The Thursday Night Men

by Benacquista, Tonino

  Philippe Saint-Jean left the villa as little as possible and used the phone to order his meals, which he took most often on the terrace, facing the endless blueness. Ever since his arrival in paradise, he had been trying to feel at home—mostly in vain, for he was convinced he had become part of the furniture, not very useful, not even matching. The worst ordeal, by far, had been learning to dress lightly. To free himself of the weight of cloth. To let go of his petit Parisien get-up in order to survive in the tropics. Into the wardrobe went the tweed, velvet, and plaid. Philippe had to uncover himself, and uncovering oneself always entailed surprises, as the philosopher in him was well positioned to know. How far back did he have to go to find his last confrontation with his own nudity, other than in the semi-darkness of the bed or the narrow confines of a bathroom? Since he viewed aging merely from the perspective of the mind, and he viewed his mind as his primary asset in the charm department, for fifteen whole years he had forgotten his body. Now, he was thousands of miles from home, there for all to see in the harsh light of the sun, and the naked truth was glaringly obvious: folds, sagging, gray skin, liver spots, flabby muscles, spare tires.

  How could he have so ignored his own body? Why had he treated his old bones as little more than a vehicle? He had celebrated the living with so much eloquence, and now he was obliged to remind himself at last that he was made of flesh and bones. So what if he had always admired those wrinkled faces that had been through so much, with their slow, bent, infinitely touching bodies: his own reflection now showed him nothing but negligence. So what if he had always tolerated other people’s physical disparities and imperfections: now he pinched his skin the way one inspects an overripe fruit.

  When she was unable to find anything in Philippe’s wardrobe suitable for minimal coverage in ninety degrees in the shade, Mia raided the trendy boutiques: short-sleeved shirts in Egyptian cotton, brand-name Bermuda shorts, leather sandals, boxer short swimming trunks, and a light linen jacket for the evening. No sooner had they arrived than she was already caught up in work, so she said, Enjoy your time, darling. He replied, That’s the worst thing you could ask of me. Enjoy? It was a verb he despised, as he despised any injunction to pursue pleasure. And yet, he had harnessed himself to the task under cover of an entirely new experience: he would seek out the subtle sensations linked solely to the pleasure of existing. His living organism, back in its original bath, the sea. Once again he would be a naked aquatic creature, his skin wearing nothing but a faint tan; he would swim among his fellow fish. He would disregard his desires, fears, and questionings, to attain the age-old dream of the ancient Greeks: that point of equilibrium and harmony. He would find humility among the elements once again, he would be satisfied with the horizon without seeking beyond it, he would venerate the sun as the atheist’s only god.

  But to attain that old dream, he would have needed the courage to confront the infinitesimality of his being, to consider himself as a simple organic entity, infinitely fragile, emptied of thought, gregarious. He would have had to go against his nature, cease to invest himself, and accept the feeling it induced; he would have to restrain his mental machine until he found it ridiculous and vain. Leave aside the fear that nothing had any meaning. Forget everything and nothing, to have the physical experience of everything and nothing. Accept that the supreme stage of consciousness consisted in denying one’s consciousness.

  But how could he stop being Philippe Saint-Jean, even for one hour? Where could he find the necessary detachment to become relative to his own self? From the moment he became stuck in Bali, the good old Cartesian I think therefore I am had been taking on an entirely new meaning. In the early morning, once Mia had left to join her team, he began to wonder how he would spend his day and, feeling guilty that he had no idea, he clung to one principle: I think therefore I do not “enjoy” and I am content merely to resist. At the end of the morning, after a quick perusal of the international press, he dipped up to mid-thigh in the blue water in hope of stimulating his entire body and finding an entirely new energy to draw on. As a rule, one lap around the pool was enough: I think therefore I paddle joylessly around a private swimming pool. At the end of the afternoon, and there was no glory in it, he would compile the list of the day’s activities prior to Mia’s return, for she would be providing him with the detailed narration of an infinity of minor events. And then he would feel just that tiny bit more excluded: I think therefore I exist as a thinker in a world which often discourages such individuals. Late at night, when she went off to sleep, he would at last, on the terrace, have a taste of suspended time and of the spindrift carried by the winds. I think therefore the life of ideas is my only rampart against insignificance.

