A Madman Cannot Survive His Own Masterpiece

Javier Serena

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An excerpt from Attila by Javier Serena

He always responded in the most eccentric possible way: and so on finding himself alone and confused, ostracized and adrift in Paris, instead of giving up, Alioscha chose to entrench himself even deeper in his writing obsession. I confirmed this for myself mere hours after landing in Paris. Uneasy about his state of mind and fearing he’d gone mad following the desertion of latest female companion, I searched for him everywhere, seeking any sign that he was still alive, finally locating him in the expanses of the Parc de Belleville. It was a serendipitous discovery. I’d gone to that place with its exceptional panoramic views on a whim, trying to kill time, resigned that I’d have to wait until the next day to try and talk to him, but upon reaching a cluster of graffitied wooden benches at the top of the hill and looking to my right, I suddenly found myself confronted by my friend’s solemn and tragic silhouette, set against the Parisian rooftops. The figure he cut revealed that, over the past few weeks, he’d only sunk deeper into the delirious swamp in which he already flailed. He looked like a soloist seized by a musical fever, moving his lips to a melody only he could hear, his hair whipped about by the wind and his body in the throes of a strange vibration, so abstracted and brooding that he seemed entirely indifferent to his surroundings, wholly focused on reading from a piece of paper held inches from his face. Only when I got closer, when I could finally hear the absurd litany he was muttering, hand clenched in a claw, did I realize without surprise that I was witnessing a kind of theatrical rehearsal in that secluded spot: Alioscha slowly and deliberately reciting the most recent chapter of Attila, the novel he’d been writing for years and whose long and chaotic discourse of impossible verses and nonsensical paragraphs he would finish just days before he killed himself.

But it would take until October for Alioscha to finish his book, and at that time it was only February, a raw winter afternoon on which Alioscha seemed immune to the cold and the vast and naked sky, so absorbed in his words that he remained completely unaware of my presence until I tapped him on the shoulder.

He turned, startled, as disoriented as if he’d just surfaced from the ocean’s depths. But when he saw it was me, he smiled and embraced me warmly, remembering out loud that I had, just one week prior, in fact, advised him of the time and date of my arrival.

“I thought it was Tuesday, that tomorrow was Wednesday!” he said, pained by his mistake. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have left the house until you got in!”

He rambled on, apologizing for his confusion until he appeared to accept that there was nothing to be done about the mix-up and instead began to tell me about the progress on his book.

“I finished another chapter yesterday,” he said, holding up the pages, purposefully avoiding any discussion of the details surrounding his new life situation. “In a few months, I’ll have written the last page.”

This seemed to be his only aim: to finish the book as soon as possible, working around the clock, refusing to feel sorry for himself over Camille’s jilting, taking refuge in his idiosyncratic endeavor to string together words and thereby not confront the absolute isolation in which he was immersed. He clearly avoided the subject of his reclusion as we looked for the exit from the park, for as we climbed stairs and left ponds and leaf-strewn dirt paths behind us, Alioscha wanted only to talk about what his recent reading and certain technical aspects of his book, making no mention of the despair I knew the young university student must have caused him. Nor did he confide in me when, having left the bounds of the park, we ran out of literary topics to discuss. As we moved farther from where I had found him, I remained uncertain whether Camille’s departure was a temporary, mutual decision, or if she had unilaterally resolved never to sleep in my friend’s company again. Regardless of what Alioscha did or did not tell me, he certainly showed obvious signs of having gone too long with no one to talk to: it was partly the nervous way he had of speaking, his expressions more clipped and abundant than usual, along with the worsening of his physical appearance, evidenced by long greasy hair and obvious pallor.

And yet, I actually found him to be in much better shape than I’d imagined a week before, when my home phone in Madrid rang in the wee hours of the morning. Alarmed by the untimely noise, I grabbed the receiver and heard the voice of a sick and dying man, a voice slow and thick, as if he’d been drinking alone, and which disclosed—with no apology for waking me—that Camille had left him. “Now I don’t have to worry about keeping tabs on her temperature or the violent coughing fits,” he mumbled ironically. “Now I can spend hours and hours writing with no other obligation except to remember to breathe.” That night he spoke in a passionless monotone, muted by somnolence, and before he hung up to drown in his own darkness, I lied and told him I already had a ticket to Paris for the following week. And I wasn’t the only one alarmed by the fateful bit of news that Alioscha had lost the young student’s companionship. When I relayed the news to him the next morning—as we were wont to do in such situations—his cousin Carlos Valls replied with a fateful prediction, a deep truth, the truest and most chilling, and one neither of us wanted to accept: “It could be now or in a few years,” he sighed, making his dark prophecy, “but one of these days Alioscha’s going to jump in the Seine with an anvil around his neck.”

