Uselessness

by Eduardo Lalo

  The gifts meant so much to me. Not only did I enjoy these objects in themselves, but also the pleasure of seeing Marie reach out to me, which I experienced from the perspective of nostalgia. Despite my efforts and the struggles of our lives, I couldn’t (and perhaps didn’t want to) break free from her. I didn’t realize the extent to which my love was a ball and chain—in a way, an illness I couldn’t shake—a dependency, in brief, a stupidity. I still couldn’t forget the sweetness we had so often shared.

  During those days I used the notebook for the first time. I began a novel I would work on for the next two or three years and that would accompany me when I returned to my country. I wanted to tell the story in these pages. A writer always returns to the same sources, even if afterwards the texts he presents to the public erase the traces. At that time, I was writing from inside the story, without knowing the outcome, struggling to find a meaning, a tone, and a denouement. The book wasn’t totally bad, and an editor was on the verge of publishing it, but I am grateful for his hesitation, which allowed me to return, again and again, to that time in Paris, fighting with memory, giving into the pain.

  When I had already finished my exams and it was almost time for the new academic year to begin, I received in the morning mail a note from Pétrement inviting me to come by his house. He had just signed a contract that called for a great deal of work, most of it tedious, consisting, among other things, of producing notes on hundreds of file cards, and he was proposing to make me his assistant. I accepted immediately. More than the money, which would come in handy, the opportunity of working at his side appealed to me, spending hours in the smoky gloom of their apartment, watching Son come and go without a single floorboard creaking under her weight. That year, all I had to do was attend a dissertation seminar. The rest of my time I could use to read, write, and work.

  My task was to catalog the collections of Tibetan sculpture and objects in several French and foreign institutions in order to present them to the commissioners of an exhibit with encyclopedic pretensions, which would be inaugurated in the Grand Palais and travel afterwards to other countries. Pétrement would be in charge of the research, as well as dealing with the museums and shaping the collection. My work consisted of producing a clean copy of the findings and organizing the data (size, date, place of origin, etc.) in a preestablished format.

  I began going two afternoons a week but soon they extended the job to three, with frequent invitations to dinner. I would work diligently, but the Pétrements loved to chat, pause for tea or coffee and a smoke on their pipes, or—why not?—two or three. Son bombarded me with her questions about Simone and Marie, Puerto Rican cuisine, or the history of my ancestors. At my slightest query, often barely formulated, Didier would jump at the chance to vanish into his library and bring down, from the upper shelves, books by German Sinologists, or parallel versions (Sanskrit, Pali, and Chinese with their corresponding translations into English or German) of the Buddha’s long and midlength speeches. This was such a complex and fascinating world that, on the occasions that I went by the university, discussions of certain lengthy nineteenth-century French or English novels left me cold and wondering how could I waste time like that.

  On the face of it, Simone had adapted to the new order. We were living together, tolerating each other’s absences, which grew longer and longer. Sometimes I’d return to the studio to find a note informing me that she was staying at her father’s house or was going out to eat with Sylvie and Hamed. We entertained and kept each other company, but the spring was drying up.

  One night, returning home from a leisurely dinner and conversation with the Pétrements, I found her waiting for me. I saw her suitcase in the kitchen and I imagined the worst.

  “I’m not breaking up with you, but it would be better if we didn’t live together for a while. It’s no longer the same and we need a change.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yes, I know, but what’s left?”

  “Don’t make a scene. No reason to see it that way. I want to be far away for a few days. Then we’ll see. By the way,” she added, “I don’t have anyone else.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Well, you have Marie.”

  “Don’t be silly. She’s on another continent.”

  “But you still have her.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Let’s not talk about it now. It’s better this way. I’m not complaining, but neither am I fooling myself about your nana and this doesn’t take anything away from what we’ve experienced together. I don’t even know if she has anything to do with my desire to leave. It’s not only you, or her. In the end, this always happens. I don’t want us to end badly. This is simply the way I am, and whatever happens I know I won’t forget you.”

  The conversation had rapidly led us over a line, had become a good-bye.

  “Stay a few more days,” I said, feeling my heart in my throat. “Maybe we can be like before, go someplace together.”

  “That’s not it, and besides, I have no money.”

  I went to sit next to her on the bed and we embraced. I tried to pull her closer, to keep her from getting up.

  “No. I’m going to miss the last metro.”

  5

  A period began in which I was often grateful for having sat at that table in a café next to the Musée de l’Homme. The Pétrements were my only friends. I saw Simone a few times in cafés and squares, but she would not return to my studio, not even to retrieve her last belongings. Sandrine, meanwhile, resented my distance and paid in kind. I spent weekends between the radio and my books, going out for a walk when the walls started to close in on me. Paris became a desert once again.

  The new order of things was apparent even in my relations with Didier and Son. The file cards were boring and often I just didn’t feel like listening to the Orientalist rant about a broad gamut of French institutions. At the same time, I became tired of witnessing the couple’s arguments; they now felt comfortable enough in my presence not to hide their rough edges.

