It is now ten to two in the afternoon.
In ten minutes Manuela will emerge from the darkness of the stairwell to come and inspect the finished product.
I do not really have time for meditation. I remove my kerchief, undress hastily, slip on the beige gabardine dress that belongs to a dead woman and there comes the knock at the door.
7. The Vestal Virgin in Her Finery
Wow . . . holy cow!” says Manuela.
An onomatopoeia and a slang expression coming from the mouth of Manuela, whom I have never known to say a single trivial word, is rather like the Pope forgetting himself and shouting to the cardinals, Where the devil is that bloody miter?
“Don’t tease me.”
“Tease you? But Renée, you look wonderful!”
Full of emotion, she sits down.
“A real lady,” she adds.
That is what I’m worried about.
“I’m going to look ridiculous going to dinner like this—like some vestal virgin in her finery,” I say, making the tea.
“Not at all, it’s natural, you’re going to dinner, people get dressed up. Everyone thinks that’s perfectly normal.”
“And what about this?” I ask, raising my hand to my scalp and getting a shock as I touch this light, airy thing.
“You went and put something on your head afterwards, it’s all flat in the back,” says Manuela, frowning, reaching in her bag for a little pouch of red tissue paper.
“Nuns’ farts,” she adds.
Yes, do let us talk about something else.
“Well?” I ask.
“Oh, if only you had seen her!” she sighs. “I thought she was going to have a heart attack. I said: Madame Pallières, I’m sorry but I can’t come anymore. She looked at me, she didn’t get it. I had to tell her two more times! Then she sat down and said, How am I going to manage?”
Manuela pauses, annoyed.
“If she had said, How am I going to manage without you? She’s lucky I was able to get Rosie for her. Otherwise I would have said, Madame Pallières, you can do what you like, I don’t give a d . . . ”
Darned miter, says the Pope.
Rosie is one of Manuela’s many nieces. I know what this means. Manuela may be thinking about going back to Portugal, but a seam as lucrative as 7, rue de Grenelle has to stay in the family—so she’s been introducing Rosie in her place as part of getting ready for the big day.
Dear God, what am I going to do without Manuela?
“How am I going to manage without you?” I say with a smile.
Suddenly we both have tears in our eyes.
“You know what I think?” asks Manuela, wiping her cheeks with a very large red handkerchief fit for a toreador. “The fact I’ve quit Madame Pallières, it’s a sign. There are going to be some good changes.”
“Did she ask you why?”
“That’s the best bit,” says Manuela. “She didn’t dare. Being so well brought-up, sometimes it’s a problem.”
“But she’ll find out soon enough.”
“Yes,” whispers Manuela, jubilantly. “But you know what? In one month she’ll say, ‘Your little Rosie is a gem, Manuela. You did the right thing, passing the job on to her.’ Oh these rich people . . . What the heck!”
Fucking miter, says the Pope impatiently.
“Come what may,” I say, “we are friends.”
We exchange a smile.
“Yes,” says Manuela. “Come what may.”
Profound Thought No. 12
This time a question
On destiny
And its scripture
Early for some
And not for others
I don’t know what to do: if I set fire to the apartment, it could spread to Kakuro’s. To complicate the existence of the only adult person thus far who seems worthy of respect is not the right way to go about things. But all the same setting fire to the place still means a lot to me. Today I had a fascinating encounter. I went to Kakuro’s for tea. Paul was there, his secretary. Kakuro had invited Marguerite and me when he met us in the hallway with Maman. Marguerite is my best friend. We’ve been in the same class for two years and it was love at first sight, right from the start. I don’t know if you have any idea what a high school in Paris is like in this day and age in the posh neighborhoods—but quite honestly, the slummy banlieues of Marseille have nothing on ours. In fact it may even be worse here, because where you have money, you have drugs—and not just a little bit and not just one kind.
