Nor would the name Marie-Jeanne Pereyres be spoken that night, any more than Mia or Kris. Denis had kept quiet about the reasons for his illness, and he would have been incapable of coming up with any reasons for his sudden recovery either. By moving into his place the intruder had dispossessed him of his right to complain. His long bout of despair had yielded to an indignation that awoke his faculties of resistance; the superb thing about trying to come up with explanations for the presence of this intruder in his house was that it had unblocked the gears in his mind and restored his fighting spirit.
By ordering a third round, they were extending their post-session ritual. The three of them enjoyed each other’s company, but they didn’t realize it. Philippe Saint-Jean, in his everyday life, rarely came across people like Yves Lehaleur or Denis Benitez. No matter how he lauded the reigning eclecticism and dreaded the degeneracy of milieus that were blood relations, he rarely took the time to get to know the man in the street, unless there was some immediate benefit to be had—his wineseller, his computer consultant, or his ear, nose, and throat specialist—they could boast that they knew him. Unburdened at last of his role as a thinker, of his defects as a dialectician, he could savor the sweet futility of their confabulations at the bistro. Denis Benitez appreciated the way in which the intellectual refrained from being judgmental, but remained attentive, ready to learn—and even if it was all a pose, their exchange seemed sincere. And Denis also appreciated the outspokenness of a man like Lehaleur, his independent spirit, the fact that he did not seem in the least inclined to make this into a pissing contest. In fact, Yves knew how to avoid the usual guy talk or any topic that might lead to discussing their hopeless fascination with performance. He was thankful to Philippe and Denis for sparing him the usual clichés, and the tiresome complicity of men among men.
Everything seemed to indicate that Marie-Jeanne Pereyres had finagled her way into Denis’s house to seek revenge: was there any other explanation for this kind of meddling? He must be paying for some major sin committed long ago. When he was around twenty, Denis and a buddy had embarked on a tour of all the nightclubs in France, getting themselves hired as waiter and bartender respectively. Three months in Marseille, two in Antibes, the same in Montélimar, ten days in Bordeaux—but what a ten days it had been!—and short stays everywhere they were wanted, and even where they were not wanted. They had filled their pockets, and fornicated like devils, clearing out at dawn; they had sown their wild oats to the point of exhaustion. How many Marie-Jeanne Pereyres had they met and charmed and intoxicated and betrayed with complete impunity? Was it not obvious that sooner or later, even twenty years later, one of them would call them to account? Someone had caught up with Denis at last for his juvenile misconduct: it made sense. The intruder was clearly of the opinionated sort, not to be deterred from her goal, and when that goal was revenge, she would mete out her punishment, ineluctably, ever harsher as time went by. Perhaps women were more spiteful than men when it came to things like this, and there were a good number of such crimes that knew no statute of limitations.
The intruder lay sprawled on the couch, her nightgown up to her knees, white socks up to her calves. With her glasses on her nose, she was reading a book that looked like a guidebook to some faraway country.
“You’re back early,” she said, without budging from her languid position.
“You seem annoyed.”
“Not at all, I’m just surprised. Usually you don’t finish your service until after midnight.”
“Usually? What usually? What do you know about my life and what I usually do or don’t do? Do you even have any idea what I was doing this evening?”
“No idea.”
“Well, I spent the evening digging through my memory and I couldn’t find you. Maybe we’ve already met somewhere, but for the life of me I don’t know where or when, and do you know why?”
“No.”
“Because you don’t look like anything. And I’m not even saying that to hurt you.”
Denis had studied her from head to toe, spied on her as she slept, clothed her in a host of different outfits: no memory of Marie-Jeanne Pereyres.
“Not like anything at all?”
“Everyone has some distinguishing feature. You don’t. Your shape is the kind people meet all their lives, in the street, in a corridor, but which leaves no impression on the retina or the memory. Everyone knows that people like you exist somewhere, but they don’t really want to know where. For me you represent, all on your own, exactly what goes to make other people. You’re a kind of vague, indistinct entity—at best, you could be characterized as a woman, but your specificity goes no further. And on that very point, you may not believe me, but as a rule I have a sort of gift for decrypting women, I know where they come from and where they’re going, I can sense instinctively what is missing in their lives, what they desire more than anything. With you I can’t see a thing, nothing at all, no matter how much I watch you sleep or move around, you don’t give off any particular truth, nothing in your physical being gives me the slightest clue, you are indescribable. For example, the impression you give is that you have brown hair, let’s say a light chestnut, as indefinable a color as it gets, like gray walls and off-white raincoats. But in artificial light you look blonde, a kind of half-hearted blonde, not forthright, not the blondness of a blonde. Likewise, it is impossible to say what color your eyes are, and yet eyes are supposed to light up a face, to release a kind of inner light—well, in your case, nothing. Apparently you’re of medium height, and when someone sees you coming from a distance they might say, ‘Look at that little woman over there,’ but when I see you curled up on the sofa here, I get the impression you don’t know where to put your legs. Your features could correspond to absolutely any professional profile; you don’t look right for the job, you look right for every job. You could be a dental assistant as easily as a senior executive, the kind who’s always in a hurry, who lives intensely, or you could be the head of a team of hostesses at a convention or a car show.”
