In Paris With You
Page 2
Apparently it’s an aerodynamic phenomenon
related to the positioning
of the towers.
A small architectural mistake.
And everyone complains about it, everyone bellyaches,
but no one thinks of the joy
of those four buildings
playing ping-
pong with the wind,
lifting up skirts,
artistically swirling the leaves and dirt.
It’s too bad
how the happiness of some makes others sad.
Eugene and Tatiana walked through this whirlwind,
and between them brief electrifying glances
darted and fled,
the way little crabs dart and flee
when children touch their fingers
to a rock pool by the sea.
Their little dance of glances
might have gone on like this forever,
but someone got in the way.
He was a tall man,
handsome,
perhaps,
if your idea of beauty is the cold hard
ice of marble, if your idea of beauty
is the tough leather, scarred,
of tree bark.
He was a powerful man,
sensual,
perhaps,
if sensuality for you
is a craggy mountaintop
in the wind-lashed dawn.
I believe it was Edmund Burke who used the word sublime
to describe that beauty, cracked and mineral,
that wild beauty, rough and material,
which not only attracts but terrifies.
‘How glad I am to see you, Tatiana!
I’d wondered if our paths might cross today,’
declared this man, who was, it turned out,
the supervisor of her thesis on Caillebotte.
She hastened to introduce him to Eugene,
who caught only brief snatches of their words,
Mr Leprince
well-known specialist
French Impressionism
preoccupied as he was by other things:
made notable discoveries
about Renoir
Tatiana’s pink, chapped lips, her dimpled chin,
a few white cat hairs on her raspberry scarf,
her posture, curved to the left
was the curator
of the exhibition at the
Musée du Luxembourg
by the weight of her bag,
presumably stuffed with books and notes.
‘That’s very interesting,’ said Eugene,
who really couldn’t have cared less about Caillebotte
or Renoir
or Monet
and analysed
Degas’s correspondence
or Degas.
Bloody Degas,
with his stupid ballerinas.
But just to participate in the conversation, he said: ‘Hey,
that reminds me – it’s been ages since I went to the Musée
d’Orsay.’
It was then that Eugene noticed Tatiana’s dark
shining hair,
blown by the wind
into delicate arcs.
And what, my dear,
are your plans for the day?
He also noticed that she had very pretty teeth,
small, pearly, with nice little spaces –
he hadn’t realised that back then.
Hang on,
didn’t she used to wear braces
before?
Before: ten years ago, she was … Hang on …
Fourteen!
Well yeah, there you go: fourteen.
At that age, you’re still under construction.
I’m going to reread Valéry
as you suggested recently
And now, it had all changed: her hair, her skin, her teeth.
I remember how young she seemed,
like a little kid.
I didn’t take enough notes before.
And it’s always useful to return
to sources that you think you know.
And I was practically an adult, thought Eugene.
And suddenly
he remembered: fuck, I was seventeen. Seventeen!
Seventeen years old! Christ, that’s beyond belief.
Did it really exist, that age? Seventeen!
It’s impossible, seventeen. It’s pure fiction.
It’s an age dreamed up to make old people believe
that they used to be adolescents.
Whereas in reality, it’s absolutely certain
that no one in the whole wide world
was ever seventeen.
Eugene, however, was beginning to realise
If you ever need to see me,
just drop by
that this thesis supervisor, sublime
in the Burkean sense of the term,
was, quite calmly and casually,
your brilliant work
is always a pleasure to read
but very clearly, trying to pull Tatiana.
It was obvious that he, too, had seen
the interlacing of her hair in the wind,
her white teeth, those nice spaces in between,
and I am of course eager
to hear you speak
at the museum
next week
and he suddenly wondered if there wasn’t something
going on between those two
that he should
have been told about,
before remembering that, only this morning,
as recently as quarter to nine,
he hadn’t thought about Tatiana more than five or
six times
in ten years.
He’d tried his best not to; whenever he’d got close,
anywhere near,
to thinking of her, by chance – of her, of that summer –
he’d tiptoed back,
clicked shut the door,
again and again,
on that room in his mind where he’d stored
that July, that August, those joys. That pain.
