When I came to the checkout desk, I recognized the librarian. Her name was Eline Bookmans, though everyone on campus called her Zélie. Originally from the Netherlands, she was a rather self-important bluestocking with a well-rehearsed opinion about practically everything. The last time I’d seen her, she had been a flamboyant forty-something who made the most of her lithe figure. Age had transformed her into a sort of hippie grandmother—square face, double chin, gray hair pulled into a chignon, round glasses, baggy sweater with a Peter Pan collar.
“Hello, Zélie.”
In addition to running the library, Eline Bookmans managed the campus cinema, the school radio station, and the Sophia Shakespeare Company, a pretentious name for the school drama club that my mother used to run when she had been a head teacher.
“Well, hello there, pencil pusher,” she said as though we had seen each other only yesterday.
Zélie was a woman I had never quite been able to figure out. I had briefly suspected her of being my father’s lover, but from what I could remember, my mother had always liked her. When I was a student at Saint-Ex, all the students adored her—it was Zélie this, Zélie that, and they treated her as a confidante, a social worker, a voice of conscience. And Zélie used and abused her position. Always “strong when dealing with the weak and weak when dealing with the strong,” she had her favorites, and certain students—usually the more brilliant or the more extroverted—got special treatment. I remembered that she had adored my brother and sister but had never deemed me worthy of her interest. Which suited me fine; the antipathy was mutual.
“What brings you here, Thomas?”
Since the last time we had spoken, I had written a dozen novels that had been translated into twenty languages and sold millions of copies all over the world. One might think that would mean something to a librarian who had watched me grow up. Not that I was necessarily expecting a compliment, but I did think she’d offer a token sign of interest. Which did not come.
“I’d like to borrow a book,” I said.
“I need to check that your library card is still valid,” she said, acting as if she were taking me seriously.
She belabored the joke, pretending to search her computer database for a library card.
“Ah, found it! Exactly as I thought—you still have two overdue books, Distinction, by Pierre Bourdieu, and Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“I am. So, how can I help?”
“I’m looking for Stéphane Pianelli’s book.”
“He had a piece in the Manual of Journalism, published by—”
“Not that one, the one he wrote about the Vinca Rockwell case, Death and the Maiden.”
She keyed the title into the computer. “We don’t have it anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“The book was published in 2002 by a small independent press. The first edition sold out and it’s never been reprinted.”
I stared at her calmly. “How can you not have a copy?”
Zélie turned the computer screen so that I could see it; the book was not listed.
“I don’t understand. Pianelli is an alum. Surely you bought several copies when it was first published?”
She shrugged. “I suppose you think we buy several copies of your novels.”
“Just answer the question, please.”
A little embarrassed, she squirmed in her baggy sweater and took off her glasses. “The administration recently decided to remove Stéphane’s book from the shelves.”
“Why?”
“Because twenty-five years after her disappearance, that girl had become something of a cult figure among certain students at the school.”
“That girl? You mean Vinca?”
Zélie nodded. “Over the past three or four years, we’ve noticed that Pianelli’s book has been constantly out on loan. We did have a number of copies, but there was a waiting list as long as your arm. Vinca often cropped up in conversations with the students. The Heterodites even put on a show about her last year.”
“The Heterodites?”
“A group of rather brilliant young women, radical feminists. A sort of sorority that follows the precepts of an early-twentieth-century New York feminist group. Many of them have rooms in the Nicolas de Staël building, and they wear the tattoo that Vinca used to have on her ankle.”
I remembered the tattoo. The letters GRL PWR discreetly inked onto her skin—girl power. As she was talking, Zélie double-clicked a file on her computer. It was a poster for a musical, The Last Days of Vinca Rockwell. The poster reminded me of a Belle and Sebastian album cover, a black-and-white photo with a pink overlay and artsy typography.
“That’s not all. There were nighttime vigils in the room where Vinca used to stay, a morbid cult devoted to certain relics, and a commemoration of the day of her disappearance.”
“Why on earth would millennials be so obsessed by Vinca?”
Zélie rolled her eyes. “I imagine that a number of girls identify with her, with her storybook love affair with Clément. To them, she embodies a sort of illusory ideal of freedom. And when she disappeared at the age of nineteen, she was frozen in the amber of eternity.”
Zélie got up from her chair and looked through the metal bookshelves behind the reception desk. Eventually, she came back with a copy of Pianelli’s book.
“I kept one. If you want to flip through it.” She sighed.
I ran my hand over the cover. “I can’t believe you’re censoring books in 2017.”
“It’s in the best interests of the students.”
“Yeah, sure. Censorship in Saint-Exupéry—you would never have seen that in my parents’ time.”
Zélie stared at me very calmly for a moment. “As I recall, your parents’ time didn’t end very well…”
I felt rage course through my veins, but I managed to control myself. “What exactly are you referring to?”
“Nothing,” she said prudently.
I knew precisely what she was talking about. In 1998, my parents’ roles at the lycée came to an abrupt, and very unjust, end when they were formally charged with some obscure breach of the regulations relating to granting public contracts.
