by Jean Echenoz
Things had gone almost too easily with Delahaye. After a moment of irritation, Ferrer had calmed down and they’d wound up negotiating. Delahaye, dazed and confused, found himself blocked at every turn. Nourishing great expectations for the clandestine sale of the antiques, anticipating enormous revenues, in the space of several months he had blown all his savings on luxury hotels and deluxe clothes: by now, he had almost nothing left. These expectations had been dashed by the arrival of Ferrer who, once he’d regained his senses, dragged him into a bar in the old town to propose a settlement. They had talked more calmly, looked to the future; Ferrer had gone back to addressing his old assistant in a more civil tongue.
For now, for lack of anything better, Delahaye decided to retain humbly and definitively the name Baumgartner, which he’d gone to great lengths to obtain: he would make of it what he could. He’d had to pay through the nose for it; false identity papers cost a bundle, and any backtracking was now impossible. He still tried to negotiate: for a compensatory sum, he would give up the address where the antiques were stored. Although Ferrer found his demands fairly benign, he took pleasure in talking him down, agreeing to pay him a little less than one-third the asking amount, which would be quite sufficient for Delahaye to manage awhile in the foreign country—with weak currency, if possible—of his choice. The other being in no position to bargain, they had settled matters there. They had finally parted company with no hard feelings, and Ferrer arrived back in Paris in the early evening.
The morning after his return, the first thing he did, on the strength of his former assistant’s information, was go to Charenton to recover the objects; then he rented a large safe at the bank and wasted no time storing them, duly insured, inside it. That done, in the afternoon he went to Jean-Philippe Raymond’s to pick up the final appraisal report; scarcely had he arrived at the reception than he ran into Sonia. Still the same with her Bensons and her Ericsson, which Ferrer could not help associating with the Babyphone. She made a show of looking him up and down with indifference, but, as he was following her in the hallway that led to Raymond’s office, she suddenly spun around and bitterly reproached him for never having called. When Ferrer didn’t answer, she began to insult him in a low voice, then, when he tried to create a diversion by ducking into the bathroom, she followed him in, threw herself into his arms, and ah, take me, she cried. He resisted, trying his best to impress upon her that it was neither the time nor the place, but she reacted violently and tried to scratch and bite him; then, abandoning all restraint, tried to unzip him on her knees intending to do goodness knows what, don’t play innocent, you know perfectly well what. But, go figure, Ferrer fought her off. Restoring some measure of calm, he was able to escape these various assaults, not without mixed feelings. Luckily, a little later, back at the gallery, he noticed that in his absence things had evolved in a fairly positive direction. Business seemed to be picking up, but all afternoon Ferrer found it difficult to concentrate.
Sonia certainly wasn’t the solution, but Ferrer, the man who has a hard time living without a woman, as we know, tried as of the next day but one to revive a few adventures. These were potential amours, flirtations put on the back burner or lures set in place long before, cases in progress, pending files offering greater or lesser degrees of interest. But none of his attempts panned out. The women who might have sparked his fancy turned out to be unreachable, now living elsewhere or otherwise engaged. Only the ones of minor interest appeared still viable, but then it was he who didn’t give a damn.
Obviously there was still Hélène, although Ferrer hesitated to renew contact with her. He hadn’t seen her since the day she’d worn makeup, having run off to Spain immediately afterward, and he still didn’t have a very good idea of how to act around her or what to think. Too distant and too close, available and yet cold, opaque and smooth, she left few handholds for Ferrer to grab onto toward an unpredictable summit. He nonetheless resolved to call her, but even with Hélène he couldn’t get a date for less than a week away. The week passed. After he had denied three times the temptation to cancel, everything happened according to the desperately common process, meaning that they had dinner then slept together; it wasn’t a raging success but they did it. Then they did it again. It went a little better that time, so they tried it again and again until it became not bad at all, all the more so in that between those embraces they began to talk more spontaneously; it even happened that they laughed together. Things were moving forward. Perhaps they were moving forward.
