These are just details,” you’re thinking. Of course they are, yes, but, you know, you don’t need to have gone to design school to understand the importance of details. The most moving things never jump right out at you; it’s the eyes that find them, and the rest . . .
The rest is less interesting.
The almost-nothing that had made me decide to accept my neighbor’s invitation to have a drink with him that night . . . it wasn’t the panache of his prattling, which was absolutely the verbal equivalent of his colorful plumage; it wasn’t the cold outside or the warmth of his handshake; and it wasn’t, I truly believe, the prospect of eating another kebab alone standing in the street, or even the energy-sapping work of my inner demons. No; what made me decide to give myself over to the moment was when he’d said, “What can I offer you to drink, to thank you for making Alice so happy,” rather than “for making my wife so happy.”
After his astonishing old-fashioned/macho/misogynist/Guitry-esque display two minutes earlier in the stairwell, the fact that her first name came more naturally to his lips than a sort of . . . possessive designation . . . had filled me with awe.
It’s a detail, I grant you.
One that, it so happens, I was touched by.
Another:
When I came back, their children were at the table. We were in a kitchen full of sound and fury; it even felt as if I were walking on crunchy pasta shells.
“Have a seat in the living room; it’ll be quieter. I’ll join you as soon as they’ve finished,” suggested the mistress of the house.
“Here,” he said, handing her a glass of wine he’d just aerated, sniffed, and tasted with great care. “It’s the Roussanne Pierrot gave us; tell me what you think. Okay, chickadees, hurry up and finish your dinner, because Mister Yann here told me he had . . . (conspiratorial wink, smiling eyes, loud stage whisper) . . . a little present for you.”
When mice giggle amongst themselves, it must sound pretty much just like that.
We clinked glasses above the heads of the two little busybodies, who had been greatly calmed down by their father’s announcement, even though the gift (big sigh) must be “really very tiny” because I “didn’t have a bag.” (It was the first time I’d been this close to kids, and I didn’t know they had such highly-developed deductive powers.)
Alice, standing at the sink, looked at me, smiling, while her husband, seated on a stool with his back against the wall, peeled clementines for his daughters and asked me question after question about my life.
Half of me fobbed off the questions (“Do you have polka-dotted ones too?” she asked. “Dalmatian Woof-Woofs?”) while the other half, in the background, promised myself: When I have a girlfriend, I’ll be like him. I won’t leave my wife all alone in the kitchen with the children. I won’t be like every other man I know, spending my time in peace in the living room having “guy time.”
That was the second detail.
“What are you thinking about, Yann? You have a dreamy look on your face.”
“No—no, nothing.”
I wasn’t thinking about anything. I’d just remembered that I did have a girlfriend.
* * *
The wine made me tipsy. I hadn’t eaten anything since morning and I was feeling pretty good. Slightly drunk, slightly cheerful, slightly off my head.
I looked and watched, asked questions and learned. For the curious person, the documentary filmmaker, the good-for-nothing dilettante, this was an absolute feast.
. . . the faded red fish, the tired ranunculus, the delicacy of the wineglass I was drinking from, the Napoleon III chairs, the big table salvaged from the refectory of an English boarding school, its dark, almost black wooden surface polished by two centuries of rolling plates and the percussive pounding of tin cutlery all along its length and breadth (a fact attested to by the little dents ringing its circumference); the little girls perched on piles of Arcturial catalogues, the weeping-willow chandeliers dripping with dun-colored wax, the Poul Henningsen ceiling light with its fashionable patina and its broken leaf (shell?), the to-do list, the unframed canvases by forgotten minor masters, the completely failed brioche of a completely failed Chardin and all those abandoned landscapes, forgotten and lost in succession, saved as one lot by Isaac and restored to the light.
More recent sketches and engravings and very beautiful pastels—and the children’s drawings, stuck with magnets to the refrigerator door: a golden moon, circle-shaped hearts, and princesses with disproportionately long arms.
Fotomat strips unapproved by the Ministry of the Interior, with nobody in them, or the tip of a doll’s ear in the lower right-hand corner, maybe. School memos about swimming days and the dreaded return of lice. Teapots, antique bowls, canisters of tea. Cast iron, stoneware, wicker, and turned wood. Lacquer and a bamboo whisk. Alice’s passion for ceramics: Raku ware, bone china, celadon glaze, faience, porcelain, and smoke-fired ceramic.
She told me about the various items (the vitreous layer, a type of glaze with which pieces are coated at the time of firing) (uh, I think, anyway . . . ) (she talked fast) (and I was pretty cooked myself!), which have a much more rustic quality in Japan because testaments to the superiority of nature over the creative power of mankind (asymmetries or irregularities caused by the Spirit of the earth, wind, sun, water, wood, or fire) were perceived as a sign of perfection, while Chinese bowls were judged on their uniformity and extraordinary smoothness.
The kilns of Ru, Jun, Longquan. This bowl “with such a fine lip,” this “soft” glaze, and this one, in “jackrabbit hair.” The splendors of the Song dynasty, and the especial joy of hearing Chinese civilization spoken of, rather than Chinese imports.
The stopped clock, the bird skulls sitting on a shelf between a packet of Chocapic and some jars of jam, a reproduction of a photo by Jacques-Henri Lartigue (the one of the girl who, just about a century ago, fell down and revealed her petticoats, laughing). The exhibition advertisements, invitations to private showings, and friendly little notes from gallery owners who know how to network. “Inevitably, all the money Isaac earns by selling his old-fashioned things, I give back to living artists!” The braid of heads of pink garlic, the Espelette peppers, the plump quinces, the mummified pomegranate, the ginger preserves in a silver goblet, the collection of peppers (long peppers, Kampot, and Muntok white peppercorns), the heap of fresh mint, the bunch of coriander, the bush of thyme, the wooden spoons.
