The Truth about Marie

by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

  Marie, the other Marie, had told me that night, I’d understood, she’d made it clear to me, it wasn’t said explicitly when after eating we’d returned to my place on rue des Filles-Saint-Thomas, but she’d kept her tiny panties on all night and I didn’t try to take them off, I’d understood without her telling me, we’d kissed on the bed when we got back, the room was broiling, we were sweating in my single bed, both of us dripping in sweat, the sheets sticking to our clammy backs, we were kissing and frolicking around in the heavy darkness of the steamy night, I was gently playing with the soft fabric of her tiny light blue silk panties, stretching and pulling at the elastic, the rain fell violently through the open window, and we were holding each other half naked in my small bed, eyes closed listening to the storm rage like those on Elba, I no longer knew where I was, nor whom I was with, sketching gestures with one Marie that I’d finish with the other, lost in love’s limited repertoire — caresses, nudity, darkness, humidity, tenderness — and it wasn’t until much later that I realized I had, on the tip of my finger, a bit of menstrual blood.

  And, mentally following the trajectory of these few drops of blood on my finger, I imagined the absurd loop linking Marie to Marie this night. This blood, soon without any definable color, consistency, or viscosity, lacking any veritable material reality, as my fingers came into contact with diverse materials throughout the night, sheets, clothes, wind, fading a bit more with each contact, softening in color, before the rain washed it away completely, these few specks of blood, which although no longer materially present were nonetheless symbolically significant, had caused me to trace mentally their course from Marie’s body, their source, through all the successive places I’d passed that night, for I must have carried that mark with me everywhere I went, from my room in my small apartment on rue des Filles-Saint-Thomas to the landing of my floor, down the staircase and soon onto the street, through Paris, down rue Vivienne, then rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs, in the rain and lightning, as though fire and water must naturally attend the mad course of those invisible blood particles on my finger as I raced to Marie’s.

  I was looking at those drops of dried blood on my bed, knowing where they came from, but, in a sort of mental confusion and daze, I associated this blood with Jean-Christophe de G., as though this were his blood, as though, in my bed, there were a few drops of Jean-Christophe de G.’s blood, blood that Jean-Christophe de G. would have shed that night in Marie’s apartment, blood belonging to him, a masculine blood — blood of drama, violence, and death — and not the feminine blood it actually was, not the delicate blood of life and femininity, but of catastrophe, and, in a sudden paroxysm of irrational fear — or lucidity — I understood then that if Jean-Christophe were to die this night, I’d have to explain why there was blood on my sheets, I’d have to defend the fact that there was human blood in my bed, this vertiginous blood at once dead and alive — this unspeakable blood — which led me to link Marie to Marie the night of Jean-Christophe de G.’s death.

  Marie called me in the early afternoon to inform me of his death. Jean-Baptiste is dead, she told me (and I didn’t know what to say, having always thought his name was Jean-Christophe).

  II

  Jean-Christophe de G.’s real name was Jean-Baptiste de Ganay — I found this out a few days later when coming across his obituary in Le Monde. It offered a brief and somber account of his life. A few lines in small font with no mention of the circumstances of his death. The names of his relatives. His wife Delphine. His son Olivier. His mother Gisèle. Nothing more, the notice similar to a brief announcement. I meditated for a while on his birth date, 1960, which suddenly seemed so distant to me, lost in the past, already deeply buried in a distant twentieth century, hazy and unapproachable, another time altogether for future generations, more so than the nineteenth century for us, due to these two ludicrous numbers at the beginning of each date, this strange and incongruous 1 and 9, reminiscent of the surreal Turbigos or Almas, city districts whose numerical correspondence on the telephone pad provided the first digits of the old Parisian telephone numbers. He was a man of our time, a contemporary in his prime, and yet his date of birth already seemed strangely archaic, as though it had expired in his lifetime, a date stuck in the past, soon without any currency and patinated by time, as if from the outset it bore within itself, like a corrosive poison hidden inside, the seed of its own dissolution, its definitive disappearance in the vast rush of time.

