There was a time when I could imagine never returning to San Juan. So many nights, on that walk from the apartment on Rue de Sèvres—to have dinner with the woman I couldn’t seem to finish separating from, caught up in an uncertain saga that would take so long to end—I was positive I would remain in Paris. Paris: contained within its damp, cold walls not only the traces of men but also the many brilliant words that radiated their stories. I had never experienced anything like this. It seemed inconceivable I should leave a city that incarnated such texts.
Marie would wait for me there on the fourth floor; one had to climb the stairs after crossing the building’s inner courtyard. Her studio was larger and more modern than mine, fifteen minutes away on foot, beyond the Boulevard du Montparnasse, on a side street called L’Impasse de l’Astrolabe. I had lived with Marie my first months in the city, when our relationship was still a peaceful ritual of habits. There I spent days reading, using a pocket dictionary and a notebook where I jotted down the words I didn’t know, improving my command of a language I would grow to love. Just as eagerly, after what was almost like daily schoolwork, I would go out to explore the city I had dreamed of, and which now, finally, lay at my feet.
But by the time this narrative begins, I’d already lost that world. I’d have dinner with Marie; we’d talk about the same things we had in the old days, and later, when the sound of the neighbors’ televisions quieted down, we’d move to the bed, three steps away. But nothing was as before and I rarely slept there. After midnight, I’d walk back following a slightly different route, heading toward the Boulevard du Montparnasse via a brief stretch of Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, until I got to the corner with my favorite café-tabac, delightfully named Au Chien Qui Fume, the Smoking Dog. I’d then cross the avenue and head toward the end of the cul-de-sac, where, on the second floor overlooking the street, I lived in a rundown studio with no heat.
I wouldn’t spend the night with Marie because in this sadly calculating way I made my dissatisfaction clear. She didn’t seem too bothered by my routine, probably because she didn’t want any commitment either. Yet, despite our years of troubled cohabitation and difficult separations—and even with all we did to convince ourselves to the contrary—we were the most important people in each other’s lives.
Because I had no contact with anyone from my country during those years, the city started to feel like a kind of desert. Customs I had taken for granted, the ease of routine and long association, were things I didn’t have. I didn’t have a circle of acquaintances from my native country to share my sense of alienation, my prejudices, or my sense of being in limbo. While I lived in Paris, I was unable to go anywhere without feeling cut off from my own past life.
So, I devised survival strategies. I pursued many passions, but two in particular were with me from the beginning, true symptoms of my situation. Indigenous music and cultures of the Americas: these fascinated me and served to anchor my intellectual life, which, given my Puerto Rican background, was more or less adrift.
After the first few months in Paris, my relationship with Marie deteriorated to the point that we decided to separate for a few weeks. I went to live, for what was going to be a few days and turned into several months, at the apartment of two women friends near the golden dome of Les Invalides. The second week of our separation, I found out that Marie wanted to break up definitively, and to keep me from trying to question this, she announced she had met someone and planned to keep seeing him. I gulped and stupidly acquiesced. We shared so much on a strictly amorous level; but Marie was also my collaborator in reading and writing projects and, as we had lived together in New York, the only person who had known me before I came to France. And besides—I suddenly realized that this was the most excruciating part—she was the only person I could speak Spanish with in Paris. I was losing not only a lover but also my native language. That there were thousands of Spanish speakers in the city didn’t matter to me then, because they were all strangers. The pain of being abandoned, which my pride at first couldn’t admit to, grew until I found it unbearable.
That night, as I have always done, I took my sadness for a walk. Instead of taking the bus on the boulevard, I wandered around the streets, directionless, confused and wavering under the drizzle, not knowing what to do or what to tell myself. Eventually I made it back to the apartment. My friends had gone to bed. I opened the convertible sofa in the living room, next to Sandrine’s big worktable and went to bed without dinner, my hair wet and my body trembling. Oblivious, I didn’t care that water had seeped through the neck of my jacket and that my feet were soaking wet. Grief kept me from sleep all night long. Absurdly, at the crack of dawn, I had the thought that I should take advantage of my suffering to go back to writing. And yet only now, after so many years—decades, really—can I bring myself even to recall that night.
The next day, I pretended to be asleep and waited for my friends to make breakfast and leave. Already dressed, I put on my still-wet shoes, grabbed another jacket, and went out for coffee. I walked all along the Champ de Mars and went to sit on the cold steps down to the Seine. Behind me stood the Eiffel Tower, which I had never climbed. Facing me, across the river, was the Trocadéro, the Palais de Chaillot, and my beloved Musée de l’Homme. The morning wasn’t excessively cold and I could sit there unprotected from the wind for a while. I had nowhere to go—my friends’ house was only a place to spend the night—and I was in no condition to be anywhere I didn’t feel at home. I didn’t know how to kill time. I had already rejected the idea of going to class at the university that day. I had no one to run to, no one to whom I could pour out my woes. The future stretched before me like a void I couldn’t face.
After spending the afternoon out on the street, I walked toward the house where there was the only person I could talk to—absurdly, back to Rue de Sèvres. She welcomed me as if she’d been eagerly awaiting my arrival, exhibiting the ambivalence of dependence versus freedom that undermined our relationship and eventually destroyed it. I had not eaten since lunch the day before and had spent many hours on the streets. When I walked into the apartment that until very recently had been mine, and felt its much-missed warmth and homey atmosphere, I collapsed out of sheer exhaustion. Seconds later, I awoke lying calmly on the rug as if I had slept for hours; looking into Marie’s tearful, worried face I asked her—in French, oddly enough, which we never spoke together except for a key word or untranslatable phrase—what was wrong. I had knocked my side against a chair in fainting, and when I stood up, I felt the wrench of pain. We moved to the bed, where, intoxicated by the warmth of the blankets, I fell asleep almost immediately.
