Roaming Academy: New York, May 2013 - Aziza Harmel

Huis Clos in New York

Aziza Harmel

No one around there knew where he came from. He did not have an accent. He ended up in New York during the 1980's. He leaves in an apartment in Queens, and has a job in an old printing house in Brooklyn. He took the subway everyday to go to work.

That short daily trip was a severe test of patience for him.

He waits everyday for the subway in the station Queens Plaza. No one says hello to anyone. All these familiar faces are too busy waiting. He is afraid that the subway will never come. Everyone looks in the direction of the subway.

Someone told him that people who travel with an empty wallet look suspicious. His wallet is always filled with many kinds of things. He is always careful about not looking suspicious. It is almost funny that he has lived in that country for so long and all that time if they would catch him they would kick him out. Often this does not stop him from belonging. He needs to belong, to be able to engage, to engage to be able to be...

It's rush hour and when he enters the metro and he literally walks in a sea of people but still he tries every morning to read his book in the packed New York City subway.  He is surrounded by the familiar pushing crowd and seat stealing all rocked by a strong smell of fish and pie, a lovely way to start a morning. The book he was trying to read was a theatre piece titled Huis Clos (No Exit) written by Sartre. He was reading it in French. In English Huis Clos or 'means behind closed doors. It was a theatre piece about three damned souls brought to the same room in hell by a mysterious Valet. They all expected medieval torture devices to punish them for eternity, but instead they found a plain room. None of them admits the reason for their damnation...

Whilst reading he felt the couple standing in front of him looking at him steadily and intently. He closed his book and looked back. In synchronised movement they looked away. Suddenly he had the irresistible desire to imitate their comfortable postures, but how could he in such packed wagon? Looking at them calmed him down. It also made him sad.

He felt homesick. Homesickness for a place he had never been to. "Like wanting to fall in love but not knowing with who". A homesickness for returning to the place of the absolute beginning. A place where he could embrace his exhaustion. He felt so tired. He fell asleep standing between all these people, rocked to sleep by the bustle of a noise he could not understand.

When he woke up he was at 14th Street and needed to change lines, taking the L to Grand Street. The couple in front of him left the metro and walked in the same direction, with the same rhythm. Sleeping had made his uncomfortable feeling more bearable, and something was pleasant about the couple. He changed to the same carriage as the couple. They were sitting right in front of him. This metro was a bit less packed.

A women voice announced a technical problem and apologised about not knowing how long it would take. No one could get out of the metro.

He looked out the window and saw the station, yet something was off about it.

Although he took that same metro thousands of times he had the feeling that he never saw this station before. He felt like he was in the middle of nowhere far from everything in a subway rivered under all the streets and under all the rivers. He did not care about where he was. He did not care about arriving late. This surprised him. Nothing mattered any more. Time froze the moment the metro stopped.  And he stopped to care. It was not a relief, more an overwhelming feeling of emptiness and deep sadness. He was emptied of what used to connect him to the rest. He felt the grief of losing this burden.

He thought they were in Huis Clos and he smiled thinking about the book he was reading.

The couple was a man and woman. It was difficult to guess their age. They were very elegant and it seemed like they had all the time in the world. They didn't look surprised when the voice announced the technical problem of the train. He had the impression he saw a derisive smile that flickered upon her face. He wanted to stare at them. Something was mesmerising about them. He had to make an effort to look away. He asked the girl next to him for the time. His own voice seemed so far away. He didn't care about the time; he just needed to say something. He looked at her for the first time.  She was wearing skimpy summer clothes and sandals and she had on her lap a net bag full of paper, books and fruits. She answered with a smile. She had braces. Her face was pleasant. He didn't hear a word she said though and it was better that way.  The guy sitting next to him complained about the train problem. With a very strong Indian accent he said: "It's always the same thing with this metro line in this damn city. The moment the doors close, you are locked into another dimension! We have just crossed over into the L train." He was not convincing and he really did not seem to mind. No one was waiting. They were just sitting.

A paper lying in the ground caught his attention. It was a business card and the name on it was Steven Rand. He knew they were all looking at it. They were all looking at the same thing.  He wanted to tell them how he felt but he knew there was no need for that. He felt that were all sharing an emptiness. They were sharing something empty. They all belonged to that empty moment.

He does not need to understand or to be understood in order to belong. "We all have the right to have a thick shadow, don't we?" He kept repeating to himself.

An ode to our complexity.

What is comprehending someone?

Prehendere in Latin means to take. So Comprehendere means to take with you. Make someone yours by reducing them to what you make of them... "I don't want to be what you make of me..."

The man accompanying the elegant women was gazing at him. It seemed that he was reading in his mind, and suddenly started speaking: "It is my business card that is laying there. I am Steven Rand. I won't pick it up as I have plenty in my wallet. But you can have it if you want. I did not put it there on purpose. I guess it fell out of my pocket. Or no, what am I thinking? I will just give a new one... here... Isn't a business card such an absurd piece of paper? We all want to belong to the excluding majority. It feels so much safer. It's basically the same in all periods in all societies... But this is our time and we are not the majority."

He was not really sure what he meant. The young girl laughed and then answered him saying: "Why do we keep looking for stories? Beautiful and comforting stories? Are we not looking for the truth? Truth is often accompanied by intense pain. People prefer to live in a comfortable lie. I come from a comfortable lie. I am Syrian." She puts her head on his shoulder. He didn't expect that. He could smell her hair.

The women in front of him smiled at him and said that it shouldn't take too long. He remembered a sentence of Oscar Wilde that says: "I will wait here for you my whole life, if you are not too long." He would have waited here for them. He wanted the train to never start moving again.

He felt so tired he wished they could all lay down. It was a funny thought. He wanted to laugh, but didn't. There was a hope that did not dare to speak its name. The hope of losing everything. A hope of sharing an unspoken grief...

The Syrian girl looked at the couple and asked them where they were coming from. Steven Rand answered: I am from here and there. The women said: when you are not happy about where you are living the alternative is to get out of your world and try again somewhere else, but sometimes you can't go anywhere..." The Indian guy answered her laughing: it's just a technical problem... we all eventually go where we wanted to go with this metro. It is still the real world with its imperfections and anticlimaxes. And even if we try to go back, we would never end up in the same place."