She read the cutting: MAVROCORDATO S’EST SUICIDÉ.
‘I still don’t get it, Dad. Who’s Mavrocordato?’
‘He’s a film director. Was a film director.’
INTERIOR. CAR. DAY.
The man lit his cigarette from the butt of the one he had just smoked. The girl reached across and lifted his sunglasses from his face and put them on. Lifted the sunglasses from his face and put them on. She stared sulkily through the windscreen, making a moue with her lips. ‘I’m tired,’ she said, ‘I want to stop.’ ‘OK,’ the man said, ‘we’ll stop at the next town.’ He turned and looked at her. ‘Baby.’ ‘Never call me Baby,’ the girl said, ‘never.’ ‘OK, Baby,’ the man said. From the car a roadside indicator could be seen flashing by: it read ‘St Julien 3 kms’. Through the windscreen there was a hazy view of a town ahead. A small town on a hill. An ancient church surrounded by cypresses. The man glanced over at the girl. (The naked woman is standing in what looks like an artist’s studio, one knee, her right, resting on a chaise longue. Some sort of ornate wall hanging behind her. She is completely naked, her upper body turning slightly towards the left. In her left hand she holds a looking glass into which she stares. The fingertips of her right hand touch the underhang of her left breast, gently. She has bobbed, badly permed hair and the heavy makeup and dark lips of a soubrette. 1920s, definitely, perhaps earlier. Her shoulders are thin, girlish, and her head seems ever so slightly too large for her body. At the foot of the picture someone has written her name in a bold, cursive hand: Irène Golan.) ‘OK, Baby,’ the man said. He threw his cigarette out of the window. Exterior, day: the car turned off the route nationale and made briskly, at a careless lick, for St Julien, snare drum on the soundtrack going tssssss-tup-a-tssssss, tsssss-tup-a-tssssss, tssssss, tssssss, tssssss.
‘Dear Mrs Culpepper –
Thank you for your letter. I do not know if I can be more precise but I will try. The village was in near complete ruins and was called St Julien, I think. I remember we crossed a railway line and then a small stream. There was a lower town and up on a hill beyond there was a church and other buildings, all fairly knocked about. I remember three fine ancient cypresses all broken down from artillery. The lower town was quiet, a few bodies here and there, but well cleared out. Captain Shaw sent our platoon forward up the road to the church. It was about three in the afternoon, quite mild, with a light rain falling. This was November 4th 1918…’
In the photograph my grandmother is standing holding her daughter’s hand in front of the sign. ‘St Julien’ stands out starkly, black on white, in what is a rather fogged, sun-faded print. All around them lie the ruins of the lower town. On the hill behind is the church with its shattered cypresses. My grandmother stands stiffly (I wonder who took the picture?), her daughter (my aunt Sarah) has turned her head slightly in her direction, as if to ask her a question. The date is 1920, some two years after my grandfather died.
I deduced that the noise must have been caused by a spontaneous rally of fifty dumpster trucks deciding to have a revving competition on Seventh Avenue, many floors below, true, but the sonic vibrations were palpable up here. Incredible. I was trying to listen to ‘Variations on a Theme of Haydn’ on my tape recorder and at the same time was going through my notes of the previous night’s concert. The effort it was costing reminded me forcefully of the main reason why I left New York. I had just turned up the volume when my breakfast arrived. ‘It’s open,’ I called, not looking round, hearing the metallic rattle of the room service trolley and the clink of glass and silverware as it made its shuddery, percussive way over to the window.
‘Ah, Brahms,’ said the waiter, organizing the table setting (now I did look round). His voice was light, the ‘r’ rolled slightly, in the French way.
He turned. That is, she turned. She was in full waiter’s rig: starched bum-freezer jacket, black trousers, lace-up shoes, a black bow tie. Blonde hair held back in a taut chignon. Late thirties, I calculated, older than me.
‘Aimez-vous Brahms?’ she said with a smile, holding out the slim folder with the check for me to sign.
‘I’m writing a book on him,’ I said, noticing simultaneously the sudden hollowness in my chest and the fact that her name tag said ‘Jay’. Odd name for a woman.
