Tears come to my eyes. Hilda bounds up the stairs, upturning everything as she goes, and while my tears flow she arrives, I think, at my door, goes in, and destroys for ever the little common sense I have left.
IV
WILDLIFE
LAMONT
I
I MET Lamont—the boat-girl—the day before the death of my maternal grandfather. It was at the end of June. Lamont, the first time I saw her, was sitting on a chair tilted precariously against the wall of the kitchen. A noisy crowd was drinking and shouting in the sitting room—a crowd in which, I told Lamont without knowing anything about her, I had not managed to find a place. Lamont nodded. She too, she said, felt herself a stranger there.
Along came our hostess, whom I shall call Estelle, a red-haired girl with prominent breasts, in a white woollen dress with slit sides: queen among the bumble-bees.
‘Oh, you’re hidden away there, you two.’
Lamont smiled without showing her teeth. One of her canines, however, slightly misplaced, flashed for a brief instant.
‘I understand: you’re waiting for a lull. Well, they’ll be leaving soon. The drink’s running out. Will you come on to dinner with us?’
Lamont looked at me with a double flicker of her eyelids, and against my better judgement I promised to go with them—I didn’t exactly know where. I hardly knew who they were, apart from Estelle, to whom one of my teachers had introduced me, and who took me up, I think, only because I wrote, or at least had written, for literary magazines.
Lamont gave a sardonic chuckle when Estelle had turned away.
‘It’s nothing to laugh about,’ I protested. ‘I’ve no great desire to stay with these people. I’d be better off at home.’
Lamont raised her shoulders and promised me a night of intense amusement. Did I know Boris, Estelle’s sweetheart?
‘Hardly,’ I replied. Lamont rubbed her nose. She was a slight, flat-chested girl with short hair dyed ash-blond. Her eyes, under thick eyebrows, were almost black.
‘Why stay here with these people we don’t particularly like? Why not slip quietly away, just you and me, before it’s too late?’
Lamont bit her lower lip. This time I saw both canines, small and pointed.
‘Where would you like us to go?’
I saw myself walking not close to her, two or three steps behind, rather, looking at her back, looking at the shadow she cast on the pavement.
‘I don’t care. Wherever you like.’
She shook her head.
‘I don’t understand you,’ I said. And I ought, at that moment, to have roused myself and said goodbye to both Lamont and Estelle, whom I should then never have seen again. We had no friends in common, we didn’t even live in the same district. But I stayed. I had pleasure in talking with Lamont; that, I believed, would surely keep me safe throughout the evening from Estelle and her set.
From the kitchen we heard Estelle’s pre-dinner guests take their leave. As Lamont understood it, Estelle was celebrating her birthday (twenty-third? twenty-fifth?) in several stages.
‘And why does she want me? Do you think she needs some chance idiot to make up her dinner party? Do you think I’m going to have a fling with her?’
But before Lamont had time to reply, red-haired Estelle reappeared, hands clasped over her chest. ‘Come and join us in the sitting room, you savages. The others have gone.’
In the sitting room of Estelle’s little flat there remained only her friend Boris and two other guests I had not seen arrive. One of these was perfidiously introduced to me as ‘a fifteen-year-old poet’, the other, older than we, took in Lamont with a single glance and then shrugged his shoulders with an odd grimace—a signal directed more at me than at Lamont. I effaced myself. Boris went into the kitchen and brought back a bottle of excellent champagne and some paper cups. Estelle laughed, and Lamont watched her laugh.
When Lamont looked at me she was not so cruel. She looked often, more so than at the others. Later in the evening when we were walking down the street in search of a fashionable bar we never found, Lamont matched her step with mine, and in her company there came to me delicious images that at first I took for memories, until I realised they were more like waking dreams, fabrications my mind produced almost automatically under the influence of Lamont’s presence. But before that she and I had had drinks in company with Estelle, and the oldest of Estelle’s friends—not recalling his name I shall call him ‘the Guru’; the young poet was called Hector—had spoken to me about post-Hegelianism and the ‘melancholy of true philosophers’. And Lamont, while he was speaking, had never taken her eyes off him. Boris watched Lamont who watched the Guru; my eyes moved from one to another. And we had dined at an Italian restaurant in the Rue Notre Dame des Champs, where the Guru had given the second half of his lecture. But facing Lamont I was a child again, standing in front of a house of bricks, and a woman took me in her arms. Someone spoke to me. I had thought only for the house and the woman captured by my roving mind. It is certain, all the same, that I took part in the evening’s debates. I was told afterwards of my tirades, which the Guru had found ‘violently anticonceptual’.
