Guyotat consented. The reading was scheduled for a twenty-minute slot just after a panel discussion and just before the stagehands had to set up for that night’s performance of The Balcony. When Albert told Guyotat he’d have only twenty minutes to read, the writer replied loftily, ‘But time is inscribed within the interior of the work and has no independent exterior existence.’ Albert swallowed hard.
Bald head gleaming under the spotlights, Guyotat began to intone in his own tongue, scrupulously avoiding any concession to the normative language. His hand moved rhythmically and beautifully as though he were the sibyl inhaling the sacred fumes and swaying above the tripod in a trance. In his language every other word sounded like ‘testicles’ for some reason. The impious in the audience fled in droves, leaving behind only hardcore devotees.
Backstage another drama was brewing. As the twenty-minute limit was approaching, the stage manager told Albert that he couldn’t let the reading go over, not even a minute or two. After all, he had a whole team of union stagehands to supervise and their work time was quantified down to the last second. Still Guyotat intoned on dreamily, his hand writhing like the serpents around the caduceus. The stage manager announced he was going out now to remove the poet forcibly from his pulpit. Albert protested that if the stage manager did any such thing the rest of the Genet festival would be canceled. Just as the two men were about to come to blows, the time inscribed within the interior of the work mysteriously ripened and the high priest swept off to the ecstatic applause of the woman writing her thesis, Stephen Barber, Albert’s wife, Hubert and me. The rest of the shallow audience had evaporated.
uit: Sketches from memory : people and places in the heart of our Paris - Edmund White en Hubert Sorin
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