Short Stories in French

by Richard Coward

  One word too many. Just one word too many for distance to grow wider, irremediably so. No, that child could not be mine. But it could have been Pierre’s, or that other man’s, the one who pretends to speak for him.

  Pierre accelerated, belted towards Paris, happy with the speed which made the countryside unravel at the rhythm of his desires, with the wind which swept in through the open windows, blowing his hair, cooling his damp body, above all happy to be alone in the car, to imagine Fafou by his side, soon, soon, the time that it would take to get there, to call her …

  So, Frantz’s son is fifteen, he thought, how old would the other baby have been, the one who had not been born, the child condensed into a few weeks of hope, about whom she could not talk without crying? ‘He would have been so cute,’ she murmured, ‘he would have had green eyes …’ Today Pierre can protect himself against emotions from the past by saying to himself: ‘No, how melodramatic!’, this phrase is etched in his memory with precisely the intonation of Fafou’s voice, slightly hoarse, slightly nasal, through the tears, and every time he hears it, he gets goose pimples, even though each time, to protect himself, he repeats: ‘No, how melodramatic!’

  As with Pierre, it is pointless me shrugging my shoulders, running my hand over my arm, I have not been able to forget that innocuous and naïvely sentimental phrase, which is yet so sober, in relation to her suffering. For how many nights and days of regret has this phrase not come and echoed in my head? That child, the one before Frantz came along, could have brought us together instead of separating us. How I wish I could rediscover my ardour of those days, our wild plans, that exaggerated romanticism, even my failure to be realistic, which made me see everything in such simple terms: I would adopt the child, I would marry the mother, my parents could not oppose the marriage, in spite of my being only twenty, since I would claim that the child was mine …

  Cling to Pierre, who is driving at breakneck speed towards a legendary Paris where lies his youth and the oblivion that he is seeking, tell myself that he is more superficial than me, that he was capable of overcoming the dullness, capable of still believing in happiness, tell myself that it is he who thinks of his sad wife, reproaching himself for never having been able to make her happy, in spite of all his good will, his love in the early years, his happiness in those days, his eagerness to want to take care of her son, that thug whose dirty tricks he fears nowadays, spoilt by his mother to the point of forcing him, Pierre, to assume the nasty role, that of Mr Bogeyman, the austere stepfather at the age of thirty-five, he who wanted to remain the eternal, cheerful youth of his teenage years, who must now chase away his happy-go-lucky attitude and his fantasy in order to be firm with that other, twenty years his junior, whose fantasies drift off into drugs that are increasingly less innocent, shady deals, acts of cruel arrogance that have eventually ruined his life and that of Adrienne in so few years of marriage …

  I had invested everything in her, my hope and my joy, my love also. But the quest is over. My duty lies with that amorphous woman, but in the midst of this slow death, my holidays were like a breath of fresh air, as with Pierre, a vital breath of youth that he has come to seek in the places of his past, of his first love. Fafou, Fafou and the others, friends, former mistresses with whom he has maintained good relations and whom he intends to see again, forgiving himself in advance for his first infidelities to Adrienne.

  He will soon reach Paris, the traffic slows down, he must take new motorways, which he does not know well, he does not know exactly how to get to the district of the Invalides, has not yet decided between the Invalides and Montparnasse, besides, everything that he knows is becoming slightly hazy, even the dialling code for Fafou: ‘Suffren or Ségur,’ he wonders, suddenly anxious, as if he did not know that her name is still in the directory, that her parents have lived in the same flat for more than twenty-five years, have the same telephone number …

  But I want him to still be driving and to get lost in the streets of those districts where we wandered so often, some evenings, and that I have come back to wander, these last few nights, and where he will probably go for a stroll, he too, in a few pages’ time.

