by Anna Gavalda
“What did you do?”
“Secret, Yann, secret . . . ” he intoned in a voice of exaggerated mysteriousness.
“What are you telling him now?” asked Alice anxiously, having just rejoined us. “Go and kiss the girls in a minute. You too, Yann. They’re demanding you, believe it or not.”
Oh . . .
How proud that made me.
“But be careful,” she added, raising her index finger. “No more nonsense tonight, okay?”
When we went into their room, the littler one was already asleep, and Madeleine was only waiting for us to kiss her before she dropped off too.
“You know what I have to do, to be allowed to kiss my daughters?” he grumbled, straightening up.
“No.”
“I have to wash my beard with baby shampoo and then rub some kind of fake vanilla-smelling conditioner into it. Isn’t that the most absurd thing! You see what I have to put up with?”
I smiled.
“Somehow I can’t feel too sorry for you, Isaac.”
“And see, now you don’t feel sorry for me!”
When we got back to the kitchen, Alice was holding a steaming cup.
She kissed her husband on the forehead to thank him for thinking of her, before announcing that she was sorry to leave us but that she was tired, and dreaming of going to lie down.
(She didn’t say “going to bed,” she said “lie down,” which knocked me out again.) (And as if that wasn’t enough, at the time she said it, she pulled a long hairpin out of her chignon and shook out her hair, and, oh . . . this was another Alice . . . Alice with her hair down.) (Softer and less awe-inspiring.) (Already naked, in a manner of speaking.) (And as I mumbled “oh” and “uh” and “um” and I don’t know what else even more obvious, I felt the mocking gaze of her lover drilling between my shoulder blades.)
I think she was waiting for me to kiss her, but since I felt much too rattled to lean forward any further, she ended by holding out her hand.
(Which I shook, and which was very warm.)
(Uh . . . because of the tea, I imagine.)
Even though I had no desire to leave, the few manners the alcohol had preserved inside me made me move halfheartedly toward my jacket and the road to purgatory.
“Oh, Yann,” wheedled Isaac, “you’re not going to leave me to do the dishes all by myself?”
God, I loved this colorful little Misha.
I loved him.
“Come on. Sit back down. Besides, you haven’t even finished your clementine! What kind of wastefulness is that?!”
* * *
Alice, on her way to bed, had turned out all the lights so that we were in a kitchen illuminated only by the gleam of the candles now, and by the dimmer glow, like a memory, of the city lights filtering through the window.
We stayed that way, without speaking, for a long moment. We emptied our glasses as slowly as possible and reflected on everything we’d just experienced. We were both a little bit drunk, and slouched a little in the dark. He had resumed his place on the stool with his back against the wall, and I had turned my chair forty-five degrees so I could imitate him. We listened to the sounds of a pretty woman going through her nightly ablutions and we daydreamed.
We must probably have been thinking the same thing: that we’d just had a very nice time, and that we were lucky. At least, that’s what I was thinking. And also that she brushed her teeth a little too fast, didn’t she?
“How old are you?” he asked me, out of the blue.
“Twenty-six.”
“I’d never seen you before. I knew the old lady who used to live in your apartment, but she moved to the country, I think.”
“Yeah, she was the great-aunt of . . . of a friend. We moved into the apartment in October.”
Silence.
“You’re twenty-six years old and you’re living in the apartment of the great-aunt of a young woman whose first name you still haven’t mentioned”
He pronounced the words in a voice completely without inflection or punctuation. It sounded terrible in my ear.
I didn’t answer.
“A young woman with no first name, but with very definite ideas about the cleanliness of the courtyard and the storing of strollers under the staircase.”
Ah . . . we were definitely talking about the same person.
It was said without irony or aggressiveness. It was said, that’s all. I reached for my glass, because my throat had suddenly gone slightly dry.
“Yann?”
“Yes.”
“What’s her name, your girlfriend?”
“Mélanie.”
“Mélanie. Welcome, Mélanie . . . ” he murmured, addressing some phantom lost between the oven and the sink. “Well, since you’re here, I have to tell you—young lady who’s always in a bit of a hurry—that fussing about garbage bins and the poorly-coiled garden hose . . . it doesn’t matter. And strollers and scooters under the staircase, well, they don’t really matter, either. Can you hear me, Mélanie? Instead of calling the property management company every four mornings and wasting their time with these pointless little complaints, come and have a drink with us.”
He raised his glass in the half-light and added:
“Because, you know, we’re all going to die, Mélanie. All of us. We’re all going to die one day.”
I closed my eyes.
We’d had too much to drink. And I didn’t need to hear all that. I didn’t want to hear bad things said about Mélanie, I knew that. And I didn’t want to see Isaac fall off his pedestal. I loved him.
I looked down.
“Yann, why are you letting me badmouth the woman who shares your life without coming to her defense? I’m only an old dickhead, after all. Why aren’t you telling me to go to hell?”
