—Madame Bernard wonders if you’d like a fire. It’s got cold and it’s supposed to rain tonight.
ONE
Why Émilie Vignou remained a virgin until the evening she met Irimia C. Irimia, I couldn’t tell you. Laziness or a lack of imagination. Everything should have worked against such enduring chastity; the example of her friends, the loose ways that prevailed in her neighborhood, and an impoverished, joyless life. She was a girl of twenty when I met her first. Hefty, slow-witted, and sluggish. I wondered sometimes what she’d been like before, as a child, but despite my best efforts I couldn’t imagine it.
In short, she was a docile creature and, ugly as she was, she had an air of resignation about her sometimes that I liked. Still today, after all this time, I can’t think of her without a certain sad sympathy, and the thought of writing her story consoles me a little for losing her. It’s a feeling she wouldn’t have understood. She would have blinked her little eyes and, feeling that it had something to do with her after all, she would have smiled—her usual smile, vague and unlovely.
I remember the evening I met her. It was in January, in a period during which I was trying to salve a secret melancholy that had endured for some three months, since a holiday I’d spent by an Alpine lake, where I’d gone for the summer to rest up after some exhausting final medical exams. I’d returned from there with the memory, which still troubles me sometimes, of a blond woman who’d loved me for no reason and disappeared in the same way, without explanations. I was trying to get over it and to get back on track with my minor successes as a young man, waiting that day for Mado, the lively girl I’d got talking to a long time previously in a Métro station and who was still hesitating in the face of my amorous advances. (I later learned that in her neighborhood any serious liaison required preparatory meetings. It was a matter of good form and I should have observed the proprieties.) It was raining that Sunday and we searched in vain for a place to go. Completely full at the bal-musette, completely sold out at the cinema. We plodded about in the rain, stopping occasionally to shelter under a balcony. I, bored of this too-virtuous affair, Mado trembling from cold at my arm. Finally, despairing of finding any place to go and with the rain getting heavier, she made a decision.
—Come on, let’s go to Émilie’s place!
I understood she was about to surrender her virtue and didn’t ask for explanations. That was when I first entered Émilie Vignou’s room. It was a garret in a dirty, lopsided house that leaned over the tracks somewhere near the Porte de Saint-Ouen. From up there you’d hear the regular whistling of the trains on the ring line and, when you opened the window, a dull rumble of the suburban street. I didn’t get a good look at the woman who lived there. All I registered when we entered was a shadow of a woman in a dim corner, getting up. Mado gave her a friendly pat on the shoulder as she slipped away without a word.
Here’s not the place to talk about Mado and it wouldn’t be interesting. Suffice to say that she was an affectionate, worthy partner. She had two hours of wandering in the rain to make up for and make up for them she did. She was naked and passionate. It was only when silence had descended after her first amorous transports that I noticed, with horror, the shape of the woman whom I’d believed to have left the room hunched there on a low stool in a corner in the dark. I can’t stand that sort of sleaziness and was about to complain roughly to the woman next to me, who was sinking into the pillows like a satisfied filly, but—understanding my frown—she said casually:
—Oh, it’s nothing. That’s Émilie.
She said this with vast indifference, as though remarking a cat or a piece of furniture. On the other hand, the shadow in the corner didn’t show any sign of life, so even I, who found intolerable the idea of sleeping with a woman while another is present, paid her no further mind and responded appropriately to my young companion’s enthusiasms.
I met Émilie Vignou a few times after that. Mado sent her to me on various errands, and the poor girl walked for kilometers just to deliver love letters. I can still see her in the lobby of the Trousseau hospital, where I was doing my internship at the time, with her faded velvet hat and long overcoat of nondescript color, fidgeting with the envelope she’d brought and not knowing how to hand it over. Every movement she had to make was torture for her and I don’t think I’ll ever forget the excruciating time I spent with her in the duty room, where I’d invited her to eat with me, thinking she’d enjoy it. She didn’t know what to do with her hands, how to hide them, and beneath the surface she suffered greatly. I think her entire life had been poisoned by that pair of hands, and her instinctive sense of their uselessness. It was as though they didn’t belong to her; they were too unwieldy and heavy. Just looking at them, I had a sense that they weighed her down. They were a permanent burden, and I wonder if Émilie would have died in the end from exhaustion if—as we shall see—an accident had not killed her first.