So she’d been wiped from his memory for years,
and now here he was, full of fears,
like some jealous husband,
a member of the Taliban,
some big macho idiot: the kind of guy who appears on
TV at one
in the morning
to explain why he can’t stand the fact that his wife is
a fan of Simon Le Bon.
And yet it was interesting for Eugene, who had hardly ever
experienced this kind of feeling before,
to sense the overwhelming power of his desire,
when he looked at this man (sublime
in the Burkean sense of the term),
to murder him
in a very aggressive way.
by the by, I heard that a wonderful article you wrote
is going to be published in Art History?
Eugene was overcome by the urge to provoke him
to a duel,
like they used to in the olden days.
If Lensky was here, he’d have been his second.
Shit, he hadn’t thought about Lensky in years!
I’ve really got to go, I’ve booked
a desk in the library for half past nine.
It was Tatiana who’d said those words.
Until soon, maybe, Eugene …
Tatiana was leaving. She’d booked
a desk for half past nine.
The library awaits!
The library awaited.
It was nice to see you again.
Really nice.
It was nice. Really nice.
A kiss on the left cheek, a kiss on the right cheek.
The smell of cold,
cigarettes, bergamot.
Time to get back to my Cai
llebotte.
What a stupid name, Caillebotte. Really, it was the
stupidest name ever.
He watched
with wonder
Tatiana
descend
the stairs
in the gusts
of the architectural blunder.
As Eugene was about to leave, feeling a bit flat,
tired and sad,
the sublime (in the Burkean sense of the term) man
suddenly said
in his guttural voice –
the kind of voice you hear on posh radio stations
like France Culture;
a voice drowning in static; rough, gravelly,
the kind you want to sweep like a driveway –
he said in this voice to Eugene:
‘And how is it, sir, that you know Tatiana?
I don’t believe she has mentioned your name.’
‘I was friends with the boyfriend of her Olga sister,’
replied Eugene, forcing himself to use the same
rhythm, but getting his words mixed up.
‘I mean, her older sister. Olga,’ he corrected.
‘Ah! A genuine, longstanding connection!
Then I’m not telling you anything new if I say
That she is the brightest student in my collection;
From the indistinct mass of my PhDs,
She emerges, like a beam cast on the sea
By a lighthouse, its dazzling reflection,
Or the little firefly hovering softly
In the dark night; incandescent perfection …’
‘What the hell is he on about?’ thought Eugene.
‘This is a public declaration of love!
Live from the steps of the National Library!
He might just as well
yell
very very loudly through a megaphone:
I love Tatiana! I love Tatiana! I love Tatiana!
Is he mad or what? Why tell me that?
Oh, this is torture.’
And he stood still as stone,
stunned by the truth of this idea.
‘The bastard.
He is torturing me.’
The man droned on in his voice from France Culture:
‘I had forgotten all about the pleasures of the mind
And was calmly drifting to the end of my career
When Tatiana appeared and magically undermined
The daily trudge and drear …’
‘Lensky was a poet,’
Eugene thought.
‘But not this kind of poet.
Not like this pompous Leprince.
Is he sleeping with her?’
At nine thirty-five in the morning, logically,
this question should not have entered his head.
But now it was
the most important question in the world.
The key question.
‘Is he sleeping with her?’
Eugene discovered that he had other questions too.
Hundreds of thousands of questions,
which he asked himself feverishly
while Leprince did his worst,
spouting declarations of love in rhyming verse.
She didn’t ask me what I did for a living – doesn’t she care
is she still angry
with me
who could blame her after what I said
is she sleeping with him
how
in whose bed
what exactly did I tell her
I can’t even remember now
dear Tatiana
no, not even a dear I don’t think I even said dear
I was a little turd back then
I was hardly even me back then
has she thought about me recently
did she recognise me straight away
why has she changed like that
has she really changed
as much as all that
was she that pretty before
was she that witty before
was it the brace on her teeth that hid her soul from me
is thirty-five minutes enough time
to fall in love with a girl
or fall back in love
was I in love with her back then
did I have a personality back then
was I really a human being back then
was there anything inside my head
is he sleeping with her
is he sleeping with her?
