He slipped the photo under his shirt and made his way back to the closet where the watchman was moaning in his sleep.
"Wake up! Good God, wake up!"
"Huh? What? Who are you?" The man's eyes widened at this apparition, for once not even monstrous.
"A visitor. I didn't notice what time it was; you have to let me out, I want to go home!"
The poor lout did as he said without being asked twice.
"Good night!" Dorsay yelled back from the bottom of the steps.
"Good night, yeah right!" the watchman grumbled.
He locked the monumental door and drew back into the depths of the museum to pick up the thread of his nightmares again, as a reader might get back to a book.
The night was clear and cold. Dorsay crossed the street, skirting the pedestal of the bronze schoolboy. The Museum Hotel was still open. He walked in. The hotelkeeper welcomed him with a surprise not entirely free of suspicion. A traveler without bags who slept in the same place twice: what was he hiding?
"I'll pay in advance, like last night," he told her.
"As you wish," she replied, relieved.
He didn't have enough cash on him. He paid with a debit card.
"I'm going to go out and have a bite before bed."
"There are hardly any restaurants in the neighborhood. I can bring a meal tray up to your room."
He wondered what it would consist of. Parma ham, salmon steak, apple pie? In truth, he felt ready to devour almost anything.
"And wine, too, please-white."
"Chablis?"
"Chablis."
"Very good, sir. I'll bring it up in half an hour?"
"Perfect. Um… your niece isn't here, is she? Maybe she stepped out?"
The hotelkeeper looked him up and down with an icy eye, all her prejudices instantly restored. What did this fellow want with the girl? "My niece?"
"Yes, the young lady I saw this morning. She's quite friendly!"
"She's only here in the daytime"
"Ah! So I'll have the pleasure of seeing her again tomorrow morning, then… Make sure the Chablis is nice and chilled, won't you?"
"I will. I keep it in the fridge."
As he slipped his key into the door to his room-305, the same as last night-Dorsay let out a victorious little laugh. The old lady could wrinkle her nose all she wanted; the girl with the rosy cheeks would inevitably be his. It was written-or rather, photographed!
He walked in, hung his raincoat and his blazer in the closet, kicked off his shoes. On his breast, between shirt and undershirt, the photo rustled. He undid two buttons and removed it carefully from its hiding place. He gazed upon it. The young woman was beautifulso beautiful! And he was… well, less handsome, of course, and not as young, but as though transfigured by the brilliance of his companion, regenerated by her grace. He pulled the bedspread back and hid the photo under the pillow. The meal was in… half an hour? He had time for a bath. He turned on the tap. While the water ran, he walked to the window. He drew back the curtains. In the moonlight, with a gaze turned directly on him, the bronze schoolboy was smiling.
Lozere, December I994-January 1995
The Pavilion and the Linden
pon his return from a war in the course of which he had, as was his custom, defeated many an enemy and reduced many a citadel to gravel and ash, King Guita wished to take the air beneath a certain aged pavilion. In the most solitary courtyard of the palace it stood, of simple stone, its floor adorned by a mosaic of no great originality. No legend clung to its grounds. A linden hung over the pavilion, whose furnishings in their entirety consisted of a single wooden bench. In his now-distant childhood days, King Guita had spent many a long and easy evening there, playing in the wan scent of lime at his governess' feet.
When, on his return, he found the pavilion leveled and the linden felled, he flew into a royal fury. He summoned the palace architect and demanded he explain himself. In a quavering voice, the man pleaded for his life. Wasn't it his duty, foreseeing as he did His Majesty's victory and the treasure he would certainly bring back, to enlarge the palace storehouses? And since that courtyard, forgotten by one and all, with its crumbling pavilion and its ailing linden, adjoined one of the storerooms already overflowing with the spoils of earlier wars…
King Guita saw that the architect believed himself to have acted rightly, and so for a time spared his life. But a feeling of irreparable loss overcame him whenever his thoughts returned to the coolness of tile beneath his knees and the scent a light wind from the tapering leaves wafted toward him. Then it seemed that he had lost much more than a city, more even than a province: something like his kingdom's secret heart. One day, when this feeling assailed him with greater force than usual, his gaze settled on the architect. He frowned, and had him put to death.
He ordered the man's successor to erect the pavilion once more in a faithfully recreated courtyard, and to have a tree, like the first in every way, transplanted there. When all was done at last, he went one night and sat alone on the wooden bench. And lingered there, sniffing the air in vain. The tree's very odor seemed foreign and unnatural to him. When the light had grown so dim that the mosaic might no longer be made out, he let himself slip from the bench onto the floor, onto the very spot where he had spent so many peaceful hours as a child. He ran his fingers over the mosaic's surface without finding the same terrain of tiny ridges, the same infinitesimal fissures, the same traces of wear his fingertips remembered. The pitiless ruler wept. He who had never before trembled was terrified. The pavilion and the linden, so lately but a memory, were a reality once more. Suddenly the king doubted his powers of recall, his own name, his very kingship. And if he were not King Guita, who was he, by God, and what was he doing in this strange palace on this hostile night?
To ensure he might never again suffer so nightmarish a feeling, he forbade henceforth any change, be it even in the tiniest detail, to the city. It could of course grow, and maintaining it would always be a sacred duty, but what already was would forever so remain, enjoying inalienable rights and total precedence over what was yet to come, over all the unformed and inchoate future.
The king's character and project seemed to capture the imaginations of his subjects and their children, as for many years, almost unto the present day, his will was done. Today, few dare venture into the city's distant heart where, on days of high wind, the last buildings from the Founder's era finish breaking apart, waves subsiding in a sea of rubble. Abandoned, too, are the plans to preserve the knotted and dangerous maze of medieval alleys. We have our people's long allegiance to the folly of a single man to thank for this our dwelling place: the sole existing urban order aimed at totality, a concentric and cumulative keep, time and the city turning ideally round a memory like a wheel around an axle.
Lozere, December 1990
Another Story
or anyone who feels deeply about property, there's nothing like owning an island. Nothing comes closer to pure possession; nothing else goes quite so far in confirming the illusion of sovereign, absolute selfhood. When a man has almost everything, buying an island is the next step.
That's what Erwin Laurencais did. To sniff out where the rich get their riches, you have to be one of them, or else few things seem so vague and nebulous as money. You see it all around, bathing those who have it in its light and warmth, filling and transfiguring them… And yet the average man, who manages food, clothes, shelter, warmth, and transport without undue worry or exertion, will sometimes want a slightly clearer idea of the gulf between himself and the truly wealthy. A pointless, even spiteful, curiosity. Just as well, then, that money isn't my subject. The Laurencais fortune plays but an incidental part in this tale. Erwin Laurencais was so rich he'd bought himself no tiny islet, but a good-sized island.