I'm Gone

by Jean Echenoz

  The day she came by, at the end of a rainy afternoon, no more petroleum-colored or light-gray suit, nor loose ensemble, just a white blouse and white jeans beneath a slightly overlarge raincoat. They talked for five minutes; Ferrer, still not entirely at ease, commented on a few works for her (a small Beucler and four mounds by Estrellas), then he let her continue touring the gallery on her own. She ignored some smaller pieces by Martinov, spent a lot of time with the photos by Marie-Nicole Guimard, lightly touched one of Schwartz’s ventilating fans installed way in back, and barely slowed down in front of the gang rape. Without losing her completely from sight, Ferrer, leaning on his desk, was making a show of going over the layout of the next Martinov catalogue with Elisabeth when, from out of nowhere: Spontini. “Ah, Spontini,” Ferrer said gaily. “How are the temperas coming?”

  From the rear of the gallery, Hélène gathered that the aforementioned Spontini had not come to present his works, neither tempera nor anything else, but his grievances. The word contract was uttered. The term endorsement was invoked. Percentages were disputed. Too far away to follow the conversation, Hélène suddenly appeared to take an interest in some recent Blaviers hanging behind the desk.

  “You understand that I,” said Ferrer, “have a certain sense of my job, and I believe that it’s worth fifty percent of the work. And if you now figure that it’s worth forty, for example, we’re not going to see eye to eye.”

  “I think that’s too much,” said Spontini, “I think that’s enormous. I really think that’s enormous. It’s off the charts. If you want to know the truth, I sometimes wonder if I wouldn’t be better off with Abitbol. He’s only waiting for me to say the word, Abitbol, I saw him again the other day at the Castagnier opening.”

  “Anyway,” said Ferrer wearily, “this isn’t the first time you’ve tried to pull this shit. For ten years you’ve taken advantage of working with me to meet everyone who’s anyone and you’ve sold things behind my back while you were still exhibiting here, and don’t think I don’t know it. So mark my words, if you want to pull this kind of shit, Abitbol or no Abitbol, the door is that way. I mean, do you have any idea how tough the work situation is in France these days?”

  “But,” Spontini pointed out, “look at Beucler. After everything he’s done to you, he’s still here all the same.”

  “Beucler is a different matter,” said Ferrer. “Beucler is a special case.”

  “Yeah, but even so,” Spontini insisted. “He’s scamming you with a vengeance. He leaves you a ten-percent commission, Beucler, while he pockets ninety and everyone in the business knows it. And after all that he’s still here, and you’re even working out a deal for him in Japan. I’ve heard about it, I know all about that one, too, everybody knows about it.”

  “Beucler is a special case,” Ferrer repeated, “and that’s all there is to it. I admit I thought about firing him, but he’s still here. It’s no more rational than that. Let’s drop the subject, if you don’t mind.”

  Fresh out of arguments, soon they were no longer speaking at all. Spontini left, muttering complaints filigreed with threats; Ferrer, riddled with fatigue, let himself collapse into a chair; Hélène, back to see the Schwartz, smiled at him from across the room. He gave her back a tight grimace while getting up, then, coming toward her: “You heard that, I imagine you understood what it was about. You must think I’m a monster.”

  “No, no,” said Hélène.

  “I hate that kind of situation,” Ferrer commented, massaging his cheeks. “It’s the worst part of this business. I so wish I could delegate those things to someone else. I used to have an assistant, Delahaye, I told you about him. He was starting to get good at handling those things for me and then the asshole had to go and die on me. It’s too bad, because Delahaye was good, he was really good at this kind of situation.”

  He was massaging his temples now. He looked tired.

  “You know,” Hélène said, “I don’t have a lot to do these days. I could help you out, if you want.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” Ferrer smiled sadly, “but I really can’t accept. Just between you and me, in our current spot, I couldn’t even pay you.”

  “Are things that bad?” she said.

  “I’ve run into some bad luck lately,” Ferrer admitted. “I’ll tell you about it.”