The cat’s dish full of fish-shaped kibble and the cat itself winding between my ankles; the overflowing garbage can, the dish towels (both clean and dirty), the cookbooks, the recipes by Olivier Roellinger and Mapie de Toulouse-Lautrec, a dietician’s prescription forgotten between La Bible de la tripe et des abats and Le Dictionnaire des noms de cépages en France; the soft music, Caribbean reggae; the basket filled with almonds, which Isaac cracked and offered to each of us in turn; the taste of the cool, fruity white wine after you’d crunched down two or three of the almonds; the scent of clementines and their glow (you could turn them into little makeshift candles if you knew how to peel them correctly and pour a little olive oil on them), and the lights we turned out to admire their quivering luminescent candlelight.
The grain of their beautiful transparent orange color, the aroma of whatever was bubbling on the stove, the smell of cardamom, cloves, honey, and soy sauce mingling with meat juices, and the scent of chamomile when you leaned over the heads of the little girls to relight a reluctant candle . . .
The alabaster drops of Alice’s earrings; her tiny antique watch, her loose chignon and broad neck. The stirring line of delicate vertebrae running from the bottom of her nape. Her man’s shirt, monogrammed “I.M.” beneath the right breast; her worn jeans, her belt buckle (simple, hammered, rustic, very Thorgal and Aaricia). The way she held her wineglass in front of her mouth and smiled at us through it; the way she laughed when her husband said something funny, and her wonderment at him, at realizing that it was still there, that it still worked, that she loved him as surely and hopelessly as the first time they met—he was just in the middle of telling me about it—in the lingerie department at La Samaritaine; he was with his poor mama, who was in despair of finding panties in her size, while she was examining some ridiculous bustier intended to stun someone other than him, and, to seduce her, he had launched into an imitation of Sophia Loren in Heller in Pink Tights (original and subtitled versions)—after bursting out of a dressing room like a jack-in-the-box . . . dressed in said pink tights.
She recounted how she had waited delicately—she only admitted this to him for the first time right then—for them to slink away before continuing to rifle shamelessly through the racks of fluff, and how, arriving at the checkout counter, she had been struck with the realization that she didn’t want to salvage her relationship anymore; she only wanted to laugh again with the plump little man in the light linen suit who spoke the Yiddish of the Saint-Paul metro stop with his mother and the Italian of Aldo Maccione with her. She wanted him to perform for her, as he had promised, scenes from Two Women and Sex Pot. She had never in her life wanted anything so ferociously, so desperately. She had searched for them everywhere, run after them in the street, and—at the Quai de la Mégisserie, breathless, scarlet-faced, panting, in front of the window of a packed bird shop, she had invited him for dinner that same evening. “Son, son,” the old lady had quavered, “did we forget to pay for something?” “No, Mama, no. Don’t worry. It’s only this young lady, who has come to ask me to marry her.” “Oh, is that all? You scared me!” And she told us how, her heart still confused, she had again watched them walk away arm-in-arm, beneath the mocking gazes of dozens of jeering birds.
Every one of my senses was being appealed to, flattered, fêted. It wasn’t the wine that was making me drunk; it was them. The two of them. This building-up, this game between them, the way they had of constantly interrupting each other while holding out a hand to me to haul me on board, on board with them, and make me laugh again. I loved it. I felt like a piece of frozen meat put out to thaw in the sunshine.
I couldn’t remember when I’d been a part of so much witty repartee, when I’d been so open, so tender, considered so worthy of attention. Yes, I’d forgotten. Or maybe I’d never known.
I grew old and then young again; I was melting with happiness.
Of course, at some point I asked myself the natural question. Of course I wondered if it was my presence that sharpened and inspired them so much, or if they were always this way . . . but I knew the answer: as conductive as we were, alcohol and I could never carry this much weight; what I was seeing was their life, their daily routine, the usual. I was a welcome and warmly received witness, but I was only a passing spectator, and tomorrow, in this kitchen, they would have every bit as much fun together.
I was dumbfounded.
I didn’t know you could live like this. I didn’t know. I was like a pauper invited into an extremely wealthy home, and I confess, along with my pleasure, I felt a rising prickle of sadness, of envy. Just a prickle. Something that hurt. I could never—would never know how to—claim all this for myself. It was too elusive.
As I listened to them and bantered endlessly with them, I was also admiring the way their daughters linked elbows beneath this umbrella that was too small for them both. They already understood that these adults would never be as interested in the two of them as they were in each other, and calmly equipped themselves so that they wouldn’t suffer because of it.
They chattered to each other, laughed with each other, lived as a duo, took care of one another, and had already left the table when Isaac—who, bellowing, “Married within the year!” (gulp) as he poured the dregs of the first bottle of wine into my glass (he had chosen three, including two bottles of red, which he had uncorked and recorked and immediately returned to the cellar . . . )—chuckled in his beard as he listened, maybe for the thousandth time, to the end of the beginning of their story.
So he had accepted Alice’s invitation and entertained her for the whole evening—but not only that; he had affected and intrigued her as well, and then walked her back to his place (it was difficult at hers; a cuckold-in-training had taken to spying through the peephole) before suddenly taking his leave by standing on tiptoe to kiss her on the cheek.
“Alice, my little Alice,” he had said, holding her long-fingered hands tightly in his short-fingered ones, “I’d rather warn you right away: it won’t be an easy match. I’m forty-five years old, an old man, and I still live with my mother . . . but trust me, the day I introduce her to you, we’ll bring our baby along, and she’ll be much too busy looking for a resemblance to me to chastise you for not being Jewish.” She had bent her knees to offer him her other cheek, and everything had happened exactly as he predicted . . . except that all these years later—that is, tonight—she still hadn’t recovered! Her expression mocking, hands clasped, she reenacted the crazy scene for me, imitating the sudden gravity of his voice: “Alice . . . my little Alice . . . it won’t be an easy match,” and laughed, as we clinked glasses to her memory of the memory of this sweet madness.
Madeleine and Misia (I discovered their first names at the same time as the “mode of use” of my gift) had basically climbed up me like a mountain, and listened to me silently.
“See, you push this button . . . the little mouth, there . . . and when the green light comes on, you record your first name. Or whatever you want, really. Now imagine what your keychain would say to you if it was really calling you. For example: ‘Misia! Find me!’ or ‘Madeleine! Here I am!’ and then you press the same button again, like that, and when you lose it you clap, and it’ll say exactly what you recorded. Handy, right?”
