We'll Sleep When We're Old

by Pino Corrias

  The GPS took them straight to Oscar’s new apartment (“These are the keys and these are the codes. I’m still furnishing the place. No one knows I’ve bought it; to all intents and purposes you’ll be in a clandestine lair: just think how insane that is.”). 16 Rue Liancourt, right around the corner from Place Denfert-Rochereau, fourteenth arrondissement, one code for the gate that leads down to the basement parking garage, another code for the elevator that will take them up from the basement to the eighth floor, and one last code for the alarm, the minute they enter the apartment. All of them pointless precautions, seeing that the apartment contains a luminous, unsettling void; that is to say, highly polished hardwood floors, two windows, a white sofa and a fireplace in every room, but no chairs. Two bedrooms, each with a bath and built-in armoires, never used, that smell of wood. An all–stainless steel kitchen just stripped of its plastic wrap, and an immense refrigerator with one of the two doors stacked full with Perrier bottles.

  The minute they got there, Jacaranda shut herself into one of the two bedrooms, the one with a wall-mounted television set that didn’t seem to be hooked up yet. He tried to read on the couch, with Paris Jazz in the background, tuned in through a burnished-steel digital radio that was miraculously operative. He fell fast asleep without even realizing it, slipping into dreams of asphalt and flickering grapevines, until the morning after, when he found himself in a room full of sunshine and unmistakably Parisian rooftops.

  As soon as he was awake he took a shower, shaved, and went out to get breakfast. When he knocked on her door to wake her up, she grunted at him to leave her alone. In the middle of the morning he went downstairs again to the market stalls on Rue Daguerre and bought warm bread, shrimp, eggs, asparagus, salad, a package of camembert cheese, a bottle of olive oil, a container of vanilla ice cream, two bottles of sauvignon, and a bottle of Talisker single-malt Scotch whisky. He cooked lunch, set the table, and called her. She half opened the door to her dimly lit room, looking first at him, then at the set table. “I’m not hungry.” She was wearing one of the T-shirts she’d bought at an H&M in Auxerre, along with the sunglasses, the jeans, and all the rest. She was pale, she was distant. She was out of it. She shut the door again before he had a chance to reply.

  Then Andrea went downstairs again. He called Oscar from a phone booth and told him, “Your actress is a bitch on wheels. And she’s depressed, too.” He told him, “She hates you. She hates me. She hates the whole world.”

  Oscar started laughing and caught him off guard: “Do you want to fuck her?”

  “Who? What?”

  “You want to fuck her and she isn’t even taking you into consideration. Ha ha! Or am I wrong?”

  “Stop talking bullshit.”

  “The great writer! Am I wrong?”

  Andrea paused a beat, told him to go fuck himself, and then asked how the movie was doing.

  Oscar was revved up, drunk, or wasted on something. “It’s not doing anything yet. It’s too soon, but we’ll go down in film history, my friend, just wait and see.”

  “Excellent,” Andrea said to him, eager to end the conversation.

  And Oscar said, “While it seems to me that all you want is to get between little Jacaranda’s legs, I know you.” He snickered. “You want to screw her, all you want is to screw her!” And he just wouldn’t stop.

  Andrea hung up. He was so frustrated that he didn’t even feel like going back upstairs. After the sunshine, a brief rain had come, and now it had moved on. Paris was pure cinema, but with the perfume of life.

  He continued toward the Boulevard du Montparnasse, took a seat at Select, ordered a Ricard, ate eggs and ham with a beer and a coffee. Then he walked over to the Fondation Cartier, where there was a personal show of Jean-Michel Alberola’s work. He’d seen an Alberola show at the Galleria La Vetrina on Via dei Coronari in Rome, and he remembered certain phrases of his painted on the walls in garish colors, the finest of which stated: La sortie est à l’intérieur. “The exit’s inside.” He thinks the same thing.

  In midafternoon, after more clouds, the sun came out again. He walked to Raspail, bought a stack of useless but very colorful magazines, went back to Select to read them, drinking a couple of beers. And once he felt better, he went back home.

