Our hero lies down on the bed, runs his eye along the stucco moldings and the shadows on the ceiling. He knows what he is suffering from, recognizes obsessive love. He contracts it only — and the logic is implacable — when he is with the sort of woman who refuses to let herself love him. From experience, his prognosis is for a rapid convalescence, total recovery, and no relapses. But, right now, this reassuring diagnosis does nothing to help him.
His head is spinning, he sits on the edge of the bed, gets to his feet, and picks up the car keys. He does not want to linger here, in this empty room where he had anticipated being with her.
Once again he arrives at the rendezvous well ahead of schedule. What difference does it make, given that Scotland has now been reduced to a colossal hourglass knocked on its side, and through which time refuses to sift.
While he sits in his car, he very quickly, too quickly, writes a little poem in his black notebook. Because, at times like this, our hero poetizes. He has a degree of talent for it, and compensates for his stylistic weaknesses and approximate technique with an acute sense of self-mockery and a touching simplicity. His poem begins:
There where the A32
Meets the scenic S70
which gives the number 2 the unusual role of offering up an inevitable rhyme with his beloved “you,” or something more despairing about “what to do,” or the two.
Let us summarize it briefly here: in this piece of doggerel our hero explains that (1) although hurt, he will not resign himself to the facts, and (2) he still hopes to see our heroine again in Paris. A meteorological parable concludes the poem with an “ond” rhyme that is neither “blond” nor “fond.”
Our hero writes the poem down in fine cramped letters, then tears the page out carefully and stows it in his shirt pocket without folding it.
He waits. All he gets to do in these two days is wait and invent devices to cheat the waiting process. He is an expert.
As soon as our heroine arrives, as soon as her bicycle is wedged into the Nissan Almera’s trunk, where — let’s say this again just in case this book should reach the car designer’s desk — you cannot fit a bike, our hero offers to take her wherever she would like to go. She chooses the closest tavern, that improbable pub overlooking the A32 that has already been mentioned.
Our hero could not have chosen a better place for a last meeting. As it takes a good minute to get there by car, he hands her his poem, its fifteen easy lines. She reads it, smiling, amused. This takes five seconds, and she folds it in two.
11
About a few sartorial details.
A general remark and a cultural reminiscence.
Ze last moment.
She leaves the bike in the trunk. At the pub they order two glasses of beer and go to sit outside, the area is completely deserted.
It is getting dark and growing chilly. All our heroine is wearing over her shoulders are a T-shirt and a black cardigan that she zips up. The shadowing curve of her breasts disappears beneath the wool. She pulls the woolen sleeves down over her hands, shivering, and the stretched stitches afford glimpses of the lightly tanned skin along her arms. Our hero just cannot take his eyes off her. Only three months ago, this young woman did not exist. How, then, has she become such a major part of him, when she herself asked for nothing?
With no trace of irony, she clinks her glass against his. He would rather not know what they are drinking to. To his leaving? To the peacefulness of their breakup? To Scotland’s mild summer? Silently, he drinks to l’Amour, and everything he knows about it. Its 2,700 miles, from its source in the Argun region to its mouth on the Tatar Strait, opposite Sakhalin. He keeps his bad joke about the River Amour to himself. A pity he doesn’t realize that the river’s English name, Armur, is closer to the word “armor” than to “love,” and — worse — that armur means “muddy” in Buriat.
Our hero takes a sip from this dark, bitter beer that he does not like, which is precisely why he chose it. He had to give the whole debacle a degree of harmony.
Once again, what they say to each other is meaningless, every word has been said before. He still occasionally tries to paraphrase, she does so less and less. The smiles they exchange reveal her weariness and his sadness, and no words can measure up to these. They have both stopped pretending. She hasn’t built any sort of wall around herself, our hero acknowledges. No part of her cleaves toward me, and there’s nothing about me she is having to resist. You can suppress desire only when desire is weak enough to be suppressed. Ovid, Blake, and plenty more said it long before he did, but right here, now, our hero really couldn’t give a damn. He thought he was leaving in order to save whatever could be saved from the sinking ship. He now realizes there may never have been a ship.
There are also silences between them. He makes less effort to fill them than she does. He imagines she feels guilty. Because she often feels guilty. Once, after making love, she astonished him by whispering that pleasure like that was a sin. A sin. He could not remember ever having heard the word.
To spare her from feeling awkward, he too starts furnishing the pauses. He decides to make her laugh. And succeeds, it is easy. But it was not a good idea, so painful is the sound of her laughter.
The level of beer is going down too slowly in their glasses. Our hero wishes he could find the courage to get it all over with, to cut the episode short. But he has only the courage to bear its being prolonged.