“And then what?”
“Then . . . uh, then . . . well, I don’t know. Then you just test them out! Each of you can record whatever she wants, and give it to her sister, who will hide it the very best she can, and the first one who finds her keychain wins!”
(Hey, I’m pretty good with kids, right? Too goddamn bad I never came back.)
“Wins what?”
“The cat-o’-nine-tails . . . ” intoned their father spookily, “ . . . the cat-o’-nine-tails, and two bloody behinds!”
And the little mice scurried away, shrieking loudly.
I don’t remember how we got on the subject, but we were in the middle of discussing Brazilian architecture of the ‘50s and ‘60s; Caldas, Tenreiro, Sergio Rodrigues, etc., while Isaac (who knew everything about everything, and knew everyone, and never said anything unoriginal, and—and this was the most refreshing thing of all—never talked about money, or speculations, or sales records, or any of those boastful anecdotes that generally fill discussions about art, and design in particular) was handing me plates and glasses which I arranged awkwardly in their dishwasher when, suddenly, metallic, nasal salvos of “Wiener fart!” and “Butt fart!” were heard from the depths of the hallway, echoing more and more and more AND EVEN MORE LOUDLY throughout the apartment.
Scato, allegro, crescendo, vivacissimo!
The keychains were apparently well-hidden, and the little darlings much too overstimulated to take the trouble of finding them.
They clapped their hands, listened for a response, and laughed hysterically, cheering at the consistency and obstinacy of their big Asian parrots, which obliged them even more loudly.
Alice snorted with laughter because her daughters were as silly as she was, while Isaac shook his head hopelessly, in despair over being the only male trapped in this gymnasium of ridiculous females, and I couldn’t believe my ears: how could such angelic beings, with such tiny bodies and such crystalline little voices, produce such booming laughter?
* * *
There was no question of my staying for dinner. What I mean is, the question wasn’t even asked. On a white tablecloth which Alice smoothed, leaning in my direction (ahhh . . . the sound, the touch of her palm on the linen . . . and the gaping of her blouse . . . and the . . . the silky sheen of her bra . . . and . . . oh, my heart . . . how it crumbled into pieces . . .) . . . ahem, anyway, on the tablecloth, Isaac arranged three place settings, still talking to me about the Brasilia of Oscar Niemeyer as he had experienced it in 1976.
He reminisced about the cathedral, its size, its acoustics, and the absence of God, too intimidated and lost in there; he found the bread and sliced it, describing the Supreme Court and the government ministries, asking me if he should put out soup plates, regretted not going into the Place du Colonel-Fabien, offered to be my tour guide there one day, and shook out a clean napkin for me.
Instead of being his wife’s lover, I could have been his son . . .
“You’re tired,” he said suddenly. “I’m boring you silly with all my stories, aren’t I?”
“Not at all! Not at all! Quite the opposite!”
If I was rubbing my eyes like that it wasn’t because I was sleepy, but to dry my tears on the sly.
Unsuccessfully.
And the more I rubbed, the more the tears came.
Stupid.
I made a joke of it. I said it was the wine. That my wine tasted of sea air and salt. The fault—really—of the scent of granite that consumes your soul, the outdoor crosses, the votive offerings, the spring tides. The famous saudade of the Côtes-d’Armor . . .
I wasn’t fooling anyone, of course. It was just that I had thawed out completely by that time . . . and in doing so I leaked a little water. That’s all.
Move along, move along. Nothing to see here. Everyone gets screwed over by his soul every now and then, right? That son of am bitch of a little thought bubble that rises up without warning to remind you that your life doesn’t measure up, and that you’re lost in your absurd dreams, which are much too grand for you. If that doesn’t happen to you, you’ve given up. Or, even better, much better and much easier, you’ve never felt the need to measure yourself against . . . I don’t know . . . to hold yourself accountable, to look yourself up and down. God, how I envied those people. And the further I went, the more I felt like they—other people—were almost all like that, and I was the fool. Like I was just listening to myself piss on dead leaves.
But that isn’t my style, I’m sure of it. I don’t like to complain. I wasn’t at all like that when I was little. The thing is that I don’t know where I am in my life. And I don’t mean in life, I mean in my life. My age, my purposeless youth, my degree that impresses no one, my bullshit job, Mélanie’s sixty points, her fake cheek kisses that flicker in the empty air, my parents . . . My parents, who I don’t dare call anymore, who don’t dare call me, who have always been so very present, and who have nothing left to offer me for the moment except their discretion.
It’s horrible.
Diversion:
Once, when I’d gone with her to visit her son’s grave (my mother’s older brother, the last deep-sea fisherman in the family), my granny Saint-Quay explained to me that you could recognize happiness by the sound it made as it left. I must have been ten or eleven, and my knife and shackle wrench had just been stolen, and I got the message loud and clear.
With love, it’s the opposite. Love, you recognize by the mess it makes when it turns up. For example, for me, all it took was a kind, funny, cultivated man, a neighbor I barely knew, to set a glass and a plate and a knife and fork in front of me, for me to break apart from head to toe.
It was as if this man had pushed a wedge into my most secret breach, and was slowly opening me up, an enormous crank in his hand.
Love.
Suddenly, I understood Alice. I understood why she had panicked so much on that first day at La Samaritaine, when she had looked up and believed she had lost him forever. I understand why she had taken off running like a crazy person, and all but tackled him in the street.
That violence with which she had caught his arm—it wasn’t to force him to turn around; it was because she was grabbing on to him. And that was what brought me to tears, that gesture. Terra firma.
“Alice, my dear . . . this boy is starving to death.”
“The girls have school tomorrow; I should put them to bed first,” she grimaced.
In the distance, moments of quiet (recording sessions) alternated with bursts of pure madness (hide-and-seek on the last day of school and other wild exclamations like something off an African savannah).
“Would have had school,” she corrected herself. “Well, let’s sit down, then. I have a pumpkin soup with chestnuts that should restore our handsome Breton’s spirits . . . joli Breton; poil au téton!”