It was his only plausible end. And yet, though Alioscha had always harbored an intense suicidal calling— over the years we could all see how he walked, unflinching, toward the brink of death—it was also true that when I set off on my rescue mission to Paris, it still seemed too soon for that fate, given that my friend was so consumed by writing that he hadn’t the time to think about hanging himself.

Such was the state affairs that early evening as we walked aimlessly in the vicinity of his neighborhood, Alioscha again insisting on the classical resonances in his novel, which he declared was structured around the patterns in specific Greek myths, and then making an offhand mention of his nonessential job at a nursing home in the Saint-Denis district. “It’s still just Saturdays and Sundays, and they’re not completely off their rocker,” he said with a complicit smile, reminding me of the afternoon I visited the home and caught him organizing a sort of clandestine sock-hop. “I bring the manuscript with me and start revising the second I get on the bus.”

He moved frenetically as we walked, animated, possessed by his typically fantastical nature, which had always allowed him to remain outside the coercive norms of constraint and decorum and often led to scenes that illustrated the extravagant character that had governed Alioscha since the day he was born. For instance, when we passed a few garbage bins on the street near the market and discovered, to our surprise, a pile of discarded books on the ground between them, Alioscha couldn’t resist such tempting rubbish and stopped to ransack them with gusto, throwing popular novels over his shoulder and rescuing a few volumes missing their covers. Shortly thereafter, having ticked off a list of important writers who had disavowed their home countries, he pulled me along on another irrepressible impulse to an alley near his apartment, a passageway littered with cigarette butts and broken bottles, where he showed me a plaque menaced by rust and inscribed with a short mention of the English poet who died there nearly a century before. But the moment that sparked his heartiest enthusiasm wasn’t when he came across a few decent books, dozens of copies of which could be found in the Paris kiosks, nor when he stood before the house of that nineteenth-century writer whose name I’d never heard, but when he suggested we visit a pond so small it was practically hidden, where we could feed red fish stale bread. No time for explanations, no answers to my questions, taking hold of my jacket so I wouldn’t slow us down at traffic lights, Alioscha rushed me to a secluded square with a small pool of dirty water, where he pulled a crust of bread from his pocket and began sprinkling crumbs here and there, trying to stir up the fish. Before we left, he stuck his hand in the water so they could feed greedily from the palm of his hand.

But the sight of him so joyous, so exuberant over his juvenile exploits, did not afford me the sense of peace I might’ve expected. In fact, it frightened me. And no wonder. I knew well that the lonelier and more desperate Alioscha became, the more compulsive about his work, the more sudden and intense his waves of irrational optimism, the deeper the resulting void that followed. Only when night fell and winter’s early shadows grew sharp and dense and a dry wind froze the streets, only when Alioscha caught a bit of a melody coming from a nearby shop and was suddenly overcome by a fit of nostalgia and all his anguish rushed to the fore, only then did he make a moving admission about his short, tortured romance with Camille. After a thoughtful silence, he stopped and wearily observed the pavement. Shoulders hunched and hands deep in the pockets of his trench coat, Alioscha confessed that he spent restless nights embracing a pillow, clinging to the illusion that he was holding a woman’s soft body, and other, even worse nights when he woke from the sinister nightmare that Camille had returned, only to desert him again. “And it’s not just my subconscious betraying me,” he said. “I call for her when I’m awake, too, even though I know she’ll never come, like it’s enough just to hear my own voice.”

After that, everything he said and did revolved around his memories of Camille. With a dejected gait, ignoring his untied shoelaces and the drivers that honked when he blindly stepped into the road, numb to everything but thoughts of the young student, he pulled me over to a bench by the Seine where he claimed to have seen her for the first time, and then on to a centuries-old tree famous for its height, where he swore that, in a teenage impulse, he’d carved his name and hers into the trunk with a knife. Then, evoking their early days—the only easy and happy time they’d shared—his tour took us to the home of Camille’s aunt, and there under the balcony he muttered and cursed the paradoxes of love, convinced that his happiest days with the girl had been at the beginning, when she still lived under her family’s roof and he’d delighted in running around half the city on foot just to see her for a few minutes.

