4
NEVER HAD HE paid so much for a plane ticket, nor wasted so much time. Two entire days. Lost. Irretrievable. Not a file, not a phone call, no decisions to make and no responsibility. At first it seemed utterly absurd to him, and then, terribly exotic.
He bummed around Toronto airport, did the same during the stop in Montreal, bought dozens of newspapers, some trinkets for Mathilde, a carton of cigarettes and two crime novels that he forgot on the counter.
It was eight in the morning when he went to get his car. He rubbed his eyelids, felt the stubble on his cheeks, and crossed his arms over the steering wheel.
Lost in thought.
Since he couldn’t see clearly about anything else, he located himself geographically on the planet, set his sights on the simplest thing, was sorry that he didn’t have something more splendid to hand, then figured that as matters stood, any old stones would be good to touch . . . He had a look at his maps, turned his back on the capital and, with neither pilgrim’s staff nor any purpose other than that of forgetting the ugliness that had been clouding his retinas and clinging to his soles for weeks, set off to visit the abbey at Royaumont.
And while he was winding his way through the succession of zones that were earmarked as urban, industrial, commercial, development, residential, or for even more far-fetched purposes, he remembered the surreal conversation he had had with the taxi driver the morning of the day he learned of her death. Was God in his life? No, obviously not . . . But His architects were, yes. And always had been.
*
Even more than to Anouk’s prayer at the foot of those concrete monstrosities (the one that had helped her to turn her back on her family for good) it was to the Cistercians he owed a large part of his vocation. Something he had read as a teenager, to be exact. He remembered it as if it were yesterday . . . In his little suburban bedroom, beneath the eaves of a house located a stone’s throw from the new ring road, there he was, feverishly devouring that book, The Stones of the Abbey, by Fernand Pouillon.
Absorbed in the stories of the convivial monk who struggled against doubt and gangrene with each passing season and each successive hardship, and raised his masterpiece of an abbey from the arid earth. The shock had been so great that Charles had never allowed himself to reread the book. Let one part of him, at least, despite all the disillusions that would follow, remain intact . . .
No, he would not relive the trials and tribulations of master Paul in his desolate quarry, nor the Rule to which the lay workers were subjected, nor the terrible death of the mule, disembowelled beneath his shaft, but he had never forgotten the opening sentences, and from time to time, he still recited them in a quiet voice, to feel again the handles of the tools and the grain of the ochre stone, and all the exultation of being fifteen years old:
Third Sunday of Lent
The rain has soaked our clothing, the frost has hardened the heavy fabric of our cowls, frozen our beards, stiffened our limbs. Our hands, feet and faces are splattered with mud, the wind has covered us with sand. The movement of walking . . .
‘. . . no longer makes the icy folds sway over our emaciated bodies,’ he intoned very quietly, after rolling down the window to rid himself of the smoke.
Rid himself of smoke . . . What sort of roundabout phrase was this, now? Come now, Charles, didn’t you simply mean, ‘to get some air’?
Yes, he smiled, puffing on his cigarette, exactly. I can’t hide a thing from you, I see . . .
At the very moment he should have been fretting in Uncle Scrooge’s mansion, having to put up with the patter of reinforced concrete vendors, he was, instead, blinking furiously to keep from missing the exit.
He took a breath of fresh air, shook the heavy fabric of his cowl, and drove towards the light.
Towards his broken vows, his naïveté, the rough draught of his youth, or the faint remnant of himself that still pulsed with life.
He shivered. Didn’t try to decide whether it was with pleasure, cold, or panic, he just rolled up the window and began to hunt for a genuine bar where he could drink a real coffee with real odours of stale tobacco, real grimy walls, real tips for the fifth race, real shouting matches, real boozers and a real proprietor in a really bad mood behind his real moustache.
*
The church’s impressive architecture, whose dimensions are comparable to those of the cathedral at Soissons, is the fruit of a compromise between the pomp of the royal abbey and Cistercian austerity . . .
