Nothing, a girl, said Rousselot, trying to adopt the same tone as his compatriot. Then he said a rather hurried good-bye and, as he was climbing the stairs, he heard the bum’s voice telling him that death was the only sure thing. My name is Enzo Cherubini and I’m telling you, death is the only sure thing there is. When Rousselot turned around, the bum was walking off in the opposite direction.
That night he called Simone but she wasn’t home. He talked for a while with the old woman who looked after the child, then hung up. At ten, Riquelme came visiting. Reluctant to go out, Rousselot said he felt feverish and nauseous, but his excuses were futile. Sadly, he came to the realization that Paris had transformed his colleague into a force of nature it was futile to resist. That night they dined in a little restaurant with a charcoal grill in the Rue Racine, where they were joined by the Spanish journalist, named Paco Morral, who liked to imitate the Buenos Aires accent, very badly, and believed that Spanish cinema was far better than French cinema, much denser, an opinion shared by Riquelme.
The meal went on and on, and Rousselot began to feel ill. When he returned to his hotel at four in the morning, he was running a fever and began to vomit. He woke shortly before midday with the feeling that he had lived in Paris for many years. He went through the pockets of his jacket looking for the cell phone that he had managed to extract from Riquelme, and called Morini. A woman, the one who had previously spoken to Riquelme, he supposed, picked up the receiver and told him that Monsieur Morini had left that morning to spend a few days with his parents. Rousselot’s first thought was that she was lying, or that before his hurried departure, the director had lied to her. He said he was an Argentine journalist who wanted to interview Morini for a well-known magazine with a big circulation, widely read all over Latin America, from Argentina to Mexico. The only problem, he alleged, was that he had limited time, since he had to fly home in a couple of days. Humbly he asked for the address of Morini’s parents. He didn’t have to insist. The woman listened politely, then gave him the name of a village in Normandy, followed by a street and a number.
Rousselot thanked her, then called Simone. No one was home. Suddenly he realized that he didn’t even know what day it was. He thought of asking one of the hotel staff but felt embarrassed. He called Riquelme. A hoarse voice answered on the other end of the line. Rousselot asked him about the village where Morini’s parents lived: did he know where it was? Who’s Morini? asked Riquelme. Rousselot had to remind him and explain part of the story again. No idea, said Riquelme, and hung up. After feeling annoyed for a while, Rousselot told himself it was better that way, if Riquelme lost interest in the whole business. Then he packed his suitcase and went to the train station.
The trip to Normandy gave him time to go back over what he had done since arriving in Paris. An absolute zero lit up in his mind, then delicately disappeared forever. The train stopped in Rouen. Other Argentines, and Rousselot himself in other circumstances, would have set off at once to explore the town, like bloodhounds following the scent of Flaubert. But he didn’t even leave the station; he waited twenty minutes for the train to Caen, thinking of Simone, who personified the grace of French women, and of Riquelme and his odd journalist friend: in the end, both of them were more interested in rummaging through their own failures than in discovering someone else’s story, however singular it might be, and perhaps that wasn’t so unusual. People are only interested in themselves, he concluded gravely.
From Caen, he took a taxi to Le Hamel. He was surprised to find that the address he had been given in Paris corresponded to a hotel. The hotel had four stories and was not without a certain charm, but it was shut until the beginning of the season. For half an hour Rousselot walked around in the vicinity, wondering if the woman who lived with Morini had sent him on a wild goose chase, until eventually he began to feel tired and headed for the port. In a bar he was told that he’d be very lucky to find a hotel open in Le Hamel. The patron, a cadaverously pale guy with red hair, suggested he go to Arromanches, unless he wanted to sleep in one of the auberges that stayed open all year round. Rousselot thanked him and went looking for a taxi.
He booked into the best hotel he could find in Arromanches, a pile made of brick, stone and wood, which creaked in the gusting wind. Tonight I will dream of Proust, he thought. Then he called Simone’s place and talked to the old lady who looked after her child. Madame won’t be home until after four; she has an orgy tonight, said the woman. A what? asked Rousselot. The woman repeated the sentence. My God, thought Rousselot, and hung up without saying good-bye. To make things worse, that night he didn’t dream of Proust but of Buenos Aires, where thousands of Riquelmes had taken up residence in the Argentine PEN Club, all armed with tickets to Paris, all shouting, all cursing a name, the name of someone or something, but Rousselot couldn’t hear it properly; it was like a tongue-twister or a password they were trying to keep secret although it was gnawing their insides away.
The next morning, at breakfast, he was stunned to discover that he had no money left. Le Hamel was three or four kilometers from Arromanches; he decided to walk. To lift his spirits, he told himself that on D-Day the English soldiers had landed on those beaches. But his spirits remained as low as could be, and although he had thought it might take half an hour, in the end it took him more than twice that time to reach Le Hamel. On the way he started doing sums, remembering how much money he had brought with him to Europe, how much he’d had left when he arrived in Paris, how much he had spent on meals, on Simone (quite a lot, he thought, melancholically), on Riquelme, on taxis (they’ve been ripping me off the whole time!), and wondering whether he could have been robbed at some point without realizing. The only people who could have done that, he concluded gallantly, were the Spanish journalist and Riquelme. And the idea didn’t seem preposterous in those surroundings where so many lives had been lost.
He observed Morini’s hotel from the beach. By that stage, anyone else would have given up. For anyone else, circling around that hotel would have been as good as admitting to idiocy, or to a sort of degradation that Rousselot thought of as Parisian, or cinematic, or even literary, although for him the word “literary” retained all its original luster, or some of it, at least. In his situation, anyone else would have been calling the Argentine embassy, inventing a credible lie and borrowing some money to pay for the hotel. But, instead of gritting his teeth and making the phone calls, Rousselot rang the hotel’s doorbell and was not surprised to hear the voice of an old woman who, leaning out of one of the windows on the second floor, asked him what he wanted and was not surprised by his reply: I need to see your son. Then the old woman disappeared, and Rousselot waited by the door for what seemed like an eternity.
He kept checking his pulse and touching his forehead to see if he had a fever. When the door finally opened, he saw a lean, rather swarthy face, with large bags under the eyes; it was, he judged, the face of a degenerate, and it was vaguely familiar. Morini invited him in. My parents, he said, have been working as caretakers of this hotel for more than thirty years. They sat down in the lobby, where the armchairs were protected from dust by enormous sheets embroidered with the hotel’s monogram. On one wall Rousselot saw an oil painting of the beaches of Le Hamel, with bathers in belle époque costumes, while opposite, a collection of portraits of famous guests (or so he supposed) observed them from a zone infiltrated by mist. He shivered. I am Alvaro Rousselot, he said, the author of Solitude—I mean, the author of Nights on the Pampas.