It was as though, in leaving, she'd taken Dorsay's weakness with her. He got enough strength back to stand up. He was tempted to follow the director, but what was point, since the damage was done? Part of the room had remained out of his sight until now. He swept the room with his gaze. It contained a library with overloaded shelves, armoires, and assorted filing cabinets, and an executive desk on which great inventory ledgers bound in black canvas stood beside piles of documents and photos. There were also masses of documents that awaited cataloguing, in boxes or stacks, plopped here and there on chairs, even the floor.
Two windows overlooked the street. He walked over to one and spotted the bronze schoolboy, this time from behind. Beyond the traffic island and the statue, he made out the glass door of the Museum Hotel. He had a fleeting thought of the girl. With its waters of unmoving asphalt, the street seemed a river on whose other shore she awaited him like an unlikely little fiancee. He shrugged. Always with the fancies! He walked to the desk. He picked himself out easily from a group of young people in the first photo his gaze fell upon. Rogan '65. In Bermuda shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, he held a short brunette with blandly pretty features in a tight embrace. He'd forgotten her name, but remembered that in the end she'd preferred Macassar. Good old Macassar! He was one of Dorsav's three hundred subscribers. Banker. All-time ladies' man. He rarely missed a launch party. He'd show up, jovial, the Financial Times sticking out of his blazer pocket. He never stayed long. "Bad timing. Got a date. A real squealer. I insisted on coming, but I have to run. Save me a Japan imperial, won't you?" A faithful friend, Macassar, but never introduce him to your woman. Dorsay had never introduced him to Fulvia. He put the photo back down. In the next he was sitting at a table, probably at La Palette, with Lozec'h and Doblinon. The young guard. The dream team. That photo was from the '70s. Before Lozec'h made it big. They were rapierthin, all three. Thin and well dressed, and by God, funny-looking! But what a fire in their eyes! He was touched. Here was the whole of youth in a snapshot: hope, fervor, and now… What? A novelist with a print run of a hundred thousand copies, a poet of three hundred, and a philosopher of a hundred twenty-five. A hundred twenty-five in a good year, because Doblinon's recent Heraclitus was, well, sorry, a bear to get through. He felt a prickling in his eyes. He sniffed, and went on to another photo. He started. Him and Hostia, naked, entwined on a bed in black and white. It wasn't pornographic-just private. So private that Dorsay couldn't imagine who'd taken it. He hadn't asked himself that question with the two before because they hadn't at all been of a private nature. Anyone could've snuck away from the group or the table for a moment and snapped a shot. But this third photo was completely different. He was sure no one had ever taken a picture of them like this, him and Hostia, even without their knowing. Since Hostia was still living in the dorms then, and he was single, they'd always met up at his place, where there were no two-way mirrors or voyeur's peepholes. Besides, their affair had remained a secret, without either of them actually meaning for it to turn out that way. Well, then? What eyes had spied on their embrace? What hands had framed and captured it? How many similar photos were there in this bundle, these piles, these filing cabinets? Admittedly, the indiscreet image was still almost chaste by the standards of the age. But if, in fact, as Dorsay had reason to suspect, the material in the museum's collections consisted of his entire life, there had to be other, less "artistic" ones…They had no right! The simple fact of that snapshot belonging to a third party without Dorsav's consent amounted to a criminal offense. Privacy? It was first among the rights of man, from which the rest followed! And yet, amidst his anger, he was flooded with doubt. Hadn't he, over the course of his poetry collections, taken an oath of shamelessness? That pathetic and accursed specimen, the authentic archetype of the Artist-wasn't it that poor devil of a flasher by the high school who offered up to sudden gusts and the laughter of little girls a strip of trembling flesh? Unless he'd only pretended, only aped the poets with his phony words set in the sham ivory of the page… A pretend-poet: a fine fate!
An ambulance siren brutally yanked him from his reflections. Photo in hand, he ran to the window. That was it, it had come for him; all this was of a piece: the blue and white van with its garish flashing lights and electric shrieking, and the photo showing him and Hostia cheek to cheek and belly to belly. His calling was reduced to an eccentricity and his loves to casual encounters. The ambulance parked in front of the museum. Two men sprang out and hurried around the back of the vehicle, which they opened to pull out a stretcher. Dorsay realized that if he remained standing here like a stick-in-the-mud, in two minutes they'd come and take him away on that stretcher despite his protests. He thought he heard, closing on him in succession, the doors of the ambulance, then the hospital, then the common room where they'd coop him up with actual patients suffering from disgusting, terrifying actual diseases… He tore out of the director's office.
Much later, when Dorsay ventured out of his broom closet, he saw that night had fallen and the museum was closed. At night, the building was placed under the surveillance of a single soused watchman. Curled up at the back of a booth wallpapered with truck photos, he was sleeping with his head on arms crossed atop a table, his slumber shot through with terrible visions. Sometimes he woke with a cry. Then he remained upright for a moment, wide-eyed and covered in sweat, before plunging in again like a man fishing for horrors. It went without saying he was no bother to Dorsay, who borrowed his flashlight and visited the rooms of the museum one by one. These explorations confirmed all his suspicions. He came back down embittered from the attic, where all the pains and humiliations that lay ahead in his final days were evoked. It was one thing to know what abyss we were all drifting toward, and another to see ourselves sinking there through letters, documents, photos, and objects testifying to our decline. The poet's cane, his hearing aid, his supporter underwear. Worse yet, the exhibit didn't settle that obscene question no creator could evade: would posterity remember his name? This museum-absurd, in posse, or prematurelimited itself to recounting the life of Jean-Pierre Dorsay. Nothing in the heaps of relics it held led him to suppose that they would be worshipped one day. Still, he hadn't hesitated to look for the slightest trace of the survival of his body of work after his death, which he now knew down to the day and hour, reasonably distant in and of themselves… Emptying the file cabinets, upending boxes, he'd tracked the posthumous reprinting, the theses, the redeeming essays, the least article that would acknowledge him. In vain. The period covered by the Dorsay collection stopped short at the date of his death. When at last he was convinced no evidence existed, hope returned. No hand had yet been played. His adventure had but pushed back by a few years the lid of smoke or fog that kept all mortals from seeing the future. Someday, in a few hundred or even few thousand lofty souls, his name might awaken the same fraternal impulse he always felt on hearing those of his favorite poets. Nothing guaranteed it, but nothing ruled it out. The idea perked him up considerably. As a result, other curiosities came back to him. Since he hadn't reached the end of the road, would he write again, love again, before the distressing deadlines of the attic? He began emptying drawers and cabinets again, without finding anything at first. Finally, as he was losing hope, his gaze fell on a black and white photo quite similar to the one that showed him in Hostia's arms. But it wasn't Hostia nestled up against him, nor any of the other women in his past. Nor was it a stranger. In fact, he had met her this morning for the first time in his life. It was the young woman come from the provinces to help her aunt at the hotel, the girl with rosy cheeks who'd stepped out of an English print. Dorsay's heart filled with joy. If life still had such a godsend in store, then he wanted to face it once more, with its gray vagaries and black certainties.