In the same entry was a well-known quotation by Einstein: “Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love.” I leaned back in my chair and laughed, and my gaze fell at that moment on a series of still-lifes pinned to the wall which Fumiko had done a few months ago, for one of her ungraded assignments at the École des beaux-arts—studies of spider and beetle carcasses, long-dead and dusty, dried-out husks found on windowsills, inside fluorescent-light fixtures and in hard-to-reach corners. The deceased insects, according to Fumiko, had been forgotten by the rest of the universe. I slammed the dictionary shut and went back to work.
At last, the twenty pages were done. They had taken me almost two weeks.
Lying on my cold, narrow bed that night, I could see Fumiko’s cupboard—the eye-of-Jupiter pattern of the woodgrain, the accumulation of dust in the corners. I could feel, in the darkness of my room, the relentless deterioration of its contents on an atomic level. I got up and opened my door. Lit only by the emergency lights, the hallway tiles reflected an eerie, phosphorescent glow. The Franprix bag in front of Fumiko’s door looked like a tiny white apparition. I stepped out into the corridor. Underneath the usual smells of the dormitory was the effluvium of decomposing cheese. Still in my nightclothes, I carried the bag to the dumpster, not looking inside to verify whether Fumiko had taken any of the items. If I didn’t look, the possibility remained. Back at her door, I sat down next to where the bag had been.
I told Fumiko, in a library whisper, about my new job, the lofty apartment, Clarisse. I described Monsieur de Gadbois, from the wrinkles around his bulldozer mouth to the creases on his moai-like forehead. Fumiko had always been fascinated by the physiognomies of old men. The first time she had visited my room, she had, after examining my meager shelf of books, spent several minutes studying the photo of Samuel Beckett sitting on the terrace of the Closerie des Lilas that I had taped to the wall. She loved the faces of W. H. Auden, Adolfo Bioy Casares, James (Frog-Eyes) Baldwin, even Sir James himself. “Old pears,” she called them—for some reason—in her childish French.
“You know what?” I said. “I can’t decide if Raoul de Gadbois is deluded or ahead of his time.”
Although I always managed to find an English equivalent for each French word I translated, the whole thing seemed to crumble under its own weight when I attempted to reunite its constituent parts.
But, Fumiko’s voice in my head protested, you are the one translating it.
“I’m not a theoretical physicist,” I answered, as if that settled the matter.
* * *
I saw Gadbois again. He invited me to dinner this time, which I took to mean that our working relationship had changed somehow. The rooms were as brightly lit as ever, and everything had the same unnatural sheen in the evening as it did during the day. Though I knew I would never ask, I wondered why he insisted on having the lights on at all times if he couldn’t see. Was he able to make out shapes, or at least perceive, on some level, the difference between night and day? My father had once told me that some blind men could sense nearby objects, especially if they posed a danger, through a sort of acoustic radar situated on the tip of the nose, on the cheeks and on the forehead: capable, as it were, of seeing with the whole face instead of just the eyes. I didn’t know whether my father had read this in one of his medical journals (which he perused the way some people peruse celebrity gossip) or if he had made the whole thing up, as he was wont to do, simply because it made sense to him—that men on whom such misfortune had fallen should be compensated with some kind of special, extra-human ability. Gadbois’s blindness, I surmised from all the paintings and photographs on the walls, must have come to him late in life. I wondered how it had happened, whether an accident or some disease had caused it, and what the old man’s days must be like, alone in his study surrounded by books he could no longer read. Had he dictated his treatise or, given the number of spelling mistakes and off-centered pages, typed the whole thing himself? The diurnal atmosphere of the apartment reminded me of summers in Denmark and Sweden, of days when the sun never seems to set, the annual celebrations of Sankthansaften and Midsommarafton, when magic is said to be at its strongest, of bonfires on beaches and everyone singing “Vi elsker vort land.” My parents’ apartment was equipped with something called a “dark room,” a fad dating back to the nineteenth century, which I used not only because of the white nights and my insomnia but also because I enjoyed the pitch-darkness—just me, my blood flow and my nervous system—like being inside an anechoic chamber. Was this what Fumiko felt in her room? A mixture of invulnerability and indifference?