“My eyes are green.”
“Oh, no, you may like to think so, but you’re wrong. Your green is more like sludge, it gives you the kind of expression that belongs to people who are forgotten. You’re not even ugly. If your looks were the kind where people say, ‘God, that girl’s ugly,’ at least you’d leave an impression, you’d be identifiable—but not even. So, if I’ve already met you in another life, you left my memory the moment you left the picture.”
As she watched him leave the picture in turn to go and hide in his bedroom, a stunned Marie-Jeanne said to the empty room: “If we had met in the past, I wouldn’t have forgotten you . . . ”
“You’ll see, she makes love without subtitles, and she knows how to drink. Don’t ask her to marry you, she’s likely to say yes, but not just to please you.”
Yves could not resist Kris’s description of Agnieszka. He made an appointment with her for Saturday afternoon with the prospect, if they hit if off, of a weekend behind closed doors. He opened his door to the loveliest surprise of all these last weeks: eyes like dark pearls against fair coloring, high cheekbones, coral lips. The beautiful Polish girl took off her raincoat, uncovered her shoulders, revealed her neckline, smoothed her satin dress over her hips, then sat down in an armchair, waiting for her host to take charge. Yves launched into a long greeting, the only word of which she understood was tea, which she accepted, in English, with a simple yes.
“How long have you been in France?”
Silence.
He tried English. “In France? Long ago?”
“Wan ear,” she said, raising a thumb.
“I’ve always heard people who live in Eastern Europe are good at languages.”
Again, a questioning silence.
“I speak as much English as you do French. Just a little English.”
She nodded, registered the word little. They smiled, s
ipped the scorching jasmine tea in a silence impossible to fill. To erase any further doubt, he asked, “Is it really possible to be a prostitute without speaking one intelligible word?”
She stared at him wordlessly.
“Or are you taking me for a fool?”
Nothing.
“Maybe you speak French better than you claim to, in order to have an unfair advantage that might turn out to be important somewhere down the line.”
Agnieszka was afraid she might have found herself one of those clients who need to tell their life story, to unburden everything they cannot tell their wives, chattering away to hide how nervous they are—the weekend was shaping up to be one terrible misunderstanding. She knew how to give her body to perfect strangers without having to say a thing to them.
“Czy pan chce, z.ebym została na cały weekend?” she said, pointing to the wall clock.
“ . . . I thought it had all been agreed with Kris. You know who I mean, Kris?”
“Tak, tak, Kris, jest tak jak sie˛ umawiali´smy. All weekend? To jest cia˛gle aktualne?”
“Until Monday morning, is okay for you?”
“Yes, Monday morning, okay.”
Without counting them, she put the banknotes he handed her into her bag. Then there was one last smile and a new silence, as each one waited for the other to relieve them of a cloak of gravity. The lovely mute woman seemed unable to decide to head for the alcove on her own initiative—the only gesture which, in Yves’s opinion, she could have made without saying a thing, and which all the other women had made for him—Kris had settled into his bed as if she had been his mistress forever; Marie-Ange had taken off her shoes the moment she arrived; Samia had said, I’m wearing something special, want to see? And the frenetic Céline had placed her hand straight off beneath his shirt to caress his torso. Agnieszka was happy just to wait, accustomed to allowing the language barrier to free her from any initiative. Yves was almost annoyed, for he felt he was paying enough as it was not to have to go through a maneuver that reminded him of his youthful procrastination, something which may well have deprived him of a career as a Casanova—could one ever know how many men chose to marry just to relieve themselves of the burden of having to make the first move? That first move toward intimacy, signaling all the others to follow, where the male was duty bound to be daring, at the risk of being snubbed, rejected, and scorned. An impulse which, since it was in fact premeditated and constantly brushed aside, was never really an impulse. A man who paid women should no longer have to go through it, for Christ’s sake, and yet this evening Yves had to force himself to say a few words she would not understand but whose tone could leave no doubt.
She let her dress slip to the floor, then her stockings, then she lay down in her matching black silk bodice and boxer shorts. Afraid he would be misunderstood, Yves refrained from saying, Take me in your mouth, now, right away, so he put his hand on the back of Agnieszka’s neck and guided her toward his cock, which she took whole into her mouth. He let himself go for a while, then caressed his partner’s back through the fabric, slipped his hand into her shorts, which she removed without pausing in what she was doing. He pulled her rump toward him and rubbed his face against a hot, streaming sex, already open, and this gesture seemed far more natural to him than so many others.
“Mia? Why don’t you come and spend the weekend at a place that would be the height of exoticism for you.”
“You know, as far as trying to blow me away with anything exotic . . . ”
“A place filled with History, which in its way is a synthesis of all human culture. Full of an enlightened disorder, but conducive to introspection. One of the very rare places on earth that is still safe from the chaos of technology, where you can hear yourself think, where the stripped down décor stimulates inner peace.”
“Where’s that?”
“My house.”
