SEE YOU ON THE OTHER SIDE

Words. She remembered his words as if he was whispering them, passionately, between her breasts.

Let me kiss you, let me kiss you again, I love kissing you, I love the taste of your lips. I don’t want the morning to come.

But he’s no longer there. And he hasn’t called.

It happened in English. Perhaps it would not have registered with such force in French. Well, how would she know? The particular sentence that keeps coming back to her, his voice shuddering, could have been any sentence, but it was those words uttered with that voice: I want to stay inside you forever. How would you say a sentence like that in French? Je veux rester à l’intérieur de toi pour toujours?

She’s running, in the racket of bullets and her high heels, and all she can hear are those words, and all she can feel is the jolt in her belly of each word coursing through her. Each flash of memory catches up with her, and her destination—the corner of green canvas where she has to collapse, where Matt Damon will suddenly appear—that corner is a resting point, her thoughts stop, her suffocating brain and pounding legs clamour for a bit of basic, physical attention, and she catches her breath as she pretends to be in agony. Words, snatches of them, mantras. And she is back in that night again, a single night, far bigger than she is.

The director thinks she’s wild, sublime, you’re sublime, Solange, you’re wild.

He had fallen asleep straight away, into a deep sleep. It is rare for her to sleep with someone, and she had not anticipated sleeping with him. She looked at his face. She could look at him, knowing that he would probably hate it. Long and thin in profile, surprisingly broad face-on. Not the same man face-on and in profile.

She wanted to kiss his lips, his nose, the roots of his hair, the strange little triangles scored into the corners of his eyes. His large soft neck, the skin slightly wrinkled. The sturdy collarbone joints, the curve of his shoulders, his arms, his chest. His soft skin, tensile, smooth, thick, perfectly defining his contours, his muscles, his tendons, with the exception of his soft neck, where she glimpsed his age. A man asleep inside his strength, moulded by his skin.

A few minutes earlier, she had uttered some words, too. She said: I love your skin. And it was true, she adored it, she kissed it and caressed it, thick, supple, smooth, those words from her mouth a kiss alighting, a butterfly.

He had flinched, loosened his embrace, moved away ever so slightly, but it was a huge distance, a huge distance from his skin to hers. He had said: I know nothing about skin.

Skin is contact. That’s what she meant, that’s all. The softness of their skin, rubbing against each other, coupled: that contact.

He had taken her in his arms again; she was absolved, embraced, as if he approved of her reply. And he fell asleep (she is being grabbed by Matt Damon, who is grinding his knee between her breasts, and the blood is spurting), and she had been able to look at him. Gaze at him. He was copper-brown, chocolate, the hollow in his neck almost black, the palms of his hands almost red, the soles of his feet orange; and she was pale beige, bluish around the wrists, pale pink breasts, mauve-brown nipples, a slightly green bruise on her sternum. She was white and she didn’t know it.

They’re doing another take, straight away, from the top, Matt and Solange, the spurting blood, Hollywood. She says her line, in an exaggerated French accent: See you on the other side. Her only line, but it’s the title of the film. He flings himself into the green corner and you’ll see, in the cinema, it will be the spectacular entrance into a rift in the space-time continuum and she will be lying there on the threshold, dead.

From the top, again. Matt sits himself on her chest again, the bullet’s fired, she’s dying. Natsumi rearranges her outfit, Damon’s pelvis is right in front of her mouth—it’s weird, but she does have a dirty mind. A poignant expression on her face, the camera up close on the right side, as well as the sound guy, she’s surrounded by feet and knees, the camera’s rolling: si iou on zi ozer saïde, see you on the other side. Cut. She has to play up her accent, and her breathing, and how weak she is.

She had wanted to act with Desplechin, Carax, Noé, but not one of them contacted her; she remembers waiting after a so-called casting session when in fact the decisions had already been made. Now she’s the one who gets to say the titles of the big Hollywood blockbusters and she’s paid fifty thousand dollars for two days of shooting and they can get fucked. A twitch of impatience in Damon’s fingers; she refocuses. There are women who think Damon is good-looking. She thinks he’s white. See you on the other side. She warbles the words, with rising intonation, like a question: that’s the one, the director loves it.

Olga wipes off her make-up, they’re whacked. Natsumi and the make-up artist have already left. Two messages on her phone: a kiss from George, and a hi from Lloyd, asking if everything went well. That’s kind of him.

Olga massages cleanser gel into her face. Mirror. Night falls.

‘I’ve met someone.’

‘How nice,’ says Olga.

At first they trade clichés, stiff and rubbery like hamburger cheese. Then things thaw a little. Her make-up is running under the white gel, her eyes shiny with tears through the diluted mascara.

‘He hasn’t called me,’ her red mouth utters.

‘Since when?’ asks Olga, wiping her face again with cotton wool.

‘Two days.’

Olga smiles. ‘Two days is nothing. Men, men…’

‘But that’s not the point.’ She struggles under the cotton wool, turns to face Olga, rather than her own reflection. ‘Something really did happen,’—she tries to think of the word—‘a connection.’

All those words he said to her. She doesn’t summon them; she lets them hover between Olga and her. Words like jelly, quivering and translucent, through which Olga recognises the two of them, her and him. Observes them, caught in the amber of the words, in the golden light of the evening. Sees them caught in love.

No, she’s left something out.

‘He is black.’

Olga doesn’t understand.

‘He is a black man,’ she repeats. Why does she need to point that out? What has it got to do with the story? What kind of hair-splitting is she getting mixed up in? Why is she mixed up in it at all? That aching all through her body, in her throat, that weariness. Olga backs away. She recalls how Kouhouesso put some distance between her and him, not much, but measurable. That’s it: it’s exactly the same distance that Olga instinctively took, a tangible distance. It goes from here to there in space, in longitude and latitude, and it can be calculated by coordinates. Compared to the ocean or even to California, it doesn’t make much sense, but relative to the human body, it can be understood as the measurement from white to black, the measurement of the prejudices with which, for two days, she’s been battling.

Olga is Asian. It’s blindingly obvious. Her eyes, her hair. A good example of the nomadic Hun tribe. From that part of Asia where the names end in -stan, from that huge interior below the Ural River where they still believe in Europe but where there are deserts and actual camels. Why didn’t she choose a different confidante, someone like Natsumi? No. Natsumi is yellow, too. She has very pale skin, but she is not white, she is Japanese, of Japanese origin as they say in France; she’s probably whiter than a Chinese person and much whiter than an Arab, but less white than a Spaniard and even less so than a Portuguese person.

Olga stares at Solange, and at her reflection, one after the other. The cleanser gel has melted and Solange looks naked, transparent. She feels as if Olga can sense her thoughts—which are arising from some mysterious place, from the murky depths of her village, far from Los Angeles, but lying low in the back of her head. She would like to apologise, tell Olga that we are all the same. She would like to open up her skin to show her universal Benetton colour.

Olga smiles but seems to hesitate before speaking. Even now, at this time of evening, sharing a bottle of Merlot in the dressing room, when everyone has left, Solange is her superior. Solange is the one on the screen, it’s big budget, she’s the Warner Bros girl, she’s the one who ends up with bruises from the star. Olga purses her lips, half-disapproving, half-malicious. She laughs, her hand over her mouth. ‘Did he have a big one?’