I also remember one afternoon in June. June 15 to be precise, because if was my ninth birthday. My great aunt had died a few days earlier. Aunt Odile. I was walking along the sunny street, the rue Lecourbe, where I lived with my parents in a small apartment at number 19, and thinking about Aunt Odile who always smelled of violets, a rather stout, red-faced woman I would never see again. An idea struck me with terrifying force, petrifying me there on the sidewalk with my satchel in my hand: Aunt Odile belonged in the past. I was only nine and yet I had a past, and I existed now because I was aware of it. I went home, devastated by the discovery. I stayed awake all night on June 15, my eyes bulging in the dark. I tried to remember the scene, to rewind back to my summer vacation by the sea, to my last birthday present, but my mind was so abuzz that, in my terror and confusion, nothing came back completely. So in the morning I made a decision never to forget anything again, ever, in order to stay alive.
That is how I was born a second time when I was nine. Before that date of June 15 nothing feels real to me at all. In my own puerile way, I had lived each perishable moment in the present, or rather on the slope of the present that is already sliding toward the future.
I opened my eyes. A smile hovered on Antonio’s lips as he watched Aurora play. I realized how much I could loathe this man whose memory was anchored so far out and so deeply, who had been given the gift of existing so early on. If women were drawn to him, then it was because of this past that carried him, making him both lighter and more weighty, a force that told them there was an invisible secret in him, a mysterious “before” that would never be accessible to them.
AURORA JOINED us on the terrace shortly after the concert ended. It was a hot, humid, almost suffocating night, and in the darkness the jungle inside the hothouse seemed to go on forever. Hundreds of sparrows perching up in the palm trees cheeped busily, barely disturbed by the electric lighting.
Aurora had showered, the ends of her damp hair clung to her temples, her forehead was still moist from the steam. A feral child in evening dress. Antonio handed her a handkerchief and she ran it over her face.
“Did you see?” she laughed happily. “Three encores …”
She was about to return the handkerchief, but two pale red initials embroidered on it stopped her short. She turned it over in her hand, intrigued. An I and an S.
“I.S.? Like International Socialist? Intelligence Service? Are you an English spy, Antonio? Or is it … Irresponsible Savage?”
Antonio took the square of cloth from Aurora’s hand without a word.
I.S. Irene Simon. It was Irene’s. It was even that same handkerchief, I’m sure of it, that she had waved with a pretense of emotion from the window of a Paris—Rome train one autumn morning. The train was still stationary, she had lowered the window and waggled the piece of white cotton mockingly to point out how ridiculous I was to stay there on the platform. Then she sat down, opposite a young student who was already showing an interest in her, and she pretended to be immersed in some women’s magazine.
Her face had disappeared behind a stranger’s profile. All that was left in view for me was a fold in the fabric of her jacket, the tips of her gloves, and the colorful carousel of pages as she leafed lazily through them. With a labored creak, the doors closed, the train swayed, and I stood there stupidly watching it move away. The scene tore open like an old bedsheet, I was left empty of all feeling except for my longing for this woman, who was suddenly as unreachable as the distant glitter of those train cars following their tracks on the horizon.
When I remember that handkerchief dancing in the air and that actor’s smile you gave to everyone, I realize how much the gesture was calculated to make fun of me and my hangdog eyes. The young man watching you who must eventually have struck up a conversation with you, the ticket collector who helped you carry your cases on board, and even the surly boy in the station buffet, they must all have been privately laughing at me, they had all worked out that you clearly didn’t love me.
And yet there were nights when you decided to sleep by my side. I think I amused you just enough for you to want to stay. I spent hours in sleepless torment, inhaling the smell of your body, swamped by your sharp perfume, choked by your heat and coldness like a gnat in a spider’s cocoon. I listened to you breathing and couldn’t get to sleep, frantic with desire for you. You said you hated that bed where I had slept with other women, I should have burned the sheets, moved house, and you complained when I looked at other women even though you refused to give yourself to me.
Antonio folded the handkerchief and put it in his pocket.
A ripple ran through the crowd and the loudspeakers crackled, started a hum of interference that was quickly stifled. An English blues song came from nowhere, something like Paul Armstrong’s “I’m the Flirt of Jesus,” and a dozen or so teenagers started dancing on the paved terrace.
Aurora slipped between Antonio and me, and took us by the arm.
“Come on, come and dance … it’s such a warm evening …”
But Antonio took a step back, intimidated, and she pirouetted in front of him. She jigged like a little girl, then began a slow sway with her hips. In the blue shadows above her, with his pair of glasses grafted to a branch, Monstro leaned forward to watch.
Every move Aurora made opened a slit in her dress, her leg was revealed up to the top of her thigh, and Antonio stared irresistibly at her dark skin exposed for a moment and almost immediately hidden. Aurora danced like the jubilant waters of a spring. She was alive, carnal, sensuality itself.
Disconcerted, Antonio stepped backward, apparently wanting to melt into the crowd.
