by Anna Gavalda
What were your last wishes, Louis?
shit, Louis,
shit
you piss me off
Seoul, ten o’clock at night, I’m stationed in a hotel room on the forty-first floor of a tower that has just risen from the ground. I think I must be the first occupant. The workers who installed the carpet left their cutter here and the sides of the shower stall are still covered with protective film.
I arrived here from Toronto where for three days I had one interview after another, after two quick stops at production sites, one in Warsaw and the other in the outskirts of Vilnius. I’ve accumulated so many hours of jet lag in one direction and then the other that my biological clock no longer has a grip on any sort of reality. I’m holding on is all, holding on.
While hunting for a memo for an agent from Tao Tanglin, with whom I’m supposed to have breakfast tomorrow, I came by chance upon this file, Untitled 1, in the depths of my computer. I had no memory of writing those words and I even find it hard to believe I was their author.
I had just opened your gift. I was unhappy. I had been drinking.
Like a fish.
Louis.
I’m back.
Several months have gone by and here I am again today, calmer and not as coarse, but I’m still wondering the same things, you know . . .
I’m wondering the same things and I still come to the same conclusion: I miss you, my friend.
I miss you so much.
I would never have imagined it was possible to miss you this much. It’s not an expression, I’m not saying “I miss you” the way I might come and complain to you about a lack of sleep, or sunlight, or courage, or time; I’m telling you this as if some part of myself had gone missing. The best part, perhaps. The only serene part, the kindest. The most watchful.
You are watching over me now the way you watched over me two years ago.
Two years, Louis, two years.
How can that be?
To have instilled so much life in so few days . . .
Phantom limb, pseudohallucination, PATHOL. noun: Illusory and occasionally painful perception of an amputated limb. Pain revived by stress, anxiety, and meteorological changes.
That’s what I feel when I think about you. Ridiculous, isn’t it?
Ridiculous. You were not only my compass, now it seems you’d become my barometer.
The slightest thing goes wrong, the least little oscillation, and I pat myself and search my body for proof of your absence.
I keep looking for you, Louis. Your death is like a wedge someone’s rammed into my skull, and the slightest doubt, wham, a sledgehammer drives it in.
Wham.
I’ll end up split in two.
What nonsense I’m writing.
Nonsense, for fear of speaking nonsense.
Two years.
If that.
Such a short time.
Such a short time, and how I regret those lost years.
We could have met much sooner, but we were discreet, you and I.
Discreet, distant, busy.
So busy.
So stupid, in other words.
I have a thousand more urgent problems to deal with, but I wish I could be with you.
I wish I could speak to you, see you, hear you.
I wish I could live through those years all over again.
It’s the right time. I am, as I was saying, as lifeless as can be.
Louis . . .
Don’t go anywhere.
I’m going to pour myself a glass of something and I’ll be back.
* * *
You were a lawyer, I was running a company—I still run it—and we were neighbors who shared a landing and sometimes met by the elevator or in the hallway of that posh building in the 16th arrondissement where we shared the top floor.
We sometimes crossed paths, but scarcely exchanged anything more than a distracted, tired nod, we were so stubborn—stubborn asses, we were, determined to become beasts of burden, each of us bending beneath the weight of our importance and the huge files we were dumb enough to bring into the circle of our private space.
(I had started to write “home,” “dumb enough to bring home,” and then I thought better of it. Did I have a home? Did you have a home? I replaced it with “the circle of our private space,” but that’s even more grotesque. The circle of our private space. What bullshit. Why not the circle of greyhound racing or a private dining club while I’m at it?)
If we shared any intimacy, it was no more than that of two members of a private club, however exclusive. Not for a lack of opportunity, but we didn’t have time, dear God. We didn’t have time. Neither for hunting nor golf nor power, still less for anything private, that might verge on intimacy.
Intimacy . . .
The name of a magazine for hairdressers, don’t you think?