It was as if an angel had become tarnished and been cast out of heaven.
“Oh, please, you two! Don’t look at me like that! Surely I have the right to regress a little too, don’t I?”
Isaac told me where to find the bathroom, and I went to wash my hands.
Aside from the little girls’ room at the end of the hallway, which was pink and sparkly, the rest of their apartment—what I could see of it, at least—was empty. No carpets, no furniture, no lamps or curtains or anything else, and bare walls.
It made an odd impression, as if life on this planet was completely restricted to their kitchen.
“Are you moving?” I asked, unfolding my napkin.
No, no, it was just to rest the eyes. They had an old country place in the South to which they escaped as often as possible, which was stuffed to the gills with all kinds of sentimental bric-a-brac, but here, outside the kitchen, they didn’t want anything to remind Isaac of his job.
“A bedroom for the girls, a kitchen for the family, a sofa for music, and a bed for love!” he crowed.
Alice explained that she was fine with it, understood it, appreciated it. And that she had a marvelous bed. Immense. A king-size.
(A king-size . . . ) (This woman had the gift of eroticizing everything as if it were nothing at all.) (It was exhausting.) (Etymologically speaking.) (It was backbreaking.)
* * *
The glitter of the candles, the velvetiness of the soup, the crumb of the bread, the filet mignon, the wild rice, the homemade chutney, the wine . . . this wine, that warmed you little by little, that breathed so much life into you by relieving you of the burden of so much of yourself; that . . . turned your soul transparent. The bursts of the little girls’ voices, coming farther and farther apart and more and more quietly (there was nothing accidental about that, according to their mother) (they were trying to be inconspicuous because they thought we’d forgotten about them, naturally) (could this be possible?) (were little girls already this wily at such a young age?) (no) (come on) (leave me with a few illusions, please, Mr. Heartbreak . . . ), the flow of our conversation, our laughs, provocations, debates, disagreements and agreements. I already knew I wouldn’t remember any of it (I would be—was already—much too tipsy), but I also knew I’d never forget any of it either. I knew this evening would be my cursor, my Jesus Christ. That from now on there would be a before and an after, and that Alice and Isaac—and it was still very confusing, but there it was, and it was the only thing I was sure of in that haze of alcohol and well-being—had become my benchmark.
And I was already afraid.
I could already tell that this was going to be an insurmountable hangover.
In the chaos, jumping from one subject to the next and then to dessert, we talked about her work (dance instructor) (so that was it . . . ) ( . . . what a beautiful body she must have . . . ), about Michael Jackson and Carolyn Carlson, about Pina Bausch and Dominique Mercy and the Place du Châtelet, and Broadway and Suresnes and Stanley Donen (I asked her to pass me the water, the bread, the pepper, the salt, the butter, and who knows what else, for the simple pleasure of watching her arm unfold and stretch), about her mother, a pianist in a conservatory of classical dance, who had spent the best years of her life watching her little ballet pupils fly away, and who had died last year lamenting the “clumsy” performance of her “final fugue”; about cancer, about illness, about the Institut Gustave-Roussy and the great merit of its doctors and the nurses whom no one ever mentioned; about those times in life when grief seizes you without warning; the green heavens of childhood that were never really that green, about Heaven, period; God, his mysteries and contradictions, the film I was going to see this evening, that unforgettable scene where the parents resolve to lose sight of their son in order to free him from the weight of being their son. About my parents, and the ancient car my father had been lovingly restoring (off and on) for more than forty years, and which he had promised to finish for my sister’s wedding; about my sister, who had gotten divorced since then, and my niece, who, all of a sudden one day, had taken onto her slender, tattooed shoulders the great hopes of Papy and his Fiat Balilla beribboned in white. About the neighborhood, the local businesses, the baker who always spoke so rudely to us and who, when she turned around, could often be seen with white flour handprints on her large round ass. We talked about school, and music, which children never learn at the age when they need it most and when it would be easiest for them to learn while having fun at the same time; about what a waste that was, and the revolutions you had to have the courage to lead (Alice told me how she and one of her friends, a percussionist, went into nursery schools and daycares once a week to let the littlest ones play with instruments—a triangle, a little guiro, maracas—and added that there was nothing more comforting in the world than watching a baby’s eyes open wide when a rain stick swished in its ear). About Isaac’s theory that life, and I needed to remember this, hung by the slenderest of threads—he had come to understand this very young, at the age of reason, let’s say, when he was ordered to spell out his last name, and around him—always, and no matter where he was—the light changed depending on whether he put one or two dots above the i, and the cynicism, the recoil, and finally the strength that a revelation like that had put into his body, a single dot, one dot or two. For a child it was dizzying. We spoke about the ballets russes, Stravinsky, Diaghilev; about their cat who had been given to them by their neighbors in the South, and who had a southern accent when it meowed. We talked about the difference between the Chamonix biscuits of our childhood and the ones you could get today, and the same thing was true of Figolu cookies. Was it we or the recipe that had changed? About Mansart, and the Prince de Ligne, and cabinetry, and ironworking, and the books published by Editions Vial, and Bauhaus, and the little Calder circus, and the signage system in the Berlin metro.
Among other things.
The rest is a bit hazy.
At one point, Alice left us to put the little girls to bed, and I couldn’t stop myself from asking my host if it was true. If their story, the one they had just told me, was true. The way they’d met, and all that.
“Sorry?”
“No, I mean . . . ” I babbled, “you . . . did you really talk to her about a child that first night? In front of your door? Even though you barely knew her?”
What a beautiful smile he gave me then. His eyes disappeared, and every hair in his beard wiggled with pleasure. He stroked the hairs to calm them down, leaned forward, and said to me, low:
“Yann, my young friend . . . Of course I knew her. You don’t meet the people you love; you recognize them. Didn’t you know that?”
“Uh . . . no.”
“Then I’ll teach you.” His face darkened, and he stared into the depths of his glass. “You see, when I met Alice, I . . . I was a very sick man. I really was forty-five years old, really an old man, and I really lived with my parents. With my mother, that is. Let’s see . . . how can I explain this to you? Are you a gambler?”