His three-room apartment in the Latin Quarter had, despite the passage of time, preserved a pseudo-Bohemian air. The parquet floor creaked, the walls were covered with books and files, there was a smell of newspaper and incense, the kitchen was that of a confirmed old bachelor, the bedroom that of a student. For Philippe, this was a test: was Mia ready to do without her usual VIP comfort and immerse herself in a world so diametrically opposed to her own? Was she, quite simply, curious about him?
She arrived on Saturday at the end of the afternoon, sat down in an ageless armchair and did not budge from it, as if she were the prisoner of a citadel of knowledge.
“Did you know that every worthy thinker in France has sat in that chair? Card-carrying editorialists, persevering researchers, disenchanted essayists, hundred-year-old ethnologists, ruthless biographers, suffering academics, gloom-mongering bon vivants, crypto-Nietzscheans, post-existentialists, disillusioned visionaries, still-green academicians, and even one or two ministers who’d lost their bearings. You are without doubt the first supermodel.”
Mia, fascinated by so much austerity, slightly dazed by the crushing quantity of books all around her, asked the most predictable question: “Have you really read all these books?”
“Almost all of them. And I plan to read the others.”
“Even The Economy of Primitive Societies?” she asked, picking up a book at random.
“Fascinating!”
She asked another, more sensitive, question about the gaps in her own knowledge, her absolute lack of references, having excluded herself from the spheres of thought—after all this time spent with a renowned philosopher, she had eventually begun to have a complex. When she had tried to read his essay on the mirror of memory, she got the impression that a hundred more essays were missing from her general culture if she were even to begin to understand. Between the references to Plato and an Oceanic tribe, and quotations from Spinoza, she had gotten lost among the various concepts, which had all been dealt with already in the dozens of books listed in the bibliography. Whenever she thought she had discovered an essential truth in life, that truth was contradicted an hour later by another current of thought. It was fairly common to see the philosopher contradicted by the psychoanalyst, the psychoanalyst by the chemist, the chemist by the sociologist, and the sociologist by the philosopher.
“So what are we supposed to do, the rest of us, other than throw in the towel?”
Out of his comfort zone, Philippe would have given an easy answer, since the point Mia was raising—is there any meaning to meaning?—was about to smash him in the face like a cream pie. That evening, the bookshelves around him enfolding him like a nice old coat, he wanted to encourage his companion’s first halting steps along the path—well-worn for him, but still untrodden for so many others. He had to banish from her mind the idea that the intellectual life was an infinite puzzle from which, for her, a piece would always be missing. Rid her of the idea of understanding, to give herself a chance to feel. To learn to listen to herself and not the contradictory injunctions of leading opinion makers, both those who were sincere and the impostors. Prove to her that those who confess to having neither the instruments nor the substance have already so many convictions and intuitions, so much experience, that all it would take would be a simple triggering event in order to combine all those experiences and reach an epiphany, one of those illuminating moments that strike so powerfully that they light the rest of the way forever.
After which, they made love, without wondering whether there was any meaning to it.
Agnieszka and Yves embraced until late at night, making little sighs that were intelligible in any language. She seemed to find pleasure in her work, and even if that were not the case, Yves was grateful to her for having shown such fervor. At two o’clock in the morning, he set out on the coffee table a selection of zakuski he had bought that very morning at a Polish delicatessen, then he took from the freezer a bottle of red vodka and two tiny iced glasses.
“A kiedy przyjmujesz Szwedke˛, to podaje
sz akwawite˛?”
He thought he caught a hint of irony in her intonation.
“I made a detour to the tenth arrondissement to find this stuff. Tell me what you think.”
She drank her shot of pepper vodka down in one, and tapped her chest with the palm of her hand to get rid of the burning sensation.
“Pieprzówka . . . Nie wiedziałe´s o tym, ale trafiłe´s akurat na taka˛ jaka˛ lubie˛.”
Agnieszka too had given up trying to communicate, at least through words, and like Yves she enjoyed chatting away without worrying about being understood—after all, what did they have to say to each other that was that important? Savoring a second pierogi, she waved her glass, already empty. The feeling of calm the vodka gave her was yielding to another: in these two days she would earn enough to be able to go away for some thalassotherapy, to make up for thousands of late nights; she’d be able to abandon her body to other hands, expert hands, with no evil intentions.
At the brasserie, the Saturday night service ended at roughly two o’clock and was often followed by a drink at the bar, the time it took for the brigade to coordinate the next schedule before the Sunday break. Denis knocked back a good strong Calvados, then went home to slip into bed without waking his intruder—that was the term that suited her best, like some permanent reminder of danger. He slept late, but not long enough to recover from the fatigue he’d accumulated from his self-imposed schedule. He felt the urge for a cup of tea, got up, and walked through the living room without having any unpleasant encounters, but a vision of horror awaited him in the kitchen: Marie-Jeanne, a sponge in her hand, was tidying up and cleaning the countertops.
“Who said you could touch anything?”
She didn’t answer.
“In case you didn’t know, I work in the restaurant business. I know what a kitchen is and how to keep it.”