The loft was bigger than I had imagined. The area where Yann had his bed was separated from the area where he had his desk by a large, wall-like bookcase that was filled with boxes of negatives, magazines and an array of books. There was a row of A.E. van Vogt novels, which I remembered from Yann’s apartment in Paris. Beneath them, on the bottom shelf, were the heavy dictionaries I was looking for. And just as he claimed, there was the partial set of the Littré—two volumes of a reissued edition from the 1950s. He had Volume 1, which contained Littré’s 1880 essay “How I Came to Create a French Dictionary”. The other volume, by sheer chance, included the words beginning with p. Flicking rapidly through the musty pages, I found what I was looking for—“pavé”. A masculine noun. “Block of sandstone or hard stone, used for road surfacing”. The definition was so straightforward, I almost felt betrayed. But then my eyes were drawn to the first example of usage that he’d given. It was a quote from La Fontaine: The loyal fly-chaser picked up a paving stone, and threw it as hard as it could.
Huh? What kind of situation would cause someone deliberately to throw a heavy paving stone at a fly? Who would even think to do a thing like that? I was not very familiar with La Fontaine, so it didn’t ring any bells, though I suspected anyone who’d had their early education in France might have got it straight away. If Yann were here, he probably could have given me a hint. Unfortunately, the only way I was going to figure it out was to read La Fontaine’s Fables—Book 8, Fable 10—Littré had been thorough enough to indicate where the quote had come from. I had a quick rummage through the rows of paperbacks on Yann’s bookshelves, but there weren’t any old classics. My inability to find the fable only fuelled my urge to get a hold of it. Maybe there’d be some La Fontaine at a bookshop in Avranches. I’d look for it while I waited for my train back to Paris.
Until a short while ago, I’d felt very comfortable in Yann’s house, but now I couldn’t wait to leave, all because of a couple of little words. This felt quite fickle, even by my standards, but I couldn’t help it. That very strange combination of “fly” and “paving stone” had seized me. Yann’s bed looked inviting, but I ignored it and went back downstairs. I lay down on the sofa, which was familiar territory, and fell into a deep sleep.
The next morning, after I’d had some coffee and a walk to wake up, I dialled the number for Catherine that Yann had left for me. The phone rang for a long time before a husky voice answered.
“Is this Catherine?”
I realized that I’d neglected to learn her surname earlier, and I got flustered as I found myself forced to call her by her first name.
“Who’s this?”
“I’m Yann’s friend from Japan. We visited you a couple of days ago.”
“Oh! Yes, hello there. I’m sorry I wasn’t much of a host when you came round. Yann’s already left, hasn’t he?”
“Yes, we ended up not leaving together. I was thinking about going back to Paris today. Do you think you would be able to take me to the station, if it’s convenient?”
“Of course. There is one condition, though.”
“A condition?”
“You must come here for lunch first. After all, you don’t have any food over there, do you?”
True, I did not have any food. “I’d be very happy to come over for lunch,” I said.
“Good, I’ll come and pick you up about twelve thirty then. Did Yann give you a key?”
“No, he told me I didn’t need to lock up.”
“Really? Well, I suppose it’s just like him to go abroad without locking his front door… Just make sure the windows are closed then, to stop the rain getting in.”
After hanging up, I washed the dishes in the sink, wiped the bathroom tiles, cleared the table I was working at, and made sure that everything in the house looked decent. Then I napped on the sofa for about an hour. Catherine came a little earlier than she said she would. I heard the car coming from far away, just like she must have heard us the other day, and I was outside waiting for her when she drove around the barn towards me. A little boy was in the passenger seat, holding a teddy bear. There wasn’t anything of the baby from the photograph about him any more. He had thick blond hair flowing out from under his little cap and down to the nape of his neck. Catherine and I exchanged greetings.
“You’re David, right? Hello.” I took the boy’s hand.
“Bonjour,” David said, and smiled.
“How old is he?” I asked Catherine.
“He’s nearly two and a half.”