I found out later that Marie spent the night with the lights off, sitting beside the only window in the studio, watching raindrops run down the glass pane and the gradual extinguishing of the lights in neighboring apartments. She had taken the phone off the hook to prevent my sleep from being interrupted and to avoid having to confront, at that moment, the cause of her conflicted feelings and our separation. Early the next morning, sitting on a big cushion covered in Polish embroidery, sensing my breathing and her own while she slowly smoked my cigarettes and crushed the butts in a plate we’d used for cheese and crackers, she decided that, even if she didn’t want to be with me, she couldn’t leave me.
I awoke as it was getting light outside. In the narrow twin bed, I could feel Marie’s body beside me. Her long, thick hair flowed over the blankets and on top of my chest. Feeling her breath on my neck, I lay still, thinking, puzzled: what was going on? There was only one bed in the apartment, after all, and Marie had to sleep somewhere.
I got up, trying not to wake her as I made coffee. Two cigarettes were left in the package, so I went out to buy more, and croissants. When I returned, Marie was already up, looking alarmingly serious.
“Do you feel okay?” she spoke as if she had been waiting all night to ask the question.
“Yes, though my hip hurts.”
“That’s not what I’m asking you,” she interrupted. “Last night you fainted. I thought you were dying. You were completely out for almost thirty seconds. Don’t do this to me. I didn’t know what to do. I was about to call SOS Médecins.”
I didn’t know what to say to her.
“Don’t you get it?” she demanded. “Fainting isn’t something to take lightly. What happened to you?”
“I already told you, I’m fine. I hadn’t eaten for a long time, and I hadn’t slept. I don’t know, I was very tired and anxious when I got here and I don’t remember the rest.”
“When you woke up, you spoke to me in French. You didn’t have an accent. You can’t imagine how it made me feel. It was totally bizarre. You looked so pale, I put my hand under your nose to see if you were breathing, the way they did to Saint Teresa. I was scared out of my mind.”
“It’s probably nothing. I haven’t been feeling well lately, so it makes sense . . .”
“You must see a doctor. I’m going to call my aunt to get the number. We have no idea what’s wrong with you. People don’t simply faint for no reason.”
The supplies I had brought back still lay on the table. Neither of us had made the slightest move to consume them. I picked up the pack of cigarettes. I noticed my half-finished coffee cup and started sipping the cold liquid. For a second we looked at each other. I opened my mouth without knowing what I was about to say.
“Don’t speak,” Marie said. “None of this is worth killing yourself over. What matters now is that you see a doctor. Stop smoking and eat something. I have to go out now, but you can stay here, if you want. I’ll be back later.”
She left. She didn’t tell me where she was going and I didn’t ask. I doubted she was heading for her classes at the university, not today, after what had happened. I imagined she was going to meet her lover. She’d tell him what I’d done, and they’d get embroiled in figuring out some impossible scenario with all three of us still in the picture.
I devoured my croissant and went back to bed. Later I returned to my friends’ house and filled my shoulder bag with a change of clothing and a couple of books. When I came back, the apartment was empty. The walls started to close in on me. Nothing had been clarified and I felt more anxious with each hour. I sat imagining what Marie could be doing and pictured only the worst.
My vigil lasted until nightfall. By the time she returned, Marie had already eaten. She had consulted her aunt and spoken with the doctor who would see us the next day. She said I could stay there that night if I wanted, but it would be better for both of us if I returned to Sandrine and Eve’s house. She had thought a lot about us and realized that she did love me, but right now she felt confused. As I knew, she was seeing another man, and she couldn’t ask him for more than she could give. Nevertheless, she added, she didn’t want to hurt me. We would continue to see each other, although not as often as before, and . . . time would tell.
This speech did not reassure me, but I stayed the night and we made love slowly and conscientiously, as if sex could ever protect us from anything.
I spent many weeks at home with Sandrine and Eve. We became such good friends that their company soon meant as much to me as Marie’s. On the weekends they’d leave for the provinces, so for a couple of days I’d have the apartment to myself. Those were the worst. I’d take walks, read, study, go to the movies, but the reality was that I was alone and the hours felt long and difficult. This was when the distance hurt the most. I’d think I was homesick, missing my friends and family, places and expressions that were part of me. But I was really missing Marie.
Those Saturdays and Sundays allowed me to get to know the ordinary, everyday Paris. Workers, bureaucrats, provincial types, the hordes of foreigners invading the streets on Sunday, were all caught up in activities as unsatisfactory as mine. I remember a particular Sunday afternoon when I walked northeast of Les Invalides. The area was residential, and there were few businesses, almost none open that day. It was nearly evening when I entered a very small café, the only one open in that neighborhood. Elderly men were having their aperitif. I have a vivid memory of the owner who was serving at the bar: He was in his Sunday best in a tie and giant cuff links, as if he had come from a family luncheon. He was in a bad mood, scoffing at the men who came to have a pastis, and was smoking—I don’t know why my memory registers this—an English cigarette from a black box. Later, as night fell, I ended up in another café eating the daily special, steak-frites. (The steak was probably horsemeat.) I sat next to the window facing the traffic on the avenue, the restaurant almost deserted at that hour, and slowly chewed the tough, barely cooked meat. Painfully, I felt Marie’s absence. More than a lover, she had become an old friend who worried about me once in a while, with whom I’d share some food, some comforting words, and a bit of conversation in my language.
