by Jean Echenoz
It’s a white parallelepiped delivery van, all square corners like a box or the huts of Port Radium: its body is not designed to fly through the air. Over the cab a small motor is installed, capped with a circular ventilation grill that looks like a hot plate. The attendant unlocks the back doors, revealing a vast, empty space with metal walls; several Styrofoam coolers are stacked in the rear. Although the inside is clean and probably scrubbed down with disinfectant, it still gives off a slight odor of stale grease, insipid blood, aponeurosis, and ganglion. No doubt it is normally used to transport wholesale meats.
After half-listening to the attendant explain how the vehicle works, The Flounder hands him part of the money entrusted by Baumgartner and lets him slide open the cab door before climbing aboard. Once the man leaves, The Flounder pulls from his pocket a pair of extra-thick yellow rubber household gloves, whose textured palms and thumbs grip surfaces, preventing objects from slipping. The Flounder puts them on, then turns the ignition key and starts up. Reverse sticks a bit, but after that the gears shift harmoniously as the truck heads toward the outer peripheral boulevard, which we’ll leave at Porte de Châtillon.
At Place de la Porte de Châtillon, The Flounder double-parks the van in front of a telephone booth. He climbs down from the vehicle, enters the booth, picks up the phone, and utters a few words. He appears to receive a brief reply, then, leaving behind several molecules of himself—fragment of earwax blocking a hole in the receiver, drop of saliva in an orifice of the speaker—he hangs up with one eyebrow raised. He does not look very convinced. He even seems a trifle wary.
20
Baumgartner, on the other end, hangs up without registering any particular expression. He doesn’t look displeased as he heads toward a studio window: not much to see; he opens the window: not much to hear—the songs of two birds chasing after each other, a faraway haze of automobile traffic. So he has returned to Paris, come back to his large studio on Boulevard Exelmans with no facing windows. He has nothing left to do but wait, kill time by staring out the window, and when night falls he’ll stare at the television. But for now it’s the window.
The paved courtyard, planted with lindens and acacias, contains a small garden edged with shrubs that encircle a basin with a vertical spout of water, arched over today, not to say driven a little crazy, by a slight breeze. Several sparrows, two or three blue jays or blackbirds animate the trees. A blob of whitish plastic emblazoned with the name of a hardware store, caught in a tangle of tall branches and inflated by that breeze like a small sail, vibrates and trembles like an organism while emitting clacks and kazoo sounds. Below him, overturned, lies a child’s bike with training wheels. Three inconsequential streetlamps set in the corners of the courtyard and three video-surveillance cameras installed above the doors of the villas keep watch over this little panorama.
Although the branches of the linden tree block visibility from one villa to the next, Baumgartner can make out the decks with their striped lawn chairs and teak tables, the balconies and large bay windows, the sophisticated TV antennas. Farther beyond, he glimpses a row of opulent buildings presenting various architectural disparities, but no matter, nothing clashes: 1910 blends smoothly with 1970 in harmonious coexistence, money winning out over anachronism every time.
The occupants of these villas apparently share the common ground of being roughly forty-five years old and of making a good living in various audiovisual domains. There is, in a blue office, a fat young woman wearing fat headphones, typing into her computer the text of a local-interest program that Baumgartner has already listened to, mornings at around eleven, on one of the public radio stations. There’s a short redheaded fellow with an absent look and fixed smile, who does not extricate himself very often from the deck chair on his terrace and who must be a producer or something, since when it comes to girls the man’s got a nonstop parade. There’s a television war correspondent who isn’t home much, spending her life on the sites of every conflict, hopping from one landmine to the next with her satellite telephone, from the Khmer to the Chechens and from the Yemenites to the Afghans. Since she’s mainly asleep when she’s home, Baumgartner doesn’t see her too often, except sometimes on his screen.
