“I don’t want it to happen like this.”
“And how do you want it to happen? You want to take me rowing in the Bois de Boulogne?”
“Sorry?”
“Take me for a boat ride and recite poetry while I trail my hand in the water?”
“Come and sit beside me.”
“Switch off the light.”
“Okay.”
“Switch off the music.”
“Is that it?”
“Yes.”
“Is that you?” he asked, intimidated.
“Yes.”
“You’re really here?”
“No.”
“Here, take one of my pillows. How was your appointment?”
“Fine.”
“You want to tell me?”
“What?”
“Everything. I want to know everything, tonight. Every single thing.”
“You know, if I start . . . You might feel you have to take me in your arms afterwards too.”
“Oh, shit. Did you get raped?”
“No.”
“Well, I can fix that for you if you’d like.”
“Oh, thank you, that’s kind of you. Uh, where shall I begin?”
Franck imitated the condescending voice of a TV presenter who has no clue how to behave around children:
“And where are you from, little girl?”
“From Meudon.”
“From Meudon!” he exclaimed. “That’s just great. And where is your mommy?”
“She’s at home eating pills and tablets and things.”
“Oh, really? And your daddy, where’s your daddy?”
“He died.”
Silence.
“Ah, I warned you! Have you got some condoms at least?”
“Don’t jerk me around like this, Camille. I’m pretty thick sometimes, you know that. Your dad died?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“He fell into the void.”
Franck was silent.
“Okay, I’ll give it to you in order. Come closer because I don’t want the others to hear.”
He pulled the duvet up over their heads: “Go ahead. There, no one can see us now.”
80
CAMILLE crossed her ankles, put her hands on her stomach and set off on a long journey.
“I was a good little girl, very obedient . . . ,” she began, in a childish voice. “I didn’t eat much but I worked hard at school and I drew all the time. I didn’t have any brothers or sisters. My father was called Jean-Louis and my mother Catherine. I think they were in love when they met. I don’t know, I never dared ask them. But by the time I began drawing horses or Johnny Depp’s gorgeous face on 21 Jump Street, by then they didn’t love each other anymore. I’m sure of that because my dad didn’t live with us anymore. He only came back on weekends to see me. It was understandable that he went away and I would have done the same in his place. And I would have liked to leave with him on those Sunday evenings but I never could have because my mother would have killed herself again. She killed herself plenty of times when I was little. Fortunately it was usually when I wasn’t there but then later on, because I’d grown up, she didn’t seem to care as much . . . Once I was invited to a girlfriend’s house for her birthday. In the evening my mom didn’t come to get me, so another mom dropped me off outside my house and when I got to the living room, I saw my mother dead on the carpet. The firemen came and I went to live with the neighbor for ten days. After that my dad told me that if she killed herself again he was going to get custody, so she stopped. She just went on taking a ton of medication. My dad told me he had to leave because of his work but my mom said I mustn’t believe him. Every evening she repeated that he was a liar and a bastard, that he had another wife and a little girl that he was cuddling every night . . .”
Camille began to speak in a normal tone of voice: “This is the first time I’ve ever talked about it. It’s like—your mother finished with you before sticking you back in the train, but mine still messes with my head every day. Every single day. There were times when she was nice, though. She’d buy me felt-tip pens and tell me I was her only happiness on earth.
“When my father came over, he would shut himself in the garage and sit in his Jaguar listening to opera. It was an old Jaguar that didn’t have any wheels but that didn’t matter, we used to go for drives all the same. He would say, ‘Shall I take you to the Riviera, mademoiselle?’ and I would sit there next to him. I adored that car.”
“Which make was it?”
“An MK or something like that.”
“MKI or MKII?”
“Shit, you really are a guy. I’m trying to tell you a real tearjerker of a story and the only thing you’re interested in is the make of the fucking car!”
“Sorry.”
“No harm done.”
“Go on, then.”
She gave a sigh of resignation.
