You were a virtuoso on the drums. As a teenager, you were in three rock bands: Les Atomes, Crise 17, and Dragonfly. You also sang, and you wrote the lyrics to some songs that you would play in front of a few friends, at parties or in basements on loan from parents. Your bands split up in as much as the members left the high school or the town to go live elsewhere with their parents. You stayed put, and you stopped playing in bands. You continued to practice in your basement, accompanying recorded music played through a powerful amplifier, or playing solos that could last for hours. You would come out exhausted, but exalted, as after a long trance. Some years later, when you were twenty-two, Damien, the guitarist from Dragonfly, got back in touch with you to replace the absent drummer for a concert that his current band, Lucide Lucinda, was giving in Bordeaux. When buying your train ticket, you decided to stay in Bordeaux for three days to see the town, which you did not know. The concert took place on the night of your arrival, in a center for contemporary art, on the occasion of the opening of an exhibition with the participation of the guitarist who had in the meantime become an artist. There was a crowd of young art-and music-lovers. During rehearsal, you discovered that you had lost nothing of your gift for playing in a band. Lucide Lucinda’s music was simple and effective, like English rock from the 1960s, to which the group paid tribute. After the concert you surveyed the exhibition accompanied by the musicians and their friends. You spent part of the evening with a young, tall, thin, blonde Polish artist who was exhibiting giant sculptures in the shape of organs or stones, made out of fragments of plastic mineral-water bottles. You were surprised that her hands, which were so thin, had executed such monumental work. The tops of her hands were intact, but when she reached out to show you a detail on one of the sculptures, you discovered scars on the inside of her palm and on two of her fingers. Her patient and slow assembly work succeeded, through the accumulation of small fragments, in producing vast objects. You made the analogy with your solitary musical sessions: you used to spend hours producing sounds that would vanish in the solitude of your basement, where you were your only audience. She edified, you dispersed yourself. The night was spent in various bars in the middle of town and in a nightclub with high-tech Japanese décor where you watched people dance while you drank cocktails. The next day you woke up in the room reserved for you in a two-star hotel. The wallpaper was yellow and the carpet royal blue, ornamented with the motif of the logo of this particular chain of cheap hotels. The window looked out onto a narrow white courtyard, in which the sun cast a violent light. The silence of this anonymous place plunged you into a hazy anguish. You knew nothing about this town that you had barely researched. You were going to explore it at random, asking around for information from strangers about places to visit. Shaving, you believed you saw a stranger in the mirror. It was indeed your face, but the décor, which was alien to you, and the absurdity of the situation, made you think that you were someone else. Your self-pity would have made you cry had the telephone not rung.
Who could be calling you? You picked up the receiver; it was your wife, who wanted to hear your news. Her voice, which ought to have reassured you, did nothing but reinforce, at a distance, your feeling of solitude. You told her that the concert had gone well, and you pretended to be enthusiastic about the idea of the two days of discovery afforded you. After hanging up, while you were preparing to leave the hotel, the telephone began to ring again. It was Damien, proposing you go with him to a techno-music festival on a beach at Biscarrosse. You were tempted to follow him there in order to make the most of his company and that of the musicians. But you had decided to go see the town, and the idea of hanging out with hundreds of strangers in an atmosphere of deafening music was off-putting to you. Despite his disappointment, Damien suggested some places to go see in town. Putting down the phone you would have regretted your decision had you not known that wavering made you suffer more than deciding did. You went out into the street, map in hand. You were in the center of the old town. You took a big pedestrian road, which stretched out for hundreds of meters. You looked into the fashion boutiques, the pâtisseries, the succession of shops of all kinds. There were no surprises waiting for you in this commercial hub. You arrived at a small square dominated by the post office. Disoriented old people had beached themselves on benches. A fifty-something man, to whose belt were attached several plastic shopping bags containing all his personal effects, walked by lifting one shoulder, then the next, in rhythm with his steps. He pointed with his index finger at invisible objects and murmured incomprehensible words. Other than you, no one paid him any attention. You guessed from this that he lived in the neighborhood, and that this square was his living room. Other homeless people hung around, some sitting on the ground, others standing still, waiting for who knows what. They were indifferent to each other; the passersby didn’t know they were there. They had become invisible. You approached a street sign in order to know where you were. The plaque indicated, as if in ironic commentary, “Place Saint-Projet.” You headed in the direction of the Saint-André Cathedral. The size of this gothic building impressed you; you went inside, but the darkness and the cold immediately put you off. Aside from some foreign tourists following a guide, the church was solely occupied by old ladies who were praying, seated or kneeling. The paintings referred to by a laminated sign at the entrance were hardly visible, so bad was the failing light. You went back out and, after having walked alongside the city hall, walked in the direction of the Musée des Beaux-Arts. Workers were restoring the building and sanding the large stones of the façade. You made your way through the flood of dust that the wind was blowing onto the main door and the bordering lawn. Inside, the two caretakers and the cashier were the only human presence. You perused the halls, where there was a succession of old paintings of the Italian, French, English, Flemish, and German schools. You looked at them distractedly, despite the quality of some of the works. You had the impression of having already seen this museum dozens of times, in other cities. Religious and mythological painting would take you back to a past that was known and without surprises. In provincial museums, you used to look for the most unusual paintings of little-known local masters, the originality of which derived from their minor subjects or clumsy workmanship. This kind of originality was in short supply here, unless it was in the form of a monumental panorama of the Garonne quays. The image showed commercial and maritime activity stretched out for kilometers, with innumerable details. Dozens of characters, small relative to the represented space, brought scenes to life representing the entire social spectrum. The town, idealized by a warm glow, appeared to you in an entirely different light. Perhaps you needed the mediation of an image to appreciate the urban landscape. You stayed for an hour in order to itemize the scenes in the image, to scrutinize its works of architecture, to submerge yourself in this film painted two hundred years ago, a film whose scenario you could, in your own way, have recomposed today. A few footsteps behind you brought you out of your reverie. A bored caretaker was watching you from a distance. You finished your visit in a minute: your immersion in the panorama had prevented you from paying attention to the eighteenth-century portraits around you, despite their merit. You didn’t even linger in front of the one of John Hunter by Thomas Lawrence. Your footsteps echoed in the vast gallery through which no other visitor paced. You left the museum under a cloud of white dust and started down the straight, bourgeois, elegant streets of a residential neighborhood. You looked around, furtively discovering interiors you would not see again. Along the sidewalk, the terraces of restaurants received office workers in suits, tourists, retirees. You were hungry, but you didn’t want to eat alone in a restaurant. You preferred to buy a sandwich at a bakery and to eat it on a corner in front of a public square, watching the procession of passersby. A girl came up to you to ask for a cigarette. You gave her two; she looked at you, surprised, and exaggeratedly thanked you. On your map you looked for the coordinates of a photography gallery that Damien had suggested to you. It was situated on the other side of town. Judging by the distance, it would have taken you more than an hour to get there. You passed back through the old town, relaxed. Having a goal to your walk was soothing to you. You walked along the Garonne; the quay was closed for construction; they were building a tramway. The construction works disfigured the road and pavement; you had to skirt around fences, cross over piles of sand and avoid holes dug out of the sidewalk. The fronts of old dilapidated warehouses were being renovated one by one as the construction advanced. You paid more attention to the part of town undergoing mutation than to those parts fixed in old and beautiful neighborhoods. There you imagined the life to come: the cityscape existed less for what it was than for what would soon be.