French Rhapsody

by Antoine Laurain

  With no university place and no JBM, there no longer seemed to be much reason to stay in Paris. I went back to Burgundy and my future seemed to be laid out for me – or so I thought. Whenever I think about that time I find myself coming back to him; I hadn’t seen Jean for thirty-three years – counting it up like that, it’s almost impossible to believe. Though I hadn’t seen him ‘in real life’, he was never out of my thoughts, and I was always hearing other people talk about him.

  It’s all so long ago, images are coming back into my head like photos you find in a shoebox at the bottom of the cupboard, images that represent your childhood or youth and whose only value is as evidence to prove you really were there, at that time, surrounded by those people. A moment fixed on paper, of which nothing now remains. You never went back to that place, or it has changed beyond recognition; people have gone their separate ways and you’ve lost touch, or they’ve died, and you yourself no longer have the face you once had. It all belonged to another life. Thinking about all this, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  Jean said he wanted to go back to the States for a year or two, get back in touch with some people he knew at MIT. I couldn’t imagine leaving everything behind to follow him: what would I do in the United States? I knew what his departure meant: the end of our relationship. I knew too that I couldn’t stop him from going, that nothing would ever hold him back; I almost managed to console myself by thinking I had been lucky to have him for a little while. Our relationship lasted a little over a year, 409 days to be precise – I counted once, when I came across my old diaries. I had written ‘Jean’ and drawn a heart for the day we met, and 409 days later, in a new diary, were the words ‘Jean left’. Then I met François and everything happened very quickly; I agreed straight away when he asked me to marry him. I threw myself into it in order to put Jean behind me. The truth is that seeing him has really thrown me. I feel like having a good cry but the tears aren’t coming; I’m crying inside, as my mother used to say. How could fate have been so cruel to us? And so inclined to play tricks.

  U-turn

  Torrential rain was hitting the windscreen, and the driver had set the wipers going, squeaking slightly as they moved in time with one another. The magical light Domitile had kept on talking about had vanished the moment the photo shoot on the platform ended. She had already emailed four photos to Aurore to get JBM’s feedback while she worked on a second selection made up of pictures taken in the garden with Blanche and the ones from the kitchen, which she was already describing as ‘imbued with immense desirability’.

  Aurore scrolled through the four pictures from the station. Total pain in the arse she might be, but credit where credit was due: Domitile had managed to get the best shot of JBM that Aurore had ever seen. The train tracks faded into a kind of haze that merged with the sky; JBM was standing tall – the photographer had centred him in a ‘chest shot’; his grey jacket hung perfectly; the white shirt, with just the top button undone, was chic; he was looking into the distance, a half-smile on his lips; and the ever-present hint of irony in his eyes was barely noticeable. The first three shots were almost identical. The fourth had caught him mid-movement: looking upwards, JBM was running his left hand through his hair as a gust of wind swept through the station. The Breguet chronometer watch was hidden, but you got a good view of the smart cufflinks. Caught mid-gesture, his hand was slightly out of focus, which gave a sense of movement to the picture – something Domitile underlined in her email, while adding that, in her opinion, they should choose from the pictures showing static poses. When Aurore suggested that JBM look through the pictures on his iPad, he shook his head gently and began staring out at the city in the rain. He hadn’t said a word since they got in the car, but sat looking out at the crossroads and passers-by at red lights, without appearing to really see them.

  ‘I never had a daughter. You?’ ‘I have a daughter.’ ‘How old is she?’ ‘Thirty-three. How old are your sons?’ ‘Twenty-two and twenty-four.’ ‘Time flies …’

