“All right. And you—d’you think I’ll be reimbursed?”
“I’d be surprised.”
“The thief took everything, you know.”
“Everything?”
“Almost everything.”
“That’s tough.”
Camille lay on her stomach and put her chin on her hands.
“You’re beautiful.”
“Oh, stop,” she said, snuggling into his arms.
“Nah, you’re right, you’re not beautiful, you’re . . . I don’t know how to say it. You’re alive. Everything about you is alive: your hair, your eyes, your ears, your little nose, your big mouth, your hands, your adorable ass, your long legs, the faces you make, your voice, your softness, your silences, your . . .”
“My organism?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m not beautiful but my organism is alive. A great declaration. I’ve never heard that one before.”
“Don’t play with words,” he said, clouding over. “It’s too easy for you. Uh—”
“What?”
“I’m even hungrier than before. I really have to go eat something now.”
“Okay, then, so long. Till we next have the pleasure, as they say.”
He panicked: “Do, do you want me to bring you something?”
“What do you suggest?” she said, stretching.
“Whatever you like.”
Then, after a moment’s thought: “Nothing. Everything.”
“Okay. I’ll get it.”
He was leaning against the wall, his tray on his lap. He uncorked a bottle and handed her a glass. She put down her sketchbook.
They raised their glasses.
“To the future.”
“No. Please, anything but. To now,” she corrected.
Ouch.
“The future. You—uh—”
She looked him straight in the eyes: “Franck, please tell me: we’re not going to fall in love, are we?”
He pretended to choke.
“Am, orrgl, argh . . . Are you crazy? Of course not!”
“Ah! You scared me for a minute. We’ve already done so many stupid things, the two of us.”
“Yeah, that’s for sure. Though we’re not really counting anymore, are we?”
“I am. Yes, I am.”
“Ah?”
“Yes. Let’s fuck, drink, go for walks, and hold hands; you can grab me by the neck and let me chase after you if you want but . . . Let’s not fall in love. Please.”
“Okay. I’ll write it down.”
“Are you drawing me?”
“Yes.”
“How are you drawing me?”
“The way I see you.”
“Do I look good?”
“I like the way you look.”
He licked the sauce off his plate, put down his glass and reluctantly returned to dealing with a few administrative hassles.
This time they did not hurry, and when they rolled apart, sated, at the edge of the abyss, Franck spoke to the ceiling:
“Agreed, Camille, I’ll never love you.”
“Thank you, Franck. Me neither.”
PART FIVE
84
NOTHING changed, everything changed. Franck lost his appetite and Camille regained her color. Paris became more beautiful, more luminous, a happier place. People smiled more and the asphalt seemed more elastic. As if everything was within reach; the contours of the world were more precise and the world itself was lighter.
Microclimate on the Champ-de-Mars? Global warming on their planet? A temporary end to gravity? Nothing made sense anymore; nothing mattered.
They navigated from his bed to her mattress, lay down as if on a carpet of eggs, and said tender things while they caressed each other’s back. Neither one wanted to be naked in the other’s presence; they were a bit gauche and a bit silly, and they felt obliged to pull the sheets up over their modest moments, before lapsing into debauchery.
A new apprenticeship or an initial rough sketch? They were attentive, and applied themselves in silence.
Pikou doffed his dog jacket and Madame Perreira brought her flowerpots back out. It was still a bit early for the parakeets.
“Hep, hep, hep,” she said one morning, “I’ve got something for you.”
The letter had been posted from the Côtes-d’Armor in Brittany.
September 10, 1889. Open quotes. Whatever was in my throat seems to be disappearing, I’m still eating with some difficulty, but at least am able to once again. Close quotes. Thank you.
When she turned the card over Camille beheld the febrile face of Vincent van Gogh.
She slipped it into her notebook.
They weren’t going to Monoprix so much anymore. Thanks to the three books which Philibert had given Camille and Paulette—Hidden, Surprising Paris; Paris: 300 Façades for the Curious; and Guide to Paris Tearooms , off you go, kids—Camille kept her head up and no longer said anything bad about her neighborhood, where Art Nouveau was on display beneath an open sky.
From that time on she and Paulette would ramble from the Russian isbas on the boulevard Beau-Séjour to the Mouzaïa of the Buttes-Chaumont, by way of the Hôtel du Nord and the Saint-Vincent cemetery, where one day they had a picnic with Maurice Utrillo and Eugène Boudin on Marcel Aymé’s tomb.
“ ‘As for Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, a marvelous painter of cats and human misery, he has been laid to rest beneath a tree, in the south-eastern corner of the cemetery.’ That’s a nice entry, isn’t it?”
“Why are you always taking me to see dead people?” asked Paulette.
“Sorry?”
She didn’t answer.
“Where would you like to go, Paulette dear? To a nightclub?”
No answer.
“Yoo-hoo! Paulette!”
“Let’s go home. I’m tired.”
And once again they found themselves in a taxi whose driver groused because of the wheelchair.
It was the perfect moron-detector, that buggy.
