Eight years later, he no longer derived any pleasure from taking care with his work. In the name of what? Beauty? Art? After the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, the word art had a different resonance when he heard it in his little workshop. One of his first clients had been that little woman with her “twelve Klimts” to frame.
“Twelve Klimts! Gustave Klimt? Are you sure?”
“Yes, twelve drawings.”
“Originals?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are they signed? Are these works on paper?”
“No, on a calendar.”
With a little experience, he got used to translating. A Gauguin drawing was usually a poster from an exhibition, and I’ve got an original heralded a few tricky moments.
“I’ve got an original Bourrelier, a seascape.”
“Who?”
“Romain Bourrelier! From his best period. I didn’t know my grandfather had one. Can you imagine: a Bourrelier, in really good condition!”
“. . . I’m not really up on my history of art . . .”
“His best period! Straight after the war! That’s what they told me at Villebonne – that’s where he was from. I want to have an estimate done but I don’t know who to ask. Would you know anyone? A specialist?”
“I’d have to find out . . .”
“Did you know there was a Bourrelier hanging in the Hôtel de Ville in Corcelles in Burgundy?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Discreet, I see.”
The prize had to go to the pure abstract from the studio opposite, a local artist, destitute naturally, very late with his payments, but his status as a painter gave him the right to be. He entrusted his framer with his strong opinions and his furious shouting – all these civil servants from the ministry who don’t know anything! – and felt that exhibiting his canvases at La Tavola di Peppe (a pizzeria on the Rue de l’Ouest) was beneath his talent, which did have the advantage of leaving that opportunity to someone else.
At first Blin was very kind to them. He accepted their touch of naivety, he even envied them for daring to do what he did not: it was his way of paying homage to them as the first person to view their work. Now he no longer felt even curiosity for the creative accidents in the area; whoever came into the shop immediately inspired boredom. He became embittered by this and no longer respected their freedom of expression. Some mornings he felt like venting his general anger on one unsuspecting customer, waxing lyrical about his pathetic lack of style, denouncing him to the committee for the protection of good taste, howling with derision. What he actually did was to stay affable and complimentary – he did have a living to make. Not a hope of opening up about it to Nadine, she was one of them. That was how they had met. A big photograph she was very proud of, you could see it in her eyes when she took it out of the portfolio; it was of an avenue with greyish silhouettes passing each other in complete indifference, and an empty bench in the background. Metaphor, allegory, modern life, uncommunicativeness, intimist-style under-exposure, etc.
“It’s very good. It’s a good print, too.”
“. . . Thank you. What would you recommend?”
“What’s your home like?”
A question he asked frequently, not maliciously though, but this time he allowed himself an amused little smile, a strangely ambiguous smile, almost disturbing.
“What I meant was . . . what sort of colours are there?”
She was a little more conniving. He even glimpsed the point where she might invite him to come and see for himself.
“It’s all black and white, like my photos.”
She was speaking the truth and he very soon had an opportunity to check; that was five years ago. They now lived in a two-bedroom apartment in the Rue de la Convention. She was an assistant to a cardiologist, and Thierry was still framing her photos for an exhibition which the gallery kept putting off by another month. Over time, he had come to have more respect for her than for her work, without daring to admit as much to her. The pleasure Nadine derived from it herself should have been enough, but Thierry had trouble facing up to this idea: she was not a true photographer in the same way that he was not a true framer.
He could have perpetuated the illusion for the rest of his life by providing a setting for the talents of the man in the street, but this uncomfortable dichotomy in his existence cost him dearer and dearer as time passed and the prospect of retirement no longer seemed to be some wild futuristic imagining.
He was not the best administrator. He would have closed shop a long time back if he had not met the woman who managed to put some order in his books, do his year-end accounts and fill in his tax return. Brigitte could handle figures the way some people knit; she could rattle away on a calculator at the same time as taking notes and talking about the last film she had seen. When she got to the bottom of a missing ten francs she would heave a sigh of relief as if she had won a chess final. She always used to say that she “didn’t know anything about painting”, but would speak about Matisse in her own particular way and Thierry would learn something new every time. He was very fond of her, he found her funny, without artifice. He particularly liked teasing her about her old maid image, which she played on without realizing it; for the first few years he had called her Mademoiselle Brigitte, then just Mademoiselle, which had created an odd intimacy between them. But, despite her Chinese satin dresses with slits up the side, which drew some risqué remarks from Thierry, he never really looked at her as a woman. He would occasionally feel that she regretted this; he saw her only as an ally.
“Haven’t you ever been tempted by painting or découpage, Mademoiselle?”
“My only talent is for percentages, that’s my strong point. If I’d had even the tiniest urge to paint, I wouldn’t have hesitated, because my thoughts about that sort of thing are exactly the opposite of yours. The more people there are expressing themselves, painting, writing, making ripples in the water, the better equipped we’ll be to cope with the inevitable apocalypse. Everyone’s an artist, some just have the nerve to believe it more than others. When I see some little man coming into the shop carrying all the agonies of Van Gogh on his shoulders just to have his cauliflower in gouache framed . . . I find it touching.”
