by Anna Gavalda
And shit. Another sip:
“ . . . and . . . and it’s not my community that grabbed me by the collar one evening of despair by the parapet, it was you. It was you who saved me.”
I’m crying, Louis. I’m crying over myself.
Too much! Listen to this scoundrel, muddling your funeral oration! It’s a good thing that ridicule doesn’t kill us, either . . .
Your soup has made me hungry.
Don’t go, let me put you on hold, just long enough to get room service.
* * *
Almost three o’clock, I gobbled down my bowl of bibimbap (rice, stir-fried vegetables, fried egg, red pepper paste) standing at the window.
Over ten million inhabitants and no one seems to be asleep. Offices, buildings, advertising screens, Seoul Tower, traffic, avenues, garbage trucks, bridges, it’s all twinkling. No, sorry, shining. No moon, not even a single star. From this high up and for as far as I can see, there is nothing that is not artificial. Everything shines. Everything blinks.
(I’ve noticed that the hotel rooms in these monster cities, whatever the continent, always act as an inner seismograph for me. When I’m feeling good, I admire the ingenuity of mankind and could spend hours studying its accomplishments; and when I’m not as valiant, like this evening, it all seizes me by the throat and I look away, staggering.
(What have we done? Where are we headed? How will it all end?)
Okay, hey there Mister holy moly preacher man, bring back Louis or go to bed.
Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, Frank Capra, Stanley Donen, Vincente Minnelli: we made it through the Christmas break like kids in the finest candy store in the history of cinema and bit by bit, every evening, by dint of encountering the same old regulars in the same little neighborhood movie theater, we struck up a conversation.
Initially we started out in movie-lover mode. We’d comment on the directing, the screenplay, the producers, the on-set anecdotes, the actors and actresses (you were crazy about Audrey’s neck, everyone else was merely entertaining), and from one film to the next, one reel leading to another, we got around to us. Well, us . . . the guy version of us. Meaning words that didn’t have much to do with our selves. Subjects as diverse and varied as: our work, our career, our job, our work, our profession, our sector, our part, in short, our corporate name.
Corporate name which, in the light of the exciting little end-of-year soirées we were currently enjoying, could equally, easily also signify our reason for living, but oh well . . . we were too busy tossing confetti in each other’s faces and strutting along like idiots doing the Chicken Dance to dare to point this out to each other.
(The truth is that you and I were entrenched in our positions, observing the front line through the chinks left by Audrey, Shirley, Ginger, Marlene, Lauren, Jane, Cyd, Leslie, Debbie, Rita, Greta, Gloria, Barbara, Katharine, and Marilyn.
(You have to admit that as sandbags go, you’ve seen worse . . . )
We had each begun to turn to our neighbor in the next seat when the lights came back on, and as the evenings went by, and the wine got better and better, and the cracks in our armor began to show, and our tongues loosened, we screened our own, personal films.
Our Seven Year Itches, Roads to Glory, O. Henry’s Full Houses, Haves and Have Nots, Sunset Boulevards, Double Indemnities, Big Sleeps, and Aces in the Hole.
The more we kept our private lives at a distance, the more we revealed of ourselves—because our reasons for living, as hopeless as they might seem, said a lot about us in the end. Said everything.
Your gown, your specialization, your files, your cases; my toga, my background, my files, my worries; what more could we add to all that?
Nothing.
Our life. Those were our lives.
Hey, Cailley-Pompom, have you listened to yourself? All your pseudo-Hollywood metaphors, your lah-de-dah flights of fancy, your dashes and ellipses and semicolons and pretentious rhetoric? Can’t you talk a little plainer, dude?
Well, uh . . . okay, then . . . well, actually, Louie and me were starting to get real wasted so we started to come unbuttoned. And the more we waved our dicks around, the more we could see it was nothing to shout about and that it wasn’t even worth telling, specially as we were right in the middle of the holiday cheer and there we were two old farts eating our tapioca and watching movies we already knew by heart and . . .
Hey . . .
You see my index finger? You see how good it is at pointing the way to Santa Claus’s house?
I don’t know about you, Louis, I can’t speak for you, but for me, I’ll tell you straight out: this was the best break in my entire life.
And even. Even. If I dared. If I was really absolutely sure you were dead forever. Maybe then. Maybe I would say it: it was the break of a lifetime, my lifetime.
Christmas is never much fun when you’re an only child, and when on top of it you become an orphan, it really begins to smell a bit off—whiffs of slavery, imprisonment, that sort of thing—so if to boot you get saddled first with a traumatlantic divorce, then a separation as tough as a Christmas capon stuffed with dry, stale bread, and kids who allegedly have been contaminated by your stress, and a considerate lover . . . How should I put it? All that merry piping of the shepherd in the crèche, and the New Year’s resolutions, well, it all seemed better at your place.
More honest.
I have been a bad son, a bad husband, and a bad father, I know. It’s a fact. It’s factual. But . . . No. No buts. I’m not writing to you tonight to justify myself. So, no buts. But still. And. Therefore. It just so happens that.
