The following morning he takes a train to Paris.
He stays at the same hotel in the rue Saint-Jacques, but in a different room, and spends the first few days looking for something by Andre du Bouchet in the secondhand bookshops. He can't find anything. Like Henri of Masnuy, du Bouchet has disappeared from the map. On the fourth day he does not leave the hotel. He orders meals from room service, but hardly touches them. He finishes reading the last novel he bought and tosses it into the wastepaper basket. He sleeps and has nightmares, but when he wakes up he is sure he has not spoken in his sleep. The next day, after a long shower, he goes for a walk in the Luxembourg Gardens. Then he catches the metro and gets off at Pigalle. He eats at a restaurant on the rue La Bruyйre and sleeps with a prostitute in a little hotel on the rue Navarin. Her hair is shaved at the back but very long on top of her head. She tells him she lives on the fourth floor. There is no elevator. And it is clear that nobody lives there. It is just a room she uses for work, she and her friends.
While they make love the prostitute tells him jokes. B laughs. In his pidgin French he tries to tell her a joke too, but she doesn't understand. When they are finished, the prostitute goes to the bathroom and asks B if he wants a shower. B says no, he had a shower that morning, but all the same he goes into the bathroom to smoke a cigarette and watch her shower.
He is not surprised (or at least he doesn't let it show) when she takes off her wig and leaves it on the toilet lid. Her head is clean-shaven and he can see two relatively recent scars on her scalp. He lights a cigarette and asks how she got them. But the prostitute is already in the shower and doesn't hear him. B doesn't repeat his question. Nor does he leave the bathroom. On the contrary, he makes himself at home; he lies down on the white tiles, feeling placid and relaxed, contemplating the steam billowing out from behind the shower curtain until he can no longer see the wig, or the toilet, or the cigarette in his hand.
By the time they leave, night has fallen, and after saying good-bye he walks unhurriedly but almost without stopping from the Montmartre cemetery to the Pont Royal, by a vaguely familiar route, via the Gare Saint-Lazare. When he gets back to his hotel he looks at himself in a mirror. He is expecting a hangdog look, but what he sees is a thinnish, middle-aged man, sweating slightly from the walk, who seeks, finds, and flees his own gaze, all in a fraction of a second. The next morning he calls M in Brussels. He is not expecting her to be there. He is not expecting anyone to be there. But someone picks up the phone. It's me, says B. How are you? asks M. Well, says B. Have you found Henri Le-febvre? asks M. She must be still half asleep, thinks B. Then he says no. M laughs. She has a pretty laugh. Why are you so interested in him? she asks, still laughing. Because nobody else is, says B. And because he was good. Straightaway he thinks: I shouldn't have said that. And he thinks: M is going to hang up. He clenches his teeth and an involuntary grimace tenses his face. But M doesn't hang up.
DENTIST
He wasn't Rimbaud, he was just an Indian boy. I met him in 1986. That year, for reasons that are neither particularly germane to this story nor, it strikes me now, particularly interesting, I spent a few days in Irapuato, the Strawberry Capital, where I stayed with a dentist friend who was going through a rough patch. I thought I was the mess (my girlfriend had recently decided to put an end to our long-term relationship), but when I arrived in Irapuato, intending to take some time off, recover my peace of mind, and think about my future, I found my dentist friend, normally so discreet and composed, in a state bordering on desperation.
Ten minutes after I arrived he told me he had killed a patient. Since I didn't see how a dentist could possibly kill anyone, I begged him to calm down and tell me the whole story. The story was simple, in as much as a story of this sort can be, and from his rather disjointed telling of it I deduced that in no way could he be held responsible for anybody's death.
The story also struck me as strange. On top of his day job in a private dental clinic, which provided a more than comfortable living, my friend worked for a kind of medical cooperative for the poor and needy, categories that might appear to be synonymous, but for my friend, and above all for the ideologues who had established the charitable organization in question, there was, it seems, some kind of difference. Only two dentists had volunteered their services and there was a great deal to do. As the cooperative did not possess a dental surgery, the dentists saw patients at their respective clinics, outside business hours (as my friend put it), mainly at night, and were assisted by volunteers: dentistry students with a social conscience, keen to refine their skills.
The patient who had died was an old Indian woman who had turned up one night with an abscessed gum. The operation on the abscess had not been performed by my friend but by a student working at his clinic. The woman passed out and the student panicked. Another student called my friend. When he arrived at the clinic and tried to find out what was going on, he was confronted with a cancerous gum, clumsily incised, and soon realized there was nothing to be done. They sent the woman to the Irapuato General Hospital, where she died a week later.
Such cases were, he told me, quite rare, roughly one in a hundred thousand, and a dentist could reasonably expect never to encounter one in the whole course of his career. I said I understood, although in fact I didn't understand at all, and that night we went out drinking. As we proceeded from bar to bar (they were more or less middle-class bars) I kept thinking about the old Indian woman and the cancer gnawing at her gums.
My friend told me the story again, with a number of significant changes, which I attributed to the quantity of alcohol we had absorbed by that stage, after which we got into his Volkswagen and went to eat at a cheap restaurant on the outskirts of Irapuato. It was a striking change of scene. Before we had been rubbing shoulders with professional people, public servants, and businessmen, now we were surrounded by laborers, the unemployed, and beggars.
Meanwhile my friend's melancholy was becoming more pronounced. At midnight he began railing against Cavernas. The painter. A few years before, my friend had bought two of his engravings, which had pride of place on his living room wall. One day, at a party thrown by one of his colleagues, a dentist who lived in the Zona Rosa and, if I remember the story rightly, devoted his talents to repairing the smiles of Mexico's movie stars, my friend had tried to engage the prolific artist, who happened to be present, in conversation.
At first, Cavernas had been willing not only to converse but also to confide, revealing, without any prompting from my friend, certain intimate details of his life. At one point Cavernas proposed they share the favors of a young girl who, inexplicably, seemed to fancy the dentist rather than the painter. My friend made it clear that he didn't give a damn about the girl. He wasn't interested in a threesome; what he wanted was to buy another engraving, directly, without middle men; he didn't mind which one and the artist could name his price, as long as it was personally dedicated: "For Pancho, in memory of a wild night" or something along those lines.
From that point on, Cavernas's attitude changed. He started to look askance at me, my friend recalled. What the fuck do dentists know about art? he said. He asked if I was an out-and-out faggot or if it was just a phase I was going through. Naturally it took my friend a while to realize he was being insulted. Before he could react and explain that what he felt for Cavernas was simply the admiration of an art lover for the work of a misunderstood genius, one of the world's truly great painters, the genius had made himself scarce.