To take up residence in the flat, for however brief a spell, would be a mistake: that he surely knew. Not to take up residence would be no less of a mistake. The thing was to make the right mistake, not the wrong one.
When Isabelle came to grace his forehead with a prim, sisterly kiss and apologise, with what certainly sounded like sincerity, for her callousness, Matthew said yes. They would collect his belongings from the hotel room later that day.
It transpired that the flat did after all contain a wing of sorts, one inhabited exclusively by the young people. They had even given it a name: le quartier des enfants. On Matthew’s way to the kitchen, where all three of them sat with elbows on the table and dunked buttered tartines into their bowls of coffee, he realised how far from the centre of the household their bedrooms were.
Since he had always had too fragile a constitution to have been packed off to summer camp as a child, and thus had never known the experience of breakfasting outside his own family circle, Matthew was determined to preserve the memory of that very first morning as, in its pristine state, unwrinkled by projection, one preserves the negative of a film. But his determination ended by investing each of his gestures with an unwarranted solemnity. Like Queen Christina, he felt he was touching that coffee bowl, that spoon, that sugar shaker, for the last rather than the first time.
It rained all day and the three friends stayed indoors. Having withdrawn early to his study to tend his inspiration, the poet manifested no further interest in Matthew’s welfare. His wife had gone shopping for the trip to Trouville.
The boys spent the day lounging about Théo’s bedroom as bonelessly as cats, chatting, devising movie quizzes with which to test each other’s memory, bringing Théo’s albums up to date.
Isabelle, for her part, had no patience with their infantile pastimes. She read a novel by Queneau, voraciously turning its pages as though the foot of every page heralded some stunning reversal whose consequence would only be divulged at the top of the next. From time to time, she uncoiled her angular limbs, stretched over to a small record-player on the carpet and set its needle down on a record, invariably the same scratchy number, Charles Trenet’s ‘Que reste-t-il de nos amours?’, to which she was addicted.
Ce soir le vent qui frappe à ma porte
Me parle des amours mortes
Devant le feu qui s’éteint.
Ce soir c’est une chanson d’automne
Devant la maison qui frissonne
Et je pense aux jours lointains.
Que reste-t-il de nos amours?
Que reste-t-il de ces bons jours?
Une photo, vieille photo
De ma jeunesse.
Que reste-t-il des billets-doux,
Des mois d’avril, des rendezvous?
Un souvenir qui me poursuit
Sans cesse.
Bonheurs fanés, cheveux aux vents,
Baisers volés, rêves mouvants,
Que reste-t-il de tout cela?
Dîtes-le-moi.
Un p’tit village, un vieux clocher,
Un paysage si bien caché,
Et dans un nuage le cher visage
De mon passé.
When Isabelle stirred herself to play the song yet again, for what must have been the ninth or tenth time, her brother glared at her.
‘If I have to listen to that record once more, I swear I’ll break it in two.’
Isabelle’s eyes opened wide in amazement.
‘You like Charles Trenet.’
‘Wrong. I used to.’
‘Listen to him, Matthew. Théo’s seen Laura eight times – eight times, can you imagine? And he orders me to stop playing one little record. Well, I won’t.’
Attempting to feign nonchalant unflappability, she set the needle back down.
After the statutory crackly hiss, the record clearing its throat, Trenet’s voice rang out.
Ce soir le vent qui frappe à ma porte
Me parle des amours mortes
Devant le feu qui s’éteint.
Théo galvanised his long lazy frame into life and Isabelle at once installed herself in front of the record-player to shield it from him. A clash of arms seemed inevitable. Then:
Que reste-t-il des billets-doux,
Des mois d’avril, des rendezvous?
Un souvenir qui me poursuit …
Un souvenir qui me poursuit …
Un souvenir qui me poursuit …
The needle had stuck.
Instead of appeasing Théo’s rage, the accident fuelled it. Striving to push him away with her fists, Isabelle protested in a high, girlish shriek.