“ ‘Well, then, mademoiselle, shall I take you to the Riviera?’ ”
“ ‘Yes’ ”—Camille smiled—“ ‘I’d like that.’ ‘Have you brought your bathing suit?’ he’d ask. ‘Perfect. And an evening gown as well! We must go to the casino. Don’t forget your silver fox coat, it can be cool in Monte Carlo in the evening.’ There was a nice smell inside the car. The smell of well-worn leather . . . It was all so lovely, I remember. The crystal ashtray, the vanity mirror, the tiny little handle to roll the window down, the inside of the glove compartment, the wood. It was like a flying carpet. ‘With a bit of luck we’ll get there before nightfall,’ he promised. Yes, he was that kind of man, my dad, a big dreamer who could shift gears on a car up on blocks for hours on end and take me to the far corners of the earth in a suburban garage. He was really into opera, too, so we listened to Don Carlos, La Traviata or The Marriage of Figaro during the trip. He would tell me the stories: Madame Butterfly’s sorrow, the impossible love of Pelléas and Mélisande—when he confesses, ‘I have something to tell you’ and then he can’t; the stories with the countess and her Cherub who hides all the time, or Alcina, the beautiful witch who turned her suitors into wild animals. I always had the right to speak except when he raised his hand and in Alcina, he raised it a lot. Tornami a vagheggiar—I can’t listen to that aria anymore. It’s too happy. But most of the time I didn’t say anything. I felt good. I thought about the other little girl. She didn’t have all this. It was complicated for me. Now, obviously, I can see things more clearly: a man like him couldn’t live with a woman like my mother. A woman who’d turn off the music just like that when it was time for dinner, who’d burst all our dreams like soap bubbles. I never saw her happy, I never saw her smile, I . . . But my father was the very image of kindness and goodness. A bit like Philibert . . . Too nice, in any case, to have to deal with all that. The idea that he might be a bastard in his little princess’s eyes . . . So one day he came back to live with us. He slept in his study and left every weekend . . . No more escapades to Salzburg or Rome in the old gray Jaguar, no more casinos or picnics by the seaside. And then one morning—he must have been tired, very, very tired, he fell from the top of a building.”
“Did he fall or did he jump?”
“He was an elegant man; he fell. He was an insurance broker and he was walking on the roof of a tower, something to do with some ventilation conduits, he opened up his file and he wasn’t watching where he put his feet.”
“God, that’s unbelievable . . . What do you think?”
“I don’t. There was the funeral after that and my mother kept turning around to see if the other woman hadn’t shown up in the back of the church. Then she sold the Jaguar and I stopped talking.”
“For how long?”
“Months.”
“And then? Can I push the sheet down? I’m suffocating like this.”
“Me too. I became a lonely, ungrateful teenager. I put the number of the hospital into the phone memory but I didn’t need it. She calmed down. Not suicidal anymore, just depressive. That was p
rogress. It was quieter. One death was enough for her, I suppose. After that I had only one thing on my mind: to get the hell out of there. I left the first time to live with a girlfriend when I was seventeen. One evening, boom, my mother and the cops are outside the door. Although the bitch knew perfectly well where I was. It was lame, as the kids say nowadays. We were having supper with my friend’s parents and talking about the war in Algeria, I remember . . . And then knock knock, the cops. I felt really uncomfortable for our hosts but I didn’t want any fuss so I left with them. I was going to turn eighteen on February 11, 1995, and on the tenth at one minute past midnight I left, closing the door behind me quietly. I got my baccalaureate and went to study at the Beaux-Arts. Fourth out of seventy admitted. I’d made a really beautiful dossier based on the operas from my childhood. I worked like a dog and got a commendation from the jury. At that point I had no contact at all with my mother and I was struggling, life was so damn expensive in Paris. I lived here and there, nothing permanent. Cut a lot of classes. Cut theory and went to the studio workshops, until I began to mess around. To begin with, I was sort of bored. I guess I really wasn’t playing by the rules: I didn’t take myself seriously