© 2014, Editions Allia, Paris.

 I.

It is very hard to be invisible. Yet, I somehow managed to. I totally disappeared without leaving a trace. Neither seen, nor known. How did I do it? That’s easy: I’m the type of person one does not notice in the streets. And when they do notice me, what this arouses in those who, by the greatest of chances, pay me a little attention, is an immediate disapproving pout. One must say that I occupy a social position that, contrary to what one could have thought, is particularly ungrateful: I sell roses illegally in restaurants, at night. And, be brave enough to admit it, I am not welcome among you. I wear the multicolored star of the pariah. Even if I am allowed to circulate furtively between the tables, I feel only disapproving eyes continually envelope my unassuming body. The small happiness that I sell in passing and which, I was foolish enough to believe, should have made me deserve a certain charity -or at least a visible sign of cheerfulness (occasions to rejoice being so rare these days)- attracts nothing but disdain. The offering of a rose has lost its enchantment, and my clients’ sullen faces testify to this crisis of faith in the unifying power of flowers. I even ask myself why the managers themselves tolerate my arrival because they never fail, as soon as they notice me, to turn their backs and plug their noses at the very sight of me. For the eight months that I’ve been doing this gig -this horrible word is nevertheless the most accurate in capturing the precarious and disdainful fashion of my occupation— no patron has shaken my hand, made an amicable gesture in my direction, or asked me my name. One could say that I shame them like a necessary yet sordid duty. Certain less hypocritical people don’t hesitate to refuse me entry because of my appearance, which, in their words, threatens the standing of the establishment. To tell the truth, this social humiliation no longer really affects me. In the beginning, it made me sad, and I didn’t understand it. While rambling around, I would curse human maliciousness. At present, this debasement, which accompanies me almost everywhere I go, ravishes me. I even make use of it. It is as if I draw a new energy from it, a strange power. I absorb this contempt that surrounds me. I drink it like blotting paper. My cells ingest it little by little in microscopic gulps and I almost hear, during my nocturnal moments of rest, the squishy sound of this continual suction. Yet I don’t simply make an armor out of it. That would be too simple, too easy. No. I absorb it patiently. I incorporate it into myself. This disdain does not clothe me; it nourishes me, and makes me grow. It is my substance, my protoplasmic soup, the maternal milk of my cynicism. I draw from it the force to provoke as much indifference and disgust I can get. And, when—with so many contortions, grimaces, tear-inspiring phrases and contrite gazes—I succeed in engendering discomfort and embarrassment in people who attempt to ignore me, I feel an indescribable delight spreading within me.

 II.

I was born on May 21, 1967 in the North West of India, in Chandigarh, the city that owes its urban design to the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. I am the second of six children in a cultivated and open-minded middle-class family. I received a degree in political science from the University of Mumbai where, six years later in 1997, I also defended a doctorate of anthropology which received the highest academic distinction and circulated in book form from a publishing house in Goa. The subject of my thesis focused on 'The Ritual of the Rua Among Negro Tribes from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.' I never succeeded in becoming integrated into my country’s higher education, which is corrupted by money, nepotism, and a clannish state of mind. In order to live and make a living, I taught literature, law, and geography in different secondary schools of the Punjab region. I was nevertheless able to pursue my anthropological research on Andaman and Nicobar and, during my free time and with my own means, I specialized in particular in the study of the people of the North Sentinel Island (it doesn’t go by any other name) that is renowned precisely for being the least well-known, the most hostile to penetration by the exterior world, the most resistant to fieldwork. Certain ethnographers paid for their curiosity with their lives and their bodies were never found; they were probably devoured during a joyous ritual of appropriation of the enemy. The world has ingrained in its mind these images taken a few years ago after the 2004 tsunami when a helicopter full of army officials went to see if the situation was stabilized; they were attacked by furious men with spears and arrows who emerged from the stone age. But, thanks to the perseverance and prudence that I learned by belonging to a forbidden political party, I had the opportunity to meet a guide who, after many long debates and a few bribes, led me to two hundred members of this ethnic group which is, one could say, the most isolated in the world. Unfortunately, upon my return, I was not able to share my research findings with the scientific community. For certain reasons that would take too long to explain here but that stem broadly from the inherent difficulties encountered by anyone who throws himself into a radical fight, what one of my bosses called 'the zone of bullets in the head,' I had to flee my country, abandon my family, take the route of exile, and slip clandestinely into Europe. I came to France in October 2010 on a very windy day -in which I saw neither good nor bad omens, but something new, alive, and fresh. Since then, I get by thanks to some tiring work and a community of faithful friends whose solidarity is proportional to my misfortune. After a week of adjustments and discoveries, I was able to observe that, for those seeking refuge, the inhabitants of this country do not concede anything to the bellicose tribes of the Indian Ocean.

