Collected Later Novels Read online

  He watched her as he lay motionless under the covers. He breathed in the smoke that escaped through every pore in the skin of this all-powerful creature, who had settled there in his hotel room as if she were at home, the one person in the world who possessed any rights over him.

  The smoke filled the room, clung to the green plush curtains, moved to the fake mahogany armoire, drifted onto the imitation paisley sateen comforter and inside Julien’s pyjama jacket, it brushed his face and hands, and slipped onto his neck in suffocating swirls of blue. Second by second the smell of Virginia tobacco in which he had grown up seemed about to grasp him again in its thick clouds and return him to a childhood he only wanted to be over.

  Fearing suffocation, he tries to pull himself up on his elbows. But no movement is possible in this dream state that persists and threatens to annihilate him.

  He cannot help reasoning as if he was awake and in full control of his powers. How could she have got in here, inside this locked room? A profound sorrow catches at his throat. He remembers that his mother is dead. Abruptly, he wakens in a strange dark room.

  After taking care to switch on a light, he finally goes back to sleep.

  In the morning he is roused by the chambermaid bringing the breakfast he’d ordered the previous night. She waves the key Julien had left in the door outside the room.

  The wide-open window frames the city Julien has dreamed of for so long — the Quai Voltaire, the Seine, the Louvre — and over it all the filtered light, like an uncertain softness. The hotel had been chosen out of dozens of others because of its location, here in the very heart of Paris. And this morning, instead of rushing to the window, whose shutters the chambermaid has flung open, Julien stays curled up in his bed and does not stir. Everything that is happening now suggests he has no right to look at Paris, to sense it living under his gaze and find it delectable, for someone extremely powerful has come to him in a dream and forbidden him any pleasure, any joy, outside the strict enclosure of his childhood.

  The chambermaid’s angular silhouette lingers, backlit against the window, tense and concentrating. She says “Zut” and returns to the room. Very slowly, even reluctantly it seems, she swipes at the table with a rag, declaring abruptly:

  “There’s another one’s had his last swim!”

  Now Julien goes to the window. He does not see the drowned man, only the crowd surrounding the body, which has just been fished up. The endless wave of cars along the quay, like the serried ranks of an army, covers everything with its deafening racket.

  “All hail my first morning in Paris!” Julien croons at his mirror a minute later, recalling a melody from Faust, as he tries to groom his thick, curly hair in which a few silver threads are tangled.

  ✦✦✦

  During the first days in Paris he was like a sleepwalker, gazing wide-eyed but unseeing. Notre Dame, Place de l’Etoile, the Invalides, Place de la Concorde — the usual tourist itinerary files past, but Julien has no hold on anything. Is the real city beyond his reach? he wonders as he endlessly compares the Paris of his dreams with the reality before him. A grey filter covers the monuments he has seen before, so clear and pure, in artbook reproductions. Crowds of people around him hamper him at every step. It’s like being in a museum, so pushed and jostled on all sides that he cannot stand alone at any painting. Too many people. Too much noise. Too many cars. Though he pricks up his ears, he can hear neither the light breath of Paris nor the muffled voices, so eagerly anticipated, of his favourite poets.

  There is something like a screen between the city and himself, a translucent window behind which stand strange closed dwellings and inaccessible creatures.

  Disdaining tourist buses and guided tours, Julien wanders from morning to night through the streets of a city that eludes him as soon as he draws near.

  He strolls along the Grands Boulevards, slowly, cautiously, like a cat walking along a wall. The space reserved for his long, slightly hunched silhouette seems measured, tightly limited, amid passersby dressed in black, beige, grey. He remembers the garish colours of his native continent. He thinks about the red shoes of his sweetheart, Aline, recalls the surprising brightness they would bring to the surrounding dullness.

  Little by little he can feel in his legs, his arms, in all his weary muscles that something is adapting itself and taking on a rhythm. And now the alien crowd is carrying him along just as the sea grasps a boat and holds it as it travels across the water.

  At the end of every day, tired from walking, he collapses onto the bed in his hotel room, feeling the movement of the living crowd spread through his body like intoxication as he falls asleep.

  Julien discovers the terraces and cafés. At times when he is too thirsty or too hungry, when fatigue makes him drag his feet, he escapes from the mass of strollers that is sweeping him along the streets he knows not where. Then he finds himself all alone, leaning at one of the small tables and shyly ordering:

  “A coffee, please.”

  He sips black coffee from a tiny cup for hours. Sometimes familiar ghosts, come from his native land, accompany him along the streets, sit with him on the terraces and in the cafés.

  At other times it may happen that Julien forgets his past life, even his painful status as a stranger in this city. Certain cafés bring him luck. In them, he calmly breathes the same smoky air as the people at the tables all around him. And if he lights a cigarette, he enjoys watching the blue smoke drift up to the ceiling and disappear into an opaque cloud, as if his entire life were joining the life he shares with all the world, in one ephemeral eddy.

  But it is only after the concert at Les Billettes that the city will truly begin to be tamed.