  For a while I thought that the only time I’d ever seen Jean-Christophe de G. was the night of his death. I’d hardly caught a glimpse of him that night. He’d appeared before my eyes lying flat on a stretcher, carted out of the building at rue de la Vrillière like a figure from a dream, or a nightmare, a specter spontaneously conjured up from nothingness and then vanishing, his image, at once complete, coherent, and detailed, had suddenly materialized before me out of nothing, it came from nothing and returned to nothing, as though created ex nihilo from the very substance of the night — the brusque appearance of this man inert on a stretcher, the frightening pallor of his face behind an oxygen mask, featureless and depersonalized, his sole heraldry, his colors, reduced to his socks, black, fine, delicate, of fil d’Écosse cotton, whose texture and splendor and silver sheen I can still imagine so vividly! I thought, at that moment, it was the first time I’d seen him, but I’d already seen him a few months earlier in Tokyo. I remember the day, in Tokyo, I’d seen him by chance alongside Marie, they weren’t arm in arm but may as well have been, they were together, this had struck me immediately, a man older than she, well into his forties, close to his fifties, not without charm and elegance, he was stylish, sporting a black cashmere overcoat, a dark scarf, his thinning hair combed back. This is the only image I have of him, but his face is without detail and will undoubtedly remain so since I’ve never seen a picture of him.

  In the days following Jean-Christophe de G.’s death I looked him up on the Internet and was surprised to find many hits pertaining to him personally, as well as to his family and ancestors. I was able link this information to that which Marie had shared with me, those rare moments when she confided details about their relationship to me. The night of his death Marie had told me how she’d met him in Tokyo at her exhibition’s opening at the Contemporary Art Space of Shinagawa. For obvious reasons, Marie had chosen not to carry on about Jean-Christophe de G. during the days following his death, she was still in shock, she avoided questions concerning him, but she let slip a few details during a dinner we had at the beginning of summer before her trip to Elba, intimate details she regretted having shared shortly thereafter, indiscreet remarks about their private relations, details upon which I seized immediately to dwell and expand on in my imagination. I’d also learned from Marie some information about the drama that had cast a shadow over the last months of Jean-Christophe de G.’s life. I had thus filled in the missing details and examined the murkier zones of his background, buying into the gossip and rumors, giving credence to the scandals mentioned in the press, pure slander, without proof, unmotivated — for there is no evidence, to this day, that Jean-Christophe de G. had ever consciously broken the law.

  At times, spurred on by nothing more than a single detail Marie had shared with me, or let slip, or which I’d discovered, I’d allow myself to build the scaffolding of further developments, distorting the facts occasionally, transforming or exaggerating them, even romanticizing them. I may have been mistaken about Jean-Christophe de G.’s intentions, I could easily doubt his sincerity when he confessed to have been betrayed by one of his own. I was capable of believing the defamatory rumors and of finding more reason to suspect illicit dealings. I’m not sure to what extent he was personally implicated in the affair he was accused of, and I ignored the question of whether the rumors of the blackmail of which he was supposedly a victim were well founded (although Marie had told me one night she’d had the feeling he was carrying a weapon during the last days of his life). I may have been mistaken in many of my assumpti
ons about Jean-Christophe de G., but never in those about Marie, I knew Marie’s every move, I knew how she would have reacted in every circumstance, I knew her instinctively, my knowledge of her was innate, natural, I possessed absolute intelligence regarding the details of her life: I knew the truth about Marie.

  Of what really went on between Marie and Jean-Christophe de G. the few months they knew each other, during the period of this relationship, which, if one were to make an exhaustive list of all the times they’d met, would amount to no more than a few nights spent together, four or five nights, no more, in between the end of January and the end of June (to which we might add a weekend in Rome, one or two lunches, and a few museum visits), no one can really be sure. I can only imagine Marie’s gestures when with him, her mood and her thoughts, on the basis of information witnessed or inferred, known or imagined, and combined with the grave, painful moments I knew Jean-Christophe de G. to have endured, joining in this way a few incontestable truths to the cracked and incomplete mosaic, full of gaps, contradictions, and inconsistencies, of the last months of Jean-Christophe de G.’s life seen through my eyes.

