“Your turns of speed are much more impressive than that.”
“Perhaps, but there’s something arrogant about that backhand that I’ve always liked. A thundering reply to anyone with any pretensions, a trick which would freeze the feet of the most insolent opponent.”
“I stole it straight from Adriano Panatta, Roland-Garros, 1976.”
“How can you steal a shot?”
“By being pretty conceited,” replied Blin. “At fifteen, you have a lot of nerve.”
“That’s not enough, unless you’re exceptionally talented.”
“I didn’t have that sort of luck, so I just had to sweat blood and tears. I neglected all the other shots to concentrate on that down-the-line backhand. I lost most of my matches, but every time I managed to place one of those shots I’d floor my opponent against all expectations and, for those five seconds, I was a champion. Now it’s disappeared from lack of use, but it’s still quite a memory.”
“It can reappear, you know, and when your opponent least expects, trust me!”
Gredzinski was surprised to find his glass empty just as a strange feeling came over him, relaxing his whole body. A sort of bright gap in the foggy sky that hovered over him all the time. Without actually being unhappy, Gredzinski had adopted a sort of restlessness as his natural state. He had accepted a long time ago now that every morning he would come across the cold monster of his own anxiety, and nothing succeeded in calming it except for feverish activity, which meant he could never live in the present. All through the day Nicolas struggled to stay one step ahead of it, right up until those sweet few moments before he fell asleep. This evening, though, he felt as if he was where he wanted to be, the present was enough in itself, and the little glass of vodka exhaling icy mist had something to do with that. He surprised himself by ordering another, and swore that he would make it last as long as possible. The rest followed on from there; the words he was uttering were certainly his own, his thoughts were freed of any interference, and a peculiar memory came back to him, like an echo of the one Blin had just described.
“There’s something beautiful and tragic about the story of those five seconds; now I understand the stealing. I had a similar experience when I was about twenty-five. I shared an apartment with a piano teacher, and most of the time – thank God! – she taught while I was out. That piano was in the middle of everything, our sitting room, our conversations, even our timetables, given that we organized them around it. Some evenings I actually hated it and, paradoxically, I sometimes felt jealous of the pupils who laid their hands on it. Even the worst of them managed to get something out of it, but not me. I was useless.”
“What was the point in battling on with this piano if it annoyed you so much?”
“Probably to insult it.”
“Meaning . . .?”
“Playing it myself was the worst revenge I could find. Playing when I’d never learned how to, when I couldn’t tell the difference between middle C and a B flat. The perfect crime, really. I asked my flatmate to teach me to play a piece by memorizing the keys and the position of my fingers. It’s technically possible, it just takes a lot of patience.”
“Which piece?”
“That’s where the trouble started! I aimed high and my friend tried everything to stop me, but I stuck to my guns: Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’.”
Thierry didn’t seem to know it so Nicolas hummed the first few bars; they sang the rest together.
“In spite of everything, she was tickled by this impossible task, and she set me to work on ‘Clair de Lune’ and, like a performing monkey, I eventually did it. After a few months I could play Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’.”
“Like a real pianist?”
“No, obviously, she’d warned me about that. Yes, I could create the illusion with a bit of mimicry, but I’d always be lacking the essential ingredient: heart, a feeling for the piano, an instinct which only comes from a proper apprenticeship, a passion for music, an intimacy with the instrument.”
“But, there you are, when you’re twenty you’ve got nothing better to do than impress those around you. And you must have done that a couple of times.”
“Only a couple, but each time it was an extraordinary feeling. I’d play ‘Clair de Lune’ and adopt a brooding expression. The piece was so beautiful that it kindled its own magic, and Debussy would always turn up at some point between two phrases. I was treated to cheering, to smiles from a handful of young girls, and – for a few minutes – I felt like someone else.”
Those last words hung in the air, just long enough for their resonance to be felt. The bar was filling up, people heading off for supper were being replaced by new arrivals, and this melting movement brought a new quality to the silence between Thierry and Nicolas.
“Well, at least you can say we’ve been young.”
Caught up in a surprising surge of nostalgia, Thierry ordered a Jack Daniel’s, which reminded him of a trip to New York. Nicolas was negotiating his vodka with all the patience he’d promised himself but it was an effort; several times he nearly downed it in one as he had seen Blin doing, just to see how far this first inkling of drunkenness might take him. Without knowing it, he was experiencing the beginnings of a great love story with his glass of alcohol, a story which was unfolding in two classic movements: allowing oneself to be overrun by the effects of that first thunderbolt, and trying to make those effects last as long as possible.
“I’m thirty-nine,” said Thierry.
“I was forty a fortnight ago. Can we still think of ourselves as sort of . . . young?”
“Probably, but the apprenticeship’s over. If you think that life expectancy for a man is seventy-five, we’ve still got the second half to go, perhaps the better half, who knows? But it’s the first half that’s made us into who we are.”
“What you’re saying is that most of our choices are irreversible.”
“We’ve always known we wouldn’t be Panatta or Alfred Brendel. Over the years we’ve constructed ourselves, and we may have thirty years ahead of us to see whether we’ve got ourselves about right. But we’ll never be someone else any more.”
