Ben called me around nine, he wanted to know if I could help with the move. He was going to put some things in a storage facility, you know, the one at the industrial dock in Gennevilliers?
“Yes, listen, I have a friend here. I’ll call you on Tuesday, OK?”
Jean was watching me, waiting for me to finish so that he could continue. So, what happened to that girl? He smiled, rather like the way an adult would smile at someone who doesn’t understand because he lacks experience.
“Her name is Adeline Vlasquez, do you know her?”
I made an effort to remember, not so much at the time, but occasionally in the days that followed, even sometimes at work when I thought about his story or let myself go and escaped into the past. Did she also go to Le Cercle, the bistro in Asnières? He nodded, yes. They were in love, at least he’d known that in his life, he was already twenty-four when they met. At that time he was working at the FNAC, the megastore, he was one of their first employees, in the days when it still meant something to work at FNAC. He made me laugh without meaning to. They’d set up house together, they were lucky and even found a little house on the hill at Puteaux at the beginning of the ’80s, before the property boom. They’d made plans for the future, and then, without warning, that fatigue of his had struck again. He’d had to quit his job. She thought he was doing drugs, or that he was cheating on her, she thought a whole bunch of things, and in spite of his efforts she ended up becoming tired of him, she’d left him two years after the election of François Mitterrand. By the time he was done, we’d finished dinner. He’d been talking for nearly two hours.
“You must be fed up, I’m boring you with my stories.”
“Why do you say that?”
He’d been telling me the life story of a guy like me, when it came down to it, but one where every episode took place between attacks of what he called his fatigue. For several years now, since Germany, where he’d earned a good living in a factory making machine tools, he’d been scraping up money from wherever he could, he loved welfare. Without it, he’d probably be dead. He’d lived a totally useless life (big smile). Later, talking with Marco, I realized that he was inexhaustible on the subject, how to live on nothing, how to make do with only the basics for as long as possible.
I suggested we move to the living room. I made coffee and he waited, his eyes turned toward the lights in the odd-numbered houses, as if he was at the movies, a spectator of his own life. We all are, obviously. No, he’d never seriously tried to live with a woman again, he’d never forgotten Adeline Vlasquez. All the same, he’d waited several years before he tried to track her down. His eyes shone as they looked at the suburb outside, for no reason, just uttering her name. He had done it, one day. It was just before meeting us again, Marco and me. I was starting to wonder what he wanted from me, apart from talking. It hadn’t been easy to find her. She’d kept the same name. She didn’t want to believe him, after all these years that hadn’t changed her one bit. She’d lived in England, after their separation she’d let herself be led on by guys for a while. Then, and he gave me his weary smile, too big and also too slow, she’d come back. She’d always had work, apparently. He told me that in a pensive tone. She was one of those women who search desperately for a man to have children with, but sometimes that takes their whole lives. Are you still angry? I asked him. He said yes, she asked me to stop harassing her. Harassing, he repeated slowly. Can you imagine? It was after midnight.
Now I wanted to get rid of him, I’d had enough of people like that around me in my life, I’d also had enough of my own memories. And yet, I don’t really know what it was, something stopped me from dismissing him with the excuse that I had work tomorrow, or that I’d already spent all that time listening to him talking, about his failed life, about everything and nothing. Adeline Vlasquez. It’s lasted my whole life, he murmured. He was smoking hand-rolled cigarettes with blue Samson tobacco, like when we were all together, during our years in high school.
“Will you roll me one, please?”
I held his hand as he lit my cigarette. His eyes were sad, seen from close-up. I decided I’d do what I could for him, if I could.
“And how’s it going now with your job?”
He smiled again in his clownish way, his face still as weary. “You must be joking, I haven’t been out in a week.”
I really think he wanted to laugh.
“You’re the first person I’ve seen in all that time.”
He stopped speaking. He often had these pauses, long ones, as if he’d gone somewhere and gotten lost on the way back, and nobody knew the name of the place. I realized it was Adeline Vlasquez country. It was a long way away, somewhere in the past, but he’d never been able to tell the difference between then and now. I think I remembered that we were good friends in the old days, but he’d never forgotten.
In the days that followed I often thought about that, and even when I told Marco about it, I wasn’t able to put a face to the name, even though I flatter myself that I never forget a face. Maybe it isn’t true, then? He’d untied his shoelaces, he was sitting there stiffly, leaning back in the armchair. I bought two of them on a whim when I first moved into this apartment, I must have been forty-six, something like that. I bought them six months later, they looked exactly like the ones my mother had bought when I was fourteen. I never sat down facing her, in one of the two armchairs. In my place she would put linen that needed darning, shirts I’d lost buttons from, and more often still, papers to be sorted. My mother had a genius for sorting, and it really drove her crazy during my childhood years. It was as if she spent my childhood sorting it into files. It struck me it would be too late to call Marie. Sometimes, our lives accelerated, and then it took us years to stem the overflow. She would understand anyway. Would she sleep tonight, or else, like the last night we’d spent together, the previous week, would she wait for me to sleep and then get up and stand by the window in her kitchen for a long time, all by herself, without switching the light on? After a while, he seemed to realize that I was there, and he looked at his watch, conspicuously, like someone who wants you to know he’s looking at his watch.
“Wow, I have to get going. Is it really two o’clock?”
I shrugged. I didn’t feel like driving him home.
“You can sleep here if you like, I don’t mind.”
He looked at me, his smile was ironic. It irritated me a little but it really was late, and I had a lot of things to do the next day.
“I get up early, all you have to do is pull the door shut behind you.”
By the time I left the bathroom, he’d rolled himself up in the blanket I’d given him, and the clearest image I still have of him from that evening, when he’d told me his whole life story, is the one of his big hand on the blanket when he said good night. And the name of that woman he’d loved badly all his life, Adeline Vlasquez. Goodnight. Yes, you too. I’ll call you. OK. I thought about F. Scott Fitzgerald. All life is a process of breaking down, where had he said that? I set my alarm for seven. At night I don’t have much time to look at my face and the damage it wears, or even the first brown age spots already appearing on my hands. Was he just skipping work, or had he called in sick? I hadn’t asked him. I’d find out soon enough anyway. He didn’t really seem to care. In any case, I wasn’t short of work. You just had to be there, not let anything show, six more years of this pace and I’d be out of it.
I had some strange dreams that night. We were teenagers, Marco and I and our girlfriends, and we were doing séances, I’d always enjoyed that. I saw myself doing it. I fell asleep at Le Cercle, I think it was. I didn’t see Adeline Vlasquez there. Then there were dreams that didn’t make any sense at all, with big fish and funerals and things. I thought I saw him walking in his underpants along the hallway where my bedroom is, I never close my bedroom door. Later, I also saw a woman, probably Marie, creeping about in a park, was it the park of the organization near Beaujon? She must have been about a hundred and was carrying a big bloodstained knife in her hand and singing a love song, India Song. That woke me before seven. I’d seen that movie a very long time ago. Benjamin and I loved the song from it. I got up without making a noise, and when I switched on the light in the kitchen, I saw the blanket neatly folded on the sofa bed, he’d already left. I don’t know what made me go to the window and look out. There he was, on the sidewalk opposite, sitting on the bench by the bus stop for routes 115, 341, and 207 A and B. I didn’t need to imagine him in a dream, he really was a guy like me. It was weird, the way he’d come back into my life, as quickly as he was going to leave it now, but for how much longer?