The doctor Marie’s aunt recommended had been a soldier in Indochina. An old racist, he was, as they say, the total Frenchman. In my emotional state, it didn’t take much to worry me, and this physician made it his business to fill me with anxiety. Suddenly my dizzy spell, which had seemed so unimportant to me, led to a place where Illness reigned supreme. He ordered me an infinite number of costly exams and ended up prescribing pills and medications. He diagnosed malnutrition but didn’t discard the possibility of a heart condition. I knew I had pushed my body to its limits. I’d thoughtlessly eat whatever came my way. I had all sorts of bad habits, was getting little and poor sleep, and hated the frankly inhospitable weather; so what had happened wasn’t really surprising. But my visits to that doctor inspired me to revise my own history into a perfectly neurotic drama featuring, in star roles, fragility and hysteria.
I was overwhelmed. The medication produced such hypersensitivity in my digestion that for a long time I could barely eat anything without suffering acute gastric pains. Often my thoughts raced so that I’d clutch my head desperately, not knowing how to stop my mind, which now focused even more obsessively on minuscule details. It was almost impossible to read—or to live, for that matter.
I felt so terrible that I went to visit Marie. After a long talk, we agreed that she would help me find an apartment. I didn’t like imposing on Sandrine and Eve’s hospitality, and besides, I needed a space of my own. In the days that followed, after buying newspapers advertising rental properties, Marie and I went all over the city. We’d put our names on waiting lists and checked out apartments that always turned out to be too expensive or far away. We finally found one in pretty bad shape, but close to Rue de Sèvres, almost equidistant from the Tour Montparnasse. We ran to the metro to get to the real estate agent’s office before anyone else. The next day, thanks to a loan from Marie’s family and her signature, I had in my hands the key to a studio on L’Impasse de l’Astrolabe.
Our walks around the city, hunting for a place that would be mine, brought us closer together and revived the old sense of common purpose that had first attracted us to each other. We progressed from a lunch of crêpes in a distant quartier to an invitation to supper at her house after a walk, to a gleam in her eyes, which led us to bed. But everything continued to feel diffuse, unacknowledged and somehow unreal. We had made love, we had had a good time on the benches along the Seine or at the movies, but nothing changed. Ironically, our relationship had become clandestine.
I remember one awful Sunday, the last one I spent in Sandrine and Eve’s apartment. As usual, they had left on Saturday morning to go see their families. That afternoon—spring was already in the air—I was sick and tired of being indoors. Without any definite plan, I went out to wander around the city. I strolled along the banks of the Seine, stopping at the bouquiniste stalls to leaf through secondhand books and look over stacks of old postcards. But I couldn’t relax, and I walked for several hours just to try to calm my nerves. I saw how the fleeting joy of Sundays vibrated in the streets and was gradually seized by a visceral fear. I was alone in the vast ocean of that city: between the human beings I saw everywhere and myself yawned an enormous and insurmountable abyss. The move to my new apartment lent a kind of official status to my loneliness. I was afraid that Sandrine, Eve, and Marie would take advantage of it to be more distant. I would remain alone within my four walls, with a world of academic work ahead of me, and an empty life.
When the sun was already setting, I found myself at the Tour Montparnasse. Ceaselessly, the doors of the train station ushered hundreds of people onto the street. The cafés and the restaurants were full, and long lines formed in front of the many movie theaters nearby. Soon, in a couple of days, this would be my neighborhood. I felt a slight and inexplicable change inside me. I could survey the sidewalks in a kind of truce. I stopped to look at everything: movie posters, clothing stores, the Brittany cultural center. I paused in front of a store window with a display of radios and realized that, no matter the little money I had, I would move to the apartment owning one of those. Little by little, I gained a sense of calm. Tired out from many hours of walking, I ventured as far as Les Invalides and circled home. I was finally able to eat something and study a bit for my approaching exams (which I would fail if I didn’t buckle down and prepare for in the coming days).
The next day I went to buy a radio. After considering the various models, I chose a relatively expensive one with a cassette player, a shortwave band, and a stereo. I left the store with what felt to me like an enormous box: I hadn’t acquired anything this big in many years.
Sandrine and Marie helped me move. I bought a used child’s desk from Sandrine’s friend and she lent me a mattress that we put on the floor against the bathroom wall. We carried the bed for blocks; to bring the desk over, I ordered a taxi. I went to a store on Rue de Vaugirard near closing time to buy a desk lamp. Then I unpacked the radio and for a long time I used the box it came in as a trash basket. The previous tenant had left a chair.
When night fell, my friends left. Nothing happened as I had imagined it would. In a silence that finally was not oppressive, I felt at ease. I sat down to read, and for the first time in a long time, I experienced the consolation of books. I faced a mountain of pages, but luckily my move coincided with the beginning of the Holy Week recess. I divided my days between the desk and the bed, substituting the book from one course for a book in the other, and even today I remember that week as one of the most pleasurable of my life. Not just because on that table and on that mattress I read the pages of extraordinary books, but because I discovered there the ways in which reading gives meaning to life. The place was as bare as a monk’s cell, but I had my thoughts, and my passion for reading. I was alone (especially that week, when all my friends had gone on vacation) but the solitude did not oppress me: I was venturing onto a new path. My moments of rest were spent listening to the radio, an indescribable pleasure.