  Jacaranda had slipped on the amaranthine red leather jacket that Andrea had fished out of the pile of coats in Sabaudia and which seemed to have been custom made for her. She sat on the cushions with her legs crossed, in her bare feet. She’d regained color: she’d eaten a little salad and some cheese. She’d downed a bottle of wine and knocked down the level in the whisky bottle by three fingers. On the tray on the floor was a package of Xanax.

  “You left me stuck in here without a set of keys,” she told him in a drawling, singsong voice, submissive and docile. A voice that immediately got on his nerves.

  “Why, did you miss me?”

  She looked at him and, looking at him, ignored him.

  “Those two things don’t go well together,” Andrea told her, pointing at the Xanax and the bottle of Talisker.

  “No, they go together perfectly, as far as I’m concerned,” Jacaranda replied, again with that voice. The voice of a stupid little girl, thirty years old, drunk on whisky, and stunned by an excess of psychoactive meds.

  She continued looking at him without seeing him. But he could see her. She must have taken a shower. Her hair was wet, brushed back, her eyes were luminous, as they had been two nights back in Sabaudia. He felt as if he’d been putting up with her for an unnaturally extended time inside this absurd situation of cinematic clandestinity. And at the same time, she always struck him as prettier than the last time he’d seen her. A beauty that was even irritating, given the way it was mistreated. He thought, “You stupid actresses,” but instead of thinking it, perhaps because he’d spent the whole day alone, he said it out loud, as if thinking to himself.

  She furrowed her brow. “What did you say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Asshole.”

  Andrea felt his irritation increasing. “Has anyone ever taught you how to live your life right?”

  Her honey-colored eyes filled with loathing. “Why of course, the first one to do it was your friend Oscar Martello.” Then she stood up and went back to her bedroom.

  In the middle of the night, he heard her sobbing. He got out of bed, knocked on her door, opened it a crack. “Hey, what’s going on?”

  She told him, “Go away,” but softly, without force, without anger, almost supplicating.

  He turned on the night-light in the hallway and saw her floating in the darkness, sitting in the middle of the bed, in a black tank top, arms folded across her chest, her face bowed. Her breathing slowly calming. “I had a nightmare.”

  “You want to tell me about it?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, now it’s over.”

  Andrea boiled some water for her, made a green tea. He went over and sat down beside her, on the bed, and brushed his fingers over her forehead, which was ice cold. “I told you that whisky and tranquilizers don’t go together. Now drink this and go back to sleep.”

  She did as she was told, docile the way that frightened women sometimes are. She drank in small sips, until she’d finished the whole mug. Then she told him, “If I close my eyes now, will you stay here and stand guard?”

  An instant later, Jacaranda was already fast asleep, lulled by other worlds that she visited from behind her eyelids, breathing deeper and deeper, as if she were walking through the underbrush of a night that was finally inhabitable and now inoffensive.

  Paris Does Miracles

  This exhausting, and yet poetic situation, of being stuck, the two of them, on something like an island surrounded by a sea of black roofs and sky, in a half-empty apartment, with their cell phones turned off, could have reined in their bland collisions until they attained a state of perpetual and reciprocal indifference. But instead, the warm sunlight of their third morning there came pouring in through
windows thrown open to the city at large and somehow made them both wake up with a new and inexplicable sensation. A state of mind that made everything around them newly lightened, creating a bubble of air, a suspension of time.

  Suddenly all that was missing to truly feel like he was free and on vacation were the café umbrellas and the scent of baguette. Jacaranda had suddenly bloomed again. Her nightmares had left no traces on her face, or in her honey-colored eyes. Her skin was luminous and her teeth were white. And as she walked into the kitchen, she said, “I’m hungry.”

  When they went downstairs, to guard against prying eyes she wore the panama hat, the sunglasses, and a shawl. They sat down at the Café Noir on Rue Daguerre and ate croissants and omelets. Then they went over to the Bon Marché, where he bought two cotton T-shirts and a pair of jeans. She tried on three dresses, three skirts, three pairs of shoes, and in the end bought a raspberry-red Agnès B. silk blouse that she put on and spun around in twice before the big mirror. She looked at herself and smiled. “I had one just like it when I was a girl.”

