by Paul Auster
For a brief moment, Walker is tempted to tear up the card and throw the pieces onto the ground—the same way he tore up the check in New York last spring—but then he decides against it, not wanting to disgrace himself with such a cheap and petty insult. He slips the card into his pocket and says good-bye. Born nods but says nothing. As Walker leaves, the sun shoots across the sky and explodes into a hundred thousand splinters of molten light. The Eiffel Tower falls down. Every building in Paris bursts into flame. End of Act I. Curtain.
He has put himself in an untenable position. As long as he was ignorant of Born’s whereabouts, he could live with the uncertainty of a potential encounter, all the while deluding himself into believing that luck would be with him and the dreaded moment would never come, or come late, so late that his time in Paris would not be destroyed by fears of another encounter, other encounters. Now that it has happened, and happened early, much earlier than he would have thought possible, he finds it unbearable to have Born’s address in his pocket and not be able to go to the police to demand that he be arrested. Nothing would make him happier than to see the murderer of Cedric Williams brought to justice. Even if they let him off, he would have to suffer through the expense and humiliation of a trial, and even if the case never went to court, he would have to endure the unpleasantness of being grilled by the police, the rigors of a drawn-out investigation. But short of abducting Born and hauling him back to New York, what can Walker do? He ponders the situation for the rest of the day and deep into the night, and then an idea occurs to him, a diabolical idea, an idea so cruel and underhanded that he is stunned by the mere fact that he is capable of imagining such a thing. It won’t put Born in prison, alas, but it will make his life extremely uncomfortable, and if Walker can pull off his plan successfully, it will deprive Hélène Juin’s future husband of the one object he covets most in the world. Walker is both thrilled and disgusted with himself. He has never been a vengeful person, has never actively sought to hurt anyone, but Born is in a different category, Born is a killer, Born deserves to be punished, and for the first time in his life Walker is out for blood.
The plan calls for a practiced liar, a social acrobat skilled in the fine art of duplicity, and since Walker is neither one of those things, he knows that he is the worst man for the job he has given himself. Right from the start, he will be forced to act against his own nature, again and again he will slip and fall as he struggles to gain a secure footing on the battleground he has mapped out in his mind, and yet in spite of his misgivings, he marches off to the Café Conti the next morning to drop another jeton into the pay telephone and put his scheme into operation. He is dumbfounded by his boldness, his resolve. When Born answers on the third ring, the surprise in the man’s voice is palpable.
Adam Walker, he says, doing his best to mask his astonishment. The last person on earth I was expecting to hear from.
Forgive the intrusion, Walker says. I just wanted you to know that I’ve done some serious thinking since we talked yesterday.
Interesting. And where have your thoughts led you?
I’ve decided I want to bury the hatchet.
Doubly interesting. Yesterday, you accuse me of murder, and today you’re willing to forgive and forget. Why the sudden turnaround?
Because you convinced me you were telling the truth.
Am I to take this as a sincere apology—or are you angling for some new favor from me? You wouldn’t be thinking of trying to resurrect your dead magazine, for example?
Of course not. That’s all in the past.
It was a hurtful thing you did, Walker. Tearing up the check into little pieces and sending it back to me without a word. I was deeply insulted.
If I offended you in any way, I’m truly sorry. I was more or less in shock after what happened. I didn’t know what I was doing.
And you know what you’re doing now?
I think so.
You think so. And tell me young man, what exactly do you want?
Nothing. I called because you asked me to call. In case I changed my mind.
You want to get together, then. Is that it? You’re telling me you’d like to resume our friendship.
That was the idea. You mentioned meeting your fiancée and her daughter. I thought that would be a nice way to begin.
Nice. Such an insipid word. You Americans have a real gift for banalities, don’t you?
No doubt. We’re also good at apologizing when we feel we’re in the wrong. If you don’t want to see me, just say so. I’ll understand.
Forgive me, Walker. I was being nasty again. I’m afraid it comes with the territory.
We all have our moments.