Charles, lost in thought, raised his head and . . . saw nothing.
. . . but not long after the Revolution, continued the notice, the Marquis de Travalet, who had already converted the abbey into a mill, razed it to the ground in order to use the stones for housing for his workers.
Oh?
What was this? Why hadn’t they chopped his head off along with all the others?
So, there are no monks at the abbey in Royaumont nowadays.
But there are artists in residence.
And a tea room.
Right.
Fortunately, there was the cloister.
He walked through it, his hands behind his back, then leaned against a column and took his time to observe the shape of the swallows’ nests hanging from the ribbed vault.
Now there were some real builders . . .
The place and the moment seemed absolutely perfect for a final curtain call.
Goodnight, goodnight, my swallows sang Charles Trenet. Nana didn’t get the chance to wear his lovely suit for their solemn communion.
One day he did not show up. Nor the day after. Nor all that week.
Anouk reassured them: he surely had other things to do. And surmised: perhaps he went to see his family, he mentioned a sister in Normandy, I think . . . And rationalized: and besides, if there were a problem, he would have told me . . . And fell silent.
She fell silent and got up during the night to ask the first bottle neck she could find if, by any chance, it had had any news.
The situation was disturbing. They knew all about their Nana with his false eyelashes, his Bobino and Tête de l’Art and Alhambra cabarets, and all the caboodle, but they didn’t know his name, nor where he lived. And it was not for a lack of asking, but . . . ‘Over that way,’ he dithered, waving his rings above the roofs of Paris. They didn’t press him. His hand had already fallen, and over that way seemed so far away . . .
‘You want me to tell you where I live? I live in my memories . . . A world that vanished a long time ago . . . I told you how we used to heat our eyebrow pencils under the lamp to soften them, and . . .’
The boys sighed. Yes, you told us, a million times. André Whatsit singing about his pink cherry tree and his white apple tree, Master Yo-Yo and his tame nightingales, curtain up every evening, and that Russian with his hands tied so that when he wanted to drink his bottle of vodka he had to bite off the bottle neck, and the patronne over at Jacob’s Ladder who locked a journalist in the coal cellar, and Lord Hooligan, and the mongrel belonging to Johnny Boy from Flanders that would jump on the tables and stick his muzzle into the champagne glass of an attractive customer then deliver it to his drunken master, not to mention the evening when the singer Barbara got up on stage at l’Ecluse, and you had to re-apply your make-up because you’d been crying so hard and . . .
Our display of bad faith would cause Nana to sulk, and the only way to make him stop his song and dance was to ask him to do his imitation of the tragic Fréhel. You had to beg a bit, to be sure, then he would puff out his cheeks, steal a cigarette from Anouk, stick it to his lower lip, wedge his hands on his hips and belt out in a husky voice,
‘Hey there booooys!
C’mon and have one on meeee!
I’m all alone t’daaaaay . . .
He’s gone and died on me this mornin!’
There, they’d have a good laugh, and the Stones could just wait for another day. They’d have to find their satisfaction elsewhere.
‘And when I’m not in my m
emories, I’m living with you, can’t you see that?’
Right, but where have you been all this time, then, if you say that we’re your greatest love story?
Anouk did some research at the hospital, found his mother’s records, picked up the telephone, explained her worries to that sister they’d heard all about, listened to her reply, put down the receiver, and fell off her chair.
Her colleagues helped her to her feet, insisted on taking her blood pressure and eventually handed her a lump of sugar that she spat back out in a gob of saliva.
When the boys saw her face as they left school that evening, they knew that Nana would not be waiting for them ever again.
She took them for a hot chocolate.
‘We didn’t realize, because of his make-up and everything, but you know, he was actually very old . . .’
‘How did he die?’ asked Charles.
‘I just told you. Old age . . .’
‘So we’ll never see him, ever again?’
