For example, I’ve dreamed that I’m walking through a cemetery and suddenly come across the gravestone of a loved one who is actually still alive. Or I’m standing in a room with nine doors. I want desperately to get out, but behind every door I open, there is an impenetrable wall of rubber. Or I’m in a hotel elevator. I want to go back to the fifth floor, because that’s where the room is where my wife is waiting for me. But every time I stop at the fifth floor, I get out, only to find an unknown corridor. I can no longer find the place I’m trying to get to.
The many ways in which the greatest anxieties find their expression are as varied as the different lives that people lead. And although there were no knives in my dream, no dark shapes rushing toward me, threatening my life, the ending of this dream, which had begun in such a fairy-tale fashion, threw me into a state of deepest misery. In the end, I had lost everything. Even today I can still remember every detail, the strangely oppressive atmosphere, the state of incredible distraction that persisted long after I woke up.
And yet—as terrifying as the dream was—it was also the reason why I went back to the Cinéma Paradis the following day to search for something I had failed to see until then. A detail that finally proved to be the key to everything that seemed so inexplicable to me at the time.
I dreamed about Mélanie. It was New Year’s Eve, and she was wearing her red coat. We were at a party and were strolling arm in arm through the halls of a big old building. There were Baroque mirrors everywhere on the walls; candles flickered; the rooms were thronged with people. The women wore dresses with puffed silk skirts and narrow waists; the men wore tight knee breeches, vests, and ruffled sleeves. It felt like being at a ball in the Palace of Versailles. And yet we were in Paris. You could see that when you looked out of the building’s high windows at the illuminated city.
As the bells ring the New Year in, I go with Mélanie into one of the rooms where they have hung up a gigantic flat screen. It shows, one after the other, the places in the city where people are celebrating: the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs-Elysées, the Eiffel Tower, the glass pyramid in the Louvre grounds, the hill of Montmartre, the bridges and the boulevards, where the drivers are exuberantly hooting their horns.
We walk about a little longer; then I look for Mélanie, who has stopped somewhere. When I return to the room with the big flat screen, I see that they are showing pictures of the earth. The world is a blue sphere that seems to be floating beneath us. I am suddenly seized by inexplicable terror. I run to the high windows. There is nothing outside but darkness.
And then I understand: Paris has become a spaceship that is inexorably moving away from the earth. We are already light-years away. The people celebrating around me, laughing and dancing in their Rococo costumes, haven’t noticed yet.
I wander through the halls, looking for Mélanie, looking for any familiar face at all. In one room, I see stands full of clothes, which I rummage through in feverish haste, pushing the hangers to one side. There are children’s clothes on them, hanging in size order, and ladies’ summer dresses, men’s suits. I’m searching for a clue.
I go back into one of the endlessly long corridors and see a line of people. They’re waiting for something. I walk along the line, hoping to find someone I recognize. Then finally I see my parents among the people waiting. Mélanie is there, too, and Robert; even Madame Clément is standing in that line. I call to them in relief; I’m so happy to have found them. But one after the other, they turn to me with a look of incomprehension, as if I were a stranger.
“Papa, Maman!” I call. “It’s me, Alain.” Papa raises his eyebrows regretfully and shakes his head. Maman looks at me; her eyes are empty.
“Mélanie, where have you been all this time? I’ve been looking for you.…” But even Mélanie turns away, perplexed.
None of them seems to know me, none of them remembers me, not even Madame Clément, not even my friend Robert.
My panic grows; my desperation shoots right off the scale. Why are they all standing there as if they’ve never seen me before? I walk a bit farther and see a person near the front who seems familiar to me. It’s Uncle Bernard. It is only now that it dawns on me that these people are standing at a box office. It looks like the box office in the Cinéma Paradis.
But Uncle Bernard is dead, I think. Nevertheless, I call out his name. He turns to me and smiles his peaceful, cheerful smile.
“Uncle Bernard!” I exclaim with relief.
“Who are you?” he asks with some surprise. “I don’t know you.”
