The Portrait

by Antoine Laurain

  She took off her right shoe, checked the sole, then removed the left and placed both in the basket with the rose heads. Then she began walking towards the next bush, her bare feet against the warm stone. The cotton dress hugged her thighs as she moved. I couldn’t stop looking at her long bare legs and white feet advancing over the stones. She stopped and I looked up at her face.

  She stared at me. Her whole being, until now all movement, became perfectly still. Her mouth hung slightly open, her eyes were locked on mine. Pale green, like the dress.

  It wasn’t my imagination, a brief moan really had just emerged from her chest, and here it was again, stronger, as though she couldn’t hold it back, her heart suddenly beating too fast and the oxygen struggling to keep up with the flow of blood. I, too, felt a wave of emotion flooding over me. My heart was thumping at the sight of this wild-eyed woman who could not speak, but only let out these little cries.

  She dropped the basket and it bounced on the ground, scattering rose heads all over the slabs.

  She flung herself at me with surprising force. Then she looked at me without a sound. We were both dumbstruck: for her it was the shock of seeing me again; for me the emotion of meeting her for the first time.

  Finally, she regained the power of speech

  ‘It’s you, it’s you,’ she murmured and squeezed me so tightly I lost my balance.

  We fell together onto the baking-hot stone. She fixed me with a pale stare, her eyes shining with tears. Between breaths, she said the words again: ‘It’s you, it’s you.’

  The straps of her dress had slipped off her shoulders but she hadn’t noticed. Her hair had fallen over her face and I placed my hands on either side of her head. I could feel her hips against me through the thin cotton dress, see her bare ankles and feet resting on the path. I closed my eyes and all I could feel was her breath and the quivering of her body. She brought her face close and pressed her lips to mine. Neither of us could complete the kiss, nor even start it. We were joined together, as if resuscitating one another. Struggling for air, I pulled away.

  ‘It’s me, it’s me, it’s me, it’s me!’ I said, having finally recovered my breath.

  I couldn’t stop now.

  My eyes had grown used to the darkness of the room. There was enough daylight filtering through the heavy velvet curtains for me to make out a bedside table, a telephone, a chest of drawers, a globe de mariée and pictures on the walls. I was lying on the bed, still dressed, although my jacket was on the armchair. Had I fainted? It was perfectly possible. I started to get up when I felt a burning-hot hand on my chest. I turned my head. Mélaine was lying by my side looking at me. She had adjusted the straps of her dress. I instantly remembered the shock of the feeling of her body against mine, her imploring gaze and her uneven breathing. Yes, I had fainted, I was sure of it now.

  I stared at the stranger I had taken in my arms who now lay peacefully at my side on the bed cover. I could not take my eyes off her. Never had a woman appeared more beautiful, more desirable, or more closely attuned to me. We seemed to have raced through all the normal stages of seduction in a few seconds.

  We lay like that for a long time, neither moving nor speaking. I wanted to say into the silence of the room, ‘I love you.’ I love you. How long was it since I had spoken those words? In fact, had I ever spoken them? I was starting to wonder.

  ‘I can explain everything,’ I said in a low voice.

  She nodded gravely. I was about to begin explaining my amnesia, but she put her finger on my lips. Her breath quickened, she removed her sea-green dress and white pants. I watched her, excited but terrified. She slipped on top of me and began to undo the buttons of my shirt. I helped her and was soon also undressed.

  Now we were both naked in the dark, gently lit by the sun behind the velvet curtains. I took her in my arms. She moved herself further up and put her hands on my shoulders. Now her breasts were level with my face, her hair was falling forwards and I parted it, smoothing it with my fingers.

  ‘I haven’t been unfaithful to you,’ she murmured.

  Now it was my turn to look at her gravely, and the words came easily to me: ‘I love you, I will love you for ever.’

