After the final bend in the road, he saw the town. It had grown, but all he noticed was that it had no suburbs. Besides, suburbs mark the steady growth of a town beyond its medieval walls, and no walls encircled Eparvay. No historic ramparts, no history… yet it wasn't modern, either. Blandeuil had never in his travels seen anything as quaint, outdated, and almost backward as Eparvay-an affluent backwardness, of course, but incorrigible nonetheless. It seemed no new construction had been started there since at least the '20s. Of course, the way they spoke, dressed, and behaved there wasn't like in the '20s, but it wasn't the '90s, either. Everything was insidiously out of step, or somehow off… On reflection, the notion of want best expressed the strangeness: something was wanting. Something was missing from the sky, the air, perhaps the light. But Blandeuil had only realized this far from Eparvay, when he'd discovered Paris, Rome, London, New York, and Tokyo. Now that he was headed home, everything seemed normal and legitimate; he found the rest of the world strange in hindsight.
He slowed and parked his car on the Avenue de la Republique. Everything was just as he remembered it. It was all clean, quiet, and peacefuclass="underline" residences of dressed stone, wrought-iron gates painstakingly painted slick black. Here a concierge might dust a hard-to-reach spot at the meeting of two iron volutes. Here the vestibules smelled of wax polish and fresh flowers. Here was here, the only real here Blandeuil could imagine, every other place on earth never having been anywhere but elsewhere.
Blandeuil tugged the bell on a town house. An unfamiliar concierge came to the door. At the sound of the bell, Blandeuil's parents appeared on the landing atop the flight of steps in the inner courtyard. He lifted his gaze toward them (the landing was high; at that moment Blandeuil remembered there were fifteen steps). He told himself he could predict his parents' every act down to the last detail. He'd often amused himself with this little game as a boy. He'd spy on them, then bet in his head: in a minute, maman will take off herglasses and scratch the tip of her nose, then say, "In the end, f you weigh both sides… "And Papa won't let her finish her sentence. He'll say, "My poor dear, your scales are off, I'm afraid!" And he'd be right: Madame Blandeuil's reckonings were always off. Reckonings material and immaterial alike. Her food was inedible, and she was as tone-deaf to logic as some were to song-that is to say, irremediably.
There, raising his gaze to the landing, Blandeuil made a silent bet he was sure to win. They wouldn't come down to meet him; theyd show their joy some other way, their way: Hugging each other, shoulder to shoulder, as befit parents witnessing the return of their eldest son. Martian would bring a hand to her head (That's right-whatever was I thinking? I had an older boy, and here he is.') while papa would lift his left arm up partway and wiggle his limp fingers a bit, as if stroking an invisible horse.
Blandeuil's parents matched his expectations exactly. Far from being annoyed, he was grateful, for once, that they'd stayed so much the same, and he only just managed to hold back his tears.
At dinner that night, they didn't bring up his little adventure, and he was grateful to them for that as well. At least there was one place in the world where he could forget it ever happened, where no one threw it in his face. Oh, strictly speaking, people weren't trying to be mean. They thought they were being nice by reminding him of his amorous exploit. Nor would they have minded had he given them exclusive details. How she'd been in private, the starlet, that most beautiful of all women, and to start with, was she as beautiful up close as they said, was she really perfect? After all, she had to be like the others, sculpted from the same clay, the same flesh. Softer-silkier, probably. Still, in the end he'd merely held a woman with a finer finish than the others in his arms…
He tried to keep a game face during all this chatter. He'd dodge questions like punches, and at the first opportunity break off the conversation, fleeing with his unsharable memories.
Whether they'd planned it jointly or not, his parents never broached the torturous subject. They only discussed his career, which they'd followed from afar, like the path of a star of the umpteenth magnitude.
"But really," his mother exclaimed yet again, "why ever did you pick that instrument?"
"Maman, can I help it if the dolceola only reaches a limited audience? God himself put it in my hands. He made it, so someone has to play it. There were only two dolceola virtuosos and, ever since the other one died, I'm the best the greatest! All these years I've given concerts in all the capitals of the world!"
It was true: he'd given a concert in every capital, in front of thirty people.
That night, while dining on his mother's disastrous fare, he suffered not from having once held the most beautiful woman in the world in his arms, but from being henceforth the uncontested virtuoso of a somewhat ridiculous instrument. Bah! When one wound closes, another opens: cest la vie! He'd poured himself a full glass of margaux, and was about to gulp it down in compensation when his parents informed him of Xenia's death.
Around one that morning, Blandeuil woke up again and got dressed in the half-light of his rediscovered childhood room. How could he ever have thought he'd sleep as if it were just another night, no more or less peaceful than any other, when Xenia was dead? He didn't even know how she'd died. His parents hadn't said, and it made him suspect the worst. Suicide, or something like that… He began biting his cheeks again. Suicide was suicide. Had Xenia committed suicide because of him? No. Surely not. To begin with, he didn't even know the date of this supposed suicide. It must've happened before the papers announced his affair with Lola Balbo. Even if it had happened aftereven if it'd happened the same day-what would that have proved? Quite simply, he wasn't worth suicide. The observation reassured him so much that he continued with this train of thought. He was just another guy-why hide it? — a loser, even. That gratifying adventure with Balbo had been sheer accident. She'd kidnapped him! She'd been taken with him the same way a very rich woman, weary of mink and ocelot, one day dons a rabbit fur coat on a whim. His naivete had entertained her for three weeks. Then she'd sent him back to his dolceola. He hadn't really been the worse for it; the whole time he'd been away from Eparvay, he'd had it in the back of his mind to come back to Xenia one day. But Xenia was dead.
In Blandeuil's memories, nights in Eparvay smelled of lilacs, and the air was often soft as a lover's stole. That night, he thought to sense beneath the sweetness and softness the whiff of roadkill. He shrugged it off. He'd always been too sensitive; it was one of his countless tragedies. On his too-tender soul, everything immediately left a mark. He urged himself to be tougher. All women were mortal. He hadn't seen Xenia in ten years, and it hadn't made him shed a single tear. He'd thought about her, vaguely, from time to time, when he felt a little too lonely. In Kuala Lumpur, for instance, before going on stage. Through a gap in the curtain, he'd looked out at the vast, almost empty room, a face with almond eyes surfacing now and again from an ocean of plush crimson. He'd thought about Xenia there.
Blandeuil let his steps carry him along. Ten years had gone by. Most of his friends were probably tucked away in orderly slumber right now, one hand on a wife's breast. Most, but not all. There had to be a few left drifting from bar to bar, like in the good old days.