It was a perfect example of collateral damage. Yvan Debruyne, the public prosecutor at the time, had gotten it into his head to bring down a number of local bigwigs he suspected of taking kickbacks from contractors, particularly from Francis Biancardini. Debruyne had had the contractor in his sights for a long time. Although most of the rumors about Francis were ridiculous—there were people who claimed he laundered money for the Calabrian Mafia—others seemed well founded. He had probably greased the palms of local politicians in order to be awarded public contracts. It was in trying to take down Francis that Debruyne had come across my parents’ names in a file. Francis had secured a number of contracts at the lycée without entirely respecting the bidding process. During the investigation, my mother had spent twenty-four hours in custody in the squalid Auvare police station. The following morning, there was a picture of my parents on the front page of the local paper, the sort of black-and-white shot that would not look out of place in a slideshow on serial murderers between Bonnie and Clyde and the Lonely Hearts Killers.
Shaken by this unexpected ordeal, my parents both resigned from their teaching positions.
I was no longer living on the Côte d’Azur at the time, but the case had an effect on me. Although my parents had their faults, they were honest people. As teachers, they had spent their careers doing what was in the best interests of their students, and they deserved better than an ignominious resignation that cast a shadow over everything they had achieved. A year and a half after the investigation began, all charges against them were dropped. But by then the damage had been done.
I glared at Zélie until she looked down at her keyboard.
“Can I take it?” I asked, nodding at Pianelli’s book.
“No.”
“I’ll bring it back Monday, promise.”
“No.” Zélie was obdurate. “It is the property of the library.”
I ignored her comment and slipped the book under my arm, and as I turned on my heel, I said, “I think you might be mistaken about that. Check your database. You’ll see that there’s no mention of the library owning a copy.”
I left the library and walked around the Agora. I took the path through the lavender beds that led to the main gate of the campus. The lavender had bloomed early this year, but the aroma seemed different, as though something had gone awry. The coppery, metallic scent drifting on the breeze had the pungent smell of blood.
6
Snowscape
1.
Sunday, December 20, 1992
I woke up late the day after the murder. The night before, I had popped two sleeping pills I’d found in the family medicine cabinet. That morning, the house was empty and freezing cold. My mother had set off before dawn for the Landes and at some point a fuse had blown, so the radiators were not working. Still groggy, I spent a quarter of an hour tinkering with the fuse box before I managed to get the electricity going again.
In the kitchen on the door of the fridge, I found a little note from my mother, who had made me some French toast. Outside the window, the sunlight glittering on the snow made me feel as though I were in Isola 2000, the ski resort in Mercantour where Francis had a chalet to which he invited us most winters.
Reflexively, I turned the radio on to France Info. Overnight, I had become a murderer, but the world was still turning—massacres in Sarajevo, starving Somali children, bloody clashes at the match between Paris Saint-Germain and Olympique de Marseille. I made some black coffee and wolfed down the French toast. I was a murderer, but I was ravenous.
In the bathroom, I stayed in the shower for half an hour and threw up everything I had just eaten. I scrubbed myself with soap as I had the night before, but it felt as though Alexis Clément’s blood were caked on my face, my lips, my skin. And as though it would be there forever.
After a while, overcome by the scalding steam, I almost fainted. I was twitchy, my neck felt stiff, my legs were shaky, my belly burned from regurgitated acid. My mind was overwhelmed. Unable to face the situation, I felt my thoughts slither away. It had to stop. I could not keep going as though nothing had happened. When I stepped out of the shower, I had decided to go to the police station and come clean, but I changed my mind at the last minute; if I confessed, I would bring down Maxime and his family, people who had helped me, who had risked everything for me. Eventually, to keep fear from engulfing me completely, I pulled on a tracksuit and went out running.
2.
I ran around the lake three times, sprinting until I was exhausted. The whole world was silvery with frost. I was fascinated by this snowy scene. For as long as I cleaved through the air, I felt as though I was at one with nature, as though the trees, the snow, the wind were assimilating me into their crystalline cortex. All around me, everything was luminous and infinite. An icy parenthesis, an unspoiled, almost unreal territory. The blank page on which I once again believed I might write the next chapters of my life.
On my way home, my legs still numb from exertion, I stopped by the Nicolas de Staël building. The deserted halls made the place seem like a ghost ship. I knocked long and loud, but neither Fanny nor Vinca was in. Although Fanny’s door was closed, Vinca’s was ajar, which made me think that she had popped out for only a minute. I went in and stayed for a long time in the warm, downy cocoon. Everything in the room radiated Vinca’s presence, an atmosphere that was melancholy, intimate, almost timeless. The bed was rumpled; the sheets still exhaled a smell of perfume and fresh grass.
Vinca’s whole world was contained within these fifteen square meters. Pinned to the wall were posters for Hiroshima mon amour and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Black-and-white photos of writers—Colette, Virginia Woolf, Rimbaud, Tennessee Williams. A page clipped from a magazine with an erotic Man Ray photograph of Lee Miller. A quote from Françoise Sagan, copied out on a postcard, that talked of speed, sea, and dazzling blackness. On the windowsill there was a Vanda orchid and the reproduction of Brancusi’s Mademoiselle Pogany that I’d given her for her birthday. On a shelf above her desk was a pile of CDs, classical (Satie, Chopin, Schubert), classic rock (Roxy Music, Kate Bush, Procol Harum), and more impenetrable recordings that she’d played for me and I’d found hard to understand (Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry, Olivier Messiaen).
