they were (they aren’t now). Then mechanically, in turn, she looked at one of the hands that were holding hers and couldn’t repress a cry when she noticed that the last two fingers were fused together. “You’ve been injured!” The young man was forced to show her his other hand, which presented the same deformity. She questions me about this at length, with great feeling: “Is that possible? To have lived so long with someone, had every possible opportunity to observe him, to make a point of discovering every one of his physical and other peculiarities, and still know so little about him, still not even notice that! Do you think, do you think love can do such things? And he was so angry, what can you expect, all I could do at that point was keep my mouth shut—those hands . . .Then he said something I don’t understand, a word I don’t understand, he said: ‘You mooncalf! I’m going back to Alsace Lorraine. Over there, women know how to love.’ Why ‘mooncalf ’? Do you know?” Naturally, I react rather strongly to the statement she has just quoted. “No matter. But I find those generalities about Alsace-Lorraine odious, this individual is certainly an utter cretin, etc. . . . So, he’s gone, and you haven’t seen him since? So much the better.” She tells me her name, the one she’s chosen for herself: “Nadja, because in Russian it’s the beginning of the word for hope, and because it’s only the beginning.”Only now does she think to ask me who I am (in the very limited sense of the word). I tell her. Then she goes back to her past, talks about her parents. She is especially moved by the memory of her father: “Such a weak man! If you knew how weak he’s always been. When he was young, you see, they never refused him anything. His parents, very well off. There weren’t cars yet, but even so, a fine carriage, a coachman . . . He frittered it all away. I love him so much. Whenever I think of him, when I tell myself just how weak he is . . .Oh, it’s not the same with Mother. She’s a good woman, as people say, a fine woman. Not at all the wife my father should have had. At our house, everything was spic-and-span, of course, but, you understand, he wasn’t the type who liked to come home and see her in an apron. It’s true he found his table all set, dinner ready to serve, but he didn’t find what they call” (with an ironically greedy expression and an amusing gesture) “a lavish ‘spread.’ I’m very fond of Mother, I wouldn’t want to hurt her for the world. So when I came to Paris, I told her I had a letter of reference to the Vaugirard convent. Naturally I never used it. But when I write to her, I always end my letter by saying: ‘I hope to see you soon,’ andI add: ‘God willing, as Sister So-and-So says’. . . I make up a name. How happy that must make her! In her letters to me, what touches me most, what I’d give all the rest for, are the postscripts. She always feels compelled to add: ‘I wonder what you could be doing in Paris.’ Poor Mother, if she only knew!” What Nadja is doing in Paris, she herself wonders as well. In the evening, at around seven, she likes to be in a second class car of the metro. Most of the riders are people who have finished work. She sits among them, tries to guess from their faces what could be occupying their thoughts. No doubt they’re fretting about what they’ve left undone until tomorrow, only until tomorrow, or what’s awaiting them that evening, which cheers them up or makes them more anxious. Nadja stares into space: “Those are some decent people.” More agitated than I wish to appear, this time I get angry: “Hardly! Anyway, it’s not about that. Those people can’t be interesting as long as they can stand working for a living, no matter what other cares they have. How can this elevate them if their strongest impulse isn’t revolt? Besides, at that moment, you see them but they don’t see you. Personally, I hate with all my might the servitude that everyone wants me to uphold. I pity people for being condemned to it, for not being able to escape it, but it’s not the hardships they endure that will make me feel kindly toward them; it is, and could only be, the vigor of their protest. I know that people can still feel free even at a factory furnace, or at one of those machines that inexorably force you, day in and day out, to make the same repetitive movement every few seconds, or when subject to intolerable orders, or in a cell, or before a firing squad, but it’s not the torture they suffer that confers this freedom. It is, I fully believe this, a perpetual unshackling—and even then, this unshackling becomes possible, constantly possible, only if those shackles do not crush us, as they do so many of those you’re talking about. But it is also, and perhaps even more so in human terms, the relatively long