He briefly contemplates telling her about the young Polish girl. But what could he say about her, and what would he actually want? To study our heroine’s reaction, provoke some feeling in her, elicit her hypothetical jealousy? Just in time, he grasps that he runs the risk, once and for all, of appearing pathetic and ridiculous. He can just imagine her response — searing and well deserved. So he says nothing.
The Other arrives in three days, and, oddly, our hero is not jealous. Yet he knows everything there is to know about jealousy, that blast of cruel images dominated by sex, bodies, and possession. He looks at our heroine’s blue eyes, her mouth, the curve of her shoulder, he tries to understand why he never succeeded in seeing this Other as a rival, nor in picturing them making love, why, in fact, when he doggedly attempts to re-create the scene — the act, to use a shrink’s word for it — he cannot manage to take it altogether seriously. The memory of their past pleasures protects him from that, at least.
He gives an involuntary little laugh, almost a sigh. What’s funny? she asks.
He shakes his head. Nothing.
She asks him if he is angry with her. And even adds, You have every right.
No, really not, our hero replies. And he is not even cheating. Simply overcome.
He does still have one redeeming phrase on his mind, but abstains from using it. Why do we always push harder on the remote control when the batteries are dying?
Acta est fabula, the ancients used to say.
Our heroine smiles at him, she shivers.
Our hero feels a bit cold too.
They do not finish their beers.
She wants to go home on her own. He offers to take her back. She lets him. They drive to the crossroads of the A32 and the S70, near the sign for Inchna — yes, that’s the one.
He is intent on taking her farther in order to spare her at least the long hill. She refuses to let him go beyond this point. She says it categorically, he does not insist. He has maintained an elegant tenacity, what would he gain from stooping to obstinacy?
He stops the car. She consents to stay a little longer. He begs for a kiss on the lips. She gives him his alms. He feels only shame.
They take the bike from the trunk, and it stains his shirt. Just a few more words, and she hops onto the contraption, puts her weight down on the pedal, and rides off. He watches her cycle away without looking back. His heart and his reason manage to agree not to prolong the episode. He sits down in the Nissan and sets off again. The folded-down seats will no longer serve any purpose.
It is not even half past nine in t
he evening. Our hero goes back to his hotel. He will have to wait, once again. The plane is tomorrow, in precisely fourteen hours. He makes some notes, sketches out the final chapters, tells himself he will get back to this later.
It is dark in the hotel room. From time to time car headlights are projected on the walls. He switches on the TV. Images and sounds fill the room, which is now plunged in complete darkness. He tries to concentrate on the news. Bomb attacks in the Middle East, Hurricane Myriam in Florida, a new prototype for a car. With a quick flick he switches it off.
Suddenly tired, he brings a hand up to his eyes and, in a gesture that has become a habit, he runs it over his face. He inhales its smell. It held our heroine’s hand, so briefly but for too long, it has captured her smell. He has never missed her so much. In an attempt to escape, he rubs his hands together in a stream of water and lathers them for a long time. The lily of the valley resists the almond’s assault. He takes another shower. The lily of the valley yields at last.
12
Back to the future.
About the rental car.
An appropriate capitulation.
The fact that he had woken so early did have one advantage: he was really tired. A hypnotic-type sleeping pill plunged him into a dreamless sleep. He gets up at seven o’clock and, on autopilot, takes a shower and goes down for breakfast. It is a luxury hotel with a lavish buffet, and he is the only person there at this time in the morning: he has a salad of fresh grapefruit and strawberries, a yogurt, and some green tea.
Then he pays his bill. The Polish girl is not at reception. Right now he would have liked being entitled to her smile. From the receptionist on duty, he gathers what her name is. Then he quickly writes her a friendly, affectionate note, wishing her success and happiness. Leaves neither his address nor his telephone number, out of propriety. He has tact. Trusting in Google, he does however sign with his first name (and adds his family name in brackets). He tears the page from his notebook, folds it, and hands it to the receptionist, who — and she is betrayed in this by her overly detached attitude — will certainly read his message the moment he has turned on his heel.
Beneath cold, fine rain, he slings his bag in the trunk. Sets off. Drives away. He is not leaving Scotland, but fleeing it. He goes back past the crossroads between the A32 and the S70, and glances one last time at the Inchnadamph sign. He should insist they erect a statue. A concertinaed bicycle, for example. If he’d known … If he’d known, what? He would still have come, he was incapable of not coming. You never can tell. The previous day’s bitterness is fading. I need to leave, he keeps telling himself. Paris is another town, where she won’t be held hostage by anything. That is all he asks.