  From the very beginning I’d been mistaken in many respects about Jean-Christophe de G. First, I continued to call him Jean-Christophe whereas his name was Jean-Baptiste. I even suspect I’d done this intentionally so as not to deprive myself of the pleasure of getting his name wrong, not that Jean-Baptiste was a better name, or more elegant, than Jean-Christophe, but the latter simply wasn’t his name, and this posthumous jab, however small, however simple, gave me great pleasure (had his name been Simon I’d have called him Pierre, I know myself). What’s more, I’d always believed that Jean-Christophe de G. was a businessman (which, in truth, he was, in a sense), and that he was a connoisseur of art, that he was a dealer or a collector of international art, and that this was how he’d met Marie in Tokyo. But if it’s true that he purchased artworks from time to time (even if only old paintings, designer furniture, or jewelry from antique shops), this was not his principle occupation. Jean-Christophe de G., like his father, but especially like his great-grandfather, Jean de Ganay, was a prominent figure in French horse racing, a breeder, owner of horses, and member of the French racing society (La Société d’Encouragement pour l’Amélioration des Races de Chevaux en France). It was in this respect, as a horse owner, that he’d gone to Japan at the end of January. He had a horse competing in the Tokyo Shimbun Hai, and it’s only by chance that, being in Tokyo at this time, he’d gone to the opening of Marie’s exhibition at the Contemporary Art Space of Shinagawa. And it was here, the night her exhibition was open to the public, that he’d seen Marie for the first time, that he’d met and conquered her (in what order we can only speculate, since it must have happened almost at once).

  Ganay’s racing colors — yellow jersey, green cap — had been selected at the beginning of the twentieth century by Jean-Christophe de G.’s great-grandfather, who presided over the Société d’Encouragement from 1933 until his death. This renowned Society, founded with the mission of improving the breeding and racing of horses in France, was created a century earlier by Lord Henry Seymour, also known as Milord the Bastard (who knows where this curious nickname originated, an underworld name, from the mob, from his working-class past, his crooked deals, his sinister ways?), and it is to this Society that we owe the modernization of the Longchamp racetrack, the creation of race officials, and the institution of the first measures, still rudimentary, of testing against doping with saliva samples. It is also worth noting that we owe the establishment of the first antidoping regulations in horse racing to one of Jean-Christophe de G.’s ancestors, given the extent to which the last six months of Jean-Christophe de G.’s life were embroiled in the Zahir Affair, named after his thoroughbred competing in the Tokyo Shimbun Hai.

  But it wasn’t so much the horse’s failure to compete in Tokyo as the circumstances of that failure that had affected Jean-Christophe de G. and cast a pall over the final months of his life. Talk had already spread upon the horse’s return to France, and the scandal was even harder to deny in that it had never been made public. Officially there was no Zahir Affair, there were no charges or accusations, but rumors spoke of illicit substances detected in the horse’s urine (although there was no explicit mention of anabolic steroids, there was talk of masking agents capable of preventing their detection), and of suspicions that there were ties between the horse’s trainer and a nefarious Spanish veterinarian who moved in cycling and weightlifting circles (where he no doubt benefited greatly from his veterinary knowledge). The official reason given for Zahir’s dropping out of the Tokyo Shimbun Hai, and the long and inexplicable series of sicknesses and complications that followed, cited a root abscess at risk of infection on the day of the race, for which an injection of antibiotics and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs was administered to ward off a potential fever, but nobody believed in good faith that a simple root abscess was sufficient cause to cancel on the spot a trained horse’s tour through Asia, especially one treated daily by a team of veterinary specialists. Jean-Christophe de G. withdrew Zahir from all scheduled races immediately and without explanation, abruptly canceled his participation in the Singapore Cup and the Audemars Piquet Queen Elizabeth II Cup in Hong Kong, fired the trainer without so much as a second thought, and, not without some regret, dismissed the rest of Zahir’s entire crew. Once back in France the thoroughbred was removed from the public eye and sent to the Rabey stud farm in Quettehou, Manche, a Ganay family property, and no one saw the horse for the rest of the year.