In those days I came into contact with writers and topics that would change my life. I had to read a long novel by Paul Neptune, which, after a few pages, completely absorbed my days. Along with its literary qualities, the text generated a magical transformation of sorts that showed me a way to connect with the city where I had felt like a stranger. Neptune, playful and brilliant, had taken the map of one Parisian city block and woven together stories about all its inhabitants. Beginning with the social habits of a fragment of the city, he included all classes, the most diverse personalities, professions, tragedies, crises, and accidents. Neptune’s narrator brought back to me an experience we have in childhood when we first lose ourselves in a book. The afternoons and nights felt too short for me to read all I wanted of the over six hundred pages of small print in Rue de Babylone.
Neptune had just died the year before, when he was still young. This felt like a personal loss: I could no longer meet the man who, through his stories, allowed me to connect with the city I was getting to know on my daily walks.
I soon acquired all his books and even the work he’d published in literary journals. I pieced together his biography: the early death of his parents, his stay in several orphanages, his precocious passion for books and chess. He had not embarked on a university career. Having to support himself, he was prepared to do whatever was necessary. For years he distributed advertisements in the streets, gathered public opinion as a pollster, organized the files of a paleontologist. Finally, when he had established a reputation, he worked for a weekly paper writing a famously eccentric column on chess. His descriptions of the objects on his worktable, gathered in articles much admired by his devoted readers, struck me as miniature sagas comparable, from a certain perspective, to the great novels of the nineteenth century. He was invisible. His country, if he had one, was a modest apartment in a suburb of Paris.
Literature creates imaginary affinities. The sense of connection that sometimes forms between a text, an author, and a reader is one of life’s wonders. No reader can forget that moment, just as nobody can forget when he or she finds out that such a connection is only an illusion. My move to that studio was marked by the stories of the inhabitants on that block of a fictional city; from then on, Paris became a world that was an indisputable part of my life.
One of the stories in Neptune’s text was about an aborigine, a dark man who lived on the ground floor. Nobody knew where he was from or how he had arrived. The young son of blue-collar workers, who lives in the same building, listens, his ear to the door, to the litanies the man hums at night. His curiosity piqued, on an impulse he doesn’t understand, he sets out to learn who the guy is. For days he follows him and finds out that he sings and plays a drum and a bone flute in the passageways of the Maubert-Mutualité metro station and that, every week, inexplicably, he visits some old woman in a bourgeois apartment. Determined to get to the bottom of the mystery, the boy knocks on the woman’s door and steps into a world he couldn’t have imagined. All the rooms and hallways are filled with indigenous artifacts that come, he will learn, from the Amazon. The woman tells him the story of Klok, the Indian her anthropologist husband, who died a few years earlier, brought to the city, after the man’s village had disappeared, devastated by slaughter, disease, and melancholy. Klok, the last warrior of his tribe, was teaching the students at the École des Hauts Études a language whose memory only he possessed and which formed part of a rare family of languages which constituted a kind of lost link in the anthropology of the Tupi-Guarani peoples. He was also a kind of star craftsman for the conservation of feather ornaments, Indian macanas, and bows and arrows in the collections of the Musée de l’Homme.
After the death of her husband, the old lady took care of Klok as best she could. Since his French was rudimentary and nobody, aside from a bookish anthropologist here and there, knew his language, he lived in silence. He dreamed of his lost world, eating frugally, allowing himself the luxury of a pipe, amid rituals and gods who would die with him.
The old woman arranges for Klok to meet the young man and they become friends. They go on excursions together to the Bois de Boulogne and Fontainebleau. Klok collects leaves, bark, and roots. They go to the city parks and run into problems with the police when they climb an old chestnut tree and when, at the Jardin des Plantes zoo, they try to free the falcons. The young man gradually learns Klok’s language and religious rites. When Klok catches cold and dies of pneumonia, he takes Klok’s drum and sits facing the corpse, chanting accompanied by the old woman in a language that has miraculously survived its last speaker.
This experience will inspire the young man to study anthropology. On his first excursion to the jungle he will carry with him a clay urn with his friend’s ashes. His companions will see him get into a canoe and head up river with a handful of Indians. The expedition wasn’t supposed to take more than two weeks, but the young anthropologist doesn’t return. However, along the tributaries of the Black River, rumors spread about the domain of a white chieftain.
These and other stories by Neptune struck a nerve. When I finished his book, with the sadness of a reader who would have wanted it to go on forever, I was inspired to read more anthropology. I was also taking a course on the indigenous literature of the Americas, which is how I discovered the essays of Pierre Plon, who impressed me so much that I came to read and reread almost all of his work. Like Neptune, Plon had died recently and in the flower of his youth. He had survived many long expeditions to the heart of the jungle, but one morning, as he was crossing the Boulevard Raspail, a milk truck ran him over. He left a brilliant and unfinished body of work that would raise the study of the “savage mind” to new heights. His first book was a heartbreaking chronicle about his fieldwork with a tribe in the Chaco region of western Paraguay. These indigenous peoples had not had contact with the white culture until very recently and would not survive the shock. In the epilogue of his book, Plon told how this society, which he had seen vital and basically whole, had, in the space of five or six years, while he was revising the text, become a little group, disconnected, sickly, in rags, awaiting their end on the margins of the estates of big landowners in Paraguay.