It just so happens that I was brought up without love. I was brought up without love and you cannot imagine what it’s like growing up all alone, never having your fill of . . . I don’t know . . . your fill of embraces: you’re forever left with something hard and awkward.
I have been, and still am, a hard, awkward man.
And, therefore, it just so happens that I was educated, no, sorry, trained to ensure the continuity of a company that I did not found, but which ensured the room and board (and perhaps even, who knows? the care, education, peace—a certain peace, let’s say, the relative material peace) of thousands of people.
That, too, is fact. Bad husband, bad son, and bad father, but in the meantime, no one is going hungry. Everyone eats their fill. Everyone.
If I had boarded the plane as planned; if I’d had a better grade on my history paper, if I’d known who Pepin the Short was, what he founded, and who his son was, if my father had not punished me by not allowing me to go with him on the flight as planned, I would have died, too. I would be buried next to him in a ridiculous mausoleum, and those thousands of people I mentioned just now might not have been any worse off, but in the meantime, I’m the one who stepped up to the plate. Me. And no one asked me my opinion.
And everyone has food on their plate.
The rest I could not deal with. I didn’t know how to lead a professional life and a private life at the same time. I knew I was better equipped, and only equipped, for the former, and more or less consciously—depending on whether life seemed to distract me from it or not—I tended to favor my professional life.
These are details I am not proud of, and I alone am aware of them, but I know this for a fact: I know I favored my professional life because it seemed easier, more convenient, no, not more convenient, that’s not the house style—more feasible.
I favored hardness and awkwardness to transform these handicaps into assets. I favored whatever put me at less of a disadvantage. And . . . And so that was where I had ended up, that was what I brooded over, those nights after I left you and found myself freewheeling through despondency.
I realized that in your home, even though you lived alone, there was life, and life felt loved. At my place, there was no more life.
I still don’t know why you held
out your hand to me, Louis; you never told me, but what I do know is that our winter respite did me a lot of good. “Eat your soup so you can grow up to be big and strong,” is what real mothers say and . . . Thank you for the soup, neighbor. Thank you for the soup, hearty or velouté—not to mention all your wizard’s gruel. I was already too old to grow up to be big and strong, alas, but you helped me stand up straight, straighten my spine, re-vertebrate me and make me taller by . . . what . . . a good little half-inch, maybe.
A little half-inch and the desire, the need, rather, the necessity of prolonging the cease-fire within myself.
Pepin the Short was king of the Franks, he founded the dynasty of the Carolingians and he was the father of Charlemagne. Right, and now that I’ve remembered, I can forget it again, can’t I?
Frankly, what the hell do I care about Pepin the Short?
Our New Year’s Eve was perfect.
The night before, I didn’t visit, and I was late that evening because I’d had to do the rounds to thank all the employees at headquarters and the French facilities for the year gone by. (I don’t like holiday wishes. Too pious; too worldly.) Tsk, tsk, bad father, but good paternalistic boss; I can hear the tongues wagging already. Yes. It’s true. Good, paternalistic boss. Visit the offices, distract them on each floor, tour the workshops, break the pace, go up into the watchtowers, look at faces, shake hands, look into their eyes, understand things, take note of them in a corner of my brain, don’t forget them, don’t forget anyone, go down to the parking lot and greet them there too, these people you never see, don’t make a big deal of it, don’t even make a deal at all. Just, here I am. I’m just passing by. I came by. I’m your good old long-suffering jerk of a boss, for sure, but in the meanwhile, see for yourselves: I came by. I remember that you do exist, that’s all. That is all I had to say to you: I remember.
I was late, I realized, and I hadn’t even bothered to change my shirt, whereas you had gotten out your best apron and you stood before the raft that served as our sofa, with a big tray in your hands.
On the tray there were two white bowls, each one topped with a dome of flaky pastry.
You set the tray down, cleared your throat, and announced, gravely, one hand folded behind your back:
“Tonight we have soupe à la truffe. A dish created in 1975 by Monsieur Paul Bocuse the day he was awarded his Légion d’Honneur, for a luncheon given at the Elysée Palace by Monsieur Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, President of the Republic at that time, and his wife, the vivacious Anne-Aymone.”
And there, I had to laugh. I laughed because your apron was imprinted with the trompe-l’oeil bosom of a sublimely vulgar and virtually naked creature (a few tassels at the most, a few tassels, a few bits of turquoise and a few eagle’s feathers) sitting with her thighs spread wide behind the handlebars of a Harley.
I laughed and you smiled.
That was our mistletoe.
You were in great spirits that evening, you had Singin’ in the Rain on the program, I think you’d had a little to drink while waiting for me and once the film was over, you murmured:
“I have a confession to make . . . ”
I hated the tone of your voice. I had no desire to hear some confession. I hated confessions. They terrified me. We had gotten along fine up to that point without lapsing into sentimentalism, so why go and spoil everything?
“I’m listening,” I said, stiffening.
