by Eduardo Lalo
We looked all around us, stuck as if time had frozen. Finally we started running again, trying to get away without really knowing if we were. Our direction kept changing without any order, presuming that this way we were confusing the Belgian, going more or less toward the northeast back to the coast.
We became slightly calmer when we reached the dunes. Further, below, was the beach where we had spent the day. Not a soul could be seen.
The night was long and hard. We were whipped by the wind and the slightest sound put us on the lookout. Our feet, clad only in espadrilles, were hurting, having tripped while running against stones and the roots of plants. For a long time we changed position every fifteen minutes, not because this tactic would prevent in some way a reencounter with the Belgian, but because the wind and the fear prevented us from staying calm. We hid several times and were indecisive about what we should do. We opted, finally, to let the hours pass.
At dawn we were sufficiently calm and rested to continue walking in the direction of the main highway. We were hoping that the Belgian had gone away a while back or that he was sleeping. After a good long walk, Simone glimpsed in the distance the lights of the cars traveling on the highway. Eager to be finished with this nightmare, we walked in single file in that direction.
A couple of hours later we reached the highway to Alicante. Nobody stopped when we tried to hitchhike, probably because they couldn’t see us in the dark. With the first light, our hopes increased. Simone could barely remain standing when, in the distance, I caught sight of a taxi. I signaled vigorously and felt like leaping for joy when I saw him stop. The driver lived in a town nearby and was going to Alicante to begin his day’s work. During the trip I told him our adventure, and when he left us near the hostel, he refused to charge us. Simone, madly grateful, stuck her head in the window and gave him two noisy kisses.
We entered a café dying of hunger and thirst. We ate and drank in silence, exchanging few words, totally enervated. A little while later, dragging our feet, we made it to our room.
When we got into bed, Simone began to cry. She was crying from a place that only she could know, far beyond us, that room, or Alicante. I consoled her as well as I could, until we both fell asleep.
This experience soured our joy. We did not venture outside of the city again, and even San Juan Beach didn’t feel safe. We spent some days as if we were convalescing, afraid to run into the Belgian around any corner. Simone could not be alone, not even in the pensión. We walked along the streets as if afraid that something awful might befall us again.
Santiago and Isabel helped us shake off the gloom. We’d meet up with them almost every night and go out to eat tapas in the little restaurants along the coast. Thanks to Santiago, some months later, I would see my first stories published in a Madrid magazine and, afterwards, I would become its stringer in Paris, sending movie reviews and critiques of the latest literary works.
The incident on the beach changed the way I felt about Simone. I now allowed myself to identify traits and attitudes in her that I had never liked but had ignored, perhaps motivated by my hopes for novelty or a fresh start. Her frequent and perplexing mood changes, the extremes of certain emotions unleashed by seemingly minor incidents, her lack of prudence disguised presumably as spontaneity, just like her disappointing and sometimes embarrassing indifference to culture: all these were aspects which, I realized, had always affected me whether or not I’d wanted to admit it. On the other hand, however, there was her joyful manner and our rich sexuality. One fact, whether or not it was fair, was crucial to my malaise: I blamed her for the incident with the Belgian. We hadn’t talked about it, but at certain moments in that endless night and in the days that followed, I caught her brooding over her foolishness. The look in my eyes must have betrayed me, because more than once she asked what I was thinking. I always hesitated to answer and would look away, pretending that I was distracted. “Nothing,” I’d say, and ask her about anything that would change the subject.
We’d been together barely three or four months, but the intensity of what we had lived, our almost exclusive concentration on each other, the trip to Spain, and the way in which I had forgotten Marie over that period, allowed us to feel as if we had been together much longer. We didn’t realize that the relationship was already in decline.
We wanted to stay in Alicante one more week but were very low on money. Too many unforeseen expenses, books and cassettes, too many tapas and bottles of wine, were boring a hole in our pockets. We could only extend our stay for four more days. Enough to take our last walks and swims at San Juan Beach, and for the final dinners with Santiago and Isabel, who, conscious of our lack of funds, treated us on several occasions.
Around nine o’clock on a late-summer evening we boarded the express train that would follow the coast, passing Valencia and Barcelona before reaching the border at Irun. We passively watched the scenery go by with the low spirits of a trip’s end, without any desire to talk much. In Paris the exams I hadn’t taken in June awaited me. Their subject matter seemed lost in time and merely thinking about them was enough to depress me.
After a night of interrupted sleep, we got off at Austerlitz station and parted on the metro platforms. Simone was going to visit her father, to get clean clothes, to ask if she could find work again at the hotel, and the next day, she would go back to my place. I went to my studio on the Impasse de l’Astrolabe. Paris looked like an old postcard: a familiar panorama that I observed with strange indifference. As I entered my building, I opened the mailbox. It was filled with junk mail, but there was also a fistful of letters. I examined the envelopes stamped in San Juan or New York, the one from my parents containing a much-needed check, and I counted three letters of different thickness with my address in Marie’s tiny handwriting.