so as a result I wasn’t taken seriously. I wasn’t an Artist with a capital A, I was a good workman. The kind to whom they’d recommend the Place du Tertre, rather, to daub some Monet and little dancers . . . And then, uh . . . I didn’t get it. I liked to draw, so instead of listening to the professors’ jabber, I’d do their portraits. The whole notion of ‘visual art’ and happenings and installations—it all bored me stiff. I realized that I had got the wrong century. I wish I’d lived in the sixteenth or seventeenth century so I could have apprenticed to a great master. Preparing his backgrounds, cleaning his brushes, grinding his colors. Maybe I wasn’t immature, I don’t know. The second thing was, I fell in with the wrong sort of guy. It was a classic scenario: silly young woman with her box of pastels and her neatly folded rags falls in love with unknown genius. The accursed prince of clouds, the widower, dark and brooding and inconsolable. A real storybook character: tormented, incredibly brilliant, suffering, passionate and with a long mane of hair . . . Argentinian father and Hungarian mother, what an explosive combination. He was incredibly cultured, living in a squat and just waiting for a dewy-eyed little ninny to fix his meals while he created in the midst of terrible suffering, and I fit the part. I went to the Marché Saint-Pierre, bought yards of cloth to staple to the walls to make our little ‘love nest’ look ‘stylish and charming, ’ and I looked for work to keep the stew pot bubbling . . . Stew pot, well, camping stove is more like it. I dropped out of school and sat cross-legged on the floor to think about what sort of job I could do. And the worst of it is that I was proud! I watched him painting and I felt important. I was the sister, the muse, the great woman behind the great man, the one who dragged the wine crates up the stairs, fed the disciples and emptied the ashtrays . . .”
She laughed.
“I was so proud when I got a job as a guard at a museum—really clever of me, no? Well, if I’m telling you about my colleagues it’s because I really discovered the grandeur of public service. To be honest, I didn’t care. I was fine. Because I was in my great master’s studio at last. The canvases had been dry for a long time but I was definitely learning more there than any school in the world could teach me. And, as I wasn’t getting much sleep in those days, I could nap all I wanted. I was keeping warm. The problem was that I wasn’t allowed to do any drawing. Even in a tiny nothing little notebook, even if there was no one around and God knows there were enough days when there was hardly anyone, but it was out of the question that I do anything besides ruminate on my fate, ready to jump whenever I heard the slap-slap of the soles of some visitor gone astray or to put my stuff away quick as I could when I heard the jangle of a key ring. In the end it became the favorite pastime of a certain Séraphin Tico—Séraphin Tico, I love that name. He’d creep up on me to catch me red-handed. God, he was pleased, that ass, whenever he could force me to put my pencil away! Then I’d watch as he walked away, spreading his legs so his balls could inflate with delight . . . But every time he snuck up on me it made me jump, and that drove me nuts. The number of sketches that were ruined because of him. God! I couldn’t take it anymore. So I learned how to play the game. My education in life was beginning to bear fruit: I bribed him.”
“Sorry?”
“I paid him. I asked him how much he wanted to let me work. Thirty francs a day? Done deal. The price of an hour’s catnap somewhere warm? Done deal.”
“Shit.”
“Yup. The great Séraphin Tico.” She added, dreamily, “Now that we have the wheelchair, I’ll go and say hello to him someday with Paulette.”
“Why?”
“Because I liked him. At least he was an honest scoundrel. Not like the other prick who would be pissed at me from the minute I walked in the door after a full day’s work simply because I’d forgotten to buy him his cigarettes. So what did I do, stupid bitch? I’d go back out to get them . . .”
“Why did you stay with him?”
“Because I loved him. I admired his work too. He was free, he had no hang-ups, he was so sure of himself, demanding . . . Exactly the opposite of me. He would have preferred to die penniless and friendless than accept the slightest compromise. I was barely twenty years old and I was the one supporting him and I admired him.”
“You were so naive . . .”