I didn’t speak. I didn’t like the turn our conversation had taken, at all. I didn’t want to mix my private life with all the beautiful things we’d just talked about, I didn’t want to talk about myself, I didn’t want to hear the words “property management company” or “garbage bin” in the mouth of a man who’d made me dream so much up to that point. To get myself out of this tight spot, I took the risk of being hurtful, too.
“Because I’m polite.”
Silence.
I don’t know what he was thinking, but I tried with all my might to get back to where I was by pouring us the last of the wine in the bottle, sharing it equally between our two glasses. He didn’t thank me. I’m not even sure he was aware of it
I wasn’t so happy anymore. I wanted a cigarette. I wanted to open the window and let the cold air distract us a little. But I didn’t dare do that either, so I drank.
I couldn’t look at him now. I looked at the candles. I played with the melted wax like I did as a kid. I let it harden on my fingertip and touched my lip, in the little angel’s groove. It had the same lukewarmness, the same smell, the same softness as it always had.
He folded his hands, one on top of the other.
It really was time for me to go. My neighbor was a sad drunk, and I’d reached my saturation point. I’d taken in too much emotion. I was collecting myself emotionally—head, arms, legs, keys, jacket, stairs, bed, coma—when it fell, suddenly, like the blade of a very gentle guillotine:
“You can fail in life, out of politeness.”
His eyes sought mine, and we stared at each other for a moment. I played the innocent and he was the persecutor, but of course I was the one who seemed nastier. Why was he telling me this?
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because of the dodos.”
Okay. He was drunk as a skunk.
“Sorry?”
“The dodos. You know, the big birds with the hooked beaks that lived on Mauritius, the ones our ancestors wiped out.”
Okay, so it
was WWF time now.
He continued:
“There was no reason for those poor birds to keep away from us. Their meat was bad, there was nothing interesting about their songs or their plumage, and they were so ugly that no court in Europe would have wanted them. And yet they disappeared, all the same. All of them. They’d been there since the dawn of time, and in barely sixty years, progress wiped them completely off the face of the earth. And do you know why, my little Yann?”
I shook my head.
“For three reasons. One, because they were polite. They weren’t ferocious and came willingly up to people. Two, because they couldn’t fly; their little wings were ridiculous and totally useless. And three, because they didn’t protect their nests, and left their eggs and babies at the mercy of predators. There you go. Three flaws, and they’re gone. There’s only one left.”
Uh . . . what could I say? The extermination of Dodolus mauritius at 1:10 in the morning, as recounted by my pocket prophet . . . I’ll admit, I wasn’t expecting that.
He pulled his stool up to the table and bent toward me.
“Yann?”
“Mm-hmm . . . ”
“Don’t let them destroy you.”
“What?”
“Protect yourself. Protect your nest.”
What nest? I groaned inwardly. Great-Aunt Berthaud’s eighty square meters, two floors down?
I must have snickered too loudly, because he heard me.
“Obviously I don’t mean Aunt Ursula’s apartment.”
Silence.
“What are you talking about, then, Isaac?”
“You. Your nest is you. What you are. You have to protect it. If you don’t, who will do it for you?”
And because I didn’t understand his words, he continued more clearly, in “try again” mode:
“You’re beautiful, Yann. You’re very beautiful. And I’m not talking about your youth or your mane of hair or your large clear eyes; I’m talking about the wood you’re made of. It’s my job to recognize beautiful things, you know. To recognize them and determine their value. I don’t make the rounds of auction rooms anymore; I’m the person people call from all over the world, the one they listen religiously to. Not because I’m so clever, but because I know. I know the value of everything.”
“Oh yeah? And how much am I worth, according to you?”
I regretted my tone immediately. What a little asshole I was. But my guilt was pointless, because he didn’t seem to have heard me.
“I’m talking about your expression, your curiosity, your kindness. The way you made everyone in my house love you in less time than it takes to say it, the way you bounced my daughters on your knees and fell madly in love with my lover without once imagining trying to steal her from me. I’m talking about the attention you pay to details, things, people. What they confide to you and what they hide from you. What you confide to them and what you hide from them. That’s the first time I’ve heard Alice mention her mother since she died, the first time she’s remembered her alive and in good health. Thanks to you, Yann, thanks to you, Gabrielle came back tonight and played a few notes of Schubert for us. I didn’t dream that, did I? You heard it too?”
His eyes glittered in the dark.
“You heard it, didn’t you?”
I assured him that yes, of course I had, so he would let it drop. Okay . . . I’m fine . . . I wasn’t going to start crying for a woman I’d never even met . . .
