I'm Gone

by Jean Echenoz

  He was about to walk away from the gallery when a woman’s silhouette appeared at the end of the street; her outline was familiar, but it took him a moment to recognize Hélène. It was not the first time Ferrer had some difficulty identifying her: at the hospital, when she came into his room, he experienced the same latency period, knowing perfectly well it was she while each time having to reconstruct her person, go back to square one, as if her features did not spontaneously organize themselves. These features were nonetheless beautiful and harmoniously arranged; that wasn’t the problem, and Ferrer could admire each one individually. It was their relationship to each other that was constantly altering, never ending up at exactly the same face. You might have thought they were in perpetual displacement, in precarious balance, as if their very composition were unstable. It was therefore not entirely the same person that Ferrer had before him each time he saw Hélène.

  The latter had come by chance, not planning or expecting anything: offering her a drink, Ferrer reopened the gallery. Then, going to fetch some chilled champagne in the studio, he decided to study Hélène’s face this time with patience and precision, the way one learns a lesson; to know it once and for all and rid himself of the disturbance it caused. But his efforts were all the more vain in that Hélène today, for the first time, had put on makeup, which changed and complicated everything.

  For makeup masks the sensory organs even as it decorates them—or at least, nota bene, those with multiple uses. The mouth, for example—which breathes and speaks and eats, drinks, smiles, whispers, kisses, sucks, licks, bites, pants, sighs, cries, smokes, grimaces, laughs, sings, whistles, hiccups, spits, belches, vomits, exhales—is painted (and that’s the least of it) to honor it for carrying out so many noble functions. One can also paint the area around the eyes, which gaze, express, cry, and shut in sleep—equally noble. And one can paint the nails, which have a box seat at the immense and noble variety of manual operations.

  But one doesn’t put makeup on things that render only one or two services. Neither the ear, good only for hearing, from which one merely dangles a pendant of some kind. Nor the nose—limited to breathing, smelling, and sometimes getting stuffy—which, like ears, might have a hoop attached, or a precious stone, a pearl, or even in certain latitudes a real bone, whereas here one mainly just powders it. But Hélène sported none of these accessories: she had put on just some ruby-colored lipstick, eye shadow hovering somewhere around raw sienna, and a brief shot of eyeliner. As Ferrer saw it, opening the champagne, this would make matters supremely complicated.

  Then again, no, it wouldn’t have time to make them anything at all, for at that instant the telephone rang: “Supin here. I’m calling earlier than expected. I think I might have found something.” Scrambling for a pencil, Ferrer listened carefully, jotted down a few words on the back of an envelope, then profusely thanked the man from Criminal Identification. “It’s nothing,” said Supin. “Just luck. We have good relations with Spanish customs,” he reiterated, “and I have an excellent colleague in the motorcycle cops down there who did a little tailing in his spare time. So much for all that hype about rivalries among the police.”

  Once he’d hung up, Ferrer nervously filled two champagne flutes, causing them to spill over. “I’m going to have to leave in just a moment,” he said. “But in the meantime, maybe we’ll finally have something to drink to, you and I.”

  32

  Whether it’s by the autoroute or the national highway that you head for the south of Spain, whether you cross the border at Hendaye or Béhobie, you must pass through San Sebastián. After Ferrer had driven through somber industrial wastelands, skirted oppressive blocks of Francoist architecture, and asked himself numerous times what he was doing there, he suddenly entered the large, unexpected seaside resort. It was built on a narrow strip of earth, on either side of a river and a mountain that separated two nearly symmetrical bays, this double indentation tracing an approximate omega, a woman’s bust that pushed into the inland regions, two oceanic breasts corseted by the Spanish coast.