‘Stop it, stop it! Wait! Matthew, tell me. What film?’
‘What?’
Isabelle was still trying to fend off Théo.
‘Name a film – arrête, je te dis! – name a film in which a needle gets stuck in a record. Forfeit to pay if you can’t answer.’
‘A needle gets stuck in a record?’
‘Quick, quick, or you pay the forfeit!’
Matthew racked his memory and finally trumpeted, ‘Top Hat!’
‘Top Hat?’
‘Remember? Fred Astaire is tap-dancing in his hotel room above Ginger Rogers’ suite and the record sticks?’
Isabelle reflected for a few seconds, trying to summon a mental image of the scene.
‘He’s right, you know,’ said Théo.
‘Then bravo, my little Matthew!’ Isabelle cried.
‘But, Isabelle, what would the forfeit have been?’
‘Ah,’ said she, ‘that would be telling.’
And that was how the game began.
Isabelle, for whom everything had to be given a name, even those things that need no names, christened it Home Movies. The idea was this: they would be calmly going about their business, together or separately, reading, playing backgammon in front of the fire, assigning stars to the films listed in L’Officiel des Spectacles – it tended to be the most humdrum of occupations – when one of them, besieged without premeditation by some idle memory, would come to a halt, re-enact a snippet of mise en scène for the benefit of the other two and call out ‘What film?’ or ‘What scene?’ or else ‘Name a character who …’
Later that same day, for example, filing newspaper cuttings he had been accumulating for years, Théo placed a glass paperweight – the type which, inverted, produces a miniature snowstorm – on top of them. Then, with a reckless sweep of his shoulders, perhaps deliberate, perhaps not, he knocked it on to the carpet. Without even giving him an opportunity to pose the prescribed question, Matthew and Isabelle cried out in unison, ‘Citizen Kane!’
That was an easy one. But, with time, the game became more and more difficult. On another morning, in the kitchen, this exchange could be heard between Matthew and Théo.
‘Théo, I wonder –’
‘Matthew, would you –’
A pause, then:
‘Go ahea -’
‘Sorry. What was –’
A further pause.
‘I just want –’
‘I meant to –’
It was then that Matthew pounced.
‘Name a film!’
‘What?’
‘Come on, Théo. Name a film, just one film, in which two people keep trying to speak at the same time.’
What ensued were mingled protestations of ‘Don’t tell me, don’t tell me!’ and ‘Time’s up! Forfeit!’ – until Théo either named the film or paid the forfeit.
The forfeits had, to start with, a strictly monetary basis. A franc, two francs, fifty centimes, depending on the victim’s resources and the victor’s whim. But they would rapidly grow bored with such trifling prizes, which, in truth, as their meagre funds were eventually to be pooled, came to seem all very pointless. No, just as a hierarchy of trials, ordeals and challenges would transform this game, one that had started so harmlessly in childish pranks and giggles, into a sacrament and a liturgy, so, in their turn, would its forfeits acquire an entirely new si
gnificance.
Let’s return to that first afternoon. Théo and Matthew left the flat at five o’clock. Théo’s mobylette stood padlocked and chained at the foot of the stairs in the apartment building’s hallway. The plan was that he would ride to the hotel with Matthew on the pillion seat, deposit his passenger in front of it and return home, leaving Matthew to pack his bags and make his own way back to the flat in a taxi. But there would be a detour in his itinerary, one he hadn’t dared divulge to Isabelle, for he intended to take a turn round the Cinémathèque to see whether, by chance, it had reopened its doors. Fearing his sister’s viperish tongue, he swore Matthew to secrecy on pain of torture.
Yet someone who entreats you not to divulge a confidence will almost certainly blurt it out again before you do. So it proved here. So quickly, indeed, that by the time Matthew re-entered the quartier des enfants, Isabelle was already privy to a secret which not even the rack would have drawn from his own lips. Need it be said, the Fermé sign was still attached to the Cinémathèque grille.