  He found himself stuck at present in a picture postcard décor, and that was just too much for someone who, whenever he received a postcard, never looked at the picture but only read the text; an unconscious mechanism which spoke volumes about both his need for self-expression and his lack of interest in places and landscapes, even at the other end of the world.

  And so it was there, on a deck chair in the antipodes, in his Bermuda shorts, that he could see as clearly as a furrow drawn in the sand what the rest of his life would be like. He would grow old in Paris to the rhythm of the seasons, increasingly out of his depth in the speed and ferociousness of his beloved city. And that is where he would die, because that was his only natural element. Climbing the three flights of stairs to his apartment would become more and more trying, but he would not move house for fear of losing the waves, the vibrations, the fluids, the phantoms that had been accumulating there from the very first day. And as long as possible he would continue to orbit around a concept, until he had the illusion he had been all the way around it. When he went out on his walks, wherever he happened to end up, he would always linger in a bistro at the bar, sipping his espresso, jotting something down in his notebook, and eyeing a passing skirt. Sooner or later he would be awarded a chair among his peers in some academy. With his little following of exegetes, who would be quick to deep-freeze his memory before he had even died, he would indulge in a few whims, a few outbursts. And one fine morning, with a peaceful expression on his face, he would be placed in a coffin in a good old tweed jacket, ready for that final journey whose destination he had questioned so often.

  On opening the red lacquered drawers of an old Chinese chest, Yves Lehaleur had a bizarre intuition: a stranger’s hand had been rummaging among the old things collected there. This was confirmed when he discovered the absence of a whisky flask that had been stamped with the initials of his paternal grandfather, an old rascal who had lit up his childhood. The magnificent Horace had given him that flask the way others give a fob watch, explaining to his grandson that there were times when a flask filled with strong liquor could save a life, but a watch, rarely. In general, this was followed by his anecdote about the time in the winter of 1954, when he got lost in a forest in the Vercors and the temperature was only ten degrees. Without my flask of gin, I’d be there still, damn it! Yves was more attached to that object than to any other, not so much for its clever design—curved to fit against the chest muscles, with a screw top held by a thin bar—nor for its noble craftsmanship—repoussé silver and peccary leather well-burnished by the old gent’s heavy paw—but because it symbolized the eccentricity of the Lehaleur clan. Even if he had no children to pass it on to, the disappearance of that object cut Yves off from his lineage, dispossessed him of his role as a transmitter of family memory. From another drawer, a brand new Dupont pen had disappeared. Yves had restored a friend’s shutters, and unsure how to pay him, the friend had thanked him with this diamond nib pen, which gave him the handwriting of a monarch for someone who wrote so little. Yves hadn’t known what to do with it, so he had put it aside for the day when he would have to write a love letter, or a letter of farewell—yet now, he had freed himself from love, and no longer ran the risk of a breaking up with anyone. He hunted around for his pocket movie camer
a and, as he expected, failed to find it. No matter how Yves tried to resist any kind of nostalgia, that camera was the only present from Pauline that he had kept. He had destroyed all his pictures of her, even the ones from the wedding, but in that camera—although he never looked at them—were a few short films that bore witness to his lost happiness; only moving pictures had that power. He had filmed Pauline while she was driving along a mountain road, they were headed for the chalet some friends had lent them for Christmas. Radiant, her cheeks rosy with the cold air, she was already describing the child they would conceive that very evening by the fireside; Yves had reflected that the day they showed it to their first-born child, that film would take on all its potency. Filled with a dread foreboding, he rushed over to a closet, opened a large metal box that, until then, had contained a leather document holder with a score by Erik Satie, annotated in the composer’s own hand. Yves’s mother had given it to him, and she had inherited it from her aunt Alice, a pianist who had met her master in 1920 at his house in Honfleur. Yves, who was utterly incapable of distinguishing the key of A from the key of D, used to feel a curious sensation when he looked at that handwriting, with its instructions for certain musical phrases: “Unostentatiously” or “With vigorous sadness.” A bitter smile on his lips, Yves wondered whether the thief—and she had to have been a woman—had stolen the score for what it represented, or merely for the value of its document holder, Cordoba leather inlaid with gold leaf.

