I too had thought about Brussels as a place to run away to, with Sylvia, but we had decided to stay in France. We needed a big city where we would pass unnoticed. There were half a million people in Nice, among whom we could disappear. It was not just any city. And then, too, the Mediterranean . . .
In the building on the corner between the little park and Boulevard Victor-Hugo, where Madame Efflatoun Bey used to live, there was a light on in a fourth-floor window. Was she still alive? I felt I should ring her doorbell or ask the concierge. I stared at the window filled with yellow light. Back when we first arrived in the city, Madame Efflatoun Bey had already lived a long life and I wondered if she had any vague memories of it. She was a friendly ghost among the thousands of other ghosts populating Nice. Sometimes, in the afternoon, she would come and sit on a bench next to us in the Jardin d’Alsace-Lorraine.
Ghosts never die. Their windows are always lit, like the windows in all the ochre and white buildings around me, their façades half hidden by the umbrella pines on the square. I stood up. I walked down Boulevard Victor-Hugo, involuntarily counting the plane trees.
At first, when Sylvia joined me in Nice, I saw things differently than I do this evening. Nice was not this familiar city where I walk back to the Majestic’s hall and my room and my useless space heater. Luckily, winters are mild on the Riviera and I don’t mind sleeping in a coat. It’s spring that I’m afraid of. It comes back like a tidal wave every time, and every time I ask myself if it’s going to knock me overboard.
I thought that my life was taking a new course, that all I needed to do was stay in Nice for a while to erase everything that had come before. We would end up no longer feeling the weight that was pressing down on us. That evening, I walked with a step much quicker than today. I passed a hair salon on Rue Gounod. Its pink neon still glows—I couldn’t keep from checking before continuing my walk.
I was not yet a ghost myself, like I am tonight. I told myself that we would forget everything, that everything would start over in this unknown city. Start over. That’s the phrase I kept repeating as I walked down Rue Gounod, with more and more of a skip in my step.
“Straight ahead,” a passerby said when I asked the way to the station. Straight ahead. I had faith in the future. The streets were new to me. It didn’t matter if I took a somewhat roundabout path. Sylvia’s train wasn’t due to arrive in Nice until ten-thirty that night.
Her luggage was a large garnet-colored leather bag and, around her neck, the Southern Cross. I felt suddenly nervous, seeing her walking toward me. I had left her in a hotel in Annecy a week before, to go to Nice alone and make sure we would be able to stay.
The Southern Cross sparkled on her black sweater under her open coat. Our eyes met and she smiled and flipped up her collar. It was reckless to wear the jewel so ostentatiously. What if she had found herself sitting across from a diamond dealer in the train and he had noticed? But this crazy thought eventually made me smile too. I took her bag.
“There wasn’t a diamond dealer in your compartment, was there?”
I stared hard at the few travelers who had just gotten off the train in Nice, streaming all around us on the platform.
In the taxi I was briefly worried. Maybe she wouldn’t like the place I had chosen, or how the apartment looked. But it was better for us to live somewhere like that than in a hotel where the employees at reception might be able to identify us.
The taxi followed the same path I am walking today, in reverse: Boulevard Victor-Hugo, Jardin d’Alsace-Lorraine. It was the same time of the year, late November, and the plane trees had lost their leaves, just like tonight. She had taken the Southern Cross off from around her neck and I felt the chain and the diamond in the palm of my hand.
“Here, take it. Otherwise I’ll lose it.”
I carefully slipped the Southern Cross into the inside pocket of my jacket.
“You realize that if there’d been a diamond dealer sitting in your compartment . . . ?”
She leaned her head on my shoulder. The taxi had stopped at Rue Gounod to let the cars coming from the left pass. At the start of the street, the hair salon’s façade glowed neon pink.
“If there had been a diamond dealer, he would have thought it was from Burma.”
