“Where did you meet?” Odile asked Jacqueline.
“Here, in the cafeteria.” She had answered in a slow, soft voice. “I always saw him alone here in the cafeteria. He looked bored. So we started talking.”
“Yes, I’ve been coming here a long time,” Brossier said. “Especially when I felt low. I always liked Cité. It’s a different world . . . I would wander around the corridors of all the buildings, sit in the TV rooms. You know what I mean. This place has something about it.”
As he was talking, Louis started to see him in a different light. How could he ever have guessed that this man, as chatty and jokey as a guy hawking something on the street, and who, he had told Odile, “dealt in tires,” was strolling around in his time off under the shade of the trees at Cité, an Ethiopian on his arm and a fake student ID in his pocket?
“Does Bejardy know?” Louis asked.
“No, not yet, but I’m planning to tell him. Nothing surprises Roland, you know. We’ll invite him out here some night. Jacqueline has to meet him.”
They left the cafeteria. Brossier wanted them to see the Cité campus and wanted to point out all the various buildings, like the provinces of his kingdom.
“We were just in the Provinces of France building, the most important. I like the England building more, in front of you. It reminds me of a hotel in Aix-les-Bains. Before I met Jacqueline, I often used to spend the evening reading a newspaper in the England building.”
He was holding Jacqueline’s hand and growing more and more eloquent as they continued their visit. He explained to Odile and Louis that people stayed out late on the great lawn in the summer to listen to the voices and laughter of the night. In June, there was the Cité festival—a ball in the Provinces of France building.
“You have to come see how nice it is here when it’s spring . . .”
He pointed out a building with a steel and glass façade.
“The Cuba building . . . The Cubans are great. They bring so much joy and excitement to Cité . . . Tell me, have the two of you ever wanted to be students?”
“You mean a student like you are?” Odile said, bursting out laughing.
A student. That was something that had never once crossed Louis’s mind, or Odile’s. How could they ever go to university?
“I can get you IDs, if you want.”
“I hope you’ll keep your promise! Will you?” Odile asked. “I’d like to be a student.”
For her, and for Louis, these two syllables had a mysterious harmony: Those who were “students” seemed as distant and incomprehensible to them as members of an Amazonian tribe.
“Everyone here is a student?” Odile asked.
“Yes.”
A group of boys and girls were scattered across the lawn and some of them were improvising a volleyball game without a net. Their shouts were in a language that Louis didn’t recognize.
“Yugoslavians,” Brossier said.
He showed them Grand Café Babel on the boulevard, which was, he said, like a branch of the university. It was so nice to have a drink there on June nights and listen to the leaves rustling in the trees. Then they walked toward Parc Montsouris.
“You see that building there, in the middle of the lawn?” Brossier said. “It’s an exact replica of the bey’s palace in Tunis.”
They sat at an outdoor table at the Chalet du Lac.
“There,” Brossier said. “Now you’ve seen practically our whole kingdom.”
And he told Odile and Louis that, if he could, he would live there forever, without feeling the least desire to venture beyond its magic perimeter. Jacqueline, his fiancée, didn’t know a thing about Paris outside Cité Universitaire and its Faculty of Sciences.
It was much better that way.
“Don’t you think so, Jacqueline?”
She said nothing, happy just to smile and take another sip of her grenadine.
They had dinner very early, in the dining hall. Its size and wood paneling made Brossier feel like he was in the reception hall of an English manor house. Next time, he said, they would have to eat in the other dining hall, which was much more modern, with big bay windows and trees all around so that you felt you were swimming in a sea of green.
“And now,” Brossier said, “let’s go back to our place.”
They walked down a gravel path to the edge of a village. The little houses shaped like bungalows, cottages, and cabins were strewn all across the meadow, among the flower beds and groves of trees.
“This is the nicest spot on campus,” Brossier said. “The Deutsch de la Meurthe area.”
They had arrived at one of the buildings, a Norman-style house with slanting roofs. A flight of stairs led up one side with a rough-hewn banister. Brossier let the others go first.
“All the way up.”
It was a spacious room, with a balcony even. Near the bed, the wall was covered with photos of Jacqueline. No furniture except a cane-back chair.
“Have a seat on the bed,” Brossier said.
Jacqueline withdrew to an adjoining bathroom and came out wrapped in nothing but a red bathrobe.
“Sorry,” she said. “I feel more comfortable like this.”
And she stepped gracefully over to the bed to sit with them.
Brossier handed them tumblers and poured them each a little whiskey. Jacqueline put a record on the player: a Jamaican song. They didn’t talk. Brossier poured them another whiskey. He had taken his sweater off, and Louis contemplated the design printed on his shirt: the sail of a Chinese junk unfolded against a pink sky, with a pagoda visible on the horizon, atop a craggy mountain.
“Now Odile can sing us ‘La Chanson des rues,’ ” Brossier said.
“If you want . . .”
Louis let himself sink into the listlessness that Odile, Jacqueline, and Brossier were visibly feeling too. Odile had wrapped her arm around his waist and rested her chin in the hollow of his shoulder. She listened to the music with her eyes closed. Brossier caressed Jacqueline’s shoulder as she lay next to him, her breasts visible in the neckline of her robe.
