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Adrien Bosc

Constellation

for Laura

Sometimes the directions we take in our lives can be decided by the combination of a few words.

— Antonio Tabucchi, The Woman of Porto Pim

AUTHOR’S NOTE TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION

Pierre Lazareff, editor of France Soir, the great French daily paper of the 1960s, once asked his friend Blaise Cendrars if he had really taken the Trans-Siberian Railway to write his Prose of the Trans-Siberian. The poet’s answer came rocketing back, “What the hell does it matter, as long as I made you take it?” Constellation is unequivocally a novel, a true-life novel to probe the fiction at the heart of our lives, that ever more inventive, surprising, and unexpected reality. In its original and full meaning, the novel is “a fabulous work based on the most singular adventures in the life of man. ” (Sade, Reflections on the Novel)

1.  Orly Airport

I am the colossal drill

Boring into the startled husk of the night.

— Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Pope’s Monoplane

On this night of October 27, 1949, on the apron at Orly, Air France’s F-BAZN is waiting to receive thirty-seven passengers departing for the United States. A year earlier, Marcel Cerdan stepped off the plane as the newly crowned middleweight boxing champion of the world, a title he had clobbered Tony Zale for. And on that October 7, 1948, the crowd lifted him on their shoulders in triumph.

A year later, inside the airport with his manager, Jo Longman, and his friend Paul Genser, Cerdan is setting off to regain his title, now in the hands of Jake LaMotta, the Bronx Bull. There is no question that in December, on another Constellation, he will bring the title back with him. In the departure hall at Orly, he blusters to the journalists: “That title’s coming home with me. I’m going to fight like a lion. ” Lion against Bull, a matter of signs and constellations. The Lion of Nemea vs. the Minotaur, mythical poster for December 2, 1949, at Madison Square Garden.