but marvelous line of footsteps that a man can follow when unchained. Do you think they’re capable of taking those steps? Do they even have the time? Do they have the courage? Decent people, you said: yes, decent, like the ones who get themselves killed in wartime, right? The point is this: heroes are a bunch of unfortunate wretches and a few poor imbeciles. Personally, I confess that those steps are all that matters. Where are they going, that’s the real question. They’ll surely end up forging a path, and who knows whether on that path it will become clear how to loosen your chains, or to help loosen the chains of those who couldn’t follow it. Only then will it be all right to pause for a moment, but without ever going backward.” (You get an idea of what I can say on the subject, provided I remember to treat it concretely.) Nadja listens and doesn’t try to contradict me. Perhaps she only meant to praise the notion of work. She starts telling me about her health, which is very precarious. The doctor she consulted, whom she’d chosen because she felt she could trust him, ordered an immediate cure, for all the money she had left, at the Mont-Doré spa. The idea delights her, given how impracticable such a trip would be. Instead, she has decided that steady manual labor could make up for this unfeasible cure. And so she applied for work in a bakery or butcher shop, where, her purely poetic judgment told her, she had the greatest chances of staying healthy. Each time, she was offered a paltry salary. Sometimes, before answering, they gave her the once-over. One baker, who had promised her seventeen francs a day, checked her out, then corrected himself: seventeen or eighteen. Very cheerfully: “I told him, seventeen, it’s a deal; eighteen, no.” We are now walking along a narrow street, I think rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière. It’s dinnertime. I start to take my leave. She asks who’s expecting me. “My wife.”—“Married! Oh! Well, then . . .” And in another tone, very serious and contemplative: “Too bad. But . . . and that grand idea of yours? I was beginning to see it so clearly. It truly is a star, a star toward which you were heading. You cannot fail to reach that star. Hearing you talk, I felt that nothing would prevent you—nothing, not even me . . .You can never see that star as I saw it. You don’t understand: it’s like the heart of a heartless flower.” I am very moved. To change the subject, I ask where she’s planning to have dinner. And suddenly that lightness that I’ve seen only in her, perhaps indeed that freedom: “Where?” Her finger points. “Well, there, or there” (the two closest restaurants), “where I am, of course. It’s always that way.” Before leaving, I want to ask her a question that would sum up all the others, a question that probably only I would ever ask but that has at least once received a worthy reply: “Who are you?” And she, without missing a beat: “I am the wandering soul.” We part company, agreeing to meet the next day at the bar on the corner of rue Lafayette and Faubourg-Poissonnière. She makes me promise to bring some of my books, even though I strongly advise her against read ing them. Life is other than what one writes. Then she holds me back a few moments longer to tell me what touches her about me. It is, in my thinking, my language, my entire way of being, it seems—and this is one of the compliments that has most affected me—my simplicity.
October 5.—Nadja has arrived first, ahead of time. She’s no longer the same as yesterday. Rather elegant, dressed entirely in black and red, a very pretty hat that she takes off, revealing her straw-colored hair that has given up its incredible disorder, silk stockings, shoes that are, unlike the first pair, very suitable. Our conversation has also become more constrained and begins, on her part, somewhat haltingly. That is, until she picks up the books I’ve brought for her (The Lost Steps, Manifesto of Surrealism): “Lost steps! But there aren’t any.” She leafs through the book with great curiosity. Her attention is drawn to a poem I’ve quoted by Jarry:The pubic arch of menhirs straddles the moor . . .Instead of putting her off, this poem, which she reads once fairly quickly, then studies more carefully, seems to have a profound effect on her. At the end of the second quatrain, her eyes tear up and are filled with the vision of a forest. She sees the poet passing near that forest, as if she’s following him from a distance: “No, he’s skirting the forest. He cannot enter, he doesn’t go in.” Then she loses him and returns to the poem, a little before where she left off, asking about the words that surprise her most, giving each one the sign of complicity or precise assent that it requires. Hunts with their steel the marten