‘What happened with Franck?’
I couldn’t not talk to him about it. In the hubbub, I outlined the basic details. He listened without looking at me and knocked back his glass of calva.
‘Is he well at least?’
‘I don’t know. I tell myself that if there’d been a problem, we would have known about it.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Papa didn’t want to tell me anything.’
‘How did it go down at home?’
‘Mama hasn’t forgiven him for the Treasury bonds business. Papa is trapped. He knows that Mama will never forgive Franck for what he did, or forgive Papa for having helped him. And it’s not much fun with Maurice.’
‘Keep me informed with news of the family, write to me, my boy. The address is Enzo Marini, care of Ricardo Marini at Fontanellato, Emilia-Romagna. Will you remember?’
‘We’re not far from the chess club. Do you remember? I told you about it. Would you like to go there?’
‘I don’t feel like it.’
‘Another day.’
‘I’m going away, Michel. The day after tomorrow.’
‘You could stay. You don’t have to go. We could play chess together.’
‘Look at this foul weather. Down there, it’s sunny. You come and see me in Italy and we’ll play chess all day long. You’d better keep on improving. I’ll take you to Florence and to Siena. You’ll see, it’s the most beautiful country in the world.’
My father, Juliette and I accompanied him to the Gare de Lyon. We arrived there one hour early. He wasn’t a railwayman for nothing! He examined the locomotive with a critical eye. He knew the journey, the timetable and the changes of train. He had planned to stop off for a week in Milan to see the city.
‘It costs an arm and a leg!’ he remarked to the clerk behind the counter.
‘You get a reduction on the French rail network. In Italy, you pay the full whack.’
‘I’m a former railwayman.’
‘The Italians couldn’t care less.’
‘You see, children,’ he said in a fit of pique, ‘there’s no international solidarity. It’s every man for himself. How are we expected to manage?’
My father put his suitcases on the rack and settled him into his compartment. We waited on the platform for him to appear at the window, blow us kisses and wave us goodbye, but the train moved off and disappeared without our seeing him. My father was furious.
‘What the hell is he going to do down there? Eh? Can you tell me that? For years, he’s bored us to death telling us over and over again that we were French. One hundred per cent pure butter, as he put it. He had a fight with a neighbour who called him Macaroni. And the very first thing he does when he’s able to do so is go back to the land of his birth. What sort of nonsense is that? It’s where you live that you put down roots. They’re in the earth beneath your feet. Not in Italy. He’s a foreigner down there. I’ll give him six months before he’s back again. Now that he’s sold his home, where will he go? I can’t look after him. He’ll just have to go to Baptiste’s. He can read Railway Magazine. They can tell each other jokes about the Trades Union and swap the latest party gossip.’
‘Talking about the party, we went to the Lenin museum.’
‘Oh really!’
‘He seemed upset. Why?’
‘You’ll have to ask him.’
‘He’s gone to Italy.’
‘That’s the way it is and that’s the way it’s always been.’
Two days after Grandfather Enzo’s departure, my father arrived late for dinner. He was carrying a parcel wrapped in white paper. He laid it on the table, as though it were a present for my mother.
‘It’s for you.’
‘What is it?’
‘Open it and see.’
My mother untied the string, pulled open the wrapping, and discovered a shoebox. Inside it were around ten bundles of one hundred franc notes. Bonapartes.
‘There’s five million there. I’m giving you back the Treasury bonds money, with the children as witnesses. You won’t be able to say that I took anything from you. You can count it.’
‘Where has it come from?’
‘Let’s just say that I borrowed it and now I’m returning it to you.’
‘Do you think I’m just some sort of weathercock? You take the money without telling me! You refuse to tell me what you’ve used it for! You bring it back as though nothing had happened. Am I some little goose you can play around with as though I were sixteen years old? Do you think I’m going to put up with this?’
She took the box and disappeared into her bedroom, slamming the door. Juliette went and joined her.