“I do too, I even worry he’ll cut his ear off one day.”
“You play tennis, don’t you?” she said with a shrug.
“So what?”
“How would you rate yourself next to McEnroe?”
“Do you know who McEnroe is, Mademoiselle?”
“Don’t treat me like an idiot and don’t change the subject. On a scale of one to twenty, what would you give McEnroe?”
“Seventeen, eighteen.”
“And yourself?”
“Oh, between a half and one.”
“And that hasn’t made you give up? Do you realize that Madame Combes with her self-portraits is much closer to Rembrandt than you are to McEnroe? And do you know why? Because she’s never seen a Rembrandt self-portrait. She acts spontaneously, she works really hard, there’s a sense of necessity in what she does. Rembrandt had a big nose and a double chin, he wasn’t just reproducing his features, he was looking for another truth. Good old Madame Combes is working in exactly the same direction, she’s not motivated by some sort of narcissism, she’s just using the only subject she can lay her hands on: herself. Would you really have the cheek to tell her she’s wasting her time?”
On the days when she came to work there, he liked knowing she was in the shop while he worked; nothing could go wrong while she was in the building.
Halfway through the afternoon he felt he had done enough for the day, and undertook a little tidying up in the workshop. The bookseller from across the street came to have a cup of tea and the remains of a chocolate cake with him; still absorbed by the plans in his head, he merely punctuated the woman’s panegyric on the village atmosphere to be found in the heart of Paris. A customer came and broke up their little ritual, and Thierry to
ok a new order: a prizewinning architectural design to be boxed in glass within two days.
Most of the time, when his customers would leave him in peace, he would sit alone at the back of his workshop, settled in an armchair doing nothing except thinking about all the dreams he had not yet buried. Only the most ordinary things, a bit of excitement in his life, a day-to-day existence which might allow for something unexpected, was that asking too much? The thought that, at barely forty, the rest of his life should be doomed to resignation terrified him. Although he did not know exactly how, he would have liked to devote his cherished independence to something other than his tools and his wooden frames, to tackle some more human material (the samples that came into his shop cannot have been representative of the race as a whole!), to penetrate the secrets of his kind without being granted permission. For a few months now he had been haunted by the memory of a blond girl he had seen playing tennis in the Jardins du Luxembourg. She had so thoroughly aroused his curiosity that he had done everything he could to sit close to her when she came off the court. With some clever manoeuvring he managed to sit at a nearby table in the almost empty little café. He had taken some pleasure in playing the small-time spy, in order to see her up close, to hear her. As he caught snatches of her conversation with her opponent, he experienced strange and completely new sensations, and eventually got what he wanted: to steal a little glimmer of her intimacy. He imagined what could follow on from his intrusion into this woman’s life and the discoveries he could have made, and the more his imagination was carried away, the stronger his feeling of shameful and, in his own eyes, suspect jubilation. Everyone on earth must at some point have wondered what the person next to them might be hiding, but Blin found the question sufficiently stimulating to take it seriously.
Going further back into his past, he liked remembering the heat wave of 1976, a whole summer spent under the sloping roof of the little house in Rugles in Normandy. Right from the start, the teenager he had been then had suffered much more from the boredom than the heat; he had not been able to forge friendships with the local children, the television had stayed in Paris, and cycle rides were only conceivable in the late afternoon with the first breath of air, when the village took on some semblance of life again. This torture began as the clock struck nine in the morning, and lasted all through the afternoon, in other words a daily eternity which made him curse the holidays.
Until he was saved by a miracle.
He was usually someone who read the strict minimum prescribed by his teachers, but his curiosity nudged him to open a collection of Georges Simenon short stories which he found in a cardboard box. He could see himself now, lying sweating in the shade in his red dungarees, his head resting on a rolled up blanket, the book on his chest. He had read the thirteen Petit Docteur novellas at a rate of one a day, and had kept himself going until the end of July by re-reading them, hoping for a new miracle for the month of August. The little doctor in question was a young GP in the country who had fun playing amateur detective rather than treating his patients, and each story thrust Thierry into an adventure which fired his imagination more than anything he had ever known. What fascinated the young Thierry was the way the character’s vocation was suddenly triggered, right at the beginning of the book, by a mysterious telephone call which set in motion some unknown mechanism in the little doctor’s mind. Working on a simple clue which he deciphered thanks to sheer common sense rather than any skill, the intrepid Jean Dollent pieced together an argument which made him increasingly curious to know more, and increasingly reckless in the face of the unknown. He felt suspense and adventure breaking into his simple doctor’s life; nothing would ever be the same again. Thierry had grasped that this was a pivotal moment which would go on to reveal a formidable need to unravel the true from the false. What made the story so exciting was the very fact that the doctor was an amateur; Thierry followed his logical reasoning one step at a time, and sometimes foresaw those steps because they were nothing like the convoluted deductions of serial sleuths. During the course of the novellas the good doctor became so taken with the game that he would jump at the first opportunity to get out of his consulting rooms, much to the delight of Thierry, who saw this as an irrepressible sign of fate. Doctor Dollent, more seasoned from one novella to the next, started making his clients pay and thought of abandoning medicine to become a professional police investigator. What could turn a doctor away from his vocation in that way, apart from something more powerful still?