I don’t remember what I told her that day
if only I could remember
what the hell did I say?
then I could explain
perhaps she’s waiting for me to apologise
but I could hardly apologise to her just then
down in the metro, on the fourteenth line,
five minutes after seeing her again
am I getting myself worked up
over nothing very much
did she already possess such beauty
such intelligence such personality
is she sleeping with him
would anyone notice if
I missed my grandfather’s funeral?
yeah
probably
I think Mum would probably notice
particularly as I’m supposed to give a speech
damn
if I run
could I catch her
is she already in the library
is she waiting for me to call her
is he sleeping with her
is he sleeping with her?
These are just some
of the thousands of questions
that we will leave Eugene (for now) to wrestle
with, alone.
Because it’s time
for a brief summary of the facts.
It’s time to go back
about ten years
into the past,
back to when it all began.
2
It all began
in a leafy suburb of Paris,
neither poor nor very rich,
in a white house
that looks like a Playmobil house.
There, Tatiana lives peacefully
with her older sister Olga
and their mother.
The fourth actor in this domestic tragedy
(not counting me)
is the neighbours’ son.
His real name is Léonard,
though everyone calls him Lensky.
He’s a poet,
but not the boring sort.
He does slam – like rap, but slower.
Like poetry, but with music.
The kind of poetry that adults don’t consider poetic.
Gosh, Léonard, it’s not exactly Rimbaud, is it,
what you do? It’s not exactly Keats.
Our son is a sort of rapper.
It’s not exactly poetry. We’re hoping one day he
might broaden his vocabulary.
And lose the hip-hop beats.
‘It’s just a phase,’ the neighbour bleats.
So Lensky does slam that’s neither Rimbaud
nor Keats.
He’s also sleeping with Olga
and they love each other.
They’re seventeen. Lensky pens
wild declarations of love to his girlfriend.
I’ve kept every single one, because I like them so much.
They make me smile.
But that’s not all.
What those letters have
is that sweet shame of things
we used to find beautiful,
that sour aftertaste of words we regret
years later.
Those overblown oaths,
those preposterous promises, those demented declarations,
those metaphors that afterwards make us groan,
that overheated hyperbole, those ridiculous repetitions
wh
ich somehow, in the heat of the moment, struck us as so
beautiful, so true,
our pens dipped in the ink of our souls,
our entire beings calligraphed into those curls,
the whole universe
concentrated in the verse
whispered by the lips
of our beloved muse,
as they read our immortal prose somewhere,
rolling our Rs, licking our Ls, wallowing in our Ws …
It seemed to us that we were nothing more
nor less
than their warm breath:
the sculpture of our words on their tongues, in their air.
‘I love you, Olga, I love you so!’
(So begin most
of Lensky’s letters.)
‘I love you like the moonstruck madman
loves his lunacy.
Every hour, every minute, every second, you are all I see.
As I stare out from my rooftop at the city far below, your
sweet visage smiles back at me from clouds and sun and
snow. Ever since that blessed day when your eyes first met
mine …’
(Despite his parents’ concerns, there is nothing
wrong with his vocabulary. Parents often underestimate
their children. Even more so their teenagers. Lensky, in
fact, has read Rimbaud.)
‘… across the garden wall, when we were small,
our souls have been entwined. You are the
essence of my existence. You are my greatest
experience. I live you like a poet thinks. I live
you like an alcoholic drinks. I love you, I love
you, Olga, and I would rather die than live a day
without you in my life.’
He sends these lines on paper in the post,
in emails, instant messages, and texts
(though not so often, because texts
are extremely expensive in 2006),
and he whispers them into her ear,
on the pillow they share,
the two of them naked,
lying in bed,
skin touching skin,
their bellies still scaly with bodily fluids,
their chests still heaving in the muggy gloom
of Olga’s little attic room.
Meanwhile in her bed on the floor below,
fourteen-year-old
Tatiana
reads, reads,
reads, reads, reads, reads, reads,
reads, reads,
reads
books by the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, Zola,
Boris Vian, Aragon and Shakespeare:
Pride and Prejudice,
Wuthering Heights,
Froth on the Daydream,
Gone With the Wind,
Romeo and Juliet,
The Ladies’ Paradise
(etc.)
and as she reads,
she imagines wild, passionate, heart-stopping love affairs.