I organized them to read them in the order they had been sent. The first went on for five pages in lines that scrawled downward. Knowing her, I knew they had been written in bed. She recounted, grosso modo, the heartbreaking tale of her disappearance. Her mother had hired a lawyer to have her declared incapacitated and thus to place her under the guardianship of the family. An ambulance had taken her to the airport and on that same day—it was nighttime in New York—she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. There she discovered the consequences of her act. Her ward companions terrified her. She was in a world of madmen and she realized she had crossed a line. This more than anything else forced her to react. She didn’t want to be one of those incurable crazies who have conversations with themselves and repeat absurd gestures. That first night, she became determined to get out of there as soon as possible. She managed to get Dr. Simmons to discharge her and to administer the rest of her treatment at her parents’ home.
The last two pages were about us. They included a complicated reflection on what Marie called “our time” without clarifying whether she meant past, present, or future. She asked me to write to her, to forgive her, not to forget her. I folded the pages and put them back in the envelope thinking of them as a message in a bottle that had drifted to shore from a shipwreck in a distant ocean. I realized how much Simone and Spain had made me forget. I didn’t want to brood over the sordid aspects of the letter and preferred to ignore what it implied about me.
The second letter had been written twenty days later. It was very short, and barely covered one side of a small sheet. It began by reminding me that she had written to me and had not received an answer. She presumed cynically that the absence of news implied that I was having a blast. She couldn’t believe that our entire past deserved nothing more than this disregard. The letter stopped at the end of this paragraph, without any farewell salutation. Below, without anything further, was her signature.
A familiar unhappiness took hold of me. Once again I witnessed the zigzag of her emotions, without being able to interrupt—or to respond. The city, which so recently had been stripped of its old associations, once again rolled over me with the patina of all that I had endured. Her depressive
complaints, more than the pain of loss and nostalgia, brought Marie back into my life.
The third envelope contained something thick. I felt it, putting off opening it for a moment. In it there was only a cassette. I went over to the radio and put it in the player, but before pressing the “play” button, I paused: the idea that I was going to hear Marie’s voice again made me stop dead. I resisted for just a minute, knowing that I would give in.
I realized I was, in some way, betraying Simone, but I sat down at the desk with a cigarette and coffee. Marie spoke as she had so many times before, from the hallowed place that had room for only the two of us. In her monologue I heard pauses and transitions that seemed to contain my responses, the phantom of our dialogue. Now nothing remained of the edginess of her second letter or the clinical case history of the first. As I listened I became aware of the powerful bond between us, which despite everything endured.
Marie signed off, but I stayed at the desk until the tape stopped automatically. I felt a joy words could not describe, a joy unlike the passion inspired by Simone. My feelings for Marie touched other places in my past and my being, like a palimpsest of our life, something I couldn’t destroy without destroying myself.
Even while knowing it would upset me, I wrote to Marie that very evening. I spoke of what her voice had awakened in me. To explain my silence, I told her I had just spent a few weeks in Spain. I didn’t mention Simone or go into any details. Thus I committed a vile act toward both of them, but at that moment I could do nothing else.
4
I had missed the June session exam on indigenous literature. I used those afternoons to refamiliarize myself with my notes and readings. I buried myself in new books and the image of Klok returned to accompany me day and night.
Simone was also studying for an exam, in her case French literature, and was reading (in bed) an awe-inspiring succession of hefty tomes. After those weeks in Spain, our life together started to feel boring, punctuated by dormant intervals. Even the sex lost its vitality. We started to feel like an old married couple, stuck at home. The exciting times of mutual discovery lay behind us.
My interest in the aboriginal world lasted well past the day of the exam. I’d go to bookstores, especially the FNAC and L’Harmattan, in search of old French and Spanish chronicles and contemporary ethnology books. I read all the essays of Pierre Plon, including his marvelous translations of myths and song cycles.
One day, when Simone was busy with chores, I went to the Musée de l’Homme and spent the whole morning and part of the afternoon wandering in its rooms. I would stop to draw and to take notes in front of display windows, which had never been changed (as I knew from having seen photos of the era) since Picasso had discovered African art and Iberian sculptures there during that extraordinary moment of cross-fertilization that gave birth to cubism and so many other artistic revolutions.
I walked out dazzled and famished and went straight to a café near the Trocadéro palace to have lunch and prolong my state of enchantment. I sat down at a table and took a book by Pierre Plon out of my shoulder bag. I ordered food and started reading. A little later, biting into my Gruyère sandwich, I couldn’t help noticing my neighbors at the next table. A heavy-set older Frenchman was sitting next to a thin, very small woman with Asian features. They were chatting with a stout woman with dyed blonde hair, and I soon gathered that the couple was married and the bleached blonde, who was the man’s sister, had just met her sister-in-law. The blonde spoke of racism among the French with an extraordinary lack of tact. It was obvious the siblings hadn’t seen each other for some time. From the way she dressed and acted, spouting clichés and a nationalistic, xenophobic view of France—more common than one expected in spite of the city’s much-touted cosmopolitanism—the blonde woman seemed to be from humble origins. Their conversation quickly degenerated into an argument and reached an impasse, making them all uncomfortable. But then the man spoke with extraordinary calm, deflecting any stormy confrontation. His wife, who was Vietnamese, and who, by her age, I imagined had lived through the war, also mediated in her somewhat limited French, and with a cool head dodged the low blows of her sister-in-law. It was truly fascinating to watch them from behind the screen of my book.
