The Incorrigible Optimists Club

by Jean-Michel Guenassia

  8

  The mornings had changed. Previously, when I got out of bed, he was in the kitchen finishing his breakfast. He was listening quietly to the news on the radio and smoking his first cigarette. I would sit down beside him. Adopting Gabin’s, Jouvet’s or Bourvil’s voice, he would ask me whether I had slept well. We didn’t say much to one another. He was always in fine fettle. There we were, together. If he wasn’t in a rush, he would make me my café au lait. He waited for the weather report and he left. In a hurry, as he did every day. Because of this bloody ring-road, which was never going to be finished and created a shambles everywhere. He had depots all over Paris, customers to see in the suburbs, he had his sights on a big deal, there were Italian goods that had not been delivered, and he didn’t know how he was going to cope with getting everything done. That’s life. See you this evening, my boy, and work hard.

  Now, the flat was quiet. It no longer smelt of tobacco. I couldn’t care less about the weather. I drank my coffee in deathly silence. I gulped down my bowl and I rushed off. So I didn’t have to see anyone. So I’d left before they got up. I didn’t take a shower. I was out of the house one hour earlier. I read my book, in peace. It was the Kazantzakis period. Christiane had recommended him to me. She had ordered all the titles of his that were published in France. I wasn’t keen on reading Christ Recrucified. I assumed he was one of those conservative Christian writers who preached the catechism. She forced it on me.

  ‘If you don’t read it, you’d better not set foot in this library again!’

  I fell under the spell of this story of hopeless redemption. But I felt confused. At times, my mind wandered off like a breeze. It took me two months to finish the book. I had a sort of aversion to it. I stopped reading frequently. I wasn’t in the mood. I felt tired and listless. I sat down all day. It was a real slump. I had Freedom and Death on my lap, but my mind was elsewhere. I didn’t manage to finish the first chapter. I started again. I switched off. I had had no news of my father for two weeks. A few days earlier, I had asked my mother about him.

  ‘It’s not my job to keep an eye on him. What he does is no concern of mine.’

  I called at the Hôtel des Mimosas by the Gare de Lyon. I was taken aback. It was a gloomy, old-fashioned building with a spiral staircase. The receptionist didn’t know him. He consulted his register and found his name; he had stayed there for two nights three weeks ago.

  ‘He told me the owner was a friend.’

  ‘I’m the owner. I don’t remember him. Because of the railway station, a lot of people come here. If I see him, I’ll tell him you were looking for him.’

  I was convinced that he’d left, that he’d caught a train. Where to? And what if he’d gone to be with Franck? Would I ever see him again? Perhaps he was dead, had had an accident, or he had committed suicide and they didn’t want to tell us. Otherwise, he would have phoned. What other explanation was there for his silence? If he wasn’t dead and he had simply deserted us, then he was no longer my father. It reminded me of the novels of Dickens. Literature is not just stories. It’s based on truth.

  I was in my bedroom, lying on my bed. I was peering at the paintwork on the ceiling and listening to Jerry Lee Lewis. My mother came in, wearing a grim expression.

  ‘Michel, have you seen the state you’re in? I’ve told you a hundred times not to put your shoes on the bed. What’s this you’re wearing? How long is it since you’ve changed? I won’t have you wearing dirty clothes. What do you look like? You must go to the barber. And turn off this barbaric music when I’m talking to you!’

  I rolled my eyes and sighed as loudly as I could.

  ‘You’re going to have to change your attitude! If you think I’m going to put up with your tantrums, you’re mistaken. I want you to show some respect to your grandfather.’

  I turned and faced the wall. I let her continue: ‘Are you ill?… We’re not going to have all that again!… You could at least answer me! I don’t know what to do with you any more!’

  The record wailed like an endless sob. The music stopped. She had pulled out the electric plug. I leapt off the bed.

  ‘Are you satisfied now? It’s scratched! It’s not my record!’

  ‘You’ll tidy this room. And take a shower. It smells like a pig-sty in here!’

  ‘I couldn’t give a damn. I’m not going to his birthday party!’

  ‘We’ll see about that!’