  So he told. Everything. From the beginning. When he had finished the tale of his misadventures, night had fallen. Outside, in the heights of the construction site, the two yellow cranes blinked from the ends of their jibs, while in the sky flew the Paris-Singapore, blinking at the same rhythm from the tips of its wings. Thus, addressing synchronic winks to each other between earth and sky, they mutually signaled their presence.

  28

  Personally, I’ve had it up to here with Baumgartner. His daily life is too boring. Apart from living in a hotel, telephoning every other day, and visiting whatever falls in his sights, he really doesn’t do much. The whole thing lacks motivation. Since leaving Paris for the southwest, he’s spent his time meandering around behind the wheel of his white Fiat, a simple vehicle without options or ornaments, with nothing stuck to the windows or suspended from the rearview mirror. He mostly takes the local highways. One morning, a Sunday, he arrives in Biarritz.

  As the ocean is strong and heaving mightily, and as it’s a warm and hazy Sunday, the inhabitants of Biarritz have come out to watch the waves. They stand in rows on several tiers, along the beaches but also on terraces, jetties, balconies, knolls, and walkways that overlook the muscular ocean; they are lined up along every vantage point, watching it run through its furious performance. This spectacle stupefies man and paralyzes him; he can contemplate it indefinitely without ever tiring, with no reason to stop. Fire also has this effect; rain sometimes has this effect; the flow of passersby from a sidewalk table can have it, too.

  In Biarritz this Sunday, near the lighthouse, Baumgartner sees a young man venture near the ocean, at the far edge of a rocky promontory, risking getting himself soaked through by sprays of nervous foam, which he sidesteps with a torero’s sway. Moreover, it’s in bullfighting terms that he comments on the prowess of the successive waves, salutes (Olé) an especially scenic burst, invites (Toro toro) a promising, rumbling swell (Torito bueno)—all encouragements, calls, and expressions that are addressed to the beasts in the ring. Then after the wave has savagely dashed in every direction, dislocated itself in explosions, when this watery monster has come to lie down and die at his feet, the young man, arm outstretched and hand raised as if to immobilize time, addresses it with the gesture of matadors in the interval after the estocada, sometimes a bit long, in which the animal remains standing while the life drains out of him, until he collapses, often to the side and perpendicular to his stiffened hooves.

  Baumgartner does not spend more than two days in Biarritz, just enough time for the ocean to catch its breath, then he heads off toward the interior lands. Even more than during his earlier trip, Baumgartner does not linger in cities, which he only crosses through or skirts around via their byroads whenever possible. He’d rather stop in a village, sit in a café without talking to anyone.

  He’d rather listen to people’s conversations (four idle men compare their weights in kilos and each picks the name for himself of the département with the matching postal code; the thinnest one, then, declares himself the Meuse [55], the more-or-less normal one takes Les Yvelines [78], the fairly stocky one admits pushing the Territoire de Belfort [90], and the fattest surpasses the Val d’Oise [95]); read the posters scotch-taped to the mirrors (LARGE VEGETABLE CONTEST: 8–11, Registration of Vegetables. 11–12:30, Jury Deliberations. 5 pm, Awarding of Prizes and Wine Reception. Eligible for Entry: Leeks, Lettuce, White Cabbage, Brussels Sprouts, Cauliflower, Red Cabbage, Tomatoes, Melons, Pumpkins, Peppers, Zucchini, Red Beets, Carrots, Celery Root, Swiss Chard & Kohlrabi, Turnips & Rape, Winter Radish, Potatoes, Parsnips, Corn, Garlic, Onions. Contest open to all gardeners. Maximum nine vegetables per gardener. One
specimen per vegetable. Presented with leaves, stalks & roots if possible. Vegetables will be judged on weight and appearance); or consult the weather report in the local newspaper (Rain and storms against a chaotic sky, sometimes accompanied by thunder in the afternoon).