As for the word “household,” to me it was nothing more than a word used for tax purposes, to calculate the amount owing on my income, whereas for you . . .
Well, you lived alone, so I don’t know.
Perhaps your evenings began not in a household, but in a lobby: theatres, operas, I imagine. Aisles, rows of seats, intermissions . . .
You went out a lot and . . . No. I really can’t imagine. I don’t know.
You were so secretive . . .
Often, when I was absent and had to catch an early-morning flight, I would run into you well before dawn. I noticed you, furtively, while my driver was hurrying to open the door to an overheated car, and there’d be this vision of you, so handsome, so pale, your hands in your pockets, your collar raised, your face blurred by the night and your nose half-buried in your scarf: that vision kept me company, for a long time.
My rides to the airport, my hours spent waiting, my battle plans, my troops to muster, my investors to reassure, my partners to win over, my moments of discouragement, their moments of discouragement, my doubts, and theirs, my reputation, my hardness, my fatigue, my headaches, my bellyaches, my ever-empty hotel rooms, my family always on voicemail, my never-ending jet lag, my combat medicine cabinet, my insomnia . . . all the trappings of the foot soldier to capitalism, an entire life of arm wrestling, fighting, passion, a life I chose, and fought for, a life I respect, even, but which exhausts me, and more than ever since your disappearance, my life, at those moments, depended solely on the memory of your elegant person.
Your person. You. Your freedom.
The memory of what I thought was freedom.
A woman of culture to whom I recently related our early-morning to-ings and fro-ings (I will tell you later the circumstances thereof), emphasizing the strange comfort they gave me, said mockingly:
“It sounds like Paul Morand calling out to Proust . . . ”
I didn’t react. I would rather be taken for a pedant than for an idiot.
There was no fooling her. She looked me straight in the eye for a long while, long enough to make me understand that I was, alas—no doubt about it, the proof being this long pause—a pedant of the worst kind: an idiot of a pedant and then, once this had been made perfectly clear, she moved her face closer to mine and added, in her lovely, deep voice:
“Proust . . . What sort of soirée do you go to at night to come home with eyes so weary and lucid? And what fright, forbidden to us, did you have, to come back so indulgent and so kind?”
Silence.
Her: Something like that, no?
I was silent.
Her: You won’t say.
I wouldn’t say, because . . .
Wham.
Your kindness, Louis.
Your kindness.
Night has fallen. Pollution and the lights of the city pay no heed to the fact, but I who am so close to you, in my ghost room almost two hundred meters from the ground, you can
not imagine how happy I am at the thought of spending the evening in your company.
Like the old days.
* * *
It’s nearly midnight. I’ve just reread what I’ve written. 1535 words. Two hours spent scribbling and an entire minibar to produce 1535 words.
What a feat.
And 1535 words that don’t mean a thing, on top of it. That understand nothing, express nothing, that simply echo: Shut up, Cailley-Ponthieu, shut up, go to bed. You’re beating around the bush, dragging things out, acting the fine gentleman. You don’t know how to write. You don’t know how to express yourself. You’re incapable of expressing the least little sentiment: incapable. You’ve never known how. It doesn’t interest you.
Hard going, all that. Hard going, and pretentious.
“A wedge someone’s rammed into my skull” and why not a touch of Proust, while you’re at it? Come on, come on. Straighten yourself up, please.
Take your sleeping pills, knock the beast out, collapse.
A wedge someone’s rammed into my skull . . .
But nothing stays in your mind, old man. Nothing. And even less in your flesh. So you see, even there. Even, there, you say “flesh” in order not to say “heart,” since the word makes you sick to your stomach. Heart, Cailley, heart. You know—that organ that is hard at work inside you. That pump. Motor.
Switch off the computer and go to bed. Go get some strength.
Go get some strength so you can go on pulling your wagons tomorrow morning.
