In London, things had been different. He and Emma had both been strangers. Their status was clear: they were tolerated. Everything was allowed, because no matter what they did, there was no question of integrating. Tristan had stopped going to class rather quickly. They had to make money to support themselves. Emma’s salary wasn’t enough. He was eighteen years old. Everything in his life was happening too fast. He felt like someone had sped up the wheel of time and his existence was playing out in fast-forward.
This disturbance dated precisely back to his mother’s death, which happened the day after the last test for the baccalauréat. He had immediately received a letter from the person she used to call “our benefactor,” with a hint of mockery in her voice. The prefect (was that really his job? was it a nickname?) was watching over them. The opera tickets, for example, had been his gift.
He was the one who took care of the funeral. Ashes spread in the Memorial Garden.
“Benedetti’s Schumann,” he whispered in Tristan’s ear. “So beautiful. A must.”
So sad, thought Tristan. Gloomy. Sinister. Mama’s death wasn’t like that. Mama’s death was “Summertime” by Janis Joplin.
The pale rain drew awkward arabesques on the ground.
“Does the young man wish to scatter the ashes himself?” asked the funeral home attendant, a thirtysome-thing man who spoke with a lisp and was exhibiting excessive politeness.
I’ve carried her so often, thought Tristan.
The urn was heavy; this wasn’t her, this dense mass, this opaque matter. He would’ve loved to tell the mortician and the prefect—the only two witnesses to the scene—about the particular lightness that had taken over his mother’s body in the last days. A twig, a leaf, the seedlings of a dandelion, no more mass, a body that let light filter through, a strainer, a wire fence, a cheesecloth. She had become immaterial and translucent. Only her laugh still had some flesh to it.
Of the days, weeks, and months that follow, almost nothing remains. The sounds of feet, of boxes, the smell of cardboard. Tristan obeys the orders he receives by phone, by mail. He spends the summer near Bordeaux. Helps with the grape harvests. The owner of the vineyard is one of the prefect’s friends. Sometimes he invites Tristan to the winemakers’ table. Tristan refuses with a smile. Everyone is relieved (The kid’s just lost his mother, they whisper, shaking their heads). The other boys don’t speak to him. They smoke, bare-chested, at the top of the hillside, dazed by fatigue, by the sun, mentally recounting the money earned from breaking their backs.
Tristan picks up a fallen cigarette from between two vine shoots. He asks the least hostile of his colleagues for a light. He inhales. Mama!
He buys a pack of Dunhill Reds at the tabac in the village. The ashes, he thinks, I’ll never be finished scattering her ashes.
He reads a book he found among her things. He doesn’t remember slipping it in his suitcase. It’s a little volume with a sky-blue silk cover that fits in his pocket. During each break, in the morning while drinking his coffee, in the evening while eating dinner, and, later, in bed, he turns the pages. It’s his first time reading a book for himself. He’s intimidated. Mama always wanted him to read the newspaper. He would carry out the task in a loud, clear voice. She appreciated his diction, made comments, assured him that if he was well informed, he would have the means to steer his life in the right direction, to not allow himself to be cheated, to take control.
“Will we read the crime stories too?”
“We’ll read everything! It’s important to know what man is capable of. Rape, theft, murder—all that’s written in our DNA. Does that scare you?”
“No.”
And he would read all these sentences that stuck to the edges of his brain. It was the murmur of the world, of course, but he didn’t join in and never would.
The little blue book is very different; it has a special power. Up until now, the books he read (always for school, never for pleasure) would at best leave traces in his mind, inhabiting his memory. This story doesn’t force its way in. Quite the opposite—Tristan is the one who enters the paper, loses himself in it, dissolves in it. There are monsters, mermaids, beasts with a hundred eyes, chasms, animals that talk, enchanted rivers. It’s his domain. One second is all he needs. He opens to a page, no matter which one, and his eyes have hardly settled on the words before he’s swallowed up.
He doesn’t talk about it. What would he say? He doesn’t know if it’s normal. He realizes that his mother, in wanting to prepare him for the worst, neglected to teach him ordinary things.
At the end of the summer, he is driven to the airport in the prefect’s car. LONDON-HEATHROW blinks on a display board. He will stay with Mrs. Klimt, at Seven Sisters. He will receive a certain sum via money order every month. He will take classes at a language school: foundational courses. The year is taking shape before his eyes, scattered with constraints, novelties, rules. The prefect has prepared everything, written everything down.
“This notebook,” he says to Tristan while entrusting it to him, “is your vade mecum. Did you study Latin? Well, it doesn’t matter. Let’s just say it’s like the Game of the Goose. If you follow each page to the letter, like moving your piece forward on the squares, I’ll come to your graduation ceremony in four years and we’ll celebrate at the Savoy. All the oysters and champagne you want.”
Tristan frowns. He doesn’t really know how to play the Game of the Goose, but he remembers one time in grade school when he had landed on jail and stayed there until the game was over.
Seven Sisters. In spite of his rudimentary English, Tristan knows what it means. How can this be the name of a metro station or a neighborhood? Who were the seven sisters, and how could he, an only child, get there? Over the course of his journey by train, then by subway, then by bus, he imagines seven girls with ash-blond hair, pale pink lips, freckles on pointed noses, long hands, and plump feet.
At each bus stop, he asks the driver if it’s the place where he should get off. The man, who is wearing a cap and has big tufts of red hair sprouting out of his ears, patiently shakes his head, until the moment when he finally nods, which Tristan takes as a sign of agreement, a silent benediction.
On the sidewalk, he consults the hand-drawn map on page 3 of the notebook. Turns it in one direction. In another. The clumps of grass growing between the cobblestones glisten in the sunlight. The sky above, sprinkled with little chubby clouds, is slowly turning pink.
“Excuse me, where the street?”
Tristan points to his map. He is talking to a woman wearing a scarf around her head, who puts her shopping bag on the ground, takes out her glasses, holds her chin in her hand, studies the drawing while coughing violently, looks right, left, smiles at Tristan, and gives him back his notebook without another word.
She walks away, slowly, without turning back around.
Tristan’s throat tightens. He doesn’t understand where he is, doesn’t speak English, doesn’t understand who these people are or where they’re going. No one knows he exists; no one cares about him. He could disappear. He feels so tiny that a crack in the road would be enough to swallow him up. He’s cold. He’s hungry. He’s tired. He needs to pee. He’s alone in the world.
Emma often tells him, “You’re alone. You can’t do anything about it. That’s what you know best. You’re at home in solitude.” Emma strings together expressions that all mean the same thing, like reproaches washing over him that she says again and again, as though waiting for him to ask her for forgiveness.