  It was there. JBM was replaying the brief exchange in his mind. Something had happened then. Something he had not been conscious of, but which his brain had picked up on. It had only lasted a moment, and now he would swear it was between the first sentence, ‘I never had a daughter,’ and the next, when he had thrown the question back at Bérengère: ‘You?’ Something had come about in those two seconds. Maybe no more than one second. It was absolutely infinitesimal, like subliminal images slipped into a film sequence that the brain grasps but the eye doesn’t see. JBM concentrated and tried to rid his mind of extraneous detail, the decor of the brasserie, the murmur of conversations and the sounds of cutlery. He was getting closer to it. There had been a faint hint of something on Bérengère’s lips and the look in her eyes had intensified. He could tell he almost had it when finally the image slipped anchor and rose up to the surface: the merest trace of irony had flitted across her mouth and come across in her expression. During their brief reunion, there had been surprise, awkwardness, nostalgia, tenderness and even a little sadness, but not irony – or only at that split second. ‘I never had a daughter.’ So it was to this statement that Bérengère had replied with an ironic smile. Thirty-three. If that was how old she was now, Bérengère must have had a child just after they split up. There was a wide spectrum of dates within which the child’s birth could have fallen. Bérengère might have met someone else and fallen pregnant very soon after their break-up. In which case, why that smile? There was nothing to justify it. I didn’t say anything ‘funny’, mused JBM. But no sooner had he had this thought, than it occurred to him that the opposite might be true: I said I didn’t have a daughter, and there’s only one person in the world who could smile ironically at that statement.

  ‘Max, how long does it take to get to Dijon by car?’

  ‘Dijon … I’d say three and a half hours. Less than four, anyway.’

  ‘And by TGV?’ he asked Aurore.

  ‘An hour and a half, isn’t it?’ the driver hazarded, seeking Aurore’s approval in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Something like that,’ she said.

  ‘Do a U-turn; we’re going back to the station. Book us two tickets, please, Aurore; we can work on the train.’

  ‘But … what are we going to Dijon for? Can’t it wait?’ she asked, stunned. ‘What about the Désert de Retz? What about Pierre?’

  ‘No, it can’t wait. Pierre can come with us for now.’

  Aurore turned to her phone.

  ‘There’s a train in fourteen minutes,’ she told them.

  ‘Max,’ JBM said soberly.

  ‘We’ll catch that one, Monsieur.’ The driver switched into the bus lane and raced up it.

  ‘What are we going to Dijon for?’ Aurore asked again.

  ‘We’re not going to Dijon,’ JBM replied. ‘We’re going to a place thirty kilometres outside it, between Vosne-Romanée and Nuits-Saint-Georges.’

  The Man Who Would Play Drums

  Feline and stoned. That would be Alain’s abiding image of her. Lying on the sofa in denim shorts and white crop top, she had extended her long legs so that her bare feet rested on the arm and she was smoking a perfectly conical joint. Her hair was bizarrely arranged in a sort of palm tree and her languid gaze never left him. ‘Ivana, a Russian artist,’ was how Lepelle had introduced her. She was clearly his girlfriend – or mistress, but that came to the same thing. Alain wondered how a guy like Lepelle could have pulled such a beautiful girl – and so young at that. Some girls inspired poetry, songs, novels or pictures. This girl inspired something very complex, something between violation and a marriage proposal. For the second of those, the discovery of Ivana had come much too late in his life; and as for the first, it had never so much as crossed his mind to impose anything at all on a woman by force. Ivana, for that was her name, would for ever remain languidly on her sofa, perfectly inaccessible, in the manner of those fabulous fish that you gaze at through thick glass in an aquarium. Like them, she barely co
mmunicated with her visitors and seemed to inhabit her own world, which Alain imagined full of snow, lovers, contraband vodka and wolves.

  Lepelle had not particularly wanted to see Alain, but he had let himself be talked into it. In the beginning, Alain had frequently come to his performances, notably the pencil-sharpening. The last time they had met was back in 2000, when the Cartier Foundation had mounted a little retrospective devoted to the matiéristes, the movement that had launched Lepelle at the beginning of the 1990s. He had sent him an invitation for the opening, but they hadn’t really had a chance to talk at the party.

  ‘It’s lucky that your letter never arrived,’ said Lepelle vehemently, handing back Polydor’s missive which he had just read after putting on the half-moon spectacles that he now removed. ‘Imagine where we would be now …’

  Alain was wondering what he meant and Ivana was waving her hand so that she too could read the letter. Alain passed it over, along with the envelope.