Whenever Émilie was troubled or unhappy, or enraged, I would observe her running her hands down her dress, as though looking for a place to hide them or to grip onto something. Many times since, I’ve thought Émilie’s life would have been much simpler had her dress just had pockets.
There was something painful in her stiffness that prevented me from laughing. Her body only bent because of her uneven gait. Émilie was not what you could properly call a cripple; she wasn’t an invalid. But she had a habit of leaning more on her left foot; something she’d picked up from her job. She worked in the basement of a big department store, in the packing section, and spent her whole day working a pedal that unspooled string for tying up packages. She’d been doing this eight hours a day, every day, for years. Her left foot had learned the steady rhythm of the pedal and she couldn’t unlearn it.
But I’ve nothing more to say about how Émilie looked. I’ve said she was ugly and that will suffice. Since, in any case, you wouldn’t understand what sweetness her ugliness held. I was fond of her, and all her friends, who tortured her with all kinds of awful errands, and will never forget the docile expression on her face.
She was as quiet as a dormouse. She stole by you without a word when she felt superfluous, without speaking, without asking anything. When we brought her with us on the town, to dances in our quarter, she stayed apart to guard the coats. And when one of her friends needed someone to accompany her on an amorous encounter, Émilie would always be present for the most sensual scenes. I don’t know if her friends did this deliberately, to exasperate her. I don’t know if Émilie suffered as a result of these shows. I just know that she sat there, unmoved, watching what was going on calmly and dully.
How Émilie Vignou could remain a virgin while living such a life is hard to understand. Prudish she was not. Social conventions were not a factor, as in her world to be a virgin after the age of fifteen was scandalous.
I think making love was more a physical difficulty than a moral one for her. At the risk of using an ambiguous expression, I’d say that for her love had become a problem of balance. What must have seemed impossible for her about love was losing her center of gravity. Being a vertical creature and then assuming a horizontal position—that’s what I believed tortured her sensual dreams, if she ever had any. I think the whole mystery of love was summed up for her in this fact, and she couldn’t get her head around it.
I’d beg the reader’s pardon for these vulgar details but, to tell the truth, I don’t much care about the reader and I care very much about Émilie Vignou. I’m recounting her life in the first place because I want to keep her image alive, here on earth, and second because I want to understand a little about the heart of a girl whom I perhaps passed heedlessly by at another time. So I’m saying that only physical rigidity stopped Émilie from being a good lover. Who can tell what simple love might otherwise have shone from her ashen eyes? But how can you love somebody with a body like hers, made of a single, inflexible piece? I think of Mado’s long thighs, I think of how her little body twisted that eveni
ng as she writhed in my arms, and try to imagine Émilie doing the same. No, no. The image strikes me as grotesque. If each of us were created with our true vocation in mind, Émilie Vignou would have been a rough-hewn table leg. It was the only role she could have played well and easily. Who knows? Perhaps she was anatomically unique and had a special form of grace that I was blind to. Her body was bound together in secret ways. When she raised a shoulder, she had to bend a knee. As though any movement threw her off balance and had to be compensated for by another movement. Émilie couldn’t move a finger without moving her entire hand from the wrist. A fellow intern who saw Émilie several times in the hospital yard when Mado had sent her looking for me, once told me jokingly:
—Strange! This girl seems to move as if she had multiple sprains.