‘But do you know what philosophy is? Do you know what a system is?’ I was asked at last by this psychagogue—as he was called by the poet of fifteen years—speaking with brows raised to the roots of his hair. We were installed in a private room at the restaurant, where chandeliers and mirrors did their best to compensate for the lack of windows; and uttering these words the Guru pulled out from his waistcoat pocket a small leather box and deftly rolled a doped cigarette. Friend Boris was not so practised, and Lamont and I had an idiotic laugh. As for concepts, ‘I am,’ I confessed to the Guru, ‘quite unable to manage them.’
‘You should learn. Anything can be learnt. You need a teacher.’
The cigarettes passed from lips to lips. Neither Lamont nor I, however, touched them. The Guru did not offer himself as a teacher. His spectacles gleamed in the smoke. I heard the poet of fifteen years reciting in impassioned tones one of his own works to Lamont. Lamont allowed herself to chuckle sardonically.
Estelle was drunk. She had put her hand on my arm and was letting her head nod, not daring to speak for fear of sliding down the slippery slope of confessions and infidelities. On the other side of the table the Guru, head bowed, was retailing his adventures ‘in the wild mountains of the Lebanon, realm of the Druses and the Assassins’.
‘Godlike Hashishins,’ murmured the poet. Boris was dragging at his third or fourth joint, and muttering insults to me in a low voice. ‘Do you expect to have your dinner paid for, you sponger?’ Lamont suddenly disappeared, and we did not see her again till the moment for settling up. ‘I’m going home,’ I whispered in her ear. Estelle had slipped her arm under mine and Boris under the influence of cannabis had landed her a vicious slap. But once again Lamont gently shook her head. She needed me; had I no desire to cross the town in such good company? I closed my eyes and breathed in the heavy ripe scent of powder on Lamont’s hair.
At the till we each paid for ourselves. I wanted Lamont to be my guest, even though it would cost me, I reckoned, three days of service at the Murillo college, my source of bread and butter in those hard times. One of these days was sacrificed at The Inconvenient, a steamy establishment on the Rue Delambre, on the altar of ‘Tangiers Kisses’—I do not know to this day what went into them—swallowed in the uproar. As the Guru, who could hardly hear himself speak, admitted, the ‘late’ bar was not a success. I drank other cocktails with crushed ice which plunged me into torpor. ‘You’re drinking too much,’ said Boris, who was further gone, however, than I. No, it was not to me he was speaking. To whom, then? The poet, who soon went out to vomit. When he came back Estelle gave the signal for departure. ‘Come on; now we’ll all go to Boris’s.’ Lamont smiled broadly and put her hand on my neck. ‘I really,’ she said, ‘must see this.’
‘Lamont! At the stage we’ve reached!’
I do not have
an accurate memory of Boris’s flat—or rather the flat of his parents, who were away. I have never been back there. Nor do I remember Boris’s face, though all evening I saw it wavering between Estelle and Lamont. Nor have I any better recollection of Boris’s sister, who was waiting upon us, neither of her face, nor her name, nor her voice. And she twined herself around us all, a virgin vine with carnivorous leaves. Had we woken her up? Had Boris warned her in advance? I don’t know. But in the large room in which we were installed and drank she never stopped walking to and fro, breathing noisily, muttering, casting upon us one after another furious glances of which we did not know what to think—except for the Guru, who eventually took her in his arms. It was four in the morning. The poet had fallen asleep on Lamont’s knee with open eyes. The sister, seized with a spasm of trembling, put her hands over her groin and started a loud snuffling, until Boris went over and smacked her on each cheek.