  As the afternoons grew shorter I would head for the metro, where I’d see the exhausted faces of the passengers, with big dark bags under their eyes. In spite of its cachet, Paris was like any other place. Solitude was doled out everywhere and life did not offer consolations. Happiness seemed far away. I had no one despite the thousands of faces, the millions of hands.

  I’d settle at a corner table in Au Chien Qui Fume. I’d always bring books, notebooks, and pens, but soon I would leave them behind and simply spend an hour smoking and looking around as I slowly sipped one or two espressos. I’d manage to feel something close to contentment. The constant activity on the street and watching the passersby had a pacifying effect. My mind wandered from one idea to another until I lost track of words altogether and found myself, for minutes at a time, essentially unconscious. These were the best moments, but all the same they left me feeling lost.

  I began to paint again and would kill time sketching faces on pieces of cardboard that I’d bring in from the street. The walls of my studio became covered with eyes, looking at me, from numerous variations on the same head I persisted in drawing time and again. All sorts of marginal types—from actors who improvised their performances on the street to nocturnal loners at the bars in cafes—inhabited my fantasies and became, as it were, my traveling companions. I chronicled their fates without missing a detail, to justify my own.

  When I’d been living this life for three months, I received a letter from Marie announcing her return. She begged me to go and get the key to her apartment at her aunt’s house, because she didn’t want to have to see her when she arrived. She also asked me to come pick her up at the airport. She would soon let me know the date we would see each other again.

  This news became my salvation. I had the impression that something fundamental was changing. Marie and I would usually reinforce each other’s weaknesses, which, more than love or mutual unders
tanding, had sealed our bond. From the moment I received her letter I did nothing but wait. The days and weeks became endless, and I was influenced obsessively by expectations along with hopes I couldn’t shake and which—against all common sense—I went on building around her arrival.

  I cleaned her apartment as well as my own; I bought flowers that withered and which I had to keep replacing. I didn’t show up for the thesis seminar or for work, as if in this way I could make Marie arrive sooner. Finally, late one afternoon, after having checked my mailbox compulsively, I received a telegram. Marie was arriving in two days.

  The imminent presence of the woman with whom I had, more often than not, experienced unpleasantness, provoked in me a wave of anxiety. Doubts about my situation, now stifled by the nervous concentration of waiting, occasionally shed light on what seemed to be a comedy of errors. But I couldn’t change my mind. It was impossible not to go pick her up at the airport, not to see her, not to have anything to do with the emotional commitment I had made. I could barely sleep that night, blaming myself violently, getting up to walk around the room in little straight lines within the small rectangle between the desk and the bed. I spent hours trying to avoid making myself even more miserable with the thought that I was awaiting humiliation.

  At dawn, I found myself asleep at the table. I went to my bed and fell into it like a huge hulk, disgusted. I spent the rest of that day as if on a tightrope, enveloped in a deceptive calm. My fears had dulled my senses. I was still uneasy but could only half feel it. That night I had the mental space to hope I could be wrong. Maybe, despite my fear, nothing would happen. It wasn’t worth thinking about any further, I said to myself, smoking my nth cigarette. I had to go pick her up in the morning.

  I saw her before she could catch sight of me amid the crowd. Her hair was again its natural color, but the haircut was different, with the part on the side. She was walking among travelers toward the exit, with steps that seemed too short and slow for her age, carrying a big bag. When she left the terminal, I saw that her eyes were looking for mine. By making a small movement in her direction I attracted her attention, and she ran to embrace me. We stood hugging each other tightly, trying to express the emotion we both needed.

  We walked to the taxi station smiling and making prosaic statements about the good old days and about the temperature outside. In letters we had been endlessly eloquent, but now that we were within reach of each other, the mutual presence of our bodies kept us from putting two sentences together. In the taxi, with the city coming into view in the distance, revealing the outlines of its many tall buildings, we held each other’s hands and tried to relieve the reality of the silence. It was impossible to find words to say anything, even the obvious.

  Arriving at her apartment on Rue de Sèvres was a relief. While Marie paid the taxi driver, I could move away, taking charge of the suitcases. I went up the steps first and opened the door. I let her enter the place she had abandoned months ago and went down to get the rest of the luggage. When I came back up, I told her I had bought some basic food items, including tea. I saw her move, like an old lady, toward the stove.

  “And so?” I asked without being able to restrain myself any further.

  “Well, as you can see. I’m back. I hope it’s all okay.”

  This felt like a false start. The words weren’t going anywhere.

  “You don’t look bad,” she said. “A little thin. Are you still seeing the Pétrements?”

  “I go several times a week, but lately it hasn’t been so exciting.”

  “Before, you were enthusiastic.”

  “I know, but the work has become monotonous. Basically it’s like any other. There’s no doubt that Didier is a great guy and has been very generous with me, but I don’t know, I’m a little fed up.”

  “Have you seen Sandrine?”

