‘That’s never revealed,’ I answered. ‘I am someone who doesn’t want to be found, so it’s not part of the game to say who.’
‘And the person looking for you who you seem to know so well,’ Christine asked again, ‘does he know you?’
‘Once he knew me, let’s suppose that we were great friends, once. But this was a long time ago, outside the frame of the book.’
‘And why is he looking for you with such determination?’
‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘It’s hard to tell, I don’t even know that and I’m writing the book. Perhaps he’s looking for a past, an answer to something. Perhaps he would like to grasp something that escaped him in the past. In a way he is looking for himself. I mean, it’s as if he were looking for himself, looking for me: that often happens in books, it’s literature.’ I paused, as if I had reached a crucial point and said confidentially: ‘Actually, as it turns out, there are also two women.’
‘Ah, finally,’ Christine exclaimed, ‘now it’s getting more interesting.’
‘I’m afraid not,’ I went on, ‘since they too are outside the frame, they don’t belong to the story.’
‘Oh, come on,’ said Christine, ‘is everything outside the frame in this book? Why don’t you tell me what’s inside the frame?’
‘I told you, there is someone looking for someone else, there is someone looking for me, the book is his looking for me.’
‘So then tell me the story a bit better!’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘it begins like this: he arrives in Bombay, he has the address of a third-rate hotel where I once stayed and he sets off on his search. And there he meets a girl who knew me in the past and she tells him that I’ve fallen ill, that I went to hospital, and then that I had contacts with some people in the south of India. So he goes off to look for me in hospital, which turns out to be a false trail, and then he leaves Bombay and begins a journey, still with the excuse that he is looking for me, whereas the truth is that he is travelling on his own account for his own reasons; the book is mainly that: his travelling. He has a whole series of encounters, naturally, because when one travels one meets people. He arrives in Madras, goes around the city, the temples in the vicinity, and in a scholarly society he finds a few equivocal clues as to my whereabouts. And in the end he arrives in Goa, where, however, he had to go anyway for reasons of his own.’
Christine was following me with attention now, sucking a mint stick and watching me. ‘In Goa,’ she said, ‘Goa of all places, interesting. And what happens there?’
‘In Goa there are a lot of other encounters,’ I continued, ‘he wanders about here and there, and then one evening he arrives in a certain town and there he understands everything.’
‘Which is what?’
‘Oh, well,’ I said, ‘that he wasn’t finding me partly for the very simple reason that I had assumed another name. And he manages to find out what it is. In the end it wasn’t impossible to find out because it was a name that had to do with himself, in the past. Except that I had altered the name, camouflaged it. I don’t know how he got to it, but the fact is that he did, maybe it was luck.’
‘And what is this name?’
‘Nightingale,’ I said.
‘Nice name,’ said Christine. ‘Go on.’
‘Well, then obviously he manages to find out where I am, pretending he has some important business with me: someone tells him that I am in a luxury hotel on the coast, a place like this.’
‘All righty,’ said Christine, ‘now you’d better tell the story really welclass="underline" we’re on set.’
‘Right,’ I said, ‘you’ve got it: I’ll take this as the set. Let’s suppose that it’s an evening like this evening, warm and spicy, a first-class hotel, by the sea, a big terrace with tables and candles, soft music, waiters who move about attentively, discreetly, the best food, naturally, with an international cuisine. I am sitting at a table with a beautiful woman, a girl like yourself, with a foreign look to her; we are at a table on the opposite side to the one we’re sitting at now, the girl facing the sea, while I on the other hand am looking toward the other tables. We are talking amicably, the woman laughs from time to time, you can see from her shoulders, exactly like yourself. At a certain point. .’ I stopped talking and looked across the terrace, my eye running over the people eating at the other tables. Christine had snapped her mint stick, she was holding it in a corner of her mouth as if it were a cigarette, following intently. ‘At a certain point?’ she asked. ‘What happens at a certain point?’
‘At a certain point I see him. He’s at a table toward the back on the other side of the terrace. He’s sitting the same way I’m sitting, we are face to face. He’s with a woman, too, but she has her back to me and I can’t see who she is. Perhaps I know her, or I think I know her, she reminds me of somebody, of two people even, she could be either of them. But from a distance like this, with the light from the candles, it’s difficult to say for sure, and then the terrace is very big, just like this one. He probably tells the woman not to turn round, he looks at me for a long time, without moving, he has a satisfied expression, he’s almost smiling. Perhaps he too thinks he recognises the woman I’m with, she reminds him of someone, two people even, she could be either of them.’
‘In short, the man who was looking for you has managed to find you,’ said Christine.
‘Not exactly,’ I said, ‘it’s not quite like that. He has been looking at me for a long time, and now that he has found me he no longer has any desire to find me. I’m sorry to split hairs but that’s how it is. And I have no desire to be found either. We both think exactly the same thing; we look at each other, but nothing more.’
‘And then?’ asked Christine, ‘what happens next?’
‘One of the two finishes drinking his coffee, folds his napkin, adjusts his tie, let’s suppose he has a tie, gestures to the waiter to come, pays his bill, gets up, politely draws back the chair of the lady who’s with him and who gets up together with him, and goes. That’s it, the book is finished.’
Christine looked at me doubtfully. ‘It seems rather a lame ending to me,’ she says, putting down her cup.
‘Right, it does to me too,’ I said, likewise putting down my cup, ‘but I can’t think of any other solution.’
‘End of story, end of meal,’ said Christine. ‘Both at the same time.’
We lit cigarettes and I made a sign to the waiter. ‘Listen, Christine,’ I said, ‘you’ll have to excuse me but I’ve changed my mind, I’d like to buy you dinner, I think I have enough money.’
‘No way,’ she protested, ‘the agreement was explicit, a friendly dinner and we both pay our own.’
‘Please,’ I insisted, ‘take it as an apology for having bored you so much.’
‘But I’ve enjoyed myself immensely,’ retorted Christine, ‘I insist on going halves.’
The waiter came up to me and whispered something she couldn’t hear, then padded off in his discreet way. ‘It’s no good arguing,’ I said, ‘the dinner is gratis, a customer at the hotel who wishes to remain anonymous has paid for you.’ She looked at me in amazement. ‘Must be an admirer of yours,’ I said, ‘somebody more gallant than myself.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ said Christine. Then, pretending to take offence: ‘It’s not fair,’ she said, ‘you’d already arranged everything with the waiter.’
The verandas that led to the rooms had a roof of polished wood, forming a kind of cloister that looked out on the dark of the vegetation at the back of the hotel. We must have been amongst the first to retire, almost all the other guests had stayed on, in deckchairs, listening to music on the terrace. We walked side by side, in silence. At the end of the veranda a big moth whirred for a moment.