That was it. Whenever Émilie moved, I expected to hear the crack of bones breaking. I’m afraid all these details, set out like this, paint a repulsive picture of Émilie. That would be a shame. There was something so gentle and homely about her, like a household object that’s no longer any use, yet you don’t throw it away because you’re fond of it for some reason. I liked Émilie exactly as she was and even though I never told her I think she understood and that she felt a certain gratitude toward me. Perhaps it was one of the few pleasant things in her life; at the age of twenty, she had nothing to look forward to. She seemed destined to go on as she was for her remaining days, and that’s certainly what would have happened had chance not brought Irimia C. Irimia before her.
TWO
I can’t say I was pleased that Fourteenth of July, when I crossed paths with him at the Pont Saint-Michel. I was leafing through a pile of old magazines at a secondhand bookseller’s on the quays and it’s not a pleasure I like to share with anyone.
—Oh, Valerie! (We’d known each other long but he made no great effort to pronounce my name—Stefan Valeriu—correctly, as he found it an odd sort of name, while “Valerie” sounded more familiar and local.) Irimia planted himself before me and I could tell by his silence that he wasn’t going to leave there alone.
—What are you up to, Irimia?
—Oh, just looking around…
Indeed, he was just looking. He watched the water flowing under the bridge and his big eyes didn’t even blink. I took him with me for a stroll along the quays. He told me in that familiar, rough voice of his that he’d got his law degree in June in Bucharest and was thinking of doing a doctorate in Paris. He’d obtained a grant to do this and had arrived two weeks before from our country. He wanted to learn French by autumn, when the academic year began.
—Because, you know, right now, it’s no good. No good at all.
He spoke haltingly, in fragments of sentences, and it was a victory any time he managed to fully articulate an idea. I remembered how he suffered at school, when he had to recite the lesson in front of the history teacher; it was as though each word were a brick he had to dislodge with a hammer from an edifice that in his mind at least was well constructed and handsome.
Poor Irimia! What ridiculous circumstances had taken this peasant from Ialomita and thrust him among that class of society fellows in Lazar high school? What error of judgment had diverted him from his destiny as a plowman and set him struggling with things he had no aptitude for? We’d been classmates since the start of high school and I’d had time to get to know him: he was so tall and heavy, his shoulders and feet so huge, that he barely fitted at his desk. Time and time again, after he’d recited the lesson he’d learned off so laboriously the previous evening, the teacher would send him back to his seat by saying, in a bored voice: “Irimia C. Irimia, return to your place!” I imagined Irimia one day walking quietly to where his coat was hanging and taking it from the hook and saying, in his usual slow voice, that he was not in his proper place. But no. He didn’t come from a race of rebels. He went tamely back to his desk, crossed his arms over his chest, and sat there quietly and watched and listened, hulking and ungraceful in that cramped space. I sensed that behind Irimia’s obedience lay the melancholy of a domesticated animal that watched and waited, yet retained in the deepest recesses of its being the appetite for another life, and felt the call of other horizons. Maybe I was mistaken. But I didn’t know how else to interpret that big fellow’s docile smile; an awkward smile that seemed to be permanently begging forgiveness for some mistake.
I have two particular memories of Irimia, neither of which has anything to do with the other, but they have remained distinct in my mind. One was in the schoolyard. An old peasant with an overcoat and saddlebags was at the gate, looking through the bars, not daring to enter. I asked him whom he was looking for.
—Well, my sister’s boy.
—What’s the boy’s name?
—Well, he goes by the name of Irimia.
I sought out Irimia C. Irimia, though there must have been other boys in that high school of the same name. I don’t know what told me it was he whom the old man at the gate was looking for. Perhaps his blue eyes, tinged with apprehension, which were the same as the boy’s. He was the one, as it turned out. He approached the gate unhurriedly, unsurprised, took off his cap (in the same time-honored way that his ancestors for centuries had doffed their caps), bowed and kissed the old man’s chapped, brown, bony hand. I didn’t laugh. There was something awesome in the way this giant bowed to the old man, arching over him. I, who have lived in a world of false traditions and false laws, sensed myself in the presence of something eternal, and my schoolmate, Irimia C. Irimia, was enacting it there, in front of me, in the street, by kissing the old man’s hand.