‘It’s unbelievable!’ my father exclaimed. ‘She’s never happy. I take the money, she grumbles. I bring it back, she grumbles. I don’t know what else I can do.’
‘You could have told her the truth.’
‘She mustn’t know for your brother’s sake. You promised, Michel.’
‘I’ve said nothing. And where did you get this money? It wasn’t Franck who gave it back to you.’
He hesitated.
‘It’s your grandfather.’
‘Grandfather Enzo?’
‘He sold his house in Lens and the furniture. He divided the sum into three parts, one for Baptiste, one for me and one for himself.’
‘There’s no reason to hide it from Mama.’
‘You don’t understand. Taking the Treasury bonds put me in an appalling position. This way, I’ve patched things up without appearing to do so.’
‘You should have talked to her about it.’
‘I’m not going to take lessons from a kid!’
‘I’m trying to help you.’
‘You’re not helping me. You’re pissing me off!’
The repayment of the money did not help his situation. Quite the reverse, matters only got worse. He would have done better to keep it. When I spoke about it to Igor, he told me that my father had been wrong. When you do something stupid, you never patch it up. You have to follow things through to the end and hope you get a chance to extricate yourself. Otherwise, you pay twice over. Both for the stupid deed and for having tried to extricate yourself.
*
Grandfather Enzo did not come back. He toured Italy by bus in a methodical manner and he found a clever way of doing so. He slept in monasteries, of which there are countless numbers there. They were clean, you could eat your fill, and it cost almost nothing. It made him laugh, he who loathed priests, to be taking advantage of this. He sent us postcards of the duomo in each little town to make us feel envious. It was more beautiful than he had imagined. He also wrote to us on our birthdays. He was happy and had been made very welcome. He gave a helping hand to Ricardo’s children picking the tomatoes or the corn. They got on well and it was as if they had always known one another. He sent us a photograph of Fontanellato in which we could see them all in an arcaded square. In the background were a brick castle and a park. It’s true that they did look like a family. The notion of returning was not mentioned. On the contrary, he asked us to come and see him and to discover our country. Apparently he spoke Italian with a Romagna accent, and no one noticed that he was French.
5
Nicolas put pressure on me to lend him Pierre’s records. He insisted. I stood firm. But you can’t go on saying no to your best friend, otherwise, as he kept repeating to me, it means you’re not friends.
‘You’re a rotten swine, Michel, I lend you mine!’
‘These ones aren’t mine. I’m the trustee.’
‘You’re making fun of me! They’re yours. Pierre’s dead and his sister has cleared off!’
It wasn’t an easy situation to cope with. Especially when the friend was gifted at maths and sat beside you. I went round to his place and took along two or three of the records. We listened to them eagerly, with our eyes closed, and I took them back with me when I left. He had a passion for Fats Domino and knew the words by heart.
He eventually came up with an ingenious solution. For his birthday, his parents had given him a Philips tape-recorder with a reversible magnetic tape. I couldn’t refuse to allow him to record them. But in spite of repeated efforts, the results varied from mediocre to bad. Try as we might to avoid making noises, there were still crackling, hissing, squeaking sounds and a grainy background sound. We asked his brothers for total silence. The windows were shut tightly and we held our breath. We took refuge in the bathroom that overlooked the courtyard. I held the pick-up arm. He pressed the ‘record’ button. We remained stock-still until the end of the song. But we couldn’t get rid of the interference. We had to make do.
‘It’s better than nothing. Between now and the end of the year, we’ll have recorded the lot.’
Above a certain volume, you could no longer hear the static. That’s the advantage of rock’n’roll. Nothing can drown it out. We tried to play the record and the recording at the same time, but we never managed to synchronize the two. We also got an echoing effect.
As I left Nicolas’s house, I spotted Sacha, sitting on a bench in place Maubert. He was smoking and blowing rings. He watched me with his ambiguous smile as I approached.
‘Paris is a small world,’ I said to him.