  Which one? he wondered.

  Which one of his fair ladies of the night had committed this pathetic petty crime?

  There had been one incident three months earlier, but it had finished happily: he had caught Annette red-handed in the middle of the night pilfering a few British pounds he’d left lying around. She’d been ravaged by guilt, and Yves had consoled her, but not before lecturing her at length about trust betrayed. At the end of the night, she had obtained her pardon with the supple movement of her hips. So now the only possible culprits were Sylvie, Céline, Agnieszka and Maud, but Yves could not bring himself to suspect any of them. Sylvie even less than the others. Sylvie, the indolent quasi-ingénue, who one morning had returned a surplus banknote to him which in fact he had slipped into her previous remuneration. Céline? Céline insisted on paying her way at the restaurant, and there were times she left Yves’s bed forgetting to ask him for what she was owed. And Agnieszka? She was greedy, to be sure, but would be terrified by the thought of aggravating prostitution with a run-in with the police. Suddenly a memory came to him, so obvious it was wrenching, and yet it had been so pleasant at the time: Yves, relaxing in the bathtub, while Maud used the time to run an errand: he told her where the spare keys were, she went out for a moment, then came back to join him in the foamy bath. The next morning, all she had to do was slip the keys into her bag before leaving, then come back to the apartment once she had seen Yves ride off on his scooter to reap her villainous little harvest, before putting the keys back on the nail in the fuse box.

  Maud. The phony great lady. She’d worked so hard at seeing herself as elegance incarnate in the guise of a whore that she’d become vulgar. Far too inclined to lecture others to be innocent. After selling her body, she was reduced to selling her pride at a discount. Yves paid a great deal for her class fantasy, as he called it. Since that night, she no longer incarnated respectability but degradation; the vilest little street thief had more ethics and panache. Just as Yves thought he had been delivered from his past, now he felt dispossessed of the only key moments in his entire history.

  The prospect of confronting the villain was repulsive. Yves could already imagine the scene: first she would deny it, then she would try in vain to hide her shame with forced indignation. She would not learn her lesson from this mediocre end to their relationship, and he could never put aside his resentment. He wanted to leave her a chance to recover a bit of self-esteem.

  “Hello, Maud?”

  “Yves?”

  “It’s never been so hard to get hold of you.”

  “I’ve taken on too many appointments, you know what it’s like.”

  “We’ll go on acting as if you hadn’t robbed me.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “We’ll just say that you had to write something down in your diary and you inadvertently dropped my pen into your bag. We’ll say you needed a movie camera so you borrowed mine. We’ll say that to learn to play the piano you decided to start with Erik Satie.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “You’re such a sensitive woman, how could you be so lacking in dignity?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “You can keep it all, except the flask, it’s been in my family forever and you won’t get anything for it.”

  “Am I to understand that you suspect me of having done such a thing?”

  “I can just see you in the act, trying to figure out if this or that item had any market value, how much you could get for it, and where to offload them. You might get a thousand euros at an auction house for the musical score. Let me know when the day comes.”

  “How dare you accuse me like this—it’s absolutely hateful. Why don’t you ask some of those low-level whores who parade through your place instead.”

  “Return the flask and we won’t mention it again.”

  “And even if I were guilty, what would you do? File a complaint?”