Our hero drives on. The windshield wipers sweep a leaf toward the hood, mercilessly. He turns on the radio, switches it off right away. He does not want company. In the rain, the journey seems longer. But he reaches the airport two hours early, and hands the car back to Avis. He puts the rear seats up, checks over the bodywork. The Nissan is untouched, not even a scratch.
The girl in a red jacket behind the counter asks him whether everything went well. He says, Yes, thank you, and this standard exchange brings a smile to his lips. It’s not all doom and gloom, he could have had a blowout and missed his flight. He adds, just out of principle, Actually the seats don’t go down flat enough to get a bike in.
So here he is at the airport. Outside it is overcast and pouring rain. From the departure lounge, he calls our heroine to confirm that he is taking off and also, he admits, to hear her voice again. She makes him promise not to contact her again in Scotland. He would not have. She agrees to his doing so as soon as she is back. He is pacified. He feels neither resentful nor bitter, he knows that he still wants to believe in this. He thinks back to what he told her: being in love is when it feels hot inside your head. It was the best he could come up with. He still feels hot enough for two. All in good time.
The lounge slowly fills with people. He drifts. Does he really need a duty-free shop? A fluffy sheep key ring attracts his attention. He smirks.
Is it because the carpets are dirty or something about the way the seating is lined up? Our hero gradually succumbs to all-encompassing melancholy and invasive anxiety. He is suddenly worried that, with her, he will never be able to take anything for granted. Afraid that, with every passing moment, she is leaving his life, abandoning him to his fate as a soon-to-be-old man, that, rather than him, she wants a life with something to look forward to. How can he hold this against her? She is the one with the world at her feet, while our hero feels he is on borrowed time. She is thirty, which is almost twenty. He fifty, which might as well be sixty. If he inverted this morbid logic they would both be the same age, but this is no time for optimism. His spine stoops beneath the absurd superstition of seeing figures in decades. When he plunges into a state of dejection and mental liquefaction like this, our hero feels so old he could make flowers wilt just by touching them.
He slumps into an uncomfortable chair. Then immediately berates himself for his resignation, which is far removed from the strong cheerful him. He keeps telling himself that he is young, that he will continue to be young as long as he refuses to give up hope of a future. He is alive enough today to move mountains, still attractive enough to register as a man. The same will still be true tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow. But a terrible sentence pops into his head. He read it in The Life Before Us, and it marked him for life. He was eighteen, Ajar’s book had just come out, and no one knew he was in fact Romain Gary. Little Momo is talking about Madame Rosa, saying, “She used to be a woman and she’s still got a bit of it.” Our hero stands, paces up and down the waiting area by the departure gate, and draws some renewed strength from his energetic striding. Then sits back down and lowers his eyes.
He stares at the gray carpeting, and — as the saying goes — the scales seem to fall from his eyes. His age and that of our heroine have no part in their affair’s failure. She knows nothing of his concerns, she cannot begin to imagine what it is to be fifty. He could be twenty years younger and it would change nothing. Our heroine may not allow herself to indulge her desire for him or grant him her tenderness, and this is because what she most wants to avoid is pain, what she refuses is heartache, and what she dreads is drama. It is so easy breaking away from him now. This is what our hero finally grasps. High time too. He now needs to become a promise of happiness for her, the very image of happiness. That, he thinks, is right up his street.
And now he is afraid that if she ever did give in to him, he would owe that to his perseverance, his doggedness. If she started loving him for the energy he put into conquering her, could she then learn to love him of her own free will? How can he now rekindle the carefree atmosphere of the early days? These are the new questions gnawing at our hero, quite pointlessly, when the flight attendant calls out his row.
The plane takes off on time. Through the porthole, our hero watches the runway scud past, then shrink in the distance. The sheep, them again, grow smaller. Seeing them finally disappearing, drowned out by the altitude and his myopia, is both a relief and a torment. There is, should he want one, panini on the menu. A group of young French kids on a language trip bawl throughout the flight. He tries to remember whether, at their age, he was such an asshole. He could well have been. He is in seat 16A. The young woman in 16B tries to start a conversation. Blond, pug-nosed, an eyebrow piercing that does not succeed in making her ugly. She is from Paris, a researcher, she works for a company that specializes in transgenic products. She offers him her name. He gives her his in return.
She reminds him that they both traveled on the same outbound flight, and so were held up for hours. She thought he looked very stressed, really. She asks him whether he had a pleasant stay in Scotland.
Our hero does not lie to her. He replies:
“The weather was nice.”
acknowledgments
Apple France
Avis Rental Inverness Airport
&
nbsp; British Airways
British Telecom
Currabottle Inn
Great Southern Hotel Braemore
Glen Carron Park Hotel
Glen Carron Park Pub & Restaurant
Orange International
G7 Taxis
The Intervention of a Good Man Page 4