Camille was tired.
More and more tired, heavier and heavier.
She didn’t like to admit it but she was constantly having to keep Paulette from going over the edge: struggling with her to get her dressed, feeding her and obliging her to carry on a conversation. It wasn’t even a conversation she wanted; a simple response would do. The stubborn old woman did not want to see a doctor and the tolerant young woman did not try to go against her will, first of all because it was not something she typically did, and secondly because it was up to Franck to convince her. But whenever they went to the library, Camille immersed herself in medical magazines or books, reading depressing things about the degeneration of the cerebellum and other Alzheimeresque delights of old age. She then put away these Pandora’s boxes with a sigh, and made a few bad “good resolutions”: if Paulette didn’t want to get care, if she didn’t want to show any interest in the modern world, if she didn’t want to finish her plate and would rather wear her coat over her bathrobe to go for her walk, that was, after all, her right. Her most legitimate right. Camille didn’t want to pressure her, and if there were people who had a problem with that, then let them get her to talk about her past—about her mother, about the evenings during the grape picking, about the day the abbot nearly drowned in the Louère because he had thrown the casting net a bit too quickly and it had caught on one of the buttons on his cassock, or about her garden—let them try to put the spark back in her eyes, eyes which had become almost opaque. In any case, as far as Camille was concerned, there was nothing else to be done.
“Which sort of lettuces did you grow?”
“May Queen or Fat Lazy Blonde.”
“And the carrots?”
“La Palaiseau, of course.”
“And the spinach?”
“Ooh . . . spinach. Monstrueux de Viroflay. That was a good variety, grew well.”
“But how can you manage to remember all those names?”
“And I remember a whole lot m
ore. I’d leaf through the seed catalog every night, the way others would get their prayer missals all sticky. I loved it. My husband dreamt about cartridge pouches when he read his hunting and fishing catalog, and I loved my plants. Folks came from all over to admire my garden, did you know that?”
She would put her in the light and draw her while she listened. And the more she drew her, the more she loved her.
Would Paulette have struggled harder to stay on her feet if there hadn’t been the wheelchair? Had Camille infantilized her by begging her to sit all day so that they could go faster? Probably . . .
Never mind. What they were experiencing together—the looks they exchanged, hand in hand, while life was crumbling away with every passing memory—was something no one could ever take away from them. Neither Franck nor Philibert, both of whom were leagues away from even conceiving of the wild, improvised nature of Camille and Paulette’s friendship, nor the doctors who would never prevent an old woman from returning to the riverbank, eight years old again and shouting, “Monsieur l’abbé! Monsieur l’abbé!” through her tears, because if the abbot went under, it would be straight to hell for all his choir children . . .
“I tossed my rosary out to him—what on earth good do you think that could have done the poor man? I think I began to lose my faith that day, because instead of begging God to save him, he was calling for his mother. Now that seemed fishy to me.”
85
“FRANCK?”
“Mmm?”
“I’m worried about Paulette.”
“I know.”
“What should I do? Force her to get some tests?”
“I think I’m going to sell my motorbike.”
“Right. I can see you really care about what I’m saying.”
86
HE didn’t sell it. He swapped it with the grill man at work for his pretentious Golf. He was at the bottom of the abyss that week but he was careful not to show it and, the following Sunday, he gathered all of them around Paulette’s bed.
Stroke of luck, the weather was fine.
“Aren’t you going to work?” she asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. Don’t much feel like it today. Say, uh, wasn’t it the first day of spring yesterday?”
The others were confused, between Philibert who lived in his fog of unintelligible scribbles, and Paulette and Camille who’d lost all notion of time for weeks now; so he was deluding himself if he hoped to get any sort of response.
But he didn’t give up: “It is, you Parisians! It’s spring, I swear!”
“Oh?”
Not very enthusiastic, this audience.
“You don’t care?”
“Yes, yes . . .”
“No, you don’t, I can see that you don’t.”
He went over to the window: “Nah, I was just saying that. Just saying that because it’s a pity to stay here watching the Chinese tourists sprouting on the Champ-de-Mars when we have a nice country house like all the rich people in the building, and if you get a move on we could stop at the market in Azay and buy what we need to make a good lunch. At least I—well, that’s my vote. If you’re not interested, I’ll go back to bed.”
Like a tortoise, Paulette stretched out her old wrinkly neck from her carapace:
“Pardon?”
“Oh, just something simple. I thought maybe veal chops with assorted vegetables. And strawberries for dessert. If they’re good ones. Otherwise I’ll make an apple pie. We’ll have to see. A little Bourgueil from my friend Christophe to wash it all down and a good nap in the sun, what do you say?”
“And your work?” asked Philibert.
“Bah. I do enough as it is, don’t I?”
“And how will we get there?” said Camille with a touch of irony. “In your top case?”
He took a sip of coffee and announced calmly: “I have a beautiful car waiting outside the door: that scum Pikou already baptized it twice this morning, the wheelchair is folded up in the back and I filled her up a little while ago.”