  “I wouldn’t stop there.”

  He did not know Maud’s last name, or even her real first name, so finding her would not be easy, but Yves had time to lose and patience to spare. To obtain redress was not so important. He felt he was entitled to a genuine farewell.

  Whether God existed or not, an angel had fallen from the heavens into Denis’s bed.

  Whether God existed or not, the visitation of Marie-Jeanne Pereyres was the irrefutable sign of a celestial decision.

  Whether God existed or not, Denis had suffered the torture of martyrs. He had been deprived of the earthly love to which all men are entitled, then thrown into an abyss of asthenia, until a herald angel had rung at his door.

  Whether God existed or not, Denis was being inducted into paradise, after five long years of purgatory. In a single night, Marie-Jeanne Pereyres had erased his rancor and his loneliness, had brought a long-overdue gratification to his senses. Denis had dozed off, his hands clutching her buttocks, his face buried in her thighs, finding his oxygen in her scent and nowhere else, her hips his only mooring.

  Whether God existed or not, a superior being had the power to combine all women into a single one, to give her the perfect curves of a creature Denis could curl up to, as if she were the missing part.

  Only unbelievers need proof. His proof was breathing, alive, in his bed. Whether God existed or not, Denis would never doubt her again.

  Mia was dropped off at the hotel at nightfall, then she walked up to the villa where Philippe was waiting, irritable with boredom, ready to light the fuse to an arsenal of complaints. So he had to force himself to ask her how her work day had been, already dreading that she would utter a certain word.

  “We were at this sort of artificial inlet on the western tip of the island. This morning I was wearing a pareo and a straw hat. This afternoon I was wearing a one-piece flesh-colored Érès bathing suit. The second shoot lasted three hours and forty minutes.”

  Philippe didn’t mind people coining words, making up idiomatic expressions, if they enriched the language. But this use in French of the English word shoot carried with it too many despicable connotations and in itself alone summed up the ridiculous urgency of representing a world that did not have the slightest material reality. For Philippe, that single word conveyed all the pugnacity of advertisers, the hysteria of fashion designers, and the machine-gunning frenzy of the photographer with his unconscious desire to shoot at a living target.

  If Philippe went out of his way to criticize the cl
ichés of the fashion industry, neither did he spare any other aspect of the art of photography which, in his opinion, no longer served any purpose. After a century overloaded with images—in newspapers and advertisements, exciting or subversive, incriminating or decorative, full of lies or blaring the truth, all of them esthetically perfect—there was not a single photograph that still had the power to charm, inform, shock, or even inspire a daydream in the man on the street—who, with a cheap camera, could very well create his own iconography. The sole vocation of so-called professional photography in this day and age was to wrap up the merchandise or rob other people of their privacy. In either case, Mia was indeed a target, both as a provider, and as a victim, and Philippe took it on himself to remind her of the fact, just to reduce her value close to zero.

  “Fill me in: does this word shoot mean anything other than someone filming you with a camera? A simple photo session? If so, why do you call it shoot when all you mean is a photo session?”

  “Not even two days ago, you explained to me that the term Dasein referred to a philosophical concept which could translate to being-in-the-world.”

  Philippe looked at her.

  “So why do you use the word Dasein if all you mean is being-in-the-world?”

  Over time Philippe no longer got annoyed with this sort of argument. He was so nimble in his use of words, so quick to develop an idea; yet with Mia, he had given up on verbal sparring, went no further than the hypocritical barbs of someone who has quarreled long enough and, worn down by the other person’s arguments, is weary of trying to defend his own. Worse still, this man whose vocation was to express the world had now refined the art of saying nothing to a level of applied dialectics. Thus, he refrained from replying, I could explain it to you, but I am afraid you might fry your precious neurons, and chose simply to say, “Tomorrow I’ll try to imagine a fusion between the Dasein and the Shoot, it will keep me busy.”