But the most eloquent signs of his grief, those which mercilessly showed all he lacked, arose when we stopped in front of the main building of the Sorbonne, a place that was for him steeped in both sentiment and scars, and where, with a mix of guilt and sorrow, he recalled that when he’d met her, Camille had been an exceptional student.

“She always went to class. Everyday. Even when she had a fever,” he said in the middle of the cobblestone square, thinking of the times he’d waited for her, tucked away in some corner. He would start watching the door well before eight o’clock, and she would rush out to him the moment her class was over, mindful she wasn’t being followed.

And though he spoke as if describing scenes from a distant past, his recollection of those early meetings convinced Alioscha that he had to find out right then and there whether or not she had resumed her studies. We approached this undertaking with all the necessary precautions, sidestepping the main stairs, aware that— if she discovered us—Camille would likely be furious and set to beating my friend about the head with her purse. And so, having discarded a plan to hide among the columns at the entrance, we finally sheltered in a doorway dimly lit by a flickering streetlight that only revealed us intermittently, located at one end of the square where students and residents passed by, more concerned with their conversations than what was happening in the street. But despite our vigilance, we never saw her among the groups of students when the day’s last classes let out, nor with the professors who lagged behind, nor when almost all the lights were switched off and only a few increasingly ambiguous shapes remained visible inside the building. But instead of leaving, instead of taking refuge from the freezing night air in some bar, we lingered in the shadows until past eight o’clock, quiet and expectant, Alioscha glancing about and me trying to look inconspicuous, less motivated now by the hope of hearing Camille’s quick footsteps and more by the desire to pay homage to the ghosts of the past. We didn’t even make to leave when the last bells of a nearby church tolled, and no one was left in the square except a dog and his owner. We only moved off when Alioscha grew tired, so late by then that only the night watchmen remained, and we did so very slowly and in silence, each pained by our own dark angst, each longing, perhaps, for some vague homeland existing only in the purest fantasy, each with the same bitter and futureless melancholy of a pair of men who had spent many years in exile.

Alioscha only revealed the details surrounding Camille’s desertion the next morning, in the middle of the crowded Belleville market—one of Paris’s noisiest spots—at a stall consisting of a tarp covering three long tables heaped with bags and wallets and other poor-quality leather goods. It was an off-the-cuff confession. We had been strolling the market from end to end, not paying particular attention to any vendor, impervious to the fabrics and fruit-filled baskets on offer, when we passed a narrow side aisle and Alioscha, having spotted some studded belts, stopped to examine them.

He rifled indifferently through the merchandise, as if already familiar with the stock, and then, after a prolonged silence, spoke Camille’s name.

“One day she woke up with the highest temperature she’d had in weeks, soaked in cold sweat,” Alioscha said, picking up and discarding handbags and wallets at random, so abstracted that he seemed to be muttering to himself. “She realized she couldn’t go on much longer like that.”

It was the explanation I hadn’t dared to ask him for. Avoiding my eyes, Alioscha recounted how at the end of December, Camille had suffered from high fevers that left her vomiting through the night. Even so, he persisted in trying to cure her by his own methods, afraid he would lose her if he took her to a hospital. But, he went on to admit, despite the fact that he went broke buying ineffectual drugs and searched his medical school textbooks for alternative therapies, not only did he fail to restore her to health, but her condition worsened. This went on until one morning when Camille was forced to admit her mistake, and forgetting the promises she made in the euphoria of her flight from her family home, demanded to speak to her parents. In his recollection of those hours, Alioscha, who had always catered to her every whim, said that he brought the phone to the bed willingly, though he knew that once Camille contacted her father, the man would come immediately to take her away.

“She poured it all out she the minute the phone was in her hand, confessed everything she’d been hiding for eight months: where she lived and with whom and how much she regretted having gone missing for so long,” continued Alioscha, who claimed he’d had to lean against the wall for support as he listened in. “She cried and asked them to come and get her as soon as they could, swearing up and down that she would never do anything so stupid again.”