For the moment he doesn’t see anyone. Earlier that morning, behind the Vietnamese embassy, five or six diplomats in jogging suits were doing their tai chi, as they do every day. But right now, on the other side of the embassy fence, there’s nothing but a basketball backboard nailed to a tree, an asymmetrical swing, and a rusted safe turned over on its back, against an empty cement wall with an empty chair set in front. It seems to be warmer, more humid on that side of the fence, as if the embassy produced its own Southeast Asian microclimate.
Baumgartner, in any case, looks at the world only from a distance. Though he watches people, in public he plays dead and doesn’t greet anyone, except, every Monday, while handing him his voluminous rent, the retired dentist on the ground floor who leases him his upper floor by the week. They have made this arrangement, Baumgartner having notified the dentist from the start that he would not be staying long, that he would probably have to leave on a minute’s notice. Still, it’s a fact that, cloistered in his studio most of the time and getting rather bored, he has to go out for some air now and again.
Here he is, in fact, taking a walk and, well well, here’s the war correspondent, seemingly awake, heading off with a yawn to some editorial meeting. She’s one of those tall blondes who drive an Austin Mini; hers is emerald green with a white roof, dented grill, windows spangled with towing notices that the police chief, a friend, will fix for her. It’s just that this is a wealthy neighborhood inhabited by a fair number of well-known people, who themselves know a fair number of well-known people; a nice neighborhood, also frequented by a fair number of tabloid photographers.
And indeed, two of them are lurking under a porchway on Rue Michel-Ange, armed with fat oblong devices made of gray plastic that look less like cameras than like telescopes, periscopes, musical instruments, or even weapons with infrared sights. The paparazzi are startlingly young and dressed as if for the beach, in short-sleeved shirts and Bermuda shorts, but their faces are solemn as they watch the porch across the street; no doubt they’re waiting for a superstar to come out with her new flame. Baumgartner stops out of curiosity; he waits a moment with them, discreetly and without showing any interest, until one of the photographers suggests none too politely that he shove off. He’s not contrary; he leaves.
He is idle, almost painfully idle. He’ll go take a spin around the Auteuil cemetery, which is nearby and of modest proportions, housing the remains of a fair number of Englishmen, barons, and sea captains. A few tombstones are broken, left abandoned, while others are being restored; one of the funerary monuments that looks like a small villa, decorated with statues and the verb Credo in place of a doormat, seems to be undergoing renovation. Baumgartner walks without stopping past Delahaye’s tomb—though he retraces his steps to right an overturned pot of azaleas—past the grave of a stranger who was doubtless hard of hearing—Homage from his deaf friends in Orléans, shouts the slab—then past the grave of Hubert Robert—Dutiful son, tender spouse, good father, loyal friend, murmurs the slab—and that’s quite enough: he leaves the Auteuil cemetery and walks back up Rue Claude-Lorrain toward Michel-Ange.
There, a little later, as the long-awaited superstar has just crossed the porch with her new flame, the two photographers start bombarding the couple. The flame wiggles and smiles beatifically, the superstar freezes and directs the photographers to Hell, and Baumgartner, returning from the cemetery and wrapped up in his own thoughts, walks absentmindedly through their field of vision on his way back home. Once there, he pours himself a drink and stares out the window again, waiting for the end of day that takes its time, that infinitely stretches the shadows of things stationary and vegetal, porch steps and acacias, until both they and their shadows are engulfed by a larger shadow that softens their contours and colors, to the point of abs
orbing them, imbibing them, extinguishing them, making them disappear, and that’s when the phone rings.
“It’s me,” says The Flounder. “It went off like a charm.”
“You’re sure no one saw you?” worries Baumgartner.
“Get out,” scoffs The Flounder. “There was nobody in back. To tell the truth, there was hardly anybody in the front room, either. You ask me, this modern art stuff doesn’t seem to be doing so hot.”
“Shut up, you moron,” says Baumgartner. “What else? Where’s the stuff now?”
“Everything’s in the fridge, just like we planned,” answers The Flounder. “It’s parked all snug and warm near my place, in the storage space you rented. So what do we do now?”
