It started when I turned forty, like most guys I know. I sponsor a little orphan, a little Haitian boy as it happens, and every year I keep the letter he sends me, a completely stereotypical letter to the white man who sends him a check for twenty-five euros every month. A year after my divorce, I also started volunteering in a hospital, but that way of doing good didn’t suit me all that much, because often, the next day, I’d start to feel symptoms, and more than once I fell ill. How can you give a hand to someone who’s dying anyway? I never figured out the answer to that. There were support groups too, with shrinks, only it bored me, and I stopped, it wasn’t my thing. Then I met a woman I was hoping to get love from, but nothing like that happened. I was forty-four when I discovered that you can hope to get love in return for a washing machine, two installments on a car, and other things like that. When I realized that, I was cured of that woman, and of others too in the long run. I wasn’t seeing much of Benjamin at the time. Just after our separation, I tried to live close to him, I’d call him every two or three days, but even during the times when he needed me I often disturbed him. So I found myself calling him less often, he was growing up. I’m very proud of him, he’s done well so far. But I can’t say anything about that pride because I think all I’ve done is pay, since he was eleven, and he’s twenty-six now. I missed all that, I sometimes tell myself. He soon got into the habit of living with a sporadic father, his mother didn’t set him against me too much, I let things go during the divorce proceedings in order not to hurt them. Two years later was the time of the woman with the installments who needed a washing machine, a time also of unemployment and depression, and I couldn’t pay the alimony in time. A bailiff came at seven in the morning. I’ve never dared to ask Benjamin if his mother told him.
He looked around him from time to time. The waiters were young, there was a blonde woman in black behind the cash register, looking at her cell phone. She couldn’t have been much more than thirty. She kept up an amused conversation with each of the guys coming and going between the bar and the back room. We were in one of the booths, the kind that seemed meant especially for people on their own. He often walked past this café, he told me later. I can’t really remember when he told me that. It was still one of the pleasures he could afford on Rue d’Amsterdam. It wasn’t the only one, obviously. But apart from the papers in the case for his laptop, which he’d also had to sell, he had almost nothing left. He’d found a little ground-floor apartment, which he rented in La Garenne-Colombes. I offered him a cigarette to replace the words we didn’t say during that first meeting. He took it without thinking, with two white fingers that must have made me think of the claws of a bird of prey. I often lack imagination, so when I talk about myself I can’t help talking about him, and when I talk about him I’m talking about me. Because it was him, because it was me. I learned that in class, was I still sitting at the same desk as him, or next to Marc-André? Anyway, it stayed with me. It’s the same with Martin Luther King’s speech, I Have a Dream, and also Tired of Waiting, we must have been in eighth grade. He’d left school. His mother had found a job in Marseilles, they’d lived there for a year. Then when he came back, we talked again, but we didn’t have the same life anymore, and he wasn’t at school. He lit it greedily, as if he’d been craving it for a long time. Cigarettes are expensive.
“Do you still smoke?”
I smiled, without meaning to.
Yes, even though I’m over fifty I still smoke, though less than before.
“Five a day, something like that,” I said, as if I needed to justify myself to him.
He didn’t seem to be listening. But even though he didn’t look as if he was listening, I had plenty of time to realize that he hadn’t forgotten any of the things I’d said to him, or done for him. We smoked for a while in silence. A couple came and sat down in the booth next to ours, in the tinted light, which seemed to come from a fluorescent tube. The waiter took our orders. I was thinking about Benjamin, what was he up to right now? Sometimes, in all those years, I thought I was going to see him, turning a corner in Paris, without our having talked. And so, because I wanted it so much to happen, when he did see me it came at the right time, he’d been feeling sad, or he’d even been thinking about me. Not about his monthly check, or his cell phone contract, like when he was starting out in life, but about me, his father. He looked at the end of his cigarette and asked me if I’d ever been to Cuba. No, I’d never been to Cuba. Still haven’t.
“You never liked traveling.”
He was the same as he’d always been, ever since he was a child, obsessed with traveling. I pushed him further on this. “How about you, still roaming?”
He shook his head. He looked toward the couple we’d seen come in when we’d sat down. “A bit, but after a while, you know …”
He made a broad gesture that ended in mid-air, just like that.
“Did you get tired of it?”
I wanted to set my mind at rest about his love of traveling, which had been with him since childhood.
“After a while, you know … You can’t spend your whole life traveling, you need to set down roots somewhere.”
I nodded, I think. I have roots, I told myself later. But what could that mean to a guy like him?
“I’d like to be able to go back to Africa one last time.”
I immediately remembered the book in his bedroom when we were children.
“By the way, how’s your mother?”
He didn’t seem surprised by my asking him about his mother. In fact, he even seemed pleased.
“Not bad for her age.”
He leaned slightly in the direction of the bar. Outside, the noise of the crowd walking down toward Cour du Havre. The same noise for years. I’ve often forgotten it.
“I don’t see much of her, she lives in an apartment in Marseilles, with a cousin of hers. But she’s fine, I mean, she forgets a lot of things.”
“In Marseilles?”
“Yes, the rents are too high in Paris. She has a cousin down there, they share a small apartment. They’re old now. Do you know what I mean?”
I said yes, of course I know what you mean.
I already knew that later, when I got home, other fragments of the story we shared would come back to me from time to time and keep me awake. I’d always liked his mother even though, like mine with me, we both knew they didn’t need us in their lives, and that in some way we were like enemies because we’d been born. His mother was the concierge of an apartment building, and also worked as a cleaner. In the evening, sometimes, she’d go dancing with her friends in clubs in Argenteuil, La Garenne, and Paris. She loved dancing. He’d go with her, as soon as he became a teenager. I remembered I envied him that. Now the couple was embracing, what age could they be? When the guy listened to her talking, that little blonde with extensions, he’d look up at the ceiling, with a smile on his lips, his body strained toward her. My wife took the decision to get a divorce after reading an American book called Mars Versus Venus. Or something like that. She only ever read in bed, slowly. For three months, that book was on the coffee table in the living room. Benjamin also noticed it. I don’t know why the scenes of happiness that I see, in cafés or elsewhere, always remind me of that book lying on the coffee table in the living room all that time, and I’m not able to wipe out the memory.