 III.

The general contempt that overburdens me is simply the inverse of the disdain that the people who disdain me feel for themselves. They can’t stand not hating me, me the poor undocumented immigrant who sweats water and blood in pitiful conditions for his miserable scrap of bread. In truth, it is not directly me that they hate, but the very fact of hating me. And, bizarrely, by an inexplicable reversal, they hate me even more for that. Indeed, they feel guilty for maligning me because, given my situation, they should offer me a certain amount of goodwill, even compassion. But that is not the case. This sudden renunciation of generosity afflicts them like a slap received in public. They thus hold me responsible for the guilt that they feel. For, if I did not exist, they would not suffer the affront of their feelings of powerlessness. It is hard for them to admit that we belong to the same human race and that we are distanced from one another thanks to a welfare system that could collapse from one day to the next. Therein lies the core of their disgust: the wall that separates us is no more solid than the ground on which they stand. I remind them of the pitiful image of their own vulnerability which they precisely seek to repress. The disgrace of my condition has been attenuated by my independence. With twelve of my compatriots, who have brown skin and jet-black hair, I work for Moira, a hostile Bengali who is calculating, dishonest, and pathologically thin, and whose animal equivalent would be a cockroach. He exploits our situation and tantalizes us with the prospect of becoming legal residents some day – sometime in which no one believes, not even him. Every day I go to the suburbs to a dusty warehouse which—sandwiched between an illegal carpooling zone and an abandoned scrap metal yard—resembles a depot, away from the big commercial thoroughfares. There, seated on a barrel, Moira sells us bouquets for 30 € a piece that he buys in bushels of 300 the same morning at the region’s wholesalers and that he preserves upright on their stems in galvanized iron bowls. Each bouquet contains twenty roses that we resell for 2 € apiece. This means that, if I succeed in selling my entire bouquet in an evening, in the best-case scenario all that I have left in my pocket is 10 €. Yet, it is very rare that I can sell all of my merchandise. Most of the time, when my mood is right, or the climate, or the circumstances, I succeed in selling about ten roses to the masses that temporarily gather in warm and lit places, especially on Friday evenings. But it is more frequent, after an entire night spent crossing the city in all directions, that I succeed in selling only two or three, or even none. I have thus walked kilometers upon kilometers, avoided dog shit and puddles of piss, inhaled night air that tasted like beer, crossed the path of club kids, talked to drug addicts, speculated about miraculous sales, dreamed of another life, opened dozens of doors, navigated between hundreds of tables, made the same speech—all that for nothing.

 IV.

Do I need to specify that the smell of roses has always seemed atrocious to me? They have a chemical note that turns, at the slightest increase of temperature, into bitterness. In the beginning, when I began this marvelous work which consists, through small gestures, in embellishing the quotidian dullness of the overburdened Occident, I sold roses called Cuisse de nymphe émue (The Thigh of an Aroused Nymph) that were pastel mauve, delicate, almost diaphanous, with fine black veins that resembled gnarled webs—like veins against white skin emerging from water. It was the only type of rose whose fragrance seemed tolerable and, during this period, I wasn’t forced to take several showers in a row in order to remove the odor from my body when I returned to the furnished apartment that I shared with compatriots. But Moira considered this choice too costly. His profit margin became too narrow, and he didn’t see the commercial benefit of selling a luxury product to distracted people without taste and who, in any case, savored only the idea and not the thing itself, and who, once their object was consumed, immediately threw this ruling plant’s splendor in the gutter of their post-coital dejection. We thus opted for a type of Madame Meilland. But very quickly, we realized that its smooth and penetrating fragrance—which recalled the purple dirt from Lake Naivasha where they were grown in bulk to the detriment of all reasonable agronomics—did not agree at all with the nocturnal exhalations that wafted through the streets, kitchen smells, humid armpits, and deodorants turned acrid. Worse yet, this fortuitous alliance of African sensuality and Western lanolin made the atmosphere stink so much that I was repelled faster than usual with a symbolic kick in the ass, which was just as painful as its physical equivalent because of its lack of finality. Finally, like a number of our competitors, we gave up and settled on the red rose, whose scientific name I forgot.

