The evening they discovered that Joséphine had gone, Baptiste and Isabelle remained together in the living room, talking, combining their anxieties. In spite of Isabelle’s questions, Baptiste kept silent about his analysis of the situation, not to retain any kind of superiority, but rather out of a sense of hope: the hope that he was wrong and that Isabelle might see things differently.
“Did she give you any reason to think she wanted to leave?” he asked her.
“I didn’t pay any attention at the time. She kept saying, ‘When it comes down to it, you and Baptiste are having so much fun together you’d be better off without me!’ I found that so absurd, I didn’t reply. What about you?”
“Well, she’s always so careful with her words in front of me . . . On the other hand I did notice some hostility, several times, in fact.”
“Hostility?”
“She was angry with me.”
“Why?”
“I guess for accepting you. Feeling desire for you, attachment toward you.”
“But it’s what she wanted!”
“Oh, Joséphine’s a bundle of contradictions. No, what worries me . . . ”
“Yes?”
“Is that she left in order to think . . . There’s nothing more harmful to her than thinking.”
“Baptiste! That’s horrible!”
“I swear I say it without any kind of contempt. Joséphine thinking means Joséphine alone, with no one to turn to, despising herself. If she doesn’t feel a human presence, if she isn’t aware of a safeguard, she gets a little crazy and can easily go over the edge. That’s what scares me.”
At that moment, the doorbell rang. They gave a start, thinking that Joséphine had returned.
It was Victor, looking stricken, who had come to tell them that Oxana had vanished.
Once they had shared the young man’s pain and told him of their own, Baptiste and Isabelle found themselves alone again, worried at having to spend a night of doubts and questioning.
“Do you realize, Isabelle? Just the other night, the five of us were having dinner together, happy, drunk, invincible, and now both Oxana and Joséphine have run away. How fragile happiness is!”
Isabelle got energetically to her feet. “Let’s not be complacent, Baptiste! Let’s not wallow in tragedy. You have to find the solution.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you.”
“Why not you?”
“If only I could! But you’ve known Joséphine for fifteen years, you must know where she’s gone.”
“I don’t!”
“Baptiste, you’ve always boasted of the human soul thanks to your work as a writer, so for God’s sake use your brain! Sit down at your desk and search!”
Too surprised to protest, Baptiste obeyed. The thing Isabelle was ordering him to do was something Joséphine would never have allowed herself. He almost told her that, in order to complain, but didn’t.
“In the meantime, I’m going to the bedroom to rest,” Isabelle said.
“Oh, I see!”
“Just to show you that I trust you.” As sweet now as she had been commanding before, she tenderly kissed the back of his neck. He smiled, shrugged, and switched on his computer.
This is absurd, he thought. There isn’t anything here that can help me. Why go through with this ritual?
After a few minutes, the computer, the chair, the desk played their roles: aids to concentration, they allowed him to set in motion those mental capabilities previously impaired by anxiety. As if Joséphine were a fictional character, he gathered information, sensations, images relating to her. Little by little, things started to come together. Because a novelist loves his characters—that intimate cohabitation, that risk he takes of opening the doors and letting the character come in and draw substance from what he has accumulated, can indeed be called love—he went beyond the passivity of his own memories and called his imagination to the rescue. What would the heroine Joséphine do in such a situation?
She wouldn’t go to her parents because, even though she worshipped them, going back would be tantamount to regressing. She wouldn’t go to any of her female friends either, because she had so far kept their threesome a secret. Would she just set off aimlessly? She didn’t like relying on chance, at least not for long, because it accentuated her feeling of not being in control. Would she book a hotel in a large city, a noisy bustling capital, where she could keep boredom at bay? This hypothesis gave him food for thought . . . Yes, she might well be capable of taking refuge in one of the cities she loved: St. Petersburg, Amsterdam, Istanbul . . . But since they had discovered them together, plunging into their shared past would be upsetting to her. There had to be another option . . . Baptiste was getting close to the truth, he could see it as if it were a figure in the distance, and was trying to hail it, to make it see him, but couldn’t quite manage it. Somewhere there was a solution—he was convinced of it—the facts were just waiting for him to grasp them.
Isabelle was right: his investigation into Josephine was like the writing of a novel. The story was there at the back of his mind, he just had to summon it up. There was nothing to invent, everything to discover. Baptiste didn’t claim to be a creator, just a patient archeologist digging up hidden treasures.
To help his consciousness descend into the most protected parts of his mind, he had recourse to his usual ploys: music and cigars.
Lying down on a couch, he put on Mozart’s C minor Mass. He didn’t want to listen to it—he knew it by heart—he wanted to let his mind wander beside it, roam in its choral expanses, throb with its strings, fly on the wings of its song. The work was merely meant to be a springboard for his reverie.
