The flanks of submarines being rarely supplied with windows, no familiar yellow glow framed — why not — by cretonne curtains sends out any reassuring signal. For a moment the submersible’s expressionless albacorean profile may be glimpsed, diminishing as they each go their own way, and Céleste Oppenheim rapidly finds herself all alone at the bottom of the sea. As her eyes gradually adjust to this biotope, she begins to distinguish a bit of flora, a bit of fauna traversing the flashlight beam from time to time. Among the daphnia and sponges she encounters a bevy of moonfish, a few jellyfish of the Linuche or the pelagic kind, and a member of the “knit-striped” sea snake family. Not far away must roam dugongs and manatees, sharks, rays, and chimaeras1—all creatures that would tell an expert that she is somewhere in a marine environment of the Indo-Pacific. Opening another pocket of her Btex bag, Céleste Oppenheim pulls out a square sheet of plastic printed with contours, axes, and coordinates.
After studying it a moment, then correcting a particular angle of her horizontal progression, the young woman follows her itinerary until she reaches an area of irregular relief which — albeit informed in advance of its position by the plastic document but noticing it only at the last moment — she almost bumps into and which forms a kind of hill or even mountain beneath the waves. Fairly certain of the zone she must now be in, she stops swimming to look around for a peak marked on the diagram, a kind of column supposedly right next to the hilclass="underline" this is her objective, and it takes her a few minutes to find it.
It is, in fact, a sort of thick obelisk of an irregularity too evident, too decisive to be a natural phenomenon, and its long strands of red, green, and brown seaweed, the eel grass and Spirogyra, the Lithophyllon and Tricleocarpa colonies that carpet its flanks disguise its man-made origin rather clumsily — but it’s true that the place isn’t overrun with people wondering about its origins. Having identified this protrusion, Céleste Oppenheim begins to circle it, scrutinizing every inch of its surface until she finds what she’s looking for: a circular hole about the diameter of a bicycle wheel, apparently the entrance to a pipe it would be appropriate to enter.
Hardly has she done so when this opening closes like the diaphragm of a camera, the iris of curved leaves converging upon the center to overlap themselves into closure, and she keeps swimming until she bumps into the end of the narrow tube. There she remains immobile, cloistered in this new lock chamber that gradually begins to empty itself of water until it’s dry, when the far end opens and light appears at last, toward which Céleste Oppenheim now starts to crawl.
At the other end of this tunnel she must somehow turn herself around to get out. After taking off her flippers, which she places in a net bag, she manages to step backward onto the top rung of a ladder, which she descends. Regaining the open air in a huge and quite brightly lighted hangar, the half-blinded young woman has to blink repeatedly until her eyes are used to this new environment. As high as it is wide and constructed on several levels, with dividing walls that intersect via stairs and passageways, this hangar is furnished with machines no less cumbersome than they are unidentifiable, while part of its ground floor is a parking lot for carefully lined-up underwater scooters. Wearing striped fluorescent outfits, a number of people are busy everywhere, carrying and silently shifting things, consulting blueprints, apparently paying no attention to the young woman.
And she, for a while, contemplates this new setting without taking off the rest of her accoutrements, without even removing her mask, through the “window” of which I can make out her blank expression, watching her from my armchair in my office a few yards from the tunnel exit and separated from the general area by another window, this one of two-way glass, naturally.
Then I see her strip off her equipment, unbuckling her mask before taking off her weight belt, her stabilizer vest, diving regulator, Btex bag, and tank of Nitrox, a mixture of enriched air prescribed for such depths. Freed from these accessories, Céleste Oppenheim is now wearing nothing but her charcoal-gray neoprene wet suit, appealingly skintight, to my great delight. I see her rummage once more in one of those zippered pockets, emptying it of a few technical accessories — the flashlight, the dive map — but also pulling from a different pocket various cosmetic accessories, a comb along with a small mirror, and I watch her apply makeup, discreetly giving her face a bit of color, in little dabs, before the indifferent eyes of my employees.
I light a cigarette and take the time to smoke the whole thing — which is even more strictly forbidden in a submarine habitat but, by now it’s obvious, I am the boss here — while enjoying this show before rising and leaving my office to join her. I head over to Céleste who hadn’t noticed me right away but smiles when she recognizes me; I usher her toward my office and when we’re finally alone, I happily open my arms to her, holding her close, brushing my lips over the neoprene all the more pleasurably in that I’m very fond of the taste of salt — indeed I’m often reproached for that, I always oversalt my food.
THREE SANDWICHES AT LE BOURGET
ON THE FIRST SATURDAY in the month of February, having gone to bed quite late the previous evening, I arose quite late as well and decided to go have a sandwich in Le Bourget. This resolution was something I’d been mulling over for a while.1
Walking toward Gare du Nord, I was almost diverted from my purpose, in particular when passing the front windows of a pizza-by-the-slice place on Rue de Maubeuge* and then the kebab seller’s shopwindow on Rue de Dunkerque,* but I didn’t give in. I held out. Nothing could be allowed, despite my hunger, to interfere with my project.
At Gare du Nord I got lost for a moment in the station trying to get to the RER B, one of the five rail lines in the Réseau Express Régional serving Paris. It was not my habit to go to Le Bourget, in fact it was the first time I was attempting to go there, for reasons too long to explain. So I had never gone there. I didn’t know anyone there. I had nothing to go see there. A few escalators weren’t working, that threw me off, but in the end I found the entrance to the Réseau, then spotted a ticket vending machine, from which I obtained a round-trip ticket (I had no intention, either, of hanging around Le Bourget forever), taking advantage without any hesitation of the reduction available with a senior citizen card.
I felt some pride in swiftly and efficiently completing this self-service purchase even though, through clumsiness, I dropped a few coins, which forced me to crouch down to get them, which I don’t like doing and neither, I would imagine, do most other people with senior cards.
When I got on the train, there weren’t too many of us; a young man was sitting across from me. Through my window I watched an endless perspective of the tags and graffiti, sometimes in palimpsest, that fill the vast majority of the walls along the tracks. I pulled my notebook from my pocket (a small, oblong, beige notebook from New York, witness the price tag: BOB SLATE STATIONER $1.10) and considered writing them down but there were too many; I couldn’t manage to decipher them all and anyway other people must already have done that long before me.
As I was coming to that conclusion, the young man across from me asked where I was going. Le Bourget, I told him. With a look of concern, he informed me that I must have taken the wrong train, this one being a nonstop express to the terminus, Mitry. When I asked him if it was far, Mitry, he led me to understand that it was in fact quite far, that I was in something of a predicament; he even mimicked the gesture of a desperate fellow making an emergency phone call for help. While I was reassuring him, intimating that it wasn’t serious and I had plenty of time, he began to laugh, saying no, it was a joke, and he asked what time it was. I told him: twenty past two. That’s when the train stopped at the first station: La Plaine-Stade de France. We didn’t say much after that; the young man got off at the next station, La Courneuve-Aubervilliers,* after wishing me good day rather coolly, which didn’t seem to jibe with his practical joking, and that’s when some light hail began to fall, as I watched, on the platforms of that station. I’d brought along no hat, no umbrella, no nothing.