  ‘You live on Rue de Moscou?’ she said, astonished. ‘There’s a Moscow Street here?’

  ‘Yes, and just beside it, there’s Rue Saint-Pétersbourg. It changed its name; before it was Rue de Leningrad.’

  ‘Is it the Russian quarter?’ she asked in her thick accent.

  ‘No, the European quarter; all the streets are named after a capital city, or a major city.’

  ‘We’d have been pitiful has-beens, that’s what we would have been,’ resumed Lepelle, getting up from his armchair. ‘We’d have been fifty-somethings scraping a living between unemployment benefit and gigs at suburban youth clubs for eighty euros a time. A life of nothingness, a life of failure, that’s what we’ve been saved from by your letter being lost in the post. You should send flowers to your postman.’

  Alain had not known what to expect at the meeting Lepelle had organised at his home-studio in Yvelines, but it certainly was not this. ‘We might also have been successful,’ he objected. ‘Plenty of groups made it, look at Téléphone—’

  ‘Téléphone broke up,’ cut in Lepelle, ‘and a long time ago. Anyway, Téléphone was way before us, in 1977, before wave; they were punk rock, Téléphone.’

  ‘What difference does it make if Téléphone aren’t together any more?’ retorted Alain. ‘Depeche Mode, the Eurythmics, The Cure were all famous for a while – that’s what counts, isn’t it? And Indochine still exists.’

  ‘Wrong.’ Lepelle’s tone was brisk. ‘Indochine got back together, that’s different. And it’s only because Nicola Sirkis is a nutcase, obsessed with his own glory and he needs Indochine. I recognise that he was very courageous in the wilderness years, all of the nineties. He continued to believe in himself, when everyone had forgotten him … No, frankly, look at you, a GP; you live well; all your patients’ illnesses pay for your country house, if you have one, your children’s education, good restaurants, holidays … Even Vaugan was right to give up on the band, and JBM too. You think he would have been fulfilled as our producer, our manager? No, JBM had another destiny and he knew it. And our singer, Bérengère, what became of her? No one knows. As for me? Eh? Me? Don’t you think I prefer being what I am, rather than a lame drummer chasing recognition at provincial festivals? I’m rich and famous, a celebrity even, and with the band all I would have been was a loser along with all of you.’

  ‘You are a loser,’ said Ivana, exhaling the smoke from her joint.

  ‘Give that back,’ Lepelle snapped, snatching the letter from her and handing it over to Alain, who put it back in the envelope.

  ‘OK, well, did you keep the tape or not?’

  Lepelle sighed and shrugged. ‘Do you really think, my poor old friend, I would have kept that for thirty-three years? And what about you, do you still have the pencil shavings? You know, they’ll be worth a lot; you made a good investment. How much did you pay for them?’

  ‘I can’t remember,’ replied Alain. ‘It was still francs then – a thousand francs, I think.’

  ‘There you go then!’ cried Lepelle. ‘Today, old chap, they’re worth twenty thousand euros. Oh yes,’ nodding his head as if he had just bestowed manna from heaven and Alain should be very honoured.

  Alain finished his glass of orange juice. His quest was useless – those he could reach no longer had the cassette. What had he succeeded in tracking down? A megalomaniac fascist in the grip of political madness, a man with a boil from a Thai resort – at this hour he would be tucking in to one of his favourite grilled fish with a flower on top – and today an arrogant contemporary artist, proud of his success and contemptuous of the Holograms.

  Some days earlier, before Lepelle had deigned to make contact with him, Alain had reread Polydor’s letter and had suddenly wondered about its author: Claude Kalan, artistic director. The internet had provided some information about the producer, now retired. He seemed to have had his heyday in the 1980s and 1990s. He must have been one of those quiet people whose name no one knows, but whose work is familiar to everyone. One of those people who, without giving any sign of it, have amassed a large fortune by producing records that everybody recognises. Alain found several Top 50 hits under his name, along with collaborations with famous artists, French as well as foreign. Google Images, on the other hand, only had two recent photos, both very small and taken from a long way away. They showed a slight man with white hair, who must have been about seventy. Alain had scanned the Polydor letter, and started to write back, thirty-three years after the man had requested a meeting.