  ✦✦✦

  At length he decides to go to a concert in the church of Les Billettes, on rue des Archives. As soon as the decision is made, the air around him seems more breathable, as if the music has already begun its healing work. For has not music, ever since his childhood, had the power to make him happy in spite of everything?

  From deep in the past the buried sounds and images arise. He hears Mozart and Schubert anew. Sees the music light up Lydie’s animated features. Savours the bliss on her beautiful face before it is given over to her passion for life.

  Adrift in memories, Julien crosses the Pont d’Arcole without seeing the greenish Seine as it moves in the sun. Only when he arrives at the cloister of the church of Les Billettes is he aware of the cloudless summer sky.

  Here begin the lamentations of Jeremiah.

  First, the lead tenor’s voice, a cappella — only the voice, for the singer cannot be seen.

  There is no preamble or introduction; from the first note it is the song that rises from the shadows of the earth, neither avoiding nor bypassing them but, rather, taking possession of them to give them a form and a face in the light.

  The lead tenor makes his way into the plain, bare choir.

  The great cross behind the altar, the wooden railings of the galleries.

  Another tenor, a harpsichord, a viola da gamba.

  Julien abandons himself to the music, his own dislodged darkness part of the night that radiates with the Lesson of Darkness, now being celebrated in the little church of Les Billettes. Nothing in the world, it seems, can distract Julien from his contemplation.

  Twice, though, his gaze alights on the shoulders of a woman dressed in black who sits two rows in front of him.

  Jerusalem, Jerusalem, come back to the Lord thy God.

  It’s not that she is unfamiliar with the music of Couperin or with Julien’s fervour; on the contrary, it is Julien who is troubled by the lack of distance between the woman and himself. He has the impression of being shut away with a stranger (who suddenly stands out against the crowd of the faithful) in an enclosed place, reduced to the same breathing, the same shared delight.

  His gaze lingers on the
shoulders draped in black. He observes the chignon, low, at the back of her long neck.

  When the concert is over he sees her walk slowly down the cloister, look up towards the intersecting ribs. He watches her intently. The narrow face, the coils of her black hair. She turns on her high heels, stretches as if she were alone in the world, a dark presence in this summer light, and arches her back, throws out her chest, her red lips smiling vaguely. How she resembles Lydie, Julien thinks, and suddenly all he wants to do is to check the unknown woman’s face for the little mole, the black beauty spot that adorned Lydie’s right cheekbone. Julien takes a step in her direction. She is looking at him, a broad smile showing all her teeth. Caught unawares by that too easy smile, those lips too thickly painted, and suddenly feeling terribly strange, Julien lowers his gaze, then turns and strides away from the cloister.

  He walks briskly down the rue des Archives as far as the rue de Rivoli. Just as he is about to cross the Seine he slows down, imbued with the fine weather that prevails on the water and in the sky. All at once he stops comparing a troubled adolescent from the past with the unknown woman from the church of Les Billettes.

  He leans on the parapet, looks at the water that flows beneath the bridge, first dark green, then pale blue because of the changing sky filled with fraying clouds.

  Still, Julien wished he knew if the woman from Les Billettes had a tiny black-velvet beauty spot on her right cheekbone. For a long time he looks at the moving water until he no longer sees it at all, for his eyes are blurred with dreams.

  ✦✦✦

  Most nights, despite the heat, Julien dresses in a three-piece suit, with a white shirt and tie, in honour of the music. Like someone without hearth or home, he goes from concert to concert. Solo recitals, chamber groups, symphony orchestras. Julien joins his hands, gathers his thoughts, laughs and cries, trembles from head to foot. His lean frame in its Sunday best, his dishevelled hair, stand out in the top tiers of the concert halls, where men in shirt sleeves and women in bright dresses perch. The gallery and the gods. Julien spends his meager savings without keeping track. Spends intermissions spying on the wave of listeners who pass slowly, then stop, talk, and gesticulate in little groups. As time goes by, the hope of seeing the woman from Les Billettes turns out to be more and more absurd.

  Late Sunday afternoon finds Julien at Notre Dame for an organ recital.

  Perched on a straw-bottomed chair he listens with his whole body, his mind as taut as a drum under the onslaught of the great organ.

  And now the organ falls silent, the huge vessel continuing to vibrate with diminishing waves of sound beneath the vault. The stained-glass windows are tinged with glowing light. Julien takes cover behind Paul Claudel’s pillar. He closes his eyes. Pleads for grace and revelation.

  Little by little the cathedral empties. The silence of God fills the space. You could touch it with both hands, as if you were making your way through damp, dense fog. It is from the depths of this silence that Lydie suddenly appears, beneath Julien’s closed eyelids. She shows herself both full-face and in profile, her long black hair in wild disarray on her shoulders and her back. She is sitting astride a dapple-grey plough horse, showing off, endlessly. A little more and she will pass into Julien’s memory like Eve emerging from Adam’s ribs, she will escape into full daylight, she will enter the nave and cry out at the top of her lungs beneath the vaults of Notre Dame, “Dear little Julien.” The faithful gathered there will be startled, and Julien, lurking behind his pillar, seeking wonder and miracle, will be like a man succumbing to a dream.

