Although the men stay outside on the sidewalk, they can see her through the store window. She comes out to the door twice to ask them what they think. Now she knocks on the window and orders them to come in. Kepa stays outside, because he’s smoking. She has a small strappy top on, bright blue—Klein blue, says the retail assistant, a sophisticated woman of Abaitua’s age who looks at him with curiosity, wondering if the girl’s his daughter—and tight black pants. There’s also a dress she likes, it’s made of very fine cloth and has a pattern of large leaves. But she thinks it’s too chic. The shopkeeper says she should try it on. The leaves are mostly green and yellow, colors that look good on mademoiselles, she says. The girl’s barefoot. Her feet are very thin without being at all bony. She spins around with one hand over her head, the dress hem billows out. She asks what it looks like on her. Wonderful. She has perfect toes, unaffected by the ugly marks on so many women’s feet caused by wearing the wrong shoes. The girl follows his look down to her feet and stares at them as if she were seeing them for the first time, and when she looks at him again, he thinks she’s embarrassed. In any case, she puts her sneakers on again. She isn’t going to buy the dress, beautiful though it is, because it’s too sophisticated, and “very expensive too.” The shopkeeper quickly understands Abaitua’s signal that she should put the elegant dress underneath the other purchase, and he pays for his gift while the girl is getting dressed.
The enormous buttresses and flying buttresses propping up the sides of St. Andrew’s Cathedral are so irregular that they look as if they’ve been put up in a great hurry. Kepa makes them count the apostles on the Porte Royale, and there are ten of them. He says there are eleven at Arantzazu, because the sculptor, Jorge Oteiza, left Judas out, and so on. He can’t stop talking. Sometimes when Abaitua listens to Kepa come out with all these quotes, dates, names, and anecdotes about whatever it is they’re seeing, he thinks he’s just making it up.
Didn’t Oteiza do thirteen apostles?
The bookstore smells of wax. A man who’s older than Abaitua and wearing blue overall murmurs a greeting to them, “bonsoir messieurs-dames,” almost without lifting his head from the book he’s reading. The girl asks if they have Montauk. They have just one copy left. Beautifully published. Matte cover, beige, no photographs, drawings, or decorations, just “Max Frisch, Montauk, a Tale, translated from the German by Michèle and Jean Tailleur, NRF, Gallimard.”
The girl reads, with her funny accent: “C’est icy un livre de bonne foy, lecteur.”
She’s deeply moved to think they’ve just been walking along streets that Montaigne must have known, and she holds onto the two men’s arms as she says so. And they walk through the streets like that, the girl between them, holding onto their arms.
They have dinner in the brasserie at the hotel they’re booked into, because there wasn’t a free table at the bar Kepa wanted to go to. They’ve already drunk a bottle of wine, and the men can’t stop talking. The girl listens to them attentively, one elbow resting on the table and her chin balanced on the palm of her hand, her eyes moving from one to the other. They talk, and the girl laughs. She’s a receptive person. It seems she finds everything they say interesting, and they compete, trying to seduce her by being the smartest, the funniest, but then when he realizes what they’re doing, Abaitua feels ridiculous and talks less.
Kepa teaches the girl how to taste wine. Hold the glass up, look at it against the light, stick your nose in. He exaggerates every gesture, especially the swishing of the wine inside his mouth, he opens his nostrils really wide, which even looks a little obscene. Abaitua never tastes the wine. Pilar does, more cautiously than Kepa, but she takes in all the nuances of a wine in her nose and on her palate. She doesn’t exaggerate her gestures, but she knows more about wine than he does, and more about gastronomy in general. She takes a little into her mouth, looks straight ahead, and then she can identify everything that was used to make the wine, however complex it may be. She obviously has a gift for it, but she’s also been educated to do it. At lunch at her parents’ house, there is complete silence when each dish is served. Everyone—except for her mother, who sits upright in her chair like an accused woman awaiting the final sentence, both hands firmly on the table—takes a first mouthful, and after a silence, which lasts long, drawn-out seconds, they start giving their opinions one by one. It’s a sentencing process that focuses on the negative: “I don’t think the full flavor of the truffle comes out”; “It could do with a little cream, just a touch”; “I don’t think it should have the basil.” It seems Kepa’s reading his mind at that precise moment—pointing at him with his glass, he says that Abaitua’s wife really knows how to taste things, she has an incredible gustatory memory. Abaitua doesn’t like her being mentioned. The young woman looks at him with interest, though, and he merely nods. But his own wife, he says, wouldn’t have been able to realize the difference between a very cheap Don Simón and a Château Cheval Blanc. He talks about his wife in the past tense.
