“I say, well, the governor of Syria Secunda did all right for himself!”
She had had to explain the word poujadiste to John a few months earlier…
The bronzes of Lorestan gave John an opportunity to speak of his time backpacking through Iran during his studies. “It was before the ayatollahs…” Annie remembered she had admired the beautiful samples at the Cernuschi museum in Paris.
“Samples of the ayatollah?”
“No, nitwit, of the bronzes!”
They burst out laughing, nervously, then became serious again, he a bit melancholic, she on the verge of tears. To get a hold of herself, she started reading aloud entire phrases from the guide. Since they were alone in the museum, she felt like she was strolling through an immense palace, as if it were their home. Her home. “The Egyptian collection contains more than eleven thousand pieces,” she read. She showed him the “Dame de Bruxelles,” then the relief of Queen Tiyi. He nodded his head without teasing her about her very recent knowledge. “The Roman collections are structured around a few important oeuvres: remarkable Etruscan mirrors, marble busts of the imperial epoch…” Leaning over the immense model of Rome, they showed each other, with their fingers, the monuments they recognized.
“That will be our next trip!” exclaimed Annie rashly — then she bit her lip.
In another room, they saw icons, silks, Coptic textiles, and Byzantine ceramics.
“Mais c’est Byzance…” Annie murmured mechanically.
John approached her.
“What did you say?”
Annie hesitated a bit then turned toward him and taught him the expression she had heard so often in her childhood. Her grandfather, in Toulouse, would come close to the table during parties, a big smile lighting up his emaciated face that had known so many hardships and he would exclaim, full of sun and kindness: “Mais c’est Byzance!”
“How would you say that in Dutch?”
He started to think.
“Het is de hoorn des overvloeds, maybe. But there’s probably a better translation. I’ll think about it…”
The Vietnamese ceramics, the Khmer sculptures, the drums from Laos plunged John into his childhood haunted by echoes of the war in Indochina on the radio…An imposing sculpture, brought from Easter Island, lured them toward a somber corner of the museum. Speechless, they lingered for several minutes before the menacing colossus without realizing they had drawn nearer to each other and were almost touching. The neighboring rooms presented the Inca, Mayan, and Aztec civilizations. Annie leaned in and read the texts diligently. John preferred to look first at the objects at length, then throw a rapid glance at the little cards glued to the displays. Annie murmured:
“…the feather-working art of the Indians of the great Amazon forests…”
She burst out laughing. John started to smile and looked at her, intrigued.
“No, it’s nothing, it’s a word that made me laugh: plumassier. I don’t know it. It made me think of plumard. L’art du plumard…Bed art…It’s funny.”
John didn’t laugh. “Vind je dit grappig?” He saw the words float before his eyes with the French translation: “Et vous trouvez ça drôle?” which he knew because one day Annie had made him listen to a sketch by Coluche which had ended in those words. Again another thing that didn’t work: she never laughed at his witticisms. By the time he explained them, dissected them, they had obviously lost all their appeal. “You’re terribly serious, you don’t have a sense of humor…” Petra and Mieneke, on the other hand, had appreciated his deadpan humor, the little absurdities he delivered with a very serious air. Again, it was necessary first to understand them…
Inside the museum, he discovered a Gothic cloister. They sat for a moment on the cold stone. They had promised, one day, at the beginning of their adventure, to visit all the cloisters in all the abbeys of Europe… “A vast undertaking.” “Yes, I know, I was waiting for that,” thought John, hearing the voice of de Gaulle whispering his words to him. “I’ll go alone to the cloisters,” Annie said to herself, “maybe I’ll put on a little black veil, they’ll think I’m a penitent…” She pulled herself together. “What do I have to atone for? This is nuts! There’s a part of me that feels guilty…” They left the cloister, took a wrong turn and found themselves in an immense room of pre-Columbian art. They were standing looking at a sort of miniature totem pole when John suddenly felt himself assailed by a tide of colors and sounds. Words formed in his head, it was as if he were a spectator looking on as it happened, and he distinctly heard his voice pronounce this phrase, in French:
“Annie, I’m sorry but it’s over between us.”
Immediately he felt a chasm open beneath his feet. No! He wanted to take back his words but it was impossible. The words were no longer there, there were only garish images, colors, echoes that bored into his skull. Terrified, he turned toward Annie but she was no longer at his side. Feverishly, he looked around the big room then saw her in the distance, her back to him. She was on the other side of the room, frozen before a display. He approached her, wondering how she had managed to walk away without him hearing. He touched her shoulder, she gave a start and turned around, shaken, shocked, looking haggard. But it was impossible, she couldn’t have heard him. Why this fright, then? He noticed a sort of gray mummy in the display. It was a terrifying skeleton, an adolescent embalmed in a strange position, as if crouching. His bones were distinctly visible, one could make out the pieces of skin now turned to leather, one could surmise his gaze in his sunken eye sockets. Annie nestled herself in John’s arms and started to cry.
Now they were too tired to go admire the glassware, the stained glass windows, the tinware, and the ceramics the guide promised in the chapel. The lacework, the textiles, the clothing…
“Another time,” she said.
“Yeah,” he responded. “I shall return.”
“Why are you speaking in English?”
“It’s actually a famous saying. It’s what General MacArthur said while leaving the Philippines under the threat of the Japanese, during the war.”
“Do you know how to talk other than in quotations? Do you know that you’re extremely tiring? And for starters, it’s not I shall return but We shall return.”
She had said all that with a lot of tenderness. They returned to the hotel, making a detour to pass under the archway of the Cinquentenaire. This time, in the park, their hands searched for each other, found each other. Back at the hotel, they went to have a drink at the restaurant bar. They decided together to stay there for dinner instead of going to the Grand Place, as John had planned. The waitress was Italian, friendly, and discreet. Annie took a sip of wine and remarked:
“You’re certainly quiet, for once!”
He smiled, took her hands and looked her in the eyes. He said nothing, but the words jostled around in his head.
“Today, I almost lost you…But I realized that all the phrases that brought me toward our separation…toward what I thought was my decision to separate, were not from me…In a certain way, I heard voices. Quotations. Words, collars of sounds that came from I don’t know where. When you were getting on my nerves, I saw phrases appear. ‘What an idiot!’ ‘What am I doing with this woman?’ ‘This relationship isn’t going anywhere.’ ‘Let’s finish it!’ Words…But the important thing is that atrocious feeling of solitude that gripped me in a second when I thought it was over. That was concrete. That was me. My body, my soul, call it what you will…It’s then that I understood, at that precise moment. (By what miracle did you walk away from me when I thought you were by my side?)”