Only minutes earlier, you spoke the few sentences which make it impossible for us to stay together with the same happy-go-lucky feeling as before, sentences that mean I have to say I’m going. Not leaving now would mean losing you, and that’s why I’m leaving, to keep intact the possibility of coming back to you.
“Take care of yourself.” The tender, tender words a father says to his son before he goes away, to die. They tell me you will no longer be there to watch over me, but have you ever watched over me? You head for your Renault, turn back to face me. Then, after briefly catching my eye, your body suddenly rebels, throws itself at me, holds me tightly. For a fleeting moment, I fill myself with its smell, its warmth, then you resist and break away from me, for real. The wind carries off your sweet perfume, by the time the car starts up and drives off, there’s nothing of you left, I walk mechanically toward the bus that will take me home.
I cross the street on autopilot, watching out for the number 31 bus speeding past, I have no desire to die, the pain makes me feel unbelievably alive.
TWENTY-NINE
This twenty-ninth memory is of a short night spent writing feverishly. Remember: a little iron box, stolen because you hid it in your handbag. I gave it to you four days after we met. It held “Twenty-six tiny moments between us,” printed on pieces of paper the size of a Métro ticket. One of them said:
I’ve done the math, we’ve seen each other
Three times, it’s almost unbelievable.
Do you think you can dream something like this?
That none of it is real?
THIRTY
They’ve sold two and a half million of your Renault Twingo cars, a million of them in and around Paris, and almost one in three is black (I’ve checked). It’s in this virtually invisible model that we’re driving around the Place de la Concorde. It’s dark and raining, the windows are opaque with condensation. I try to kiss your neck. You protest sharply. “I know everyone around here.”
THIRTY-ONE
It’s a photocopy of an insurance statement that I’ve lovingly kept. You slammed on your brakes on the rue Pouchet in the Seventeenth Arrondissement, opposite the passage Berzélius, and the car behind ran into yours. On the back of the statement, where it says “Circumstances of the Accident,” still shaken by the event, you wrote: “My vehicle (A) must of knocked …”
You show it to me later, laughing at your slipup, your mistake. Sometimes, quite often actually, I read that statement, and it immediately makes me smile. You who always do the right thing, who’s always so precise in her choice of words, you easily get swamped by the contingencies of daily life. What that statement, that “must of,” reveals is a trace of you rubbing up against the world.
THIRTY-TWO
You’re having a bath (a very hot one) in my apartment. I sit down beside you on the wooden step and slip my right hand into the water, up to the elbow, it comes to rest on you. It’s an instinctive move, I have so little control over what I do when I’m with you. Talking alone takes such a lot of my concentration. My fingers glide over your breasts, your hips, stroke your stomach, move down between your legs. I kiss you and your lips open slightly, your tongue plays with mine, you close your eyes. My middle finger is intrepid but respectful, pushing gently into your pussy and between your buttocks. I fill myself with the moment, already aware that this sensual experience will only ever be a sensory memory, will never be captured by words trying to define it.
THIRTY-THREE
A text message makes my cell phone vibrate. I look at the time, and know that you’ve typed it at Kennedy Airport, where you’re about to take flight AF 544 to Paris — Charles de Gaulle. In a moment of panic before getting onto the Boeing, you write: “if anythg happens 2 me, my 2008 notebks r 4 u.” Still a respect for punctuation. I can’t help smiling and this is the reply you get: “U r crazy. But I want somethg 2 happen 2 u.”
In one of Virginia Woolf’s novels, a woman dies in an accident, a suicide perhaps? She bequeaths her personal diary to her husband. In it he discovers the existence of another man, a more and more prevalent presence as he reads on. He sets out to find this other man and, particularly, the other man’s wife.
If you died, how would I dare claim those notebooks? I can’t imagine it and yet I would do it. What you’re offering me is the subject of a play: one man knocks at the door of another man who is in mourning. They don’t know each other. The first simply says: “I’ve come to ask for your wife’s notebooks, the ones she’s written over the last year. We were in love. She left them to me.”
THIRTY-FOUR
The Porte de la Chapelle one Friday afternoon, at nearly four o’clock. I get into your little car and we head for your children’s school, you’re late, of course.
All these journeys — how many of them were there, twenty, thirty? — get confused in my memory like a multicolored mosaic. Over all those months, we saw blue skies and gray ones, driving rain and summer sun. You wore jeans, black dresses, white skirts, woolen sweaters, floaty blouses, you were too hot and you were very cold. But the rue Saint-Martin was always the same, noisy and stagnant with traffic, inside your black Renault, laden with files and papers. Our conversations covered everything and nothing.
One hour. Every Friday. I smile.
THIRTY-FIVE
Florence. I’m there for a reading and have succeeded in taking you with me. From among all the postcard memories, and other more intimate ones, I’ve chosen a dinner we had in a chic restaurant with working-class decor, as so many of them in that city are.
We’re sitting side by side and you’re talking to Luciana, the young blond woman opposite you. From time to time I turn toward you and Luciana smiles, touched by my little look which means I’m watching over you. She recognizes in it the look of attentive kindness her husband gives her when his banking job means he has to take her along to dinners with clients, and he’s worried she’s getting bored. Now it’s your turn to laugh, and because there is a growing friendship between you, you mention your husband and children, that other life I don’t belong to, and you take my hand, in a spontaneous gesture that expresses your love and your uncertainties.
THIRTY-SIX
It’s a Saturday in late October: I’m walking through the Père-Lachaise cemetery where tourists wander among the graves, getting lost down its pathways. I go slowly in the direction of the crematorium.
Hugues Léger’s body is being burned beneath the zinc cupola. I write that sentence in all its extraordinary violence. I can picture you, mute and petrified, confronted with this, with Hugues’s second, definitive disappearance. I came so that I could be there by your side, without asking whether I could. I took the initiative, it seemed the right thing to do. I sit down on a bench, send you a text, and wait.
For reasons that still escape me, now that Hugues Léger is no more, I feel a closeness to him that has nothing morbid about it: I’m not fascinated by death, but his suicide has affected me. I would even go so far as to say, without feeling presumptuous, that it overwhelms me. I know how different we were, but can now see our similarities. Is the best day of my life already behind me too?
It’s as I sit on that bench that I realize with genuine sadness that I let a friendship — between men, between writers — pass me by, and that you would have liked it if we’d become friends.
You don’t seem to figure in this memory, and yet it’s for you, and you alone, that I’m here, on this bench.