He had been born in a small town in Brittany and (naturally) he must have had a mother and father, but I am sure that he did not know them or never remembered them and that, at some point, he began to see himself as self-generated, a child of chance, like certain wild organisms that seem like granite, resistant to all adversity and yet are very fragile inside. Although the translation of his name – P’tit Pierre – is Little Peter, in his case it should have been little stone (without the capital letters). Because that is what P’tit Pierre had been all his life when I knew him in Paris: a pebble, a rolling, wandering stone, without a surname, a history or any ambition.
He had always lived around the Latin Quarter, with no known address, virtually at the mercy of the elements, earning his living as a bricoleur. This word fitted him perfectly: a man for any job, a one-man orchestra, who could clean out pipes and chimneys, tile halls, repair roofs, mend old things and turn dilapidated attics into elegant garçonnières. But he was also unpredictable and very much his own man. He fixed the price of his services according to whether or not he liked his customers and he would think nothing of disappearing without warning in the middle of a job if he got bored with what he was doing. He didn’t know the value of money and he never had any because everything he earned disappeared immediately paying the bills of his friends in a kind of potlach. Getting rid of everything he had as quickly as possible was, for him, something of a religion.
I got to know him through my friend Nicole, a neighbour of mine. The built-in shower in my garret was falling to pieces and in order to have a shower, I had to perform all manner of gymnastics and contortions every morning. Nicole said, ‘P’tit Pierre is the answer.’ She had got to know him recently and was very pleased because, with extraordinary skill and ingenuity, P’tit Pierre had begun to transform her small bathroom magically into a sumptuous palace for ablutions and diverse pleasures. P’tit Pierre came to my garret, examined my shower and humanized it with a sentence that summed him up completely: ‘I’ll cure her.’
We became friends. He was thin, shabby, with long curly hair that had never seen a comb, and roving blue eyes. Nicole lived with a Spanish boy who was in the cinema world, like her, and P’tit Pierre would wake them up in the morning with crisp croissants fresh from the baker’s on the corner. He worked on Messalina’s bathroom and then came to wake me up. We’d go down to Le Tournon for a sandwich and I’d begin to learn about his carefree lifestyle which consisted of sleeping wherever the night found him, in the landings, rooms, chairs and cushions of his innumerable friends, in whose houses he also left strewn around the few clothes and tools that were his capital.
While I wrote, he resuscitated my shower or rummaged through my things quite unselfconsciously or started doing sketches which he’d then tear up. He’d sometimes disappear for many days or weeks and when he reappeared, the same as ever, smiling and warm, I’d learn of the strange adventures that he had experienced, which he took for granted as the mere rituals of normal life. I found out that he had lived in a gypsy camp and that, on another occasion, he was locked up for swimming naked in the Seine at daybreak with a group of boys and girls who had formed a commune. But he was too much of an individualist for such promiscuous experiments and he did not stay with the group for long.
He had, on occasion, charitable love affairs with the owners of the houses that he painted, ladies whose maternal instincts, it seemed, were kindled by his absent-minded nature. He went to bed with them out of sympathy or pity and not in any self-interested way since, as I have already said, P’tit Pierre was a curious mortal, completely devoid of greed or calculation. One day he appeared with a girl who looked fresh out of a nursery. She was an old flame, so that when P’tit Pierre seduced her, she must have been in nappies (I exaggerate a little). They lived together and, some time later, she ran off with a Vietnamese. Now she had gone back to her parents and was finishing school. P’tit Pierre took her out from time to time to get some air.
When, after a few months, my shower was finally repaired, P’tit Pierre refused to charge me for his work. We continued to see each other in the bistrots of the Latin Quarter, sometimes with long gaps between our meetings. One afternoon I met my friend Nicole in the street. She blushed when she gave me the news: ‘Did you know that I am living with P’tit Pierre?’