‘I love Brahms,’ she said.
‘Me too,’ I said. ‘More than life.’
‘… We were almost up to the church when the shells started exploding on the road. A whole bunch of us took cover in the graveyard but they had that targeted too. Lieutenant Povitch shouted at us to head back to the lower town. John and I with a dozen others had jumped over a low wall that bounded the cemetery. Ahead of us up the hill to the left we could see a ruined farm house and a big stone barn. It made more sense to take cover up there than risk the descent to the lower town. We set off, John was right behind me…’
My grandmother and her daughter Sarah stayed at the Hostellerie du Coq Hardi in Rochette, ‘the original kitchen of which’, according to their guidebook, ‘has preserved its ample proportions and innumerable copper utensils’. My guidebook makes no mention of this establishment but I have decided to stay in the town anyway, if only to approximate to the spirit of this impromptu pilgrimage. The road from Paris is quiet and I am finding, to my vague surprise, that I am actually enjoying driving. I will stay somewhere in Rochette and proceed to St Julien tomorrow, taking my time, making sure that as I walk up the hill from the lower town it will be around about three o’clock in the afternoon. If a light rain happens to be falling, so much the better.
That Haydn did not write the melody that inspired Brahms’s celebrated ‘Variations’ is well known, but the designation is firmly established and so – So what? So we might as well stick with it. How to express that more elegantly? How to say that the notion that this fool has found a ‘missing’ variation is a crock, a brimfull, steaming, grade-A crock of –
Jay came into the bar and I put down my notes with barely a tremble, scarcely a rustle of paper. She was wearing a short black dress and her hair was still up, but more loosely, the result of some artful manipulation of pins and tortoiseshell combs.
We shook hands – it seemed unduly formal, but she was foreign, remember, she was not American – and she sat down beside me. She smiled at me as I Sieg-heiled through the gloom at the idle waiter.
‘How’s the demolishment going?’ she said.
‘The stiletto has been inserted between the seventh and eighth rib. We are half way to the hilt.’
‘This new variation was meant to go where?’
‘Another vodka martini and – ‘I said to the waiter and glanced round at Jay.
‘– And another vodka martini, on rocks.’
‘Between two and three. Variation 2 (a), I suppose. Absurd.’
‘Obscene. May I?’ She took one of my cigarettes from the pack on the table, broke off the filter tip and put the shortened filterless cigarette to her lips, a little off centre. I reached for my lighter but she was there first. But she frowned, not lighting her cigarette, thinking (thinking about Brahms?), the cigarette between her lips, slightly off centre, three uneven creases between her fine, dark blonde, frowning eyebrows. This is how I will always remember her, frowning, trying to imagine what possible kind of variation could have gone between number two and three. This is one of the ways I will remember her.
INTERIOR. ROOM. NIGHT.
The man leant against the window frame of the hotel room and placed his forehead against a cool pane. There was a flushing of water on the soundtrack (over) and the man did not look round. Irène Golan’s round, impassive face, then the camera tracked down her body. Her small breasts, the swell of her stomach, her neat divot of pubic hair, her knees, her feet. Her name. Irène Golan. The man in profile: he closed his eyes. The girl was in the room, now, a stronger light coming through the left-ajar bathroom door. She wore a loose white t-shirt (the man’s?) and black panties that did not quite conceal the cleft between her buttocks. The man
moved away from the window. ‘How many times did you sleep with Urbain?’ he asked, in a reasonable voice. ‘You can tell me, I don’t particularly mind.’ The girl was sitting down at the room’s solitary table. Leaning forward slightly. From the configuration of the folds of her t-shirt, the convexities and concavities, it was possible to imagine that, beneath her t-shirt, her breasts were just resting on the table top – the underhang of her breasts just grazing the table top. She had an unlit cigarette in her mouth, just off centre, and had frozen in the act of removing a match from a book of matches. She frowned, possibly, you imagined, considering a response to this question. She looked directly at you, looked directly at you, and with two fingers took the unlit cigarette from her mouth, and said, ‘France is really a beautiful country.’ Cigarette from her mouth, turned and looked at directly at you, and said, ‘France is really a beautiful –’
Jay carefully picked a shred of tobacco from the pink point of her tongue.