My mother’s ex-militants from May ’68 make me laugh with their oh-so-daring memories of joints and bongs. At school (it is a public school, after all, my father was a minister of the Republic), you can buy everything: acid, Ecstasy, coke, speed, etc. When I think of the days when kids used to sniff glue in the toilets, they seem really corny and innocent. My classmates get high on Ecstasy the way we pork out on chocolate truffles and the worst of it is that where there are drugs, there’s sex. Don’t act surprised: nowadays kids sleep together really young. There are kids in sixth grade (not a lot, but a few all the same) who’ve already had sexual relations. It’s depressing. First of all, I think that sex, like love, is a sacred thing. My last name isn’t de Broglie, but if I were going to live beyond puberty, it would be really important to me to keep sex as a sort of marvelous sacrament. And secondly, a teenager who pretends to be an adult is still a teenager. If you imagine that getting high at a party and sleeping around is going to propel you into a state of full adulthood, that’s like thinking that dressing up as an Indian is going to make you an Indian. And thirdly, it’s a really weird way of looking at life to want to become an adult by imitating everything that is most catastrophic about adulthood . . . Where I’m concerned, just seeing my mother shooting up with her anti-depressants and sleeping tablets has been enough to inoculate me for life against that sort of substance abuse. Lastly, teenagers think they’re adults when in fact they’re imitating adults who never really made it into adulthood and who are running away from life. It’s pathetic. Mind you, if I were Cannelle Martin, the class pin-up, I would wonder what else I could do with my days besides take drugs. Her destiny is already scrawled across her forehead. In fifteen years, after she’s made a wealthy marriage just for the sake of making a wealthy marriage, her husband will cheat on her, going to other women for the thing that his perfect, cold, and futile wife has always been utterly incapable of giving him—let’s just say human, and sexual, warmth. So she’ll transfer all her energy onto her houses and her children and, through some sort of unconscious revenge she’ll end up making the kids clones of herself. She’ll doll her daughters up like high-class courtesans, toss them out into the arms of the first financier to come along, and she’ll order her sons to go out and conquer the world like their father did, and to cheat on their wives with pointless young women. You think I’ve got rocks in my head? When I look at Cannelle Martin, with her long gossamer blond hair, her big blue eyes, her tartan miniskirts, her ultra-clingy T-shirts and her perfect belly-button, I swear to you I can see it as clearly as if it had all already happened. For the time being, all the boys in the class begin to drool whenever they see her, and she is under the illusion that these pubescent males are paying tribute to her feminine charms when in fact they are merely idealizing the consumer product she represents. You think I’m being catty? Not at all, it really makes me unhappy to see this, it hurts me for her sake, it really does. So when I met Marguerite for the first time . . . Marguerite is of African descent, and if she’s called Marguerite, it’s not because she lives in a posh banlieue like Auteuil, it’s because it’s the name of a flower. Her mother is French and her dad is Nigerian. He works at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs but he doesn’t look like any of the other diplomats we know. He is simple. He seems to like what he does. He’s not at all cynical. And his daughter is as lovely as the day is long: Marguerite is pure beauty, her skin, her smile, her incredible hair. And she smiles all the time. When Achille Grand-Fernet (the class show
-off) sang to her, on the very first day, “Melissa the mulatto from Majorca scarcely wears any clothes at all,” Marguerite sang right back, straight off the bat and with a big smile: “Hey mama dear it hurts, why’d you go and make me so u-ugly.” That’s something I really admire in Marguerite: she’s no whiz on the conceptual or logical side but she has an unbelievable gift for repartee. It really is a talent. I’m intellectually gifted, she is a champion of precision response. I’d give anything to be like that; I only ever find the right answer five minutes too late and I trot out the whole dialogue in my head. The first time Marguerite ever came over, Colombe said, “Marguerite, that’s a pretty name but it’s the sort of thing they named women of our grandmothers’ generation.” And she answered right back: “And is your other name Christophe.” Colombe stood there with her mouth wide open; it was a sight to see! She must have mulled it over for hours, the subtlety of Marguerite’s response, telling herself that it happened by chance, no doubt—but she was upset, all the same! Same thing when Jacinthe Rosen, Maman’s great friend, said, “It must be hard to style hair like yours” (Marguerite has the wild mane of a lion of the savanna), Marguerite replied, “I don’ understan’ what she say dat white lady.”