I groan and curl up for a moment in despair. “But Uncle Bernard, it’s me, Alain. Don’t you remember? I used to come to the cinema every afternoon and we’d watch the films together. Méliès!” I call.
“Locomotives! Impressionist cinema! Cocteau, Truffaut, Chabrol, Sautet…” I name all the important directors who come into my head, in the hope of producing some reaction in his good-natured face, which at the moment is gazing at me as blankly as that of an Alzheimer’s patient.
“Giuseppe Tornatore,” I cry. “Cinema Paradiso. That was your favorite film. We watched it together. Don’t you remember anything at all? Our cinema. The Cinéma Paradis.” I produce this as if it were a magic spell that could open all doors.
All of a sudden, a look of recognition crosses Uncle Bernard’s face. He narrows his eyes for a moment as he looks at me. Then his mouth curves into a hesitant smile, which slowly becomes much broader. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, of course—I remember. My memory is a bit hazy. But you’re Alain … my little Alain.… But that was all so long ago.… I was still alive then.…”
I cry with relief, and I’m crying because a dead man has recognized me. Perhaps I’m dead myself. I’m somewhere out in space, and I have no people anymore.
I try to make the tragedy of my situation clear, but Uncle Bernard just shakes his head, totally baffled.
But don’t you understand?” I repeat emphatically. “I’ve lost everything. I’ve lost everything.”
Uncle Bernard becomes blurred before my eyes. “You must go to the Cinéma Paradis, my boy. Go to the cinema. You’ll find everything there … in the Cinéma Paradis.…”
His voice becomes quieter and begins to fade away. I stretch my arms out toward him before I fall and fall and fall.…
Twenty-four
Long after I woke up, that strange dream was still buzzing in my head. It stayed with me the whole morning, underscoring the disturbing events of the previous day with a dark minor key.
When I opened my eyes and the morning reached my ears with its many familiar little sounds, the first thing I did was to go to the window and look out into the courtyard to reassure myself that Paris had returned into the earth’s atmosphere. I was relieved to establish that this was, in fact, the case, but the gloomy mood the images of the previous night’s dream had inspired in me was not so easy to shake off. Indeed, I found I had little enough reason to celebrate as I tried to drive away the phantoms by making myself some coffee in my tiny, narrow kitchen.
I kept seeing Mélanie’s pale face in front of me and the sad little smile with which she had traveled away into the Métro tunnel.
On my cell phone, which I’d switched off during the dinner at Georges, I found several messages. Three were from Solène, who had obviously tried to reach me immediately after my hurried exit from the restaurant. Her voice sounded increasingly concerned and—it struck me—even a little embarrassed. One call was from Allan Wood, who had immortalized himself on my voice mail with the question of whether the food had disagreed with me. My tax adviser warned that several documents needed for my return were missing, and my mother, who normally never called my cell phone, and didn’t even have one because she’d heard that the waves cause cancer, wanted to tell me she was back from a trip to Canada and ask how I was. Compared with all the questions of the last few weeks, which I had had no answer to, this last was easy enough.
I was feeling bad, not to say miserable, and I hadn’t the slight
est desire to answer any of the messages. I just wanted peace, like Diogenes in his barrel, and even though I wasn’t a philosopher, I had a deep-seated need to crawl off somewhere and be alone with my thoughts.
I sent Solène a text, giving a headache as my excuse.
Then Robert called, and I picked up the phone. Robert, with his scientific fatalism, was the only person I could bear to speak to at that moment. When I told him about my strange meeting with Mélanie and my wild pursuit—well worthy itself of being filmed—through the tunnels of the Paris subway, it silenced even him for a moment.
“Robert?” I asked. “Are you still there?”
“Yes.” His voice sounded perplexed. “Unbelievable” was the next thing he said. “I can tell you one thing: The chick is totally screwy. Probably some kind of psychopath with paranoid delusions. That would explain everything.”
“Just listen to yourself,” I said. “Melanie’s no psychopath! No, no, there must be something else.”
“What else? Most likely a man. Was there a man with her?”
“No, there was no one. She just looked at me and then ran straight for the exit.”