and ermine. With their steel? The marten . . . and ermine. Yes, I see: the frigid hollows, the ice-cold rivers: with their steel. A bit farther down: C’havann, the owl, eating the whirr of maybugs,(In fright, shutting the book:) “Oh! That’s death!”The color relationship between the covers of the two books surprises and seduces her. Apparently it “suits” me. I’ve surely done it on purpose (which is true). Then she tells me about two friends she had. One, upon her arrival in Paris, whom she habitually refers to as “Special Friend”; that was what she called him because he never wanted her to know who he was. She still feels great veneration for him, a man of around seventy-five, who had spent years in the colonies, and who told her when he left that he was returning to Senegal. The other, an American, who seems to have inspired very different feelings in her: “And besides, he called me Lena, in memory of his dead daughter. It’s very affectionate, very touching, don’t you think? Sometimes I could no lon ger stand being called that, as if in a dream: Lena, Lena . . .So I would wave my hand in front of his eyes, like this, and say: No, not Lena, Nadja.” We go out. She continues: “I see your home. Your wife. Brunette, of course. Small. Pretty. And next to her is a dog. Maybe also, but somewhere else, a cat” (all true). “For the moment, that’s all I see.” I’m about to go home; Nadja accompanies me in a taxi. We remain silent for a while, then abruptly she starts using the familiar tu with me: “A game: say something. Anything, a number, a name. Like this” (she closes her eyes): “Two, two what? Two women. What do these women look like? Dressed in black. Where are they? In a park. And what are they do ing? . . . Oh, come on, it’s so easy, why don’t you want to play? Anyway, that’s how I talk to myself when I’m alone; I tell myself all kinds of stories. And not only stories: that’s pretty much how I live all the time.”* I leave her at my door: “And what will I do now? Where will I go? But it’s so simple to head slowly back toward rue Lafayette, Faubourg-Poissonnière, to start by returning to exactly where we were.”
October 6.—To avoid loitering too much, I leave home at around four, intending to go on foot to the Nouvelle France, where Nadja is supposed to meet me at five-thirty. Enough time to make a detour via the main boulevards: not far from the Opéra, where I have to retrieve my pen from a repair shop. Atypically, I decide to take the right-hand sidewalk on rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin. One of the first people I spot heading toward me is Nadja, looking as she did the first day. She walks as if trying not to see me. Like the first day, I retrace my steps to accompany her. She proves fairly incapable of explaining her presence in that street, where, to forestall further questions, she says she’s looking for Dutch candies. Without realizing it, we have already made an about-face, and we go into the first café we come across. Nadja observes a certain distance toward me, even appears suspicious. She
turns over my hat, no doubt to read my initials on the sweatband, though she claims she’s doing it mechanically, out of a habit of trying to discover the nationality of certain men without them knowing. She admits that she’d intended to miss our rendezvous. I noticed when running into her that she was carrying the copy of The Lost Steps I’d lent her. It is now on the table and, from the top edge, I see that only several pages have been cut open. They’re the ones containing a brief essay called “The New Spirit,” which in fact relates a remarkable encounter that Louis Aragon, André Derain, and I each had one day, only several minutes apart. The in decisiveness we had all shown on that occasion; the difficulty we had a few moments later trying to characterize what had just happened to us; the strange, mystical call that drove Aragon and me to return to the places where that veritable sphinx had appeared in the guise of a charming woman—that sphinx who crossed from sidewalk to sidewalk, questioning the passersby, and who had sequentially ignored the three of us—and, in search of her, to run down all the streets that even tangentially connected those places; the hopelessness of that pursuit, given how much time had elapsed: that was what Nadja had immediately gravitated toward. She is surprised and disappointed that the narrative of that day’s events did not seem to elicit any further comment from me. She presses me to explain the exact meaning I attribute to my report and, since I published it, how objective I feel it is. I’m forced to answer that I have no idea, that in such matters the only right I can claim is to record, that I was the primary victim of that deception, if deception there