Monsieur Pain

  Still disturbed by the events of the previous hours, I called Monsieur Rivette from the same telephone. I don’t know why. I was acting on a blind impulse. I felt a kind of indistinct anger, a vague resentment at having been fooled, which was gradually hardening me from within like a carcass being stuffed by a taxidermist.

  “It’s Pierre Pain; this business is getting complicated.”

  “ . . .”

  “I don’t know what to do . . . I’m losing my grip . . . my grip on reality . . .”

  “ . . .”

  “I don’t even know why I called . . . What’s to stop me breaking off this friendship . . . It’s a hangover from what turned out to be a complete waste of time, although we really knew that even then, didn’t we? . . . A few nights ago I dreamed of you . . . You looked very old, as old as you are now, in fact . . . Wrinkled and worried . . . But in the dream it was 1922, and the others were there, you know who I mean . . . Why am I thinking of them? . . . They’re like ghosts . . .”

  “ . . .”

  “You were looking all around, but only your eyes were moving, as if you had a nervous tic, or were being very slowly strangled . . . It wasn’t exactly reassuring . . . Were you looking for someone hidden in the room? . . . Or a message, a few undeniable words . . . I don’t know . . . This morning, yes, I had an awful morning, I thought we all had to die . . . You, me, and everyone we might in some sense call a fellow traveler . . . The sorcerer’s apprentices . . . As a joke it’s pitiful, but that’s not the point . . . The only hiding place was in the roof . . . Was it a spider? . . . You knew we were being watched from the corners of the room . . . I realized and was frightened . . .”

  “ . . .”

  “As if someone hidden in the ceiling had pointed me out . . . Why me? . . .”

  “ . . .”

  “I’m not exaggerating, dreams don’t exaggerate, I’m desperate . . . Not because I think that something extraordinary is happening, but because I feel I’m losing everything . . .”

  “ . . .”

  “What? Not much, almost nothing, but I didn’t realize before . . .”

  “ . . .”

  “Excuse me for calling . . . I’m better now . . .”

  “ . . .”

  “Sympathy? . . . I feel for you as one man on death row might feel for another . . . Look at us, look where we’ve ended up after all these years . . . It’s pathetic . . . Here I am insulting you on the telephone . . . Forgive me . . . I think Vallejo . . . my patient . . . is going to be assassinated . . . Don’t ask me how I know . . . I don’t have any rational explanation . . .”

  “ . . .”

  “All of us are implicated in this hell . . .”

  “ . . .”

  “Good-bye, you never did me any harm . . . or any good, either . . .”

  “ . . .”

  “ . . .”

  I hung up. The rude way in which I had ended our friendship came as a complete surprise to me as well as to Monsieur Rivette. And yet I felt better, lighter, cleaner. To be honest, after hanging up I had to make an effort to contain my laughter.

  Poor, venerable Monsieur Rivette, none of it was his fault, but nor was he the elder with immaculate hands, living in neutral territory. In fact, I thought with wicked satisfaction, old Rivette deserved a good dressing-down. I lingered over the expression: dressing-down. In some bizarre way, the disaster lay hidden behind it. Then I understood that the old man and myself were alike not only in our attitudes towards the labyrinth, but also because we were both spectators.

  Absorbed in my own problems once again, but in a better mood already, more inclined to reflection, and free of anger and resentment, which obscure everything, I went to dine, as I did from time to time, in a restaurant which, although reasonably priced, was reputed for its excellent cuisine.

  All I could do was formulate a series of questions. What was Madame Reynaud doing in Lille? Was her presence there related in some way to Vallejo? What threats or promises could the telegram have contained to precipitate such an abrupt departure? How could I describe, or understand, my experience in the warehouse? Had it been an hallucination due to my own nervous instability, or some kind of inscrutable apparition. Was the imitated hiccupping a parody or a premonition? I had claimed that there was a plot to assassinate Vallejo; did I really believe that? I raised the napkin to my lips and closed my eyes. Yes, I did.

  Lost in these and other ruminations, I spent longer than usual over my meal. Suddenly I saw one of the Spanish men outside, the thin one, walking breezily along the opposite sidewalk. My heart almost jumped out of my chest. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I left some bills on the table and ran out.

  I began to follow him, at a distance of about thirty yards, initially. The Spaniard was walking with his hands in his pockets, at a relatively unhurried pace, as if he were out for a stroll and taking an interest in his surroundings, although conscious that he did not have much time to spare. All I wanted was for him not to turn around and see me, as I would not have known what to say, and for the walk not to last too long, since I could feel my strength beginning to ebb.

  After a few minutes my enthusiasm evaporated. I remember being observed with interest by passers-by; in spite of the cold, my face was covered with perspiration. Smoke briefly encircled the Spaniard’s neck, like a pitiless comment on my fatigue.

  I soon realized that the thin man was not going anywhere in particular. He was walking energetically, true, but that was his natural way of walking. All he was doing, in fact, was strolling about, gazing at store windows and the façades of buildings, never turning to look back, as if a single glance were enough for him to record all he saw in a precise and definite manner. I wondered if it might not be best to catch up and accost him. I guessed that it would not be long, depending on the duration of his walk, before I had no choice but to do so.