But Mozart had entered the room and sat down by his bedside, and was now talking to him, forceful, intense, passionate, voluble, varied. Baptiste was following the composer’s ideas, not his own. To break the spell, he leaped to his feet and went to change the disc, looking for a steadier, less engrossing piece that wouldn’t stop him thinking freely. Schubert, with his repetitions, his restraint, his divine longueurs, struck him as perfect; as the arabesques of the Arpeggione Sonata rang out, Baptiste lit a big cigar.
Watching the wreaths of smoke curl up into the air, warming himself with the rounded, capricious melodies, he started thinking again. Where had the character named Joséphine gone to take refuge?
Once again, an answer was stirring deep inside him, but he could make out neither the features nor the form. All the same, he knew that he would soon formulate it.
At last, the combination of the music and the tobacco produced the desired effect: he felt a sudden, almost violent need to sleep, like a blow to the head. Don’t resist it.
He dozed off.
A few moments later, he woke up, brandishing the idea like a diver emerging with the coveted pearl: Joséphine was in Ireland!
He ran to the bedroom, where he had no need to disturb Isabelle’s rest: she was already packing.
“What are you doing?” Baptiste exclaimed.
“Packing our bags.”
“Why?”
“To go to the place you’re about to tell me.”
He smiled, dazzled by so much optimism. “Josephine is in Cork in Ireland. In a boardinghouse.”
The plane was a direct flight to Cork. Isabelle was about to set foot for the first time in the land of the shamrock. She was in an emotional state, totally focused on her objective: to win Joséphine back. As for Baptiste, the nearer they got, the more confident he felt.
“None of my characters has ever lied to me. I’ve never been deceived by a character. I’ve sometimes deceived myself by stopping halfway, not going far enough to meet him, making do with seeing him only from a distance.” Over the North Sea, he explained to Isabelle all about “proof through sleep,” one of his credos as a writer: in his opinion, going to sleep led to the truth. He alwa
ys had to go down that corridor. As soon as he detected the existence of a character, as soon as he started to hear him, he would go to sleep for a few minutes in order to wake up next to him. Ever since his beginnings as a novelist, the god Hypnos had taken Baptiste by the hand, leading him away from factual reality and toward the essential truths contained in his imagination.
“Joséphine is in Cork, getting bored. As soon as I reach the truth, I know I’m right.”
The plane reached the Emerald Isle and started flying along the coast, its round contours made smooth by millennia of winds emerging from the waves to caress the land.
They were hit by occasional turbulence. Below them, the vast hostile sea, a uniform, almost violent blue, rumbled and prowled around the cliffs, as if determined not to spare the rocks.
“Look, there are the first flocks in Ireland, flocks of clouds.”
As the plane began its descent into Cork, green replaced blue, uncovering hills crisscrossed with low walls, brown stone manor houses clinging to promontories, gray mountains in the distance.
“Now tell me how you guessed that we were supposed to come here,” Isabelle said, eyes closed, trying to ignore the turbulence.
“When Joséphine and I first met, I fell in love with her, but refused to admit it. I thought I was in love with just one thing: my freedom. I made Joséphine suffer. She gave herself to me entirely, unreservedly, but I would leave and come back, determined to prove to myself that nothing bound me to her, that I was still my own master. Frankly, a major relationship didn’t figure in my life plan, I’d imagined myself flitting from woman to woman, having lots of affairs. The plural, I was obsessed by the plural, and refused the singular. But Joséphine had realized from the start that this was it, we had to be together. Every time I was with her, I felt the same, but every time I forced myself to leave, hoping to rid myself of that dependency. Settle down? Never! One morning, Joséphine disappeared. Although we weren’t living together, we’d gone as a couple to stay with some friends on the Greek coast for three weeks. After five days of total happiness, Joséphine vanished into thin air.”
“Were you worried?”
“She’d taken the precaution of leaving a note to stop us thinking she’d drowned or something bad like that. That was when I understood.”
“What?”
“How much she meant to me. I loved her more than my freedom. I was planning to go back to Paris, but then she sent me a telegram telling me she’d send me her address soon if I was interested. It was one of the most unpleasant moments of my life: I’d made up my mind, I knew how much I loved her, and I couldn’t tell her. At last, the address arrived, and I took a plane for Cork.”
A smile lit up her face.
“She was waiting for me in the house of an Irish family with six children and a lot of sheep.”
“Why there?”
“There’s no why with Joséphine, you just have to take it or leave it.”
The plane touched down, hesitated, reared up again, then embraced the runway.
“Thank you for bringing me,” Isabelle said in a low voice.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re proving your love for me by taking me into the heart of your relationship with Joséphine.”
As if in confirmation of this, Baptiste kissed her passionately. A true kiss, long, vibrant, endless. The stewardess was touched, assuming they were on their honeymoon. How could she ever have imagined that the reason these two lovers were embracing with such force was because they were about to throw themselves into the arms of another woman?
At the airport, Baptiste decided to rent a car. “It’d be too complicated to go by taxi, I couldn’t give the driver an exact address. But I think I could find the way once we get to the harbor.”
Isabelle agreed.
Baptiste looked down at his feet in embarrassment. “Can you drive?”