We had rabbit à la provençale, with slices of aubergine. I savored the overcooked meat, the texture of the burned aubergines. We discussed Scandinavian literature. In Gadbois’s voice I could almost see the expanses of exquisite, unblemished snow. He mentioned, with admiration, the names of Hans Christian Andersen and Kierkegaard; Niels Bohr; King Christian X, who had defied the Nazis and donned a yellow star. And then he told me, as though to win me over, that it was a Danish architect—Johan Otto von Spreckelsen—who had designed the Grande Arche de la Défense. My ancestors, according to Gadbois, were an exemplary people, an example for the rest of Europe. I wanted to tell him that my Japanese girlfriend had locked herself in her room for the past three weeks, but I didn’t. Dessert was a variety of cheeses—brie, camembert, vacherin, chèvre—each involving a lengthy exchange between Gadbois and Clarisse on its authenticity. As Clarisse cleared the table, she passed over the unused plate, as she always did, without any change in expression.
Later, while reading my translated pages to Gadbois, I had a ludicrous thought: that he gave me more work only because I continued to have lunch—and now dinner—with him, as though that, and not the translations, were the true nature of my services. Had Gadbois wanted, from the start, someone who knew nothing about physics, someone who would be incapable not only of stealing his ideas but of seeing through their inherent fallacy? Perhaps the old man already knew that the British scientific community would react in much the same manner as the French. I envisioned my predecessors, candidates much more qualified than I, giving up on the first day, politely excusing themselves or storming out in disgust. Then again, maybe I was the only one who had bothered to answer his ad. Leaving the apartment with twenty more pages, I walked past Clarisse, who was smoking a cigarette in the kitchen doorway. This time, her smile was slow and deliberate—a knowing, ironic smile, the kind of smile exchanged between two conspirators. Or fellow pretenders.
Instead of going straight home, I wandered around La Défense, the business district, and sat on the steps underneath the Grande Arche, which housed, among other things, the offices of the Ministry of Tourism. I went up the steps to the splendidly illuminated platform. The wind was strong that evening and made the enormous canvas roof, suspended by cables, whip and buckle rhythmically. At that hour, I was the only one walking around the premises. Fifty feet away, an employee in uniform, most likely a security guard, sat inside a glass booth shaped like a giant pill capsule. Peering up at the glittering rows of windows dotting the monument walls, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the sheer size of everything. I told myself that I had every reason to take pride in Spreckelsen’s work. H. C. Andersen and Christian X were my people. And yet why did I feel as though I had deceived Gadbois?
* * *
Stopping only to eat or go to the toilet, I did nothing but translate. A draft was entering my room from somewhere, and in desperation I sealed the window with insulating tape. Yet the feeling of cold persisted. I tried listening to the radio that Fumiko had given me, but the crackling static was ruining my concentration. Reluctantly, I took it out to the dumpster. I found the newest batch of pages—fewer equations, more text—even harder than the last. My dictionary was now a tattered, sorry mess, its spine broken, its coffee-stained leaves creased and torn. Late one night, unable to sleep, I started thinking about the cupboard again. Had Fumiko eaten anything? The stump of baguette?
The chickpeas? Knowing her fondness for apples, she had probably eaten the Fuji, I concluded. Perhaps she had managed to soften the bread with hot water from the faucet …
Something about what Gadbois had said tugged at me. “S.R. doesn’t take into account the effects of gravitation…” Getting up, I turned the light back on and skimmed the pages I had already translated. On a whim, I took down from the bookshelf my abridged edition of Frazer’s Golden Bough and flipped through the chapters until I found a passage that I had read long ago. It said that magic, in its most primordial form, might be defined as the effect of two independent bodies acting upon one another over a distance, such as voodoo, psychokinesis or telepathy. Two bodies. The distance between them. It was a coincidence, a fortuitous convergence of notions, but as I compared Frazer’s definition of magic with the dictionary’s definition of gravity, I felt I had discovered Gadbois’s secret. In refuting Einstein’s theory of relativity, Raoul de Gadbois wanted to prove the existence of magic.