“Yes. No. After the adolescence I’d just been through, he was the best thing that could have happened to me. We had all the time in the world, all we talked about was art, painting. We were ridiculous, yes, but we had our integrity. Six of us could eat on two welfare checks, we were freezing cold and we stood in line at the public baths, but we had the feeling we were living better than others were. And as grotesque as it may seem today, I think we were right. We had passion. The luxury of it . . . I was way naive and I was happy. When I was fed up with one room, I moved into another one, and when I didn’t forget the cigarettes, it was party time! We drank a lot too. I acquired some bad habits. And then I met the Kesslers—I was telling you about them the other day.”
“I’m sure he was a good lay.” Franck scowled.
She cooed: “Oh yes, the best in the world. Oh . . . just thinking about it gives me shivers all over.”
“All right already. You made your point.”
“Nah,” she sighed, “it wasn’t really so great. Once the first postvirginal emotion was over with, I—I, well, let’s just say he was a selfish man.”
“Ah.”
“Yes. You might know something about that too.”
“Yeah, but I don’t smoke!”
They smiled at each other in the dark.
“After that, things began to go downhill. He was cheating on me. While I was putting up with Séraphin Tico’s stupid tricks, he was screwing the first-year students, and when eventually we made peace, he confessed that he’d been doing drugs, oh, not a whole lot, just to try, for the beauty of the act . . . And that’s something I really don’t feel like talking about.”
“Why?”
“Because it was just so sad. It’s unbelievable how fast that shit can bring you to your knees. Beauty of the act, my ass. I held out a few more months and then I went back to my mother’s to live. She hadn’t seen me in nearly three years, she opens the door and says, ‘I’m warning you, there’s nothing to eat.’ I burst into tears and I didn’t get out of bed for two months. For once she was decent, she had what it took to take care of me, so to speak. And when I was back on my feet, I went back to work. In those days all I ate was baby food. Hello? Dr. Freud? After all the Dolby Surround CinemaScope, all the sound and light and blockbuster emotions, I went back to a small-scale life in black and white. I watched TV and my head would go all funny whenever I walked along the river . . .”
“Did you think about it?”
“I did. I pictured my ghost rising up to the heavens to the aria of Tornami a vagheggiar,
Te solo vuol amar . . . and my papa would be there to open his arms and laugh, ‘Ah, here you are at last, mademoiselle! You’ll see, it’s even nicer than the Riviera up here!’ ”
She was crying.
“Hey, don’t cry . . .”
“I feel like it.”
“Okay, then cry.”
“That’s nice. You’re not the complicated type.”
“True. I have plenty of faults but I’m not complicated. You want to stop there?”
“No.”
“You want something to drink? A little hot milk with orange flower water like Paulette used to make me?”
“No, thanks. Where was I?”
“Funny head.”
“Yes, funny head. Honestly, it wouldn’t have taken much more than a nudge in the back to tip me over, but instead, fate was wearing fine black kid gloves, and tapped me on the shoulder one morning. That day I was playing with figures from a Watteau painting, I was bent over on my chair when this man went by, behind me. I’d seen him around a lot. He was always wandering in among the students and peering at their work when they weren’t looking. I thought he was a pickup artist, and I wondered about his sexuality, I watched him chatting up these kids who seemed flattered, and I admired the way he went about it. He always wore these superbly long coats, and classy suits, and scarves. It was like taking a break, to watch him . . . So I was leaning over my sketchpad and all I could see were his magnificent shoes, very fine quality, with an impeccable shine. ‘May I aska you an indiscreeta question, mademoiselle? Can your morality resist all temptation?’ I wondered where he was headed with a remark like that. To the hotel? Well, okay . . . could my morality resist all temptation? Here I was corrupting Séraphin Tico and I dreamt of going against the Good Lord’s work. ‘No,’ I replied, and because of my gallant little reply, off I went down another shit hole. Immeasurably deep, this time.”
“A what?”
“An unspeakable shit hole.”
“What did you do?”
“The same thing as before. But instead of sleeping in a squat and playing housemaid for a lunatic, I lived in one of the grandest hotels in Europe to play parlormaid for a crook.”