Indeed. And now you want to break bread with Hélène and Cécile. As per my invitation of yesterday. Consider it done. I’ll leave word at your hotel as soon as I’ve made the arrangements.
The dinner is set for the following night at Vagenende, a turn-of-the-century brasserie on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Walker arrives promptly at eight, the first member of the party to show up, and as he is led to Monsieur Born’s table, he is too nervous and distracted to pay much attention to his surroundings: the dark, oak-paneled walls, the brass fixtures, the stiff white tablecloths and napkins, the hushed conversations in other parts of the room, the sound of silver utensils clanking against china. Thirty-four hours after his demented, groveling conversation with Born, this is what his lies have earned him: unending fear, unmitigated self-contempt, and the priceless opportunity to meet Born’s future wife and stepdaughter. Everything hinges on what happens with Hélène and Cécile Juin. If he can manage to form a connection with them, with either one of them, a relation independent of any connection with Born, then sooner or later it will become possible for him to reveal the truth about Riverside Drive, and if Walker can persuade them to accept his story about the killing of Cedric Williams, then there is a chance, a better than even chance, that the wedding will be called off and Born will be forsaken by his bride-to-be. That is all Walker has set out to accomplish: to break up the marriage before it becomes a legal fact. Not such an onerous punishment for the crime of murder, perhaps, but, given the available options, harsh enough. Born rejected. Born humiliated. Born crumpled up in misery. Hateful as Walker finds it to be pandering to him with false apologies and insincere avowals of friendship, he understands that he has no other choice. If Hélène and Cécile prove to be intractable, then he will abandon the effort and quietly declare defeat. But only if, and only when, and until that moment comes, he is determined to go on playing cards with the devil.
His initial findings are inconclusive. By temperament or circumstance, both mother and daughter come across as modest and reserved, not easily approachable or given to lighthearted talk, and since Born dominates the early going with introductions, explanations, and various other comments, little is said by either one of them. When Walker gives a brief account of his first days in Paris, Hélène compliments him on his French; at another point, Cécile blandly inquires if he enjoys living in a hotel. The mother is tall, blond, and well dressed, by no means a beauty (her face is too long, Walker thinks, a bit on the horsey side), but like many middle-class Frenchwomen of a certain age, she carries herself with considerable poise and assurance—a question of style, perhaps, or else the product of some arcane Gallic wisdom concerning the nature of femininity. The daughter, who has just turned eighteen, is a student at the Lycée Fénelon on the rue de l’Éperon, which is less than a five-minute walk from the Hôtel du Sud. She is a smaller, less-imposing creature than her mother, with short brown hair, thin wrists and narrow shoulders, and alert, darting eyes. Walker notices that those eyes have a tendency to squint, and it occurs to him (correctly, as it turns out) that Cécile normally wears glasses and has decided to live without them for the duration of the dinner. No, not a pretty girl, almost mousy in fact, but nevertheless an interesting face to look at: tiny chin, long nose, round cheeks, an expressive mouth. Every now and then, that mouth tugs downward with
a clandestine sort of amusement, not quite blossoming into a smile, but for all that showing a sharply developed sense of humor, someone awake to the comic possibilities of any given moment. There is no question that she is extremely intelligent (for the past four minutes Born has been bragging to Walker about her outstanding grades in literature and philosophy, her passion for the piano, her mastery of ancient Greek), but much as Cécile has working in her favor, Walker sadly acknowledges that he is not attracted to her, at least not in the way he would have hoped. She is not his type, he says to himself, falling back on that vague, overused term, which stands in for the infinite complexities of physical desire. But what is his type? he wonders. His own sister? The sex-hungry Margot, who is ten years older than he is? Whatever it is he wants, it is not Cécile Juin. He looks at her and sees a child, a work in progress, a not yet fully formed person, and at this point in her life she is too withdrawn and self-conscious to give off any of the erotic signals that would inspire a man to run after her. That isn’t to say he won’t do his best to cultivate a friendship with her, but there will be no kissing or touching, no romantic entanglements, no attempt to lure her into bed.