‘Why did you say that? No . . . I . . . I’ll always . . .’
It was their first funeral and the boys hesitated an instant before tossing their handfuls of sequins and confetti onto the coffin: Who was this Maurice Charpieu?
No one came to greet them at the graveside.
The paths emptied. Anouk took their hands, stepped forward to the edge of the grave and murmured, ‘So, my Nana . . . Are you there? Did you find all those wonderful people you used to go on about so often? You must be having a wild time of it up there, no? And . . . and your little poodles? Tell us, are they up there too?’
Then the children went off for a walk, and she sat next to him just as she had done years before.
She tossed tiny pebbles on his head for the pleasure of seeing him roll his eyes heavenward one last time, and she smoked a last cigarette in his company.
Thank you, said the swirls of smoke. Thank you.
They were silent on the ride home and, just when they must have been thinking, all three of them, that life was the most rotten cabaret act of all, Alexis leaned forward to turn up the volume.
Léo Ferré was singing that life was grand, and yes, just then – but only because it was Ferré and Nana had known him before he was famous – they were prepared to believe him for the three minutes his bloody song lasted. And then Alexis switched off the radio, talked about something else, and had to repeat that year at school.
One evening Anouk, who had been fretting over this business for a long time, came out with it: ‘Tell me, kitten . . .’
‘What?’
‘Why do you always change the subject when we talk about Nana? Why haven’t you cried? He was someone important in your life, wasn’t he?’
He focused on his macaroni, then was obliged to raise his head and meet her eyes because of the strings of Gruyère, and he simply replied, ‘Every time I open my trumpet case I can smell him. You know, there’s this sort of old musty smell and . . .’
‘And?’
‘And when I play, it’s for him and . . .’
‘And?’
‘When people tell me I’m playing well, it’s actually because I think I’ve been crying . . .’
If she could have, she would have taken him in her arms at that very moment in their lives. But she couldn’t. He didn’t want her to, any more.
‘But . . . are you sad, then?’
‘Oh, no! Absolutely not! I feel good!’
She smiled instead. A little smile with arms and hands, a neck and two cheeks grazing.
Charles looked at his watch, turned round, glanced at a tiny grotto in the style of Lourdes (On the path of Saint-Louis, said the arrow. What rubbish . . .) and waited until he got back to the car park to be done with it and spew out his Dies Irae.
‘Yes. And then, he even managed to win her over, in the end,’ echoed Anouk’s voice.
No, he hadn’t tried to contradict her on that score. His mother . . . His mother had found other fish to fry, soon enough. She had her house to run, her marriage, her social status, her flowerbeds and all the rest. And then de Gaulle was back in power. So she’d eventually relaxed.
Not on that score, but:
‘Anouk?’
‘Charles . . .’
‘Today you can tell me . . .’
‘Tell you what?’
‘How he died.’
Silence.
‘Old age, you said it was, but you were lying. Weren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was it suicide?’
‘No.’
Silence.
‘You don’t want to tell me?’
‘Sometimes lies are better, you know . . . Particularly where he’s concerned . . . He gave you so much to dream about . . . And all those magic tricks he knew . . .’
‘Did he get run over?’
‘Got his throat cut.’
Charles sat in stunned silence.
‘I knew it,’ she said, cursing herself, ‘but why do I always do what you want, anyway?’
She turned around to ask for the bill.
‘You see, Charles, you have only one fault, but dear Lord . . . and it’s a sad one . . . You are too intelligent. But, believe me, there are things in life that don’t figure in the operating instructions . . . when I got here earlier and I saw all that maths you were stuck with, I felt sorry for you even when I was hugging you. I thought to myself that for your age you are spending far too much time trying to fold the world up into neat little squares. I know, I know. You’re about to say that it’s your studies and all that, but . . . But here’s the thing. From today on, when you think about the final hours of the most wonderful mother hen there’s ever been, you’re no longer going to picture a little old man sleeping in his shawls in the midst of his memories, no, and you’ve only got yourself to blame, sweetheart, you’re going to go and shut yourself away with your calculator and you won’t be able to concentrate, because all you’ll see in your bloody paragraphs full of x this and y that ad infinitum, is an old man they found naked in a public urinal . . .’