Based on what I gathered from Alioscha’s story, Camille’s father, terrified by his daughter’s confession, made a frantic trip to Paris from Tours and turned up at Alioscha’s basement apartment that very night, as furious as if he really had been rescuing the young student from a kidnapper. The man’s reaction was easy to imagine: horror when faced with the squalor of the musty and unventilated apartment, and rage at finding his daughter prostrate on a mattress as decrepit as an old cot in a war hospital.

“I showed him which medications I’d been giving her,” he brooded as the handbag vendor eyed him with growing suspicion. “But there was no way to calm him down: he was livid, like he couldn’t even believe that we’d been living in such a hole—he kept repeating that it looked like a broom closet, or catacombs.”

What most affected Alioscha, however, wasn’t the father’s rancor, which he must have expected, but that the man who hated him for having taken away his daughter should ultimately show him pity. Witnessing firsthand Alioscha’s preposterous state of poverty, the man realized that he was nothing but a poor wretch blinded by his own naive Romantic illusions. And seeing him so helpless, so alone and unbalanced in the chaos of the apartment glutted with books and smudged papers, Camille’s father took his leave with the same gesture of compassion he would have shown a pauper.

“He opened his wallet and gave me all the money he had on him,” Alioscha said, looking at me at last as he moved away from the stall, which we’d been blocking for several minutes without making a purchase. “And before he left with Camille, he gave me a card with his address and phone number and asked if I had any family that could help.”

He wouldn’t provide any more detail, not even whether he’d been able say goodbye to Camille, though as we left the market, I had the impression that he was always thinking of the girl and the futility of winning her back. Alioscha understandably feared the definitive nature of such farewells: after all, just two years before, in a foreshadowing of the spiral of loneliness in which he would sink ever deeper, Élene—his wife and only ally since the day he left Barcelona—had up and abandoned him in the wee hours of the morning, tired of the anachronistic tics of a failed writer who had moved them to Paris.

In truth, anything I knew about Alioscha’s history with Élene I’d learned from Carlos Valls, my main confidant, given that she had already left their apartment in Oberkampf for good by the time I first met Alioscha. So it was only thanks to the recollections of his cousin—as intrigued as I by the mystery of the man who had been his closest companion since childhood—that I heard how Alioscha and Élene had settled in Paris, enchanted by what Alioscha saw as the city’s mythical aura, which lasted until the third or fourth year when Élene began to sense the cracks that threatened her husband’s fantasies in which he’d become a respected novelist and she a great avant-garde painter. Carlos Valls had seemed certain that the couple’s relationship couldn’t have ended any other way. He remarked how, with Alioscha so absorbed in his writing, it was only logical that Élene—a discreet, balanced, and quiet woman—would feel increasingly defrauded, ever farther from her original goal, and would eventually come to the conclusion that the best thing was for her to open their front door and vanish, aware that if she kept living with Alioscha, she’d only become more lost in his asphyxiating labyrinth.

In any case, I gleaned that his relationship with Camille had been different in every sense, given that it had been short-lived, and there hadn’t been the same intermittent periods of harmony. Yet, as with his wife, their relationship had come to the same irrecoverable end. The affair had been shorter, much shorter, hardly eight months, and its conclusion, therefore, couldn’t be attributed to the eventual tedium inherent to cohabitation, to the shadows and silences that had gradually tarnished his life with Élene, but rather to an original misalignment, an older and more insurmountable breach far exceeding simple boredom, given that they’d been submerged in a state of deep and permanent tension ever since they’d moved to the basement rooms in Belleville. It quickly became clear that they had both fallen prey to a fleeting mirage they never should have indulged in. She was a beautiful young woman, unpredictable and capricious, who had only recently arrived in the city with a desire to lose herself in the Parisian night and its shadowy recesses, while Alioscha was already a grown man who behaved with monastic discipline, uninterested in parties and engrossed in his writerly routines. And to make matters worse, they’d known each other such a short time and so superficially that Camille’s disenchantment arrived almost simultaneous to the moment she began to share his bed, making him feel guilty for ever having courted her and convinced her to leave her aunt’s house. Over the course of their months together, both Carlos Valls and I were witness to Camille’s continual displays of anger. More than once we saw her interrupt Alioscha while he was speaking, cutting him off mid-sentence, or ignoring him when he asked her a question, or berating him for having bought cheaper soap than she was used to or because the milk he put in her coffee was too hot and burned her tongue.