  We kissed passionately, before her lips left mine and moved down along my neck. I opened my eyes and looked up at the bedroom ceiling. It was white. But what I saw there were the most beautiful clouds that had ever graced any landscape. And far far away, on one of them, I saw a figure disappearing into the distance in a black cape until he was nothing more than a speck, which eventually disappeared. My previous life had ceased to exist. Nothing had ever existed except Mélaine de Rivaille and Mandragore.

  ‘We looked everywhere for you, everywhere … Why couldn’t we find you in that clinic?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I murmured.

  And we fell silent. Then Mélaine cuddled up to me and we stayed in each other’s arms for a while.

  We had made love and I hadn’t had the strength to tell my story of amnesia. It had taken me several hours to find the courage to lie. Deep down I would rather have told her the truth, that she had mistaken me for her vanished husband and that I did want to replace him. I wanted to live at Mandragore with her and to love her. That was all I wanted, to tell her morning and night that I loved her and to make love to her as often as she wanted. I had never made love like that. I had never loved. But I was obliged to lie, to tell her the story of amnesia, the clinic, Dr Baretti, the only real part of the story.

  ‘I’ll bring you my medical file. I’ll go back to Paris and get it,’ I had insisted, partly to convince myself.

  ‘You never used to smoke,’ she said gently.

  ‘I don’t smoke,’ I protested.

  ‘I smelt it on your clothes,’ she said, smiling.

  Was the magical interlude where anything was possible about to dissolve? There would be more and more questions, and each would be more specific than the last. I was in danger of tripping myself up over the details; I needed to snap out of my intoxicated state as soon as possible, get a grip and stay alert. I could not lose the love of my life, or rather, of my new life.

  ‘Dr Baretti smokes, and I began to smoke with him. There is so little to do in the clinic …’ I added wearily.

  ‘Give me a cigarette,’ she said.

  Then my eye fell on my jacket and I immediately considered what was in the pockets. There was my wallet and my papers – identity card, credit card, car registration, car insurance and social security card. I didn’t have a packet of cigarettes but there was my tortoiseshell cigarette case with the Venice scene. I decided to risk everything by taking it out and proffering it to Mélaine.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said. And immediately added, ‘It’s not yours.’

  ‘No, it’s Dr Baretti’s.’

  ‘Like the Jaguar. Your doctor has lent you so many things!’

  Mélaine was studying me through narrowed eyes, lighting her cigarette with a faint smile.

  ‘Is he gay?’

  ‘Yes, he is!’ I said, surprised.

  ‘You were always attractive to men,’ she said, exhaling. ‘Don’t you remember?’

  ‘No, I don’t. Tell me about it.’

  She fetched a crystal ashtray from the chest of drawers and came over to the bed. I touched her cheek lovingly. ‘You’ll have to tell me. I can’t remember everything yet.’

  Mélaine was thirty-seven and I was forty-three. We had met twelve years earlier at a winemakers’ conference in Dijon. Mélaine Gaulthier was a young journalist noted for a feature on François Mitterrand’s walks in the Morvan mountains, and her latest project was a piece on burgundy producers for the Figaro summer supplement. Clos Mandragore was one of the vineyards she had decided to focus on. Mélaine had noticed me at the start of the conference, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her. When I got up on the little stage to promote Mandragore wines, I took the opportunity to ask her to join me. I claimed I needed ‘an innocent tongue’ to try the wine and chose Mélaine
before I even knew her name.

  She told me that the expression ‘innocent tongue’ made a frisson of excitement run through her. That same evening, back at the chateau, we took that frisson further. My father, the Comte de Mandragore, declared that ‘the prettiest mandrake has just sprung up on the estate’. The next morning, I asked Mélaine to stay with me for ever and be my wife.

  ‘Everything you see here belongs to you,’ I told her.

  She asked me to give her a week to go back to Paris, abandon her Figaro assignment and break up with her boyfriend. In the event, four days were enough.

  The only fly in the ointment of this passionate love story was that this most beautiful of mandrakes was unable to have children. A cloud had hung over us for a few years until one evening we eventually accepted that we would be the last of the Rivaille-Mandragores. The line that could be traced back to the twelfth century would die out in the twenty-first.

