That boat was rapidly approaching falls within a stone’s throw. The mist from torrents of water had already sparkled down on them as it arced back and rose from the edge. Beyond the edge the world was blue, the drop infinite, and no one had ever seen beyond it. Now that it was so close, Jules was fixed on what was ahead, but François was still blindly concerned with his position in the boat, fighting with anyone who would fight with him about definitions, words, economics, justice, and ideas, all so that he might continue to accumulate that which he soon would not at all need.
Jules taught his one remaining class just out of habit, like making his bed when he got up in the morning. Some people, because no private person must make his bed, don’t. He did, always and always meticulously. Apart from continuing certain lifelong routines and bringing expensive gifts to Cathérine and David – they thought he had robbed a bank, which fit intriguingly with his insistence that they plan for Switzerland or America – he spent his days walking through Paris and Saint-Germainen-Laye, in the forest there, and the gardens, where he would sit in the spring sun for hours, resting, still, and listening to the wind.
Although he went as much as possible to parks, high overlooks, and other beautiful places, he found beauty even in commercial quarters and industrial districts – in the spring sun shining on a wall, or in small bits of greenery clinging to nothing or having arisen from cracks in crumbling concrete. He delighted in form, warmth, and the breeze, in shades of color, and in changing light. He sometimes walked all day, stopping in a restaurant and, without looking at prices, ordering exactly what he wanted. He didn’t care if, when walking through a dangerous place, as he often did, he would be attacked or even killed – although he thought it best to stay alive until the second day of August, after the Acorn servers were purged. He slept when he wished, ate when he wished and what he wished, and did what he had always wanted to do from the time he had first learned music but had never found the courage to start: he began to write a symphony.
It came naturally, if slowly because of all the parts. He would dream the music with fidelity that exceeded that of music in the world, awaken to note the themes for all the instruments, and later in the day or evening fill them in note by note. He had always dreamed music but never written it down. Not only because he had never seemed to have had the time, but because it had always seemed too close to Beethoven – not Mozart or Bach – and he assumed that no one was interested in a symphony-length, Beethoven-like cadenza by Jules Lacour. Now it didn’t matter who was interested or not. He wrote it because it called out to be written, and he calculated that if he kept up the pace it might be finished by the end of July.
He would talk, sometimes for hours, to his mother and father, whom he hardly knew; to Luc, imagining him as a young man; to Cathérine; and to Jacqueline. He paced the huge room, gesticulating and speaking out loud especially to Jacqueline’s photograph, not quite as if she were there but rather as if he were communicating with someone on the other side of a glacial crevasse or a small river. He spoke to Cathérine in a way in which he was unable to speak with her when he was with her. He told his parents what his life had been like, and that he had never forgotten them and never would. And he spoke to Élodi, apologizing for allowing himself to take her lead or having led her on – he was not sure which.
Early in May, he decided to go to the Louvre. It was not for edification, to study, or to learn, but rather to look at the paintings and marbles without intellectual exercise and let their colors and forms flow through him as if someone in charge of the museum had ordered the opening of windows and doors to allow the fresh air of spring to pour into the galleries.
Though Paris was immense, he hoped at every turn of every corner to see Élodi coming down each newly opened prospect. He dreamed that he might then finally embrace and kiss her, the gift of coincidence enclosing them briefly, as if in parentheses. It hadn’t happened, and he ached to think that it would not.
A LIFETIME OF PROFESSION and practice allowed Jules to hear music without any kind of electronic device. The stores of his memory and his precision of pitch enabled him to reproduce the sound of music without physically hearing it, although the inexplicable thing was that even so, without the actual sound it did not have the same transcendent power. He had always been annoyed by speculations about Beethoven’s deafness. How could Beethoven have continued composing if he couldn’t hear? The answer was simple. He heard music despite his deafness as precisely as if he had had the ears of a newborn. It was all inside. But whether or not at that point in his life he could enjoy it was an open question.
Without benefit of the implements stuck in the ears of entire upcoming generations, Jules listened to whatever music he wished, and wherever he was it enhanced form and motion. Clouds scudding by were fine enough, perhaps even captivating, but with music they seemed to hint at the answer to all questions in their graceful obedience to the rhythm, syncopation, and counterpoint present in all things. The pulsing of electrons, flashing of stars, harmonies of orbiting planets, the apparently disjointed movements of traffic coursing through the arteries of a city, or of blood faithfully flowing throughout the body for a hundred years without cease, were set to one elemental interval of motion. All the variations were only the symphonic components weaving in and out of the main theme. Music opened up and made apprehensible everything as it ran together and pointed in one direction too distant and bright to be intelligible but perfectly comforting nonetheless.
As he walked through Paris, music deepened the sight of everything. From jets inscribing white lines across a powder blue sky, to leaves shifting only a few millimeters in bright sun, or the grace of a woman moving through a garden, never had the world seemed so beautiful and forgiving.