In this and in other more theoretical works, Plon revealed the complexities of a political system that prevented the development of cultural resistance. His findings on the education of children, the difference between the sexes, homosexuality, and the mysticism of these distant beings, opened my eyes to other ways of seeing reality. This broadening of my ideas beyond Western teachings provided me with an invaluable new resource, a way to contemplate life in the city. Plon led me to other books, which led to new volumes and authors. I went to exhibitions, lectures, and films; I spent many hours in the dusty old Musée de l’Homme; I dug up studies and chronicles in the drawers of the bouquinistes. Indigenous marginality, the moral status of the defeated, the harsh struggle of indigenous minorities and their earthy wisdom—these became a mythology defining my life in the city. I acquired a series of affectations and practiced them with absolutely serious playfulness. I would buy loose tobacco and roll my own cigarettes; I carried an aboriginal bag on my shoulder; I even bought a Tarahumara drum. I saw myself in the role of the uprooted, the defeated. I embraced and enjoyed this new identity. I pretended to live like Klok and didn’t mind that it was all a fantasy.
In spite of all the riches these books brought me, there were times when I couldn’t read even one more page. Then I would turn on the radio and lie down in bed. Thus I fell in love with the invisible world coming out of the speakers. For the first time in a long time, I was listening to music with a rich sound, to interviews of artists, filmmakers, addicts or drunken clochards, to stories by authors from all over the world, news, and political scandals. The radio created an intimacy and a state of relaxation that filled me with happiness. Here and there I bought cassettes and built up a library of recordings that did not follow any particular trend: Andean music, Asian and African folklore, French and Latin American songs, ancient music, contemporary and chamber music.
When the holidays were over, I felt like a different person. I had come out of my depression and was enthusiastic about life again. My women friends returned from their family vacations and decided they didn’t have to worry about me any more.
I soon learned things weren’t going well for Marie. One day she came to my apartment and complained that I hadn’t called her—a surprise, given the state of our relationship. She was annoyed and impatient. She had gained weight and was attempting fanatical fasting diets that lasted from six to eight hours, after which, in an uncanny mixture of rapture and defeat, she’d run to the refrigerator or downstairs to the pastry shop to devour whatever she could find. This ambivalence set her nerves on edge. But the primary cause of these manic swings was her love life. The man she was seeing since our separation had not told her he was married. Marie had found out too late—that is, after weeks of bliss—when she was already too emotionally involved with him. I learned from Sandrine that Marie could not tolerate her unknown rival, could not accept that she had been deceived and, in some way, left out of the plot. She’d refuse to sit and talk about it; she preferred to take her anger for long walks.
Just as I had once gone to her, Marie would now come to my apartment to seek comfort. This familiar, impossible situation (crying on the shoulder of her old lover over the love that had split them up) perfectly illustrates the dependency between us and, perhaps, the harsh nature of the city. Paris was a tough place: a sort of an orphanage for lonely adults. Despite their sophistication, few of them seemed able to confront their problems directly. They always found something outside of themselves to blame; they concealed the real source of their distress and their own responsibility behind some big theory. Marie would come to visit me allegedly to discuss one issue—which she then never mentioned—and would remain talking for hours, finding an excuse to stay longer. My reaction was complicated. While I preferred not to see her, I would listen to her for hours, going from boredom and fury to the satisfaction of knowing she was unhappy. I thought that in some way her suffering vindicated me and—though I wouldn’t admit it—allowed me to hope we could get back together again.
Whatever it was, I could never have seen what was coming next.
One night, after writing some letters, I realized I still had time to run to Montparnasse and make it to the last showing of a movie. At the ticket office I ran into a French classmate from the university, and we went to sit together. The movie was about an eccentric group of people who founded a utopian community on a small island off the coast of Brittany. It told of the vicissitudes of their idealism that led to a hair-raising dénouement. The head honcho died shortly before a storm, one of their boats capsized, and at the end, the survivors, broken and defeated, decided to return to the civilization they had tried to escape. When the lights came on, Simone and I walked out on the boulevard and chatted until we got to the entrance of the metro. Facing us was a café, and through the windows one could see a group of musicians playing full-tilt boogie. I invited her in and we sat over glasses of beer, trying to communicate over the noise. It was a pleasant and different night. It wasn’t easy for a foreigner to meet French people, and Simone captivated me with her openness and good cheer. Past one o’clock, after getting her telephone number, I walked her to the taxi stand, watched her wave good-bye, and headed back to my apartment.
The chat with Simone had filled me with enthusiasm. I decided to take a stroll before returning to the Impasse de l’Astrolabe to prolong the pleasure, the daydreaming the encounter had provoked. When I finally reached my door, I found a puzzling message, written directly on the wood with what appeared to be lipstick. It was a single word, cabrón (basically calling me a bastard), traced in separate letters, sloping downward. Incredulous, I read it several times.
At first I thought it might be someone who had tried to get into the wrong apartment. After all, my neighbors were rather rude: I’d had to cover the wall we shared with cork to muffle the racket of their squabbles, glass and dish breaking, and afterwards, the sessions of hysterical and collective bawling. But I decided the insult was addressed to me because it was written in Spanish. I wondered if it could be a joke of Sandrine’s, as I had taught her a few words of Spanish. But there was something disturbing in the writing, and in the act itself, which did not fit this theory. After drinking some mint tea and listening to a little music, I decided to forget about it and went to bed.