I was not as surprised as others were by this information since I had always suspected that P’tit Pierre was in love with the magnificent Nicole. How had the role swap come about? How had P’tit Pierre moved from being the bearer of croissants to Nicole and her Spanish lover to becoming the lover’s replacement? My theory was that the decisive factor had not been the crumbling croissants but the bathroom, that marvel of marvels, a space of scarcely five square yards into which the imagination (and the love) of P’tit Pierre had concentrated mirrors, carpet squares, adornments, porcelain receptacles and cabinets, all with Babylonian refinement and Cartesian balance. All my friends in the quartier were sure that the relationship between that cultured, bourgeois and prosperous woman and the semi-literate and deliquescent artisan would not last long. With my incorrigible romantic imagination, I bet that it would.
I was wrong only in part since I was correct in assuming that this love affair would be unexpected and dramatic rather than conventional. I heard news of them in snippets and, after a time, by hearsay, because I left Paris soon after Nicole and P’tit Pierre began to live together. I went back after some years and in the course of a conversation with a casual friend about what had happened to people I knew, I learned that they were caught up in the labyrinths of a love passion: they separated then made up, only to split up again. Someone, somewhere, some time asked me: ‘Do you remember P’tit Pierre? Did you know that he’d gone mad? He’s been locked up for some time now in an asylum in Brittany.’
It was the part about being locked up – and his supposed violence – that left me sceptical. Because if madness is a break with normality P’tit Pierre had never been a sane man. Since before the age of reason – like his ancestor, Gavroche, the urchin in Les Misérables – he had not complied with the accepted customs, the dominant morality, the dishonest values and probably even the law. But I could not conceive of him showing any trace of physical aggression towards another person. I had never known anyone more gentle, unselfish, helpful and kind-hearted than P’tit Pierre. No one could convince me that this man, for whom the attractive word nepheloid – a being lost in the clouds – seemed to have been invented, could become a furious madman.
Several more years had passed without news of him when, in a stopover between flights at Madrid airport, a shadow blocked my path,
spreading its arms wide. ‘Don’t you recognize me? I’m your neighbour from the Latin Quarter.’ It was the Spanish cinéaste who had lived with Nicole. He was so fat and white haired that I found it difficult to identify him with the weedy boy from León who, fifteen years previously, exploded with very Spanish prejudices every time his French lady gestured to pay the bill. We embraced and went to have a coffee.
He visited Paris from time to time but he wouldn’t live there again for anything in the world, for the city was not a shadow of its former self. And did he see Nicole? Yes, sometimes, they were still good friends. And how was she? Much better now, fully recovered. Had Nicole been ill? What, didn’t I know what had happened? No, I hadn’t heard a word, I’d had no news of Nicole for ages.
So he gave me the news, of her and of P’tit Pierre against whom, he said, he had never harboured a grudge for having taken his woman away from him. The story about the asylum was true and also the rage. But not against others, because P’tit Pierre was not capable of hurting a fly. But he was capable of hurting himself. He’d been locked up for some time in Brittany when Nicole was told that he’d got hold of an electric saw and had mutilated himself horribly with it. Nicole’s visits disturbed him and for that reason, until there was a marked improvement in him, the doctors forbade her from seeing him.
Weeks, months or years later, the clinic told Nicole that P’tit Pierre had disappeared. He could not be found. About then, I suppose, Nicole had – as they say – remade her life, improved her lot, found a new lover. I imagine that the day she decided to sell her flat in the Latin Quarter, P’tit Pierre would have been a distant memory. The fact is that one of the potential buyers decided to poke around in the huge attic above the bedroom, bathroom and kitchen of the apartment. Was it Nicole who saw it first? Was it the potential buyer? The body of P’tit Pierre was swaying among the spiderwebs and the dust, hanging from a beam. How did he manage to slip in there without being seen? How long had he been dead? Hadn’t there been perhaps some smell that would have given the body away?
The plane was about to leave and I couldn’t ask the Spanish cinéaste any of the questions that were pounding in my head. If I meet him again in some airport, I won’t ask him then either. I don’t want to hear another word about P’tit Pierre, that little stone from the Latin Quarter
who mended my shower. I am writing this story to see if, by doing so, I can free myself from the wretched shadow of a hanging man that sometimes causes me to wake at night, in a sweat.
Lima, December 1983