“Pardon?”
“I’m not talking about Pope Joan or craps. I mean suffering, addiction. Games with winnings and a capital G: casino, poker, horse racing . . . ”
“No.”
“Then I highly doubt you’ll be able to understand.”
He set his glass down on the table and continued, without meeting my eyes again:
“I was . . . a hunter. Or a dog, rather. Yes, a dog. A hunting dog. Always restless, always on the alert, always howling, scratching, ferreting in corners. Obsessed by the idea of seeking and destroying, of tracking, of fetching. You can’t imagine who I was, Yann—or what I was, I should say. You can’t imagine. I could go thousands of kilometers at a time without sleeping; I could skip meals and keep myself from pissing for whole days. I could cross Europe on a hunch, on the idea of a stamp or a signature of the vague promise of maybe, just maybe, the arch of a back like this or a way of painting clouds like that. The certainty that there was, in Poland or Vierzon or Anvers or I don’t know where, a veneer to scratch or a false ceiling to remove or a drapery to lift. Thousands and thousands of kilometers to realize at the first glance that I’d been wrong, and that I had to leave again—quick!—because I’d already lost too much time, and someone might beat me out for another opportunity if I stayed even one second longer!”
Silence.
“I lost sleep, decency, the awareness of other living people. They say hunters have a taste for blood; well, when I gritted my teeth, what I tasted was the dust of auction rooms, the odors of wax and varnish, tapestries and old horsehair. And sweat and fear and those silent little farts that mean someone has a terrible case of the runs, and the awful funky breath of all those old nutcases that lose their minds over a titian-haired portrait but let their own teeth rot away in their mouths. What I tasted was the smell of diesel from the tailpipes of trucks, and of banknotes quickly counted and stuffed in a pocket, and grieving households, and families at war, and visits to hellish hospices and castles in dire straits, defeated and sad and soon to be stripped of everything. What I tasted was death, the kind that hovered over certain private mansions, and certain amateurs I knew, and certain collectors who, I knew, knew me. The cries of auctioneers and the dry crack of the hammer, the auction sales, death announcements in the daily report, the confidences that were sometimes dropped along with the cigar ashes, the Savoyard rooms, the hours spent around tables with old country notaries. Reading the Gazette while driving to save time. The power struggles with the haulage contractors, the mafia of experts, the planes, the trade shows, the biennials . . . I don’t know if you read stories about trappers or poachers or Sioux hunters when you were a little boy, Yann. All those unbelievable stories of hunting and tracking and safaris. Ahab and his whale, Huston and his elephant, Eichmann and his Jews. Did you read those things?”
“No.”
“All of them were very sick people. Like me.”
He smiled then, and met my eyes again.
After pouring us each a little more wine, which we were nursing at this point rather than really drinking, he continued:
“My great-grandfather was a merchant; my grandfather was a merchant, and so were my uncle and my father, and his offspring after him. The crazy Moïses—foxhounds, all of them, all down the line! (Laughter.) Do you know why my uncle came back from the camps? Because he wanted to bring a Bohemian crystal ashtray to his fiancée. He could barely lift it, and he didn’t survive long, but he came back with it! And when I met Alice, I was at that point too. I was also a ghost, nothing but skin and bones with a fixed stare, already dead—but who brought the shit back, goddammit! Who never came back empty-handed!”
Silence. Long silence.
“And then?” I ventured, to steer him back on track.
“Then? Nothing. Then, Alice.”
Teasing smile.
“Come now, neighbor, come now . . . don’t look at me like a shocked choirboy. I told you I had an eye. An unfailing eye. And I saw the way you looked at her on the landing when she came out behind me; I saw it! Honestly, what can I tell you about her that you haven’t already seen and loved?”
He had asked the question very gently, and I bit my lip so I wouldn’t cry again.
Because of the standing stones of Pergat, high percentages, my Opinel knife, and this whole thing.
Overwhelming.
Fortunately—or maybe it was out of delicacy—he’d gone back to speechifying:
“You know, it was a major challenge for my mother to find panties that she liked! Girdle panties, that’s what she wanted, I remember. Which means that I had time to observe this young woman—a dancer, I could tell—surreptitiously, while she looked at lingerie that was more and more luscious, and assessed each item, knitting her brows, as if they were cartridges or gunpowder. Her solemnity intrigued me, and her neck . . . ah . . . her neck, the way she carried her head, her style . . . Of course, she eventually sensed me looking at her. She looked up, and looked at me, and looked at my mother, and then looked at me again, and she smiled at us gently, while hurriedly dropping her little bits of lace as if afraid of shocking us. And there, Yann, right there, in that second, I died and came back to life. Some would call that a cliché, right? Some would say I’m just being romantic, but I’m telling you, because you’ll understand, and because I already love you, that it’s the pure truth. Off/On. I came apart and was put back together in one flutter of her eyelashes.”
After the almonds, he peeled clementines for me, too. He inspected each segment and delicately peeled off all the white strings before lining them up single-file around my plate.
“Then,” he sighed, “then I said to myself, oh, you big lug, a pretty little thing like that won’t come around twice. And my ancient Moïse blood, mine and the blood of three generations of rabbit hunters, didn’t have to think twice. If this dream of a woman passed right under my nose and I let myself get beaten to the punch, there’d be nothing left for me to do but bow out. But how to go about it? How? She was already turning away, and my mother, oy, was already starting to mutter the kaddish she reserved for bad days, cursing her worthless son, the size of her rear end, and the Eternal. I was frantic! Which is where the pink tights come in, because something I’ve learned in my career, and this applies to any occasion where fate comes into play that way, I would think . . . there comes a time when you have to give destiny a bit of a nudge. And by that I mean you have to take the initiative. Yes. There always comes a time when you have to go grab luck by the scruff of the neck and try to steer it in your direction by staking everything you’ve got on it. All the chips, all the cash, everything that can be bid on. Your comfort, your pension, the respect of your peers, your dignity, everything. In a case like this it isn’t ‘God helps those who help themselves,’ it’s ‘Make God laugh and maybe he’ll reward you.’ I came out of that dressing room like I was playing a hand of poker, like I was putting my life on the table, just to see, and I launched into a ridiculous imitation of Sophia Loren—being very careful to avoid the appalled face of my mother, who was clinging to the plastic thighs of an Eminence mannequin so she wouldn’t keel right over. My goddess laughed, and I thought I was victorious—but no. She was still looking at garter belts.”