“Who knows,” Robert pondered, “perhaps she’s going with some violent guy who’s threatened her that something nasty will happen if she ever meets you again. Perhaps she’s just trying to protect you. Like that … Elena Green in the James Bond film.”
“Eva Green,” I said sharply, correcting him. “Yes, of course, that would be it. Silly that I didn’t think of that myself!”
“What? I’m only trying to make myself useful.” Robert would not allow himself to be deflected. “Ha! I have it! It’s her twin sister!” He seemed to like the idea. “I once knew twin sisters—you couldn’t tell one from the other, both blond, both freckled, both with fantastic figures. The whole time I was with them, I thought I was drunk and seeing double.” He clicked his tongue. “That’s it. Did you ever think she might have a twin sister?”
“Yes, yes.” I jammed the handset between my shoulder and my ear and spread a chunk of baguette with butter and jelly. Of course I’d thought of that. There was nothing I hadn’t thought of in the last few hours. “Of course that could be it. Theoretically. But why should her twin sister, who doesn’t even know me, run away from me? That’s absurd. I mean, I don’t look so terrifying that anyone should take to her heels to get away from me.”
“That’s probably true.” Robert thought over my words, and I thought of my totally terrifying performance in the Métro station, shouting wildly and kicking the train door.
“To be honest, I’d hoped that the whole thing would have sorted itself out by now. And now this mysterious woman pops up again. It’s enough to drive you crazy.” Robert sighed.
“Yes,” I said, sighing as well. “Tell me about it!”
Then we both said nothing.
“You’ve got to stop this, Alain,” he said eventually. “It’s all going nowhere. It’s like with black holes: The more you feed them, the bigger they grow. The best thing to do would be to file it under ‘Unsolved Mysteries of the Universe’ and put your energy into more realistic projects.”
I guessed what he was going to say next.
“You are coming to dinner on Friday? Anne-Sophie’s looking forward to meeting you.”
“Anne-Sophie?” I asked gloomily.
“Yes. Melissa’s friend.”
“Oh, yeah.” I didn’t sound all that euphoric. “I don’t know if that makes much sense, Robert. I’m totally devastated.”
“For goodness’ sake, Alain, pull yourself together. Your self-pity is getting just too bad. What’s really happened?”
“Enough,” I said. “I have a sprained ankle and a black eye.”
“A black eye?” I heard Robert’s astonished laughter. “Have you been scrapping with someone?”
“No, someone’s been scrapping with me,” I growled. “Solène Avril’s jealous boyfriend came to Paris and laid into all the men in her vicinity with his fists, including me.”
“Wow!” said Robert. “You really do lead an exciting life. Famous actors and mysterious psychopaths, wild pursuits and brawls—Bruce Willis has nothing on you.” He whistled admiringly through his teeth. “A black eye,” he repeated, impressed. “Well, that promises to make for a good evening! Women find that sort of thing attractive.”
“Please, Robert! I’m totally out of it. Let’s just postpone the meal. I’m not in the mood to chat to any girls, no matter how nice they are. My heart is broken.”
“Oh, for crying out loud, Alain, don’t be so pathetic. You sound just like a soap opera. Hearts can’t break.”
With gritted teeth, I bore his laughter, and I had only one wish: that Robert should one day fall so hopelessly in love that he would feel, in the flesh as it were, what it was like when your heart breaks with a quiet ping. And then I’d be the one laughing.
“Go on, laugh,” I said. “Wait till it gets you! You don’t know what it was like to see her going away in the Métro like that … or just to see her again. I can’t get the picture out of my head. I came home and couldn’t sleep. She gave me the cold shoulder and I can’t understand it. I just can’t understand it. If I could at least understand it, everything would be easier.”
