“Excuse me?”
“Are you the girl from the Arc de Triomphe?”
It hurt when she smiled and she realized she had bitten her lip until it bled.
“I wasn’t sure. He’s in the country. He went back to work for his uncle. In Périgueux.”
Sweet Jesus. Périgueux. It might as well be Australia.
“Does he have a phone number?”
“I don’t know it. Do you have something to write with? I’ll give you the name of the restaurant. It’s not like here, you know. It’ll be easier to find him.”
She carefully wrote down what he told her, and then looked up to thank him:
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked, startled.
“No reason.”
He turned around and walked a few steps away before changing his mind. “Hey!”
“Yeah?”
“What was in your bag, exactly?”
“An atlas.”
“Oh, really?”
He seemed disappointed.
6.
Mathilde thought about going home to grab her laptop and a toothbru—no. They’d already lost enough time.
She hesitated at the first red light: wait, goddammit, which station for Périgueux? Montparnasse or Austerlitz?
Okay, little emperor, you’ve been the third wheel since the beginning, so I’ll trust you all the way. They say it was your greatest tactical victory, and I’m pretty hopeless when it comes to tactics. So, Austerlitz it is.
Don’t let me down, okay?
She chained her bike to a parapet and made a dash for the ticket windows.
“One-way or round-trip?” a friendly clerk in a mauve vest asked her.
Yikes. One-way. It was already complicated enough.
“Just one-way for now, please.”
And forward-facing, if possible, for once.
FINAL ACT
1.
It was a long day of waiting. First in the Gare d’Austerlitz, and then in the station in Limoges, and finally in the streets of old Périgueux.
Even though she’d never been here, this place brought back a lot of memories. D’Artagnan was there, everywhere, dashing into taverns exclaiming: “Greetings, you rogue! Greetings, you devil of a barkeep! Our best wine!” Otherwise there were bottles of walnut oil, preserves, stuffed duck necks, and the same logo-emblazoned clothing as everywhere else in the whole world.
The fleur-de-lis had had a setback in the place. In China, it must be said, they embroidered them a lot more cheaply.
Ah well . . . it was our world, and you had to love it. These old stones, which told swashbuckling historical romances . . . they didn’t hurt, either.
Mathilde wandered around, killing time, because she had decided to wait for the end of the dinner service. To reveal herself to him in the twilight. Not because it was more romantic, but because she was terrified.
She may have acted like an idle onlooker observing the local lifestyle, but the simple truth is that our young friend was scared. The anger of the head chef who had sent her away had rattled her. Maybe the guy in question really was crazy. Maybe she was walking into a lion’s den . . . or worse, into the clutches of a half-wit. Or someone who really didn’t give a shit about the poor little rich girl from the Champs-Élysees with her false promises and her words, who remembered . . .
Or, much, much worse even than that, someone who would say to her in a few hours, pointing to the clock:
“Sorry. We’re not serving anymore.”
Yeah, it was entirely possible that she was about to lose another life to this idiotic game she had invented to pass the time.
God help me.
Greetings, barkeep! An ice-cold Coke to help the little girl pluck up some courage!
At the Place du Marché she stood on her tiptoes to photograph a pretty statue of a pilgrim on the Route of Santiago de Compostela.
Click. Holiday memory.
Worst-case scenario, if things really went badly, she’d make it her desktop background.
Like a Post-it stuck up to remind her forever how risky it was to love your neighbor, and to believe again.
2.
Quarter to midnight. She’d spent two hours loitering on a low wall across from Unky’s Inn.
The place was stylish, full of wooden beams and copper pots and laughter and the tinkling of silverware and glasses. D’Artagnan and his gang would have loved it.
The last slowpokes were finally rousing themselves enough to pay their checks, and the Coke wasn’t having any effect anymore. Mathilde rubbed her stomach, begging it to behave itself for just a little while longer.
Her palms were sticky with perspiration.
* * *
Now the customers were all gone, but there were still people moving around the room. A lady brought the blackboard in from outside the front door. A young man, motorcycle helmet under one arm, said goodbye to her before lighting a cigarette and taking off; another put new place settings on tables that had just been vacated, while a big man with a mustache in a vintner’s apron (the uncle?) was busy behind a counter.
Then, nothing more.
Mathilde was seething.
Swear words bubbled up inside her and forced their way out between her teeth, clenched as they were.
A murmuring in the night:
“Fuck, what the hell are they doing in there, goddammit? Come on, come on, get lost, assholes. Get lost. And you; when the hell will you be coming out? Haven’t you driven me crazy enough yet? Come on, for God’s sake, put the stuffed duck necks down and come out of that greasy spoon . . . ”
Ten minutes later, the lady and the young table-setter finally reappeared and kissed each other on the cheek directly in front of her before going off in opposite directions. All the lights in the restaurant went out.