 V.

There are so many people at night in the streets, in bars, restaurants, that one would swear that they don’t have homes. They live, it seems, perpetually outside because of their hatred of homes. One wonders why they bother paying rent in order to spend so little time in these places that they abandon at every opportunity. Unless the city’s distractions function as their substitute abodes ? In one sense, they resemble me. We share the fact of being nowhere at home. In circles, they mingle, eat, drink, laugh, talk into the late hours of the night. They make noise, stagger, show their teeth. These are my clients. In a few weeks, I became a master in the art of furtively sliding into a restaurant and suddenly appearing, like a devil coming out of his box, at a corner of a table where no one is expecting me. I appreciate the effect of surprise that I provoke and the repugnance, which one immediately reads on shocked faces. Of course, I prioritize couples, my privileged target, but it also does not bother me to interrupt groups, even women who are alone. Although I speak an entirely correct French, I try to fake a pitiful accent that transforms my catch phrases into something almost inaudible. I repeat them with a stupid demeanor at least five times in a row like a badly learned lesson and I don’t leave the table until exasperation disfigures my clients. The many 'no’s' that resound one after the other do nothing. I remain planted there, grimacing out of misery, misfortune, and stupidity, trying to inspire guilty consciousness of the well-heeled people around me with my clumsy gestures and the pathetic looks that I perfected in front of the bathroom mirror. I am never truly satisfied until I succeed in producing the kind of irritation that grates on nerves. When I reach this stage, I experience a rare joy. A sense of accomplishment invades me. I know perfectly well that this isn’t the right method, and that a polite smile and a more discrete attitude would be commercially more appropriate, but I can’t stop myself. I like making myself into a fool, playing the trickster’s role. Often, when the room is almost empty, and when no one can escape my intrusion, I improvise a mime performance and, like a grimy and dislocated puppet, I mimic all the distress of the third world in a few movements. For a brief instant, I multiply myself into diverse masks and social signs. I play the flatterer, the beggar, the seducer, the obsequious valet, the filthy derelict, and the sick whiner. Before the owner can kick me the hell out, my awful pantomime summons all the vile scapegoats of misfortune and I secretly rejoice at being the last of this sad race.


 
(...)


 
 VII.

I am often disappointed by the reactions that my appearance provokes. This oscillates between schoolboy jokes and a hackneyed romanticism that feigns sincerity. I rarely happen upon interesting people who give a funny reply, or even a spiritual one. Each time, or almost, all I get is enamored poses, vulgar laughs, false glamor or true kitsch. One must admit that my performance does not really allow for a quick response. My caricature of the poor wretch only elicits a response that is even more stereotypical, a type of mechanical abstraction of all lived experiences. But I don’t hate them. Without a doubt, the atmosphere of these places does not facilitate things. Having said this, I don’t feel any cynicism towards the little comedy of love performed by couples to which I awkwardly attempt to peddle my junk. I reserve my sense of satire for other situations. I would feel as though I were wasting my talent and choosing an easy way out if I caved in like that and turned into derision the little piece of happiness that they try to extract from destiny. I do not, however, prohibit myself from doing every thing I can to upset them, and to harass them with my appalling demeanor and my idiotic insistences. I could have thrown bombs or derailed trains, annihilated by the fire and blood of this world that makes me so vile. At some point, I was ready to embrace terrorism. To get rid of all the chains, norms, scruples, to take the irreversible path of direct action. My political background would have led me there almost naturally. But, out of a lack of courage or conviction, I settled down with selling red flowers on which, on nights of depression, I never hesitate to piss. That gives them a carmine sparkle that scintillates under the lights of the mediocre restaurants that I frequent. And I take advantage of the time I don’t spend haggling, jabbering about something, or cruising, to make a few observations on primitive ethnography; I enrich what I call, in a whisper, my anthroporama. One can never truly change.


 
(...)


 
 XIV.