was, but I can see that she’s not letting me off the hook. I read impatience in her eyes, then consternation. Perhaps she thinks I’m lying: there persists a certain awkwardness between us. When she mentions returning home, I offer to accompany her. She gives the driver the address of the Théâtre des Arts, which, she tells me, is a few doors down from her building. On the way, she stares at me at length, in silence. Then her eyelids close and reopen very quickly, as when you find yourself in the presence of someone you haven’t seen in a long time, or that you never expected to see again, as if to signify that you “don’t believe your eyes.” A certain struggle appears to be raging in her, but suddenly she lets herself go, shuts her eyes completely, offers her lips . . .Now she tells me of my power over her, the ability I have to make her think and do whatever I wish, perhaps more than I think I wish. Given this, she begs me not to undertake anything against her. She feels that nothing about her has been a secret to me, from well before we first met. A short scene in dialogue toward the end of “Soluble Fish,” which seems to be all she has read of the Manifesto (a scene to which, moreover, I’ve never been able to ascribe a precise meaning and in which the characters remain opaque for me, their restlessness immune to interpretation, as if they had been brought there and carried off again by waves of sand), leaves her with the sense that she’d actually participated in it and even that she’d played the part—obscure, to say the least—of Hélène.* The location, the atmosphere, the actors’ stances were exactly what I had imagined. She’d like to show me “where it took place.” I propose we have dinner together. A certain confusion must have entered her mind, as she has us driven, not to Île Saint-Louis, as she thinks, but to Place Dauphine, which curiously enough is the setting for another episode of “Soluble Fish,” the one beginning “A kiss is so soon forgotten.” (Place Dauphine is surely one of the most profoundly remote places I know, one of the worst wastelands in Paris. Whenever I’ve found myself there, I’ve felt the urge to leave gradually dissipate, and I’ve had to fight with myself to get free of a grip that was very soft, pleasantly insistent, and, ultimately, destructive. Moreover, I lived for a while in a hotel near that square, the City Hôtel, in which the comings and goings at all hours, for anyone who isn’t satisfied with simple answers, were highly suspect.) Daylight is fading. In order to be alone, we have the wine merchant serve us at an outdoor table. During the meal, for the first time, Nadja acts rather frivolously. A drunkard keeps hovering around us. He spews out loud, incoherent words, in an angry voice. Among those words, he keeps repeating one or two obscenities, which he emphasizes. His wife, watching from under the trees, merely calls out now and again, “Are you coming or what?” I try several times to shoo him away, but in vain. When our dessert arrives, Nadja begins looking around her. She is certain that an underground tunnel runs beneath our feet, starting at the Palais de Justice (she shows me from where in the Palais, slightly to the right of the white flight of steps) and snaking around the Hôtel Henri IV. She is disturbed by the idea of what has already happened in this square and what is yet to happen. While at this moment only two or three couples are fading into the twilight, she seems to see a crowd. “And the dead, the dead!” The drunkard continues to make lugubrious jokes. Nadja’s eyes now roam over the apartment houses. “Over there, do you see that window? It’s black, like all the others. Watch closely. In a minute, it will light up. It will be red.” The minute passes. The window lights up. There are, in fact, red curtains. (I’m sorry, but I can’t help it if this stretches the limits of credibility. Still, on a matter such as this, I’d be hard pressed to take sides: I’ll simply acknowledge that the window was black, then became red, and that’s all.) I confess that at this point, I start to get frightened, and so does Nadja. “How dreadful! Do you see what’s happening in those trees? The blue and the wind, the blue wind. Only one other time did I see that blue wind run through those same trees. It was over there, from a window in the Henri IV,* and my friend, the second one I told you about, was getting ready to leave. And there was a voice saying: ‘You’re going to die, you’re going to die.’ I didn’t want to die, but I felt so dizzy . . . I would surely have fallen if he hadn’t pulled me back.” I think it’s high time for us to go. All along the quays, I can feel her trembling. She’s the one who wanted to walk back past the Conciergerie. She is very unrestrained, very trusting of me. Still, she’s looking for something, she absolutely insists that we enter a courtyard, the nondescript courtyard of a police station that she quickly scans. “It’s not here . . . But, tell me, why do you have to go to jail? What did you do? I was in jail once. Who was I? It was centuries ago. And you, back then, who were you?” We’re again walking alongside the fence when suddenly Nadja refuses to take another step. There is, to the right, a window below street level that looks out on the moat; she cannot tear her eyes away from it. It’s in front of that window, which looks dis used, that we absolutely have to wait: this she knows. It’s from there that everything could come. It’s there that every thing begins. She grips the fence with both hands so that I can’t drag her away. She barely answers my questions. Tired of fighting, I end up waiting for her to resume our walk of her own free will. She is still thinking about the underground tunnel and probably believes we’re at one of its exits. She wonders who she might have been in Marie Antoinette’s entourage. Passing footsteps give her the tremors. I start to get worried, and loosening her hands one at a time, I finally oblige her to come away with me. More than half an hour has been spent like this. After crossing the bridge, we head toward the Louvre. Nadja seems constantly distracted. To bring her attention back to me, I recite for her a poem by Baudelaire, but the inflections of my voice inspire a new fright in her, aggravated by the memory of our kiss earlier: “a kiss that carried a threat.” She halts once more, leans her elbows on the stone parapet from where her gaze, and mine, plunge into the river, which at that hour is sparkling with lights: “That hand, that hand on the Seine, why is there a flaming hand on the water? It’s true that fire and water are the same thing. But what does that hand mean? How do you interpret it? Just let me watch that hand. Why do you want us to leave? What are you afraid of? You think I’m very sick, don’t you? I’m not sick. But what does that mean for you, fire and water, a hand of fire on the water?” (Playfully:) “Not fortune, of course: fire and water are the same thing; fire and gold are completely different.” At around midnight, we arrive at the Tuileries, where she wants to sit for a moment. We are in front of a fountain, and she seems to be following the curve of its jet. “Those are your thoughts and mine. See where they all start from, how high they rise, and how it’s even prettier when they fall back down. And then they are immediately absorbed, taken up with the same force, again there’s that broken surge, the fall . . . and so on indefinitely.” I cry out: “But, Nadja, how strange! Where did you get that image, which is expressed in almost exactly the same way in a book you couldn’t know and that I’ve just read?” (And I have to explain to her that it’s the subject of a vignette, at the head of the third of Berkeley’sThree Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, in the French edition of 1750, where it is accompanied by the caption: “Urget aquas vis sursum eadem, flectit que deorsum,” which at the end of the book takes on particular significance visà-vis the defense of idealist philosophy.) But she isn’t listen ing, her attention now absorbed by the doings of a man who has passed by us several times and whom she thinks she knows, as it isn’t the first time she’s been in these gardens at this time of night. That man, if it is indeed he, offered to marry her. It made her think about her little daughter, a child whose existence she reveals to me very cautiously, and whom she adores, especially because she is so unlike the other children, “with her idea of always plucking out dolls’ eyes to see what’s behind them.” She knows that children are always drawn to her: wherever she is, they tend to flock around her, come smile at her. She is now speaking as if for herself alone, the things she says are of variable interest, her face is turned away from me, I’m starting to get tired. But, without any sign of impatience on my part: “Just one thing. I suddenly had the feeling I was going to cause you pain.” (Turning toward me:) “It’s over.” We leave the gardens and soon stop once more, in a bar on rue Saint-Honoré called the Dauphin. She remarks that we’ve come from Place Dauphine to the Dauphin. (In the game that consists of looking for correspondences between a person and a given animal, people often agree that I’m a dolphin.) Nadja cannot bear the sight of a mosaic pattern that runs across the floor from the counter, and we have to leave the bar soon after we’ve entered. She gets out in front of the Théâtre des Arts. We agree to meet again at the Nouvelle France, but not until the day after tomorrow.