With Marguerite, our favorite topic of conversation is love. What is love? How will we love? Who will it be? When? Why? Our opinions differ. Oddly enough, Marguerite has an intellectual vision of love, whereas I’m in an incorrigible romantic. She sees love as the fruit of a rational choice (of the www.sharedtastes.com variety) whereas I think it springs from a delicious impulse. There is one thing we do agree on, however: love mustn’t be a means, it must be an end.
Our other favorite topic of conversation is fate, and people’s prospects in life. Cannelle Martin: ignored, cheated on by her husband, marries off her daughter to a financier, encourages her son to cheat on his wife, ends her life in Chatou in a room costing eight thousand euros a month. Achille Grand-Fernet: becomes a heroin addict, goes into rehab at the age of twenty, takes over his father’s plastic bag business, marries a bleached blonde, engenders a schizophrenic son and an anorexic daughter, becomes an alcoholic, dies of liver cancer at the age of forty-five. And so on. And if you want my opinion, the most awful thing is not that we’re playing this game, but that it isn’t a game.
Anyway, when Kakuro ran into Maman and Marguerite and me in the hall, he said, “My great-niece is coming to visit me this afternoon, would you like to join us?” Maman said, “Oh yes, of course,” before we even had time to say boo; she’s hoping this will lead to her own invitation someday soon. And so we both went down. Kakuro’s great-niece is called Yoko, she’s the daughter of his niece Élise who is the daughter of his sister Mariko. She is five. She’s the prettiest little girl on earth! And adorable, too. She chirps and babbles and clucks and looks at people with the same kindly, open gaze as her great-uncle. We played hide and seek, and when Marguerite found her in a closet in the kitchen, Yoko laughed so hard she went wee-wee in her undies. And then we ate some chocolate cake while we talked with Kakuro, and she listened and gazed at us sweetly with her big eyes (and with chocolate up to her eyebrows).
Looking at her, I wondered, “Is she going to end up just like all the others, too?” I tried to picture her ten years older, blasé, with high-rise boots and a cigarette dangling from her mouth, and then another ten years later in a sanitized décor waiting for her kids to come home while she plays the good Japanese wife and mommy. But it didn’t work.
And I felt extraordinarily happy. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve met someone whose fate is not predictable, someone whose paths in life still remain open, someone who is fresh and full of possibility. I said to myself, “Oh, yes, I would like to see Yoko grow up,” and I knew that this wasn’t just an illusion connected with her young age, because none of my parents’ friends’ little kids have ever made that sort of impression on me. I also said to myself that Kakuro must have been like that himself when he was little, and I wondered if anyone back then had looked at him the way I was looking at Yoko, with delight and curiosity, just waiting to see the butterfly emerge from its cocoon, not knowing, yet trusting, the purpose of its wings.
And so I asked myself a first question: Why? Why these people and not the others?
And yet another: What about me? Is my fate already written all over my face? If I want to die, it’s because I believe it must be.
But if, in our world, there is any chance of becoming the person you haven’t yet become . . . will I know how to seize that chance, turn my life into a garden that will be completely different from my forebears’?
8. Saints Alive
At seven o’clock, more dead than alive, I head for the fourth floor, praying fit to burst that I shall not run into anyone.
The hallway is deserted.
The stairway is deserted.
The landing outside Monsieur Ozu’s apartment is deserted.
This silent desert, which should have filled me with joy, weighs upon my heart with a dark foreboding and I am overcome with an irrepressible desire to flee. My gloomy loge suddenly seems a cozy, shining refuge, and I feel a wave of nostalgia thinking of Leo sprawled in front of a television, which no longer seems so iniquitous. After all, what is there to lose? All I have to do is turn my heels and go back down the stairs and into my loge. Nothing could be simpler. It is an entirely reasonable proposition, unlike this dinner, which borders on absurdity.
A sound from the fifth floor, just above my head, interrupts my thoughts. I begin instantly to sweat with fear—how very elegant—and, not fully understanding my own gesture, press frantically on the doorbell.