“That’s the awful thing about women,” Robert said matter-of-factly. “There’s no formula for it, no authoritative instructions. Even Stephen Hawking says so, and he’s really a genius. He said that women are a complete mystery.” Robert was in his element. “And then there is always all that sensitivity, all those emotions. Personally, I have no time for all that empathy garbage—that you should always try to understand people. What’s the good of that? I mean, people misunderstand themselves half the time anyway. Yes, you touch someone, you reach out to others, but in your heart of hearts you’re a stranger even to yourself. Ultimately, we’re all trapped in our own skins. In what we believe to be the truth. That’s why I like astrophysics so much. There is clarity in the universe. There are regular rules.”
I thought of my dream. “I had a terrible nightmare,” I said. “Paris was a spaceship, we were moving away from the earth at breakneck speed, and no one recognized me—not even you.”
“Yes, yes,” said Robert impatiently. “it’s in the nature of dreams to be confusing and unpleasant. The brain’s garbage-recycling system. You’d probably eaten too much.”
I sighed. “Why are you my friend, Robert? I seem to have forgotten.”
“Because opposite poles attract. And unlike you, I’ve got to go now—to introduce my students to Newton’s laws. I’ll pick you up this evening after the late performance and we’ll go for a drink. No, no objection! And then we’ll talk about Friday evening. There’s no question of allowing you to just wallow in misery.” With those words, he hung up.
I finished my coffee and put the cup in the sink. Orphée jumped up and meowed reproachfully around the faucet. I turned it on and watched the cat contentedly lapping up her water. That day, I would gladly have changed places with her.
My friend was one thing above all: strong-willed. So of course he came to the cinema, and of course I went for a drink with him that evening: no objection allowed. But Robert turned out to be wrong about one thing.
We didn’t talk about whether I’d go to dinner with him that Friday to impress Anne-Sophie with my damaged eye. We didn’t talk about Friday at all. We sat in the bistro and talked about men’s names. Because in the meanwhile, I’d discovered something that added new fuel to an old story.
That Monday, it was Madame Clément’s day off, and so I—after the main feature had run twice—was the one who had to go along all the rows after the last performance to clear up the auditorium and pick up all the things the audience had forgotten to take with them.
“Sit down a moment. I won’t be long,” I called to Robert, who was inspecting the new film posters in the foyer. We were alone in the cinema. François had left the projection booth in an unusual hurry after the last performance.
>
“The English Patient—what’s that like?” Robert asked. He was looking at the stills from Anthony Minghella’s film, which I had chosen for that Wednesday’s performance in the Les Amours au Paradis series, and was eyeing up Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas.
“A literary film. A great, tragic love story—not your kind of thing,” I mocked. “You’d do better sticking to Basic Instinct.”
“What’s wrong with that? It was really exciting, and that Sharon Stone was so sexy.”
“Exactly,” I said, disappearing with the vacuum cleaner into the brightly lit auditorium while Robert retreated into my office and lounged around on the swivel chair.
Vacuuming a cinema—perhaps simply vacuum cleaning—has something contemplative about it. While you’re doing it, you can follow your own thoughts, and as long as the machine is switched on, there’s no chance of anyone disturbing you.
I didn’t hear my cell phone ringing; I didn’t hear Robert making several phone calls and giving several loud, flattered laughs. I cleaned the rows with uniform movements, looked out for handkerchiefs and coins, enveloped by the monotonous hum of the machine.
I thought of the time I’d sat in the front row many years before, holding hands with the little girl with the braids. In the fifth row, I thought of the first time I’d been allowed to put a reel of film in the projector under the watchful eye of my uncle, and how, when I took it out, I’d forgotten to hold it firmly in both hands, so half the film unwound in seconds like a paper streamer. In row twelve, I thought how I’d reencountered my dead uncle Bernard for the first time in my peculiar dream the night before. I saw his kindly smile, and his final words seemed to blend in with the noise of the vacuum cleaner: You must go to the Cinéma Paradis, my boy. Go to the cinema. You’ll find everything there … in the Cinéma Paradis.…
It may sound strange—and I’m not actually the spiritual type—but in the loneliness of the cinema and my heart, I suddenly asked myself if there could be such a thing as messages from the other side. Had my dead uncle sent me a message, or was it just my own subconscious trying to make me aware of something?
One Evening in Paris Page 18