Nadja

I couldn't tell you how I ended up with a copy of the book but sometime at the end of January, two yellow métro tickets fell right out of its open spine. I was holding the ‘64 edition: the one with the big hand and the memorable pencil portrait of Nadja on the cover. The version Breton diligently revised (1) , omitting all traces of a physical affair. I was holding it up, a few inches from my nose. On the tickets, a tiny note in black pen read something about vacationing, knitting a sweater and looking for a car. They were old but they were not my mother’s, nor my aunt’s. I traced the tickets back to Paris, sometime around ‘82, when the RATP launched a publicity campaign called Ticket Chic, Ticket Choc, a video with yellow tickets painted on a cow, sticking out of back pockets of jeans, top hats, rings, ties and bras. Get your yellow tickets! The 10th of October, 1926. Nadja (2) tells Breton that before meeting him for dinner she asked the employee in the métro to pick heads or tails. As he punched her ticket he said: tails. He was right. You were wondering if you would see your friend again, he said. You will. That night she predicts Breton will write a novel about her, aware of the fleetingness of their encounters, she hopes that a trace of them withstands time. The 10th of October 2023. A portrait of an imagined woman, is leaning on the floor of Dylan’s mother’s basement. While photographing his work, I fall in love with the large hand that frames her face. Dylan insists that she is Scottish, I wonder how one would know. Strange how a pair of eyes in a painting can be so agile at keeping things from us. This thing with the book, it has developed into an obsession. Nose deep in its pages, I am like a truffle pig. First it was the spine of the book, the tickets like piano keys, then the fleeting romance, the fall into madness, Mélusine: the mermaid, fish suspended in still water but actually moving forward, only forward, never backwards. The temporality of desire, the hand big like a flame, burning fast and bright, the tiles that frightened Nadja from entering a bar, these yellow tiles…. The ticket man. The glove. The convulsive beauty. Playing prey to analogies, as if struck with lucidity. As if all the parts of the cryptogram exist only for you and whomever you deem most trustworthy. And who’s to say it doesn't. (1) 1929. Breton publishes the first edition of Nadja. This first surrealist novel, recognized as one of the great love stories of 20th century French literature, is a detailed account of his short affair with Léona Delcourt, a young woman he met on the streets of Paris. The narrative is weaved through photographs, illustrations and annotations. Breton’s experimental prose is direct, self aware and transparent, he seeks to convey a sense of immediacy in the text while moving from descriptions of their encounters, to critiques of capitalist labor and psychiatry, passionate descriptions of works of art and the streets of Paris in the 1920s. (2) 1926. Nadja, or Léona Camille Ghislain Delcourt (b. 1902), moves to Paris at 18, after a pregnancy. When she meets Breton, she is desperately poor. Delcourt works on the streets and lives out of small hotel rooms, she can barely feed herself. Breton is struck by her. He gives her a drawing to help pay her way. 10 days later, Breton’s love wanes as he discovers that the poetics of her mind are in fact symptoms of her mental instability. He realizes that he cannot give her the love and care she needs. Breton fades out of her life. A month later, Delcourt suffers a mental breakdown in the hallways of her hotel. She is sent to a psychiatric institution where she spends the rest of her life. Breton receives a letter from her doctor, but never visits. Delcourt dies in the hospital 14 years later, during the war (possibly, from a tumor aggravated by typhus and starvation).