A Life on Paper: Stories

by Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud

  "Ma'am! Ma'am! Is there anyone up front?"

  Was she from some far corner of the world, or even another altogether? She spoke no language that Dorsay knew. And yet she didn't lack common sense. As he was gesturing wildly at the empty cage, she urged him, with a single, briskly eloquent movement of her chin, to pay no heed and enter the first room of the exhibition.

  Kids' outfits of all ages, swaddling clothes, diapers, and onesies, all kinds of woolens, bibs, pajamas, and bodysuits, variously frayed, worn, and unraveling-these were what the first display cases Dorsay bent over featured. The frames of theses cases were of the finest oak, and outfitted with thick glass and heavy locks, as though they held jewels or manuscripts of incredible value. Moving along, Dorsay found even more display cases. In these, with a piety worthy of a collection of Noah's fishing hooks or Xenon's arrowheads, were bits and pieces of toys in a neat row. The axles of tiny cars, torsos of pilots exiled from their cockpits, gas-station signs, railroad-crossing gates, canoes with garish redskins, surviving pawns from the shipwreck of a board game, corsairs with gaping holes midhull, nurses eternally well-behaved in their unmussable skirts, the heads of high-wire electricians, battleships on casters, spavined sawhorses… Dorsay understood perfectly that he was fainting. In fact, a mist seemed to be descending from the coffered ceiling, but the sight of this didn't fool him. He congratulated himself on losing consciousness in utter lucidity: he'd recognized the toys, and had decided to faint. For the sake of form, he tried to hang onto the top of the display case. He managed only to slow his fall a bit, or perhaps stage it better, like children who practice their dying fall artistically before the wardrobe mirror.

  He was lying on a sofa, and his head was in a woman's lap. She was stroking his forehead, brushing his hair back with two gentle fingers. She was sitting too far back for him to see her face.

  "What happened?"

  He knew quite well, but he wanted to hear the stranger's voice. Besides, she wasn't a total stranger to him: he recognized her perfume, was sure of having smelled it once before in a woman's arms… But which one? Hostia, perhaps? It had been so long, my God, so long!

  "You fainted. The watchmen brought you here."

  The voice was deep and beautiful. He didn't like twittery voices. 0 Verlaine! "And her voice, distant, calm, and deep…" He felt relieved; the voice that had responded wasn't Hostia's. Hostia had a rather deep voice, too, but less husky, more velvety.

  "Who are you?"

  "I'm the director of the museum."

  "And where am l?"

  "You're in my office."

  "But this museum-"

  "Shh, don't get excited. Relax. Isn't it nice here, just like this?"

  The gentle fingers slipped from his forehead to his right temple and began lightly massaging it. Dorsay was torn between the anxious curiosity this place inspired in him, and a languor close to the utter relaxation of a well-fed infant or a sated lover. The woman's voice, her perfume, the warmth of her thighs beneath his neck, her calming caresses, produced a hypnotic effect on him. He felt like he was about to go under again, but voluptuously this time, as one might under soft eiderdown. And yet the incongruity of his situation provoked a flash of pride.

  "Ms. Director, what do you think…"

  The woman smiled. He knew without seeing her that she was smiling, and when she spoke again, the almost tender irony of her voice proved him right.

  "Let yourself go," she said. "Forget everything. Here, with your head in my lap, you're right where you belong at last, and I fully in my role-"

  "No! 11

  He wasn't sure what rebellion of his entire being lifted him from where he lay. But just as he was about to turn toward the director and order her to explain this so-called museum, this building's true purpose and the role she'd boasted of playing with regard to him, his strength deserted him. He fell to a crouch at the foot of the sofa, out of breath, about to be sick.

  "Really, you're impossible!" She rose in turn. He heard the sound of her heels on the parquet floor. "I'm going to call an ambulance. They'll take you to the hospital, if that's what you want."

  The voice was curt now. It no longer held the complicit inflections he thought he'd heard earlier, even when she was mocking him.

  "No-no, not the hospital;' he stammered in a strangled whisper.

  She stopped, picked up a telephone, and dialed a number. "Hello? Emergency? This is the museum. One of our visitors has just had a little fainting spell."

  "Don't!"