  Ferrer parked his rental car in the underground lot near the main bay, then registered in a small hotel in the center of town. For a week he walked down wide, calm, airy boulevards, attentively washed, lined with serious, light-colored buildings; but also down short, narrow streets, also swept with care, dark and overhung with narrow, nervous buildings. Palaces and grand hotels, bridges and parks, baroque, gothic, and neogothic churches, spanking new arenas, huge beaches flanked by a thalassotherapy spa, the Royal Tennis Club, and the casino. One more solemn than the next, the four bridges were paved with mosaic tiles and laced with stone, glass, and cast iron, decorated with white and gold obelisks, wrought-iron streetlamps, sphinxes, and turrets bearing royal monograms. The water of the river was green veering to blue as it threw itself into the ocean. Ferrer haunted these bridges, but more often he strode up the promenade that trimmed the conchoidal bay, the center of which was occupied by a little island topped with a minuscule castle.

  For days on end he wandered around like this, with no particular goal other than a chance encounter, trying to inventory all the different neighborhoods. He ended up tiring of this city that was both too large and too small, where you were never sure where you were even while knowing it all too well. Supin had given no further indication other than the name San Sebastián, accompanied by a hypothesis with limited probability. Whether the antiques thief was actually living there was anybody’s guess.

  At mealtimes, Ferrer mainly frequented the many bustling small bars of the old town where you can eat all sorts of things while standing at the counter and where you’re not obliged to take your solitary nourishment seated at a table, which can be so demoralizing. But this, too, grew tiring: Ferrer finally came across an unpretentious restaurant near the port where his solitude was less of a burden. He called Elisabeth at the gallery every afternoon, and at night he went to bed early. Still, after a week his undertaking struck him as hopeless. Looking for a stranger in a strange town made no sense at all, and discouragement overtook him. Before thinking about returning to Paris, Ferrer would spend a few more days in this city, but without crisscrossing it in vain, preferring to doze away his afternoons in a deck chair on the beach when the autumn weather allowed, then to kill his last evenings alone at the bar of the María Cristina Hotel in a leather armchair, facing a glass of txakoli and a full-length portrait of a doge.

  One evening, when the entire ground floor of the María Cristina was invaded by a noisy party of conventioning oncologists, Ferrer decided to go instead to the London & England Hotel, an establishment only slightly less tony than his, whose bar had the advantage of large airy windows overlooking the bay. The ambience that evening was much calmer than at the María Cristina: three or four middle-aged couples sitting in the common room, two or three men standing alone at the bar, little movement, few comings or goings. Ferrer sat all the way at the end of the room, near one of the large windows. Night had fallen. The lights of the coast were reflected in wavy columns on an ocean of oil, where twenty-five light-colored silhouettes of pleasure craft rested in peace near the port.

  Now depending on how your eyes focused on them, these windows allowed you to see either outside or into the immobile common room by a rearview effect. A movement soon appeared at the opposite end of the bar: the revolving door turned on itself for a moment, disgorging Baumgartner, who went to lean against the bar next to the single men, his back turned to the bay. Distantly reflected in the window, those shoulders and that back put a crease in Ferrer’s brow. His eyes gradually focused more and more closely on them, then he finally stood up from his seat and approached the bar with a cautious step. Stopping six feet away from Baumgartner, he hesitated a moment, then went closer.

  “Excuse me,” he said, lightly posing two fingers on the man’s shoulder, causing him to turn around. “Well,” said Ferrer. “Delahaye. I thought as much.”

  33

  Not content with not being dead, whic
h in the end didn’t surprise Ferrer all that much, Delahaye had undergone quite a change in the past few months. He had even been transformed. The jumble of vague and obtuse angles that had always defined his person had given way to a series of razor-sharp lines and perspectives, as if the whole picture had been overly focused.

  Now, as Baumgartner, everything about him was impeccably drawn: his tie whose knot (when he wore one) had hung askew at some vague angle from the collar of his shirt; the crease of his trousers that was always flat out and k.o.’d at the knees; his very smile, which before did not stay on track and quickly wilted, bent, melted like an ice cube in the tropics; the tenuous side part of his hair; his slanted belt; the crooked stems of his glasses; even his gaze—all the sketchy, confused, unfinished, muddled segments of his body had been straightened, stiffened, and starched. The uncontrolled wires of his shapeless mustache had themselves been sheared into an impeccable realignment, a perfect, meticulously trimmed thread, as if traced Latin-style with a fine brush along his upper lip.