  ‘Nine centuries is a pretty good innings,’ I concluded.

  This near-millennium of family history was part of our daily life. We often went to look at our ancestors in the portrait gallery. The earliest were little illuminated watercolours on parchment, and all that was missing was one of the two of us. We had opted to have an oil painting done by a local artist to make a change from the recent portraits, all photographs by the Harcourt studio.

  ‘Isn’t there another one that’s missing?’ I asked, interrupting Mélaine’s account.

  ‘Yes, there is … So that’s one thing you haven’t forgotten.’

  ‘Who is it of?’

  The question which had been burning on my lips since that day in room eight at Drouot Auction House would at last be answered.

  *

  Louis-Auguste, Comte de Mandragore, known as ‘the absentee’ after absenting himself from his own life. He had been a friend of Louis XVI and shared the King’s passion for locksmithing. During the Terror, Louis-Auguste was arrested in Paris and imprisoned for several weeks. He escaped and, after witnessing the terrifying spectacle of the sovereign’s execution, went back to the provinces without a sou to his name. Fearful of returning to Burgundy and Mandragore, he took refuge in a little village in the Auvergne where he worked as a blacksmith and locksmith, thereby abandoning his wife, children and chateau. No one questioned his metalwork skills at the forge. Claiming his birth certificate and apprenticeship papers had been lost in a fire at the guild archives, he took on the name of his former master blacksmith: Chaumont. As Mélaine continued to tell the tale of Auguste Chaumont, my throat tightened and my head began to spin.

  My father had once asked a genealogist to carry out some research on the Chaumont family tree. The line mysteriously stopped in the late eighteenth century with a locksmith in the Auvergne: Auguste Chaumont.

  The thirteenth Comte de Mandragore, my ancestor.

  Now I knew. All that remained was to do as the first of the Chaumonts had done before me and disappear. After all, making oneself scarce ran in the family.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ she said, stubbing out her third cigarette. ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Mélaine got up and wrapped a dressing gown around herself, sea green like the cotton dress, like her eyes.

  ‘There must be some veal left in the kitchen,’ she murmured, doing up her belt. ‘I won’t be long.’

  These few words made my heart thump almost as hard as holding her in my arms had done. If we could exchange such anodyne phrases as these, then yes, I was her husband; yes, I had always been here. Yes, this woman was my wife. There was no doubt about it. I felt the urge to get up, head down to the kitchen, hold her and tell her how amazing it was that there was leftover veal in the fridge, that this would be the best meal of my entire life: two slices of cold veal with a dab of mayonnaise, eaten straight off the waxed tablecloth in the kitchen at Mandragore. But I didn’t know where the kitchen was. If I left the bedroom, I wouldn’t be able to find Mélaine.

  I knew I had to make the most of being left alone there.

  ‘I need to call Dr Baretti,’ I said to myself. ‘Now.’ I got out of bed, took my phone out of my jacket pocket and turned it on. A message flashed up on the screen: twenty-two voicemails. I scrolled through the numbers: Charlotte, Charlotte, Chevrier, Chevrier, Foscarini F1 Team, Charlotte, Chevrier, Tajan Auction House, Expert Associates, Vaudhier and Partners, Chevrier, Chevrier, Charlotte, Samuel Antiques, Marchandeau Books, Orange Customer Service, Charlotte, Heraldic Bookshop, Charlotte, Chevrier and finally two missed calls from an unknown number.

  ‘This is a message for Monsieur Pierre-François Chaumont. This is Lieutenant Masquatier calling from the police station in the seventeenth arrondissement in Paris. I’m contacting you because we have received a missing persons report filed by your wife, Charlotte Chaumont, and your business partner, Monsieur Alain Chevrier. These individuals have had no contact from you for twenty-four hours and they’re concerned for your welfare, Monsieur. I should point out that no search operation has been launched at this time. You’re an adult; you have the right to come and go as you please. Nevertheless, we’re trying to make contact with you at the request of your loved ones. If for any reason you are unable to contact them or us …’

  The message was cut off there. No doubt I could hear the rest in the next voicemail. I decided not to listen to it.