It was an untenable situation, a painful and degrading reality no good for either one of them. Yet Camille resisted the relationship’s failure out of pure obstinacy, forcing herself to endure the mistake that originated on the night she called her father and told him she was starting her adventure as an emancipated woman. She hid behind her declaration of self-sufficiency for months, anxious, beside herself, trapped by her lies and her pride, too stubborn to admit her mistake, until the end of December when she fell gravely ill and had to choose between accepting defeat or dying in the company of a démodé troubadour.

She chose to live, and so abandoned Alioscha, who was left alone and one step away from madness or death.

He still maintained that, with time, he would have cured her, and that the success of his books was imminent, which was why he claimed to have the terrible sense of having been the victim of some misunderstanding. That might have explained some of his behavior, like how he returned to the Sorbonne day after day in the weeks following Camille’s departure, still rattled by the young woman’s disappearance, unable to accept that she’d gotten fed up with spending her nights shivering with cold.

My friend’s despondence caused me to make that visit to Paris my longest in the city, partly because I was worried and partly in solidarity, given the neglected state in which he’d been left. I stayed for almost two weeks, not enough time to see him recover, true, but sufficient to ascertain that Camille had indeed been his last chance at salvation: he subjected himself to such a peculiar lifestyle that he would never find another person who was willing to sleep in his bed. Besides, his economic insecurity was by then fully apparent. He lived off his paltry savings, what remained of a family inheritance, and the money he earned working in the nursing home. His income was so minimal that he’d turned to collecting bags of trash from his neighbors in the noisy building where he lived, in exchange for them covering his water and electricity, a new role that obliged him to cut his activities short at ten p.m. on the dot. Because of this responsibility, if the appointed time drew near while we chatted on the paths in the Parc de Belleville or some other remote part of the city, he would ask that we quickly make our way back to his building, where he would then go door to door hauling the bags his neighbors left out for him. Alioscha didn’t seem to be frustrated by his circumstances. Quite the opposite: he accepted them with punctual docility, attentive and conscientious, as if he didn’t notice the humiliation inherent to the task, impervious to the jokes and laughter, and so used to coping with failure that he wasn’t even rattled when they mocked him by setting out bags filled with rocks.

Yet what did still pain Alioscha deeply was the hushed memory of Camille, to which he continued to pay homage with incomprehensible ceremonies celebrated to appease his fantasy, such as the melancholy custom of showing up at the university gates with the quite unreasonable hope that she had resumed her studies instead of returning to Tours. Stranger yet was how he continued to set a place for her at the table, as if they were about to share a meal, or continuing to sleep on the couch so that the bed remained available for Camille’s feverish body. And those were just the more routine practices, which at times seemed designed to invoke her and others to simply stave off boredom: he’d also discovered new rituals, darker and more somber, like the way he disposed of the clothes she’d left behind, a process that seemed to be guided by a peculiar, sentimental intuition. Once, in the wee hours of the morning, I watched him lug a suitcase stuffed with shirts and sweaters to a church doorstep. Another day, I caught him filling a sack with several pairs of her shoes, which he later strung up from a solitary tree. And one overcast afternoon, I was witness to how he tossed a bag containing several pieces of her lingerie into the Seine, sighing all the while.

And yet it wasn’t all laments with him, since—as was often the case—the sadder and more alone he felt, the worse his ostracism in Paris, the more any ordinary event could enchant him. His faithful visits to the pond to feed the red fish, for instance, or his juvenile penchant for stealing from secondhand bookshops. And along with those more mundane pastimes, which I’d seen him enjoy for years, another more exciting and surprising hobby emerged: taking photographs on the street and developing the film in his apartment using a slow artisanal process.