  “Not much lately. I suppose she’s okay.”

  Marie brought over the cups and a package of biscuits.

  “Thanks for the tea,” she said, “and for everything else.”

  “It was nothing,” I answered, but I knew that she was talking about something else. We took refuge behind the steam from the cups.

  “And your friend? What’s her name? Simone?”

  “We’re no longer together.”

  “Ah, bon!”

  “We see each other from time to time. It wasn’t a breakup, but rather a gradual separation, but that’s the end.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too. And you?”

  “What?”

  “Are you with someone?”

  “No. Not right now.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Believe me, it wasn’t the moment . . .”

  “And how are you doing? I mean, obviously . . .”

  “Better. Really much better, though at times I just don’t know what the problem is. But I had to return. I couldn’t stay there with my parents. And you know how mother is. What she did wasn’t right, even though she thought it was for my good. I’m no longer a child.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “I don’t know yet. For the moment, come back here to live. It’s possible that I might take some more classes but not till next year. I have to find a psychiatrist or an analyst. Mom got in touch with her contacts and I already have a few phone numbers, but I’d like to find someone on my own. I still have to figure some things out, to sort out what happened.”

  We drank our tea in a silence that was no longer anxiety ridden.

  “I am so grateful to you for what you’ve done for me,” she said. “Your patience and your understanding. I know that you didn’t have to do it. I had no right to expect it of you. I behaved very badly with you. And with others.”

  “I did it because I wanted to.”

  “I know. That’s why I am asking you to forgive me.”

  For the first time since her arrival we looked at each other without feeling defensive.

  “What do you want to do?” I asked.

  “Go to bed with you.”

  It was a rediscovery. I returned to a body I had not forgotten. The room we were in had witnessed so much misery that, despite the surrender with which we possessed one another, a patina of regrets remained. But it was preferable to ignore or rather to live with it, as if it were an illness, an incurable disease. In our mouths and hands, in the action of our muscles, there was something, despite everything, that retained a perverse, wilted flavor. After the act, when we cavorted with our legs entwined, on the verge of being overtaken by sleep, a poem by Ezra Pound came to my mind, as a kind of warning. Some time later I looked for it. Titled “Fratres Minores,” it said: “With minds still hovering above their testicles / Certain poets here and in France / Still sigh over established and natural fact / Long since discussed by Ovid. / They howl. They complain in delicate and exhausted metres / That the twitching of three abdominal nerves / Is incapable of producing a lasting Nirvana.”

  We went down to have lunch at a fairly good restaurant. It was a bit late in the day and there were only a few customers. I remember I ordered a fish soup, Provençal-style. Through the windows flowed an afternoon whose yellow light was delicate. I could let myself feel the beauty of a Paris where passersby strolled unhurriedly. It felt good to be there. It felt good because I could remember my country and knew that there I would have found none of this: not the soup nor the people nor the extraordinary light nor the woman who faced me and who spoke to me as if nothing had happened between us could be on the streets of the city where I had grown up. Paris became a dream city again, the city it could sometimes be, when one could deal with loneliness and distance.

  Slowly, cautiously, more out of habit than anything else, trying to convince myself that I wasn’t making a stupid mistake, I returned to Marie. We spent days talking, moving from the table to the bed, or from the bed to the street, from a crêperie to a movie theater, from the movie theater to a walk, or to sitting outside at a café. Our respective studios eliminat
ed any sense of property boundaries between us and we could go to bed and wake up in either of them. Our days and hours were once again richly filled with games and complicities, set aside for so long. I had the impression that the Marie of the previous year had been an aberration, and yet I feared, with equal force, that this new life was a fantasy.

  For over a week I devoted myself to her and did not go to work with Didier Pétrement. I had called to let him know the reason for my absence and he and Son kindly invited us to come to dinner. Simone had never wanted to go. She hadn’t been interested, didn’t feel comfortable in that world, and, rudely, had refused to come for even one visit.

  At nightfall, Marie and I took the metro to Didier and Son’s house. Before we went in, Marie stopped at a pastry shop to buy raspberry tarts.

  From the very first minute, she felt at ease. She chatted and made herself at home in the kitchen with Son while I talked with Didier in the study. We enjoyed a Vietnamese dinner with many dishes, and our conversation lasted as late as possible, until we had to run to the station to catch the last metro. While the women were clearing the plates and preparing herbal tea, Didier took me aside and, as he lit his pipe, blowing big puffs of smoke, he congratulated me on Marie. He was completely enchanted.

  From that day on, there were many occasions when, after I’d spend the afternoon working with Didier, Marie would arrive at the couple’s house to prepare dinner with Son, or she would make us hurry to get to a movie in time, or a lecture with slides, given by some scholar who had lost himself in jungles or deserts. Marie even became interested in the work of Le Petit Vietnamien and read a long series of books Son lent to her. Her growing interest led her to meditation, and she considered the possibility of spending the next summer with me at Monsieur Nan’s Swiss community.