Consolation (25 page)

What he liked were the escapades, the things you did on the spur of the moment, the week suddenly broken up. The pretext of an appointment outside Paris, getting lost miles off the motorways.

The
Cheval Blanc
inns where the chef’s talents made up for the hideousness of the décor. World capitals. Their stations, markets, rivers, history, architecture. Deserted museums between two meetings, villages barely on the map, embankments without views and cafés without terraces. To see it all without ever being a tourist. And never masquerade as one again, that would be something.

The word ‘holidays’ had meant something when Mathilde was little and together they would win the prize for best sand castle in the entire world. How many Babylons had he built between two tides in those days . . . How many Taj Mahals for baby crabs . . . All the sunburn on the back of his neck, the comments, the seashells and frosted chips of glass . . . How many plates shoved back so a drawing could take shape on the paper tablecloth, how many tricks to get the mum to sleep without waking the daughter, and indolent breakfasts where all he wanted to do was to sketch the two of them without leaving any crumbs in his sketchbook.

And all those watercolours . . . how well the paint used to mix beneath his fingers.

Such a long time ago.

*

‘There’s a Madame Béramiand who’s been trying to get hold of you.’

Charles was sorting the day’s mail. Their tender for the head-quarters of Borgen & Finker in Lausanne had not been selected.

A lead weight came down upon his shoulders.

Two lines. No rhyme, no reason. Nothing to justify the disgrace.

The closing salutation was longer than their dismissal.

He dropped the letter onto his assistant’s desk: ‘To be filed.’

‘Shall I make copies for the others?’

‘If you’re up for it, Barbara, if you’re up for it . . . But I must confess that in this case . . .’

Hundreds, thousands of hours of work had just gone up in smoke. And beneath the ashes, investments, losses, funds, banks, financial arrangements, upcoming negotiations, rates to calculate, energy.

The sort of energy he no longer had.

He’d already walked away when she added, ‘And what shall I do about this woman, then?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Béram—’

‘Why’s she calling?’

‘I didn’t quite understand . . . Something personal.’

Charles scoffed at her last word with an irritated gesture.

‘Same. File it.’

He didn’t go down for lunch.

When one project fell through, a new one had to start up right away: the ultimate conviction of a profession that had undermined all other convictions. Anything, anything at all. A temple, a zoo, his own cage if nothing else turned up, but one idea, one stroke of the pencil, and you were saved.

So that is where he was, lost in the study of an extremely complicated spec sheet, his palms flat against his temples, as if he were trying to stick back together a skull that was cracking on every side, taking notes with his teeth clenched, and then his assistant
was
there again in the door, clearing her throat. (He had left the phone off the hook.)

‘It’s her again . . .’

‘The lady from the Borgen Bank?’

‘No . . . the personal call I told you about this morning . . . What shall I say?’

A sigh.

‘It’s about a woman that you both knew.’

Ever polite in his despair, Charles owed her at least a smile.

‘Goodness! I’ve known so many women! Tell me everything, what’s her voice like? Husky?’

But Barbara wasn’t smiling.

‘A certain Anouk, I think.’

12

‘THE PAINT ON
her headstone, that was you, wasn’t it?’

‘Sorry? Yes, but . . . who’s speaking?’

‘I knew it. It’s Sylvie, Charles . . . You don’t remember me? I worked with her at the Pitié-Salpêtrière. I was there for your first communion and –’

‘Sylvie. Of course . . . Sylvie.’

‘I don’t want to keep you, it was just to –’

Her voice had grown thick.

‘– to thank you.’

Charles closed his eyes, let his hand slide down his face, abandoned his pain, pinched his nose, tried to gag himself once again.

Stop. Stop that right now. It’s nothing, it’s her emotion, not yours. It’s the medication that’s got you out of kilter without providing any relief, and all those perfect blueprints that are already taking up too much room in your archives. Get a grip, for God’s sake.

‘Are you still there?’

‘Sylvie . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘Wh-how,’ he fumbled, ‘how did she die?’

Silence on the line.

‘Hello?’

‘Alexis didn’t tell you?’

‘No.’

‘She killed herself.’

Silence.

‘Charles?’

‘Where do you live? I’d like to see you, Madame Béramiand.’

‘Don’t be so formal, Charles . . . And yes in fact, I have something for –’

‘Now? This evening? When?’

