AGAINST SINGLE AND UNILATERAL THOUGHT LET'S READ CELINE IN HER TANGLED PROSE THE AIRS OF FREEDOM ARE BLOWING

 

LISEZ CELINE

That summer of 1964, just twenty years old, I arrived in Paris. A hubbub of freedom (emptying me) hit me in the face. It was nice not to feel like a foreigner in that city. On the walls of the Alma Bridge subway tunnel where poor Lady Di would tragically die, there was a large graffiti "Lisez Celine".

I found work on the Rue de la Pompe and every morning when I took the subway at dawn I ran into that poster while the radios broadcast songs by Gilbert Becaude. I remember one:

paris s'eveille

J´ai pas sommeil

He went to work in the factories of the banlieu, spoke with the workers, many of them Spanish emigrants from the civil war. I earned my first money and with the savings I bought a Gallimard book every day from the livre de poche collection that was worth two grancos. I keep all those texts in a drawer. "letters from my mill", "La Nauseé" and all the works of André Gide and now that Lissez Celine ad echoes in my memory.

I bought Celine's novel but I didn't understand it. It put words that the dictionary did not bring. Pure jargon. Dynamic slang and when a Parisian "starts a bavarder comme ça!" it's hard to follow. They seem to sing, but no, they're staying with you.

With my first literary attempts came the incipient love affairs. I had an Irish girlfriend. Very catholic.

She accompanied her every Sunday to mass at Notre Dame but she refused to go to bed with me because she said "it is a sin" (it is a sin) but she allowed me to handle everything I wanted without reaching the final.

I once winked at a black woman and it turns out she was the wife of a Muslim. One afternoon I found myself at the exit of the Cité Universitaire restaurant with a black man who was over two meters tall and weighed a hundred kilos. She told me:

- Je you go crasser la tête, cochon

Yes, I read Celine in fits and starts or at least tried. Jealous black didn't break my head So in that free, disinterested and lawless Europe the morbidity of anti-Semitism had not arisen. It was about forgetting the horrors of the world war and many young people like me were unaware that Celine had been jailed as a collaborator.

Now, in her Journey to the End of the Night, Jews are never spoken ill of. What does bring out his defense of the poor and the underdog, there was always that author who was the doctor of the poor of Paris, with those from below and as a doctor he dispensed free health care to the disinherited of fortune in the Cité Lumière.

His prose is like a leash that makes available to the reader all the jargon of the underworld with that singsong, buffoonish tone of the Parisian. Despite criticizing the system, he loved France.

He was a decorated combatant with the Legion of Honor in the First World War. A bomb destroyed the joint in one of his arms and his ears had been buzzing all his life. Lissez Celine. Live France. The memory of her comes wrapped in the memories of the songs by BECAUD, Aznavour and Brassens. His prose is like a fucking machine, accurate and forceful, not suitable for delicate palates. "Our life is a winter and hellish journey looking at the sky where the stars no longer shine"