  After his quick decision to exfiltrate the horse from Japan Monday morning, the day after the race, Jean-Christophe de G. canceled all Zahir’s engagements for the rest of the year and, after some dozen phone calls, arranged for the horse’s return trip to Europe himself, then, fearing complications with customs officials, he called a long-time friend, an official from the JRA, the principal organization for Japanese horse racing. After this conversation, he decided to leave that very day and to personally escort the horse to Europe. Then he called Marie and invited her to join him, which to his great surprise she accepted without question or any display of emotion. But after the call Marie felt suddenly sad, nostalgic, as she realized that she’d be returning to Paris without me, whereas only a week had passed since we’d arrived in Japan together.

  The window in her hotel room was wet, streaked with raindrops, dotted lines sliding slowly down the pane, moving in fits and starts, their course interrupted abruptly for no apparent reason. Marie had just hung up the phone and was standing motionless at the large bay window, pensive, looking out gravely at Shinjuku’s administrative center, and she watched the city slowly vanish under the rain and fog, her gaze fixed on nothing in particular, beset with that dreamy melancholy incited by the passage of time, by the realization that something is coming to a close, and that, at every second, little by little, the end is approaching, the final moments of our loves and our lives. Presently, an hour before leaving Tokyo, she thought about me — the person she had broken up with in this very place, in this hotel room we’d shared the night we got to Japan, this room where we’d made love for the last time, this bed where we’d loved each other, this unmade bed behind her where we’d clawed and held each other. Marie would have liked to erase me from her thoughts, now and forever, but she knew quite well this wasn’t possible, that I could appear in her mind at any moment in spite of her wish, subliminally, a sudden immaterial memory of my personality, my tastes, a small detail, my way of perceiving the world, an intimate memory to which I was inextricably bound, for she realized that, even when absent, I continued to live on in her mind, to haunt her thoughts. Of my current location she hadn’t the slightest idea. Was I still in Japan, or had I too changed my plans and taken an earlier flight to Europe? And why hadn’t I tried to contact her? Why hadn’t I called or written since my return from Kyoto? She didn’t know, she didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to have anything to do with me, understand, never
— enough of me now.

  When, in the afternoon, Jean-Christophe de G. came to pick up Marie at the hotel, she wasn’t ready, her room was still a mess, the bed unmade, her suitcases flung open. Marie had arrived in Japan with three hundred pounds of luggage distributed unevenly among various suitcases and trunks, hatboxes and poster tubes, and, although able to leave some bags and suitcases in Tokyo (the exhibition at the Contemporary Art Space of Shinagawa would last several more months), she’d nevertheless accomplished the feat of returning with as much as she came, if not in weight then at least in volume and number of bags, accumulating, like natural outgrowths of her suitcases, a whole host of sacks and bags of all sizes, in leather, in canvas, or in paper, some sturdy, white, and rectangular, with tan handles of reinforced plastic, others loose and sagging and filled with knickknacks, Takashimaya’s decorative logo of blooming red roses adorning the front, stuffed with presents she received or planned to give, purchases of wild silks and other fine material, obis and trinkets, diverse trifles and souvenirs, paper lanterns, seaweed, tea, in bulk or in individual bags, and even fresh products, small vacuum-packed containers of fugu sashimi kept for the past couple of days in her hotel room’s mini-bar among canned beer and tiny bottles of alcohol. Jean-Christophe de G. called her room twice from the lobby, urging her, tactfully, to make haste, reminding her of how little time they had, the horse and cars were waiting. Marie then had a sudden spurt of energy, dashing back and forth through the room, her arms waving and flitting this way and that as she threw her things together in a rush of panic and goodwill (Marie always made up for being late with a final and sudden push before the finish line, constantly arriving at meetings flustered and out of breath, in a show of haste and with a dramatic entrance, even though often an hour late), then, returning to her natural pace, she finished packing absently, carefully placing her last few things in her bags, looking over her belongings arrayed on the large unmade bed, listlessly placing her bags at the door, without of course closing anything (Marie always left everything open, windows, drawers — it was exasperating, she’d even leave books open, turning them over on her night table next to her when she was done reading).