‘Do you want to –’ I cleared my throat, ‘Eat, stay here, try –’
‘– I’d like to go to a movie,’ she said. ‘I’d like to see, more than anything, Visions Fugitives. It’s playing downtown.’
‘Anything you say, Jay,’ I said.
She looked curiously at me. ‘Why do you call me Jay?’ she asked. I explained.
She chuckled. ‘Oh, that. I was only helping Jay out. I forgot to take his name off the jacket.’
I felt that slipping and sliding inside me once more.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘you have me at a disadvantage. You know my name. I thought I knew yours.’
‘It’s Irène,’ she said.
‘… All the way up to the farm building John was right behind me. He was saying, “Come on, Bob, let’s go, let’s go, Bob.” When we reached the farm we could see that it was in full view of the trench lines and gun emplacements in the upper town. Other men who had run up from the churchyard had taken shelter behind the barn whose walls were three feet thick, an ancient building. “Over there, Bob,” John said to me. “That’s for us, buddy.”I can hear his voice in my ears as I write this. There was a four-yard gap between the end of the farmhouse and the gable end of the barn. John pushed me in the back and I hightailed it, ran round the corner of the barn and fell over. That’s when I heard the explosion. Some tiles were blown off the roof and there was a lot of smoke. There were some hens inside the barn and they set up a mighty squawking…’
According to my grandmother’s note in the margin of the guidebook she and Sarah ate ‘some kind of stew’ the night they stayed in Rochette, but neither of them had much appetite. I find a room in the Hôtel du Cygne (two stars) in the Place des Halles and, dutifully, eat a cartilaginous daube de boeuf in the Brasserie Centrale, five minutes from the hotel, an overlit establishment as doggedly functional as its name.
Walking home at night I reflect that there are few places quite so firmly closed and shuttered to the traveller as a French village after hours. Even the hotel front door is locked and it takes half a dozen rings to summon the amiable patron from his flickering TV.
I stand in my room and look down at the silent street, the shine of the street lamps picking out the dead cars in dewy, night-time monochrome. I have that sensation – you must know that form of self-consciousness that comes from being strangely alone – when every gesture, every scratch of the head, every throat-clearing acquires a curious, mannered significance. I feel I am performing, I feel I am being filmed. I feel I am playing out an abandoned scene from Visions Fugitives.
INTERIOR. ROOM. DAY.
The man sat in a wooden chair, smoking, and watched the girl sleeping. Birdsong, morning light squeezing through half-open shutters. The man was clothed but the girl – most of her beneath a sheet – was plainly naked. Irène Golan’s face. The man picked through the girl’s clothes searched her fringed suede handbag went through her coat pockets lit another cigarette sat down stood up walked round the bed. Smoking his cigarette walked round the bed and crouched down staring at her. The girl’s face. The man’s face. Irène Golan turned through ninety degrees. The man stood by the closed window. Stood by the open window. Two gendarmes in the street below. The man recoiled, turned and kicked the leg of the bed. ‘Hey, get up. I’ll bring the car round.’ The girl woke and sat up in bed, slowly. Her right arm gathering the sheet to her breasts, modestly. She looked as if she had really been sleeping. The man left the room and the girl sighed – bored, irritated. With her free hand she pushed strands of hair back from her slumped and sleepy face. She yawned and a corner of the sheet slipped and nearly fell free. You wondered if they had made love the night before. There was the sound of the key locking the door. The girl did not even turn her head.
‘… John was lying on the ground in the gap between the farmhouse and the barn. He was rolled on to his side. And he was very pale, white as chalk. But there was no mark on him, not a drop of blood. It must have happened instantly – I was told that concussive force of certain explosions can do this to you. There appears to be no evident cause of death, apart from this unnatural pallor, as if the blood as well as the breath has been driven from you. We pulled him into the lee of the barn wall and we waited until dark, at which point we made our way back to the lower town. I am sure it happened in a split second and it is inconceivable that he knew a thing. This is exactly as I remember it. I hope this is of some comfort. I should only add that he seemed very peaceful. The next morning our battalion was withdrawn from St Julien and we remained in billets at Verdun until the armistice.