‘We live in the same neighbourhood. I’m five minutes away.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘I’ve got your photos. If you wait for me, I’ll go and get them.’
‘There’s no hurry.’
‘They’re wonderful.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘I know a bit about it. I was surprised. Three or four of them are really good. Come on, let’s go and get them.’
I followed him. Sacha lived in an attractive building on rue Monge, but his room was on the seventh floor and there was no lift. The back staircase was filthy and had not been cleaned for years. The wooden steps were bare and the damp had caused plaster to peel off the walls. The paintwork was blistering. Electric wires were dangling. There were no lamp-bulbs on the first and second floors. It was a long, slow climb. Sacha was panting. When we arrived at the top, he was red in the face. He fanned himself with his hand and caught his breath.
‘No more cigarettes.’
A dark, narrow corridor led to a dozen attic rooms. Sacha opened the third door. We entered an austerely furnished room of about twelve square metres, lit by a skylight high above. There were a neatly made single bed, a shelf full of books, a rectangular table with odd bits of crockery, a fruit bowl with two apples, an overflowing ashtray, a chair, a wardrobe lacking a door with a few clothes inside, no decoration, and all arranged with fastidious neatness. The only apparent luxury was an ancient crystal set placed on a stool, and an old gramophone with a pile of 78 records.
‘It’s not big and it’s not expensive.’
‘Have you lived here for a long time?’
‘A year after I arrived in France, Kessel found me this place.’
‘Do you know him?’
‘A bit. He gives us all a helping hand from time to time.’
He took off his overcoat and threw it on the bed.
‘Are you thirsty? I can’t offer a choice. All I’ve got is water.’
He picked up a bottle and left the room to fill it from the tap at the end of the corridor. I cast an eye over his bookshelf. Authors I’d never heard of. He returned, poured out two glasses and handed me one of them.
‘What nationality are you?’
‘What would you say?’
‘There’s nothing to go by. There are only books in French.’
‘When I left Russia, I hadn’t time to take anything with me. To find Russian books in Paris, you’ve got to have money. If I want interesting novels, I go to the public library.’
‘I’ve never seen you there.’
‘For you, it’s somewhere you pass through. You return your books, you take away others. You chat to Christiane for five minutes and you rush off. Me, I’m not in a hurry. I sit down. I do my reading there, in the warmth. I stay there and make the most of it until closing time. There’s no central heating here.’
‘It must get cold. Especially at night.’
‘When you’ve lived in Leningrad, you’re accustomed to polar temperatures. Our hides are tough. Do you want to see the photos?’
‘I’d love to.’
He went out of the room and looked up and down the deserted corridor. There wasn’t a sound. He waited for the light to go out. He put his hand to his mouth.
‘Follow me,’ he whispered.
He moved forward on tiptoes. We went down a few steps in the darkness. On the half landing, he opened a door with care. He walked into a room full of hole-in-the-ground lavatories. He motioned me to follow him. I hesitated for a moment. He noticed my reluctance.
‘Don’t be frightened of anything,’ he muttered.
I followed him inside. He bolted the door. He put his hand inside his shirt and drew out a thin cord from around his neck. On it was a pointed key with sharp edges. He stood on the concrete ledge and raised himself up with great agility. Balancing, he unlocked a panel in the wall with the key and pushed aside the metal cover. He put his hand inside, felt around and brought out a cardboard folder. He handed it to me. I took it. He replaced the metal cover, locked the panel and climbed down again. He wiped the palms of his hands and put the cord back inside his shirt. We left the toilets. He was still on the alert. Reassured by the silence, he moved forward, without switching on the light. We walked down the stairs and emerged onto the street. He dived into the adjoining entrance. We came out in the Arènes de Lutèce. We sat down on a bench in the sunshine. He pointed out the building to me. He lit a cigarette.
‘That’s where I live. If you put the chair on the table, climb up on it and hoist yourself onto the roof, you get a marvellous view over Paris.’