Not even time for my heart to start pounding: the door opens.
Monsieur Ozu greets me with a big smile.
“Good evening, Madame Michel!” he trumpets with what seems like genuine good humor.
Saints alive, the sound on the fifth floor is becoming more distinct: someone closing a door.
“Yes, good evening,” I say, and very nearly shove past my host to get in the door.
“Let me take your things,” says Monsieur Ozu, still smiling profusely.
I hand him my purse and take in the immense hallway before me.
Something draws my gaze.
9. Dull Gold
Directly opposite the entrance, in a ray of light, hangs a painting.
This is the situation: here am I, Renée, fifty-four years of age, with bunions on my feet, born in a bog and bound to remain there; here am I going to dinner at the home of a wealthy Japanese man—whose concierge I happen to be—solely because I was startled by a quotation from Anna Karenina; here am I, Renée, intimidated and frightened to my innermost core, and so acutely aware of the inappropriateness and blasphemous nature of my presence here that I could faint—here, in this place which, although it may be physically accessible to the likes of me, is nevertheless representative of a world to which I do not belong, a world that wants nothing to do with concierges; as I was saying, here am I, Renée, somewhat carelessly allowing my gaze to wander beyond Monsieur Ozu and into a ray of light that is striking a little painting in a dark frame.
Only the splendors of Art can explain why the awareness of my unworthiness has suddenly been eclipsed by an esthetic blackout. I no longer know who I am. I walk around Monsieur Ozu, captured by the vision.
It is a still life, representing a table laid for a light meal of bread and oysters. In the foreground, on a silver plate, are a half-bared lemon and a knife with a chiseled handle. In the background are two closed oysters, a shard of shell, gleaming mother-of-pearl, and a pewter saucer which probably contains pepper. In between the two are a goblet lying on its side, a roll showing its doughy white interior and, on the left, half-filled with a pale golden liquid, is a large goblet, balloon-shaped like an upside-down dome, with a large cylindrical stem decorated with glass lozenges. The colors range from yellow to ebony. The background is dull gold, slightly dusty.
I am a fervent admirer of still l
ifes. I have borrowed all the books on painting from the library and pored over them in search of still life paintings. I have been to the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Musée d’Art Moderne, and I saw—a dazzling revelation—the Chardin exhibition at the Petit Palais in 1979. But Chardin’s entire oeuvre does not equal one single master work of Dutch painting from the seventeenth century. The still lifes of Pieter Claesz, Willem Claesz Heda, Willem Kalf and Osias Beert are masterpieces of the genre—masterpieces full stop, for which, without a moment’s hesitation, I would trade the entire Italian Quattrocento.
And this picture, without a moment’s hesitation either, is unquestionably a Pieter Claesz.
“It’s a copy,” says Monsieur Ozu behind me; I had totally forgotten about him.
Must this man forever startle me?
I am startled.
Taking hold of myself, I am about to say something like:
“It’s very pretty,” a statement that is to art as using “bring” when you mean “take” is to the beauty of language.
Having regained my self-control, I am about to resume my role as obtuse caretaker by uttering something like:
“Amazing the things they can do nowadays!” (In response to: it’s a copy.)
And I also very nearly deliver the fatal blow, from which Monsieur Ozu’s suspicions would never recover and which would establish the proof of my unworthiness forever:
“Those glasses are weird.”
I turn around.
The words, “A copy of what?” which I abruptly decide are the most appropriate, remain stuck in my throat.
And instead, I say, “It’s so beautiful.”
10. What Congruence?
Whence comes the sense of wonder we perceive when we encounter certain works of art? Admiration is born with our first gaze and if subsequently we should discover, in the patient obstinacy we apply in flushing out the causes thereof, that all this beauty is the fruit of a virtuosity that can only be detected through close scrutiny of a brush that has been able to tame shadow and light and restore shape and texture, by magnifying them—the transparent jewel of the glass, the tumultuous texture of the shells, the clear velvet of the lemon—this neither dissipates nor explains the mystery of one’s initial dazzled gaze.