On the nightstand, I spotted the book I had seen the day before, a collection of poems by Marina Tsvetaeva. On the flyleaf, the elegantly phrased dedication by Alexis Clément once again plunged me into despair.
For Vinca,
I wish I were an incorporeal soul
that I might never leave you.
To love you is to live.
Alexis
I waited for a few minutes longer. I felt fear gnawing at my gut. To calm myself, I turned on the CD player. “Sunday Morning,” the first track on the legendary Velvet Underground and Nico. A song that seemed appropriate for this particular moment—diaphanous, ethereal, toxic. I waited and I waited some more until I finally realized that Vinca was not coming back. Ever. Like a junkie, I lingered in the room, breathing in the last wisps of her presence.
In the long years that followed, I have often wondered about the nature of the hold Vinca had over me, the fascinating yet painful fever she triggered in me. And every time, I’m reminded of a drug. Even when we spent time together, even when I had Vinca all to myself, I was already feeling the eventual withdrawal. There were magical moments, lyrical, harmonious sequences that had the perfection of certain pop songs. But that weightlessness never lasted. Even as I was living them, I knew that these perfect moments were like bubbles. Always about to burst.
And Vinca slipped away from me.
3.
I headed back home so that I would not miss the phone call from my father; he had promised to get in touch after the long flight from Paris to Tahiti, around one p.m. Since long-distance calls were expensive, and he was never very talkative, our conversation that afternoon was short and a little cold, which rather summed up our relationship.
I managed to eat the chicken curry my mother had left and not throw up. Then I tried to focus on what I was actually supposed to be doing: studying math and physics. I tried to work my way through a number of differential equations but soon gave up. I could not concentrate. I could feel a panic attack coming on. My mind teemed with images of the murder. By early evening, when my mother called, I was in a terrible state. I was determined to confess everything, but she never gave me the chance. She suggested I come and join her in the Landes. On reflection, she had decided that it was not good for my morale to be on my own for two weeks. It would be less of a chore to study with family around, she argued.
I accepted the suggestion, if only to stop myself from foundering completely. In the snowy darkness in the early hours of Monday morning, I caught the first train, a commuter train from Antibes to Marseille, then a crowded Corail train that arrived in Bordeaux two hours late. By that time, the last regional train had already left and I had to take a bus to Dax. After a hellish journey, I arrived sometime after midnight.
My aunt Giovanna lived in a cottage out in the countryside. The old stone building was overgrown with ivy, the roof was beyond repair, and there were leaks everywhere. In the winter of 1992, it rained constantly in the Landes. By five in the afternoon, it was pitch-dark, and the sun never seemed to rise.
I have no clear memories of the two weeks I spent with my mother and my aunt. A strange atmosphere hung over the house. The days passed—short, cold, bleak. It felt as though all three of us were convalescing. My mother and my aunt looked after me as much as I did them. Sometimes, in the sluggish afternoons, my mother would make crepes and we would slump in front of the television watching old episodes of Columbo and The Persuaders or the umpteenth screening of Who Killed Santa
Claus?
All the time I was there, I didn’t open a math or a physics book once. To shake off my fears, to escape the present, I did what I had always done: I read novels. That’s the only thing I remembered about those two weeks, the books I read. That winter, I suffered with the twins in Ágota Kristóf’s The Notebook as they struggled to survive the inhumanity of man in a city ravaged by war. I wandered the Creole neighborhood of Fort-de-France in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco, crossed the Amazon rain forest in Luis Sepúlveda’s The Old Man Who Read Love Stories, and was surrounded by tanks during the Prague Spring as I contemplated The Unbearable Lightness of Being. These novels did not heal me, but they briefly relieved me of the burden of being myself. They were like a decompression chamber. Like a dike raised against the waves of terror crashing over me.
On those days when the sun never rose, I woke each morning thinking it would be my last day of freedom. Whenever I heard a car approaching, I was convinced the police had come to arrest me. The one time the doorbell rang, determined not to go to prison, I climbed onto the roof so that, if necessary, I could throw myself off.
4.
But no one came to arrest me. Not in the Landes, not on the Côte d’Azur.
In January, when I went back to the Lycée Saint-Exupéry, life returned to normal. Almost. Although everyone was talking about Alexis Clément, people were not lamenting his death but droning on about the rumors that Vinca and the philosophy teacher had been having a secret affair and had run away together. As with most salacious stories, this one enthralled the academic community. Everyone had something to add—an opinion, a little secret, an anecdote. They reveled in the scandal. Even some of the teachers whose open-mindedness I had always admired got involved, vying with one another to come up with the wittiest comments and making me physically sick. A handful remained dignified, including Jean-Christophe Graff, my French teacher, and Miss DeVille, who taught English literature. Although I was not in her class, I heard her in my mother’s office saying, “We should not lower ourselves to wallow in mediocrity. It is an infectious disease.”
The Reunion Page 7