“Hey!” she exclaimed, jumping up and crossing the street at a run. “I’m not going to sleep out here!”
She bumped into tables, knocked over a chair, swore under her breath, and, like a moth, headed toward the only source of light left to guide her, shining through the porthole of a kitchen door.
She pushed it open slowly, holding her breath, steeling her dignity, her nerves, and her gut.
A man in a white jacket was concentrating on his hands.
He was standing, busily fiddling with something in front of him on a stainless-steel work surface.
“You can go, I’ll lock up. But leave me your keys; I forgot mine again,” he said, not taking his eyes off his work.
She started.
She recognized his voice, low as it was.
“By the way, did you let Pierrot know about the veal sweetbreads?”
And because, alas, no, she hadn’t let Pierrot know, he finally looked up.
3.
His face manifested neither surprise, nor happiness, nor astonishment.
Zilch.
He looked at her.
He looked at her for . . . hard to say how long. Seconds aren’t really seconds at times like this; they’re rare and count triple. For an eternity, let’s say.
And she . . . she was speechless. First she was drained, and then it was okay. Her part of the work was done.
She didn’t move a muscle. It was his turn now. His turn to take over their story. To say something stupid and jeopardize everything, or to say . . . she didn’t know, something that would finally let her sit down and breathe.
He had sensed all of that. He was struggling for words; it showed in his face. Words, fatigue, and his memories. That he was groping. That he was on the point of . . . and then biting it back. That he was scared, and that he was as deeply enmeshed in this as she was.
He looked down again, and went back to what had been absorbing his attention. To buy some time, and because he was smarter when his hand
s were occupied.
A long, rectangular blue stone was on the counter in front of him. He was sharpening his knives.
She watched him.
They played Mikado with their nerves, and the calm, regular scraping sound soothed them both. These, they might both have been telling themselves, were so many minutes bought before everything might crumble.
He inspected the blade, testing its sharpness by letting it slide in a curve over his left thumbnail, then turned it around and went back to work.
A sort of dark paste had formed on the stone. He traced loops in it, and figure eights, and whorls, bearing down with all his weight on the three fingers guiding the steel.
Fascinated, she studied the short fingernails whitening with effort, the hardened and cut pads of flesh at their tips, and, hidden beneath the ebony sleeve, the famous abbreviated ring finger.
That finger, crippled, soft, and pale . . . she wanted to touch it.
Without sparing her a glance, he pulled a bowl of water toward him and moistened the stone with gentle strokes of his hand.
The scraping of the blade, the stormy little flutterings of their hearts, which had been pent up for too long, the humming of the walk-in freezer in the distance, cradled them for another moment, and then there were footsteps in the next room, the CLACK! of a circuit breaker, the noise of a door closing and a pair of shutters being drawn, and then one—no, two—locks clicking.
They found themselves plunged into darkness, and it was only then that she saw him smile. She could hear his dimples in his voice.
“Too bad. Like I just told you, I forgot my keys.”
He was already savoring this. She still hadn’t spoken. She groped behind her and found a stool, pulled it over and sat down across from him.
After all the noise, silence again.
“I’m happy,” he murmured.
She had reopened the little cut on her lower lip. Was it his turn to talk? Oh dear, no, not now. She was too tired. She’d come to him because he hadn’t stolen from her; please, let him keep up that momentum.
She played with her wounded lip, to gain a few more seconds.
She bit it where it hurt the most, and sucked away her own blood.
“You’ve lost weight,” he said.
“You too.”
“Yeah . . . me too. More than you. But I had more to lose, right?”
She smiled in the dark.
He rocked back and forth, as if he wanted to make a hollow in the stone.
After another minute, or two, or three, or maybe a thousand, he added, his voice still low:
“I thought that you . . . that I . . . no . . . nothing.”
Sccccritch! A fly electrocuted itself in the bluish halo of a trap set near the corridor.
“Are you hungry?” he asked after a time, looking at her as if he’d never seen her before in his life.
“Yes.”
“Me too.”
She smiled, and it hurt, and she licked her lips, because it hurt.
She salivated on her lip a little, to cauterize it, and he carefully wiped his big knife.
“Take your clothes off.”
YANN
ONE, THE BALL
I’m closing this week. I approve the final orders, turn off the machines, and make sure the drawers and all the display cases are locked.
I’ll admit that this is what bores me the most. I feel like a little country jeweler carefully locking up his gold-plated necklaces and bracelets every night, but Eric, my colleague in the 5th Arrondissement, all but got caught stealing more than 3,000 bucks worth of hardware last month, and I know he’s not out of the woods with that whole thing.
Oh, no one has said he’s a thief; it’s just understood, that’s all.