“If you want.”
“Oh, no, it’s not that . . . It’s just that I don’t have a license.”
“Did you fail the test?”
He blushed in annoyance. “No, I’m not stupid! The fact is, I never took it.”
Amused, Isabelle put her arms around his neck and covered him in kisses. The more time she spent with him, the more complex she found Baptiste, the solid Baptiste, the unshakable Baptiste, the respected writer—almost as complex as that multifaceted diamond Joséphine. Just when you thought he was rational, he turned mystical. When you had determined that he was a responsible adult, he turned into a big child.
“You have to understand,” he said by way of self-justification, “I’m too easily distracted. Instead of looking at the road and the signs, I think about my characters, or else I watch the movement of the telegraph wires because I like the way they curve.”
She hugged him—this little boy who dreamed up stories when he was in a car—put her license down on the counter, and chose a red racing car.
They set off for Cork. In spite of having to drive on the left, Isabelle was a confident driver.
The farther they advanced, the more Baptiste noticed how much Ireland had changed since his youth. Roads, industrial buildings, warehouses . . . A kind of ugly prosperity had invaded the once rural landscape. Although he was pleased that the country had cast off the poverty in which it had stagnated for centuries, he wondered if he hadn’t made a mistake . . . Since the world had changed, maybe he had too? In which case, so had Joséphine, and they had traveled hundreds of miles on a mere intuition.
They reached Cork, a city cut in half by a river, and came out onto the harbor. Isabelle was amazed at the low, colorful houses press closed together. Their riot of color was surprising: it could have been tropical, and it wasn’t; it could have been vulgar, and it wasn’t; it could have been kitsch, and it was picturesque and charming. The hues of the housefronts—Cadillac pink, lagoon blue, pagoda red, fluorescent green, soda orange—weren’t too garish because the drizzle, the clouds, the atmosphere of the ocean muted them, giving them a matte varnish like the opaque layers on an old master painting.
They stopped on Saint Patrick’s Bridge with its three arches, and Baptiste searched his memory. He then suggested several contradictory directions. Like all people who don’t drive, he had an idiotic, useless, crazed memory for places, relying on details like plants, posters, shopwindows, all elements that had disappeared.
Isabelle was so aware of his unhappiness about his own failings that she didn’t lose patience. At last, he recognized a terra-cotta Virgin Mary at a crossroads, and they left the city and set off across country.
All at once, a dazzling light illumined the landscape, like a second dawn rising in the middle of the day, as if to signal the end of their worries; the sky cleared, and the few clouds were reduced now to a painter’s brushstrokes, making the blue even more intense.
They drove along paths lined with moss-laden little walls and dilapidated fences. At a point where two paths crossed, they spotted a rustic sign.
“Murphy’s Bed and Breakfast! That’s it!”
Baptiste was jubilant!
The cars set off along a stony track surrounded by sheep.
Joséphine was sitting on a rock in front of the farmhouse with its purple shutters. She looked crestfallen. When she heard the noise of the engine, she got to her feet and quickly stood up on tiptoe to try to see what was inside the red car.
The car came to a halt.
Baptiste got out, followed by Isabelle.
Joséphine smiled at them.
Without moving, they looked at one another for a long time, eyes full of love. Above them, seagulls circled cheerfully. Blushing with emotion, Joséphine bowed her head and said in that grumpy street urchin tone of hers, “Well, you took you time. I thought you’d never get here.”
Then, laughing, she threw herself into their arms.
A few minutes later, t
hey were in her room: she’d had to persuade the farmer’s wife, Mrs. Murphy, a rough woman as broad she was tall, to allow her to bring her guests here.
Joséphine lay down on her narrow single bed, and they lay down on either side. The springs protested.
At the risk of shocking, Baptiste told Joséphine that he could only love Isabelle when she, Joséphine, was around, and provided she continued to love him. In this way, he was putting his wife back in the center of this adventure.
“I would never have been drawn to Isabelle without you. You led me to her. The fact that we now get along so well, that we love each other, won’t wipe that out.” He turned to Isabelle. “Isabelle is ours, Joséphine, both of us. She’s part of us.”
“You’re like two drops of water on a windowpane,” Isabelle said in a low voice. “The Joséphine drop and the Baptiste drop. A long time ago, the two drops joined to become one. Nobody can ever separate you. I can’t imagine loving one of you without the other.”
Joséphine looked at them, saw they were sincere, gave up trying to protest, and took them both by the arm.
“Take me away with you, right now. None of the fundamentalist Catholics in this place will ever be able to understand what we’re doing. We’re in the ninth century here, just after Saint Patrick converted the Celts.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“Not a bit of it. A depraved Irishman is an Irishman abroad. Look at Oscar Wilde.”
“Or else a drunken Irishman?” Baptiste suggested.
“No, that’s a happy Irishman.”
Laughing, she took out a bottle of whiskey hidden under her bed, locked the door, threw herself on the bed, and hugged Baptiste and Isabelle to her.