  She slammed the door. I examined the record under the light. Fortunately, it wasn’t scratched. I put it back on the turntable and turned up the volume so that the neighbours could enjoy it. Juliette joined me. She sat down on the bed. We listened until the record finished.

  ‘I’d love to play the piano like him.’

  ‘Is it true you don’t want to go to grandpa’s birthday party?’

  ‘Did Mama send you?’

  I didn’t have the heart to conceal the truth from her: ‘I’m not going because… Papa’s dead and I’m in mourning for him.’

  ‘It can’t be true?’

  I nodded my head in confirmation.

  ‘There’s no other explanation, my dear Juliette.’

  She burst into tears, jumped up and ran out of the room. Girls have no guts. I lay down on my bed. I was reading the flyleaf of Zorba the Greek when my mother came in like a fury.

  ‘What’s all this about?’ she yelled.

  She grabbed my arm and dragged me into the sitting room before I could stop her. She picked up the phone and dialled a number.

  ‘Is that you?’ she said.

  She passed the receiver to me.

  I heard my father’s voice saying: ‘Hello? … Hello, Hélène? What’s going on?’

  He was alive. I put the receiver down. In a flash, I felt something snap. It was worse than if he was dead. My mother said something. I didn’t hear her. She took my hand. I pushed hers away. My face was burning. I slammed the door as I left the flat. I found myself outside. I walked without knowing where I was going. I was furious. With him, with her, with myself and with the whole world. The bastard! He had no right to forget me. He had abandoned me. If he had said to me: ‘I’m going far away, I’ve got some problems, we’re not going to see each other for a few months’, I would have understood. I realized that I meant nothing to him. I played no part in his decisions. What seemed unbelievable to me a few minutes earlier now struck me as overwhelmingly obvious. He had struck me out of his life, without any warning. I was surrounded by desert. One by one those I loved had died, gone away or abandoned me. Perhaps it was my fault? Maybe there was nothing about me that merited their affection. Maybe I was worthless. But you can’t cut yourself off from those you love. I was falling down a deep well and there was no one to cling on to.

  I took the métro to Gobelins on the Porte de la Villette line. If I were to disappear, nobody would realize. There weren’t many people on the train. There wasn’t any point in going on under these circumstances. There was no hope, no light at the end of the tunnel. Who would miss me? I opened the carriage door. The dark wall of the tunnel rushed by. The electric wires swayed. One second of courage and I wouldn’t have to think about it any more. I felt complete indifference. I was going to crush myself between the carriage and the wall. There would be shreds of me left. I smiled to think of their horror when they saw the bits of my body. They would cry from grief and shame. They would blame one another and tear themselves apart over my coffin. People would point the finger at them for having driven their son to despair. They would be haunted by guilt until the end of their days, which would be soon. No, it would be better if it gnawed at them for as long as possible, better if they died slowly from grief and bitterness. I pulled the door a little further. A cold, damp draught blew into my face. My hand trembled. It suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t have my papers. They would find an unrecognizable body, without a name. And I would end up as an anonymous corpse in a communal ditch. They would think that I had run away from home. If you’re going to do away with yourse
lf, you need to have your identity card on you. Otherwise, there’s no point. I got off at Châtelet.

  *

  I was quite close to the quai des Grands-Augustins. If she had returned, that would alter everything. I hadn’t been back there for two months. I had the keys to the flat, but I didn’t want to use them. Each time I did, I went away feeling depressed. And there was no point speaking to the concierge. As soon as she saw me, she gave a negative wave. I stayed on the embankment, unconcerned by the passers-by staring at me or the cries from the tourists on the riverboats. I found myself in the Luxembourg. I looked away as I passed the Médicis fountain. I sat down by the pond. I started to blub. ‘Only sissies cry,’ my father used to joke. I didn’t want to cry. Not for him. I couldn’t give a damn about his piddling morality, his shitty promises and his bloody stupid remarks. He could make fun and act the tough guy. It was all his fault. I would never see him again. Too bad. I was holding my head between my hands, trying to create some order in the clutter in my brain when I heard: ‘You’re going to catch a filthy cold going out in a sweater in such chilly weather.’

  I sat up. Sacha was standing in front of me, his hands in his overcoat pockets.

  ‘I left home in a bit of a hurry.’