  Suddenly I was engulfed by the hubbub of the Boulevard Haussman and could not remember how we had ended up there. Again I saw or intuited the circular corridors of the Clinique Arago and the angular face of Doctor Lejard projected into empty space. Although I was confused, my spirits rallied.

  I could tell that the Spaniard was slowing his pace. For no reason at all, as we entered Rue de Provence, I assumed that he was heading toward the synagogue, where he would stop, and there would be someone waiting for him inside, but oblivious to that itinerary, the Spaniard continued uphill to the Place D’Orves and came to a halt on the edge of the sidewalk, pensively observing the traffic and the opening of the first umbrellas.

  I took refuge in an entranceway while keeping an eye on him. There, in a tiny cubicle, a clockmaker had set up his workshop. The tick-tock of the clocks mingled with that of the rain. The clockmaker looked at me and lowered his eyes. He was old and his face was covered with tears. The weather could not have been worse; the rain was intensifying, and above the fossilized buildings, which were enveloped in a murmur that struck me, paradoxically, as similar to a nursery rhyme, a leaden sky reared, with milky patches molded by the shifty wind into lung-like shapes, forms that seemed able to breathe in and out, suspended over our heads. That was when the Spaniard looked in my direction without seeing me and lit another cigarette, sheltering the flame with his hands and the brim of his hat, before setting off again toward Rue de Châteaudun.

  From that moment on the situation began to veer toward farce. For a start, the pedestrian traffic in the streets had thinned out considerably, and the Spaniard could quite easily have caught me on his tail. Even the dimmest observer would have twigged, seeing one man walking through the rain followed by another, adjusting his pace. Had there been any doubt, both of us were soaked through, and no one in their right mind walks in the rain for that long. Soon the distance had narrowed to no more than ten yards. The Spaniard lit another cigarette, and turned to look back quite openly, as if to check whether I was still there.

  I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, wet and defenseless, a perfect target for his shrewd gaze. Thunder
rumbled in the distance. The Spaniard looked curious. What does he want, I wondered. For me to follow him? That much was clear. I felt despondent. The other option was to cry out. Was he the madman, or was I? Shivers ran right through my body; I was undoubtedly falling ill, and yet my mind and spirit remained alert, curious, open to—how can I put it?—to the strange confessions whispered along those unreal streets. And yet I didn’t want to stay out in the rain, which shows that I still hadn’t set aside certain misgivings. A steaming hot coffee and a glass of something strong would have done me a world of good.

  The Spaniard smiled. We went up Rue Rodier to Rue Rochechouard. The rain became sleet, falling slantwise and slowly like a silk handkerchief. Now we were walking toward Place Blanche. I thought of Madame Reynaud; papier mâché; a plummeting fall through claws; the taxi driver who didn’t know where Place Blanche was; Madame Grenelle descending the staircase. The sum of my destinies. I laughed. I knew that the Spaniard, five yards ahead of me, was laughing too. In spite of appearances to the contrary, he must be a very clever man, I thought.

  Before reaching Place Blanche, we went downhill again, along Rue Pigalle, to Rue La Bruyère. We were walking in circles. When we reached Rue D’Amsterdam, the Spaniard quickened his pace again, and for a moment I thought he would get away from me. The sensible thing to do was to turn toward the Gare Saint-Lazare, and that was what I did. Before long I spotted him standing still in front of the signboard for a tiny movie theater that I had never noticed before. Having carefully inspected the poster for the film, he surprised me by proceeding to buy a ticket and disappearing into the theater. I considered the situation, which had taken an unexpected turn; I had to act decisively. The movie was called Actualité and was described rather vaguely as a story of love and science; the lead roles were played by actors unknown to me, a man and woman, both young, with perfect, serious faces. I had the impression they were mannequins, although they were just the standard young lovers who could have starred in any melodrama. A character actor also appeared in some of the photographs, with his face screwed up in a grimace of incredible pain and shock; the production company had made sure to point out on the poster that this was the actor’s last role: “Featuring the late, fondly remembered Monsieur M . . .” M . . . yes, I remembered him, a supporting actor, with a talent for comedy, who never had much success. I suspected that his wince in the photographs owed more to the illness that finally killed him than to the requirements of the script.

  I approached the ticket window.

  “The movie has just begun,” murmured the vendor without looking at me; she was a rather plump redhead, more or less my age, who was busy writing something in what appeared to be an ordinary school exercise book, except that its pages were pink. Verses! A poet!

  I bought a ticket and went in.

  An aisle divided the rows of seats, from which the heads of the viewers protruded like nocturnal flowers; they were sparsely scattered, unclassifiable, mostly alone and isolated in their places, while the images projected on the screen showed something that I mistook, at first glance, for a procession, but which turned out to be the inauguration of a palace, a ball, or some similar gala occasion.