He put his cup down and reached for the breakfast tray: “C’mon. Get a move on, guys. I’ve got peas to shell, you know.”
Paulette fell out of bed. It wasn’t her cerebellum; it was the hurry.
No sooner said than done, and what was done was repeated every week.
Like all their wealthy neighbors—but without them, since they were one day out of synch—they would get up very early on Sunday morning and come back on Monday night, their arms filled with victuals, flowers, sketches and a sweet fatigue.
Paulette revived.
There were times when Camille suffered from spells of lucidity and she would look things squarely in the face. This thing with Franck was truly pleasant. Let’s be happy, let’s be crazy, let’s nail the doors shut, carve the bark, exchange our blood samples, not think about it anymore, let’s discover each other and pluck daisy petals and suffer a bit and gather our rosebuds and yadda yadda yadda—but it could never work. She didn’t feel like going into it at length, but their affair was bound to be a washout. There were too many differences, too much—anyway. Let’s move on. She just couldn’t put the wanton Camille side by side with the watchful Camille. One was always looking at the other, wrinkling her nose.
It was sad, but that was the way it was.
But sometimes it wasn’t that way. Sometimes she managed to bring it all together and the two bickering Camilles would melt into a single silly and helpless Camille. Sometimes, he really won her over.
On that first day, for example. The business with the car, the nap, the good-natured little market and all that, that wasn’t bad, but it got even better.
It was when he stopped on the way into the village and turned around: “Grandma, you should walk a little and do this last bit on foot with Camille. We’ll go on ahead and open up the house in the meantime.”
That was a stroke of genius.
Because you should have seen her, the little dame in her quilted slippers, grasping the arm of her youthful cane, the same lady who for months had been sinking into the mud, how slowly she moved forward to start with, slowly slowly so as not to slip; then she raised her head, lifted her knees and loosened her grip . . .
You should have seen her so you could appreciate words as corny as happiness or bliss. Paulette’s suddenly radiant face, her queenly bearing, those little nudges with her chin toward the furtive net curtains, and her implacable commentary on the state of people’s window boxes or entryways.
How quickly she was walking all of a sudden, her blood flowing with memories and the smell of warm tar . . .
“Look, Camille, there’s my house. There it is.”
87
CAMILLE just stood there.
“Well, what is it? What’s wrong?” asked Paulette.
“This—this is your house?”
“Well, I should think so! Oh, just look at this jungle. Nothing’s been cut back. What a sad state of affairs.”
“The house looks like mine . . .”
“Pardon?”
Her house: not the one in Meudon where her parents scratched each other’s eyes out, but the one she used to draw for herself from the time she was old enough to hold a felt-tip pen. Her little imaginary house, the place where she sought refuge with her dreams of hens and metal biscuit boxes. Her Polly Pocket, her Barbie camping-car, her nest for the Marsupilamis, her blue house clinging to the hill, her Tara, her African farm, her promontory in the mountains.
Paulette’s house was like a square and solid little woman, showing off and greeting you with one hand firmly planted on her hip and the knowing look of someone who gives herself airs. The kind who lowers her eyes and acts modestly when really, everything in her oozes happiness and serene satisfaction.
Paulette’s house was a frog that wanted to become as big as an ox. A little railway guard’s bungalow that was not afraid of competing with the grand châteaux of Chambord and Chenonceaux.
Dreams of grandeur, like a pushy little peasant woman proclaim
ing: “Take a good look, sister dear. My slate roof with that white limestone which nicely sets off the door- and window-frames—I’ve made it, don’t you think?”
“I fear not.”
“Ah, you don’t think? And my two dormer windows, there? Aren’t they pretty, my finely carved freestone dormer windows?”
“Not in the least.”
“Not in the least? And the cornice? The cornice was carved by a journeyman!”
“You don’t even come close, my dear.”
The timid country bumpkin became so upset that she veiled herself in a trellis, dolled herself up with unmatching flowerpots and pushed her disdain to the extreme—body piercing with a horseshoe above the door. Ha! They didn’t have anything like it, those Agnès Sorels and other royal mistresses of Poitiers!
Paulette’s house existed.
Paulette didn’t feel like going inside, she wanted to see her garden. Oh, woe . . . Everything’s ruined . . . Weeds everywhere . . . And this is when we should be sowing . . . Cabbages, carrots, strawberries, leeks . . . All this fine soil gone to the dandelions. Oh, woe. Fortunately I have my flowers. Well, it’s still a bit early, now. Where are the narcissi? Oh, there they are. And the daffodils? And here, Camille, bend down so you can see how pretty they are. I can’t see them but they must be around here somewhere . . .
“Little blue ones?”
“Yes.”
“What are they called?”
“Grape hyacinths . . . Oh,” she moaned.
“What?”
“Well, they have to be divided.”
“No problem. We’ll take care of it tomorrow. You’ll tell me what to do.”
“You would do that?”
“Of course. And you’ll see, I’ll be a better student than I was in the kitchen.”