“We meet tomorrow at Charenton,” says Baumgartner. “You remember the address?”
21
All this time Ferrer is still nursing a beer, the same and then another under the sun, but if he hasn’t changed neighborhoods on the left bank, he has nonetheless changed cafés. He is now sitting in Carrefour de l’Odéon, which is not usually the ideal spot for having a drink even though you can always find people there whose lives are devoted to it: it’s an agitated, enclosed, noisy hub, stuffed with red lights and cars heading in all directions at once, and moreover it’s chilled by the great drafts of air that come from Rue Danton. But in summer, when Paris has cleared out a little, the sidewalk cafés are relatively bearable, the light is steady and the traffic calmer, and there is an unobstructed view of two entrances to the same metro station. A parade of people comes and goes from these entrances and Ferrer watches it pass by, taking a closer interest in the female half of this parade, which is, at least quantitatively, as we know, superior to the other half.
This female half could also, he’s noticed, be subdivided into two populations: those who, just after you leave them (not necessarily forever), look back as you watch them walk down the subway stairs, and those who (forever or not) do not look back. As for Ferrer, he always looks back the first time to judge in which camp, looker or non-looker, a new acquaintance belongs. Then he takes his cue from her, conforms to her mannerisms, models his behavior on hers, given that it really doesn’t do any good to look back if the other doesn’t.
But today no one is looking back and Ferrer is about to head home. As no available taxi presents itself—roof lights dark, off-duty signs on—and as time generously permits, it is perfectly reasonable to return home on foot. It’s a bit far but it can be done, and a little exercise can only help put some order in Ferrer’s thoughts, still muddled by the last remnants of his jet lag.
These thoughts, in no particular order, and not counting memories, concern the insurance agent and safe dealer he has to call, a stand-maker’s bill to be renegotiated, Martinov whom he really should repromote, given that for now he’s his only relatively prominent artist. Then there’s the lighting in the gallery, which has to be totally redesigned to go with the new antiques. And finally he forces himself to ponder whether or not he’s going to call Sonia.
And the urban spectacle, in order, as he approaches Rue d’Amsterdam, zigzagging along the sidewalks amid the dog turds, notably presents a guy in dark glasses pulling a large drum out of a white Rover, a little girl declaring to her mother that, all things considered, she’s opted for the trapeze, then two women about to slit each other’s throats over a parking spot, followed by a refrigerated truck speeding away.
Arriving at the gallery, Ferrer is detained a moment by an artist who comes at Rajputek’s recommendation and who wants to tell Ferrer about his projects. He’s a young plastic artist, smug and self-satisfied, who has zillions of friends in the art world, and his projects are of the kind Ferrer has also seen by the zillions. The trick this time is that, instead of hanging a painting on a wall, he eats away at the corresponding place in the collector’s wall with acid: small rectangular format, nine by twelve inches and one and a quarter inches deep. “I’m exploring the concept of the negative work, so to speak,” the artist expounds. “I subtract from the wall’s thickness instead of adding to it.”
“Of course,” says Ferrer. “It’s interesting, but I’m not doing too much in that area at the moment. We might want to think about an arrangement, but later, not right now. We’ll have to talk again. Leave me your book and I’ll be in touch.”
Once rid of the wall eater, Ferrer tries to settle all the pending matters, assisted by a young woman named Elisabeth whom he’s hired on a trial basis to replace Delahaye and who is anorexic but overdosed with vitamins; she is there only on spec, we’ll see how she works out. For starters, he gives her a few minor assignments.