  If only he opens his eyes, his solitude and the soothing sha­dows all around will be restored to him. The straw-bottomed chairs are lined up neatly. Small flames flicker in the side aisles like frightened breaths. Julien feels only an immense fatigue.

  Now he can clearly distinguish the confused trampling inside the church. All these people come and go, meet and vanish, look all around but see nothing; they could pass through fire and water unharmed.

  Standing still as if carved there against the wall of the porch, a nun holds out a little basket. A woman’s hand drops in a banknote. Julien looks at the hand as if it were the only one in the world and has suddenly broken away from the crowd to be looked at by him. He studies the bare arm, the shoulder draped in black.

  The woman from Les Billettes has come here most likely to pay her share for the organ recital — or does she intend it for God’s poor, to solicit some secular favour? Julien drops in his offering. The foreign banknotes in his fingers seem false to him, like stage money.

  Soon they are both in the square outside the church, part of the wave of tourists, standing face to face like two individuals waiting to be introduced.

  ✦✦✦

  There is no beauty spot on her cheek. The woman from Les Billettes bears less and less resemblance to Lydie. Julien persists in seeking a likeness.

  “You remind me of someone . . .” he says, across the round table on which she is resting her elbows.

  “You don’t remind me of anyone, dressed up like that in this heat.”

  She laughs. There is some red on her white teeth.

  “There’s no one in the world like you, I’m sure of that. Where do you come from?”

  He feels like answering that he comes from nowhere, that he’d like to go back there and not be asked any questions. Across from this woman who is full of life and laughter he feels like a convalescent, barely recovered from a strange illness with no precise name, a kind of dreadful aridity that has taken hold of him since his arrival in Paris.

  He is silent amid the noise all around them, this confused world where unkempt people slump on cane chairs and lean on the little fake marble tables lined up on the sidewalk.

  She eats her sherbet with a long, icy spoon. You can see the tip of her catlike tongue between her teeth. You might even think it’s the only thing in the world she has to do — to eat ices in the bright summer sun not far from Notre Dame, lost in the wave of tourists, while scraps of sentences in foreign languages pass over her head.

  A little more and she will get to her feet in her close-fitting dress, resume her stroll through the city, sit at other terraces, opposite other men, eat more ices, laugh and make appointments for a tomorrow of little importance.

  She has finished her ice and now she is looking at Julien as she leans across the table, her face very close to his, waiting for a sign from him that doesn’t come.

  “How sullen you look. Is your bow tie making you uncomfortable. Or is it me?”

  This woman has agate eyes, with veins of brown and green. She is so close to him he can see the matte texture of her skin.

  He hears himself say very clearly, each syllable quite distinct, as if he was making some irrevocable disclosure:

  “Lydie’s eyes were perfectly green, like grapes!”

  She laughs so hard that he jumps to his feet, furious, and flings at her all the belligerence held back since his arrival in Paris, getting it off his chest.

  “Everything here is too old, too ancient, the past is suffocating, and most of all everything’s too small. Your Seine is more like a stream, your forests are like well-groomed parks, and the salt’s not salty, the sugar’s not sweet, there are too many people, too many cars, too much pollution . . .”

  She chokes with laughter.

  “How I adore your accent! What a treat! Please don’t be angry. You remind me of the deep dark countryside. Go on, please go on.”

  She has stopped laughing. She closes her eyes as if in meditation while anticipating some new delight.

  He rose so abruptly he almost knocked over the little table where his glass and the metal sherbet dish collide.

  She gets up, too, perfectly erect in her narrow dress. Not young enough for such a dress, he thinks. Lydie’s image rises once more between him and the woman facing him
. Against the image of Lydie at seventeen, a long slim body and endless legs.

  He speaks clearly so she won’t notice his accent and mock him further:

  “Goodbye. I have to go home now.”

  She stammers, afraid of losing him and of being alone:

  “How uncouth you are. I’d have liked to go for a walk with you in the Jardin du Luxembourg. It’s not polluted at all there, I swear.”

  He has already turned his back and now is walking towards the quays. She stays there for a moment, motionless and infinitely idle. She straightens her little purse with its gold chain and reluctantly begins to walk. Soon she has resumed her nonchalant step, alert for the slightest encounter with another human. Only after she sees Julien’s long, narrow silhouette disappear into a hotel on the Quai Voltaire does she realize she has followed him all the way from the café.

  So I’m uncouth, Julien thinks as he crosses the threshold of his hotel.

  ✦✦✦

  He likely doesn’t hear the hum of traffic on the quay, nor the vibration of the windowpanes. Julien makes an effort to tally up his expenses for the day, the way someone else might examine his conscience. Coins and bills are scattered over the bottle-green bedspread. Julien frowns. Isn’t a thousand-franc bill missing from his wallet?

  He thinks of the woman from Les Billettes and frets, certain he will never see her again. For he doesn’t know her address or even her name.

  Julien shuts himself in for the night. Creates a void within himself and around himself. Makes a secret wish. That the woman from Les Billettes will remain inaccessible, stay outside in the shadows of night, an eternal stranger completely absorbed in eating lemon sherbet on the terrace of an unfamiliar café. Amen.