  The voice continued, implacable. "How long? All right, I'll notify the watchmen; they'll keep an eye out for the ambulance."

  She hung up.

  "You're… mean!"

  Could she even hear him? With great strides, she crossed the room again, and passed near him without stopping, in a whiff of perfume. Her indistinct figure disappeared through a tall padded door.

  It was as though, in leaving, she'd taken Dorsay's weakness with her. He got enough strength back to stand up. He was tempted to follow the director, but what was point, since the damage was done? Part of the room had remained out of his sight until now. He swept the room with his gaze. It contained a library with overloaded shelves, armoires, and assorted filing cabinets, and an executive desk on which great inventory ledgers bound in black canvas stood beside piles of documents and photos. There were also masses of documents that awaited cataloguing, in boxes or stacks, plopped here and there on chairs, even the floor.

  Two windows overlooked the street. He walked over to one and spotted the bronze schoolboy, this time from behind. Beyond the traffic island and the statue, he made out the glass door of the Museum Hotel. He had a fleeting thought of the girl. With its waters of unmoving asphalt, the street seemed a river on whose other shore she awaited him like an unlikely little fiancee. He shrugged. Always with the fancies! He walked to the desk. He picked himself out easily from a group of young people in the first photo his gaze fell upon. Rogan '65. In Bermuda shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, he held a short brunette with blandly pretty features in a tight embrace. He'd forgotten her name, but remembered that in the end she'd preferred Macassar. Good old Macassar! He was one of Dorsav's three hundred subscribers. Banker. All-time ladies' man. He rarely missed a launch party. He'd show up, jovial, the Financial Times sticking out of his blazer pocket. He never stayed long. "Bad timing. Got a date. A real squealer. I insisted on coming, but I have to run. Save me a Japan imperial, won't you?" A faithful friend, Macassar, but never introduce him to your woman. Dorsay had never introduced him to Fulvia. He put the photo back down. In the next he was sitting at a table, probably at La Palette, with Lozec'h and Doblinon. The young guard. The dream team. That photo was from the '70s. Before Lozec'h made it big. They were rapierthin, all three. Thin and well dressed, and by God, funny-looking! But what a fire in their eyes! He was touched. Here was the whole of youth in a snapshot: hope, fervor, and now… What? A novelist with a print run of a hundred thousand copies, a poet of three hundred, and a philosopher of a hundred twenty-five. A hundred twenty-five in a good year, because Doblinon's recent Heraclitus was, well, sorry, a bear to get through. He felt a prickling in his eyes. He sniffed, and went on to another photo. He started. Him and Hostia, naked, entwined on a bed in black and white. It wasn't pornographic-just private. So private that Dorsay couldn't imagine who'd taken it. He hadn't asked himself that question with the two before because they hadn't at all been of a private nature. Anyone could've snuck away from the group or the table for a moment and snapped a shot. But this third photo was completely different. He was sure no one had ever taken a picture of them like this, him and Hostia, even without their knowing. Since Hostia was still living in the dorms then, and he was single, they'd always met up at his place, where there were no two-way mirrors or voyeur's peepholes. Besides, their affair had remained a secret, without either of them actually meaning for it to turn out that way. Well, then? What eyes had spied on their embrace? What hands had framed and captured it? How many s
imilar photos were there in this bundle, these piles, these filing cabinets? Admittedly, the indiscreet image was still almost chaste by the standards of the age. But if, in fact, as Dorsay had reason to suspect, the material in the museum's collections consisted of his entire life, there had to be other, less "artistic" ones…They had no right! The simple fact of that snapshot belonging to a third party without Dorsav's consent amounted to a criminal offense. Privacy? It was first among the rights of man, from which the rest followed! And yet, amidst his anger, he was flooded with doubt. Hadn't he, over the course of his poetry collections, taken an oath of shamelessness? That pathetic and accursed specimen, the authentic archetype of the Artist-wasn't it that poor devil of a flasher by the high school who offered up to sudden gusts and the laughter of little girls a strip of trembling flesh? Unless he'd only pretended, only aped the poets with his phony words set in the sham ivory of the page… A pretend-poet: a fine fate!