  An usher appeared on the left, the beam of his flashlight quivering on the carpet. I handed him a few coins from my pocket, then, before he could walk away, I took hold of his arm and forced him to stay. He offered barely any resistance. His muscles were like wire under the cloth of his jacket; I could feel him trembling like an animal, and guessed that his face, which I couldn’t see, was sensuous and worn.

  “Calm down,” I whispered. “I want to sit right here. Far from the screen. My nerves are not the best.”

  I had meant to say my optic nerve, but it was too late to make amends.

  The usher switched off his flashlight and looked anxiously at the curtains hiding the door.

  “All right, don’t worry, there’s a free seat here, behind you, all you have to do is turn around and sit down.”

  “Ah, that’s perfect.”

  “At your service, Monsieur.”

  I let go of him and settled into the seat. I was in the last row on the right-hand side; behind me there was only a little wooden balustrade with decorative carved pillars rising above it and the curtains that covered the back wall of the cinema from one side to the other. On the screen, the sun was coming out.

  The scene was a beach, presumably in summer, a beach that was empty except for a few seagulls walking nonchalantly by the water’s edge. The sand was black and shining; the sky, by contrast, was a slick of steady, unvarying light, quietly spreading over the rest of the screen. “After Paris and its parties, the sea and the beaches of Normandy were the ideal balm for Michel,” recited a woman off camera, in a somewhat ecclesiastical tone, like an aging secretary who has seen it all, while at the far end of the beach a couple appeared: two dark spots, barely visible at first, taking forever to reach the foreground. The Spaniard was sitting on the left, near the aisle, about ten rows in front of me. Well, I didn’t lose him, I thought, and sighed, but now came the hard part, overcoming my indecisiveness, thinking of specific questions to ask if I took the plunge—I couldn’t put it off much longer—and went to sit beside him. “Michel, however, had not forgotten the whirlwind of Paris”: this sentence is emphatically articulated by a different voice, the lively, capricious voice of a blonde woman, who closes her eyes with an air that is at once resigned and cross. In the next sequence it is Michel who is closing his eyes (Michel is the lead actor whose photo appears on the posters) and the following scenes have a swirling quality, which suggests that he is dreaming. First the staircase of a palace; then a motor car stopped in the Bois de Boulogne; a view over a racetrack at night; feet walking down a corridor; an unmade canopy bed, from which the sheets have been violently ripped; the face of an old man, perhaps Michel’s valet, watching something, terrified; the echo of a distant explosion; the back of a man who is slumped, sobbing, over the steering wheel of a car stopped on a country road; the feet in the corridor again, suddenly breaking into a run; burnt remains of a hobo’s camp on the bank of a river; and a group of elegantly dressed young people milling enthusiastically around a slightly older man, no doubt their leader, who turns out, of course, to be Michel. Imperturbably, he raises a hand to ask for silence and readies himself to propose a toast.

  That was when I realized that someone was sitting next to the Spaniard.

  A hitch. I don’t think there could have been more than twenty people in the theater, so it didn’t seem likely that the Spaniard would have chosen to sit right there, when there were so many free seats. In fact the cinema was almost empty; apart from me, there was no one in my row, and in the Spaniard’s, only him and his unexpected companion: a powerful bare neck, bulky shoulders, the right ear like a scrap of crumpled parchment stuck to his temple, where some tufts of dark hair still clung. “We have to get married, it can’t go on like this,” says a woman’s voice. Somebody puts on a record. The music is barely audible, drowned out by a mechanical squeaking, which is followed by an explosion.

  Michel is sprawled in an armchair, in a dimly lit corner of the room, offering no comment. After a while, he gets up and goes to the window. Only then do I understand that he is alone in the library and that the window looks out over a cliff. It is night and the camera pans gradually down from Michel’s preoccupied face to his shoes. He taps on the floor with the toes of his shoes and then there is only the sound of the waves. Impatience is going to kill us all, I thought.

  The usher reappeared, followed by a hesitant client. “My life, my career, all my worldly goods are in your hands,” Michel confesses, in profile, examining something off camera. A blonde woman is watching him intently in the background. The usher cleared his throat as he passed me on his way back up the aisle, as if trying to alert me to something out of the ordinary. The blonde woman raises her hands to her face. There was no reason to anticipate danger, and yet I turned around; the usher was behind me, half hidden
by the curtains, which gave him the air of a Roman patrician, timeless and indifferent to the turmoil and seductions of the screen. “We’ll get married, of course,” says Michel with a melancholy smile, “but we shall have to accept the verdict of fate.” I turned back to the screen: again there was only the endless beach under the snow-colored sky, and the two indistinct figures coming toward the viewers. I stood up. The usher had disappeared and all that remained where his shadow had been was a slight fluttering of the curtains. With my first steps I realized just how wet my clothes still were. I hesitated. “The main obstacle to loving you is my memory,” says Michel. “During the day, amnesia is like a desert. At night, it is like a jungle, inhabited by wild beasts. Do you still believe that we could find happiness?” The woman’s face stands out against a background of grassy dunes. A maddening sun pulsates over the sea. While the screen was shedding so much light, I made my way to the Spaniard’s row. Then it all went dark and I sat down promptly, embarrassed by the sound of my wet clothes.