  Pierre, false mask. I reread what I have written, and this tale does not ring true, with its simple style, stuffed with clichés, but how it trivializes and appeases, brings one back to normality, and how this simple subterfuge calms me, knowing that through Pierre I am going to find Fafou, hear her voice on the telephone, stroll in those streets, as I did fifteen or sixteen years ago, kiss her, breathe that musky perfume whose name escapes me. Through him I will be able to allow myself to confront those fragments of the past, rebuild them, keep the indescribable grief at bay. It is probably too soon to refine my thoughts in any other way, to write in a better style … too soon … or too late.

  And to plunge into that past under the name of Pierre or my own, what does it matter in the end. It is Fafou that I am seeking, she is my quest, my reconquest in the presence of whom I can, for once, become invisible.

  So Pierre arrives, at the wheel of his car, wild with joy at the thought of seeing you again. I arrived gloomy and joyless, wanting to draw from those who had witnessed my youth a little of what I had been, to prove to myself that time had not passed, nothing was yet beyond repair.

  Do you remember? Can you remember everything which brought us together? So where is your memory, my mad bird freed from its cage, where? Were the cage and the bird ever real? So deep is the silence of this night in which I have just created Pierre, my first deception, that I wonder if this fake respect does not betray you more than all the rest.

  But with the aid of these few handwritten pages, that Pierre, who is such a help to me, has begun to grow in my mind, to stand between me and me, you and me, though still barely visible.

  His face is probably like mine, the one that I glimpse reflected in mirrors or windows, the one you perhaps looked at between two kisses, although I do not really know what my face resembled when it was leant towards you … I can only see yours, whose expression disturbed me so much at those moments when tenderness turned to desire, as pink turns to crimson, and which I would like to be able to describe, better to remember. But you, what face did you gaze upon in those minutes, to call me a depraved angel, a wild child, a greedy Pierrot? What images has your memory retained of me, Fafou, by what signs would you recognize me if, by chance, in the street, you met me, grown old, in a few years’ time?

  Pierre eventually got to your district, here he is looking for a hotel and I am hesitating to give him one, I who remember only one, a little further on, in the rue Vaugirard, that I do not want to link with you …

  I cannot help feeling that he is looking for a telephone booth although it was not from this district that I wanted to call you, although, before he called you, I would have liked him to have the time to wander about the streets, looking for our memories … He will probably not be able to help shutting himself into a narrow booth that reeks of cigarettes and, the receiver in his hand, he will hear that quivering ring which will evoke so many happy and unhappy memories … But they were my memories! Mine, not Pierre’s! And I hesitate to give to this zombie these emotions that are so intimate, these feelings that were mine, this life which still belongs to me, to me and not to that usurper who so easily, and in a few hours of daydreaming, takes for his own a few cast-offs of my past, that past in which, however, I only wanted to find the two of us. And through his fault, the slender thread of my feelings breaks and I become lost in the meanderings of that river of memory in which I wanted to venture in search of you, too cowardly to set off alone.

  The place where I must find you is already so far away, and so long ago at that!

  I would have liked to evoke the day we met, to begin again at the beginning, to fix the snapshots of our love, to see ourselves as though in a film of which I would be both cameraman and the trembling camera, the eye and the actor who held you in his arms, to describe the expressions, to dig up your words, to bring back
to life those few months, those few years that held you in my life, but the words slide away like octopuses, stifle what they seize. Certain scenes become superimposed, drift away, slowly like seaweed in the waters of my memory. And that is as unbearable to me as my vanity in wanting to use my words to bring back that time in my life which is sinking into the mass graves of the past.

  But in delaying for too long, the images are fleeing. Whatever the words, let them flow and lead me towards that great amphitheatre where we got to know each other.