A knock on the door woke me. Disoriented, I threw on my pants and a sweater and approached the door. I wasn’t dreaming. There really was someone on the other side, banging stridently on the wood. I asked who it was and heard Marie’s voice. Mystified, I opened the door, and she entered quickly, as if afraid I would block her with my body. I turned around to find her standing in the middle of the studio, looking out of control, as if she were about to attack me.
“Where were you?”
“What do you mean where was I?”
“Where were you last night? I came over at nine, at ten, at midnight.”
“I was out.”
“Out where?”
“Marie, please, what’s going on?”
“Where were you last night?”
“I went out. To the movies.”
“Who were you with?”
Finally I had a clue. This was a fit of jealousy, out of the blue. For a split second I felt something close to satisfaction, but I also realized that even if that was what it was (and probably it wasn’t, or it wasn’t only that), there was something inexpressibly sinister about this interrogation.
“I would think that, given the state of our relationship, this shouldn’t matter to you.”
“Tell me who you were with, who the damn whore was.”
The insult was laughable. I would have never imagined it from her mouth, but she said it with an absolutely straight face.
“Calm down, and stop screaming. It’s the middle of the night, for Christ’s sake. I went out around nine, to the movies, and met up with a friend from the university. After the movie she and I went out for a drink.”
“What’s her name? Do I know her?”
“What are you after? You’re making things up.”
“Tell me her name. Tell me her name or I’ll start breaking things!”
On my desk next to her were a half-empty wine bottle and an opened notebook. I didn’t want to deal with either her hysterics or the mess. I’d lose nothing by giving in.
“Simone.”
“Her last name?”
“I don’t know it.”
“Tell me!”
“Marie, I told you I don’t know, and I really don’t. Why all this fuss? You go out with other people and I don’t ask you anything or persecute you.”
“So, you’re going out with her.”
“I told you that I ran into her at the movies and then we went out to have a beer.”
“So, you’re going out with her.”
“No, and stop already. Sit down.”
“I want to know what you were doing with her. I don’t want to sit down.”
“It doesn’t concern you. I don’t have to answer. What the fuck is the matter with you?”
Marie was silent and turned her back on me. I could see she was crying so much she was trembling. I went over to her but she whirled around, pushing me away in order to flee. She slammed the door, which had remained opened during the fight, and I listened to her sobbing fade as she ran down the stairs.
I was completely in the dark. I had known Marie for years but had never seen anything remotely like this. She could be impulsive, irrational, and unfair, and I had often been the object of her fits of anger, but the senseless scene that had just occurred was weird and disturbing. I thought and thought but finally went back to bed. Later, assuming the coast was clear, I wiped the door clean. I spent the day uselessly, without concentration or energy, distracted by worry. I hadn’t the slightest intention of going to the apartment on Rue de Sèvres to see what was going on, but neither did I want to continue pestering Sandrine with my problems. It was another lonely day.
At ten at night Marie knocked on my door. I opened it; she sat on the bed and began to cry. Interrupted by hiccups, she was weeping softly, which for her was unusual, and begging me to forgive her. She stretched out in bed and asked, with a voice I had a hard time hearing, if she could stay. I remembered my visits to her house a few months ago and thought how impossible it was to overcome fate. I covered her and waited for her to fall asleep before lying down beside her.
When I awoke, I could hear Marie scurrying between the two ranges and the sink, in our excuse for a kitchen. The aroma of coffee flooded the apartment. While I was sleeping, she had gone out to get cheese and bread. The skies were clear this morning, apparently. At breakfast there was no mention of what had happened. I tried to approach the subject with some lighthearted humorous reference, but I saw her change the subject immediately.
I don’t know if we fall in love with a person, or with the need for love. I suspect both are true. Marie and I had begun this deaf and dumb dance of blindly groping toward intimacy years earlier. We were united by a passion that coincided with our entry into the adult world. We had assumed (or at least I had) that our relationship was the most solid thing we possessed, but the last few months had proved us wrong. Our separation helped me realize many things. I had lost something, possibly forever. I could no longer naïvely take for granted the meaning of grand words. Here was the unquestionable problem of falling out of love, the human capacity to create suffering. Marie had abandoned me once knowing that I had nowhere to go, knowing that her actions betrayed everything we had said to each other for years. However, she could not erase our history. That last night proved just this. I could imagine her motivations, and what might have happened to her with the man she was after. Who was I for her now? While I provided warmth that had not yet faded away, I was not the being she loved or the one to whom she was committed. We were no longer sharing a life together, nor could we until we could re-create what we had lost. Automatic gestures, affectionate habits, were all that was left, and most probably we both knew this now. Perhaps this seeking of leftovers was why Marie had come to show her desire to be loved, staining my door with an insult. Despite everything I must have been able to see and know in that moment, I stubbornly believed that enduring love was possible. Falling out of love was human, after all, as was our lack of forethought.
That morning, having barely finished breakfast, we made love. This served as an antidote to the bad taste left over from the previous night and all those months. On top of her, in a timeless dimension, I was returning to something that seemed like home. I couldn’t or didn’t want to admit that sex was a way to avoid talk. We preferred the efficacy of blindness, an intimacy that was really anguish, and loved each other without really knowing the object of our love.