He claimed it was a sudden passion, born by coincidence: one day he was rummaging around in the nursing home attic, through the cast-off chairs and chipped lamps, exploring the contents of the same trunk from which he’d rescued a busted radio and an old record player, and discovered a camera. His dismal economic circumstances meant he’d had to learn the secrets of the photographer’s art on his own. He developed the film himself, in the shower, following a meticulous and burdensome operation that he nonetheless seemed to enjoy, engrossed in the languid labor of transformation, as delighted as if it were alchemical magic. Afterward, when the process was complete and the images had been rescued from the nebula of the film roll, he stacked them on his writing desk, or laid them out on the couch, or left them hung up with clothespins on the drying line for a few days. But what my friend liked most was the thrill of shooting in the streets. That visit, whenever we met for a walk, Alioscha turned up with the camera around his neck, as if it were a part of his antiquated outfit, the most valuable and important accessory, the most extraordinary: the only thing that allowed him to momentarily suspend his nostalgia for Camille. He had fixed obsessions. He usually photographed people, not landscapes, and almost always opted for a woman’s face, whether it was a radiant girl waiting at a stoplight, or a woman reflected for a blurry instant in the top half of a mirror. He never had a plan. He worked as if guided by amazement, fascinated by a unique set of features or smile, drawn to some deliberate gesture, a business-woman’s elegant gait. They were impulsive acts, maneuvers in which Alioscha lurched abruptly, hunched over, running or climbing a fence or pressing himself to a storefront window, oblivious to the effect he was having on his model. He looked happy as we walked, pleased to be carrying a piece of the city inside his camera, jubilant over the ecstasy of the hunt. That is, until sundown, when the time came for us to say goodnight and Alioscha stumbled again over his shattered reality. His transformation was notable. Crestfallen and grave, he made plans for us to meet for lunch the next day, then walked slowly away down the sidewalk, eyes lowered and shoulders slumped. He never looked back and was always much sadder than at the beginning the day, as if wrapped in a funeral shroud, aware that the only signs of life awaiting him in his basement rooms were the portraits he’d hung there to dry.

So passed several of the days during which I witnessed firsthand the angst affecting Alioscha, a pain old and deep that followed him like a curse through the anonymity of Paris. In truth, I couldn’t do much in our short time together besides confirm his grim condition as an exile—even though that term wasn’t entirely accurate in his case. By unspoken agreement, we organized our days much like we had on my previous visits: I would spend the early part of the morning by myself, working on my articles and features, while he immersed himself in writing his novel of indecipherable paragraphs. Then around one o’clock, by which time Alioscha had used up all the strength he’d managed to store during his fitful nights, we would meet for lunch in some Belleville restaurant near his apartment, then stroll with no fixed destination, long walks that sometimes stretched on under the lit street lamps, depending on the urgency he felt to get back to his desk. Now that he was on his own and with no one to talk to, a ghost stranded in a village of ghosts, he sometimes preferred to leave his writing for later and prolong our time together so that he could leisurely digress on his incurable abstractions.

Alioscha and I always ended our evenings before the ten p.m. trash collection, so I never did see him up to his neck in that disreputable muck, soiled by mockery and scorn, filth and fruit peels, until the very last night of my visit when, thanks to an oversight, I returned to his apartment after we’d already said goodnight.

The origin of the mix-up could be traced back to that day’s lunch, when we got up to leave after coffee and dessert and Alioscha—distracted by his despair over Camille—left the little bag of bread he’d saved for the fish on the table. I put the bag in my pocket and promptly forgot it myself until a few minutes before ten o’clock, as I strolled alone down a poorly lit avenue, my mind far from Paris, preoccupied with getting back to the hotel and packing for my flight. Stepping onto the curb to hail a passing taxi, I put my hand in my coat pocket and felt the little bundle of bread from lunch. All I wanted was to rest, to take refuge from the intense chill of the February wind, but I remembered how Alioscha insisted that his beloved fish had adapted their feeding schedule to his visits. Certain that my friend’s ritual of sprinkling crumbs on the dirty pond was important, I apologized to the driver in the waiting taxi and found myself making the trip on foot back to Alioscha’s basement apartment. I was distracted and subdued, thinking of the assignments awaiting me in Madrid, and didn’t consider the fact that my friend would, at that very moment, be engaged in the thankless task of collecting the neighbors’ trash. I wasn’t thinking of it as I made my way down the gloomy street toward his lair, just like I hadn’t given it much thought on any other day, all the times he bid me goodnight, forever in a rush, at the mercy of the strict punctuality of the municipal garbage truck.