She had whispered this sentence in my ear so that the driver wouldn’t hear it, in the accent Villecourt had called “suburbanite” back when he was trying to seem distinguished—the voice I loved because it was that of childhood.
“Yes, but what if he’d asked you if he could take a closer look, with a magnifying glass?”
“I would have said it was a family jewel.”
The taxi stopped at Rue Caffarelli, in front of the Sainte-Anne, furnished rooms to let. We stood frozen for a moment on the sidewalk, the two of us. I was holding her bag.
“The hotel’s in the back,” I said.
I was afraid she would be disappointed. But she took my arm, I pushed open the gate that swung back in a rustle of leaves, and we walked down the dark path to the pavilion lit by a bulb above the porch.
We walked past the porch. In the main room, where the owner had seen me to rent me the room for a month, the chandelier was on.
We went around the pavilion without anyone noticing us. I opened the back door and we went up the service stairs. The room was on the second floor, at the end of a hallway.
She sat down on the old leather armchair. She didn’t take her coat off. She looked around, as if trying to get used to the décor. The two windows looking out on the pavilion’s lawn were covered with black curtains. There was rose-patterned wallpaper except on the back wall—a light wood, suggesting a mountain chalet. There was no other furniture besides the leather chair and the rather large bed with brass bedposts.
I sat on the edge of the bed and waited for her to say something.
“Anyway, no one will come looking for us here.”
“Definitely not,” I said.
I tried to lay out for her the advantages of the place, partly to convince myself: I had paid a month in advance, there was a separate entrance, we would keep the key ourselves, the owner lived on the ground floor, she would leave us alone . . .
But she didn’t seem to be listening to me. She was looking at the ceiling fixture as it cast a weak light over us, then the parquet floor, then the black curtains.
With her coat on, she looked like she was about to leave the room at any moment, and I was afraid of being left all alone on the bed. She stayed there without moving, her hands flat on the chair’s armrests. A discouraged look passed over her face, the same discouragement I was feeling myself.
But she only had to look at me for it all to change. Maybe she could tell that we were feeling the same things at the same time. She smiled at me and softly said, as though afraid that someone might be listening at the door: “There’s nothing to worry about.”
The music and an announcer’s deep voice coming from a speaker downstairs in the pavilion suddenly stopped. Someone had turned off the TV or radio. We were lying outstretched in bed. I had pulled back the curtains, and a feeble light from the two windows crossed the darkness of the room. I saw the side of her face. Her two arms reached up behind her head, hands gripping the bars of the bedframe, and the Southern Cross was at her neck. She liked wearing it while she slept—that way no one could steal it.
“Do you smell that strange smell?” she asked.
“Yes.”
The first time I’d been in that room, the smell of mold had almost suffocated me. I had opened both windows to air out the room, but it hadn’t helped. The odor had seeped into the walls, the leather chair, the wool bedspread.
I curled up to her and soon her perfume was stronger than the smell in the room, a heavy perfume I can’t forget, something soft and shadowy, like the bonds that connect us to another person.
Tonight, in the one-time dining hall of the Hotel Majestic, is the weekly meeting of the Distant Lands Club. Instead of going up to my room, I could t
ake a seat on one of the wooden benches—the same benches as outside in the parks—and listen to the talk along with a hundred other people gathered there, each with a white circle inscribed “D. L.” in blue letters on the back of their coat. But there’s no space free for me, and I slip past them to the stairs, brushing against the wall.
My room today is like the room in the Sainte-Anne Pension on Rue Caffarelli. The same smell fills the air in winter, from the humidity and the old wood and the leather furniture. Places rub off on you over time, but back on Rue Caffarelli, with Sylvia, I didn’t think that way. Today, I often feel like I’m rotting away on the spot. And I’m right. The feeling goes away after a while and all that’s left is a calm, detached sense of lightness. Nothing matters anymore. In the Rue Caffarelli days, I was discouraged sometimes but the future seemed bright. We would eventually get out of this dicey situation we were in. Soon, very soon, we would leave and go somewhere far away, abroad. I was fooling myself. I didn’t know yet that this city was a morass, that I was getting stuck in it, little by little. And that the only path I would follow down through the years would be the one leading from Rue Caffarelli to Boulevard de Cimiez, where I live now.