I reached for the remaining stack of sheets, which I’d planned to finish over the next few days. The first glimmer of dawn was squinting over the horizon when, halfway through the last page, in the midst of an interminable paragraph on electromagnetic interferences, I came upon the word “possum.” My pen dropped, with a clatter, from my cramped fingers. The word struck me as out of place in a physics treatise. I was tempted to replace it with “positron”—the chapter was on positrons—but reminding myself of my duty as a translator, I started to translate:
Imagine a possum at point A and at time t, so that, at time t´, we suspect it to be at point A´.
“Have you come to a conclusion about Monsieur de Gadbois?” a familiar voice asked, interrupting the tomblike silence of my room.
I found Fumiko lying on the bed. She was sketching the back of my head and was nearly done.
“If you ask me, I don’t think he’s all there.” She considered what she had just said. “If I was that far gone, I would just eclipse myself.”
I watched her fiddle with the radio I had thrown away. When I blinked, her hands, like a prestidigitator’s, were empty.
“You know,” she said, slowly, “this last time, I nearly did it. I nearly eclipsed myself. Do you know what stopped me?”
“What?” I whispered.
“Your voice. It didn’t sound the same. There was a hopeful note in your voice when you came to my door. That’s what kept me from eclipsing myself. Your voice.”
“Well,” I said, going back to my translation, “I’m glad you didn’t do it.”
A moment later, I turned to say something else, but Fumiko was already gone.
* * *
On my way to meet with Gadbois, I stopped at Pascal’s door. What if he had been right all along? What if ancestry, in the end, was the only thing that really mattered? There was no answer when I knocked. I tore off part of a page from my translation and wrote on it, “Fumiko hasn’t left her room in a month,” before adding, “You were right about her. And about me.” I thrust the note under the door before I could change my mind.
During the meal, Gadbois hardly spoke, as though our previous meals had worn him out. Only the sounds of utensils scraping against the porcelain punctuated the silence, and it occurred to me, suddenly, that this was what the old man’s life was like most of the time. A muted, monotonous darkness—like the invisible motion of dark matter around a black hole. Clarisse, hardly disturbing the silence, entered the room bearing a tray. She served Gadbois his coffee first, before coming around to my side. Gadbois had almost touched the steaming cup to his lips when I found myself saying—my voice abnormally loud—“Don’t drink the coffee, Monsieur de Gadbois.”
Both Gadbois and Clarisse looked at me.
“I don’t think,” I went on, “that what you have there is coffee.”
Gadbois raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”
“It’s obviously not coffee.”
Gadbois said, uncertainly, “I beg your pardon, Monsieur Blatand?”
“I believe Clarisse is trying to deceive you. I suggest you find someone to replace her, Monsieur de Gadbois. Someone who doesn’t have a habit of spitting into the coffee of blind men.”
For a brief second, the old man seemed at a loss. Then he cleared his throat, nodded, and, addressing the cup of coffee more than Clarisse, said, “You are free for the rest of the day.” He nodded once more. “That will be all.”
Without a word, Clarisse gathered up the untouched cups of coffee. As she picked up mine, I heard her murmur, quietly but distinctly, “I’ve been spitting in yours, too.”
Moments later, accompanying Gadbois to his study, I saw him come to a halt, as he always did, in the middle of the hallway. Hesitantly, his hand reached out, and I considered warning him, or even pushing his frail body forward. I watched, instead, as his fingers brushed against nothing, or, rather, the empty wall just to the right of his wife’s portrait. To Gadbois, it might as well have been light-years away.
“Clarisse!” he shouted. When she appeared, still holding a dishcloth, he pointed to the wall and said, with icy formality, “Please be so kind as to put the portrait of my wife back in its original position.”
I watched as Clarisse, her hand betraying a tremor, adjusted the picture frame until it was within range of Gadbois’s outstretched arm.
As if nothing had happened, we continued on our way, leaving Clarisse in the hallway. I almost turned to see if she was still standing there, but I resisted the urge. After all, there must be days when Gadbois made a mistake, started counting his steps too soon, or too late—missing his wife by mere millimeters. It wasn’t impossible. In the study, after groping about, he handed me a thick bundle of papers: the remainder of his treatise, whose title page read “On the Persistence of Sorrow in Gravitational Interactions.” To my surprise, I said to him, “I’m sorry about your wife.”