Twenty-five years had passed since that love affair with a book. Like all youthful passions, it was unforgettable. He even felt that, with the passing of time, it had found a disturbing way of coming back to visit him, as if forgetting simply closed a loop and the lapses in memory produced by ageing were just a roundabout way of getting back to what really mattered. Behind the sum of his job-related doubts and the choices he had made, the fantasies of his youth came back to haunt him and, among them, there was one that imposed itself like an injunction, hiding behind two words which had a magical and yet very real ring to them in his mind: private detective.
Before he could even dream of what he might become, Thierry was going to have to shake himself off. Every epic had to start by turning a corner, the rest was just a question of stages to reach and obstacles to overcome. He had to start with a symbolic gesture.
At 7pm he still had time to close up shop, nip to Les Feuillants and get back home in time to attend to Nadine as she stepped out of the bath.
“My name is Thierry Blin, I joined yesterday, do you remember?”
“You played a wonderful match for us. If Monsieur Gredzinski had got a few more first serves in, he would have had a chance. Would you like a court?”
“No, I came to rescind my membership.”
*
Nadine and her bath-time ceremony. Very hot, almond-scented bubble bath. A wooden shelf in front of her, a little altar where she laid out a magazine, an aperitif, a mirror and a towel to wipe her hands. Thierry was a part of the ceremony: he simply had to sit on the side of the bath, kiss Nadine on the lips, exchange a few words with her about the day and pour her another drink, usually a dash of whisky with lots of sparkling water. He automatically looked at her breasts, half submerged, at her tiny nose, her serious eyes, her slightly dusky skin. Her imperceptibly sad smile, her slim body. He had always liked things to be little in women. Feet, breasts, stomachs. It didn’t matter so much now. He had reviewed his criteria since coming across the blonde in the Jardins du Luxembourg. Little white knickers revealed for all to see at the least acceleration, firm tapering legs which put her navel exactly on a level with the strip at the top of the net. She was about forty-five, with the smile and wrinkles of a woman who still enjoys life just as much, skin accustomed to terribly expensive creams, a coarse voice, a way of wielding the subjunctive similar to her sliced backhand, and breasts too big to appeal to his emotions, but Thierry didn’t give a stuff for emotions that day, all that mattered was the feeling of greed. Opulent breasts restrained by a cropped bra fit for a champion, sculpted by thousands of forehands, backhands and winning serves, not one muscle spared; in the long run it had its rewards. He would play with Nadine’s, make them into shapes they were not meant to have, then move on to other things. Thierry Blin had imagined spending a bit of time with a woman like that, a great big creature who could cope on her own and would know how to make him laugh. Nothing like the sweet-faced little brunette who could only think of snuggling up for safety. Nadine pitched her voice delicately, but more often than not let everyone else do the talking. Over the years, Blin had started to loathe her discretion; he sometimes even found her gentleness unbearable.
“Thierry?”
“Yes?”
“Shall I put on some make-up and we can go out to this dinner?”
“Take your time.”
Nadine had only ever called him by his name. Sometimes he would have liked to have been her sweetheart or her poppet, anything, even something ridiculo
us, but not her Thierry. His friends also called him Thierry but no one, not even his parents, had appropriated his name to make a familiar, natural sound of it. No woman had sighed a Thierry! while they made love, a heartfelt cry, a gasp. He could remember no diminutives derived from Thierry, no nicknames derived from Blin, and God knows there could have been thousands. He did not loathe his first name in itself, but there were others that suited him so much better. As a child, he had never tried to become a Thierry, to live like a Thierry and yet he had known real Thierrys, quite at home with their two syllables, wearing Thierry smiles on their lips. As time had passed, things had not improved. He got worse and worse at being Thierry and he used the name as he might have done, say, Bernard: the problem was the same, he was no more suited to Bernard. Not satisfied with just calling him Thierry, his parents had not deigned to give him any other names he could clutch onto. If only he could have chosen from Thierry Louis Bastien Blin, he would have imposed Louis on everyone and the problem would have been dealt with. He felt much more like a Louis than a Thierry. So he was in fact a thwarted Thierry. An unworthy Thierry. Or unworthy of being a Thierry.
The question of his surname had never been a problem, there was so little intimacy in the family name. He had known dozens of Blins, starting with his aunts and uncles, old people and children, nothing but Blins; he did not feel any more or less like a Blin than anyone else. And in this instance, it was true, it was just to do with how it sounded. Ah, Blin, I’d like you to come and see me in my office. In the end, like everyone else, he had grown accustomed to it, and yet he felt sure that surnames are not inscribed in our hearts or our souls, just our memories. Even a dog who has been called Sultan all his life can respond to Cafetière or Versailles within a week. There was no reason why a human being should be so very different.
All the other questions stemmed from the issue of names. What did the Public Record Office mean, anyway? he asked himself. Why exactly do I exist legally with a social security number and an obligation to do national service?