Matthew, too, had his secret. It was Tuesday, the day on which he was accustomed to go to confession. Which is why, after Théo had sped away, he walked off in the opposite direction from his hotel and took the metro to the avenue Hoche.
There, in the English church, in an alcove directly facing the confessional, stood a plaster Madonna with a globe of the world, like a basketball, clutched in her hands over the sculpted folds of her robe. Her pale head tilted to one side. Her halo, ringed by a garland of stars, resembled an electric fan in motion. Her glazed, unfocusing eyes were open but looked closed, as though false pupils had been pencilled on to the surface of her eyelids.
Matthew knelt before her and prayed for something which it isn’t regarded as proper to pray for, something which, if ever it came to pass, he would be compelled to confess and repent.
In vain he struggled with himself not to articulate, even wordlessly, his blasphemous appeal. Alas, the trouble with the flesh is not that it’s weak but that it’s strong.
In fact, the Virgin heard his prayer. And even if her painted eyes did not shed any tears, Matthew’s did – which is itself a kind of miracle.
Walking back along the aisle, he noticed an elderly woman leaving the confessional booth. After a moment of hesitation, he entered it in his turn.
‘Bless me, Father,’ he mumbled, ‘for I have sinned.’
The priest’s accent was Irish, his voice weary and sonorous.
‘How long is it since you’ve been to confession?’
‘You don’t understand, Father,’ said Matthew, impatient to be done with it. ‘I’ve just sinned. Right here in your church.’
‘Eh?’ said the dozy priest, who had abruptly snapped out of his torpor.
Back at the hotel Matthew stuffed his belongings into a leather suitcase. Then he paid his bill and had the receptionist ring for a taxi.
When his taxi stopped at traffic lights near the carrefour de l’Odéon, a fire engine went storming past, its siren wailing, its massive hosepiping coiled like braided hair, its scarlet-clad firemen clinging on for dear life like the Keystone Kops. Its appearance made him think of his bedroom in San Diego, of his parents’ house, of their neighbours’ houses all alike in having sprinklers on their lawns and beige-and-cream station wagons parked outside their open garage doors. For there is something cosy, unexpectedly conducive to nostalgia, about a fire engine.
He looked away again. The lights turned to green and the taxi drove off.
That evening Matthew dined with Théo and Isabelle in a seafood brasserie on the place Bienvenue in Montparnasse. It was his treat for having been invited to stay at the flat. They ordered a colossal platter of oysters, mussels, crayfish, whelks, shrimp, crab and lobster, all nestling on a bed of crushed ice. Plying hammers, pincers and tongs, they left the plate as devastated as an archaeological dig.
It was a few minutes after midnight when they returned to the flat. The poet and his wife had already retired. Their plan was to set out for Trouville at the crack of dawn.
Not infrequently, when about to begin or end one of his books, the poet chose in this way to decamp to his summer house on the Normandy coast. And though, on earlier trips, when his children were children, his wife had remained in Paris, her presence was now required at his side, should ever, at some eternal twenty-past or twenty-to the inspirational hour, the capricious guardian angel of his Muse decline to alight on the virgin page.
The children, he insisted, could be trusted on their own. They were mature, intelligent beings. Besides, there was his sister, a maiden lady in her early sixties, to ensure that all was as it should be.
And, time and time again, he would be proved right. He and his wife would arrive back to find the flat in shipshape order, their offspring conscientiously engaged on homework, translating Virgil or working out some mathematical puzzle involving pipes, wash basins and dripping taps.
Unguessed, undreamt of, was the metamorphosis which the flat and its occupants had meanwhile undergone. For each such departure of their parents would leave the two young people to their own devices. Many, various and wonderful were these devices, and both Théo and Isabelle, at least since their adolescence, would avail themselves of the physical and spiritual freedom vouchsafed them. Like gamblers who, deprived of their cards or dice, will bet on car registration numbers, on the speed at which raindrops slither down a window pane, on anything at all, they needed nothing but a mutual, unconditionally offered complicity to descend to their private shades.