It fell like a verdict, and they drank to the certainty of it.
“Anyway, what’s the point in wanting to be someone else, to live someone else’s life?” Gredzinski went on. “Or to feel someone else’s joy and pain? If we’ve become who we are, then the choices can’t have been that bad. Who else would you have liked to be?”
Thierry turned round and swept his arm over the room.
“Why not that man over there, with the gorgeous girl drinking margaritas?”
“Something tells me the guy must have a complicated life.”
“Wouldn’t it appeal to you to be the barman?”
“I’ve always avoided work which involved contact with the public.”
“Or the Pope himself?”
“Not the public, I’ve already said.”
“A painter whose work gets exhibited at the Pompidou Centre?”
“That’s worth thinking about.”
“What would you say to being a hired killer?”
Nicolas raised an eyebrow in silence.
“Or just the man in the apartment next door?”
“None of the above, but why not me?” said Nicolas.
“The other me that I dream of being, the one I’ve never had the courage to become.”
He suddenly had a sense almost of nostalgia.
For the pleasure of it and out of curiosity, they each described this other me who was both so close and hopelessly inaccessible. Thierry could see him wearing particular clothes, doing a particular job; Nicolas exposed his great principles of life and some of his failings. Each of them had fun describing a typical day for his other self, hour by hour, in such abundant detail that they found it worrying. They were so thorough that, two hours later, there really were four of them there, leaning on the bar. The glasses had proliferated to the damning point where the very
idea of counting them was almost indecent.
“This conversation’s becoming absurd,” said Nicolas. “A Borg can’t become a Connors or vice versa.”
“I don’t like myself enough to want to stay as me at all costs,” said Blin. “I’d like to spend the thirty years I’ve got left as this other me!”
“I’m not used to this,” said Gredzinski waving his glass, “but do you think we might be a bit drunk?”
“It’s up to us to go and find this someone else. What is there to lose?”
Gredzinski, captivated, had buried his anxiety somewhere in a desert and was now dancing on its grave. He fished about for the only answer that made any sense to him: “We might lose ourselves along the way.”
“That’s a good start.”
They clinked their glasses together under the jaded eye of the barman who, given the time, was not going to serve them anything else. Blin, who was far more lucid than Gredzinski, suddenly affected a conspiratorial expression; without even realizing it, he had steered the conversation to arrive exactly here, as if in Gredzinski he had found something he had spent a long time looking for. His victory in the match now egged him on to play another kind of match in which he would be both his own opponent and his only partner, a competition so far-reaching that he would have to gather all his forces together, to reawaken his free will, remember his dreams, believe once again and push back the limits he was beginning to sense around him.
“I’ll need time – say two or three years to fine-tune the tiniest details – but I’ll wager you that I will be that someone else.”
This was a challenge Thierry was putting to himself, as if Gredzinski was reduced to a pretext, at best a witness.
“. . . It’s June 23rd,” he went on. “Let’s meet in three years’ time, three years to the day, in this same bar, at the same time.”
Far, far away, intoxicated by the momentum of what was happening, Gredzinski let the drink guide him, a form of autopilot which left him free to concentrate on what mattered.
“If we meet . . . will it be the two of us or the other two?”
“That’s what gives the challenge its spice.”
“And what’s at stake? If by some extraordinary chance one of us manages it, he’d deserve some incredible reward!”
For Blin, that was not the question at all. Conquering this other him was the greatest stake in itself. He wriggled out of it with a flourish. “On that evening, June 23rd at 9 o’clock in exactly three years, whichever one of us has won can ask absolutely anything of the other.”
“. . . Absolutely anything?”
“Are there higher stakes in the world?”
From where Gredzinski was right then, nothing seemed eccentric any more; everything and nothing vied for attention. He was discovering his own capacity for elation, a rare sensation pervading both his head and his heart.
It was time for them to part, something indicated the moment when they should leave. Neither would have been able to say what.
“This may be the last time we ever see each other, Thierry.”
“That would be the best thing that could happen to us, don’t you think?”
Thierry Blin
He got up without stopping to re-evaluate the decisions taken the previous evening; by setting himself this impossible task in front of a stranger the day before, he had also started a countdown.
On the refrigerator door there was a note from Nadine reminding him they were meant to be having dinner with their oldest friends that evening. Making himself a coffee would have made him late opening the shop, so he settled for the dregs of a lukewarm cup of tea abandoned on the corner of the table by his partner, and went into the bathroom to have a quick shower. He felt unusually energetic for first thing in the morning, and he made the most of this to trim his thick beard, which was beginning to overrun his cheeks. When people asked him why he kept it, Thierry would tell them he loathed shaving. That was partly true, but he did not tell them how much it bothered him looking himself in the face.
