Angela realised she had raised her voice, and all at once she fell silent. She stroked Pierre’s head, but he remained impassive.
‘There’s something strange about you. Something I don’t get. We have to make the best of these moments, we mustn’t think about horrible things. I know we’ll have to stop seeing each other sooner or later, but until then hold me close and let’s try to be happy. Please.’
Pierre stubbed out his cigarette and hugged her, felt her hot breath against his chest, kissed her face, then saw her tears.
‘Don’t cry. When the time comes I’ll disappear without a fuss. I may go away.’
‘Where?’ she asked with a sniff.
‘I don’t know yet. Perhaps to Yugoslavia, where my father lives.’
Angela studied his face. ‘You really want to leave?’
‘There’s this business about my father, my letters have started being returned to me. And since the age of thirteen I’ve wanted to see him again, and see a country that isn’t like this one, a socialist country, a place where we’ve won.’
‘Odoacre says Yugoslavia is a social-fascist country.’
Pierre couldn’t bear to hear Montroni’s name mentioned any longer. ‘Well I don’t know, at least they’ve had a revolution there. And anyway I don’t trust what Odoacre, Benfenati and all the others say. As far as they’re concerned, whatever the Party says is true. You have to see with your own eyes to judge. My father is no fascist, and yet he’s stayed there. That might be a reason, don’t you think?’
Angela nodded gloomily. ‘This is what Fanti tells you, isn’t it?’
‘No, Christ almighty, it’s what I think!’ He leapt to his feet, then faltered and stopped in the middle of the room, paralysed by his thoughts. He walked towards the window, and peered through the half-open shutters.
She studied the thin shadow that stood out against the blades of light filtering through.
He spoke with his back towards her. ‘I want to see something different, Angela. When I think that my life is going to be spent between the ballroom and the Bar Aurora I can feel myself dying. At the demonstrations, when I get a kicking, I don’t feel like a hero. My father, my brother and everyone else have fought for a good cause, but people my age have nothing but stories about partisans and weapons that are left to rust in cellars, nothing to do but dream of the revolution that never comes. What are we supposed to do? Find a good job, a nice girl to marry, have children, wait till we’re old enough to have people listen to our stories, that time we fought the riot squad? I can’t see myself at the age of seventy playing briscola with Brando and Sticleina. I’m sorry. I don’t want to end up like the guys in the bar.’
Angela felt a thump inside her, like something breaking, and her eyes filled with tears once more.
Pierre went on. ‘Thinking about the revolution, taking up arms. All those things that other people have done in the past, during the war and before, when we were children. But when they brag to their friends, they know they’ve lost. I’ve got a Party card as well, but I don’t want to see the world through the eyes of Montroni or the editor of L’Unità.’ He turned to her. ‘I want to go and see and judge for myself. I want something else.’
Angela wiped her eyes. ‘I was starving before I married Odoacre, and Ferruccio. you know. Life isn’t like it is in the films, you don’t bump into Cary Grant on the train, he doesn’t fall in love with you and take you to America. Go to Yugoslavia if you want, then come back and tell me if it’s that much better than it is here.’
Pierre went over and hugged her and held her tight. They settled into the sofa, and he cuddled her gently, trying to make her go to sleep. ‘Shhhh. Let’s pretend we’re two hares in our lair, and it’s snowing outside and very cold and we’ve got loads of food set aside for the winter, and we’re going to keep each other warm with our fur.’
As he talked and ran a hand through her hair, he heard her breathing more heavily.
She was right, there was something strange about him. And it certainly wasn’t easy to understand.
His father, Yugoslavia, the Tito fascists.
Sleep finally extinguished his thoughts.
Chapter 28
Palm Springs, California, 15 March
Jean-Jacques Bondurant forced himself to look at the screen.
He was having trouble keeping his eyelids open, he was sweating, Nom de Dieu! If he had so much as arched his eyebrow, his toupee would have fallen over his eyes. God, it was hot in there.
Now he ran the fingertips of his right hand over his forehead, keeping his thumb pressed into the hollow of his temple to prevent the imminent migraine. Just before he did that, he ran his index finger across the damp zone above the top of his nose. Until the previous day, a tuft of hair had connected his eyebrows. ‘Thin it? Thin it? It’s going to take more than a little bit of retouching!’ the beautician had told him.
Even stranger was the flat surface left by the removal of his mole. He was having trouble getting used to it.
What else? His teeth had been whitened, his gold ring removed (with some difficulty).
If anyone had seen them there, sitting side by side, two replicas of a single face in the shimmering light: Bondurant, exhausted by the interminable matinee of Cary Grant comedies; Grant very attentive, his arms lying loosely on his thighs, his buttocks perched on the edge of the little sofa. But there was no one else there in the sitting room.
At that moment, in the black-and-white film, a third (younger) version of Cary Grant sat with legs crossed and arms folded, a beatific smile on his face, the expression of a man savouring his own triumph to the last drop.
‘Freeze!’ One of the two full-colour versions, raising an arm, the one who wasn’t perspiring.
A frozen frame, one of the scenes from the denouement of The Awful Truth, 1937.
‘You try that now!’ Cary ordered his double. ‘But first of all compose yourself, for heaven’s sake! You’re drenched in sweat!’
Bondurant mopped himself dry with his handkerchief, and straightened the hairpiece on the top of his cranium.
‘There’s no need to be so agitated, I’ve told you you’re making progress! Keep at it, I want to see you in this pose, the same smile, the same air of self-satisfaction.’
Bondurant crossed his legs, took his elbows in his hands, then arched his spine backwards and tried to imitate the smile.
‘We’re not quite there, Mr Bondurant. The attitude is missing. In fact I’ll go further than that: the feeling is missing. I’ll try to put you in the right frame of mind. You’re forty-three, isn’t that right?’
Bondurant nodded too vigorously, and had to rearrange his perruque. Grant noticed and exploded: ‘Christ almighty, where on earth did they find that little wig that does nothing but slip around all over the place? In a joke shop?’
He took from his pocket a black leather-bound notebook, scribbled a note, then continued. ‘Let’s get back to us: in your forty-three years of life, has there ever been a moment when you’ve said to yourself, “The worst is past”?’
In what sense. Oh! Of course! Le plus gros est fait! He had understood. Grant was referring to a moment of complacency, in which il se la coula douce.
‘But yes, of course, when the war was over and I returned from the Italian front.’
‘Fine, Mr Bondurant. When you got back to Montreal I expect they threw a party for you, or am I mistaken?’
‘Of course, and I was delighted. I saw my fiancée, Charlotte, again for the first time in five years.’
‘Fine. Shut your eyes.’
Bondurant did so.