He broke off and smiled.
We could hear snatches of Alice’s voice in the distance, at the end of the hall, reading a story to the girls.
“I mean, what was I expecting to happen? She was so young and beautiful, and I was so old and ugly. And I looked like such an idiot! Wearing panties! Panties under pink tights, with my gnarly, hairy little Louis XV hooves! What was I expecting? To bewitch her? So I got dressed again, vanquished but not despairing. After all, I’d made her laugh. Besides, the best players of the game of Chance share this quality: we like to win, but we also know how to lose. A true gambler is a good sport.”
He got up, filled the kettle, and put it on to boil before continuing:
“I was out in the street with my pain-in-the-ass mother hanging on to my arm and the memory of my beautiful ballerina before my eyes, and I . . . I was sad. Yes, I had died and come back to life, but frankly, I was wondering why, since my new life seemed much less fun than the old one. And my mother was still there, on top of it! But mostly I was annoyed. The underwear she’d wanted hadn’t fit at all. With a body like that she could squeeze herself into silk or cotton, but not that horrible nylon, you see. I sighed and distracted myself from old Jacqueline’s whining by imagining what pretty chemises and other lingerie I would have draped her in, if she had let me love her, and . . . well, I was lost in these agonizing daydreams when I lost my balance, and would you believe it, there she was, out of nowhere, grabbing my arm so hard she almost wrenched it out of the socket, the crazy woman!”
As he poured boiling water into an old teapot filled with lime-blossom tea leaves, he unleashed his second-most beautiful smile of the evening.
“You’re lucky,” I murmured.
“It’s true. I am. Though women’s tights are bloody difficult to put on . . . ”
“I didn’t mean only you, I meant the two of you. You’re both lucky.”
“Yes.”
Silence.
“Listen. Since it’s you,” he continued, “since it’s you, and since it’s now, I’m going to confess something to you that I’ve never had the guts to tell anyone before. Of course, my mother is still alive, of course. Since I was born she’s been haranguing me about her imminent death. When I was little she traumatized me with it, and she’s spent my whole adult life blackmailing me emotionally with her phony ‘this is it’s, and now I’m sure she’ll outlive me. She’ll outlive us all. And that’s fine. But she’s an old lady now. A very old lady, who can barely walk, and she’s deaf, and she can hardly see anymore. But none of that keeps the Eternal from fixing her right up every Thursday, you see. Every Thursday I take her to lunch in a little bistro downstairs from her flat, and every Thursday, after the coffee, we go through the same ritual; we walk with tiny little steps to the Allée des Justes, near the Pont Louis-Philippe. We stroll, we dawdle, we practically crawl, and she hangs onto my arm, and I support her . . . hold her up . . . carry her, almost. Her legs hurt, her rheumatism’s practically making a martyr out of her; her neighbors are killing her; her home-care worker’s about to finish her off, the new mailman is making her crazy, the TV is poisoning her, this world is persecuting her, and this time, this time, it’s definitely over, she’s done for. This time she can feel it; this time, my dear, I’m really going to die, you know. And I’ve been taking her word for it for ages now! But when we get there she stops complaining, and finally shuts up. She shuts up because she’s waiting for me to tell her, again, the names of all the human beings engraved there in the stone. The first and last names. Of course I do it every Thursday, and while I’m filling her ears with this little laic litany, I can feel—physically feel—the weight on my forearm getting lighter. Touched, all at once, her gaze softened, and with an angelic smile, my old Jacquot stands up a little straighter and perks back up. And there, exactly like on a mobile phone screen, I can see them. I can see, in her cataract-whitened pupils, the little bars of her internal battery, more and more bars the more names I read. And then after a minute she remembers that her legs hurt, and we leave as slowly as we came. Just as slowly, but much more valiantly! Because these people existed, and because they did what they did, my God, it must have been hard, but . . . for them, and especially for me, she wanted to try to stay alive for just one more week. And you see, for me, Alice’s voice has exactly the same effect.”
Silence.
What can you say, after that?
I don’t know about you, but I kept my mouth shut.
“But you know, the real key to happiness, I believe, is to laugh. To laugh together. When Gabrielle—Alice’s maman—passed away, it was terrible because I couldn’t make my beloved laugh anymore. I’d never been so unhappy in my life—and believe me, I come from a family that knows something about unhappiness! I was simple; I was raised on herring, and not even a whole lot of that. But here, I’d tried everything. She smiled, yes, but she didn’t laugh anymore. Fortunately,” he added, wriggling with pleasure like a young girl, “fortunately, I had one last secret up my sleeve . . . ”
“What did you do?”
“Secret, Yann, secret . . . ” he intoned in a voice of exaggerated mysteriousness.
“What are you telling him now?” asked Alice anxiously, having just rejoined us. “Go and kiss the girls in a minute. You too, Yann. They’re demanding you, believe it or not.”
Oh . . .
How proud that made me.
“But be careful,” she added, raising her index finger. “No more nonsense tonight, okay?”
When we went into their room, the littler one was already asleep, and Madeleine was only waiting for us to kiss her before she dropped off too.
“You know what I have to do, to be allowed to kiss my daughters?” he grumbled, straightening up.
“No.”
“I have to wash my beard with baby shampoo and then rub some kind of fake vanilla-smelling conditioner into it. Isn’t that the most absurd thing! You see what I have to put up with?”
I smiled.
“Somehow I can’t feel too sorry for you, Isaac.”
“And see, now you don’t feel sorry for me!”
When we got back to the kitchen, Alice was holding a steaming cup.
She kissed her husband on the forehead to thank him for thinking of her, before announcing that she was sorry to leave us but that she was tired, and dreaming of going to lie down.