Silence, up there, silence. I’ve been drinking, I am drinking, it will all work out. It has to. It has to come out. Like a blood-letting. I have to end things with you. I have to bury you, too. Whether I bury you or scatter you hardly matters, whatever you want, whatever you would have chosen, but I really have to put an end to this mourning which your discretion has deprived me of.
I have to bring you back to life one last time, so that at last I can say goodbye.
Say goodbye, let you rest in peace, and see if I can open your gift again now without crying like a baby.
* * *
I was saying, above, that we were restrained in our behavior toward each other, and only acknowledged each other with a courteous nod when we met in the common area of our building, but that’s not altogether true. Our shoes, Louis, our shoes were more flexible than we were, and it was our shoes, if you recall, that took the first step.
We shared this one guilty weakness: shoes, and it wasn’t just a way we could greet each other, it was also a furtive glance. No looking each other up and down, no, we would make the most of our stolen glances to verify that one thing, at least, in a world gone mad, was still as it should be: come rain, wind, or snow, the neighbor from across the hall would still be wearing shoes that had been styled and put together by a reputable house, and which were impeccably polished.
Now that was reassuring, was it not? Yes. So reassuring . . . a reassurance that is impossible to imagine for someone unacquainted with the early-morning pleasures of a heel slipping down the curve of a shoehorn, of a perfect pair of laces cinching up one’s soul as firmly as one’s leg, of the perforated trim on the toe adding a touch of fantasy beneath those suits that have none at all, of the double stitching which (in addition to being elegant) gives you the illusion it can never wear out, of a sheen that says more about you and your past life than you could ever possibly express on your own, or even of the wooden shoe trees that you cannot help but caress before you slip them into an exhausted shoe, and which immediately smooth out those creases on the uppers, on a day that has proven equally trying.
You and I both knew this and we were mutually grateful for the knowledge. For all that they were fleeting, our glances were no less appreciative. The knowing look of the connoisseur who recognizes his equal from his shoes, compounded with that of the reserved man awkwardly expressing his gratitude. The tiny smile hidden in the tiny nod, saying, more or less: Thank you, fellow believer, thank you. My blessings upon you.
The run-of-the-mill fellow wearing sneakers would no doubt maintain that I’m going overboard, but you, and a few others, will listen to me without batting an eyelash. A fine shoe, Louis, a nice pair, handsome Derbys, good-looking loafers, a shining buckle, an immaculate pair of bucks, box calf and leather saddle shoes, shoe trees made of alder wood, moiré calfskin suede, cordovan leather that squeaks when it’s bent, a sheen like Japanese lacquer, a polish made of carnauba wax . . . Ah. Dear God. What could be finer?
Given my obligation to dress like a boss, you’ll never see me shod in anything other than a pair of black Oxfords, with a straight or uniform toe, or in a pinch, an extreme pinch, on a Friday with no hassles in view, a perforated toe (what madness), but you, especially once I got to know you better, you have no idea, the thrill you could give me. Such a thrill. All our discussions. And animated debates. About this model over that one, this lack of taste rather than that one, a Hungarian bootmaker over a Viennese one, a Viennese one over a New Yorker; about an estimate, an impulse, a wise renunciation, a cobbler out in the back of beyond, the soft feel of an old rag, or the length of the hairs on a shoeshine brush. How many hours did they keep us enthralled, all these existential questions? How many hours? It seems to me we never spoke of anything else, just our shoes, our wonderful shoes—there to polish, to dream about, to get resoled—and that as we were talking we were exposing a great deal about ourselves to each other.
In a lifetime there are classmates, fellow students, army buddies, work colleagues, good friends, old friends, Holmes and Watson; and then there are encounters like ours. Which are all the more delightfully unexpected in that they are founded on nothing, no common past, encounters which, precisely because of that nothing in common you have in common, give free rein, under cover of something completely different (in this case, men’s footwear), to the greatest moments of abandon.
Nothing is said; everything is understood.
Or, the invisible plunder of contraband friendships.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, getting ahead . . .