  He and Ferrer considered each other a moment in silence. No doubt to give himself something to do, Delahaye began to twirl the glass in his hand gently on itself, then stilled his movement: the contents of the glass pursued their rotation alone before settling down in turn.

  “Right,” said Ferrer. “Why don’t we go find a seat. It’ll be easier to talk.”

  “Okay,” sighed Delahaye.

  They left the bar for the groups of deep armchairs, arrayed in threes and fours around covered pedestal tables. “Take your pick,” said Ferrer. “I’m right behind you.”

  From there, as he followed, he observed the clothes worn by his former assistant: in this domain, too, Delahaye had changed. His anthracite-gray double-breasted flannel suit seemed to act as a back brace, so straight did the man now carry himself. As he turned to take a seat, Ferrer registered a midnight blue tie over a pearl-colored pinstripe shirt, oxfords the color of antique furniture on his feet, tie clip and cuff links emitting dull sparkles, muffled tones of muted opal and frosted gold—in short, he was dressed exactly as Ferrer had always wanted him to be at the gallery. The one flaw in the picture was when Delahaye dropped into a chair and the hems of his trousers lifted: the elastics of his socks seemed inordinately loose.

  “You look really good like that,” said Ferrer. “Where do you buy your clothes?”

  “I didn’t have anything left to wear,” answered Delahaye. “I had to pick up a few things down here. You can find some great stuff in the center of town, you wouldn’t believe how much cheaper it is than in France.” Then he straightened in his chair, adjusted his tie, which had shifted slightly off-center—excess of emotion, no doubt—and pulled up the socks corkscrewed over his ankles.

  “My wife gave me these socks,” he added absently. “But they don’t stay up, you see? They tend to fall down.”

  “Ah,” Ferrer said, “that’s pretty common. Socks people give you always fall down.”

  “That’s true,” Delahaye said with a tight smile. “That’s an excellent observation. Can I buy you a drink?”

  “With pleasure,” said Ferrer. Delahaye signaled to a white jacket. They waited in silence for their order to arrive, then without smiling they raised their glasses and drank.

  “Right,” Delahaye then ventured. “What do we do now?”

  “I’m not quite sure yet,” said Ferrer. “That depends largely on you. Shall we go for a walk?”

  They left the London & England Hotel and, instead of heading toward the ocean, which that evening seemed to be of violent disposition, took the opposite direction. The days began to shorten more and more frenetically; night thickened more and more quickly. They turned a corner onto Avenida de la Libertad, toward one of the bridges spanning the river.

  Although this powerful waterway pours continuously into the Cantabrian sea, when the sea is too strong it flows back into the river, opposes and invades it; the fresh water chokes on so much bellicose salt. Then the countercurrents, after crashing against the piles of the Zurriola and Santa Catalina bridges, die down past the María Cristina bridge. Nonetheless they continue to shake the river, stirring it up below the surface, making the waters undulate as peristaltic movements do a stomach, as far as the Mundalz bridge and probably even farther. The two men stopped midway across the bridge. As they momentarily contemplated the war between insipid and salty being waged beneath them, and as Delahaye fleetingly recalled that he’d never learned how to swim, an idea crossed Ferrer’s mind.

  “I could get rid of you once and for all, when you get down to it,” he said softly but without much conviction. “I could drown you, for example, it wouldn’t be that hard. When you think about it, I probably should, for all the shit you’ve put me through.”

  As Delahaye hastily objected that such an action could only bring woe upon its perpetrator, Ferrer pointed out that since he had already disappeared officially, a second disappearance would surely pass unnoticed. “Everyone thinks you’re dead,” he reminded Delahaye. “You no longer have any legal existence. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? So what risk would I be taking by eliminating you now? Killing a dead man isn’t a crime,” he supposed, not realizing he was reproducing the same logic that Delahaye had imposed on The Flounder.