He despises himself for thinking such thoughts, for looking upon the innocent Cécile as if she were nothing more than a sex object, a potential victim of his seductive powers (assuming he has any), but at the same time he knows that he is fighting a war, an underground guerrilla war, and this dinner is the first battle of that war, and if he could win the battle by seducing his adversary’s future stepdaughter, he would not hesitate to do it. But the young Cécile is not a candidate for seduction, and therefore he will have to devise more subtle tactics to advance his purpose, shifting from an all-out assault on the daughter to a two-pronged offensive against mother and daughter both—in an attempt to ingratiate himself with them and eventually lure them over to his side. All this must be accomplished under Born’s watchful gaze, the intolerable, suffocating presence of a man he can barely bring himself to look at. The wily, skeptical Born is no doubt deeply suspicious of the two-faced Walker, and who knows if he hasn’t merely pretended to accept the latter’s pretend apology in order to find out what mischief the boy is up to? There is an edge to Born’s voice buried under the pleasant chatter and false bonhomie, an anxious, straining tone that seems to suggest he is on his guard. It will not be wise to see him again, Walker tells himself, which makes it all the more imperative to establish his separate peace with the Juins tonight, before the dinner comes to an end.
The women are on the other side of the table. He is opposite Cécile, and Born is sitting to his left, face to face with Hélène. Walker studies Hélène’s eyes as she looks at her betrothed, and he becomes just as baffled as Margot was when he detects no spark emanating from them. Other feelings lurk in those eyes, perhaps—wistfulness, kindness, sadness—but love is not among them, much less happiness or a single trace of joy. But how can there be happiness for a woman in Hélène’s position, for someone who has spent the past six or seven years living in a state of grief and suspended animation as her half-dead husband languishes in a hospital? He imagines the comatose Juin stretched out in bed, his body hooked up to countless machines and a tangle of respiration tubes, the only patient in a large, deserted ward, living but not living, dying but not dying, and suddenly he remembers the film he saw with Gwyn two months ago, Ordet, the film by Carl Dreyer, sitting next to his sister in the balcony of the New Yorker theater, and the dead farmer’s wife laid out in her coffin, and his tears when she sat up and came to life again, but no, he says to himself, that was just a story, a make-believe story in a make-believe world, and this is not that world, and there will be no miraculous resurrections for Juin, Hélène’s husband will never sit up and come back to life. From Juin’s bed in the hospital Walker’s mind jumps to another bed, and before he can put a stop to it, he is revisiting the repugnant scene Margot described to him a few days ago: Margot in bed with the two men, Born and the other one, what was his name, François, Margot in bed with Born and François, the three of them naked, fucking, and now he sees Born watching François push his hardened cock into Margot, and there is Born, naked in his chunky, odious flesh, swept up in the throes of arousal, jerking off as he watches his girlfriend do it with another man . . .
Walker smiles at Cécile in an attempt to dissolve the image, and as she smiles back at him—a bit puzzled, but apparently pleased by the attention—he wonders if this kind of debauchery doesn’t explain why Born is so keen on marrying Hélène. He is struggling to turn his back on himself, to resist his sordid, malevolent urges, and she represents respectability to him, a wall against his own madness. Walker notes how decorously he behaves with Hélène, addressing her by the formal vous instead of the more intimate, familiar tu. It is the language of counts and countesses, the language of marriage in the highest reaches of the upper class, and it creates a distance from both self and world that serves as a form of protection. It is not love that Born is looking for but safety. The libidinous Margot brought out the worst in him. Will the calm and repressed Hélène turn him into a new man? Dream on, Walker says to himself. A person of your intelligence should know better than to think that.