  They walked over to the Cinémathèque Française, where at noon a retrospective of the work of Jean-Marie Straub was playing, but they left after the only scene that could possibly be worth watching, the one where the schoolteacher scolds his pupil in front of the boy’s parents for being too impertinent, for never giving the correct answers. In order to prove his point, the teacher points the boy to a framed butterfly under glass and, when he asks him what it is, the boy replies, “A crime.”

  On their way out, they noticed that scheduled for the next day was a screening of a restored version of Antonioni’s L’Avventura. She wrinkled her nose. “It’s a beautiful film that talks about nothing.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It always made me feel tremendously sad, it put me into some kind of a bad mood.”

  “I think that’s what Antonioni had in mind when he made it. To put you respectable folk in a bad mood.”

  For the first time, Jacaranda laughed. “Respectable folk! Nobody says that anymore. It’s a word from twenty years ago.”

  “A lot longer ago than that. It’s a word from the sixties. Just like the film.”

  “There, exactly.”

  “But as you can see, it still works, it always comes up with the film. Because it continues to put you in a state of alarm.”

  “Put us? Are you saying that I’m . . .”

  “You said it.”

  “No, I didn’t say anything of the sort.”

  “But you made me think it.”

  “I don’t think of myself as respectable in the slightest. In fact, I often think and do the most disrespectable things.”

  “That’s exactly what being respectable means, completely disrespecting others and completely respecting yourself.”

  Jacaranda gave him a serious glance. “And in fact, that’s the way I am.”

  “You see?”

  They ate lunch at the Café Bonaparte in Saint-Germain. The cinema and the landscape were healing her. She kept looking around as if she were seeing it for the first time. As they were drinking their coffee, she said, “I’d like to do something I’ve never done before.”

  “Like what?”

  “Something that you promised me.”

  An hour later, they really were at the top of the Eiffel Tower, surrounded by respectable tourists just like them and Japanese couples on their honeymoons taking pictures of each other. When they got back to earth, a guide offered them a half-price open tour on a double-decker bus leaving for Notre-Dame and the Louvre. Jacaranda started laughing. “That’s the last thing we need, standing in line for two hours to see the Mona Lisa.”

  An hour later, they were really were standing in line in the Denon wing, on the second floor, to see the Mona Lisa. And as they were waiting to move forward, one step at a time, hemmed in by men in flowered shorts, women in wooden clogs, and fat, annoying children, she said, “I can’t take it anymore. When we’re done, promise me that we’ll go back to behaving like cynical, self-regarding bastards.”

  He pulled her out of the line. “Let’s start over right away. The Mona Lisa is overrated.”

  On their way back home they went into the Montparnasse Cemetery. As they were searching for Guy de Maupassant’s grave, they stumbled upon the grave of Alice Prin, better known as Kiki de Montparnasse, an actress, singer, and painter, and Jacaranda stood for a long time in silence, looking down at that grave, and then said, “One time I studied a theatrical script that talked about her life. Her mother abandoned her when she was fourteen, because she was posing nude in the painters’ ateliers. Did you know that? She had a purity all her own that no one understood. And everyone punished her for that.” She looked at him with a certain intensity, and Andrea had the sensation that she wanted to add something. Instead, though, she said nothing, looked elsewhere, and once again had a change of mood.

  Three Knocks and He’s There

  After another day spent maintaining an intermediate distance, he is drying off after taking a shower. Jacaranda is locked up in her bedroom, and in the living room Paris Jazz is broadcasting Jaco Pastorius recorded live at the Montreux Jazz Festival. Suddenly three knocks threaten to break down the front door. And when Andrea throws it open, in comes Oscar Martello like a gust of wind, with a leather travel bag slung around his neck and a fat pack of newspapers in one hand. “Come on! Get out the glasses and the caviar. The producer has arrived! You don’t have any caviar? Of course you don’t, you’re poor: so I brought it.”