  An ambulance siren brutally yanked him from his reflections. Photo in hand, he ran to the window. That was it, it had come for him; all this was of a piece: the blue and white van with its garish flashing lights and electric shrieking, and the photo showing him and Hostia cheek to cheek and belly to belly. His calling was reduced to an eccentricity and his loves to casual encounters. The ambulance parked in front of the museum. Two men sprang out and hurried around the back of the vehicle, which they opened to pull out a stretcher. Dorsay realized that if he remained standing here like a stick-in-the-mud, in two minutes they'd come and take him away on that stretcher despite his protests. He thought he heard, closing on him in succession, the doors of the ambulance, then the hospital, then the common room where they'd coop him up with actual patients suffering from disgusting, terrifying actual diseases… He tore out of the director's office.

  Much later, when Dorsay ventured out of his broom closet, he saw that night had fallen and the museum was closed. At night, the building was placed under the surveillance of a single soused watchman. Curled up at the back of a booth wallpapered with truck photos, he was sleeping with his head on arms crossed atop a table, his slumber shot through with terrible visions. Sometimes he woke with a cry. Then he remained upright for a moment, wide-eyed and covered in sweat, before plunging in again like a man fishing for horrors. It went without saying he was no bother to Dorsay, who borrowed his flashlight and visited the rooms of the museum one by one. These explorations confirmed all his suspicions. He came back down embittered from the attic, where all the pains and humiliations that lay ahead in his final days were evoked. It was one thing to know what abyss we were all drifting toward, and another to see ourselves sinking there through letters, documents, photos, and objects testifying to our decline. The poet's cane, his hearing aid, his supporter underwear. Worse yet, the exhibit didn't settle that obscene question no creator could evade: would posterity remember his name? This museum-absurd, in posse, or prematurelimited itself to recounting the life of Jean-Pierre Dorsay. Nothing in the heaps of relics it held led him to suppose that they would be worshipped one day. Still, he hadn't hesitated to look for the slightest trace of the survival of his body of work after his death, which he now knew down to the day and hour, reasonably distant in and of themselves… Emptying the file cabinets, upending boxes, he'd tracked the posthumous reprinting, the theses, the redeeming essays, the least article that would acknowledge him. In vain. The period covered by the Dorsay collection stopped short at the date of his death. When at last he was convinced no evidence existed, hope returned. No hand had yet been played. His adventure had but pushed back by a few years the lid of smoke or fog that kept all mortals from seeing the future. Someday, in a few hundred or even few thousand lofty souls, his name might awaken the same fraternal impulse he always felt on hearing those of his favorite poets. Nothing guaranteed it, but nothing ruled it out. The idea perked him up considerably. As a result, other curiosities came back to him. Since he hadn't reached the end of the road, would he write again, love again, before the distressing deadlines of the attic? He began emptying drawers and cabinets again, without finding anything at first. Finally, as he was losing hope, his gaze fell on a black and white photo quite similar to the one that showed him in Hostia's arms. But it wasn't Hostia nestled up against him, nor any of the other women in his past. Nor was it a stranger. In fact, he had met her this morning for the first time in his life. It was the young woman come from the provinces to help her aunt at the hotel, the girl with rosy cheeks who'd stepped out of an English print. Dorsay's heart filled with joy. If life still had such a godsend in store, then he wanted to face it once more, with its gray vagaries and black certainties.

  He slipped the photo under his shirt and made his way back to the closet where the watchman was moaning in his sleep.

  "Wake up! Good God, wake up!"

  "Huh? What? Who are you?" The man's eyes widened at this apparition, for once not even monstrous.

  "A visitor. I didn't notice what time it was; you have to let me out, I want to go home!"

  The poor lout did as he said without being asked twice.

  "Good night!" Dorsay yelled back from the bottom of the steps.

  "Good night, yeah right!" the watchman grumbled.

  He locked the monumental door and drew back into the depths of the museum to pick up the thread of his nightmares again, as a reader might get back to a book.

  The night was clear and cold. Dorsay crossed the street, skirting the pedestal of the bronze schoolboy. The Museum Hotel was still open. He walked in. The hotelkeeper welcomed him with a surprise not entirely free of suspicion. A traveler without bags who slept in the same place twice: what was he hiding?

  "I'll pay in advance, like last night," he told her.

  "As you wish," she replied, relieved.