October 7.—I suffered a violent headache that, perhaps wrongly, I attribute to the emotions of the night before, as well as to the sustained effort of attention and accommodation I had to make. All morning long, too, I missed Nadja, chiding myself for not arranging to see her today. I’m dissatisfied with myself. I feel like I watch her too closely, but how can I do otherwise? How does she view me, judge me? It’s un forgivable of me to keep seeing her if I don’t love her. Don’t I love her? When I’m near her, I’m nearer to the things that are near her. In the state she’s in, she will surely need my help, one way or another, and without warning. Whatever she asks, it would be despicable of me to refuse: she’s so pure, so free of earthly bonds, with such a fragile—but marvelous—hold on life. She was trembling yesterday, perhaps from cold. So lightly dressed. It would also be unforgivable if I didn’t reassure her about the nature of my interest, if I didn’t persuade her that she could never be just an object of curiosity for me, a mere whim, as she might believe. What is to be done? Resign myself to waiting until tomorrow afternoon—that’s just impossible. What to do in the meantime, if I don’t see her? And what if I never saw her again? I would no longer know. I would therefore deserve not to know. And I would never find it again. False annunciations exist, fleeting moments of grace, veritable death traps for the soul, the abyss, the abyss into which the splendidly mournful bird of divination has plummeted. What can I do, other than go at six o’clock to the bar where we had met previously? No chance of finding her there, of course, unless . . . But isn’t “unless” where Nadja’s great potential for intervention resides, well beyond luck? I go out at three o’clock with my wife and a friend; in the taxi, we continue talking about Nadja, as we had done over lunch. Suddenly, as I’m paying no particular attention to the passersby, I don’t know what rapid blur, there, on the left hand sidewalk, at the entrance to rue Saint-Georges, makes me almost automatically rap on the window. It’s as if Nadja had just walked by. I run haphazardly, in one of the three directions she might have taken. It is indeed she, now stopped, talking with a man who, it seemed to me, was with her earlier. She leaves him fairly quickly to join me. At the café, our conversation gets off to a difficult start. It’s now been two days in a row that I’ve run into her: it’s clear she is at my mercy. That said, she appears very reticent. Her financial situation is completely desperate, but to be able to improve it, she’d have to not know me. She makes me touch her dress, to show me how sturdy it is, “but at the expense of any other quality.” She can’t pile up any more debt, and she’s dealing with threats from the manager of her hotel and his horrifying insinuations. She makes no secret of the means she would employ to earn money were it not for me, even though she no longer has the wherewithal to get her hair done so she could go to the Claridge, where, inevitably . . .“What can you do,” she says with a laugh. “Money slips through my fingers. Anyway, now it’s all gone. I did once find myself with twenty-five thousand francs, which my friend had left me. I was assured it would be very easy to triple that sum in a few days if I just went to The Hague to buy cocaine with it. They gave me thirty-five thousand more francs for the same purpose. Everything went off without a hitch. Two days later, I brought back nearly two kilos of drugs in my bag. The trip couldn’t have been more pleasant. And yet, getting off the train, I heard a kind of voice telling me: ‘You won’t get through.’ I was barely on the platform when a man I’d never seen before came up to me. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘am I indeed speaking to Miss D. . . .?’—‘Yes, but, forgive me, I don’t know. . .’—‘No matter, miss, here’s my card,’ and he brought me to the police station. There, they asked me what was in my handbag. Naturally, I told them what it was and opened it to show them. They let me go the same day, thanks to the intervention of a friend, a lawyer or judge named G. They didn’t ask me anything else, and as for me, I was so shaken that I forgot to mention that not all of it was in my bag; they should also look under my hatband. But what they would have found there wouldn’t have been worth the trouble. I kept it for myself. I swear that’s been over for a long time.” She’s now unfolding a letter that she hands me. It’s from a man she met one Sunday coming out of the Théâtre Français. He must be an office employee, since he waited several days to write to her and not before the beginning of the month. She could telephone him now, him or someone else, but she can’t make up her mind to do it. No question that money slips through her fingers. I ask how much she needs right away: five hundred francs. Not having it on me, I offer to give it to her the next day. All her worry seems to evaporate. I savor once again her adorable mix of lightness and fervor. Respectfully I kiss her very pretty teeth. She, slowly, solemnly, the second time several notes higher than the first: “The communion takes place in silence . . .The communion takes place in silence.” It is, she explains, that this kiss leaves her with the impression of something sacred, in which her teeth “served as the host.”