‘Come on, wake up, you’re being a bore.’
‘Boris, leave her in peace.’
‘It’s for her to leave us in peace. She’s making an exhibition of herself.’
‘I’m making an exhibition of your nothingness. You piss me off with your nothingness,’ retorted the sister. I started to laugh. The sister disengaged herself from the Guru and staggered uncertainly. Tears flowed over her cheeks, down her neck into her corsage. She advanced towards me. Lamont wore her animal smile.
The sister kissed me on the mouth.
‘In the past,’ she sobbed, ‘I have been disembowelled, cleaned out. Can’t you feel it?’ She took my hand, and made it slide beneath the belt of her skirt. ‘Can you feel it or can’t you?’
With the tips of my fingers I must have stroked the edges of her pubic hair. Alcohol then took control of me. I took the skin of her pubis between my thumb and forefinger and gave a sharp pinch. She screamed: ‘Boris! Boris! Boris!’
Boris pushed me against the window of the room.
‘Have you hurt her, you fucking bastard?’
‘I’ve done nothing.’
‘Bastard! Bastard! I’ll have you arrested.’
But to my amazement I was bigger than Boris and certainly stronger. Over his elbow I saw the Guru consoling the sister. Estelle was asleep in her turn on the sofa. Of Lamont and the poet there was no trace. They had gone, they claimed later, to look for croissants. ‘Lamont, you’re pulling my leg.’ They had not found any, and I have no recollection of any general reconciliation in the early morning. We left, Lamont and I, after the sun had risen. The sister, having been consoled by the Guru, who was drunk at last, set off in quest of a fresh drama. Estelle was snoring, and the three others once again manufactured their mystic cigarettes with the air of conspirators. They spoke of Guenon, of amnesia and of ecstasy, subjects suggested by Lamont, who had then quickly withdrawn from the conversation; she was disheartened, she said, by this fag end that travelled from mouth to mouth like a dead cockroach.
But in the early sun we were in a mood approaching joy. I proposed to Lamont that I should escort her home. She lived, by a happy chance, at Arcueil, near the autoroute.
‘It’s on my way,’ I said.
We had a coffee at the Place Denfert-Rochereau. I had remembered a Café d’Orient which had replaced a restaurant that was shut in the morning. The pavements steamed.
‘What would be fun would be to go home on foot, if you’re up to it.’
In the light of day Lamont’s appearance was changed. Her cheeks were fuller, but she put me in mind of a boy I had known, a passing friend who had once taught me to steal wallets in the Metro, an art I had only once put into practice. I told Lamont about it. She showed her teeth. I imagined her nude, sitting in a chair with her legs spread, and started to bleed at the nose. She laughed. And I wanted to go home on foot?
We went up the Avenue Coty and the deceptive slope of the Avenue Deutsch de la Meurthe. The night came back to me in all its drunkenness. ‘Those people, Lamont, do you really know them?’ Lamont had met Boris, Estelle’s friend, at a second-hand record-shop: she worked as a saleswoman on Sundays. They had often spoken together. They had become friends. When he was on his own, Boris was not so brutish.
We crossed the park of the Cité Universitaire, which had just opened. The lawns were empty. Towards the bottom of the campus tiredness overtook me. Lamont, who was walking in silence, hands in the pockets of her jacket, regarded me with a novel compassion. ‘I used to know that church,’ I said, pointing at the fearsome angels of the church of Gentilly. Lamont lived a little further on. We walked beside the tracks of the RER, which at the meeting point of Arcueil and Gentilly crosses the Autoroute du Sud. Lamont explained that she was house-sitting for friends who had gone abroad. The french window of the kitchen, through which she made me come in, as she put it, for a ‘refreshment’, opened upon a small garden. Lamont, seated at the kitchen table, her face between the yellow walls reflecting the pale morning light, closed her eyes. I did the same. We slept for a quarter of an hour, facing one another across the table. The dream we had did not come back to me till later in the day, after my visit to my dead grandfather.
Lamont accompanied me back as far as the street.
‘It can’t be too pleasant,’ I said, groping for something to say, ‘living between the line to Sceaux and the autoroute.’