For an undocumented immigrant, everywhere is a hunting ground. During my rounds, I always pay attention to who is following me, who is ahead of me, who observes me, who brushes up against me. Sometimes, I feel interrogating gazes upon me, and when I detect the presence of such a probing soul, I wedge myself in an obscure nook and I wait. I learned to identify rapidly little-known cracks and the shadows that they produce: the entryways of buildings, underground passageways, invisible corners, indistinct no-man’s-lands hidden under the highway, lost alleyways. My fear creates an entirely new geography. From time to time, roundups take place downtown. They arrive in groups of four and arrest everyone who is not Caucasian and who has the dark complexion of an emigrant. I cannot, under these conditions, get caught up in even the smallest distraction. I am always on edge, my eyelids open like rolled up blinds, my pupils dilated like black suns. I forbid myself from strolling; each of my steps carries the mark of duty, the weight of a necessity that excludes any letting up. I am rarely seen whistling, my nose in the air, my hands in my pockets, distracted by the details that compose the urban landscape. I never take the exact same route; instead, I multiple false ones. In this, my long experience as an illegal immigrant helps me. Each of my movements requires a variety of strategies.

 XV.

Under the setting sun that pours, between the rows of buildings, its reddish light –like in some apocalyptic Western film- I begin my rounds. The first few times, at the advice of my countrymen, I followed a precise path that should have maximized my sales. I would begin with the train station’s district and progressed by following a counter-spiral movement that took me far from the periphery; I moved towards the center of town where the theaters and cinemas are. My path depended on peak bar and restaurant hours. But I learned one day that if I went randomly, in these animated streets that spoke of abandon and renunciation, without worrying a lot about tactical schemas, I obtained the same results. Mediocre numbers in all cases. I now give myself over freely to pure chance. Only uncertainty is able to assemble, in fleeting moments, things that have nothing to do with one another, erratic icebergs of experience that find themselves far from their original glacier. And if my earnings have not accrued as much as they could have, my pleasure wandering finds itself augmented.

 XVI.

Over the course of my ramblings, I’ve met many bizarre and eccentric people: a circus of tortured existences cobbled together, unproductive, fantastical, celebratory good-for-nothings, bums, thieves, whores, informers, penniless artists, street scum, losers from adult education centers, spineless students, the stuttering vendor of contraband cigarettes, the psychotic distributer of flyers with his facial paralysis and his deranged tics, the thwarted lover who obsessively visits the sites of his misfortune, the Congolese bouncer who played the Archbishop of York in Richard III. My gift of observation has allowed me to make them emerge from behind the dense thickets of obscurity and to examine these people on sheets of glass like stem cells in a laboratory. I have this talent, which my background in anthropology has cultivated, for exposing what hides just under the threshold of other men’s perceptions. My gaze, freed from all prejudice, scrutinizes in a wolf-like manner the secrete range of attitudes, the traitorous details that expose it all. If, for others, all blends together, for me, everything keeps its singularity. It is as if this black veil around me sharpened my sight. Among these maniacs—who wouldn’t look out of place in certain Asian cities where marginality is sacred—the billposter left a vivid memory. On several occasions, I had already noted his presence in the city blocks that surround the Opera. I thought that he belonged to a political party or worked for some live-events planner. There are so many posters on city walls that one does not always have the impulse to look precisely at what they are about. Their letters blend in with other urban signs and compose a giant book of eccentric typography that only has an equivalent among illuminated scrolls. The same could be said about these millions of faces which, barely perceived, immediately leave our consciousness. But, little by little, I learned to extract singular characters from this anonymous background. I practice a selective extraction. One fall night, when yellow leaves blew in the wind like confetti thrown from a balcony, I glanced behind the man’s shoulder to a poster that was glued with large brushstrokes which, in that same instant, made me dream about the unrelenting efforts of an Indian elephant trader rubbing the back of his companion pachyderm. The poster was his résumé printed in giant letters. All was geometrically noted: his background, his different employment, his linguistic and technical skills, his hobbies. His black and white photo was perfectly centered above his name. The man posted it every hundred meters. He salvaged other copies washed away or crumpled up and was not stingy with the glue that smelled like cold endives. 'How sagacious', I told him using a French word that is a little refined to let him know that I was not some vulgar vagabond who commented without being invited into the lives of others. 'And how uncommon. That is free advertisement for you'. 'Yes, that’s it, that’s it. An operation of communication', he repeated in an absent tone, without irony. I noticed, at the bottom of the large poster, that his last professional experience dated back to three years ago. My social disposition was piqued. 'You’re reaching the legal limit of the law, is that it?' 'No, no it is because of the cyst.' 'What cyst?' I asked. 'Of my dead brother.' And he distanced himself with a grumpy demeanor; his head was slouched towards his shoulders. This man seemed deranged. His words did not have any meaning, any coherence. I did not see the connection between his poster and his dead brother. Intrigued, I followed him. With his roll of posters and his pot of glue under his arm, he walked in haste as if he were walking in front of something precise that he himself did not yet know anything about. His lively footsteps slapped the sidewalk with the overwhelming magnitude of a water drop hammering the bottom of a sink. I had trouble following him. I progressively fell behind. I almost started running behind him. After a hundred meters, I kept pace with him. I caught up in order not to give him the impression that I took him to be a traitor. 'I don’t understand what you are saying', I said breathless. He answered me as if we had pursued a normal conversation in a calm place: 'The cyst, you see, the cyst. I lost my job because of this wretched cyst in my back.' 'Ah', I said, 'I am sorry, I’m sincerely sorry. It is cancerous?' 'No, no, not a tumor, or something of that sort. A big brown cyst, an intricate one, the stunted embryo of my parasitic twin. For thirty-eight years, I carried on my back the stunted embryo of my twin.'