We went out to lunch. We recovered the rhythm of our conversations. We walked around the city bathed by a spring sunlight that accentuated happiness. In a shop, with the concentration and ease with which women pick out clothes for their men, Marie bought a shirt. Then we visited a couple of bookstores. Returning to that place where I could find the things I most cherished, in the company of my female accomplice, was an experience of intense pleasure. I left with books by Neptune and Plon, a novel by Genet, and an illustrated volume of Amazon ethnology. I had no money left and this fact filled me with anxiety as well as joy.
It was starting to get dark later, and at that hour, a little before the stores closed, we bought cheese, bread, wine, and a slice of pâté in a place on Rue de Sèvres. I went with Marie up to an apartment I hadn’t seen in weeks. I noticed a few small changes: an old church chair occupied one corner, a shawl covering the bed, in the sink, cups I had never seen, and on the table books I couldn’t imagine Marie wanting to read. I suppressed a comment, knowing it would elicit an angry response about my absence. The bed we would share again had been, and perhaps still was, shared with someone. I tried to push that thought aside and to enjoy the supper we enjoyed on the rug Marie’s parents had brought from Morocco. But the strain of the day weighed on me, the exhaustion veiling doubts and aggravation over what I was doing. We made love in the mechanical, subdued way Marie tended to do everything, as if she wanted to show me that she was willing to give of herself without asking for anything in return.
We lay there holding each other. Lying face up, I felt her sleeping on my chest. There I was again, beside the woman I loved but whom I had tried so hard to forget. What had just happened, even though I had enjoyed the sex, placed me in a difficult situation. My weakness disgusted me. I was throwing overboard all the work I had done.
I got out of bed and began to dress. Marie opened her eyes and asked what I was doing.
“I’m going home.”
“You’re not staying.”
“I need to be home. It’s been a long day. Come see me tomorrow.”
“Stay.”
“Another day will be better,” I said as I bent down to say good-bye.
“You call me.”
Marie made it sound like an order. I was too weak and too unwise.
Exams were just around the corner. I was so far behind that, even with the effort made since I had a place of my own, I found myself in desperate straits. I spent the next few days surrounded by books, knowing this was a good excuse to avoid seeing Marie.
When I got back from my first test, I found a note slipped under the door. It was from Sandrine asking me to go see her that night.
I must have suspected that something was going on, because instead of walking over to Les Invalides, I took the bus, cutting short the time it would take to get there. I hugged my two friends (whom I’d barely seen since I had left), realizing I still felt disgust about the time spent in their cold, dark apartment. After chatting about trivialities with Eve, Sandrine took me to her room and closed the door. Marie, whom Sandrine had known since they were teenagers and whom she considered one of her best friends, had come over that morning to accuse her of having gone to bed with me. They had had a shouting match, with insults and recriminations over old injuries that had nothing to do with the present. Confronted with the question of what proof she had, Marie had asserted that I had told her so. Sandrine was beside herself; her friend had convinced her I had lied, and now she attacked me with the intention of unloading all her fury and indignation.
It took a lot of work to calm her down and convince her that Marie was lying. When I lived there, I had ample opportunity to hit on Sandrine and hadn’t done so, even when I felt most vulnerable, even knowing that our daily contact had made me like her. Feeling compelled to be sincere, I told her that probably, if she was honest, she had felt the same. We had done many things together and had always had a good time. It wouldn’t be surprising if, at some moment, we might have imagined that we could fall in love. Sandrine looked at me with her little blue eyes, nervously twitching the corners of her mouth. I had convinced her, but she tried to keep arguing for a while. She digressed, adding confusion, and while annoyed she also seemed curious or happy about the attraction I had just admitted. I picked up my package of tobacco and rolled cigarettes that were too thin, full of saliva.
We ended up exhausted, with nothing left to say. We lit our cigarettes. She brought over what remained of a bottle of wine.
“I don’t know whom to believe,” she said.
“You know that I’ve told the truth.”
“Maybe . . . But then why did Marie come to tell me that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why did she come to accuse you if you didn’t tell her that?”
“I can’t explain it, but it’s clear that Marie is not well.”
“Why isn’t it you who’s in bad shape?”
I told her all about the last few days, the insult on my door, and briefly, about the rapprochement with Marie. As I told the story, I acknowledged its contradictions, the disturbing gaps along the way. As she listened, Sandrine seemed convinced.
A little later she accompanied me to the door. This time I walked back to my apartment even though it was late and cold, and I had an exam the next day. I would have to get up before dawn to study. I needed to shake off the feeling all this had left me with. It was useless. I arrived home not knowing what to think, and some hours later, in a classroom at the Sorbonne, I did what I could.
I began to dread Marie’s visits. I would catch myself making as little noise as possible in the studio, standing absolutely still when I’d hear footsteps on the staircase. I would postpone going home after class, reading in the noisy library at the university, or refueling at a table in a café. It was absurd since Marie was a student like me, and even if I stopped going to classes, she still knew where to find me.
Sometimes I wondered if I should call her. My silence might make her suspect that Sandrine had spoken with me, and given her recent behavior, this could complicate matters even more. I wanted to protect myself by getting away from her problems. This plan was useless because one evening, when I was fed up with wasting time at the Café Universitaire, I took the metro and got off at the station two steps from the Bon Marché. I had gotten off the stop before hers, so I could think on my way. The store’s street stands had been dismantled and the sidewalks finally looked as wide as they actually were. After a few minutes I made it to her building, crossed the familiar courtyard, and went up to the fourth floor. When I had already raised my fist to knock, I heard voices. I stopped short and stepped back when I noticed that one was a man’s voice. It was deep and did not sound young. As I had never asked about Marie’s lover, I knew nothing about him except that he was married. Any detail, therefore, was news.