The sister stood up to say good-bye, halfheartedly inviting them to dinner. I figured they wouldn’t be seeing each other again for a long time.
“What do you make of that?” asked the man when his sister had left.
“Hatred leaves scars on those who cultivate it,” said his wife.
“Yes, no doubt. I can assure you hers is a sterile existence, and what’s worse, she doesn’t even realize it because she sees herself as white and French and therefore superior, compared to your people.”
“How tragic.”
“What can we do? There are so many like that.”
“I know. In Saigon they were worse.”
Out of her cloth bag, the woman took a very long pipe, as long as her forearm; on its end was a small, carved bowl for the tobacco. It was not only strange to see a woman smoking a pipe, but also the style of her pipe was very striking. The man asked for two more coffees (I took advantage of the waiter’s proximity to order mine), and he took out of his jacket pocket another pipe, this one of an ordinary size.
During the conversation with his sister, the man had glanced in the direction of my table several times. I didn’t know what could be catching his attention, as he seemed to focus either on the ashtray or on my hands. I was intrigued. I took out a cigarette and discovered I didn’t have anything to light it with. I asked my neighbors for a light.
“Tenez,” said the man, and placed a box of matches on my table.
“Merci bien, monsieur,” I answered.
“Regarde, il lit le bouquin de Pierre,” said the woman who looked over and smiled.
Suddenly it was clear: the man had been looking at the book in my hands. My passion for this text, and perhaps also my visit to the museum, emboldened me.
“Do you folks know Pierre Plon?”
“Yes, we know him. He was our friend. “D’ou venez-vous, monsieur?” asked the man, who must have noticed my accent.
“De Porto Rico.”
“Ah, bon!” the woman sounded surprised.
Following the protocol of formality with which strangers address each other in France, we started talking. Plon provided a bond between us, for my keen interest in him and his work visibly pleased my interlocutors. I learned from the Frenchman that the ethnologist had been his friend ever since the two of them had first entered the classrooms of the Sorbonne, almost three decades earlier. Plon had then embarked on his scholarly vocation and had become, according to this man, not only a great field research scientist and an astute theoretician but also the poet who introduced to French scholars and academics the spoken word of the indigenous peoples. Plon knew what those words meant, since, in his unfinished work, he not only wrote papers for specialists but also had reconstructed the imaginary world of the Indians, allowing anyone with curiosity and intelligence to gain entry to a culture that revealed to us how much we had lost.
I told them I had just spent hours in the Musée de l’Homme taking notes and sketching in front of the Amazon display windows.
“That collection is quite outdated and incomplete, but I admit that it is fascinating. I understand your interest. May I take a look at your notebook?”
I put it on his table. The man leafed through the pages, identifying objects and tribes from my crude and sometimes schematic sketches, and asking me if I knew certain texts and catalogs, commenting that in Berlin, Hamburg, Brussels, and Stockholm there were feather necklaces and domestic objects that outdid the beauty and ethnological fascination of those to be found in Paris.
I told them I was sorry about the death of Plon, that I would have loved to have known him, and that, being a literature student, the encounter with his work had made me contemplate the possibility of changing my research plans and university center in order to s
tudy the primitive world.
“The day he died in the traffic accident, that very same day,” said the man, “he was supposed to come to our house for dinner. Believe me, sir, you cannot imagine what his loss has meant to me.”
The woman was slowly smoking her long pipe. “Perhaps you might like to come to our house to see photographs of Pierre’s expeditions,” she said, the words curling out of her mouth at the same pace as the smoke.
“I would love to.”
The man gave me their names and address, and the date and time of the appointment. I hesitated as I wrote his last name in my notebook and asked him to repeat it.
“Don’t worry, sir. It’s easier than you think. Look in the first page of the book you have on your table. There you will see it written. So then, see you in a few days. It has been a pleasure to meet a young reader of Pierre’s.”
We shook hands smiling and I watched them leave the café. The man tenderly put his big hand on the skeletal nape of the woman’s neck. As soon as I lost sight of them, I opened the book. On the page that followed the title page there were only three words: “To Didier Pétrement.” Plon had dedicated to him his translation.
I was in the vicinity of the Pétrements’ building before the appointed time. Normally I was punctual and when I would first visit someone new, I would make sure to leave enough time. On this occasion my expectations created by our first meeting made me arrive a half hour early. Etiquette did not allow for ringing the bell before I was expected, so I killed time going to a café around the block. They lived on the southeastern edge of the city, near the autopiste périphérique. The museum of Asian antiquities was not far off.
My enthusiasm about this visit had made Simone uncomfortable. She didn’t like the intelligentsia, that large sector of people who thought, wrote, and created, and who in France, unlike other countries, were not dedicated exclusively to teaching or to administration. More than anything else, her antipathies revealed her natural tendencies, her desire to complicate her existence as little as possible and to live in the stability of Paris, which had always been her home, with an inertia that was the enemy of questioning and change.