‘May I ask you why you put that in the toilets?’
‘Did you see the door of my room? It’s paper-thin. One shove of the shoulder and you’re in there. People who live on this floor go out to work. During the daytime, the place is deserted. The rooms are often burgled. The woman next door to me, who works at the baker’s shop on place Monge, they even stole her lipstick and her iron. Do you know what they took from me? My electric radiator! And what’s more they’re vandals. So that’s where I hide my treasures and I do what Alyona Ivanovna, the old pawnbroker in Crime and Punishment did, I keep the key of my casket round my neck. No one would think of searching in the bog, would they?’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘I trust you.’
‘Really?’
‘Don’t talk to anyone about it.’
‘OK.’
‘You mustn’t tell your friends at the Club that we know each other.’
‘As you wish.’
‘It will be a secret between us.’
He took the cardboard folder and opened it. He took out my prints. The photographs of the Médicis fountain had been laid on stiff card and on top he had pasted on a mount that brought out the black and white details. I was gobsmacked.
‘They’re 18 x 24. It’s a good format. Several of them have come out really well.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘You’ve got talent, Michel. I know about these things. Believe me. Any fool can press a button and take photos. But there aren’t many photographers. You know how to frame a shot, pick out the main focus, find the most effective angle, look for the right sort of light and decide on the best moment to take it.’
‘You don’t know how pleased I am. It’s the first time anyone’s told me that.’
‘And I’m not someone who pays compliments.’
‘The card helps bring out the best in them.’
‘Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like a frame for a painting. I don’t use it to make it look pretty. It’s to help focus the view and make the photo stand out. Nothing should interfere with it. If the photo’s no good, it won’t make it any better.’
‘You don’t think I’m too close?’
‘On the contrary, that’s what’s interesting: you don’t make the beginner’s mistake of trying to control the perspective. You avoid the high and low-angle shots that distort or dwarf the subject matter. The camera should interact with the eye and remain at the same level. It shouldn’t be performing gymnastics.’
‘When they look like this, they’re wonderful. The problem is that I can’t pay you for them.’
‘I’m not asking you for money. I don’t let my friends pay.’
‘Why do you say we’re friends?’
‘Aren’t we friends?’
‘Yes… but…’
‘What’s the matter, Michel? Don’t you feel at ease with me?’
‘What bothers me is that we address each other as “vous”. I use “tu” with my friends. I’d feel more comfortable if we said “tu” when we speak to one another.’
‘I hate using “tu”. I’d prefer to go on as we are. We can be friends without being over-familiar.’
‘As you wish.’
‘In time, maybe. If you don’t mind, I’ll take a couple of them.’
‘You want my photos?’
‘I like grouping photographs together on a particular theme. I’m going to organize a small exhibition of photos of open-air sculptures. I’ll put them in the window, with your agreement.’
‘I’d be delighted.’
‘I can’t decide between these two.’
He was looking at two close-up, right-side profile prints of Polyphemus. A patch of sunlight dappled the bronze face, expressing its never-ending sorrow.
‘One has the feeling he’s alive. I’m choosing this one. I’ll give it back to you after the exhibition.’
Sacha was different. He didn’t have the Slav temperament. He didn’t get irritated, he spoke in a soft, calm, slightly weary voice, and he looked at you with a mocking smile. I wondered whether he tried to cultivate this enigmatic aspect. I don’t think so. He hung around the neighbourhood. I used to see him sitting on a bench in the Luxembourg, reading, surrounded by sparrows that came to peck from his hand the crumbs from his baguette. We would bump into one another all over the place. We’d spend hours chatting on the pavement. He worked at Fotorama when he felt like it. Had he wanted to, he could have had his papers put in order, but he took no steps to get a regular job. On several occasions, I tried once more to discover why the members of the Club disliked him. He shrugged his shoulders in a resigned sort of way.
The Incorrigible Optimists Club Page 41