Of course, I couldn’t say “It must be tough”, or anything like that, but Catherine must have known that I was aware of the situation. I knew David’s name, which meant Yann had told me about him. I had climbed into the back seat and was straddling the bump in the middle, meaning I could glance back and forth between Catherine and her son. David had grown big enough to hold his teddy bear in one hand. He called it Nounours, and sounded very cheerful. He seemed to be in a good mood.
After a bit, Catherine said, “Yann has told me about you, actually.”
“Really?”
“I don’t remember when it was. He told me he had a Japanese friend who was good at idling his days away, doing nothing. He seemed proud of it. Just because the stereotype was that Japanese people were all worker bees, it didn’t mean there weren’t exceptions, he said. He never did give me a name, but I guess he must have been talking about you, right?”
“I guess so. I don’t think he knows that many idle Japanese people. Did you know that we met at a pétanque tournament?”
“Pétanque? Japanese people play pétanque?”
“Well, I just like throwing things. Camemberts, for example.”
“Camembert? The cheese? Hah!” Catherine laughed, and looked at me in the rear-view mirror.
“Iron balls, Camembert cheeses… I’ll throw anything as long as it’s round,” I said, and somehow thought about the La Fontaine character who threw the paving stone.
“You need a lot of free time to play pétanque, though. What were you doing then?”
“I was a student. Free time was the one thing I had plenty of.”
“Yes, of course. You know, as soon as I met you the other night I knew you were the friend Yann had told me about.”
“You could see me idling, even in the dark?”
“I thought I could,” she said, laughing again. “I’m starting to see why you get along so well with Yann.”
I didn’t have a response. As though to compensate for that, David started tossing his teddy bear in the air and making happy noises. I could see the bear’s eyes sewn shut with two crosses of red thread.
Catherine’s house seemed completely different by daylight. It was a well-built stone structure, all on one floor and clinging fast to a sloping piece of land, so that it seemed to be ever so slightly out of kilter. Catherine showed me to the living room, which was just off the entrance hall, and asked me to relax there while she prepared the food. The room was quite large, with old exposed beams and a wooden floor. One corner seemed to be a play area, centred around a playpen. David plonked himself down on a cushion, and started to play happily, shaking a toy that had bells on it and chewing on some building blocks. The bear sat next to him in silence.
Catherine shouted from the kitchen if I minded the meat rare. I shouted back that that was fine, and wandered over to a heavy antique bookcase. My eyes immediately fell on a series of volumes with distinctive red lettering along their spines. I couldn’t believe it—La Fontaine’s Fables. The smell of garlic tickled my nostrils, and as I watched David playing out of the corner of my eye, I reached for Book 8 and flipped the pages to Fable 10. With the book in hand, I sat on the sofa next to David’s playpen. The fable was called “The Bear and the Amateur Gardener”—La Fontaine always was fond of a crazy title.
Deep in the mountains, in a place that was barely accessible for animals and out of the question for humans, a bear lived all alone. Though bears are solitary creatures, even they even
tually grow tired of being isolated, and of having no one to talk to. As luck would have it, an elderly amateur gardener lived not too great a distance away, and he too had grown to dislike his life, filled as it was with flowers but no conversation. He wanted a friend, and so he ventured out in search of one. Soon enough, he happened to come across the bear, which had come down from the mountains with the same goal in mind. The man was scared of the bear, of course, but he invited it to his house nonetheless, and cooked it dinner. They soon discovered that they were kindred spirits, and decided to live together. The bear would go out hunting, while the man worked diligently in the garden. The bear’s most important job, however, was to chase pesky flies away from the man while he enjoyed his afternoon nap. One day, while the man was sleeping soundly, a fly came and landed on his nose. Try as he might, the bear could not chase it away. Determined to get rid of the fly no matter what, the loyal fly-chaser picked up a paving stone, and threw it as hard as it could, crushing the fly, of course, but also its friend’s head.
Thus, the bear, who possessed few powers of reasoning but was capable of a mighty throw, killed the man as he slept. There is nothing more dangerous than a stupid friend. A wise enemy is far better.