She smiled. She had the whole house to herself, paying only a ‘peppercorn’ rent. She chose this expression carefully.
Lamont wrote her telephone number in my notebook. The address I already knew, didn’t I? I shook her hand—that too faute de mieux. But the skin of her face was so pale, so insubstantial, that it made me fear I should be kissing only emptiness.
II
My grandfather died that afternoon, one hour, I was told, before my arrival. ‘We called your mother, but there was no reply.’ My mother had gone to Italy with her second husband. The nurse took me to my grandfather’s room—a different room from the one he had occupied for the last two months. The blinds were lowered. My grandfather was lying on his bed, the arms spread apart a little from the body, and his mouth wide open.
‘Someone will come and close it, sir. Don’t you worry.’
The woman left me alone, and I passed my hand over my grandfather’s cheek, which was still warm—something at least above the temperature of the room—still warm and soft, so much so that I bent over to kiss it. In the passage I started to cry. My tears fell on the linoleum, squeezed out by my tiredness as much as by true grief. The nurse took me back to the waiting room and offered me coffee. In my mind’s eye I saw Lamont again, her face almost translucent in the morning light, her eyes fathomless, her elbows on the kitchen table. I nearly telephoned her from the hospital to tell her about my grandfather with his mouth open upon its dead interior, an open mouth I ought never to have seen.
‘Is it the first dead person you have seen?’ asked the nurse.
I had already seen my two grandmothers and a young motorcyclist, the top of his skull broken open. But it was my mother I called, not Lamont. My mother and her husband came back to France next day and took charge of everything.
Nevertheless, the same evening, when I had gone to bed and was torn with spells of grief, the dream returned to me that I had had in Lamont’s kitchen—the dream I dreamt along with Lamont. It was like this. After having offered me a cup of coffee Lamont stood up and signed to me to follow her. We went out of the kitchen. The rest of the house smelt of saltpetre. Lamont opened a door that gave onto the stairs to the basement, a white clean room lit by a naked bulb. Next, another door, another room, and then a small bathroom. Lamont sat down on the cover of the lavatory and seated me upon the rim of the bath. She raised her arms upwards, and I rose precipitately. A man’s body, cut in pieces and neatly skinned, was arranged in the bath. Lamont moved me aside with an affectionate gesture, turned on the hot tap. The steaming water flowed over the pieces of the man, whose head was placed face down between his two bare feet. We both awoke at this moment and looked at each other
in a quandary by the yellow light of the kitchen.
I often saw Lamont in Paris, and almost always took her back to her door; but I never again went into her house, or rather into the house of her friends, if they really existed. She invited me once or twice. I refused under various pretexts; and she did not speak of it again. Lamont, now that I reflect on it, plunged me into a blissful stupor. I walked close to her; I often brushed against her hand or her thigh inadvertently; her shoulders stiffened; and a chill spread through my legs. In these moments of weakness memories came to me—something I had experienced since that first night—memories which I took for my own, but which perhaps were only inventions by Lamont. These fragments were hard to pin down: lost worlds, pounded up in Lamont’s brain.
Then she left Paris for the United States. She had an uncle there or a cousin—I forget which—who could provide for her and give her a final year at university. What she was studying, how she really lived, I have never known and I never asked. She gave me an address in Portland, Oregon, and I went with her to the airport. The house in which she had once received me, the house in which we had slept and dreamed together, remained, so far as I could see, empty.
As for Estelle, she gave no sign of life until she visited me one September evening shortly after Lamont’s departure, in the small house which I left a month later for my grandfather’s flat in Paris. In the autumn I was still living at Plessis-Robinson in this little damp cabin at the bottom of a garden; a clump of withered lilacs grew under my window. The evening when Estelle came I was slightly out of sorts, trying to write a letter to Lamont. I wanted to be amusing, but could not bring it off. I was lying fully dressed on the bed, my letter on my chest, a book with a hard cover within reach. On the ceiling I saw shadows passing, a flotilla of them, trembling waves: but neither Lamont nor me among them.
Someone tapped on the window pane. From the bed I saw my neighbour’s son making a face.
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