AT THE LOUVRE, Jules was not conventional. His approach was somewhat like experiencing a sauna in reverse. In the Finnish style, you heated yourself to almost boiling, then plunged into ice water, which clarified and calmed. But rather than hot followed by cold, Jules would spend half an hour in the statuary hall, staring at the marbles until everything dissolved into motionless white. Cleansed, as it were, he would move to the painting galleries, where form and color would rush in, the wealth and density of the imagery as overwhelming as being taken by the wild surf of a remote ocean.
Given a limit to what he could absorb, he always had to rest, which he would do in the Louvre’s bookstore. Every time he visited Cathérine and David he brought presents: books and prints for them, toys for Luc. Because Cathérine didn’t know that everything would end in August, and he had recently spent more than three thousand Euros on copper engravings and reproductions of Greek marbles, she was on the verge of having him committed.
With his arms full of books and toys, he moved toward the cash registers. Standing off to the side in a passage that led from the center aisle, was Élodi. As he approached her, without taking her eyes from the book in which she was absorbed, she stepped to the side and politely excused herself, until she saw that it was he, and then it was as if she had walked into a wall. They looked at one another for a wonderfully long time.
“What’s that?” he finally asked, about the book she was holding.
She held it up: Les Maîtres du Marbre, Carrare 1300-1600, by Christiane Klapisch-Zuber. On the cover was a picture of a quarry.
“Carerra marble is a most interesting subject, isn’t it,” Jules said, gently teasing. “The last – I would guess – thirty or forty cellists I’ve taught always had a book about marble with them during their lessons. When I’d leave the room and come back, they’d be reading it, and I’d have to clap hands to get them out of the trance.”
Never at a loss, Élodi replied, “Okay, that’s me. And you? You’re buying toys?” It was an affectionate and emotional accusation.
“You’ve heard of second childhoods? This is my fourth.”
She looked at the pile in his arms. “‘Babar Goes Fishing Magnetic Catch and Release Game?’” She read further, “‘Ages three to
five?’”
“Did you ever play it?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Then how would you know? It’s very calming if you play while listening to Erik Satie. It makes you feel like Daubigny painting on his boat. That was always a dream of mine, that on a boat drifting down the rivers of France I would paint what I saw on the banks.”
“Then why music?”
“It’s superior, and more discernible, in that it fully occupies you until it ends. Then it’s gone. It’s linear, it vanishes, it leaves you both sad and fulfilled. And I inherited it. It was my father’s profession and now it’s mine. Also, I draw like a two-year-old. You stopped coming.”
“You made me stop coming.”
“I know. I can explain.”
“With your arms full of toys?”
IN THE TUILERIES they paused to sit by the first fountain west of the Louvre, the one almost embraced by the wings of the palace but slipped from their grasp like a dropped ball. The green metal chairs littered about the gardens were new and had little of the feel of the essential Paris that Jules once had thought would remain fixed throughout his life. Since his youth, someone had invented an epoxy or other compound that kept the slats shiny and smooth without wear. Like civilization itself, they seemed frictionless and unworn, with no story except things to come. Their time had just begun, there was nothing rough and knowing about them even though eventually they, too, would be old.
“I have to rest,” he said, despite the fact that he could have run, however slowly, all the way to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, but he wanted her to know by way of warning, to remind her, that he was old. This was because, as they walked, they walked together with the rhythm of a man and a woman who are in love. There was a lightness, an expectation, and an exactitude to their step, an excitement that carried them forward as if gravity had disappeared from the world.
“I have to rest, too,” she said. Obviously she didn’t. They moved their chairs east a few meters when a south wind carried the plume of the fountain out beyond the rim and sprayed water across the gravel. It wouldn’t have been disastrous had it wet them. For the first time that spring, the evening was so warm that they might have heard the few tree frogs in the park, awakened after having slept since October. In fact, except sometimes at four o’clock in the morning in the middle of a hot and empty August, the traffic on the Place de La Concorde made it almost always impossible to hear tree frogs or crickets in the Tuileries. But they were there.
“Are you all right?” Élodi placed a hand on his arm. He wondered if it were as electric for her as it was for him, or, for her, more like petting a dog.
“I’m all right, but I don’t think I’ve ever just walked past this fountain. I don’t really have to rest, I just like to sit here. Even when I have an appointment and have to rush, I’ll sit down for at least a moment, like genuflecting, before I go on.”
“Do you genuflect a lot?” she asked mischievously.
“No, but I know how to do it. When I was young the churches were full and it was part of the culture. Even Jews could genuflect perfectly. I think it’s a lovely gesture and I’ve always admired it. Especially when a woman does it, it’s extremely graceful and beautiful.”
“I do it,” she told him, “in church.”