The expression le pavé de l’ours, an unwanted intervention, has its origins in this cautionary tale, and was still in use. But leaving aside the tale’s moral teachings, how on earth did a seventeenth-century poet come up with this gory scenario, one in which a bear throws a heavy paving stone to try and kill the fly, and succeeds only in splitting open his companion’s skull? OK, so the lonely bear happened to meet the old man, but that alone did not seal their fate. For one thing, there would probably not have been a paving stone around had the man not been such a keen gardener. What’s more, had he befriended almost any animal other than a bear, it wouldn’t have been able to lift the paving stone to throw it at him. And what about the little fly that came between them? It would certainly have flown off at some point if they’d just let it be, and if the brawny bear really had to throw something at it, a Camembert would have been much better. The fly would have liked the smell of the cheese, and even if it had hit the man in the head, it probably wouldn’t have injured him badly. Mind you, if the bear hadn’t thrown the stone, and had tried to swat the fly away with its powerful paws instead, the old man would probably have suffered the same grisly fate.
For a while, the terrible lengths which the fable went to in order to denounce unwanted interventions dulled my awareness of its conclusion—that there was nothing more dangerous than a foolish friend. It got me to wondering whether I was Yann’s equivalent of La Fontaine’s bear. There was “something about me” which made him talk about things he didn’t need to talk about, made him expose his wounds. That surely made me more dangerous than a stranger who was totally indifferent. Still, I hoped that our shell fires still burned for each other. Yann had once told me a fable that was somewhat similar, so I don’t think my existence bothered him or made him uncomfortable. But when I looked back at the kind of conversations we had, we spent more time on topics that mattered to us deeply than we did on ordinary day-to-day events. Of course, I couldn’t deny that my limited facility at conversation was related to that. When we first were getting to know each other, Yann would try to condense what he was saying to the basic essence, omitting any modifiers. It would be wrong, though, simply to say that this became a habit—that this was why we jumped from one big issue to the next when we talked. Words and ideas seemed to flow from us naturally. Émile Littré and Jorge Semprún became connected in some abstract way—an illusion not unlike when the tide goes out at Mont Saint-Michel and the shoals which are revealed give the impression that one could walk along them forever. In much the same way, the jump now was from Littré’s dictionary to La Fontaine’s fable. Actually, though, maybe we were swatting at flies on each other that neither of us could see. Maybe we just hadn’t found the right thing to throw. The only one who could be friends with a bear who’d never throw a paving stone at him was sitting right next to me, stroking a cloth picture book that he couldn’t read—an angel with no eyes.
“Lunch is ready,” Catherine said, calling me to the table. She had prepared beef steaks, chips and a salad of Batavian lettuce. It was like a set meal at a cafe. Catherine placed her chair where she could keep an eye on David in the full-length mirror. We began eating, and I found myself almost inhaling the food ravenously, myself now little more than a dull-witted bear. I hadn’t had any meat for two days. I tore the bread—the same kind that Catherine had given us the other day—spreading the mustard that had been served with the beef on it and gobbling it down. I told Catherine that I guess I was starved and that this meal was exactly what I’d really wanted and that it was delicious, all the while shovelling it in. Catherine said with an embarrassed smile that all she’d done was cook some meat and fry some chips from the freezer. She watched, bemused, as I demolished the whole lot in the blink of an eye, then said she’d made a dessert. I said I’d love some, but that she should finish her own meal first. Catherine hadn’t eaten half of what was on her plate, so she shrugged, and replied that she probably should. She continued eating, alternating between mouthfuls of meat, chips and vegetables, all the while stealing glances at the mirror.
“I’m taking David for his regular check-up this afternoon. He loves being in the car, and he’s always in such a good mood on check-up day. He can feel the wind, hear sounds outside the window, it’s like he can ‘see’.”