  I was sitting in the middle and, at my side, there was this empty seat where you would come and sit down. I saw you approaching along the right-hand aisle, with your nonchalant, swaying walk. These are clichés, I know, but is it my fault if there are not any other words that better describe your walk, because I immediately associated clichés with that tread of yours, and for the moment those words stick like glue to the film that is my memories, to the extent that they trigger off images for me alone as soon as I pronounce them, as one would pronounce passwords? You were looking at me, although I thought your eyes were fixed on the empty seat; you had a knack of staring at what seemed to amuse you. ‘May I?’ you said to me as you took your seat. With a lump in my throat brought on by a wild desire sparked off by your perfume, I had not replied and you had sat down with an amused smile on your face.

  Why does the name of that perfume still escape me, when my memory is overcome by it and when at this very moment I can still smell it, over the smell of my cigarette, so distinctly, across so many years?

  I dare not reread these few lines that it has taken me so long to write in order that I might once again be totally overcome by that perfume: the scene of our meeting, which I thought I had forgotten, has come back to me in such completeness, it too! Yes, I know that these few words will not express everything to a third party: a meagre victory of words, which fills an absence and brings time back to life.

  Here I am again, destitute, worn out, emptied: what can this pathetic memory do against Time? What can my childish joy do, when I find precisely the right word to describe you, what can my joy do against Time? You looked like a rogue, Fafou, yes like a rogue, but I know that this word only means something to me, because of the image of you that it evokes in me, that raised eyebrow, that brown eye, perverse but child-like and playful, and I dare not imagine what images someone else would think of, reading that single word by which you loved me to call you: ‘rogue’. I am too afraid that the other man lacks subtleties, that he does not know how affectionately I called you this, that he adds to your portrait, which is already so incomplete, the features of another woman, the prejudices that can arise from this clichéd adjective. The slightest word makes me stumble, the slightest adjective makes me afraid, whereas then, in our romantic innocence we got drunk on those clichés, met through them, do you remember, we had fun like children who play with colours and pictures prepared in advance, it was just a matter of combining them in an unusual way for us to find them beautiful: worthless lines of verse, words from songs, the panache of hopelessly romantic shop-girls and bohemian folklore, but giggles from cultured minds, a tiny distance that we were obliged to keep by the intellectual rules of good taste, the moment when our fever abated … It is too long, Fafou, rogue, mad bird, gypsy-girl, since the fever abated, which no longer allows me to write as freely as before; nowadays words frighten me, and not just because I dread a critical reader, no, not just for that reason … And I would like to scream my fear, my grief, your absence that words do not fill, that nothing can wipe away any more, otherwise words would be able to make you live again in the eyes of a third party, just as you were, exactly as you were and not as he might imagine you if ever the adjectives that I am using do not have for him the same flavour, the same music …

  I must even mistrust myself, not allow subsequent words to be directed to you. Just now I was writing: mad bird, gypsy-girl and I thought ‘my darling’, I almost wrote it but I immediately crossed out the few letters that were bordering on deception. I have never called you ‘my darling’, and I would only have had to think of you in those terms for the faces of other women to come and insidiously superimpose themselves on yours like reflections …

  And I return to that musky perfume, to my need to describe it, when I only need to evoke it for it to overcome me, to plunge me into that light trance of desire … A slave to writing, who can only recreate by assuming a distance, why does it force me this evening to circumscribe emotions, feelings, events, instead of allowing me to be carried away on this tide of melancholy from which memories occasionally emerge, as undying as the present whose clearness and glow they have? Probably because living again is no longer enough for me, because you must also live again with me.

  These pages, runways or decodings, are not enough: I lack the signs. I feel as though I am tackling an unfamiliar language. I examine each word which refers to you, I weigh it up, I taste it, I breathe it, I pronounce it, I repeat it and listen to it, I feel it, I smell it and finally I reject it, disheartened. Its resonance does not suit you, does not seem fitting. And yet, I only have words left to reach you again, to bring you to me from as far away as you are, a difficult reconquest. Could I throw words away as Orpheus threw away his lyre in order to be able to run more easily to Eurydice, was that his mistake?