Ten o’clock the following morning. He made her repeat her address one more time, and then he got straight back to work.

Sideration. A state of sideration. Anouk had taught him the word. When the pain is so extreme that the brain just gives up, for a while, ceases to transmit.

That stupor between the tragedy and the first screams of pain.

‘So it’s like what happens with Monsieur Canut’s ducks when he chops off their heads and they keep running around like crazy?’

‘No,’ she replied, rolling her eyes skyward, ‘that’s just a joke in very poor taste that they invented in the country to frighten people from Paris. It’s utterly stupid, anyway . . . We’re not afraid of anything, are we?’

Where had it taken place, that conversation? In the car, surely. It was in the car that she said the silliest things.

Like all children, we were terribly sadistic and, on the pretext that we were revising our biology lessons, we always tried to get her to talk about the goriest side of her profession. We loved wounds, pus, and amputations. Detailed descriptions of leprosy, cholera, rabies. People foaming at the mouth, fits of lockjaw, fingertips left stuck in mittens. Did she believe us? Of course not. She knew our minds were warped, so on occasion she’d lay it on thick and, when she thought that we were well up on the matter, she’d slip in something with a casual air: ‘Well, actually, pain is a good thing, you know . . . It’s a good thing it exists . . . Pain is survival, boys . . . It is! Without pain, we’d lose our hands in the fire, and it’s because you swear when you miss the head of the nail that you still have all ten fingers! Which just goes to show that . . . What’s the matter with that idiot, flashing his headlights at me like that? Just overtake, wanker! Now . . . where was I?’

‘Nails,’ sighed Alexis.

‘Ah, yes. Which all goes to show that . . . DIY and barbecues, they’re all very well, you know what I mean, there . . . But later on in life you’ll find out that there are things that will make you suffer.
I
say “things” but I really mean people. People, situations, feelings, and . . .’

On the rear seat Alexis signalled to me that she was utterly off her rocker.

‘Hey, if I can see people flashing headlamps at me, I can see you too, you little cretin! C’mon! I’m telling you something important. Anything that looks like it might make you suffer in life, get out of there fast, my little darlings. Run as far away as you can, as quick as you can. You promise?’

‘Okay, okay, we’ll do just like the ducks, don’t worry.’

‘Charles?’

‘Yes?’

‘How do you manage to put up with him?’

I was smiling. I had a good time with them.

‘Charles?’

‘Yes?’

‘Did you understand what I said just now?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did I say?’

‘That pain is good because it means we’ll survive but you have to run away from it even if you’ve lost your head . . .’

‘What an arse-licker . . .’ moaned my neighbour.

How did you destroy yourself, Anouk Le Men?

With a very big hammer?

13

SYLVIE LIVED IN
the 19th arrondissement, near the Robert-Debré hospital. Charles arrived more than an hour early. He wandered along the Maréchaux remembering the very upright gentleman who had built the hospital in the 1980s. Pierre Riboulet, his professor of urban composition at engineering school.

Very upright, very handsome, very intelligent. He spoke little. But so well. To Charles he seemed the most accessible of all his professors, but he never dared approach him. Riboulet had been born in an airless, sunless, squalid building, and had never forgotten it. He often said that the creation of beauty served an ‘obvious social purpose’. He inspired them to shun competitions and opt rather for the healthy atmosphere of rivalry among studios. He’d introduced them to the
Goldberg Variations
, the
Ode to Charles Fourier
, the texts of Friedrich Engels and, most important of all, the writer Henri Calet. He created on a human scale, on a scale of the soul – hospitals, universities, libraries, and, on the ruins of council estates, housing that had greater dignity. He had died a few years earlier, at the age of 75, and he left behind a number of orphaned building sites.

Exactly the trajectory that Anouk must have dreamt of . . .

He turned round and went looking for the Rue Haxo.

He walked right by the house he was looking for, grimaced as he shoved open the door of a café, ordered a coffee that he had no intention of drinking, and headed for the back of the room. His guts were playing up again.

Fastened his belt: he was now at the last notch.

He got a shock when he walked up to the sink. The bloke standing there really had a nasty look about him – but that’s you, you wretch. That’s you.

He hadn’t eaten for two days. He’d spent all his time at the
agency
, where he unfolded the emergency bunk, in other words a sort of huge foam armchair that smelled of stale smoke; he had not got much sleep, nor had he shaved.