  Soon they would begin looking for me. If I made a call from this phone, it could easily be traced. Having worked on broadcast technology patents, I knew that as soon as a call was made anywhere in France, the number was automatically logged on the servers. I opened my contacts and went to the folder for clients with names beginning with B. While looking up the doctor’s number on my mobile, I picked up the landline phone on the bedside table, all the time keeping an ear out for Mélaine. The house was silent. I dialled the number.

  ‘Dr Baretti? Maître Chaumont here. Tell me, Dr Baretti, are you still perfectly homosexual? … I’m sorry too, Doctor … sorry for what I’m about to do, but I’m afraid I’ve no choice, and you’ve no choice but to help me.’

  There wasn’t a single place to stop on either Rue des Archives or Rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie. I couldn’t leave the car double-parked since a parking ticket would ruin my plan, so I decided to park at the town hall. Feeling a bit paranoid, I tried to conceal my identity from the surveillance cameras by putting on the dark glasses I had found that morning at the chateau in the lost property drawer.

  I had seen the terror in Mélaine’s eyes when I told her I was leaving Mandragore. I understood why and took her in my arms, saying, ‘I will come back this time.’

  ‘I don’t want this just to have been a dream,’ she told me. ‘I don’t want to wake and find I am alone.’

  ‘Neither do I; I never want to wake up again.’

  She may have wondered what I meant but she did not question me. She watched me walk away towards the gates of the chateau. I turned to look at her one last time as she stood at the bottom of the steps. The old retainer who had dropped the tray of silver a few days earlier went over to her and I saw Mélaine put her hand on his arm and hold it a long time, in a gesture of friendship and possibly because she felt faint.

  ‘This is a message for Maître Chaumont. It’s Lieutenant Masquatier again. Your phone operator has confirmed that you have listened to your messages, unless your phone has been stolen and is now in the hands of a third party …’

  I snapped the phone shut immediately in horror. They knew that I had listened to my messages. I would have to get rid of the phone as soon as possible. I placed it on the first public bench I came to and hid behind a tree to see if anyone would steal it. A young man in a tracksuit went past. His gaze fell on the phone then he took his headphones out. He looked to left and right, sat down, stayed still for a few seconds then got up and walked quickly away. The telephone had gone. I wasn’t worried that he would drop it off at the lost property. I was relieved that the last link to my old life and to the endless questions from the poli
ce officer was now being carried away in the pocket of his tracksuit.

  I was looking for a club called Thomas l’imposteur. After going up and down the street several times with no luck, I went into a boutique that sold tight trousers and hiking boots and offered a piercing service. A young man in a close-fitting white T-shirt with ‘porn star’ emblazoned across the chest welcomed me with a smile.

  ‘Hello, I need to go to … this address, but I can’t see the sign anywhere,’ I said, holding out my piece of paper.

  The boy’s smile widened and his eyes brightened. ‘You go into the courtyard. It’s on the left as you go outside. There’s no entry code for the door.’

  As I was leaving he called out in a friendly way, ‘But you’d better knock; it’s usually closed at this time!’

  He had assumed I was gay, reminding me of the way I was sometimes taken for a Freemason. Like all good collectors I was interested in Masonic symbolism and in the objects the brotherhood had produced over the centuries. My interest sometimes led me to visit the specialist bookshops on Rue Puteaux or Rue Cadet. When I asked knowledgeable questions, the sales assistants would fetch books for me and address me as a friend. I had been a Freemason by adoption, now I was gay by adoption, and as I walked along the street I felt the powerful presence of my uncle following me. He had died much too early and had never known the gay scene in the Marais. ‘This quartier would have finished him off,’ I thought. ‘He wouldn’t even have had a cape to leave me.’ I pushed open the heavy door and entered the paved courtyard. At the back on the left the red metal door had presumably led in previous times to the building’s coal cellars. Now there was a bell and a little laminated notice: ‘Thomas … l’imposteur’.