  He sat down on a nearby chair. We remained there, side by side, without saying anything, watching the kids playing with their boats on the pond and pushing them with their poles. One of the boats had become stuck beneath the water spouting from the fountain. Sacha took out a Gauloise, held out the crumpled pack to me and gave a flick with his thumb to make one of the cigarettes emerge. I took it. He struck a match. I leaned over to light it while he cupped the flame in the hollow of his hands. That was how I came to smoke my first fag. Because of my father, my mother, and in order to keep myself warm. And besides, you had to begin sometime, take the plunge, cut the ties, push off without your stabilizers, fall off, get up and start again. The cigarette had a bitter taste that clung to my palate and burned my throat, and an unpleasant smell of charred leather. We smoked them in silence and stubbed them out on the ground.

  ‘You’re looking out of sorts, Michel. You seem preoccupied.’

  ‘What’s there to laugh about?’

  ‘At your age I never stopped. And yet it was a grim time. There was nothing to eat. We had nothing to keep ourselves warm. But what fun we had with our pals. The grown-ups wore gloomy expressions, whereas we made the most of things. We were right. Have you got problems?’

  I hesitated to tell him where to get off. What business was it of his? There was nothing he could do to change the situation. He looked on kindly and waited.

  ‘My parents are separating. My father has forgotten me. My mother takes no notice of me. My brother has run away. My best friend has disappeared. Her brother died in Algeria. My grandfather has returned to Italy. And I’m hoping I haven’t lost my identity card.’

  ‘I’m not someone who gives advice, Michel. But where troubles are concerned, I’m an expert. To get rid of something that’s upsetting you, there are three cures. You’ve got to eat. A good meal, cakes, chocolate. Then listen to music. You should always have some with you. It makes you forget. There are few sorrows that some time with Shostakovich has not removed, even a few minutes. Though you should avoid music when you are eating.’

  ‘And the third cure is to get thoroughly plastered?’

  ‘A big mistake. Alcohol doesn’t make you forget. Quite the reverse. My own favourite method is the cinema. A whole day. Three or four films one after the other. That way, you forget everything.’

  ‘It’s expensive.’

  ‘You’re quite right. I can’t afford it. Come on, I’ll take you.’

  We walked up rue Soufflot as far as the Panthéon. We turned right into rue d’Ulm. A little further and I would have given up and gone home.

  ‘Do you know the Cinémathèque?’

  I’d walked past a hundred times without noticing it. I’d seen groups of people chatting on the pavement, laughing or arguing. Nothing unusual about that in this area. But I didn’t know that it existed, or what its purpose was. Tickets weren’t expensive. Forty-seven centimes. I could have paid that myself. Sacha insisted on taking me.

  ‘What are we going to see?’

  ‘If you’re interested, there’s a poster in the window showing the programme. Personally, I don’t want to know. It’s of no importance. It’ll be a surprise.’

  As we walked in, he shook the hand of a huge man with an enormous forehead and tousled hair who was talking to two students.

  ‘Hello, Henri, how are you?’

  ‘I’m furious. We’ve got two copies of Fritz Lang’s Fury. There’s one in English, without subtitles, and in poor condition. It keeps breaking. The other is dubbed in Italian, with subtitles in Spanish, and it’s seven minutes shorter than the original version.’

  I had just walked into a madhouse. The people at the Cinémathèque couldn’t care less about the language. We were given the Italian version. I have to admit, to my great surprise, that after the first few minutes it didn’t bother me. The subtleties of the dialogue passed me by, but I was so enthralled that these incomprehensible films have remained rooted in my memory far more than those I saw last year and which I have forgotten. It was a small room with wooden seats that banged when you stood up. It was packed during the week, with retired folk or people who didn’t have enough money to go to the local cinema, with those aspiring to make movies, who took notes in the dark about what was the correct thing to do or not to do, with students who were skipping courses, fighting with one another to be in the front row and take it all in, or to sit on the floor. We got to see Los Olvidados dubbed in Portuguese with subtitles in German. It was luminously clear. We finished with Raoul Walsh’s The Tall Men, a magnificent western and in French: bliss.