Yours sincerely,
J. Robert “Bob”Quentin.’
Visions Fugitives (1961). Un film de Jean-Didier Mavrocordato. Avec la participation d’Alain Hoffman et Julienne Jodelet… I remember the poster. I remember the revival house in the Village running a season of ‘nouvelle vague’ films from the ‘60s. I remember certain scenes in the movie with the recall of the the most pedantic cineaste. But the rest of it remains opaque. It was not that long ago, either. Twelve years, thirteen. I have never made any attempt to see the film again. The memory, with all its gaps, remains sharp, perfect but fragile, and I do not want it disturbed, do not want to shatter its perfect fragility.
‘Mavrocordato is Swiss. I am Swiss. I think he used a village in Switzerland for this film which I know. St Julien, it’s not far from my home.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Near Lausanne.’
The lights dimmed. The film began. On the screen the credits rolled and the abrasive, badly recorded jazz score filled the cinema. Tinny trumpet blare, hiss and tap of wire brush on snare drum. I don’t think I had seen a black and white film in the cinema for over a decade. I watched, with the curiosity of an anthropologist, as Alain Hoffman and Julienne Jodelet strolled hand in hand along a promenade. Nice? Villefranche? Beaulieu? Juan les Pins? I find it hard to recall much more of the opening sequence of the film. In the shifting silver of the semi-dark I felt Irène gently take my hand.
Who was this Irène Golan? Why did Mavrocordato use that old photograph in his film? Cutting back to it repeatedly? As if it was a vision of absolute torment to taciturn Alain Hoffman, on the run with the exquisite Julienne Jodelet…I lie in my lumpy bed in the Hôtel du Cygne, my head resting on the solid bolster that passes for a pillow, and shuffle the images that slip into my mind. I will not sleep, I know, my mind going now in the perfect shuttered blackness of the room, in that dead calm of hotel noiselessness – which is not noiseless at all. A distant lorry changes gear on the route nationale, the chuckling of the central heating, the unexplained creaks and thuddings of an old building, the confessional whisper of a toilet flush somewhere below. Shhhhh.
You know those unhindering hours of the night when your thoughts will wander free, sometimes freighted with despair, but sometimes inspired and almost miraculous – this is one of those nights. And just before I begin to doze I think I have it, my Theory of Everything. It is to do, I decide, with mysterious parabolas – as if an event, a moment, i
s launched at your life like a projectile – a stone, a dart, an arrow – sent soaring in the direction of your life. One day it will descend, following its parabolic curve and hit you, or glance off you, or near-miss. It seems to me in the dazzle-dark of this shuttered hotel room that at times our individual lives are peppershot with these mysterious comings-to-earth. Much of the time they pass unacknowledged – or, if we do, we are only half aware of something happening to us. We stop and turn and take our bearings – we shiver, we ponder, we forget – but do not really understand that we have just intersected with a mysterious parabola. Even if we do, even if we grant that something has happened, something has changed, we do not understand because we cannot trace that parabola back to its starting place. We all know these moments of fleeting significance that touch our lives. The great problem, the abiding problem is to make some sense of them…
The bizarre death of John Culpepper in St Julien on 4 November 1918. Brahms’s ‘Variations on a Theme of Haydn’. Jay turning into Irène. (There’s one: she recognized Brahms. What if she had not?) Visions Fugitives. Jean-Didier Mavrocordato’s decision to film his nouvelle vague masterwork in the small town on the Meuse where my grandfather had died. Irène’s misconception that it was filmed near Lausanne provoking our argument. Mavrocordato’s suicide (that touched me, glanced off me, that one, but only because I am here in France). I would not be lying in my unyielding bed in the Hôtel du Cygne if John Culpepper had not pushed his friend Bob across the gap between farmhouse and barn first, instead of going himself.
‘Brahms chose something deeply obscure and through the special alchemy of his genius transformed it into one of the best-known tunes in the orchestral repertoire. The melody he chose has nothing to do with Haydn, it forms the second movement of a Partita, probably by one Ignaz Pleyel, which may in turn come from some older, even more forgotten source…’