“Well, can you imagine that this old fart here . . . Yes, yours truly . . . This rusty old beanpole hunched over here before you was elected best tap dancer at Harvard’s Fred & Ginger’s Club in the summer of nineteen hundred and . . . well, of his generation, in other words.”
“Really?” I said, relaxing.
“Don’t move.”
You stood up straight.
“I’d like you to know, Paul,” (he was a bit drunk), “to . . . to know that . . . that you weren’t the only person in favor of exporting all things French. No, no, no! I too took part in the scheme to promote our country, old man! I too hoisted the flag! Don’t move: let me show you how high a French froggy can jump!”
He came back wearing a pair of old red, white, and blue shoes.
“And now,” (drum roll of little spoons on his grandfather’s bronze skull), “ladies and gentlemen . . . Oh, no, damn—and now, gentleman only, for your astounded eyes only, the world-famous Froggy Loo-isss presenting his even more world-famous tap-dancing number!”
And then . . .
The dancing lunatic.
Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, all to myself. Slightly rusty, slightly tipsy, to be sure, but all to myself. The rattle of little metallic taps on Baron Haussmann’s parquet floor.
The clatter, click, song, melody, even, yes, melody of little taps on the old baron’s parquet floor, while we could hear the far-off muffled crackling of some fireworks set off who knows where.
From a distance (but I really was sitting way at the back of the sofa), there was a touch of An American in Paris about it all.
Then you showed me the technique for tapping to one beatcount, two beatcounts, three, then . . . Well no, you weren’t able to do the other combinations, you collapsed again next to your dazed and astounded audience.
Ah, Louis. It did come to a hell of a good end, that annus horribilis. One hell of a good end.
All the more of an ending in that when we parted, a few moments later, we made it clear to each other, without having to say a word, that now, gentleman and gentleman, lights out, the show was over.
Reels rewound and umbrellas snapped shut.
For the first time I shook your hand and, for the first time, you walked me back to my front door.
I said, a bit solemnly, I think: “Thank you, Louis. Thank you.”
You waved it away with the back of your hand, my surfeit of solemnity, and said, looking me straight in the eyes:
“You’ll be fine. You’ll see: it will all be fine.”
I nodded, just the way little Paul with his dirty hands would have done that first evening, and you went away with a charming tap tap tick-a-tock—a little Hollywood entrechat, of the made-in-France variety.
* * *
The next day, January first, I went to see my mother in her chic medical hospice.
Of course she didn’t recognize me. Any more than on any of the previous visits.
She gazed fixedly at the stranger sitting at the end of her bed and we had an Into-the-Void Staring Contest for a long while, until I eventually broke the silence.
“You know, I’ve made a friend.”
She didn’t react.
She didn’t react and it didn’t matter at all, it still did me good. At least for once in my life I will have managed to have some sort of complicity with her.
So I went on.
“His name is Louis, he’s very kind, and he tap dances.”
To hear myself saying such silly, simple, childish words, on a public holiday, to a woman who had at last become human—but only once her brain had turned to porridge, reflecting a more or less legible image of a mother to me at last: it made me want to laugh and cry at the same time.
By then I didn’t know anymore.
I didn’t know. I was lost.
By then I was so clueless about everything that I stayed with her much longer than usual. It was quiet, I felt good, I was steeped in calm. I looked at her. I looked at her face, her neck, her long, useless arms, her hands, and I thought, Take a good look at her because you won’t be coming back. You won’t set foot in this room again. And she doesn’t know you, she doesn’t recognize you anymore, and now it’s like the business with the Carolingians, now it’s too late, there’s no point trying to remember anymore.
Look at her one last time and then do like Louis showed you. Shuffle, brush, step, and tap, transferring all your weight onto the tap. Make it ring out, Paul
, make it ring out. Look at her one last time then leave this weightlessness behind you.
* * *
The hostilities started up again but it was no longer the same. Even if we saw very little of each other in the weeks and months that followed, I knew you were there, that goodness was there. It may seem a measly candle wick in a life as barren as mine, but I know what I mean. It was like in the awful antechamber where my mother was patiently waiting: the good was done, the good had been done. Suddenly all the rest did not weigh so heavily beneath the harness. The rest would follow. Everything had been changed. Audrey had been there.
As for Ariane, she never came back, but our relations were warmer. The pretext being, of course, the girls, the girls and their logistics, and it was a fine pretext. I’d been incapable of giving them a happy family life and I was still just as awkward, but they knew that already. They knew it and had learned to live with it. As a result, they took good care of their great lump of a dad. They took him every other weekend, the occasional Wednesday evening when he was around, and during vacation. They dressed him, went out with him, took him to the Jardin d’Acclimatation or the zoo at Vincennes. They showed him how to send balloons and fireworks and confetti via text message, they taught him how to decrypt the subtleties of emoticon language, how to watch makeup tutorials, play Harvest Moon DS, find Sprites, buy the teleportation stone, build a bird shed, save the harvest goddess, change his profile picture, unfriend fake friends, like funny Youtubers, stop going to the restaurant all the time, and slice coagulated overcooked macaroni noodles into equal portions.