Venturing into the world at large, they dipped their lights as a car will dip its headlamps when encountering another on a nocturnal highway. Thereafter, when once the door to the world had closed behind them, these same lights would blaze out brightly, blinding the naked eye.
What was to happen, then, was not a new occurrence; if their folly this time was more acute, it was maybe that in Matthew they had at last found a child for their incestuous cradle.
The first few days were uneventful. Every morning, in the kitchen, they breakfasted on cold cereal, undaunted by the fragments of dried cornflakes with which the sides of their unrinsed bowls would become encrusted. Then Isabelle would accompany her brother on his mobylette to the lycée which both of them attended, while Matthew took the metro to his own school in the suburbs. Every evening, on their return, shedding overcoats, jackets and scarves over the hallway floor, they withdrew into the quartier des enfants and gave themselves up to the increasingly compulsive sessions of Home Movies, for which they had now started to keep a score.
These were blissful days for Matthew, who would sometimes, on his way back from school, travel by metro no further than Denfert-Rochereau. From there, with a springing step, he would walk the remaining distance to the flat, titillating himself with the prospect of spending yet another evening in the company of his beloved mentors and tormentors.
Inevitably, though, things couldn’t last too long as they were. For this is how a drug works. It ensnares its victim with the finesse of a card-sharp, letting the future addict win a few hands before moving in for the kill. Théo and Isabelle were born addicts, addicts to whose cravings the cinema and each other were the sole opiates ever to have presented themselves. And Matthew – who, had he not left San Diego, would doubtless have married some childhood sweetheart, some winsome flirt, all patience, gratitude and guile – Matthew had once and for all pledged himself to their unstable fortunes.
The first phase of Home Movies, its prehistory, was therefore of fairly short duration, and it wasn’t long before Isabelle, exasperated by having to wait for chance to strike unbidden, decided to force the issue.
One afternoon, wearing white overalls, an improvised white turban and a pair of white-rimmed dark glasses, like some thirties Hollywood actress snapped in a relaxed pose on the veranda of her Bel Air mansion, she looked into Théo’s bedroom, where he and Matthew were reading aloud to each other from back numbers of Cahiers du Cinéma. Her beady eyes registered the mou
nting clutter of books, magazines, underclothes, half-consumed sandwiches and peanut shells. Smiling to herself, she took a cigarette and tapped one end of it against the pack with clipped, staccato violence. Then, with an ostentatious puff, chewing the remark in the corner of her mouth as though it were a wad of bubble gum, she spat out, ‘What a dump!’
Without raising his eyes from the page, Théo mechanically called back, ‘Liz Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.’
Isabelle beamed in triumph.
‘Wrong!’
‘I am not!’
‘Yes you are!’
‘In the opening scene of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf –’
Realising his mistake, he broke off.
‘Oh, I get it. She’s imitating someone else, isn’t she? Bette Davis?’
‘In what, brother dear?’
‘God, I should know this. Is it a film I’ve seen?’
‘We saw it together.’
‘We did?’
He thought hard.
‘Give me a clue.’
‘Certainly not.’
‘Be a sport. The director’s name.’
‘No.’
‘Just the director’s name.’
‘No.’
‘The number of words in the title.’
‘I said no.’
‘The number of words in the title? Is that asking so much?’ He started to wheedle. ‘S’il te plaît, Isa, s’il te plaît.’
‘No.’
‘The first letter of the first word.’
‘God, you’re pathetic,’ Isabelle said with a sneer. ‘Isn’t he pathetic, Matthew? Don’t you think he’s pathetic?’
‘Matthew!’ Théo cried. ‘I bet you know!’
The Dreamers Page 6