His hair (ah, ah) was long, the shadows under his eyes were blackish-brown, and his voice was full of mockery: ‘Go on, Jesus . . . this is the last station coming up. Two hours from now and it will all be over.’

He left a coin on the counter and went back the way he’d come.

*

She was as moved as he was, didn’t know what to do with her hands, brought him into an immaculate room while she apologized for the mess, and offered him something to drink.

‘Have you got any Coca-Cola?’

‘Oh, I’d thought of everything but I didn’t expect that . . . Wait a moment . . .’

She went out into the corridor and opened a closet that smelled of old trainers.

‘You’re in luck . . . I think the grandchildren have left you some . . .’

Charles did not dare ask for ice, and imbibed his lukewarm panacea, asking her in an almost affable voice how many grandchildren she had.

He heard her answer, did not register the number, and assured her that that was wonderful.

He would not have recognized her if he had passed her in the street. He remembered a perpetually cheerful little brunette, on the plump side. He remembered her buttocks, a great topic of conversation back in those days, and that she had given them a record, a 45 rpm of
Le Bal des Laze
. Anouk was mad about Michel Polnareff in those days, and they eventually grew to hate the song.

‘Be quiet, be quiet. Can’t you hear how beautiful it is?’

‘Fuck, haven’t they strung him up yet, that bloke? We can’t take it any more, Mum, we just can’t take it . . .’

What a strange filing cabinet memory could be . . . Jane and her fiancé – so went the song – and Anouk . . . It had all just come back to him.

Sylvie’s hair was an astonishing colour now; she wore glasses with incredibly glitzy frames, and seemed to Charles to be wearing
too
much make-up. Her foundation had left a tidemark beneath her chin, and her eyebrows had been redrawn with a crayon. At that point in time he felt too wobbly in his guts to really pay attention, but later he would think back on that morning – and God knows he would think back on it – and he would understand. A woman who is lively and still cares about her looks, and who is expecting a visit from a man she has not seen in over thirty years – that was the least she could do. Honestly.

Charles sat down on a leather sofa that was slippery as oilcloth and set his glass on the coaster she had placed before him, between a Sudoku magazine and an enormous remote control.

They looked at each other. They smiled. Charles, who was the most courteous of men, hunted for a compliment, a pleasantry, a little phrase without consequence to lighten the weight of all the doilies, but no. That was just too much to ask.

She lowered her gaze, fiddled with her rings one after the other, and asked, ‘So you’re an architect now?’

He sat up, opened his mouth, was about to answer that . . . and then went, ‘Tell me what happened.’

She seemed relieved. She couldn’t care less whether he was an architect or a butcher and she couldn’t bear it any longer, keeping everything she was about to tell him all bottled up inside. Moreover, that was why she’d felt it was all right to harass that stuck-up secretary . . . She needed to find someone who’d known Anouk, so she could tell the story, relieve herself of her burden, get it off her chest, pass on her weary load, and move on to something else.

‘What happened – starting when?’

Charles grew thoughtful.

‘The last time I saw her was in the early 90s . . . As a rule I’m more precise than that, but . . .’ He shook his head with a smile. ‘I’ve made great efforts not to be that way any more, I think . . . She had invited me to lunch on my birthday, as she did every year, and . . .’

His hostess encouraged him to continue. A kindly little nod of the head, but so cruel. A little gesture which said, Don’t worry, take your time, there’s no hurry, you know . . . No, there’s no hurry,
now
.

‘. . . it was the saddest of all my birthdays . . . In the space of
one
year, she’d grown terribly old. Her face had got puffy, her hands were trembling . . . She didn’t want me to order any wine and she smoked one cigarette after the other to make it through. She asked me questions, but couldn’t care less about my replies. She was lying, she said that Alexis was fine and sent his regards, whereas I knew perfectly well that wasn’t true. And she knew that I knew . . . She was wearing a cardigan that was covered with stains and smelled of . . . I don’t know what . . . sorrow . . . A mixture of cold ashtrays and eau de Cologne . . . the only time there was a spark in her eye was when I offered to go with her some day to Nana’s grave, she’d never been back. Oh yes! What a good idea! she said, suddenly cheerful. You remember him? You remember how nice he was? You . . . and then huge tears drowned it all.