The American girl must be about the same age as the waitress. Kepa says saucy things to her each time she comes up to their table, which she takes in good grace. “Profitons donc,” she says this time. She’s speaking about chocolate, inviting him to enjoy it while he can. The restaurant’s star dessert is a “tour de chocolat noir et de crème brûlée”—a tower of dark chocolate and crème brûlée—and a bunch of other stuff, all served “sur un soufflé de riz”—on a soufflé of rice, and Kepa makes a show of wondering whether to order it or not, because “chocolate’s a very powerful aphrodisiac.” So much so, he says, that in the not-too-distant future, it’ll be forbidden, just like smoking and making love. “Profitons donc,” says the waitress, laughing. Only Kepa yields to the temptation of the chocolate. The American girl chooses strawberries, but it turns out that they, too, are aphrodisiacs. Kepa thinks they’re an indecisive, ambiguous fruit, somewhat hermaphroditic, and that’s why we like them. He says he’s read that the aphrodisiac effect lasts longer than the strawberries themselves. Abaitua feels quite tired and punishes himself by not ordering any dessert. It’s a way of distancing himself from Kepa’s joke; he hates to think of the girl deducing that they go around paying court to young waitresses when they’re out on their trips. But his refusal ends up looking ridiculous, it just leads to further joking, giving the waitress the chance to tease him for not wanting to take the risk—“Monsieur ne veut pas se risquer alors”—and she laughs again, with no inhibitions whatsoever, showing off her white teeth and pink gums. When she goes, the American girl says she envies those great teeth and complains that she herself has the teeth of a mouse.
Europe: the happy circumstance of having many different languages and cultures in one small area. And the unhappy one, Abaitua blurts out. Fortunately, the girl doesn’t ask him why. He doesn’t feel like talking about it.
Bas Armagnac. Abaitua doesn’t normally drink spirits. Only when he goes on trips with Kepa. The girl doesn’t want to drink anymore, because she’s “pretty drunk” today, as well. Then, just to try it, she takes a sip from Abaitua’s glass.
Kepa looks melancholy, especially when the waitress comes up to them wearing her own clothes, to say goodbye and wish them sweet dreams. “Faites de beaux rêves,” she says.
In fact, the things that Abaitua is looking at from his bedroom window—sloping lines, zinc roofing, stone façades lit by gentle yellow light, the reflections of streetlamps and the black dome of a public building trembling on the river—are quite like what he used to see from his parents’ home as a child. There is complete silence, it’s perhaps too quiet, and with the light off, he gets the feeling that he’s plunged into the void. In the bathroom, however, he hears the sound of a shower. It must by the young American; her room is between his and Kepa’s. He takes a shower, as well.
He’s half asleep when he hears the door. Perhaps he’s completely asleep. Fingers are tapping on the door, almost scratching it, and he knows it’s the
American girl on the other side. So he jumps out of bed naked and looks for the pajamas he has in his bag. It takes him a long time to put them on, among other things because the buttons on the shirt are still done up, and he’s worried about what the girl might think.
The girl’s wearing the same clothes she had on during the day, thick sweater and everything. He’s wearing his blue silk pajamas with the darker blue piping, all very conventional. The girl says, “Doctor, I’m not feeling well.” And then, with her hands crossed over her chest, she repeats Lizardi’s words, “Bihotzean min dut, min etsia.” She smiles sadly. And then in Spanish she explains that that’s what she had planned to say, but it’s so conventional, “Es lo que había pensado decir pero es tan convencional.” Abaitua takes both her hands. He embraces her. “Let’s keep it simple, all right?”
He feels it’s a long time since he last embraced anyone.