The day after Sylvia arrived was a Sunday. We went to the Promenade des Anglais and sat at an outdoor table, in the late afternoon—the same one where, the other day, I saw Villecourt walk by, with his leather shoulder bag. He had finally joined the shadows passing before us, back-lit, these men and women like Sylvia and me, as old as we were . . . I get scared when I shut the door of my room. I wonder whether, from this point on, I am one of them. That evening, they were slowly sipping their tea at the tables next to ours. Sylvia and I watched them and all the others continuing to walk past us down the Promenade des Anglais. The end of a winter Sunday. And I know that we were thinking the same thing: that we had to find someone, among all those people ambling at the same time along the Riviera, to whom we could sell the Southern Cross.
It rained for several days in a row. I went to the newspaper stand at the edge of the Jardin d’Alsace-Lorraine and came back through the rain to the Sainte-Anne Pension. The owner was feeding her birds, dressed in an old raincoat and a scarf on her head tied under her chin to protect her from the rain. She was an elegant woman, around sixty, who spoke with a Parisian accent. She waved me over and said good morning, then continued to open her cages one by one, give the birds seeds, then close the cages. Her too—what accidents of chance had made her wash up in Nice?
In the morning, when we woke up and heard the raindrops pounding on the tin roof of the little shed in the garden, we knew that it would be like that all day. We often stayed in bed until the end of the afternoon. It was better to wait until nighttime before going out. During the day, the rain on the Promenade des Anglais, on the pale buildings and the palm trees, made our hearts sink. It soaked the walls, and before long the pastry-shop colors and ridiculous décor were completely sodden. Nightfall wiped out this desolation, with the streetlamps and the neon.
The first time I had the feeling of being caught in a trap in this city, it was in the rain, on Rue Caffarelli, when I had gone out for newspapers. But when I got back to the room, my confidence returned. Sylvia was reading a mystery, her chest leaning against the bars of the bedframe and head hanging forward. As long as she was with me, I had nothing to fear. She was wearing a tight light-gray turtleneck that made her look even thinner and contrasted beautifully with her black hair and shining blue eyes.
“There’s nothing in the newspapers?” she asked.
I flipped through them, sitting on the foot of the bed.
“No. Nothing.”
Everything eventually blurs together. The images of the past blend into a light, transparent haze that thins out, swells up, and takes on the shape of an iridescent balloon about to burst. I wake up with a jolt, heart pounding. The silence only makes me more anxious. I can’t hear the “Distant Lands” lecturer anymore, whose amplified monotone had reverberated all the way to my room. That voice, and the soundtrack to the documentary that followed—about the Pacific, no doubt, given the wails of the Hawaiian guitars—had lulled me to sleep.
I don’t know anymore whether we met the Neals before or after Villecourt arrived in Nice. I have searched my memory, looking for points of reference, but am unable to sort out the two events. Anyway, there’s no such thing as “events.” Ever. It’s a false term, suggesting something definitive, spectacular, brutal. In fact it all happened gently, imperceptibly, like the slow weaving of a design into a carpet, like the strolling people passing before our eyes on the sidewalk of the Promenade des Anglais.
At around six o’clock, we were sitting in the glassed-in terrace of the Queenie. Violet light flickered in the streetlamps. It was night. We were waiting, without quite knowing for what. We were like the hundreds and hundreds of people who, over the years, had also sat at the same table on the Promenade: refugees in the Free Zone, exiles, Englishmen, Russians, gigolos, Corsican croupiers from the Palais de la Méditerranée. Some of them hadn’t budged in forty years and were drinking their tea at the tables next to ours with little halting gestures. And the pianist? How long had he been scattering his handfuls of notes in the back of the room from five to eight o’clock? I was curious enough to ask him. Since forever, he said. An evasive answer, like that of someone who has known an incriminating secret for too long and only wanted to conceal it. In other words, someone like Sylvia and me. And every time he saw us come in, he gave us a sign of recognition: a friendly nod or a few chords played on the piano with special emphasis.