  How can I bring you to me, other than by waking in your mind all the memories that linked you to me, which I have allowed to grow fainter, by breathing new life into the emotion and by ceasing to evoke it for me alone?

  Do you remember? In that great amphitheatre, when I saw you coming towards me, I would have liked to be invisible in order more easily to watch you reacting naturally. But I was immersed in myself as I watched you. So it is not that which you can remember, but me, when you saw me. You had said to me: ‘I only saw your eyes, in the middle of the amphitheatre, the only ones that were alive, the only ones which saw that I existed. It was as though they were calling to me.’

  I need to believe you, today. At the time, it all seemed too beautiful to be true. I try to put myself in your place when you came in through the door on the right, I remember perfectly the general view that you might have had – how often has the vision of those hundred or so heads sticking out of chair-backs in identical rows made my head spin! – no, it is not difficult for me to allow that image to rise up in me, and no more difficult than to focus on the centre and to see myself there, by chance turning round at that precise moment, but the vision becomes blurred as soon as I spot my own face: everything becomes confused, becomes dull, your features replace mine, I no longer remember anything other than me looking at you looking at me with that dark eye, roguish beneath the long strand of hair that curled softly and caressingly over your temple and your cheek. But you, what did you see in me that might have moved you? I am looking at myself at this moment in a place where you can no longer see me, knowing that it is no longer quite the same face as the one of fifteen years ago, but you would probably recognize it …

  Could she really recognize him?

  The window that is half-open on to the night sends me back a reflection that is sufficiently lacking in detail to soften the few nascent wrinkles, those bitter lines that start at the nose, those cheery crow’s-feet scars of one’s smile and, as usual when looking at this face, I am amazed that I must identify it as my own. But it is more precious to me tonight: it is with this face that you remember me, this is the face that you had loved …

  So why put on make-up, hide myself behind this mask? Fafou, it is I who speak through this man, it is I, not him, that you must remember! A scribe, his only use is to throw you like a message in a bottle into the sea, his face is not mine, but I am here, do you recognize me?

  I know that faces are merely like peel, but they are the shapes that we have loved. What face would this man have, the one who is slow to dream of his first mistress in this narcissistic game in which reflection leads to death? I place him here, however, in this flat where we loved each other. He
re? No, lower, in the cellar, do you remember it? When we had arrived, my sister was with friends, and I had pretended to want to show you some old daguerreotypes … yes, in the cellar. And now, that other man, who could have loved you in broad daylight, talks about his face, whereas it was mine that you loved, whatever the resemblance that there might be between us both! Pierre embarrassed him – me too – but it was he who got rid of him with a stroke of the pen.

  Pierre, whom we left on the road, has already had the time to get to Paris, to go into that bistro, to ask for a telephone token at the bar, a Canadian moved by these Parisian archaisms. With the receiver in his hand, he has just heard the ringing that he easily recognizes … And your mother’s voice … No.

  I am coming back to you, Fafou, with my face washed, as on the first day. I shall not hide myself any more. I am neither Pierre, nor that other man, who pretended to be Pierre or myself. And yet, the image has been launched, Pierre has recognized your mother’s voice. He goes through the scene that I played before him: he gives his name, explains who he is, asks about you … Probes the uneasiness, at the other end of the line, he can even hear your mother asking Cyril: ‘Go and play in the other room, will you, darling?’, he thinks that this is not how one talks to a fifteen-year-old boy, already dreads the moralizing comments that your mother might make to him, now that she is alone with him, she who had learnt everything about your affair …

  But it is I, I alone, who can hear those words which chill me, ridiculous because of their old-fashioned expression, pitiless.

  I needed him, however, to relive this scene, but he can leave me now. For the moment I am alone, in order to hear this old woman’s words, which chill me and yet answer my prayers, across the years: ‘She was so in love with you, if you only knew!’ Does she know with what love or has she forgotten, she who now, after chasing me away from your house as though I were a demon, today asks me to go back and see her?