For the last time—the last time that year, at least; I couldn’t see any further ahead—I followed Line 6, but not riding the Métro. The Y.S. drove parallel to the viaduct of the overground section, keeping pace with a train that had left Saint-Jacques station just as I pulled away from the traffic lights. At Bercy, it plunged back underground again, while I turned right toward Avenue du Général-Michel-Bizot, heading out of Paris and the entrance to the A6 motorway. I intended to stay on it as far as Mâcon; there, I’d leave the main roads once and for all and drive down to Lecce via the smallest country roads possible. I didn’t know how long this journey would take, and I was excited at the thought of it. I had sublet my studio flat when I moved into Soliman’s place, so I had a little money, enough to keep the tank filled and to buy food—and for everything else, I’d manage. I had a jerrican and a bag of clothes, a windbreaker and boots, Leonidas’s French–Italian conversation manual, and Zaide’s present. And books, lots of books.
I also had names dancing in my head—Alessandria, Firenze, Perugia, Terni—and the one that always made me laugh because it made me think of the only board game my parents ever played: Monopoli. Each day, I’d throw my dice to move forward a few kilometers, but I wouldn’t be content to make my way round a board and keep passing the same squares; I’d go forward, I’d really go forward. Toward what, I had no idea. After Lecce, maybe I’d go to the sea. Then I’d drive up the length of the boot by a different route; I’d go and visit the lakes of northern Italy and continue eastward, or to the north. The world was absolutely vast.
I suddenly recalled an evening with Zaide—one of our last evenings together at the depot. She had filled a glass salad bowl with water and placed it on the kitchen table. She turned on all the lights and then brandished a pipette.
“Look,” she said.
She was just like her father when her eyes lit up with that special radiance, that of a magician who is about to transform illusion into wonder and make you think about the reality you are witnessing. She was so like him that I felt, once more, tears prick my eyes, a lump rise from my stomach and lodge in my throat.
The little girl dipped her pipette in the water, then held it up to the lightbulb dangling over the table.
In the liquid drop that was slowly stretching, she had captured the entire room: the window and its four panes with the waning daylight, the chest covered with a red rug, the sink with the handle of a saucepan poking out, the big photo tacked to the wall showing an almond tree bowed under a storm, its blossoms torn off, blown away, tiny angel flights or sacrificed lives.
“The world’s tiny … it’s a pity we can’t keep droplets for all the beautiful things we see. And for people. I’d love that. I’d put them in…” Zaide broke off, shaking her head. “No. You can’t put them anywhere. But it’s beautiful.”
I whispered, “Yes, the world is beautiful,” discreetly pressing a finger into the corner of my eye—wretched tears!
The world seemed to me like a Russian doll: I was in the bus, which was a little world of its own and which was driving in a vast yet tiny world. Behind me, sitting on the floor, was a woman with a sweet, tired face, a man whose overly long arms protruded from the too-short sleeves of his black sweater, a laughing girl in a flounced dress, and then there was my mother, too, panic-stricken—I was going to leave the safety zone she’d created for me for good. There were all the men I’d thought I’d loved, and all my paper friends, but they were brandishing glasses of champagne and absinthe, they were the broke, alcoholic poets, sad dreamers, lovers, unsavory characters, as my father would have said (my last visit to him had not gone very well; but there’s no point going into detail). My family.
A few hundred meters farther on, the train I’d been following left me behind when I stopped at a pedestrian crossing. I watched all those strangers flash past, people I must have glimpsed at least once on the Métro, some of whom I recognized—from their walking stick, the way they turned up their coat collar, muffling themselves up to their glasses, or from the backpack that swayed between their shoulder blades to the rocking of the train.
And then I saw her. The girl who read romances, the girl with pretty breasts in tight polo-neck sweaters, moss green, powder pink, honey mustard. The one who always started to cry at page 247, when all seems lost.
“It’s the best moment,” Soliman had said.
I had the feeling, for my part, of having gone beyond page 247—not by much. Just a little. Just enough to savor the radiant smile of the girl who had a fat novel wedged under her arm, four hundred and fifty pages, by the look of it.
Just before crossing, she put the book down on a bench. Without looking at it. Then she started running.
The drivers behind me were growing impatient, but I still hadn’t pulled away. I couldn’t take my eyes off the book, from which a cardboard bookmark protruded, stiff and white with a beveled edge.
I switched on my hazard lights and parked by the left-hand curb. Three or four cars passed me in a cacophony of hooting and swearing out of hastily lowered windows. I didn’t even turn my head; I didn’t want to, not at all, at the sight of their furious expressions and contorted mouths. So let them hurry. I had all the time in the world.
I got out of the Y.S. and went over to the bench. I didn’t look at the title of the novel; what intrigued me was the bookmark. I slid my finger between the smooth pages. Page 309.
Manuela pressed her forehead against the silky fabric of the dinner jacket.
“I’m so tired,” she whispered. The huge arms encircled her.
“Come,” whispered in her ear the voice she heard every night in her dreams. “Come.”
Disconcerted, I let the novel fall shut on the little cardboard rectangle. The reader from Line 6 had abandoned her book before the end—there was nearly a third of the story unread: how many ups and downs still, partings, betrayals, returns, kisses, torrid embraces, and perhaps a closing scene on the deck of an ocean liner sailing to America, with two silhouettes at the prow, a laugh borne away by the wind, or a silence, because you can be as overwhelmed by joy as you can by an irretrievable loss.
So there I was, mentally writing the end of the book, and that was perhaps the reason it was there, on that bench, for me to pick up, so that I could fill it with romantic dreams that no one dares admit to, stories you consume in secret, feeling slightly ashamed. But she wasn’t ashamed, that girl who had so often cried in front of me, on the Métro, and now she was running in the street, toward whom, toward what, I’ll never know, and she had left her book there on the bench.
I placed my hand on the cover. It was already a little damp. I hoped that someone would find it before the pages got wet. I wasn’t going to take it. For the time being, I had decided to give, not to take. There’s a time and a place for everything.
The Yellow Submarine was there, waiting for me. I was clutching the keys in my left hand.
Before going back to it, I bent down and removed the bookmark, which I slipped under my sweater, against my skin. The beveled corner dug into my breast, and I enjoyed feeling that prick—that small stab of pain.
I knew that it would stay with me. For a long time.