“I’m talking about the tenderness with which you talk about what you love, and protect what belongs to you; I’m talking about our deliveries, which you bring upstairs every week, and the pieces of cardboard you’ve been wedging in the double doors since it got so cold outside, which I take out every morning so you won’t get chewed out by the other residents. I’m talking about your squashed toes, your exhausted, famished big-boy tears, your obsessive, tedious work, your smiles, your discretion, your clearheadedness, and finally your politeness, which I insult, but which holds up the walls of our civilization, as I’m well aware. I’m talking about your elegance, Yann. Yes—your elegance. Don’t let them destroy all of that, or what will be left of you? If you, and the people like you, don’t protect your nests, then . . . what . . . what will become of this world? (Silence.) Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“ . . . ”
“Are you crying? But . . . but why? Is it making you cry, what I said? Come, now . . . it’s not such a bad thing to be worth so much, is it?”
“Screw you, Moïse.”
He jumped up and gave a delighted chortle that woke up the red fish.
“You’re right, son, you’re right! Here”—he thumped his glass against mine—“to our loves!”
We clinked and drank, smiling into each other’s eyes.
“This wine of yours is good stuff,” I said finally. “Really good stuff.”
Isaac nodded, glanced at the bottle, and looked unhappy.
“Here, now I’ll give you a proper reason to cry . . . those people on the label, Pierre and Ariane Cavanès, are the human beings Alice and I admire most in the whole world. Our garden in the Vallée de l’Hérault ends where their vineyard begins. It’s not a big vineyard—barely thirty hectares—but every year their wine wins a bigger prize, and you’ll see, one day it’ll be counted among the greats. Pierre’s father was a geologist and his mother had a little property, and in the 1980s, even though there was nothing there and nobody thought it was anything—not the winemakers in the region and not the professional experts—he took the risk of following his instincts and planting, there in that wild valley, some Cabernet-Sauvignon vines that had more or less fallen off the back of a truck belonging to a big winemaker in Le Médoc, if I remember correctly . . . anyway, they built a storehouse and a fermenting room, went into debt up into their eyeballs, asked the advice of a retired oenologist, and . . . you remember what Alice told us earlier about the great ceramic artists? That half-mad obsession with tests and attempts and every possible combination of water and fire, and air and earth? Well, I believe it’s kind of the same thing with wine, except with fruit instead of fire, and . . . ”
Isaac was exhausting me.
Stories, anecdotes, technical terms, viticultural procedures, fermentation, maceration, oak casks. Ariane, who had come from her native Normandy twenty years earlier to work the grape harvest one summer because she dreamed of running off to Bolivia and who had never left. Their love story, their fatigue, their sacrifices and their fragility; the weather, which could destroy a whole year’s work in a few seconds. Unforgettable tastings, unforgettable meals, guides, notes, rankings, the recognition that was finally arriving now. Their three children, who had been strictly raised in the open air and in grape baskets, their hopes, and finally their despair.
An uninterrupted stream of verbiage from which I picked out the words “immense courage,” “life of hard work,” “extraordinary success,” and “multiple sclerosis.”
“He wants to sell,” concluded Isaac. “He wants to sell everything, and even though I find that upsetting, I understand it. For me, if anything happened to Alice, I couldn’t go on either. That’s why Pierre and I understand each other so well. We talk big, we beat our chests and are horrible little pests, but we belong to a woman . . . ”
Well, too bad for them, but the dodos have taken one more hit. We didn’t care about them anymore. A lead weight had just settled on our shoulders. The candles sputtered, and my host stared off into space, lost in his own little world.
Alone, sad, unknown, hunched over.
I looked at my glass. How many swallows left? Three? Four?
Almost nothing.
Almost nothing, and what remained of one of the most beautiful evenings of my unpromising existence.
I didn’t have the heart to empty it.
My offering.
My offering to th
e spirits watching over the unknown Ariane.
I hoped they would be grateful to me, and let her live in peace.
I reached for my jacket.
SEVEN, THE DESCENT
I’m not sure how many steps separated their apartment from mine, but I was sober by the second one.
A witness, if there had been one, would have said I was lying; that he’d seen me and I was staggering, and holding onto the banister before daring to extend a foot into the void.
He was so trashed, the witness would have added, that he ended up pressing himself against the wall and sliding along it until he reached his door.
The dirty snitch.
If I did hesitate, it was because I really was tumbling through the void, and I wasn’t pressed against the wall; I was clutching the wall in my arms. Trying to warm it up so as not to go home alone. To take it into my bed. This wall, which I had banged into so often a few hours and a lifetime earlier, holding a little marquise against my heart in the company of a baronet and two princesses, this wall, which had echoed with all the spirit and gaiety in the stairwell, so many booming curses, laughter, and childish consternation; this wall, which so stubbornly refused to come have a last drink in my apartment with me, had become my last friend. A companion as lost as I was, against whose shoulder I could slump for just a little longer before I had to go back and face real life, the real Yann, real denial.
And even admitting that this gentleman is right, Madam Judge; even admitting that, let me just say that it wasn’t for very long. I’d hardly set foot into my house, finally home . . . in my girlfriend’s house, her crazy old aunt’s house . . . I’d hardly pushed the door of the place open when I sobered up in an instant.