Catherine asked me about my job, my family, my life in Tokyo and how I met Yann. She didn’t seem to believe that we’d met at a pétanque tournament, instead of at university, or on a company training course, or as friends of friends, or by some other more usual means. I guess that was to be expected. Even I think that it’s strange. It was a late autumn Sunday, over a decade ago, in a park on the outskirts of Paris. Playing against local retired people, Yann proved himself to be a good thrower. I can still hear the clank of the ball that won the match. It was a tough throw, the jack surrounded by his opponent’s balls. Yann’s ball came down from a high angle, almost perpendicular, straight on top of his opponent’s, knocking it out of the way and taking its place in exactly the same location. Yann was the youngest player at the tournament, and I spoke to him at lunch, trying to compliment him, but struggling with my French. That was how we met, how our friendship started. I wondered why there weren’t any photos of pétanque in his collection. Maybe he just liked playing pétanque, and wasn’t interested enough in it to take photos of it. Catherine’s questions, I realized, were taking me—ever the idle daydreamer—to all sorts of interesting places.
At a break in the conversation, Catherine stood, went into the kitchen and brought out desert, the surface glowing a rich amber. “Homemade tarte Tatin!” she announced.
She then brought out espresso—the perfect accompaniment for apple tart.
I was full of anticipation, practically salivating, but the instant I bit into a piece, I felt a pain so sharp it was as if my jaw were falling off. I scrunched up my face in agony, and in that instant I was taken back to the suburbs of Paris on a warm spring afternoon, in Yann’s studio after a game of pétanque. I’d let slip that I was feeling a bit peckish, so Yann was poking around in the fridge.
“It’ll take a while, but I could bake a cake. Fancy it?”
“You’ll be the one baking, right?”
“Of course.”
“Then I’ll try it.”
He placed a bunch of carrots to the table, along with a cutting board, a peeler and a knife.
“Chop these up, nice and fine,” he said.
“You’re not doing it yourself?”
“Come on, you can help.”
I peeled the carrots, sliced them, then chopped them into small pieces. In the meantime, Yann had covered about half the table in a mountain of white flour. At the top of the mountain, he dug a little pond into which he cracked some eggs and added butter that had been cut into small cubes
. He kneaded the mixture before dumping in about eighty per cent of the carrots I’d chopped. He added in some sugar, dropping it all in one go, as though he were sweetening a cup of North African mint tea. I was worried he’d put too much in. He kneaded the mixture lightly, and skilfully spread it out, creating a fairly thick dough, then put the mixture into a tin with a removable base. He sprinkled the rest of the carrots and more sugar on to the top, then slipped it into the preheated oven. I was very impressed, and I told him so.
“My grandmother taught me how to do it. She used to run a pâtisserie,” he replied.
The kitchen was on the mezzanine level, and from the window I could see an old Peugeot in the automotive repair shop across the street, raised above the garage floor. I watched as the bearded mechanic worked under the car, wrench in hand. He lowered the car, and I could hear him revving up the engine. There was no way I could smell the exhaust that was coming out, but after twenty minutes I was sure I could detect a whiff of it in the air, mingling with something sweet and pleasant. It was an uneasy mix of smells.
“It’s done,” Yann said, carrying over the freshly baked cake, “but we have to let it cool a little first.” Yann started to make a pot of tea, but I couldn’t wait. Behind his back I cut a small slice and sneaked a few crumbs, and it was exactly as I nibbled on them that it happened. The hot sweetness of the cake penetrated deep into the nerve of my bad molar, and I felt a spasm of pain that ran all the way down my spine. I had to press both hands against my jaw, burying my cheeks in my palms. I crouched down in my chair, in fear.
“Are you all right? What’s wrong?” I could hear Yann asking.
“It’s my tooth… my tooth,” I moaned, barely managing to get the words out.
Yann kept asking me if I was OK, but how could I say I was OK. The pain was intense. My mouth throbbed. It felt like a wire had been yanked through my tooth. My eyes were burning. Tears were rolling down my cheeks.
That was when Yann spotted the crumbs on the table.
The Bear and the Paving Stone Page 6