October 8.—On awakening, I open a letter from Aragon in Italy, containing the reproduction of the center detail of a painting by Uccello that I didn’t know. The painting’s title is The Profanation of the Host.* Toward the end of the day, which has passed without further incident, I go to our usual bar (the Nouvelle France), where I wait for Nadja in vain. More than ever, I dread her disappearance. My only resort is to try to find where she lives, somewhere around the Théâtre des Arts. It doesn’t take long: the third hotel I try, the Hôtel du Théâtre on rue de Chéroy. Not finding her in, I leave a note asking how to get her what she needed so urgently the day before yesterday.
October 9.—Nadja called while I was out. To the person who answered the phone, and who asked on my behalf where she could be reached, she answered: “No one can reach me.” But a little later, she sent a pneumatique inviting me to come to the bar at five-thirty. I indeed find her there. Her absence the day before was the result of a misunderstanding: we had, that one time, arranged to meet at the Régence, and it was I who had forgotten. I give her the money.* She bursts into tears. We are alone when an old peddler comes in, a kind I’ve never seen before. He offers us several crudely colored pages from a history of France. The one he holds out to me, which he insists I take, depicts notable episodes from the reigns of Louis VI and Louis VII (and in fact, I have just been heavily immersed in that period, as it’s the time of the Court of Love, and had been imagining very intensely how life was conceived of back then). The old man makes a number of jumbled comments about each of the illustrations; I can’t follow what he’s saying about Suger. For the two francs I give him, then two more to make him go away, he is absolutely insistent on leaving us all his pictures, as well as a dozen glossy color postcards of women. Impossible to dissuade him. He backs away: “God bless you, miss. God bless you, sir.” Now Nadja has me read letters that she recently received. These letters are of little interest to me. Some are tearful, others declamatory, still others ridiculous, all signed by this G. she’d mentioned previously. G. . . .—but isn’t that the name of the criminal court judge who, the other day at the murder trial of Mrs. Sierri, accused of poisoning her lover, let loose with the odious remark that the defendant had “bitten the hand that fed her” (laughter in the court)? And in fact, Paul Éluard had asked us to find that name for him, which he couldn’t remember and had left blank in the manuscript of his “Review of the Press” for the next issue of LaRévolution surréaliste. I notice with some queasiness that printed on the backs of the envelopes I’m looking at is a pair of scales.
October 10.—We have dinner on Quai Malaquais, at the restaurant Delaborde. The waiter is exceedingly clumsy. It’s as if he’s mesmerized by Nadja. He fusses at our table for no reason, scraping imaginary crumbs from the tablecloth, moving her handbag around, proving utterly incapable of remembering our order. Nadja laughs up her sleeve and warns me that it’s not over yet. And indeed, while he serves the other tables normally, he splashes wine outside of our glasses and, while taking infinite care to set a dish in front of one of us, he jostles the other and sends it crashing to the floor. Over the course of the meal (and this, too, is almost incredible), I count eleven broken plates. It’s true that whenever he enters the dining room, he is facing us; then he raises his eyes to Nadja and seems to have a dizzy spell. It’s at once comical and painful. He ends up not daring to approach our table, making it extremely difficult for us to finish our dinner. Nadja is not at all surprised. She knows she has this power over certain men, for instance over blacks, who, wherever she might be, are compelled to come talk to her. She tells me that at three o’clock, at the ticket window of Le Peletier metro station, someone handed her a new two-franc coin, which she kept tightly gripped in her hand all the way down the stairs. To the ticket-taker at the turnstile, she asked: “Heads or tails?” He answered tails. He won. “You were asking, miss, if you would see your friend later on. You will see him.” We walk along the quays toward the Institut de France. She speaks again of the man she calls Special Friend, to whom she says she owes being who she is. “If not for him, I’d just be the lowest of streetwalkers.” I learn that he used to put her under hypnosis every evening, after dinner. It took her several months to realize it. He made her recount how she’d spent her day, in every detail, praising what he considered good and criticizing the rest. And after that, a physical discomfort in her head would always