“I want to talk to you about spiders.”
The man in the green hat jumped, and his tea spilled into the saucer. Juliette leapt up, a paper napkin in her hand. He brushed her aside, with that same smile, that of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, she mused. Simultaneously amiable and distant. In front of him, she felt too young, clumsy, muddleheaded, with “foozling hands,” as her grandmother used to say, hands that dropped everything. Even now, she had the impression that she herself had spilled the tea, and perhaps she had, with her odd proposition.
It was because of the book, the book on insects that he read on the Métro—the first time she’d noticed his little game, she’d taken him for a collector or a researcher. She hadn’t thought, completely bonkers, this guy, but … actually, yes, she had thought that.
And now, he was here in front of her.
He came almost every day. Rapped gently on the office door at either 3:47 or 3:49 P.M.—Juliette supposed that this regularity depended on that of the Métro. She was actually starting to miss Line 6, with its familiar landmarks—the finance ministry’s speedboat moored under its river porch, the wavy meadow-green curves of the docks building on the opposite bank, the glass roofs of the aboveground stations, and the little nursery school with its tiled roof, a real house standing alone, dwarfed by the increasingly tall apartment buildings surrounding it. She had often gazed at it with a pang of nostalgia; she didn’t know why. Then there was the street art of Porte d’Italie, giant murals on the blind gable ends of apartment complexes built in the seventies, the double bridge of Pont de Bir-Hakeim, Passy with its air of a provincial railway station … She also missed the strangers to whom she’d given books whose titles were masked by Zaide’s colored card, those people to whom the cover had promised happiness and transformation. She wished she could meet them again, not necessarily to question them—no, reading was something very private and very precious—but to look at them and scan their faces for a clue of a change, of improved well-being or joy, however fleeting. It was stupid, perhaps.
“Is it stupid?” she asked Leonidas after sharing her thoughts with him.
“I thought we were supposed to be talking about spiders…”
“That, too. You’re an expert on insects…”
“Not really. But I never tire of watching them. Nowhere, in my view, does nature’s design attain such perfection in any other living being.”
“Is that why you always read the same book? On the Métro?”
“Yes. Overwhelmed by my own shameful cowardice and the heartbreak of my unspoken love, I needed comfort. And what is more comforting than the wing structure of the humble Gryllus campestris, or field cricket?”
Embarrassed, he fidgeted in his chair.
“That’s enough about me. What do you want to start with?”
“Spiders. Why do they climb up drainpipes? Why do they leave a safe place for another which is much more dangerous?”
Leonidas folded and unfolded his pale, carefully manicured hands several times. Each of his nails was polished and perfectly filed.
“The question does not only apply to spiders,” he eventually replied. “I could give you a mini lecture on the habits of those arachnids, but my impression is that that is not what you’re looking for. Am I correct?”
That unleashed a verbal torrent from Juliette, who couldn’t get her words out fast enough. She needed to unburden herself. Her words came tumbling out as she described her confusion in the face of this new life that she was slowly, too slowly, coming to terms with. The crystalline insight that had suddenly shown her the futility of her previous life, her doubts, her fears, and that glimmer of obstinate hope, which was perhaps tucked between the pages of these countless books that were impossible to classify.
“Me, too,” she said. “I was covered in dust. It had built up without my being aware of it. Do you understand?”
“I think so,” replied Leonidas. “And now?”
She closed her eyes for a moment. “All this”—she raised her arm to indicate the room they were in and beyond, the stockroom, the courtyard, the rickety iron staircase, the rooms that opened onto the gallery, the patch of sky over the neighboring walls and roofs—“blew on me like a great icy wind. I feel naked. I’m cold. I’m afraid.”
She heard him move. Gently he placed a hand on her forehead. It reminded her of her grandmother, when she used to visit her in the Pyrenees in winter and she caught a cold from playing for too long out in the snow with wet shoes.
“Congratulations.”
Juliette thought she’d misheard. Why was he congratulating her? What had she done to deserve any praise? His hand, so light, did not linger on her skin. She felt it withdraw. Leonidas had gone back to his armchair, which creaked. She didn’t dare open her eyes. Not yet. Maybe she’d mistaken irony for sincerity. Maybe …
To hell with all the maybes!
She looked at him. Caressed by the blue smoke from his pipe, the man’s features rippled, morphed: he was the genie in the lamp, the mischievous goblin who appears in the embers or from a marsh dotted with pale, hopping lights.
Leonidas removed the pipe from his mouth, raised it to his temple, and gently tapped the stem against the side of his head.
“Being afraid is a good thing,” he continued calmly. “You are beginning to understand that the great tidy-up that you’re planning—and which I do not in any way oppose, believe me—must not take place between these walls.”
“Where, then?”
She did not recognize her own voice, which sounded feverish, ardent.
“There. Inside whatever you like to call it—your mind, your head, your heart, your understanding, your consciousness, memories … there are plenty of other words. All inadequate, in my view. But that is not what matters.”
Supported by the armrests, he leaned toward her slightly.
“It is inside you that all these books must find their place. Inside you. Nowhere else.”
“You mean … that I must read them all? Every single one?”
Since he said nothing, she wriggled, then folded her arms across her chest protectively.
“And when I’ve managed that … then what?”
Leonidas threw his head back and blew a perfect smoke ring, which he watched dreamily as it unfurled and hit the ceiling.
“You’ll forget them.”