Then it’s back to the telephone: Ferrer calls the insurance man and the safe salesman, both of whom promise to come tomorrow. He reconsiders the bill from the stand-maker, whom he also calls, announcing his visit for later in the week. He doesn’t manage to reach Martinov directly, gets only his answering machine on which he deposits an ingenious hodgepodge of admonishments, blandishments, and warnings—in short, he does his job. He lengthily discusses with Elisabeth the best way to improve the lighting in the gallery, in view of exhibiting the Polar objects. To clarify his ideas, Ferrer suggests going to fetch one or two in the studio, we’ll try it out with, let’s say, the ivory armor and one of the mammoth tusks, you’ll see what I mean, Elisabeth. Then he heads toward the back of the gallery, unlocks the door to the studio, and that’s all there is to it: forced, gaping, the closet door opens onto nothing. It’s no longer the moment to think about whether he’s going to call Sonia.
22
Leaving two fat buckled valises just inside the entrance to his perfectly tidy studio, as if he were preparing to vacate the premises in short order, Baumgartner slammed the door on his way out. Like a pitch pipe, a dial tone, or the signal announcing the automatic closing of subway doors, this curt, dull thud produced an almost perfect A that made the strings of the Bechstein baby grand ring in sympathy: for twenty seconds after Baumgartner left the place, the ghost of a major chord haunted the empty studio before slowly fading, then dissipating.
Baumgartner crossed Boulevard Exelmans, which he followed for a moment toward the Seine before cutting over onto Rue Chardon-Lagache. In the middle of summer, the 16th arrondissement is even more deserted than usual, to the point where Chardon-Lagache, at certain angles, affords postnuclear perspectives. Baumgartner retrieved his car from the underground lot of a modern building on Avenue de Versailles, then rejoined the Seine and took the express lane, which he left behind before the Pont de Sully. He found himself at Place de la Bastille, from where he followed the long Rue de Charenton in a southeasterly direction, to the town of Charenton itself. He had thus crossed via its axis, along its spine, the entire 12th arrondissement, which is a little more populated in this season than the 16th, the population taking fewer vacations in the former than in the latter. On the sidewalks one can especially see, slow, solitary, and perplexed, third world natives and senior citizens.
Once in Charenton, the Fiat veered right into a small artery bearing the name Molière or Mozart, Baumgartner could never remember which, but he knew that it ended perpendicular to another fast-moving street, beyond which stretched a minuscule industrial zone bordering the Seine. This zone is composed of rows of warehouses, lines of garages with metal shutters, some of which carry the painted names of companies, stenciled or not. Indicated by a large sign—Flexibility in the service of logistics—there are also a number of storage cubicles for rent, ranging in surface area from twenty to ten thousand square feet. In addition, there are also two or three small, quiet factories that look as if they’re operating at one-quarter capacity as well as a purification plant, all of this scattered around a stretch of apparently nameless road.
This sector is emptier still than anywhere else in the middle of summer, and almost silent: the only perceptible noises finish up as vague rumors, dull shudders, echoes of God knows what. During the year, at most, two elderly couples might walk their dogs there. Certain
driving-school instructors have also spotted this place and spread the word, taking advantage of the zero traffic to let their charges maneuver at reduced risk, and sometimes also, vehicle on his shoulder, a cyclist crosses it to take the little bridge that spans the Seine toward Ivry. From that footbridge one can see many other bridges cast in every direction above the waters. Just upstream from the confluence with the Marne, a large Chinese business and hotel complex raises its Manchurian architecture on the edge of the river and of bankruptcy.
But today there is nothing and no one. Nothing but a refrigerated delivery van parked in front of one of the storage cubicles, no one but The Flounder at the wheel of that van equipped with a Thermo King. Baumgartner has parked the Fiat alongside the refrigerator and lowered his window without getting out of the car: it’s The Flounder who has to extricate himself from the van. The Flounder is hot and The Flounder is complaining. Perspiration magnifies his sloppy appearance: his hair is a frizzy, greasy mess, sweat stains are superimposed onto the various spots on his message T-shirt, and grimy stripes bar his face like prefaces to wrinkles.
“All set,” says The Flounder, “everything’s here. What now?”
“Now you carry them,” answers Baumgartner, handing him the key to the cubicle. “You stack everything in there. And be careful to handle these things gently.”