  The weather indeed turns bad, yet Baumgartner is less demanding about the quality of the hotels he patronizes. The establishments he spends his nights in are more basic than ever; it all matters little to him. The first days he never failed to buy the local and national dailies, reading carefully through the Arts and Society pages without ever finding the slightest mention of an antiques theft. When it became clear that no mention was forthcoming, Baumgartner lowered his consumption of press, which he ended up only leafing through distractedly over breakfast, greasing the pages with butter and jam, underlining passages in coffee, creating interlaced circles of orange juice up and down the salmon-colored financial supplement.

  One evening under pouring rain, between Auch and Toulouse, he drives through the night that has begun falling earlier and earlier. Beyond the windshield wipers running at top speed, his headlights are barely enough to light the road: he notices only at the last moment, to his right, slightly below the roadway, a silhouette moving along the shoulder. Engulfed in water and darkness, on the point of dissolving in it like a sugar cube, the silhouette does not wave its hand nor even turn around at the approaching cars whose headlights and engines, in any case, are smothered by the storm. If Baumgartner decides to stop, it’s less from charity than from reflex, or because he’s a little bored; he flicks his blinkers to the right, brakes one hundred yards farther on, and waits for the silhouette to join him.

  But it does not quicken its pace, as if it did not draw any causal connection between itself and the stopping of the Fiat. When the figure arrives next to the vehicle, Baumgartner can vaguely make it out through the streaming window: a young woman, it appears, a girl who opens the door and gets in without them exchanging the usual preliminary words between hitchhiker and driver. She tosses her bag onto the backseat and sits down without a word, carefully shutting the door. She is so completely soaked that immediately the windshield is coated in a light mist—Baumgartner sourly imagines the state of the front seat after her passage. Not only is she drenched, she also looks fairly dirty and detached from the world. “Are you making for Toulouse?” Baumgartner asks.

  The young lady does not answer immediately; her face in the shadows is not very distinct. Then she utters in a monotonous and recitative voice, a little mechanical and vaguely frightening, that she is not making for Toulouse but going to Toulouse, that it is deplorable and odd that people confuse those two expressions, which nothing justifies, and which in any case is indicative of a general tendency toward linguistic sloppiness that one can only protest, that she in any case strongly protests, and with that she rolls her sopping hair against the headrest and falls asleep. She seems completely deranged.

  Baumgartner remains agape and slightly annoyed for a few seconds, then he gently shifts into first as if he were reconsidering before starting up. Five hundred yards later, as the girl begins softly snoring, he is seized by an irritation that nearly makes him pull over and send her back to her liquid obscurity, but he gets hold of himself: she is sleeping peacefully now, her entire relaxed body is at peace, gently held in place by the safety belt; it would not be worthy of the gentleman he has decided to become. This feeling flatters him, but it’s mainly something else that holds him back: it’s mainly that her voice reminds him of someone. Absorbed by driving through hostile territory, he has few opportunities to glance over at her, and in any case the woman is leaning on the window with her back to him. But in a flash Baumgartner recognizes her, realizes her identity; it’s totally implausible but there you have it. All the way to Toulouse he drives on eggshells, holding his breath and avoiding the slightest pothole, the least jolt that might wake her. The trip lasts no less than an hour.

  Arriving in Toulouse in the middle of the night, Baumgartner lets the girl out in front of the station without putting on the overhead light, facing in the other direction while she undoes her seat belt and gets out, thanking him almost inaudibly, twice. Before starting up again, Baumgartner watches her walk away toward the station cafeteria in the rearview mirror, never turning back. Since it’s dark, and since that girl (who, if you ask me, is plumb crazy) barely looked at him, we have every reason to believe that she hasn’t identified him, or at least so he fervently hopes.

  Over the next few days, Baumgartner pursues his rambling itinerary. He gets to know the melancholy of roadside restaurants, the acrid awakenings in as-yet-unheated hotel rooms, the numbness of rural zones and construction sites, the bitterness of impossible affinities. It lasts for another two weeks or so, until mid-September, at which point he finally notices that he’s being followed.