  He explained that the postal service had lost the letter, of which he enclosed a copy, and asked him, without any great hope, whether he remembered the Holograms. He did not bother asking whether Polydor or Kalan had kept the five-track cassette. He had really only written to Kalan as a sort of confession, to talk to someone about it and to tell the story. Then he had telephoned the record company where a young girl had confirmed that Monsieur Kalan had retired but that Alain could send his letter to the company and they would ensure that it was sent on. But Kalan had not replied yet and probably never would.

  It was very quiet. Alain watched the flames behind the heat-resistant glass of the fireplace. The room was high-ceilinged, painted entirely white and opened on to an American-style kitchen. A little further away, through a very large window, you could see the studio and the garden. Although the overall impression was cold and soulless, Alain knew that this place was worth at least two million euros, maybe three. Alain had no desire to prolong the encounter. In the end, Lepelle was right. He had a comfortable life, and the best place for the letter was the waste-paper basket. He took his leave.

  No sooner had Lepelle closed the door behind him than Ivana had remonstrated with him. ‘Why don’t you give him his songs? You really are a horrible man.’

  Lepelle did not bother to reply. He sat down heavily in a chair, as if stunned, his eyes staring, muttering curses. Then the muttering became a crescendo until he got to his feet and yelled, ‘Damn it to hell, we would have made it!’ He repeated, ‘We would have made it! I knew we were good!’ He was shouting and flinging his arms up as if he were addressing God. ‘I knew it, I always knew it.’ He groaned. ‘And as for that bastard who came to show me his letter!’ In his fury, he picked up a magazine and hurled it at the door. ‘It’s too much to bear. That would have meant everything to me, everything! When will this ever end?’

  And he picked up another magazine, tore it to shreds and threw them around the room.

  Ivana

  The room with all the records is at the other end of the house. It’s so big that you have to stand on a sliding ladder to get to the top shelves. Lepelle has thousands of records, thirty-threes and forty-fives, and thousands of CDs and audio tapes too. The guy has the whole history of rock, pop, disco and new wave. In the middle of the room is his drum kit with Tama written on the side of the bass drum. He says it’s the best brand of drums in the world. There’s also a sound system with enormous speakers that he had put on specially made slate stands to make the sound better. He
shuts himself in there and spends hours going for it on the drums. When the room’s empty, I’m allowed to go in there and listen to whatever I want, as long as I put the records back in the right order and don’t copy anything.

  On one of the shelves, there are some framed pictures of him looking young and holding his drumsticks, and on the same shelf there are the records and audio tapes he helped to make, about ten of them. To begin with, he didn’t want me to listen to them, but then he was happy for me to. No doubt about it, Lepelle was a good, maybe even very good, drummer. On the same shelf, there’s the Holograms cassette with the black and white photo of the group and the song ‘Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On’. What I think is that the record room is like a mausoleum for his own dreams. I told him that once and he just looked at me. I think the truth is he has never got over not having made it in the music business. Playing drums in recording studios, concert halls, being on the road, jumping on groupies in hotel rooms, leaving again the next day and doing the same thing over and over until the end of the tour, when he would lock himself away with his hi-hat and drums – that would have been the ideal life for him. Lepelle would have been ‘cool’ and happy as a musician; modern art has never brought him the fame he wanted and now he’s ‘bitter’. That’s a word I only learnt recently, and I think it suits him. It means you’re going round in circles like a snake in a basket, exactly like he does; he’s jealous of all the artists with a bigger following than him. He spends his time inventing enemies, like he has an obsession with a collector of French contemporary art who hasn’t bought any of his work; he even pinned a picture of this guy on the wall of his studio and throws darts at it. He’s actually nothing like an artist; I think he’s more like a village shopkeeper, the kind that spend their time plotting ways to steal customers off their competitors down the road.