It’s the girl who decided to go back to her room. At around six, the time he usually wakes up. The curtains were still open, and the view, which the girl’s figure was highlighted against, was bluish. He gets up, as well, and puts his pajamas on, even though the girl says it’s still early and he should go back to bed and sleep a little more. She’s only wearing her T-shirt and is holding all her other clothes, including her sneakers, in a bundle under her arm. He goes with her to the door, but she opens it, just enough to be able to squeeze through.
Abaitua feels a vague sense of guilt—which may be the result of some slight fear from having bowed to desire—but also the satisfaction of having seduced a young body.
Kepa is in the dining room reading Tolstoy. “Interesting,” he says when Abaitua asks him how he is, though he isn’t talking about the book. He supposes he knows that he’s slept with Lynn and is reproaching him for it. But he doesn’t notice any change in his attitude when speaking with Lynn. In fact, he teases her again for having chosen strawberries. Lynn doesn’t say or do anything that might point to her having been in an intimate situation a little earlier. They try to make plans for the day. They could take a quick walk around the city, set out early, and have lunch somewhere along the way, or they could stick around until after lunch. The girl doesn’t mind one way or the other, “I’m sure either way will be fine.”
Walking downtown is nice, the streets are fairly quiet. They see the place with the Grosse Cloche belfry, and Lynn gives two fine Percherons that are yoked to a cart there an apple each. They see Montaigne’s house in the Quartier de la Rousellen. They sit underneath the Café Régent’s red awnings in the Place Gambetta and order a café avec une noisette de lait, a café crème, and a café au lait, so that they can compare them all. They count the columns—Corinthian, Kepa dixit—on the Grand Théâtre, and there are twelve of them. Twelve statues. Nine muses and three goddesses. Juno, Venus, and Minerva. They find the monument to the Girondins ugly and the Grandes Hommes market spectacular.
The girl stops in front of an elegant gift shop to look at amber figurines. It’s the same shop Pilar bought a little jade dog in—it was identical to a fox terrier she’d had as a girl. In fact, she chose it and Abaitua paid for it. It’s Pilar who controls their joint finances, but sometimes she likes him to pay, he supposes it makes her feel like a lady. There was a time when Pilar used to buy a lot of ceramics, figurines, and other decorative objects. She doesn’t do that anymore. Now she says the only thing they do is pile up dust. He moves up to Lynn. He asks if she likes them, and she says she does, but she holds him by his sleeve when he makes a movement to go into the shop. She likes them, but that doesn’t mean she has to buy them—we don’t buy everything we like. He’s already bought her enough things. They start walking again, Kepa out in front of them. They walk behind him, slightly separated from one another. Abaitua is worried the girl might think he had intended to buy her a gift as a sort of reward. She smiles when she tells him the dress was too much. It’s the third time she’s thanked him for it.
Kepa is waiting for them at the corner. At the door of a Crédit Lyonnais office. Abaitua guesses that it’s the one his friend and Lynn’s landlord once attempted to hold up. So he asks him, “How many years ago was it?” Not because he’s interested, he just wants to see if he’ll tell them the strange story, which is like something out of Laurel and Hardy. But all-knowing Kepa says he doesn’t remember, it was ages ago.