By the time they place their orders, Walker has been told that Hélène works as a speech pathologist at a clinic in the fourteenth arrondissement. She has been in the profession since the early fifties—in other words, long before her husband’s accident—and although she now depends on this job to generate the income needed to support her small household, Walker quickly understands that she is a dedicated practitioner, that her career gives her immense satisfaction and is probably the single most important element of her life. Find yourself drowning in a sea of trouble, and hard work can become the raft that ends up keeping you afloat. Walker reads it in her eyes, is impressed by how noticeably they have brightened now that Born has mentioned the subject, and suddenly there is a possible opening, a chance to engage her in pertinent dialogue. The truth is that Walker is genuinely interested in what she does. He has read Jakobson and Merleau-Ponty on aphasia and language acquisition, has given serious thought to these matters because of his engagement with words, and therefore he does not feel like a fraud or a conniver when he starts pelting her with questions. At first, Hélène is taken aback by his enthusiasm, but once she realizes that he is in earnest, she begins to talk about articulation disorders in children, her methods of treating the lisping, garble-mouthed, stuttering youngsters who come to her clinic, but no, she doesn’t only work with children, there are the adults as well, the old people, the victims of stroke and various brain injuries, the aphasics, the ones who have lost the power of speech or can’t remember words or jumble words to such an extent that pen becomes paper and tree becomes house. There are several different forms of aphasia, Walker learns, depending on which part of the brain is affected—Broca’s aphasia, Wernicke’s aphasia, conduction aphasia, transcortical sensory aphasia, anomic aphasia, and so on—and isn’t it intriguing, Hélène says, smiling for the first time since she entered the restaurant, truly smiling at last, isn’t it intriguing that thought cannot exist without language, and since language is a function of the brain, we would have to say that language—the ability to experience the world through symbols—is in some sense a physical property of human beings, which proves that the old mind-body duality is so much nonsense, doesn’t it? Adieu, Descartes. The mind and the body are one.
He is discovering that the best way to get to know them is to leave himself out of it, to ask questions rather than give answers, to make them talk about themselves. But Walker is not adept at this kind of interpersonal manipulation, and he falls into an uncomfortable silence when Born barges in with some pointedly negative comments about the Israeli army’s refusal to withdraw from Sinai and the West Bank. Walker senses that he is trying to goad him into an argument, but the fact is that he agrees with Born’s stance on this issue, and rather than let him know that, he says nothing, waiting for the harangue to run i
ts course by looking at Cécile’s mouth, which is again tugging downward in response to some secret inner mirth. He could be wrong, but it appears that she finds the intensity of Born’s opinions rather funny. A couple of minutes later, the rant is interrupted when the appetizers are set before them. Seizing his opportunity, Walker breaks the sudden silence by asking Cécile about her study of ancient Greek. Greek wasn’t offered at the high school he went to, he says, and he envies her for having the chance to learn it. He has only two years of college left, and by now it’s probably too late for him to start.
Not really, she says. Once you learn the alphabet, it’s not as hard as it looks.
They talk about Greek literature for a while, and before long Cécile is telling him about her summer project—a crazy, overly ambitious plan that has led to three months of constant frustration and regret. God knows what possessed her to try in the first place, she says, but she got it into her head to take on a book-length poem by the most difficult writer imaginable and translate it into French. When Walker asks who the writer is, she shrugs and says that he hasn’t heard of him, that no one has heard of him, and indeed, when she mentions the poet’s name, Lycophron, who lived around 300 B.C., Walker admits that she is right. The poem is about Cassandra, she goes on, the daughter of Priam, the last king of Troy—poor Cassandra, who had the misfortune to be loved by Apollo. He offered her the gift of prophecy, but only if she agreed to sacrifice her virginity to him in exchange. At first she said yes, then she said no, and the jilted Apollo took his revenge on her by poisoning his gift, making sure that none of Cassandra’s prophecies would ever be believed. Lycophron’s poem is set during the Trojan War, and Cassandra is in prison, already mad, about to be murdered with Agamemnon, spewing forth endless ravings and visions of the future in a language so complex, so crammed with metaphors and allusions, that it is almost unintelligible. It is a poem of shrieks and howls, Cécile tells him, a great poem in her opinion, a wild and utterly modern poem, but so daunting and elusive, so far beyond her powers of comprehension, that after hours and hours of work she has managed to translate only a hundred and fifty lines. If she keeps it up, she says, mouth tugging downward once again, it will take her only ten or twelve years to finish.