  29

  During those same two weeks, Hélène continued to visit the gallery fairly often. As at the hospital, she dropped in at odd times but never stayed for more than an hour, once every two or three days, and as at the hospital Ferrer greeted her politely but stiffly, his attentions too courteous and his smiles a bit forced, as if he were humoring a fragile relative.

  In the end, the long tale he’d told her of his recent woes hadn’t really brought them much closer. She had listened without any particular reaction, neither admiration at Ferrer’s northern exploits nor commiseration, even laughter, at the dismaying conclusion of the affair. And if she hadn’t renewed her offer to help around the gallery, clearly it wasn’t for financial reasons. Be that as it may, the situation hadn’t progressed too far; they still looked for things to say to each other without always finding them, which sometimes produced silences. That might not have been so bad; silence can sometimes be a good thing. Combined with the proper glance and smile, silence can yield excellent results, rare intensities, subtle perspectives, exquisite aftertastes, definitive decisions. But here, no: there was only a pasty, heavy muteness, cumbersome like sticky tar on the sole of your shoe. After a while, they couldn’t stand it anymore. Hélène started coming by less and less often, then hardly at all.

  At first Ferrer had been relieved, naturally, but also naturally it soon created a little void that he hadn’t expected. He found himself waiting for her, glancing oh so casually down the street, and it goes without saying that she’d never given him her address or left any kind of telephone number, since idiot Ferrer had never thought to ask. And now it was a Monday morning, which is never a great thing. Shuttered shops, cloudy sky, opaque air, dirty sidewalks: in short, everything was closed in every direction. It was as depressing as a Sunday, without the alibi of having nothing to do. Scattered little clusters of pedestrians crossed the streets off the zebra stripes toward the only market on duty, and Ferrer’s mood was the same rancid yellow as the cranes in the construction site across the way and the electric sign of the supermarket. It was the wrong moment for Spontini to reappear, bent on reiterating his dissatisfaction with percentages.

  He was not given time to make much of an argument: “Listen,” Ferrer interrupted, “I’m going to tell you what I really think, now. You don’t work enough, frankly your work hasn’t evolved. Strictly between us, what you’re doing now doesn’t interest me all that much, get it?”

  “What does that mean?” worried Spontini.

  “It means that just because you’ve sold to two art centers and three private collectors, you still don’t qualify as an artist,” said Ferrer. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re nothing. Wait until you have regular collectors abroad, then you can talk about a career. It also means that if you’re not happy, the door is right there.”

  In the frame of that door, as he left the gallery, Spontini nearly ran into a guy of about thirty wearing blue jeans and a leather jacket, which these days doesn’t make you look like an artist, and still less a collector, but rather a young police detective, and in fact that’s just what the man was.

  “You remember me,” said Supin. “I’m f
rom Criminal Identification. I’m here about your case.”

  Without going into the technical details, the situation according to Supin was as follows: Good news and bad news, I’d rather start with the bad, which is that the electron microscope analysis of samples lifted from the studio had told them nothing. On the other hand, the good news was that in the pocket of a thawed corpse, discovered by chance and imperfectly preserved, they had found among old, stiff, crumpled Kleenexes, compact as flat stones or cakes of soap in the final stages of their career, a scrap of paper bearing a license number. Once they’d identified the registration, certain cross-checks allowed them to posit that the Fiat in question had some involvement in the theft reported by Ferrer. So they were looking for it. That’s where things stood.

  This immediately put Ferrer in a better mood. Before shutting the gallery, at the close of the afternoon, he was visited by a young artist named Corday. The latter presented projects, sketches, mock-ups, and manufacturing invoices. He did not, unfortunately, have the funds necessary to achieve all his objectives.

  “But this is good,” said Ferrer, “it’s very good, I like it a lot. Tell you what, we’ll mount an exhibition.”

  “No!” went the other.

  “Yes, yes, sure,” said Ferrer, “of course, of course we will. And if that one works out, we’ll do another.”

  “So, are we going to sign a contract?” the other imagined.

  “Easy,” said Ferrer, “take it easy. Contracts don’t get signed just like that. Come back and see me the day after tomorrow.”