prevent her from doing those things he must have forbidden. That man, lost in his white beard, who wanted her to know nothing about him, is like a king to her. Wherever she went with him, it seemed as if people respectfully stood at attention as he passed by. And yet, sometime later, she saw him one evening, on a bench in a metro station, looking very weary, very disheveled, and very aged. We have arrived at the start of rue de Seine, which we turn onto, as Nadja does not want to keep walking straight ahead. She is again distracted, tells me she’s following a streak of lightning that a hand is slowly tracing across the sky. “Always that hand.” She shows it to me in reality, on a poster, a short way past the Dorbon bookstore. There is indeed, high above us, a red hand with a pointing index finger, advertising who knows what. She absolutely must touch that hand, which she jumps up several times to reach and against which she finally manages to slap hers. “The hand of fire, that’s about you, you know, it’s you.” She remains silent for a while, and I think she has tears in her eyes. Then suddenly, placing herself in front of me, practically blocking my path, with that extraordinary way she has of calling me, as you might call out to someone from room to room in an empty castle: “André? André? . . .You’ll write a novel about me. I promise. Don’t say no. Beware: everything fades, everything disappears. Something of us must remain . . . But it doesn’t matter: you’ll pick another name, and that name, believe me when I tell you, is very important. It has to be a little like the name of fire, since fire always enters into it where you’re concerned. The hand, too, but that’s less critical than fire. What I see is a flame starting from the wrist, like this”—with a gesture of palming a card—“which makes the hand burn up immediately, vanish in the blink of an eye. You’ll find a Latin or Arabic pseudonym.* Promise me. You have to.” She uses a new image to help me picture how she lives: it’s like in the morning when she takes her bath and her body floats away as she stares at the surface of the water. “I am the thought on the bath in a room without mirrors.” She’d forgotten to tell me about the strange incident that happened to her yesterday evening, at around eight o’clock, when, believing she was alone, she was singing and dancing as she walked under the arcades of the Palais Royal. An old woman emerged from a closed doorway, and she thought the woman was going to ask for a handout. But all she wanted was a pencil. Nadja lent her hers and the woman made a show of scribbling some words on a calling card before slipping it under the door. She took the opportunity to hand Nadja a similar card, explaining that she had come to see “Madam Camée” and that the latter was unfortunately not in. The scene took place in front of a shop, on whose facade one could read the words for stone cameos: CAMÉES DURS. The woman looked a lot like a witch. I study the diminutive card that Nadja insists on giving me: “Madam Aubry-Abrivard, woman of letters, 20 rue de Varenne, 4th floor, right.” This episode demands some clarification. Nadja, who has thrown a flap of her cape over her shoulder, suddenly and with remarkable ease looks like the Devil as he appears in Roman tic etchings. It is very dark and very cold. Moving closer to her, I’m appalled to see that she’s trembling, literally, “like a leaf.”
October 11.—Paul Éluard went to the address on that card. He found no one home. Pinned to the door, upside down, was an envelope bearing the words: “Today, October 11th, Mme Aubry-Abrivard will return very late, but will return most certainly.” I’m in a bad mood following a conversation I had that afternoon, which went on too long for no good reason. On top of which, Nadja arrived late, and I’m expecting nothing sensational from her. We wander through the streets, side by side but very apart. She repeats at various moments a sentence whose syllables she articulates more and more distinctly: “Time is a tease. Time is a tease because everything has to come in its time.” It’s irritating to watch her read the menus outside restaurants and pun on the names of the dishes. I’m bored. We walk along boulevard Magenta past the Sphinx Hôtel. She points out the neon sign bearing those words, which made her decide to register there her first night in Paris. She stayed for several months, her only visitor being Special Friend, who passed for her uncle.
You can buy Mark Polizzotti’s translation of André Breton’s Nadja from NYRB.com or from your favorite bookseller. Private Life is hosted by me, Jarrett Earnest along with associate producer Luna Hayes Dean. The audio is edited and produced by Tyler Hill. The music is by Matthew Acoin, and it is a production of the New York Review