This difference between them arose only instantly to disappear, to their pleasurable relief. To check the excitement relief generated, neither said anything, which, in silence, brought them closer. “Why are so many children crying?” Élodi asked. When she saw small children, she felt love for them that was very strong in view of the fact that they were not her own, and a desire to have children that filled her with both pleasure and longing. Jules had the same surge of love – which a foolish person might think inappropriate – but rather than prospective it was an intense remembrance of things past and lost, and the natural emotion of someone in the process of leaving life.
Amidst the crowd at least two children were screaming unhappily. Remembering Cathérine at that age, Jules answered, “They get excited by the playground, but eventually they have to leave. They get tired from the Métro, scared by the crowds, or they’re hungry, their clothes are too tight, or the wind blows in their faces. Sometimes they’re scared by what they see, and you never know what it is: a face, a dog, it could be anything.”
“You have children?”
“A daughter.”
“How old is she?”
“She’ll be forty soon.”
“My,” said Élodi, taking in a breath.
“Yes, that’s what I say. I don’t know what’s happening here, but I don’t want to walk away, not yet. Perhaps we should have dinner. I know a place nearby that’s practically invisible because it’s in a courtyard with no sign on the street. It’s been there since before the war, and the food is good.”
AT DUSK, THE STREETLIGHTS had begun to come on over the bridges and along the boulevards, and the restaurant was warm and dark, with islands of light. When they entered they were hit by a wash of conversation as cheerful and unintelligible as the sound of a waterfall, and as they walked to their table they smelled bread, wine, candle smoke, perfume, linen, good leather, and gin. The owner seated them near a fireplace in the back and left them with menus. A conical blaze was dancing above four splits of oak that after having spent the winter outside crackled like gunfire. The people who looked at Jules and Élodi thought that she was either his granddaughter or that it was scandalous even for France. As they scanned the menus, Élodi asked, “Why are the Tuileries always so packed with people? Is it just overflow from the Louvre?”
Jules could not converse and read his menu at the same time, so he looked over the top of it to answer. “Overflow from the Louvre is part of it. This area has few parks. Tourists not going to or coming from the Louvre come here to rest after walking around. And I think the French are repeating what their forbears did. For some, a very few, it’s atavistically promenading with their aristocratic ancestors. For others, it’s strutting through the domain of the king they beheaded. In revolutions the populace goes mad with a desire to view the king’s real estate. It’s always the same. Which one are you?”
“I suppose I’d be promenading like a low-level peacock, which is ridiculous of course. And you?”
“We weren’t here.”
“Where were you?”
“Germany, Holland, I really don’t know as far back as the Revolution. Our family records and memorabilia were lost during the war. It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes it does.”
“No, not compared to what else was lost.”
They ordered soup, bread, cheese, but not wine. “Just Perrier,” Jules told the owner, and looked over to Élodi, who followed his lead after he said, “I’ve come to believe that Badoit is too salty.”
“No wine?” she asked.
“What I have to tell you I want to tell you without wine, which would make it less difficult. But it must be difficult, because it must be exact.”
“Sometimes water is better than wine,” she said. She looked around. “The tourists don’t come?”
Glancing in the direction of the proprietor, Jules said, “He keeps it out of the guidebooks. How he does that, I don’t know, but it’s almost like a private dining room. I’ve always preferred modest restaurants. They’re somewhat like women in uniform. Clothes can be a great frame for beauty, but when a woman is in uniform – military, police, nurses – the only thing that matters is her face, and you see the real person, freed of plumage. Although sometimes, I admit, the cut and tailoring of clothing adds to a woman’s beauty in a breathtaking fashion.” Élodi was reddened from having been in the sun, and she was wearing the dark navy-blue dress with white piping. Jules never smiled in photographs, because he felt that he looked like an idiot when he did. But when Élodi smiled – he had seen pictures of her in chamber music programs tacked to the bulletin boards and kiosks in the Cité de la Musique – she looked not merely beautiful but brilliant.
Like a sinking swimmer grabbing the side of a pool, he returned to the subject of restaurants. She was aware that when he had spoken of the beauty in a woman’s face he had not been able to take his eyes off her, and she was also aware that she herself was almost glowing.
“I like station restaurants, cafeterias, the places where truck drivers and construction workers eat, or fishermen, or poorly paid clerks.”
“No Michelin stars?”
“Not a one, and very few deathly sauces. The same simplicity for hotels. For years we vacationed in Contaut ….”
“Where is that?”
“Do you know Hurtin, or Hurtin Plage?”
“Normandy?”
“Aquitaine, the Gironde. North of the cut above Arcachon are beaches and forests that are as empty as if they were on the coast of Africa. French and German tourists crowd Hurtin Plage, but south of it for sixty kilometers there’s nothing. When you get to Contaut you can turn north to Hurtin Plage, or south on sand roads into the forests and dunes. For eight or nine years it’s been a national reserve, but before that there were a few shacks near the beach. We used to stay there for two weeks in August, returning in the last two weeks, when Paris is empty and quiet.