Let’s keep moving forward, too, and faster. In the weeks that follow, not only does Hélène come to spend more and more time on Rue d’Amsterdam, but she also frequents the gallery more and more often. Soon she has a spare key to the apartment. Soon Ferrer does not renew Elisabeth’s contract and it is naturally Hélène who succeeds her, inheriting as well the keys to the gallery that Suzanne returned in front of the courthouse.
Hélène learns the trade fairly quickly. She acquires so subtly the art of smoothing the edges that Ferrer entrusts her, part-time at first, with most of the dealings with his artists. Her tasks might include supervising the evolution of Spontini’s work, raising Gourdel’s spirits, or moderating Martinov’s pretensions. Her role is all the more necessary in that Ferrer is completely taken up by his recovered antiques.
Before long and naturally, without much having to be said about it, Hélène moves into Rue d’Amsterdam; then, with business going better and better, she is soon working full-time at the gallery. It seems the artists, Martinov in particular, would rather deal with her than Ferrer: she’s calmer and more subtle than he, who every evening at Rue d’Amsterdam listens to her account of the day. Although they have never really formulated any plans, it begins to look a lot like conjugal life. One can see them in the morning, she with her tea and he with his coffee, talking figures and publicity, manufacturing schedules, foreign exchanges, ending up definitively pulling the plug on the budget for the plastic artists.
Moreover, Ferrer is now thinking of moving. It’s becoming entirely possible. The objects found in the Nechilik have yielded considerable profits, and besides, the market is on the rise these days. The telephone has begun ringing again, the collectors are opening a saurian eye, their checkbooks leap like roaches from their pockets. Eliminating the plastic artists has not lost them any revenue, while Martinov, for instance, is taking off toward the status of official painter: he’s getting commissions for ministry foyers in London and factory entrances in Singapore, stage curtains and theater ceilings pretty much everywhere; his work is the subject of more and more retrospectives abroad, it’s good, it’s all good. Beucler and Spontini, the first to be surprised, also begin firmly consolidating their audiences, and even Gourdel, whom everyone had left for dead, has started selling again. Thanks to all this charming liquidity, Ferrer decides that they could, that they should, that they are going to change apartments. He is in a position to buy now: so they’re going to find something bigger, something brand-new, a top floor in the middle of the sky that they’ve just finished building in the 8th arrondissement and that will be ready by mid-January.
While waiting for all the details of this residence to fall into place, they begin inviting people to Rue d’Amsterdam. They organize cocktail parties, dinner parties. They invite collectors like Réparaz, who comes without his wife, art critics and fellow gallery owners; one evening they even invite Supin, who shows up with his fiancée. In recognition of his help, Ferrer solemnly presents him with a small lithograph by Martinov that Hélène has managed to obtain below market value. Supin, very moved, at first declares that he can’t accept, but he ends up leaving with his work of art wrapped up under one arm, his fiancée under the other. It is November, the air is dry and the sky blue; it’s perfect. When they haven’t invited anyone, sometimes they go out to eat, after which they have a drink at the Cyclone, the Central, the Sun, bars where they sometimes run into people from the same milieu, the same gallery owners or art critics they’d had o
ver two nights before.
In the weeks that follow, up to the end of the month, it occasionally happens that Ferrer runs across—up close or, especially, at a distance—some of his old girlfriends. One day he spots Laurence waiting, like him, for the red light to turn green, at the other end of a zebra crossing near the Madeleine; but Ferrer, who recalls that their separation was not on the best of terms, prefers not to let her see him and sidles over to another stoplight to cross. Another time, on Place de l’Europe, he is suddenly engulfed in a wave of Extatics Elixir and sniffs it warily, but without managing to identify who is leaving it behind her. He’s not certain it was Bérangère, for devotees of this perfume have, it seems, multiplied of late. He abstains from following this olfactory trail, which he never liked in any case, and avoids it altogether by slipping away in the opposite direction.