Silence.
‘His dentures gone, his ring gone, all his papers gone and . . . An old man who waited nearly three weeks at the morgue before this woman stiff with shame would condescend to go and get him out of there, forcing herself, but for the last time in her life, God be praised, to admit that yes, they were blood relations because yes, that gaping wreck was her kid brother . . .’
Then she took me back to school, turned around, and fell into my arms.
It wasn’t me she was smothering, it was the memory of Nana, and if the next class seemed even more confusing than what she’d predicted, teeth clenched, it wasn’t the old rogue’s fault – he had died on stage, after all – no it was my own fault, because despite my best efforts to visualize a label attached to a cold toe, I couldn’t help making her aware of how upset I was through the cloth of my trousers and . . . Oh, why go round the houses? She’d given me a hard-on and I was ashamed, that’s all.
For two hours or more we’d been labouring through d’Ocagne and his lessons on infinitesimal geometry, so don’t let her go telling me I was intelligent, just because I knew more or less what the teacher was driving at . . . Shit, no, she could see perfectly well that I was, on the contrary, completely lost! And besides, she had turned away, shaking her head.
As usual, I waited for her to invite me for another lunch, and I waited a long time, as I recall.
That sordid, pointless confession, one I had begged for, bloody fool that I was, ended up meaning quite simply this: my childhood died that day with Nana, for good.
*
It was too early to head back to Paris, where no one was expecting him, so he pulled out his diary and dialled a number that he’d been postponing for months.
‘Balanda? I’d given up on you! Of course I’m expecting you, what were you thinking?’
Philippe Voernoodt was a friend of Laurence’s. A bloke who’d made a fortune in the property market . . . Or the Internet
. . . or was it property on the Internet? In short, a bloke who drove a grotesque automobile and who probably didn’t have time to go to the dentist any more, since he was constantly fiddling on his Palm with a moist toothpick.
Whenever Philippe gave him a friendly slap on the back, Charles always lost a few centimetres and couldn’t help wondering whether his friend’s powerful but rather short hand had ever found its way higher than his beloved’s forearm . . .
No, he assured himself, no. She had better taste than that.
They arranged to meet in the north of Paris at an old printing works that forward slash forward slash Voernoodt dot com had bought for peanuts (naturally . . .) and that he wanted to convert into a sublime loft (ditto). Not that many years ago, Charles would not even have bothered. He didn’t like working for private individuals any more. Or else he chose the ones who inspired him. But in this case . . . The banks . . . The banks, in the meantime, had forced him to put some water in his wine, so to speak, and were bottling up his existence. So when he found a client who was a solid megalomaniac who could help him pay his expenses, he tucked his second thoughts into his back pocket, and drank his bitter wine down to the last estimate.
‘Well? What d’you think?’
The place was magnificent. The space, the light, the density, even the echo of silence – everything had . . . integrity.
‘And it’s been abandoned like this for over ten years,’ said Philippe, crushing his cigarette on the mosaic floor.
Charles didn’t hear him. He felt as if this were merely the lunch break, and the workers would all be coming back any minute now, to start up their machines, pull over their stools, joke, pull open the hundreds of extraordinary printers’ drawers, lift up the bottle of ink that had been left there, glance at the enormous clock looking down on them and set everything working again amidst a hellish racket.
He moved off, and went to look through the window into the office.
The handles on the drawers, the backs of the chairs, the wooden stamps, the bindings of the registers: everything in this place had been finely polished by the years, by human hands.
‘Well, you can’t really get a fix on it because of all the mess, but imagine what it’ll be like once it’s cleaned up . . . It’s a great space, isn’t it?’