  He didn't have enough cash on him. He paid with a debit card.

  "I'm going to go out and have a bite before bed."

  "There are hardly any restaurants in the neighborhood. I can bring a meal tray up to your room."

  He wondered what it would consist of. Parma ham, salmon steak, apple pie? In truth, he felt ready to devour almost anything.

  "And wine, too, please-white."

  "Chablis?"

  "Chablis."

  "Very good, sir. I'll bring it up in half an hour?"

  "Perfect. Um… your niece isn't here, is she? Maybe she stepped out?"

  The hotelkeeper looked him up and down with an icy eye, all her prejudices instantly restored. What did this fellow want with the girl? "My niece?"

  "Yes, the young lady I saw this morning. She's quite friendly!"

  "She's only here in the daytime"

  "Ah! So I'll have the pleasure of seeing her again tomorrow morning, then… Make sure the Chablis is nice and chilled, won't you?"

  "I will. I keep it in the fridge."

  As he slipped his key into the door to his room-305, the same as last night-Dorsay let out a victorious little laugh. The old lady could wrinkle her nose all she wanted; the girl with the rosy cheeks would inevitably be his. It was written-or rather, photographed!

  He walked in, hung his raincoat and his blazer in the closet, kicked off his shoes. On his breast, between shirt and undershirt, the photo rustled. He undid two buttons and removed it carefully from its hiding place. He gazed upon it. The young woman was beautifulso beautiful! And he was… well, less handsome, of course, and not as young, but as though transfigured by the brilliance of his companion, regenerated by her grace. He pulled the bedspread back and hid the photo under the pillow. The meal was in… half an hour? He had time for a bath. He turned on the tap. While the water ran, he walked to the window. He drew back the curtains. In the moonlight, with a gaze turned directly on him, the bronze schoolboy was smiling.

  Lozere, December I994-January 1995

  The Pavilion and the Linden

  pon his return from a war in the course of which he had, as was his custom, defeated many an enemy and reduced many a citadel to gravel and ash, King Guita wished t
o take the air beneath a certain aged pavilion. In the most solitary courtyard of the palace it stood, of simple stone, its floor adorned by a mosaic of no great originality. No legend clung to its grounds. A linden hung over the pavilion, whose furnishings in their entirety consisted of a single wooden bench. In his now-distant childhood days, King Guita had spent many a long and easy evening there, playing in the wan scent of lime at his governess' feet.

  When, on his return, he found the pavilion leveled and the linden felled, he flew into a royal fury. He summoned the palace architect and demanded he explain himself. In a quavering voice, the man pleaded for his life. Wasn't it his duty, foreseeing as he did His Majesty's victory and the treasure he would certainly bring back, to enlarge the palace storehouses? And since that courtyard, forgotten by one and all, with its crumbling pavilion and its ailing linden, adjoined one of the storerooms already overflowing with the spoils of earlier wars…

  King Guita saw that the architect believed himself to have acted rightly, and so for a time spared his life. But a feeling of irreparable loss overcame him whenever his thoughts returned to the coolness of tile beneath his knees and the scent a light wind from the tapering leaves wafted toward him. Then it seemed that he had lost much more than a city, more even than a province: something like his kingdom's secret heart. One day, when this feeling assailed him with greater force than usual, his gaze settled on the architect. He frowned, and had him put to death.

  He ordered the man's successor to erect the pavilion once more in a faithfully recreated courtyard, and to have a tree, like the first in every way, transplanted there. When all was done at last, he went one night and sat alone on the wooden bench. And lingered there, sniffing the air in vain. The tree's very odor seemed foreign and unnatural to him. When the light had grown so dim that the mosaic might no longer be made out, he let himself slip from the bench onto the floor, onto the very spot where he had spent so many peaceful hours as a child. He ran his fingers over the mosaic's surface without finding the same terrain of tiny ridges, the same infinitesimal fissures, the same traces of wear his fingertips remembered. The pitiless ruler wept. He who had never before trembled was terrified. The pavilion and the linden, so lately but a memory, were a reality once more. Suddenly the king doubted his powers of recall, his own name, his very kingship. And if he were not King Guita, who was he, by God, and what was he doing in this strange palace on this hostile night?