It was too bad they couldn’t abandon themselves completely to this carefree indolence. Ten o’clock—Odile risked being late to work.
They were sorry to leave. Plans were made to spend next weekend together at Cité. Or why not come back tomorrow, on Sunday, Brossier said.
When they got outside, they looked up. Jacqueline and Brossier were smiling down at them from the balcony. Silence all around them. The smell of moss. They found their way back by the lights of the other buildings. How would they get back to boulevard Jourdan and the station? From the heart of this little village, Paris seemed so far away . . . In the half dark, Louis could have sworn that they were in a forest clearing.
•
She was removing her makeup in her little booth off the big room when Vietti came over with the nightclub’s manager. They sat down to wait on the sofa in the big room.
“So, your engagement is coming to an end,” Vietti said.
“When?”
“Tonight.”
She had the strength to give them a smile.
“Yes, that’s right,” the manager said. “I’m afraid I have to let you go.”
Odile’s smile vanished.
“It’s not you, I have to shorten the show . . .”
“It’s nothing serious,” Vietti said.
“Not at all. I’m sure you’ll find a new gig very soon.”
Neither of them seemed particularly to believe it.
“In any case,” the manager said, “you were very good. I’m entirely satisfied with your work, it’s just that I have to change the formula of the show. You understand, don’t you?”
When she felt the tears rising up to her eyes, she went back into the changing room and shut the door. The men continued talking. She did not turn on the lightbulb and she rested her forehead against the door. She heard the manager’s shrill laughter. She stayed in there, in the dark.
“Hey, what
are you doing?” Vietti asked.
“Would you like to have a drink with us?” the manager suggested.
She didn’t answer. Someone turned the knob to open the door, but she had latched it shut.
“Here. This is for you, the rest of your fee.”
The sound of an envelope sliding under the door.
•
Vietti turned on the radio before he headed out. A jazz tune, which he turned down.
“So are you going to stay locked in that changing room all night? Idiot . . .” He shrugged. “I have to go back to the office, I forgot something. Do you want to come with?”
She didn’t answer. She put her hand in her pocket and squeezed the envelope. She did not have the courage to open it in front of Vietti. She would never sing again, and nothing was left of the dream she had chased for so long except for an envelope, in which they had slipped her “the rest of your fee,” as the nightclub manager had said.
“Sulking?” he said in a slightly exasperated tone, and he put his foot on the gas. It was almost one in the morning and he was driving faster and faster down boulevard Suchet, then boulevard Lannes, both empty.
“Still don’t feel any better?”
He could drive as fast as he wanted, she didn’t care at all.
“You should just run the red lights.”
“You’re crazy.”
And he hurtled into the tunnel under Porte Maillot. He never stopped admiring his Italian sports car; he had even told her, one night, that there were only four people in Paris who had this kind of car, with an Allemano body.
The smell of his cologne nauseated her more than usual, but that too didn’t matter. On the contrary, she took a certain pleasure in noticing all the details about his person that repulsed her. His tan, which looked fake even though he had just come back from a ski trip, and the excessive care he took with his clothes: tiepin, vest, a pocket watch he never stopped taking out to look at. His oily, husky voice.
“So, still sulking? I don’t like girls who sulk, you know.”
He wasn’t usually so familiar with her. No mention of the record he wanted her to make. He had never believed in that record, she now knew. He turned up the volume on the radio, bobbing his head with the beat.
“I need money,” she said abruptly.
“Money? Are you serious?”
“Two thousand francs. I want you to give it to me.”
She herself was surprised at her sudden confidence, but all at once it was like she was not afraid of anyone, as if all her timidity and scruples had disappeared and she was ready for anything.
“I really need those two thousand francs. Tonight.”
“Well, we’ll see. You’ll have to be very nice to me . . .”
•
She walked behind Vietti, and the fluorescent lights blinded her, just like the first time, when she was sitting with Louis in the waiting room chairs. The same stagnant smell was in the air.
Vietti turned the key in the leather padded door and sat down behind his desk. She took refuge by the window. The street was empty and the large café opposite, where Louis had waited for her, was still lit. She looked at the lit sign: CAFÉ DES SPORTS. She felt like leaving and calling Louis from the café, to tell him that she would be back right away.
“Well, now you have to earn your money. Two thousand francs, that’s a lot, you know. It’ll cost you.”
He looked through a folder on his desk without raising his eyes to her. Then he took a record out of its cover.
“Here. Now this is a talented girl. My last discovery. You want to listen?”
He put the record on the player.
“Stand in front of me. Take your clothes off.”
He said it in an unctuous tone, a smile fixed to his face, like someone posing for a photograph.
“She’s really talented, don’t you think? You wish you could sing like that? I’m going to get her on Eurovision next year . . .”
The mischievous voice of a little girl, smothered by electric guitars.
“I’ll have to fuck her too, one of these days,” Vietti said dreamily.