Aurora was dancing, alone, a few paces from him but not with him. She smiled at everyone and no one, and he felt a rush of bitterness, an icy wind that made him back away. The whole world toppled and Antonio understood. She was offering herself to anyone who watched her and wanted her. She didn’t belong to him, and he was just realizing that he could lose her at any moment.
Antonio turned to me. He affected indifference, but his unspoken fear had suddenly aged him.
“Do you want to go back to the hotel, Vincent?”
“Didn’t you want to dance?”
He shook his head and I remembered that night, in Verona, the night when Irene was drunk.
She too danced, stumbling, abandoned, laughing a drunken laugh, flaunting herself on that dance floor, her dress riding up, revealing her tanned thighs, attracting stares, fanning flames. Two men behind me were laughing and talking loudly, one of them used the word puttana, whore. I didn’t have the courage to hit him, neither did I find the strength to leave, to tear myself away from that spectacle that was nothing but treachery, betrayal. I was drained of all energy, and I stood there, crushed by powerless anger, and watched Irene dance. Of course I could have gotten up, taken her hand, and dragged her off the dance floor, but she would have pushed me away, driven me off, slinging sarcastic comments at me. That night I should have turned my rage to contempt, my defeat to derision, my blindness to strength. I should have left that woman who didn’t want to be mine.
Antonio was now also having his doubts that Aurora had ever wanted to be his, he was finally realizing there was too little in life to connect them, that she would leave one day, was already moving away now, he would suffer, and was suffering already.
Perhaps a man would come and take Aurora by the waist, twirl her around and pull her to him, making her laugh in his arms. Their bodies would touch, their faces would be so close he would have to look away. It would feel as if the other man were possessing her right there in front of him, as if she were abandoning herself to pleasure. This other man would lead her away, taking her arm, and she would hold his hand. She wouldn’t even acknowledge Antonio, poor idiotic Antonio, she would have forgotten him already, and he would feel dirtied and then, over time, just dirty. He would want to be left alone to imagine those endlessly repeated moves of fingers and mouths over bodies.
The blues song had fi
nished and the music continued with a slower jazz rhythm, perhaps a Negro spiritual. Possibly Neil Oven’s “God Is Sitting on My Knee”? Now that’s something Harry would have known.
Aurora was sweating, her skin shimmering like mica, she was radiant with life, a man came up to her and asked her to dance but she shook her head, rejected him with a little bow. She came back toward Antonio and smiled at him, and Antonio’s nightmare evaporated. Not entirely, though. Never entirely again.
ANTONIO DIDN’T LEAVE Aurora’s side for the rest of the evening. She had coupled herself to his arm, and dragged him behind her from one group to another. She introduced him every time, saying, “Antonio, my friend,” or occasionally to some people, “my husband.”
When people looked astonished she asked indignantly, “What? Didn’t you know? Well, it is very recent. Really very recent.”
Antonio tilted his head politely in silence, discomfited, intoxicated. One time Aurora said “my fiancé,” and I smiled.
It was not a well-meaning smile. Talk of fiancés and engagement reminded me of Stéphanie Poterin du Motel, Pescheux d’Herbinville’s fiancée whose favor Galois had obtained. If Pescheux and Stéphanie had been married, perhaps her deceit would have been less hurtful. Cuckolding a fiancé is proof of impatience.
My brother was engaged once. His young intended was called Virginie, she was twenty to his twenty-two, and this ritual annunciation of a forthcoming marriage was almost obscene, in fact between a Paul and a Virginie—like the book—it was pretty close to ridiculous. But I said nothing and, at Paul’s insistence, even wrote a speech for the engagement, it was the fashion then.
I reminded them that this promise did not, either in canonical law or contemporary French law, entail any legal obligation to marry. That the engaged couple could indulge in copula carnalis, carnal union, but should not forget that if consummated, it was then a case of matrimonium praesumptum, a presumption of marriage, and hence de facto marriage.
While I outlined the rules for an engagement, I reminded them that this very expression, rules of engagement, was more usually associated with warfare.
Referring also to Søren Kierkegaard, whose first name I love with that crossed-out ø, Kierkegaard who was engaged to Regina Olsen when he was twenty-six and she barely fifteen, and whose engagement ring he returned three years later. She threatened to commit suicide but eventually found consolation in one Fritz Schlegel. I concluded by saying that this was one of the rare textbook examples where an engagement had ended well, but alas, we did have to face the fact that in most cases the two parties ended up married.
The speech was an unequivocal success. Virginie burst into tears, probably the tension. Paul led me to understand that it had not been what he had meant by amusing. Our father, on the other hand, laughed.
Speech or not, Virginie broke up with Paul a year later as the wedding drew near, apologizing and saying she wasn’t “capable of such a formal commitment,” was “terrified,” and would rather “get things in perspective.” She had actually been getting things in perspective for several weeks with one Maxime, a pharmaceuticals student like herself. Paul had never been engaged since, and Virginie, who now ran a drugstore in Asnières, had also got Maxime in perspective and married an Aurélien, whom she was probably also cheating on with some other Roman emperor’s name.