For the time being we are still in the entrance or the stairway, secretly spying on the tips of our shoes, whereas our first real encounter took place on our landing, and that evening I was standing there before you—reeling, in actual fact—in my shirtsleeves, barefoot.
* * *
It was a little over two years ago, at the end of December, when the days are so short, and the lack of light, along with the dread of year-end balance sheets, auditors, and family get-togethers, makes us all feel so vulnerable.
I’ve always worked like a dog, but even harder at that time of year. It was right in the middle of the oil crisis and I felt like that character in the Tex Avery cartoon who wears himself out trying to plug all the gushing leaks, running like a madman from one disaster to the next without ever managing to plug anything anywhere.
Business trips all over the place, endless meetings, and grim games of three-card Monte with talentless bankers, trying to patch things up. I won’t go into the details because you already know them, Louis. I’ve told you everything. I told you long after the worst of the storm was over, and you forced me, without ever obliging me in any way, to relive it, out loud, in order to understand.
To understand what had happened, understand what I had lost, and above all—again, according to you—understand what I had gained.
(To be absolutely honest, I didn’t really understand what you meant by that. It seems to me that, apart from our friendship, I didn’t gain much from any of that painful business, but never mind, it hardly matters. You always said: “Be patient, be patient.” Well look, how convenient, now you’re dead, I have no family life left and I work even harder than I used to, so, as far as patience goes, I’ve got plenty.)
I was supposed to fly to Hamburg, I’d gotten up very early, and Ariane came into the bathroom while I was shaving.
She sat down behind me, on the edge of the bathtub.
Because she was wearing a pale nightgown, and the sleeves of the cardigan she’d borrowed from me were too long and hid her hands; because she hadn’t buttoned it up but merely crossed it over her heart; and because she was hugging herself and gently swaying back and forth with her head down and her hair uncombed, I had a terrible vision: it was as if I were looking at the reflection of a madwoman. A lunatic in a straitjacket. But of course not; if she was holding herself like that it was to contain herself, to keep herself upright when at last she raised her head, and there was nothing neurotic about her gentle swaying, it was quite the contrary: she was gathering momentum.
(I often think back at how wrong I got it, Louis, and it seems that . . . that the ruin of my life is all there in that steamy mirror: I damage the people I love by reducing them to being even weaker than I am. There was nothing insane about Ariane that morning, she was merely silently gathering her strength to give herself courage. I never understand a thing. She was the one who was all-powerful; she was the one.)
I asked her if I’d woken her up and she replied that she hadn’t slept a wink, and since I didn’t react (had I even listened?) she added quietly that she was leaving me, that she was going to take the girls and move into an apartment two streets over, that I could go on seeing them whenever I liked, “Well . . . when you can,” she amended, with a bitter grimace, but that this was it, the journey was over. She couldn’t take it anymore, I was never there, she had met someone, a considerate man, who took care of his children and had custody every other week, she wasn’t sure she was really in love, but she wanted to give that life a try, and see. See if it would be sweeter, lighter, simpler. She had made the decision as much for the girls’ sake as for herself. Life here had become too difficult. I was constantly absent. Even when I was there. Especially when I was there. My stress had contaminated them all and she wanted Laure and Lucie to have a different kind of childhood. The concierge’s husband would be coming to pick up her boxes that evening, she would take nothing besides her clothes and the girls’, a few books, a few toys, and the key to the house in Calvi that I’d given her for her fortieth birthday. Divorce was out of the question for the moment, she would take Mako, the nanny-housekeeper, with her, but Mako would start her workday here, so it would be as if I were staying at a hotel, since I liked that so much, with my bed made and a clean bathroom every morning. She would go on using our joint account, but solely for the children, she had money and didn’t want me to support her, she would always be accommodating where the girls were concerned, I could have them whenever I wanted and for as long as I wanted but for this vacation—which, I surely hadn’t even realized, started that evening—everything was already planned: she would take them with her to spend two weeks in the sun.