 
(...)


 
 XXV.

I am not one of those people who confusedly blend all the calamities of our time in order to favor a climate of fear. I am well aware that pessimism essentially constitutes the game of those who want nothing to change, and that it helps maintain order. Fear has always been, and will always be, the best instrument of domination. I dream about it often while walking: those who never cease deploring the state of the world serve the interest of those who render it deplorable. That is the vicious aspect of pessimism and what makes it unworthy. But the facts are there: weighing upon human life are the multiple threats that make existence problematic. Great world dramas proliferate on the horizon, and humanity in its entirety seems to have abandoned all hope of a lasting improvement of its fate. A same sentiment simultaneously dominates the destitute as well as the wealthy: 'run for your life and save what you can.' The welfare-state slowly vacates the social scene that is immediately occupied with vigilantes in combat boots and insurance companies. The ensemble of efforts exclusively benefits the protection of the present at the expense of an uncertain, even impossible future. The end of the world escapes from the domain of the simply possible. Its shadow obscures each discourse, and gloom-mongering becomes a separate, well-established discipline. Is it thus necessary to blame the doctor for the illness that he diagnoses? It would be lost pointless and somewhat hypocritical. As it happens, one can trust the doctor when he identifies an evil of which he is also a victim, which he feels in his own flesh. My illness thus has as a name, melancholia, this sad ability to see the somber side of things.


 
(...)


 
 XXVIII.

I want to say here that my melancholy has no corporeal origin and that it flaws all traditional theories. As far as I can judge, I am a sane and happy human being, an easy-going person, who thinks little about death and illness, who does not know specific anguishes, who—despite the numerous misfortunes that overburden him—strolls through life with a certain enthusiasm; in short, an ordinary person in the most proper sense of the term; a person who, maybe because of his lack of personality, is a little inclined to inexplicable sadness, to sudden fits of anxiety. My very cynicism is of the playful kind. All this is to say that my melancholy, which is real and painful, does not reveal a psychological constitution or who knows what predisposition to a depressive state of mind. This melancholy is even worse, more insidious, and difficult to eradicate: it is only intellectual. It is not originally in me, but assaults me like a pitbull foaming with rage when I start to observe the world. However, although it is foreign, it does not leave me in peace, and its exterior origin does not attenuate its internal effects. These things are, if one thinks about them well, inherently dark and they force us to look at them as they are; they are the ones that wear the veil. Consequently, melancholy—my melancholy—is not the result of a pathological outpouring of the psyche; it is the material itself from which the current world is composed. It is into this vortex that I plunged and where I was lost many times. But I did not want to write here the simple subjective chronicles of my lamentations on an insane century. As I have said before, I am distrustful of everything, of pessimistic discourses on the state of the world, these easy sobs of a small, afflicted mind. I am neither sad nor beaten down. I have no nostalgia for the past (having known only this period, I don’t idealize any Golden Age that is defined by a true and full sense of existence circulating among the members of a living community). And I do not tremble when thinking about the future, even if I should, given my situation; the future simply worries me as much as the present afflicts me. Having said this, I write not to pour out my pain, but to ward it off in its very articulation. For me, it therefore has to do with transforming my melancholy into an analytical tool in order to surpass it by dissecting its simple elements and by making it undergo the test of adequate reason. I refused to yield to it. I have no desire to rot in this pitiful state. The present exposition of my torments has no other goal than to escape them once and for all. But, in order to heal myself of this pernicious melancholy, it is still necessary that I truly experience it, that I examine all of its somber aspects, that I explore meticulously its smallest recesses.