It only occurred to me when I neared his building and was forced to remember, for just as I was about to cross the street, I saw a group of teenagers heckling Alioscha as he grappled with the trash bags. I stopped on the darkened corner and waited in stillness. A streetlamp was angled over the scene before me, a weak stage light accentuating the impoverished set Alioscha seemed to have built for himself: Belleville itself was a busy, central neighborhood, but his building stood on a side street with worse lighting than its neighbors, as if he created his own outskirts wherever he called home.

Realizing that the drudge work of dealing with the entire building’s refuse also came with a daily dose of humiliation and contempt, I stood quietly for a few more moments, unsure whether or not I should cross the street, feeling my friend’s suffering but aware there was nothing I could do to help him: the kids’ jeers and bold stares left no room for doubt. As Alioscha was depositing a load of bags into the bins, one of his aggressors spoke from his perch on the fence and the others exploded in loud laughter. My friend ignored the provocation, focused on his job, immune to their insults, resigned to handling the garbage with striking passivity. Still unaware of my presence, his eyes fixed on the ground, Alioscha went back inside with an automaton’s steady march, quick and methodical, and in the streetlamp’s fragile light, his face contained a new expression, a deadened grimace reminiscent of the tortured figures held aloft on the shoulders of religious penitents in procession.

Alioscha returned with more bags every few minutes, the time it took for him to go upstairs and come down with another load, indifferent to his surroundings, imperturbable in spite of the grime and carnivalesque atmosphere that accompanied every round. He looked serious, very serious, like a condemned man appearing before the crowd, his face tight and sallow, the same sickly appearance as if he’d been locked away in a forgotten dungeon. But it was his composure that made the sad situation even sadder. He carried on as if nothing were wrong while the young men accosted him, deaf to their jeers, refusing to look at them or respond in any way, his sole concern to finish the job on time, operating with a speed and punctiliousness that cast him as even more pathetic and amusing to his audience. How could he tolerate such a situation? Perhaps he accepted such disgrace as part of his writerly legend, or maybe it was simply a quick and easy way to save money while he endeavored to write Attila. Whatever his calculus, I watched from the opposite sidewalk as he remained stoic, even when they threw a cigarette butt at his turned back or plopped a banana peel on his shoulder or amused themselves by moving the bins farther down the street. Unmoved by their provocations, Alioscha labored on, assured that the battle he was sworn to fight was not to be waged on Belleville sidewalks, but on the pages he wrote.

The sight I found most distressing, the vision that kept me from going over and giving him his fish food, was the mishap that occurred once the garbage truck had appeared at the end of the street, headlights submerged in the night like a ship entering an inhospitable port on the Brittany coast. The accident unfolded in a matter of seconds, when the truck was already stopped in front of the building next door, ready to lift and empty the dumpsters, and Alioscha was running down with the last of the bags. The kid on the fence, the first one to taunt him, shoved one of his companions, who in turn fell into my friend, who had no one else to stop him, and in the chaos of stumbling, tumbling bodies, it was Alioscha who ended up on the ground awash in crumpled wrappers and food scraps. He didn’t react. Uncomplaining, barely looking up to confirm that the truck was still idling, Alioscha stooped to pick up the scattered debris, ignoring the commotion around him, careful not to leave behind any pieces of paper or fruit peels, attempting to scuff the coffee grounds and cigarette ash off the pavement with his shoe.

With a squeal of brakes and grinding of the clutch, the truck shifted into gear, coming to an almost immediate stop outside Alioscha’s building, its bright headlights illuminating all the ugliness. Alioscha redoubled his efforts so as not to slow the usual pace of the collection, while a half dozen of his neighbors cheered his new show of submission. It was too much for me. Alarmed by the knowledge that such hell was routine, convinced that I could do nothing but witness his torment, I decided to leave before he’d finished, and as I moved off in search of a taxi back to my hotel, I thought about how much Alioscha must have had to suffer before being able to remain unaffected by those insults, and how unfair it was that such a thing was happening to someone like him, a person whose only sin was to bravely defend the one thing he believed in.

That image, his acceptance of defeat, his scrabbling about in the midst of ridicule, his vulnerability, was a good illustration of what had always been his destiny, the fate of one who chose to be consumed by a single idea. And the more courageous and sincere his commitment, the more he suffered, and the more he suffered, the stronger he persisted in his attempt, as if instead of being a writer whose books nobody understood, he was a heretic burning in a bonfire, fanning the executioner’s rage by enduring in his silence and his truth.