My second memory of Irimia is totally unremarkable, and I wonder if it’s even worth mentioning. It was also at school, during a lesson on French literature. The teacher had asked him to read aloud a passage from Racine. It’s odd that even though it was just a fragment, I still remember today that it was from scene four of the first act of Andromaque:
Songez-y bien: il faut désormais que mon coeur,
S’il n’aime avec transport, haïsse avec fureur.
It’s hard to describe how Irimia’s mouth transformed those verses. A dialect of Bulgarian, crushed between his teeth, without vowels, battered and bruised and abused between two pieces of flint. It caused an uproar of amusement in class and I participated. Steadfast, brows furrowed, his face tensed and his jaws clenching like those of some carnivore, and his immense hands clamped on the covers of the book, Irimia C. Irimia continued reading from Racine. A classmate, whom I personally couldn’t stand, though he has since become well-known and writes weekly columns in a reactionary newspaper, an able, intellectual lad (I acknowledge all this so that it’s not imagined that I’m somehow jealous, I who haven’t made my mark and don’t write literature)—this classmate whispered in my ear, then, looking at Irimia:
—He’s a primitive.
No, Irimia was just a peasant from Baragan. There, in our midst, reading French verses, I found him ridiculous. But I imagined him at seven o’clock on a July evening, returning to his village barefoot after a long day’s work along the edge of a field of grain, in the light of the setting sun, and I told myself that none among us, not one of us smart boys would, in any aspect of our clever lives, have even a scrap of the simple greatness that Irimia possessed in such a moment.
I don’t hear what’s labeled the “call of the soil” and find pastoral literature risible. But I do enjoy seeing a beautiful creature flourishing in its proper environment. And I sometimes find myself suffering at the sight of a huge circus dog bedecked with ribbons and bells, yoked to its job, knowing that it was made to face wolves on a mountaintop, before God and the pale stars. That, I think, is why I treated Irimia decently, and if I happened to laugh at him a few times, it was from laziness or cowardice: I found it hard not to follow the crowd. Regardless of that, I felt a sincere and straightforward friendliness toward him.
THREE
Still, I was bored on that Fourteenth of July. It was
a beautiful evening, little flags fluttered from the white boats all along the Seine as they headed toward Vincennes, and Notre-Dame was turning blue on my left, in the dusk. Irimia had finished telling me his story and I’d asked him all the questions I could about it, and we were walking on in silence, stopping from time to time. I would have liked to lose myself alone in that festive crowd, to wander freely and to stop where I wanted. But to no avail. Irimia’s boots pounded the ground beside me.
I started to feel worried. I had a date with Mado in the Latin Quarter at ten that evening and saw no way of shaking Irimia off. I say this here not to justify myself, but to clarify the role I unwittingly played in the unfortunate events which were to unfold: I did all I could to get rid of him. I like jokes, but those of my friends who maintain that I set up the farce that was the coupling of Irimia C. Irimia and Émilie Vignou are lying. Perhaps I’m guilty in some respects, and I’ll get to that. But on this one count, my conscience is clear: it wasn’t I who brought Irimia to the Café D’Harcourt. He stuck to me and came along, against my wishes. I also didn’t know that Émilie was coming that evening. I found her there, at the corner of a table, and hardly registered her before Mado was hanging from my neck, kissing me with all the ardor of a little mistress. We hadn’t seen each other for several days and she found such holidays from love hard to bear. Also, it was the Fourteenth of July and Mado was a thoroughgoing republican. She grabbed my arm and pulled me out into the middle of the street, where people were dancing in celebration of the fall of the Bastille. I celebrated too. A number of my friends were there, each with his girlfriend, and we partied madly, dancing in the street, kissing and throwing streamers. Naturally, from time to time I went back to our table, on the sidewalk, to drink and smoke, but I was having such a good time I didn’t notice anything.
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