  Sacha was right. The cinema makes you forget. It’s the best cure for depression. Preferably a film that ends happily, that makes you feel better, that gives hope, featuring a hero who’s on his knees, abandoned by his friends, who’s human and humorous and who has a beguiling smile, whose best mate dies in his arms, who withstands the blows with unbelievable resilience, triumphs over the bad guys and their schemes, ensures justice for the widow and the oppressed, finds his beloved, a splendid blue-eyed blonde, once more, and who rescues the town or the country to the sound of rousing music. On the way out, members of the audience lingered on the pavement or in the smoke-filled cafés on place de la Contrescarpe trying to work out whether it was a great film or a very great film, with byzantine subtleties in its hidden meanings, its setting and what was left unspoken, and the minute details that they alone had noticed. There were passionate discussions that broke up old friendships, gave rise to life-long bonds with a perfect stranger, or that created immense dislikes and stubborn grudges. They fought with one another trying to decide who was the best, the most innovative or the most creative director of his kind. The same American, Japanese or Italian names came up again like leitmotivs. Sacha taught me to rank films in two categories: those you could talk about for hours after you’d seen them and those about which there was nothing to be said.

  9

  In return for the match won against Tomasz and paid for by Lognon, Leonid owed me a game of chess. It was stupid of me to want to take him on. Nothing would be resolved and there would be no surprises. The only question that arose was: how long would it last? I had pestered him about it again: ‘I’ve no desire to waste my time with a pisser like you!’

  ‘You promised, Leonid!’

  ‘Improve a bit, then, in a few years’ time, come and find me and we’ll have a game.’

  I should have seized the opportunity the day he suggested it, but I resigned myself to his turning me down. To show my displeasure, I no longer spoke to him and ignored his greetings. At the beginning of March, he sought me out: ‘Michel, we’ll play our game, the one I promised you. And you’re going to beat me.’

  ‘I don’t believe you!’

&nb
sp; His eyes were twinkling. Despite his resistance to alcohol, I wondered whether his immoderate consumption of Côtes-du-Rhône had not got the better of him.

  ‘I’ve got an idea. We’ll have some fun.’

  ‘You’ll thrash me.’

  ‘Do you remember the story of David and Goliath? Who was it who won?’

  ‘Why do you ask me that?’

  ‘Apart from him, do you know many Davids who win? It’s a biblical fraud. They want to make us believe that David was clever, but they weren’t fighting on equal terms. The puny fellow had a lethal weapon. Put them in a ring with gloves on. Who’s the winner? In real life, it’s Goliath who wins. But for once, in a real match, on equal terms, David is going to beat Goliath.’

  He described, in the smallest detail, something unimaginable. Something that would remain in the Club’s annals for ever. A game that was rigged. No one would know. They would ask themselves how an arsehole of a schoolboy had been able to beat the thirty-third ranked Russian player. It would be like a whippersnapper fighting with his bare hands against a first-rate soldier with a Kalashnikov.

  ‘Sorry, Leonid, but I don’t see the point. I wanted to play a game with you. A proper one. With the aim of holding out for as long as I could. For fun. They know me at the Club. They know I’m not capable of beating Imré or Tomasz. Not to mention you. They wouldn’t believe it.’

  ‘Michel, are you able to keep a secret?’

  ‘Do I look as if I’m two-faced or something?’

  ‘Would you like to earn a bit of money?’

  I hesitated.

  ‘You could buy yourself whatever you want.’

  ‘We’ll have to see.’

  Much has been written about the lure of money. I’d like to add my own contribution. It begins early on. In my defence, I’d like to make it clear that I was taken in by a professional. I was not up to confronting Victor Volodine. I was actually the willing victim of the well-known ‘coincidence’ that fills prisons and ensures a constant number of customers for the guillotines and the electric chairs. I’m not greedy. I longed to have my own Circuit 24. I went to the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville where the game was being demonstrated on a model display of the Le Mans Grand Prix and there, for two brief minutes, having waited patiently amid the pushing and shoving in an endless queue, I was allowed access to the controls of a Ferrari TR60 and the chance to pit myself against three competitors. For several months, I had been asking my parents for this very special game. The family upheavals had reduced birthday and Christmas presents to a minimum. My mother reckoned it cost a ridiculous amount and that, considering my results, I didn’t deserve anything.