  He landed just a few hours ago in the airplane of his friend Angelina Casagrande, the Queen of Flowers, who always has new tits. He dumped her on Avenue Matignon, at the Christie’s antique jewelry auction, telling her he had to go meet old Gérard Depardieu with his agent at the bar of the Hôtel Lutetia to propose he make at least a cameo appearance in a new European series about a squad of Interpol cops: a Frenchman, an Englishman, an Italian—

  “Like in the jokes?” Andrea asks him.

  “Exactly! But with a bunch of money from the European Community, just think what a fantastic thing this is, they call it cultural integration or something like that . . . this time I’m in with a one-rock chip, a million euros. But the next series, I’m going to make it all on my own.” He went into the kitchen to find the second table in the apartment, one of those small round café tables, dragged it into the living room, unwrapped the two bottles of Cristal, opened a jumbo container of imperial Sterlet caviar, and poured two packets of crackers onto a plate. “When my aging little girl has spent her half million euros for a couple of Victorian-era emeralds and she’s finally had multiple orgasms, I’ll send her straight back to Rome.”

  Andrea starts to get alarmed. “Why, are you staying?”

  “Would you like that?” Oscar gives him a feverish glance. He must already have stuffed himself full of coke to help him take the stress of the flight and the propositions of his friend. He lowers his voice: “That way I can watch while you guys fuck, and maybe I can lend a hand, I don’t know if I make myself clear . . .” Then it occurs to him that there’s someone missing at the little party. “Where’s Jacaranda?”

  She appears at that moment. She put on the raspberry-red blouse that lights up her face. She’s beautiful. She’s seductive. Oscar takes both her hands and kisses her. “Here’s my movie star. Just look!”

  He tosses the pack of newspapers onto the sofa. All the dailies have gone for it hook, line, and sinker, and featured it on their news pages, even though we’re still not seeing banner headlines. The Corriere put it on page 8, below the fold, headline: “The Mystery of Jacaranda Rizzi,” subhead: “Lead Actress of Anti-Mafia Film Vanishes. The Producer: We’re Worried, but Not Alarmed.” The other newspapers are more direct: “Jacaranda, Where Are You?,” “Disappeared!” They all carry photos from her best-known movie, Dangerous Dance, in which she’s a lap dancer being stalked by a serial killer. Jacaranda’s behind, shot at a dramatic angle as she swings from a pole, is
beautiful, but it winds up undercutting the alarm. Oscar taps his forefinger on it. “You’re making news, my love.”

  She looks at him, without ever smiling.

  But Oscar doesn’t give a damn, he’s pumping sheer energy. “Do you know how much this publicity is worth? And this is just the first few days. Let’s let the baby grow. Then War & Peace will go into action with their sentimental bullshit and we’ll be flying high. By the way, how are the two of you doing, are you making war or are you making love? Ha ha!”

  Jacaranda gives him a chilly reply: “If you’re saving all this money on advertising, maybe we should discuss a serious fee and not this two-bit tip you’re paying us.”

  Oscar shoots back a scorching glare. “Do you know what Brooke Shields once said about Bo Derek? That she was so stupid she flunked her Pap test. There are times when you remind me of Bo Derek.”

  Jacaranda doesn’t even pretend to laugh. “I may be Bo Derek, but you definitely don’t rise even to the level of Orson Welles’s shoes.”

  Oscar doesn’t take that well. “Hey, I’m paying for you to take a vacation in Paris, I’m putting you up in my own home, I’m giving you headlines in all the papers, and now you’re busting my balls?”

  Andrea seeks a middle ground. “Let’s drink this Cristal and calm down.”

  Oscar: “I’m perfectly calm. I’m just trying to work for the good of this fucking movie.”

  Jacaranda: “You always seem to be working for the good.”

  Oscar: “It’s in my nature, sweetheart. What about you?”

  Jacaranda: “Well, you ought to know.”

  Once again, the tension between the two of them flares. Andrea pours himself a drink. Oscar and Jacaranda ignore him. There’s some kind of flow of energy between them that emits sparks and fills the air with an uneasy charge.