(She didn’t say “going to bed,” she said “lie down,” which knocked me out again.) (And as if that wasn’t enough, at the time she said it, she pulled a long hairpin out of her chignon and shook out her hair, and, oh . . . this was another Alice . . . Alice with her hair down.) (Softer and less awe-inspiring.) (Already naked, in a manner of speaking.) (And as I mumbled “oh” and “uh” and “um” and I don’t know what else even more obvious, I felt the mocking gaze of her lover drilling between my shoulder blades.)
I think she was waiting for me to kiss her, but since I felt much too rattled to lean forward any further, she ended by holding out her hand.
(Which I shook, and which was very warm.)
(Uh . . . because of the tea, I imagine.)
Even though I had no desire to leave, the few manners the alcohol had preserved inside me made me move halfheartedly toward my jacket and the road to purgatory.
“Oh, Yann,” wheedled Isaac, “you’re not going to leave me to do the dishes all by myself?”
God, I loved this colorful little Misha.
I loved him.
“Come on. Sit back down. Besides, you haven’t even finished your clementine! What kind of wastefulness is that?!”
* * *
Alice, on her way to bed, had turned out all the lights so that we were in a kitchen illuminated only by the gleam of the candles now, and by the dimmer glow, like a memory, of the city lights filtering through the window.
We stayed that way, without speaking, for a long moment. We emptied our glasses as slowly as possible and reflected on everything we’d just experienced. We were both a little bit drunk, and slouched a little in the dark. He had resumed his place on the stool with his back against the wall, and I had turned my chair forty-five degrees so I could imitate him. We listened to the sounds of a pretty woman going through her nightly ablutions and we daydreamed.
We must probably have been thinking the same thing: that we’d just had a very nice time, and that we were lucky. At least, that’s what I was thinking. And also that she brushed her teeth a little too fast, didn’t she?
“How old are you?” he asked me, out of the blue.
“Twenty-six.”
“I’d never seen you before. I knew the old lady who used to live in your apartment, but she moved to the country, I think.”
“Yeah, she was the great-aunt of . . . of a friend. We moved into the apartment in October.”
Silence.
“You’re twenty-six years old and you’re living in the apartment of the great-aunt of a young woman whose first name you still haven’t mentioned”
He pronounced the words in a voice completely without inflection or punctuation. It sounded terrible in my ear.
I didn’t answer.
“A young woman with no first name, but with very definite ideas about the cleanliness of the courtyard and the storing of strollers under the staircase.”
Ah . . . we were definitely talking about the same person.
It was said without irony or aggressiveness. It was said, that’s all. I reached for my glass, because my throat had suddenly gone slightly dry.
“Yann?”
“Yes.”
“What’s her name, your girlfriend?”
“Mélanie.”
“Mélanie. Welcome, Mélanie . . . ” he murmured, addressing some phantom lost between the oven and the sink. “Well, since you’re here, I have to tell you—young lady who’s always in a bit of a hurry—that fussing about garbage bins and the poorly-coiled garden hose . . . it doesn’t matter. And strollers and scooters under the staircase, well, they don’t really matter, either. Can you hear me, Mélanie? Instead of calling the property management company every four mornings and wasting their time with these pointless little complaints, come and have a drink with us.”
He raised his glass in the half-light and added:
“Because, you know, we’re all going to die, Mélanie. All of us. We’re all going to die one day.”
I closed my eyes.
We’d had too much to drink. And I didn’t need to hear all that. I didn’t want to hear bad things said about Mélanie, I knew that. And I didn’t want to see Isaac fall off his pedestal. I loved him.
I looked down.
“Yann, why are you letting me badmouth the woman who shares your life without coming to her defense? I’m only an old dickhead, after all. Why aren’t you telling me to go to hell?”
I didn’t speak. I didn’t like the turn our conversation had taken, at all. I didn’t want to mix my private life with all the beautiful things we’d just talked about, I didn’t want to talk about myself, I didn’t want to hear the words “property management company” or “garbage bin” in the mouth of a man who’d made me dream so much up to that point. To get myself out of this tight spot, I took the risk of being hurtful, too.
“Because I’m polite.”
Silence.
I don’t know what he was thinking, but I tried with all my might to get back to where I was by pouring us the last of the wine in the bottle, sharing it equally between our two glasses. He didn’t thank me. I’m not even sure he was aware of it
I wasn’t so happy anymore. I wanted a cigarette. I wanted to open the window and let the cold air distract us a little. But I didn’t dare do that either, so I drank.
I couldn’t look at him now. I looked at the candles. I played with the melted wax like I did as a kid. I let it harden on my fingertip and touched my lip, in the little angel’s groove. It had the same lukewarmness, the same smell, the same softness as it always had.
He folded his hands, one on top of the other.
It really was time for me to go. My neighbor was a sad drunk, and I’d reached my saturation point. I’d taken in too much emotion. I was collecting myself emotionally—head, arms, legs, keys, jacket, stairs, bed, coma—when it fell, suddenly, like the blade of a very gentle guillotine:
“You can fail in life, out of politeness.”
His eyes sought mine, and we stared at each other for a moment. I played the innocent and he was the persecutor, but of course I was the one who seemed nastier. Why was he telling me this?
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because of the dodos.”
Okay. He was drunk as a skunk.
“Sorry?”
“The dodos. You know, the big birds with the hooked beaks that lived on Mauritius, the ones our ancestors wiped out.”
Okay, so it was WWF time now.
He continued:
“There was no reason for those poor birds to keep away from us. Their meat was bad, there was nothing interesting about their songs or their plumage, and they were so ugly that no court in Europe would have wanted them. And yet they disappeared, all the same. All of them. They’d been there since the dawn of time, and in barely sixty years, progress wiped them completely off the face of the earth. And do you know why, my little Yann?”
I shook my head.
“For three reasons. One, because they were polite. They weren’t ferocious and came willingly up to people. Two, because they couldn’t fly; their little wings were ridiculous and totally useless. And three, because they didn’t protect their nests, and left their eggs and babies at the mercy of predators. There you go. Three flaws, and they’re gone. There’s only one left.”