The hothouse was gradually emptying. I had sat myself on a bench near the water lilies, to make notes. Aurora walked toward me, smiling. Behind her the tiny lights on the vaulted roof shone like newly polished upholstery tacks.
“Are you still translating that Jaime Montestrela? I asked my father and he said the name rang a bell. He took exile in Brazil when Salazar was in power, is that right? Did he write poetry too?”
“Yes.”
“My father couldn’t find his old copy of Prisão. Apparently it’s not bad. Hard to translate.”
I had no way of knowing. But the obituary in O Século ended with these two lines from Prisão, which was cited as his founding work:
Num raio de sol, a poeira faz palhaçadas
Mas que idiota pintou o azul entre as minhas barras?
In a ray of sunshine, dust plays the fool
But what idiot painted blue between my bars?
I had been more interested in Montestrela’s life than his writing, as if his existence were an interrogation of my own. If a dictatorship took over, would I go into exile like him, like Zweig, rather than bowing my head completely in the face of barbarity? There was a certain honesty in not being ashamed of one’s own lack of courage, in knowing oneself well enough to opt for fleeing anticipated submission, which would be as abject as the violence of the tyrant it empowers.
Aurora headed straight off again toward Antonio while the last guests were leaving. Antonio whispered something to her and turned to me with the shifty, embarrassed eyes of a liar: “I’m going to stay a bit longer. I’ll be back later.”
I went home to the hotel, walking quickly, almost running. It was only when I reached Avenida da Liberdade that I slowed down. I took the photograph of Duck from my pocket and looked at her for a long time in the glow of neon lights. I tried to find a name for the feeling budding inside me, tenderness perhaps, the sort you would feel for a sister far away.
At that very moment Antonio was betraying Duck, and I resented him for it. He was probably betraying Irene first, but I was delighted by that particular felony. His distraction gave me strength. Soon, when Irene was there, he would be indebted to me for my silence.
I translated a few more Contos aquosos. I knew that, botched by my anger, they would need reworking later.
In the morning when the waiter brought up breakfast for two—we had adopted the habit of taking it in the large lounge—Antonio was not there. I waited until midday, in vain, and, as it was Sunday, I thought of Ruiz Custódia and the cemetery in the suburbs. So I decided the time had come to try my luck.
DAY FOUR
PINHEIRO
A cool breeze was blowing and I shivered in the shade of a cypress tree. Graves seen in sunshine are never entirely melancholy.
There’s always a hint of life to distract the eye, a blade of grass glimmering, a carefree chaffinch pecking at the ground, a black beetle with heavy mandibles crawling over the gravel. And when graves have no story to tell, we don’t linger over them.
A large weathered stone. Familia Custódia. Names, dates, and at the very bottom, Maria Custódia, 1934–1964. The gilding had long since disappeared, the northern corner of its almond green surface was decorated with a brooch of lichen. There was a bouquet of withered mauve flowers, and a slightly muddy, chipped, discolored porcelain plaque. It said TO MOMMY.
Thirty years old. How old would Duck have been? What sort of lies did they tell her that day? That her mother had gone to heaven?
When my mother died I was in London. For an interview, with the chairman of a chemicals company. Mom had gone to the hospital a few days earlier, she was frightened. The doctor took me to one side, shook my hand: “I’m very concerned. Don’t go too far from Paris.” But I never guessed it would happen so quickly.
I found out she had died when I returned to my hotel very late in the evening. The message left in my mailbox said: “Urgent: contacter le manager. Votre frère a phoné. Concerner votre mère.” Their use of French, even this approximate version, was thoughtful. I reread those words several times and went to sit near reception in an armchair that was a little too low for me. I wished I could feel something, feel the tears rising, but nothing came. I closed my eyes, tried to remember her face. I couldn’t.
Under my eyelids, red and crimson hydras, almost translucent creatures, reached out their supple tentacles. I discovered the existence of these luminous shapes in my teens, and they had become familiar. They weren’t the blotches of color that stay engraved on objects, phosphenes, as I discovered, much later, they were called. They were well and truly microorganisms with lives of their own, capricious undulating specks of life.
The night I lost my mother, the hydras were everywhere, more mobile than ever in the shifting liquid shadows. They made it impossible for me to reconstitute her features or even find a memory of her, they were protecting me from pain.
I remember the affectedly baleful expression on the hotel manager’s face when he came over to me, walking quickly, bending forward slightly.
“Monsieur Balmer?” he asked, speaking French with almost no accent. “Terrible news, monsieur. Your mother … Your brother called this afternoon. She has passed away. Please accept my condolences and those of the hotel staff.”
I returned to Paris on the first flight the following morning and took a taxi from the airport straight to the hospital. The driver wanted to chat—about the filthy weather, the staggered rail strike, the traffic—but I said, “I’m sorry, my mother died yesterday, I don’t feel like talking.”
My words were like a thunderbolt and he stopped talking immediately. There was something comical about this metamorphosis, and it produced the beginnings of a smile on my face. The driver caught sight of it in the rearview mirror, and I immediately resumed my orphan’s mask.
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