“You know, sometimes I think it’s the best thing that could have happened to me. Having to give them my badge and mollify my girlfriend’s thwarted dreams of store credit. Not taking the commuter train anymore; not starting the day with that humiliation. Barely awake and already cooped up, packed in like sardines, a slave to the grind. All these suburbanites, haggard and resigned just like you, reading the same bullshit stories as you in the same free newspapers at exactly the same time as you. I swear, that’s what depresses me the most,” he had confided to me, sighing, while we took part in a training day on their new sales software. “Yeah . . . too bad I still love my girlfriend . . . ”
We had exchanged a smile and then a new speaker came on, and we shut up.
(If you got in that lady’s bad books she’d tell our boss, and we’d lose our Business, Care & Involvement bonus.)
(The brownnoser.)
So anyway, I lock everything up.
Then I turn off the showroom lights and take the freight elevator and walk kilometers of hallways lit only by emergency lights.
I hurry, because of the alarm.
I look for my locker in the changing room and punch in a code—another one, the tenth of the day, I’m pretty sure—and change my vest (“Yann, how can I help you?”) for a shabby old peacoat that makes it clear to the whole world that poor little Yann can no longer do anything for anyone. I hurry, again, because of another alarm, and end up in a blind alley behind the Boulevard Haussmann between two rows of garbage cans and a dog breeder making the rounds.
When he has the big Doberman we smoke a cigarette while chatting about the weather and custom cars and double-clutch transmissions (well, he chats and I try to come up with appropriate responses), and when it’s the other one, the Rottweiler, I wait until I’m at the end of the cul-de-sac before I relax.
It’s not the dog’s teeth that scare me; it’s the way he looks at me.
I always wondered who reads Détective magazine. The answer is, this guy does.
This guy . . . a headline like “Lili, age three, beaten to death, raped, tortured, and burned alive” . . . that turns him on, as they say. It turns him on a lot.
Tonight I’m the one who pulled out my cigarette pack first. He’s anxious because one of his dog’s puppies—not this one, another one, one that only does parking—has a testicle that isn’t dropping.
I was about to say how nice that was, and stopped myself just in time.
It wasn’t funny at all. It was tragic, even. No ball, no pedigree, and no pedigree, no money.
“It’ll drop eventually, right?”
He didn’t seem too convinced. “Well . . . maybe. Maybe yes, maybe no. Insha’Allah . . . heaven knows.”
Poor Allah, I thought, walking away. I hope He has someone in the prayer office who sorts through these things before putting them in the pipeline.
TWO, DEMONS
The clock on the American pharmacy informs me that it’s already 10:10 P.M. and that the temperature is -5°.
There’s no one expecting me. Mélanie’s still stuck at one of her seminars and it’s too late to go to a movie.
I head for the nearest metro station, and then change my mind. I can’t go to a club now; I’ll keel over.
I need to walk. I need to go home on foot, and cross Paris, slapping my demons away with my hands and swatting them with my hat.
I need to suffer, to be cold, to be hungry, and to take advantage of finally being alone to collapse into bed, dead tired.
I’ve been sleeping badly for months. I don’t like my school, I don’t like my schedule, I don’t like my professors or the smell of the locker rooms or the cafeteria or the idiots surrounding me. At age twenty-six I have the same insomnia I had at age twelve, except that at age twenty-six it’s a thousand times worse, because I got myself into this mess all alone. Me. I can’t blame my parents, and I don’t even have vacations anymore . . .
What have I done?
What?
What have you done?
It’s true! But what have you done now, moron?
&
nbsp; I curse myself out loud the whole way home, because the lukewarm breath of my anger keeps the tip of my nose warm.
Most of the bums are in hidey-holes somewhere; the ones who are drinking to get through the night will be dead by morning; the Seine is ink-black, slow and sluggish. Winding between the piles of the Pont-Neuf it creates a noiseless in-draught. It’s on the hunt, stalking the weary, the exhausted employees, the talentless little dreamers and the people who question themselves in the night. It picks out the ones without confidence and the slippery parapets. Come on, it murmurs. Come on, it’s only me . . . go ahead . . . we’ve known each other for so long . . .
I imagine its icy touch, the clothing billowing out before weighing you down, the shock, the cry torn out of you, the panic. Everyone imagines that, don’t they?
Yes. Of course they do. Anyone who passes a river as part of their daily routine has that kind of vertigo.
It’s comforting.
Diversion:
Text from Mélanie: “Wiped out going to bed shit weather xx,” with a little “kiss” doodad at the end. (Some winking yellow thing with big lips.) (Emoticons, that’s what they’re called.)
Emoticon. The name is as vulgar as the thing. I hate that lazy crap. Instead of expressing a feeling, you take a shortcut. You press a button and all the smiles in the world are exactly the same. The joys, doubts, sorrow, anger; everything has the same face. All the desires of the heart, reduced to five hideous little circles.
Goddamn. What “progress.”
“Goodnight,” I answer. “All my love.”
That’s much better isn’t it?