It was as though he hadn’t heard, and for a few torturous heartbeats I wasn’t sure if I had spoken the words aloud.
“My wife?” Softly, ever so softly, Raoul de Gadbois said, “My wife passed away thirty-nine years ago, Monsieur Blatand.”
* * *
Approaching the residence hall, I heard a burst of sirens. At the front entrance, silent blue lights pulsated rhythmically against the brick wall. The parked ambulance was marked I.M.L. VILLE DE PARIS. I closed my eyes, and the pulsations continued against my eyelids. As I stood there, Gadbois’s treatise tucked under my arm, I became aware of a flapping noise above me. I opened my eyes. I finally understood what Fumiko had been trying to tell me in her garbled, mispronounced French: not Ta voix but Au revoir. Gazing up at the rows of windows, I saw the white of bedsheets and Fumiko’s silhouette. The illusion held for another second, and then it was gone. Billowing curtains framed the outlines of two men dressed in white. From where I stood, I couldn’t tell if they were watching me.
The elevator doors opened at the seventh floor, and before I had time to get out, the two men in white entered with a gurney. I could make out a vague shape underneath the plastic covering held in place with belts. At the far end of the corridor, I saw Pascal, his face undone by shock. I don’t know why, but, just before the doors slid shut, I smiled at him. The men barely seemed to register my presence, as I moved back into a corner to make room for them. In order to fit the gurney into the cramped compartment, they were obliged to tilt it vertically—hence the belts—so that the upright litter stood next to me, like a fourth person, as the elevator began its slow descent.
“How long you think she was in there?” one of the men asked, staring straight ahead.
“Hard to say,” the other one replied, not looking at his partner. “At least a few weeks?”
“The body hardly smells.”
“No kidding. Window was left open the whole time. See the food in the cupboard?”
As we passed the sixth floor, Gadbois’s treatise slipped from my fingers and fell with a barely audible thud. I made no move to pick it up. Fifth floor. The one
who had spoken first, as if he couldn’t bear the silence, spoke again: “I was just thinking…”
“Yeah?”
“You think it was windy that day?”
His partner: “What?”
“There was an unfinished cigarette in the ashtray.”
“So?”
“Marlboro Lights. Like me.”
His partner took this in. “No kidding.”
“This is how I see it. A half-burned cigarette means she put it out before she died or that it went out by itself, which means…”
“Here we go again.”
“But why put out the cigarette before dying? Then again, why leave it unfinished? That’s why I think it was windy that day.”
In the days following Fumiko’s death, Pascal would show me his notes, strewn with one-of-a-kind expressions, Fumikoisms copied down in a minuscule but legible lycée script. She had told him—an impersonal interviewer, a stranger doing research—what she was incapable of telling me, a Scandinavian who looked too much like one of her own countrymen. “When I am near him, it tugs at me, like a sweet, diabetic longing. A sticky addiction welling up like a blood bubble. And then I want to eclipse myself.” Perhaps she didn’t want to admit what was happening for the same reason I was unable to admit it to myself. Love makes us do strange things and behave in unimaginable ways. As the elevator light moved from fifth to fourth, I slid my hand underneath the plastic shroud. The men, still talking, didn’t notice a thing. I took Fumiko’s cold and unyielding hand, firmly, in my own. Fourth moved to third. All the way to the ground floor, I held it like that.
Don’t Carry Me Too Far Away
The dissection room is on the fifth floor of the main building, and the thirty-six tables, or “cadaver stations,” are arranged in six rows of six. At the far corner, leaning against the walls, are plain wood coffins. For the cadavers, when everyone has finished with them. Unlike all the others, which are stomach-up, yours is lying facedown on the table. This is how you found the body, you and the others in your dissection group. It is the first day of the anatomy course, and the prof is not here yet. The buzz of fluorescent lights is broken occasionally by a muffled cough or a throat being cleared. In the back, the lab monitors look bored, half asleep. A few groups have already started on their cadavers. You don’t recognize any faces: the students you knew last year are gone, flunked out.
Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost Page 3