Paris Stories
Page 42
She came toward him now, carrying the bag she had packed so that he would have everything he needed at the hotel. “Don’t touch the bruise,” she said, gently, removing the hand full of small shipwrecks. The other thing she said today, which he is bound to recall later on, was “You ought to start getting used to the idea of leaving this place. You know that it is going to be torn down.”
Well, it is true. At the entrance to the doomed and decaying little colony there is a poster, damaged by weather and vandals, on which one can still see a depiction of the structure that will cover the ruin, once it has finally been brought down: a handsome biscuit-colored multipurpose urban complex comprising a library, a crèche, a couple of municipal offices, a screening room for projecting films about Bedouins or whales, a lounge where elderly people may spend the whole day playing board games, a theater for amateur and professional performances, and four low-rent work units for painters, sculptors, poets, musicians, and photographers. (A waiting list of two thousand names was closed some years ago.) It seems to Theo that Julita was still around at the time when the poster was put up. The project keeps running into snags—aesthetic, political, mainly economic. One day the poster will have been his view of the future for more than a third of his life.
Mathilde backed out of the cul-de-sac, taking care (he does not like being driven), and she said, “Theo, we are near all these hospitals. If you think you should have an X ray at once, we can go to an emergency service. I can’t decide, because I really don’t know how you got hurt.”
“Not now.” He wanted today to wind down. Mathilde, in her mind, seemed to have gone beyond dropping him at his hotel. He had agreed to something on Rue Delambre, behind the Coupole and the Dôme. She was on the far side of Paris, with Alain. As she drove on, she asked Theo if he could suggest suitable French for a few English expressions: “divided attention” and “hard-driven” and “matchless perfection,” the latter in one word.
“I hope no one steals my Alpine beret,” he said. “I left it hanging on the cat.”
Those were the last words they exchanged today. It is how they said good-bye.
MAVIS GALLANT was born in Montreal in 1922, and left a career as a leading journalist in that city to move to Paris in 1950 to write. Since that time she has been publishing stories on a regular basis in The New Yorker, many of which have been anthologized. Her world-wide reputation has been established by books such as From the Fifteenth District and Home Truths, which won the Governor General’s Award in 1982. In that same year she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, becoming a Companion of the Order in 1993, the year that she published Across the Bridge and was the recipient of a special tribute at the Harbourfront International Festival of Authors in Toronto. In 1996, The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant was published to universal acclaim.
Gallant is a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She has received several honorary degrees from Canadian universities and has won numerous awards, including the Canada Council Molson Prize for the Arts, the inaugural Matt Cohen Award, the Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix and the Rea Award for the Short Story.
She continues to live in Paris.
MICHAEL ONDAATJE is the author of five novels, including Anil’s Ghost, which won the Irish Times International Fiction Award, The English Patient, which won the Booker Prize and In the Skin of a Lion, the “Canada Reads” choice. He has written a memoir, Running in the Family, and his books of poetry include Handwriting and The Cinnamon Peeler. His most recent book is The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film.
He lives in Toronto.
Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Introduction by Michael Ondaatje
Dedication
The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street
Irina
The Latehomecomer
In Transit
The Moslem Wife
From the Fifteenth District
Speck’s Idea
Baum, Gabriel, 1935–( )
The Remission
Grippes and Poche
Forain
August
Mlle. Dias de Corta
In Plain Sight
Scarves, Beads, Sandals
About the Author