She was huddled on the sofa. He put his hand on Odile’s neck and pulled her face down to his waist. After that, the worst part of it for her was feeling the pressure of his manicured fingers in her hair.
•
The lights at the Café des Sports were off. She took a right down boulevard Gouvion-Saint-Cyr. The roll of bills Viette had given her was buried in one of the pockets of her raincoat: two thousand francs. He had said, looking snide, that she “cost a lot for a whore,” but that it wasn’t any problem for him, because he had “always liked expensive whores” for as long as he could remember.
She crossed avenue des Ternes and looked down toward where Bellune had killed himself. Suddenly she felt his absence with such force that it was as though she had plunged into the void. What would Bellune have thought about all this? He hadn’t believed very strongly in her future as a singer either, and near the end he was obviously preoccupied with other things. But she remembered her afternoon visits to his office, and the deck of his apartment where you felt like you were on the bridge of an ocean liner. It was Bellune who had taught her “La Chanson des rues,” a song dating from the time when he had first come to France. He had always shown kindness to her. His face, bent over the tape player while the reel turned in silence. And the words he used to say, in a soft voice, before leading her out of his office:
“What do you say we go downstairs, Odile?”
And Louis? What would he think if he knew what had just happened? He would never know. She needed the money. Bejardy’s fifteen hundred francs was not enough, and the only way the two of them could escape was by having money.
She had earned more money that night than Louis’s monthly salary, and she was sorry she hadn’t demanded more from that bastard with the manicured fingernails. She heard again the nightclub manager’s laugh, after he told her she wouldn’t be singing there anymore. She should have gotten some money out of him too.
The dream was over. She would not sing again. She had not succeeded in making people hear; her voice had not freed itself from the dust and the noise like the voice of the singer she had read about. She did not have the courage.
She reached rue Delaizement, with the garage at the end. The light on the second floor was on and Louis was asleep on the couch. The large album where he glued photographs of his father was sitting on the floor, next to an open volume of the bound issues of the sports magazine. He had glued an article at the top of the album page and she read it mechanically:
“. . . In the following stage, Memling finally had the upper hand over Gérardin, who started too cautiously, and overtook him at the 3,625 meter mark . . .”
She turned out the light and curled up against Louis.
LATER, when the two of them talked about the past—but they did so only on very rare occasions, mostly after the birth of their children—they were surprised to realize that the most decisive time in their lives had lasted barely seven months. It was true: Louis had left the army in December, they had met in early January . . .
In February, Brossier found them a new apartment. One day, when he came to see Louis at Porte Champerret, he was shocked by how tiny the room was and the stifling heat from the enormous radiator.
“You can’t stay here, old boy. Why didn’t you ever tell me about this?”
He knew about a “two bedroom” available just then, which he’d wanted to rent himself but then he had changed his mind, it was too far away from Cité Universitaire. It was at the start of rue Caulaincourt, on the other side of the iron bridge that crossed over Montmartre Cemetery. The rent? Reasonable, very reasonable. He would talk to Bejardy about it. Bejardy wouldn’t have the heart to leave Odile and Louis in such a miniscule, overheated attic.
They moved into the place on rue Caulaincourt the following month, and the apartment felt enormous. The main room was a studio. In one corner—the only
things left from the artist who had lived there—there were a fan with huge blades and a semicircular bar. The bar’s chipped black lacquer was decorated with Chinese-inspired drawings like the ones on the shirt Brossier liked to wear at Cité. The windows looked out over southwest Paris.
Bejardy gave them a bed and an armchair with garnet-red upholstery, Brossier two cane chairs and a lamp. They even had a phone. And a well-furnished kitchen. When the concierge asked for their names to put on his list of renters, they said Mr. and Mrs. Memling, thinking he would feel better about a young married couple.
One night, they had their official housewarming party, as Brossier pompously put it. He said that Jacqueline Boivin, his fiancée, would unfortunately not be able to join them—from Cité Universitaire, rue Caulaincourt seemed like the other end of the world. You had to cross the Seine to get there, and the river was the frontier between two cities that had nothing to do with each other.
Bejardy came. Louis noticed a green and yellow ribbon on the lapel of his jacket.
“You’ve been decorated?” he asked.
“The Médaille militaire,” Bejardy said. “I earned it in Germany, under Marshal de Lattre. I was twenty-three. It’s the only good thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
He lowered his eyes, and it was clear he wanted to change the subject.
They had aperitifs in the studio. Then they had dinner nearby, at Chez Justin on rue Joseph de Maistre.
•
He no longer worked nights. From that point on, Bejardy entrusted him with “little tasks” to be carried out during the day, or else he would stay in the garage to greet visitors and answer the phone. These “little tasks” consisted in bringing letters to or from various addresses in Paris and the surrounding areas; Bejardy had told him he didn’t trust the mail. Often he would act as a chauffeur, driving Bejardy to his meetings in an old English car with a leather smell. His salary had been doubled, without Bejardy saying anything to explain why.
He felt vaguely uneasy. What was his “job” exactly? What “company” was he working for? And Bejardy? Why had he made him his right-hand man so quickly?
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