Against my better judgment, I pressed my ear to the door. I could barely decipher a sentence here and there. The man spoke slowly, with apparent indifference. Sometimes I could hear the creaking of a chair or the pouring of a liquid. At some point I couldn’t stand it any longer. I heard a door open and hurried to descend the stairs, trying not to make a sound with my footsteps. Between the third and second floors, I went faster until I was almost running and just missed bumping into a couple.
On the street I found a café that was just a few steps from the entrance to the house, on the opposite side of the street. I stood at the bar, ordered a beer, and rolled a cigarette with too many loose threads of tobacco on either end. I felt my heart palpitating and my hands trembling as I raised my glass.
For a whole hour, I didn’t take my eyes off the door. However, I knew that if the man or Marie came out, I would not approach them. I also knew that if Marie remained alone in the apartment, I would no longer go up there. Ever since the whole story began, I had never been this close to its mystery. These events (Marie being with her lover) were nothing out of the ordinary; the problem was that she had recently come back to me as if none of this existed and, shortly after, had gone to her best friend inventing the story of my betrayal.
When it seemed that nothing was going to happen, and I was thinking of leaving, I saw the door open. A mature-looking man glanced in both directions as if to get his bearings, and then walked toward the Duroc metro. I left a bill on the counter and did not wait for change. Watching him from the other side of the street, I saw him take a street parallel to the Boulevard Montparnasse, so I crossed and followed him about twenty steps behind. There was no one else on the sidewalk. I saw him stop and search for something in his pockets, next to a car. I continued on and passed him as he was getting into the vehicle. The inside light, which went on when he opened the door, allowed me to see him. He seemed to be about fifty, perhaps a little older; his face had deep lines on his cheeks, his hairline receding in places with gray hair that was carefully combed. He could be anything: businessman, architect, or administrator. His Citroën, without being the most luxurious, was not a modest car. Before the door closed and the light went off, just as I was passing him, I saw, on the back seat, Marie’s bag. Now I knew who he was.
One day I heard someone calling me from the street. Sandrine was arriving with a bottle of wine. Her visit, after the bittersweet taste of our last encounter, couldn’t help but cheer me up. Far into the night we sat on the worn rug sharing first her bottle and then another bottle we went out to get: making loud toasts and clinking glasses, we laughed our heads off, kicking each other with our bare feet. For dinner I prepared an omelet, while Sandrine looked over the piles of books balanced precariously in a corner of the studio and then she turned the volume of the radio up, perhaps too high. The subject of Marie never came up and I didn’t know if it was for the best. On the one hand, I was glad that our friendship left her out of the equation, but on the other hand, I wanted to tell Sandrine what I had witnessed. What was important then was that this visit proved that Sandrine had believed me, and the bottle of wine and her good cheer were an apology for the unfair things she had said to me.
This was the first of many, almost always unexpected, visits. The loneliness I had endured the previous months gradually diminished. One afternoon Sandrine brought, along with some raspberry tarts, news of Marie. She was moving in with her méc, or to be more precise, he was moving into her apartment. The news was astonishing. It didn’t seem normal that the person I had seen would be willing to live in the reduced confines of the apartment on Rue de Sèvres. We discussed it a bit more but I let the subject drop. I didn’t want to admit how much this news hurt me.
I seldom went to class. I spent the days reading texts that almost never had anything to do with my courses. The streets of Paris were always lush with life, and the days turned rapidly into weeks. One night, moved by great determination, I picked up a notebook and wrote the first pages of a story. I returned thus to the calling that had brought me to the city and I spent days writing, enthusiastic and happy. When she’d visit me, I’d tell Sandrine the anecdotes in my stories, seeking in her a substitute for the understanding in these matters I had had with Marie. I’d watch her listening to me with attention and patience, but would suffer when I’d notice a lost look in her eyes. I rarely managed to interest her with the books I’d lend her and the movies I’d take her to see.
At that time, we were a step away from our friendship turning into something more, but the ghost of Marie got in the way. Not even when she invited me to spend a few days at her family home, in a nearby province, did our dealings move beyond spending a beautiful day gathering apples and strolling around the potato fields. At the end of our chats beside the fireplace in the large kitchen, there were a few good-night kisses and each to his or her room with lots of questions in our minds.
One day, at the university, I ran into Simone, who still felt familiar from that night when we’d seen a film together and then shouted at each other over loud music. She was a big smoker, with yellow stains on her fingers. She lived with her father, a disabled war veteran. Her mother, who couldn’t get over what had happened during the Occupation, had hung herself when Simone was seven. The wounds left by the family history could be seen in her impulsive behavior, her constant smoking, and her way, at the slightest provocation, of pressing her body against mine. Without meaning to, I felt her hips bump against me when we walked along the sidewalks or got up from a table in a café. It was impossible to walk in a straight line. I was tempted, but held back because Marie, despite everything, was still a part of me.
I don’t know how many opportunities I missed out on because, in my loneliness, I still wanted her, a desire that in the long run led nowhere. I kept waiting for something to happen, and assuming that I still had a role to play in the drama of Marie’s life. Despite the reality, clear as the nose on my face, I went on being faithful.