That night, we stayed at our table later than usual. The other customers had slowly left the room, leaving no one there except the pianist and us. It was a moment of emptiness, before the first customers arrived for dinner. The waiters had set the tables in the restaurant part of the café. And we didn’t know what to do that night. Go back to our room at the Sainte-Anne Pension? See a movie at the Forum Cinema? Or simply wait?
They sat down at a table near ours, side by side, facing us. He looked a bit disheveled in his suede jacket, face haggard as though he had just come back from a long trip or hadn’t slept for twenty-four hours. She, on the other hand, was dressed up: her hair and makeup made it look like she was off to a party. She wore a fur coat that must have been sable.
It happened in the most natural, ordinary way. I think Neal came over to ask me for a light after a while. There was no one in the room except us and them, and they had realized it was closing time.
“Really, not even a drink?” Neal said with a smile. “We’re completely on our own?”
A waiter headed listlessly over toward their table. I remember that Neal ordered a double espresso, which seemed to confirm my idea that he hadn’t slept in a long time. In the back, the pianist was pressing the same keys over and over, doubtless to check that his instrument was in tune. No customers had come in for dinner. The waiters stood stock still in the room, waiting. And those notes from the piano, always the same ones . . . It was raining on the Promenade des Anglais.
“Great atmosphere they’ve got here,” Neal remarked.
She smoked in silence, next to him. She smiled at us. There was a scrap of conversation between Neal and us:
“Do you live in Nice?”
“Yes, what about you?”
“Us too. Are you here on vacation?”
“It’s not much fun when it rains in Nice.”
“Maybe he could play something else,” Neal said. “He’s giving me a headache.”
He stood up, walked into the room, and went over to the pianist. The woman was still smiling at us. As Neal came back, we heard the opening bars of “Strangers in the Night.”
“Is this all right with you?” he asked us.
The waiter had brought the beverages and Neal invited us to have a round. Sylvia and I found ourselves at their table. The word “meet” doesn’t apply, any more than “event.” We didn’t meet the Neals. They slipped into our net. If it hadn’t b
een the Neals, that night, it would have been someone else, the next day or the day after that. For days and days Sylvia and I had been waiting, motionless in places people were moving through: hotel bars and lobbies, café tables along the Promenade des Anglais. It seems to me now that we were weaving a gigantic, invisible spiderweb and waiting for someone to find their way into it.
They both had faint foreign accents. Eventually I asked: “Are you English?”
“I’m American,” Neal said. “My wife is English.”
“I was raised on the Riviera,” she corrected him. “I’m not entirely English.”
“And I’m not entirely American,” Neal said. “I’ve lived in Nice for a long time.”
They forgot we were there, and then, the next moment, they spoke to us in a warm, friendly way. His mix of distraction and euphoria was due to exhaustion and jet lag: yesterday he had been in America, he told us, and his wife had just picked him up from the Nice airport. She had not been expecting him back so soon, and was just getting dressed to go out with her friends when he’d called from the airport. So that was why she was wearing that evening gown and fur coat.
“Every now and then I have to take a trip to the United States,” he explained.
She too came across as somehow adrift. From the martini she had drunk in a single gulp? Or was it the dreamy, eccentric side of the English character? Again the image came to mind of Sylvia and me preparing an invisible spiderweb. They had entered the web while in a state of least resistance. I tried to recall how they had burst into the café. They had had a disoriented look on their faces, a staggering walk, hadn’t they?
Sundays in August Page 3