And one evening at the Central, where he has gone to have a drink with Hélène, Ferrer runs into Victoire, whom he hasn’t seen since the beginning of the year. She looks basically the same, even though her hair is longer and her eyes more distant, as if their lenses had retracted to encompass a longer depth of field, a wider panorama. On top of which, she seems tired. They exchange a few meaningless words. Victoire seems distracted, but to the departing Hélène—“I’ll leave you two for a moment,” says Hélène, moving off—she gives the smile of a freed slave or vanquished conqueror. She doesn’t seem to know about Delahaye’s demise. Ferrer tells her the official version, with the appropriate sorrowful look, then buys her a glass of white wine and retreats after Hélène.
During that period, Ferrer prepares everything for his and Hélène’s new apartment: their shared bedroom, as well as one for each of them when they’d rather sleep alone (best to plan for everything), the studies and guest bedrooms, kitchen and three bathrooms, terrace and hallways. Several times a week, he goes to visit the nearly completed construction site. He treads on raw concrete, breathing in the plaster dust that sticks to his palate as he envisions the trim and the paintings, the curtain colors and juxtapositions of furniture, without heeding the real estate agent who trips and stumbles among the girders while unfolding rough sketches. Hélène, meanwhile, prefers not to accompany Ferrer on his visits. Remaining at the gallery, she takes care of the artists, notably Martinov who has to be looked after closely, for success is such a fragile thing, it requires such constant attention, it’s a neverending job, while Ferrer, from the terrace of his future penthouse, watches the clouds gather.
Those clouds don’t look so good, lined up and determined like a professional army. Moreover, the weather has turned suddenly, as if winter were losing patience, threatening to be in ill humor and shoving autumn aside with hostile gusts to take its place as soon as possible, choosing one hour of a late November day to noisily despoil the branches of leaves that are shriveled to the state of mere memories. Climatically speaking, we have every reason to expect the worst.
35
So winter had arrived, and with it the end of the year, and with that its final eve, in view of which everyone had preventively made sure to invite each other back and forth. In the old days, the prospect of such evenings always made Ferrer a little nervous, but this time, not in the least. He had planned ahead, intending to take Hélène to Réparaz’s where there was going to be a huge party: crowds of people, twelve bands and fourteen buffets, three hundred celebrities from every field, and two cabinet ministers for dessert. It promised to be a blast.
On the evening of the 31st, a little before the TV news, Ferrer was happily revealing this plan to Hélène when the doorbell rang. There stood the mailman, flanked by an assistant mailman, who had come for their year-end tip. They each carried a batch of complementary calendars with the obligatory pointing dogs, sleeping cats, birds on branches, seaside ports, and snowy peaks—an embarrassment of riches. “Of course,” Ferrer said enthusiastically, “do come in.”
Hélène seemed to agree with him as to the calendar selection. They opted for two recto-verso bouquets, one per half-year; in an excellent mood, Ferrer handed the mailmen three times their usual bonus. The enchanted postal workers wished the couple all possible happiness; Ferrer heard them commenting on the event in the stairway as he shut the door behind them, but, that done, Hélène announced that she had something to say. “Of course,” said Ferrer. “What is it?” Well, she said, about that party at Réparaz’s—actually, she’d rather not go. Martinov was also having a little get-together with a few friends in his new studio, the fruit of all his recent sales and of a size better suited to his current standing, and there you had it, that was where she wanted to spend her evening. If you don’t mind.
“Not at all,” said Ferrer, “whatever you like.” Of course it would be a bit delicate given his relations with Réparaz, but he’d think of something, it shouldn’t be that hard to cancel.
“The thing is, no,” said Hélène, turning away, “that’s not what I meant.” All things considered, it was better if she went alone. And as Ferrer pursed his lips and knitted his brow: “Listen,” Hélène said, turning back to him, “listen.” She explained gently that she had thought about it. This new apartment. All that furniture. The thought of living together with all that sky above them. She wasn’t really sure. She wasn’t sure she was ready, she needed to think about it, they should talk about it some more. “I’m not saying we should let it drop, you know? I’m just saying I need to think about it some more. Let’s take a few days and talk it over then.”