War stories. Abaitua imagines it isn’t because he’s afraid of coming off as ridiculous that he doesn’t want to tell the story, it’s because he wants to show some discretion where Martin is concerned; he hasn’t even mentioned that they used to be roommates in Bordeaux. But finally, faced with Abaitua’s insinuations—he asks if it isn’t true that the bank robbery of the century took place right there—he starts telling them about it, a quick summary, without going into details. He and Martin used to meet up in Baiona, Martin was studying sociology in Bordeaux at the time and would come down to Baiona most weekends, homesick, apparently. Kepa, on the other hand, lived in Baiona but wanted to get out; things had been tense for him ever since he’d left “the organization.” The Basque refugees there didn’t like Martin much, either, they thought he was weird, and some of them even thought he should be treated with suspicion. The two of them used to spend a lot of time together, and while Martin was thinking about what to do with his future, he invited Kepa to come and live with him. Kepa had the idea of robbing a bank, something he’d thought through before but the organization had never allowed, because there was a tacit agreement that they wouldn’t carry out any operations in France. Kepa was experienced, he’d done three bank robberies with the organization, and the job he had in mind now was very easy. First, on the day of the robbery, they’d have to take a Polaroid of the cashier’s little son holding one of their hands, with his face covered by that morning’s newspaper, so that the father, on seeing it, would think that his son had been kidnapped. That bit was very easy, because he knew the woman who looked after the boy from speaking with her in the park—he’d told her he was a fine art photographer. And the rest wasn’t difficult, either. They’d go to the bank, show the cashier the photo, and he, of course, would see that it had been taken that very day and recognize by his shirtsleeve that he was the same man as in the photo, and then there was no chance of him not believing it to be a real kidnapping, and he would give him all the money he had access to. Kepa would calmly leave the bank, and Martin would be waiting for him in a car they’d have stolen earlier, whose plates they’d have changed and hidden somewhere, and they’d make their way to Paris without any further trouble or anyone stopping them. Everything went well, he pretended to bump into the nanny by chance and, after taking some photos of her, asked her to take one of him with the child, which she did. She thought Kepa hiding his face behind the newspaper was some kind of artistic peculiarity. Then he went to the bank. As they’d planned, Martin was waiting for him, and he promised that he had the car in the nearby lot and would pull around at eleven o’clock on the dot and park in front of the door, because you could only park on that side of the street for ten minutes at a time. Kepa went into the bank at ten to eleven, stood in line, and, when it was his turn, showed the photo to the cashier, but just at the moment when he was going to explain that they’d kidnapped the boy, two policemen rushed into the bank, because they were being chased by a huge dog, one of those Great Danes, white with black spots, which was running after them and barking. There was an enormous uproar, and a few moments afterward, Martin burst in after the dog, which was his. Its name was Lagun, which means “friend.” Kepa decided to run out of the bank; Martin, after getting ahold of the dog, did the same, and in the street there was another surprise: instead of the BMW they had lifted earlier, there was Martin’s old Citroën 2CV. They jumped in, and after finally managing to start the engine—Martin was nervous—they fled. He explained to Kepa that he couldn’t bring himself drive the stolen car, he was afraid he wouldn’t know how to handle it. He claimed he was a one-car man.
He said
that unlike many people who only need to know how to change gears to be able to drive any car they like, he found it very hard to get used to a car—by the way, some psychologists believed that particular inability to be a sign of monogamy—and so he’d decided to take his own car, which he was already completely familiarized with, in order to be able to make their getaway drive as safe as possible, which was important, seeing as how the bank robbery itself was already a nerve-wracking affair and he would probably be quite nervous. In addition to that, he’d decided to take Lagun with him because he, too, had psychological problems and couldn’t stand being alone—the last time he’d left him alone at home, he’d destroyed all the furniture—and while he and his dog were waiting in the car, two gendarmes had walked by, and because the dog didn’t like uniforms, he started barking. The gendarmes responded with some sort of unpleasant gesture, so he jumped out of the window and started biting them—he was a well-behaved dog, but threats made him angry. Although Kepa and Martin managed to get some distance away in the 2CV, they were soon tracked down. Not much happened to them, even though they found the photo of the cashier’s son, which Kepa had dropped on the floor during all the commotion. They spent a few months in prison, and the worst thing about being locked up, he says, was having to put up with Martin. Kepa laughs loudly at that. He doesn’t know how he ever asked Martin to be his accomplice. He laughs out loud again. Perhaps it was because Martin had offered to help without asking for any share in return. Even so, his help turned out to be very expensive indeed. But he says he thinks a lot of Martin, even though he hasn’t seen him for a long time now.
Place Jean Moulin. The girl knows about the Resistance hero. A bronze angel with open wings, holding a naked, lifeless soldier in its arms; the soldier holds a broken sword. Both the soldier and the angel are very beautiful. A plaque on the ground says that the sculpture was made by Antonin Mercié, its title is Gloria Vicitis, Gloire aux Vaincus, and it’s a copy of the original in the Square Montholon in Paris.
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