Whenever he found himself looking into a mirror above the seat in a café, he would suggest changing places with Nadine so that he was facing into the room; it was second nature to Thierry to avoid his own reflection. When the encounter proved necessary, he resigned himself to it and eventually accepted what he saw, but it did not mean anything to him. A round face with thick eyebrows, lacklustre eyes, slightly protruding ears, an upper lip which formed a tiny V in the middle of the mouth, a terrible lack of chin. That was the damning detail, the nerve centre of his entire being, hence the bushy beard. Some people curse the fact that they are short, others cannot bear going bald. Blin would have given anything to have a strong, square jaw. When he was very young a boy in his class nicknamed him “the tortoise”, and he had not known why. A few years later, during a slide show at a holiday camp, Thierry had heard a girl whispering to her friend: “Don’t you think he’s got a profile like a tortoise?” He had started asking some of his friends but no one had really been able to explain; he had to wait until he was a fully grown man to understand. He was washing his hands in the toilets of a restaurant where the completely mirrored walls created a kaleidoscope effect, when he saw it close up for the first time: his own profile, his contours and how they moved in space. He finally made out the convex curve which ran from his forehead to his nose and his nose to his lower lip, and saw his eyes, which drooped over his cheeks – the whole thing reminded him irresistibly of a cartoon tortoise, a sad tortoise making painfully slow progress.
If only he could have been ugly, literally ugly, but true ugliness is as rare as beauty, and Blin was no more qualified for that category. He might have liked himself ugly. His tragedy was to have an exceptionally bland face, as insignificant as one could get. His features were pointless, that was the word he used. He could see himself ageing in a very strange way: with the tortoise getting increasingly sad, increasingly slow, filling out and hunching over at the same time, with flaccid skin and limp limbs. And it would not have made any difference if, even just for one summer, he had felt he was beautiful. He would have believed in it without being taken in by it: people who are physically pleasing are well aware of the fact. Everyone goes to great lengths to keep telling them so when they are children, and once they are adults, they have their memories refreshed from time to time. Blin had never caught a girl’s gaze lingering on him as he passed, and the women who had given themselves to him had never mentioned his physique. They liked him but not one of them found him beautiful; the more honest amongst them had admitted as much. On the rare occasions when he touched on the subject, Nadine referred awkwardly to his charm to gratify him briefly.
“At your age, you make do with the face you’ve got. And I like it. Your face, I mean.”
But why the hell should he have only one face in this bloody life? You should be able to change it in the same way you can break up a marriage that you thought was for ever.
He left the apartment and disappeared into the Métro station at Convention, re-emerged at Pernety, ordered a coffee to take out in his usual bistro, and opened up his shop, The Blue Frame, where a series of lithographs were waiting to be framed by the end of the week. He let his brain construct a complex scaffolding to flesh out the challenge thrown down the previous day, while his hands set to the task without needing any guidance.
Had Blin ever liked his work? He had chosen to be a craftsman because he wanted the independence and not because he loved paintings, framing or even wood. He had found himself a vocation in the same way you stumble into an affair that’s bound to come to an end sooner or later. While he had been doing a stint of research work in the graphic arts rooms of the Louvre, he had met a man who had perfected an ingenious system for checking drawings and pastels without having to touch them; works by Degas, Boudin, Fantin-Latour. One thing led to another, and he had learned everything you needed to know about framing; one exam later and he had a professional qualification. After contacting Musées de France to a
sk for work, he was offered a job at the Musée d’Orsay, and the game was won. A brand new workshop which he shared with a restorer, the most beautiful views in Paris, and a specialization in early photography. Nadar, Le Gray, Atget and a few others have him to thank to this day for their eternal rest between two sheets of Plexiglas. Some of his colleagues had an almost sensual approach to the materials, the varnishes, the paper, the gold leaf and, most importantly, the wood. Experts, lovers of wood whose senses were awakened by some piece of sycamore. He gradually came to face the fact: he was not one of them. His first memory relating to wood dated back to the sword thrown together by his father (a disastrous DIY man) from two rough pieces of wood, which gave him a good many splinters. In the years that he spent at the museum, he had done his work without putting a foot wrong, but without a hint of inventiveness. He resigned on a whim to grapple with another medium, an art which was no more sacred but was living. He took out a lease on an old grocery in a quiet street in the Fourteenth Arrondissement and set up his workshop: a paper guillotine, a shelving unit for the lengths of framing wood, harsh strip lighting and a few frames in the window. He did a bit of advertising in the area, relying on the goodwill of neighbouring shopkeepers, and opened wide the door of The Blue Frame, happy to be a craftsman, intoxicated by his brand new freedom, and flattered by the people who saw nobility in his craft and authenticity in his every gesture.
That was when they came.
The restaurant owners with their watercolours, the kids with their pictures folded in four, the film-lovers with their posters eaten away by the acid in the Scotch tape, the enlightened amateurs with their nudes, the ambitious amateurs with their hyperrealist nudes, and a few collectors of foxed engravings found at the Saint-Ouen flea market. Next came the artists themselves, with their pure abstracts which dared to use oil but overdid the siccative, the pastorals with their kindergarten pastels, the recent winners of various competitions, including the Fourteenth Arrondissement’s Golden Palette, and to cap it all Mme Combes’s self-portraits in charcoal. Blin had nothing to complain about; he wasn’t inundated by work and the shop was doing well enough to make a living.
Someone Else Page 2