Uh . . . what could I say? The extermination of Dodolus mauritius at 1:10 in the morning, as recounted by my pocket prophet . . . I’ll admit, I wasn’t expecting that.
He pulled his stool up to the table and bent toward me.
“Yann?”
“Mm-hmm . . . ”
“Don’t let them destroy you.”
“What?”
“Protect yourself. Protect your nest.”
What nest? I groaned inwardly. Great-Aunt Berthaud’s eighty square meters, two floors down?
I must have snickered too loudly, because he heard me.
“Obviously I don’t mean Aunt Ursula’s apartment.”
Silence.
“What are you talking about, then, Isaac?”
“You. Your nest is you. What you are. You have to protect it. If you don’t, who will do it for you?”
And because I didn’t understand his words, he continued more clearly, in “try again” mode:
“You’re beautiful, Yann. You’re very beautiful. And I’m not talking about your youth or your mane of hair or your large clear eyes; I’m talking about the wood you’re made of. It’s my job to recognize beautiful things, you know. To recognize them and determine their value. I don’t make the rounds of auction rooms anymore; I’m the person people call from all over the world, the one they listen religiously to. Not because I’m so clever, but because I know. I know the value of everything.”
“Oh yeah? And how much am I worth, according to you?”
I regretted my tone immediately. What a little asshole I was. But my guilt was pointless, because he didn’t seem to have heard me.
“I’m talking about your expression, your curiosity, your kindness. The way you made everyone in my house love you in less time than it takes to say it, the way you bounced my daughters on your knees and fell madly in love with my lover without once imagining trying to steal her from me. I’m talking about the attention you pay to details, things, people. What they confide to you and what they hide from you. What you confide to them and what you hide from them. That’s the first time I’ve heard Alice mention her mother since she died, the first time she’s remembered her alive and in good health. Thanks to you, Yann, thanks to you, Gabrielle came back tonight and played a few notes of Schubert for us. I didn’t dream that, did I? You heard it too?”
His eyes glittered in the dark.
“You heard it, didn’t you?”
I assured him that yes, of course I had, so he would let it drop. Okay . . . I’m fine . . . I wasn’t going to start crying for a woman I’d never even met . . .
“I’m talking about the tenderness with which you talk about what you love, and protect what belongs to you; I’m talking about our deliveries, which you bring upstairs every week, and the pieces of cardboard you’ve been wedging in the double doors since it got so cold outside, which I take out every morning so you won’t get chewed out by the other residents. I’m talking about your squashed toes, your exhausted, famished big-boy tears, your obsessive, tedious work, your smiles, your discretion, your clearheadedness, and finally your politeness, which I insult, but which holds up the walls of our civilization, as I’m well aware. I’m talking about your elegance, Yann. Yes—your elegance. Don’t let them destroy all of that, or what will be left of you? If you, and the people like you, don’t protect your nests, then . . . what . . . what will become of this world? (Silence.) Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“ . . . ”
“Are you crying? But . . . but why? Is it making you cry, what I said? Come, now . . . it’s not such a bad thing to be worth so much, is it?”
“Screw you, Moïse.”
He jumped up and gave a delighted chortle that woke up the red fish.
“You’re right, son, you’re right! Here”—he thumped his glass against mine—“to our loves!”
We clinked and drank, smiling into each other’s eyes.
“This wine of yours is good stuff,” I said finally. “Really good stuff.”
Isaac nodded, glanced at the bottle, and looked unhappy.
“Here, now I’ll give you a proper reason to cry . . . those people on the label, Pierre and Ariane Cavanès, are the human beings Alice and I admire most in the whole world. Our garden in the Vallée de l’Hérault ends where their vineyard begins. It’s not a big vineyard—barely thirty hectares—but every year their wine wins a bigger prize, and you’ll see, one day it’ll be counted among the greats. Pierre’s father was a geologist and his mother had a little property, and in the 1980s, even though there was nothing there and nobody thought it was anything—not the winemakers in the region and not the professional experts—he took the risk of following his instincts and planting, there in that wild valley, some Cabernet-Sauvignon vines that had more or less fallen off the back of a truck belonging to a big winemaker in Le Médoc, if I remember correctly . . . anyway, they built a storehouse and a fermenting room, went into debt up into their eyeballs, asked the advice of a retired oenologist, and . . . you remember what Alice told us earlier about the great ceramic artists? That half-mad obsession with tests and attempts and every possible combination of water and fire, and air and earth? Well, I believe it’s kind of the same thing with wine, except with fruit instead of fire, and . . . ”
Isaac was exhausting me.
Stories, anecdotes, technical terms, viticultural procedures, fermentation, maceration, oak casks. Ariane, who had come from her native Normandy twenty years earlier to work the grape harvest one summer because she dreamed of running off to Bolivia and who had never left. Their love story, their fatigue, their sacrifices and their fragility; the weather, which could destroy a whole year’s work in a few seconds. Unforgettable tastings, unforgettable meals, guides, notes, rankings, the recognition that was finally arriving now. Their three children, who had been strictly raised in the open air and in grape baskets, their hopes, and finally their despair.
An uninterrupted stream of verbiage from which I picked out the words “immense courage,” “life of hard work,” “extraordinary success,” and “multiple sclerosis.”
“He wants to sell,” concluded Isaac. “He wants to sell everything, and even though I find that upsetting, I understand it. For me, if anything happened to Alice, I couldn’t go on either. That’s why Pierre and I understand each other so well. We talk big, we beat our chests and are horrible little pests, but we belong to a woman . . . ”
Well, too bad for them, but the dodos have taken one more hit. We didn’t care about them anymore. A lead weight had just settled on our shoulders. The candles sputtered, and my host stared off into space, lost in his own little world.
Alone, sad, unknown, hunched over.
I looked at my glass. How many swallows left? Three? Four?
Almost nothing.
Almost nothing, and what remained of one of the most beautiful evenings of my unpromising existence.
I didn’t have the heart to empty it.
My offering.
My offering to the spirits watching over the unknown Ariane.
I hoped they would be grateful to me, and let her live in peace.
I reached for my jacket.