“Fine,” said Ferrer, examining the toes of his new shoes—new, as of several weeks ago, as all his shoes were—“fine, all right.”
“You’re sweet,” said Hélène. “I’m going to go change now. You can tell me all about Réparaz’s.”
“Yeah,” said Ferrer, “I don’t know.”
She left Rue d’Amsterdam—a little early, he judged, for that kind of evening. Left alone and pacing a moment around the living room, turning on the television only to turn it off immediately afterward, Ferrer spontaneously cursed Feldman for having forbidden him to smoke. Then he made two or three halfhearted phone calls, reached as many answering machines. No longer really felt like going to Réparaz’s, who, having gotten to like Hélène since she started working at the gallery, would surely wonder about her absence. Having obviously made no other plans for the evening, he was now at a loss to improvise an emergency backup. All the more so in that, having declined other invitations, phoning casually to latch on at the last minute would be delicate: there, too, people would wonder, ask questions that he did not have the slightest wish to answer.
He made several more calls, in greater number but crowned with the same results. He slipped a disc into the CD player, immediately lowered the volume, tried another disc, muted the sound on the television the second he turned it on, then stood in front of it for a long while without changing channels or understanding what he was seeing. He also remained standing for several minutes in front of the open refrigerator, in the same cataleptic state and without removing a single item. And now two hours later, here he is walking down Rue de Rome toward the Saint-Lazare metro stop, from where it’s a direct line to Corentin-Celton. On December 31st at 11 p.m., the subway cars are generally not overcrowded. It’s not unusual to find entire benches empty the way Ferrer likes them, he who is well aware of choosing at this moment quite possibly the worst of all solutions.
Ferrer knows that Suzanne, left exactly one year minus two days ago, is a past master at New Year’s Eve festivities. He also knows that he’s exposing himself to the worst and that this worst would be justified. He knows even more that Suzanne might react violently to the sight of him, that the whole thing is extremely risky. It might even qualify as a suicide operation, but it seems he doesn’t care, as if there were nothing else to be done, I know it’s crazy but I’m doing it anyway. And besides, you never know, maybe Suzanne has changed; maybe she’s become civilized since their first meeting. It’s just that she has always been a neolithically violent person, and Fer
rer sometimes wonders if he didn’t meet her at the mouth of a cave: Suzanne holding a club in one hand, a flint hatchet stuck in her belt. That day she was wearing a pterodactyl-wing suit under a trench coat cut from an ichthyosaur’s eyelid, and sporting an iguanodon’s nail fitted to the shape of her head. It hadn’t been easy over the following five years, they’d waged quite a few battles, but perhaps things have evolved; we’ll see.
The house has changed, in any case. Like the latch on the gate, the mailbox is repainted red; its label no longer bears Ferrer’s name, nor Suzanne’s maiden name. Since every window is lit, it seems the house is now occupied by new tenants celebrating the end of the year. Disconcerted, Ferrer remains near the gate for a few moments, without the slightest idea of what he is going to do nor wants to do, until the front door opens and out comes a burst of loud music and a girl who stands in the doorway, not seeming to want to leave, by all appearances only out for a breath of air.
She seems nice enough; catching sight of him, she gives him a little wave and a smile. She has a glass in her hand and is about twenty-five or thirty, not too bad-looking, sort of a lesser Bérangère. It isn’t too unlikely that she’s also slightly drunk, but only slightly, which is hardly a crime at this sort of gathering. As Ferrer continues to lurk near the gate, she calls out to him, “Are you a friend of George’s?”
Ferrer, highly embarrassed, does not answer immediately. “Suzanne isn’t there, by chance, is she?” he finally asks.
“I don’t know,” says the girl. “I haven’t seen any Suzannes, but maybe she’s here. There are a lot of people inside. I don’t know them all. I’m the sister of one of George’s business partners—he just moved in. The house is pretty nice, but it’s so hot in there.”
“Yes,” says Ferrer, “it seems nice.”