  “Come on, now,” said Delahaye, “you’re not going to do that.”

  “No,” Ferrer allowed, “I don’t believe so. Besides, I wouldn’t know how to go about it. I’m not all that familiar with the techniques. Admit it, though, you fucked up.”

  “I admit it,” said Delahaye. “Watch your language, but I admit that.”

  All this wasn’t getting them very far, so for lack of arguments they fell silent for a minute or two. Ferrer wondered what had gotten into him to make him swear like that. Sometimes a stronger wave exploded noisily against a pile of the bridge, tossing fringes of foam as far as their shoes. The sugarloaf-shaped lamps of the María Cristina bridge projected an intimate glow. Upstream, they could see those of the Zurriola, shaped like ice-cream cones with three or four scoops, but which shed more light.

  “So,” Ferrer speculated calmly, “I could nail you for theft or larceny, fraud, what do I know. But theft is already illegal enough. I imagine passing yourself off for dead isn’t terribly kosher either, do you think?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Delahaye responded. “I didn’t really look into it.”

  “Besides, if you’ve already done that much,” Ferrer said, “it probably didn’t stop there. I suppose there’s more I don’t even know about.” Remembering The Flounder’s sad fate, Delahaye abstained from commenting on that supposition.

  “All right,” he said, “I blew it. All right, fine, I blew it. These things happen. But what am I going to do now, did you ever think of that? At the end of the day, you’re the one who comes out of this smelling like roses,” he added shamelessly. “You’re still the one getting the better end of the deal.”

  With that, Ferrer shoved Delahaye against the guardrail, insulting him in a mutter, and began squeezing his throat without thinking. “You miserable little asshole,” he then cried more distinctly. And losing all sense of restraint even after he’d scolded himself that same evening for using obscenities: “You sorry little fucked-up piece of shit”—while the other, head thrown back above the roiling waters, having tried to mouth a few obscenities himself, could now only gargle no, no, I’m begging you, no.

  We have not taken the time, in the nearly one year that we’ve known him, to give a physical description of Ferrer. As this rather intense scene does not really lend itself to a long digression, we won’t linger on it. Let’s just say briefly that he’s fairly tall, in his fifties, brown-haired with green eyes, or gray depending on the weather. Let’s also say that he’s not bad-looking, and let’s specify that, despite his heart problems of all kinds and although he isn’t particularly well-built, his strength can multiply when he gets worked up. That’s what appears to be happening now.

  “You pathetic shit
-ass piece of garbage,” he continued to shout, perilously compressing Delahaye’s glottis, “fucking little shitty little two-bit swindler.”

  Cars passed over the bridge, a fishing boat glided underneath with lights off, four pedestrians ignoring their dispute fleetingly appeared on the opposite sidewalk, but no one stopped, despite the noise and the fact that it threatened to end badly. “No,” Delahaye was now hiccuping, “please, no.”

  “Shut your face, asshole, just shut it,” Ferrer spat violently, “or you’ll see how fast I can fucking shut it for you.” And as the other started to go into convulsions, Ferrer felt his carotids beating frantically behind the angle of his jaw just as precisely as he’d seen his own arteries, several months earlier, during the electrocardiogram. “Jesus Christ!” he wondered all the while. “What’s gotten into me tonight to swear like this?”

  34

  The days ran their course, having no alternative, in the usual order. First there was a whole day on the road, Ferrer having decided that he was in no hurry to return to Paris. Stopping for a leisurely lunch near Angoulême, allowing himself a detour of no particular scenic interest, just to give himself time to review and preview. In the car, which didn’t have a signal scanner, he had to cruise the FM dial every sixty miles or so. It was, in any case, absently and at low volume that Ferrer listened to the radio, which served only as soundtrack to the film of the last twenty hours that he projected for himself in a continuous loop.