But I was talking about the hipster orderlies. I saw them come into the morgue and although I noticed something cautious in their bearing, which sat oddly with their oily, feline manner, like wannabe artists out clubbing, at first I paid no attention to their movements and their whispering until one of them opened the niche where my body was lying.
Then I got up and started watching them. Moving like seasoned professionals, they placed my body on a trolley. Then they rolled the trolley out of the morgue and along a long corridor, sloping gently upwards, which eventually led into the building’s parking garage. For a moment I thought they were stealing my body. In my delirium I imagined Cécile Lamballe, the milk-white face of Cécile Lamballe; I imagined her emerging from the darkness of the parking lot to give the pseudo-artists the sum they had demanded for the rescue of my body. But there was no one in the garage — clearly, I was still a long way from recovering my powers of reasoning or even my composure.
To tell the truth I’d been really hoping for a quiet night.
For a few moments, as I followed the orderlies between the unwelcoming rows of cars with a certain trepidation and disquiet, I experienced the dizziness I had felt in my first few minutes as a ghost. They put my body in the trunk of a gray Renault, covered all over with little dents, and we emerged from the belly of that building, which I was already beginning to think of as home, into the utter freedom of the Paris night.
I can’t remember now which avenues and streets we took. The orderlies were high, as I was able to ascertain from closer observation, and they were talking about people well beyond their social reach. My first impression was soon confirmed: they were pathetic losers, but there was something in their attitude, something, I thought at first, like hope, and then it seemed like innocence, which made me feel close to them somehow. Deep down, we were similar, not then and not in the moments leading up to my death, but they were similar to how I imagined myself at twenty-two or twenty-five, when I was still a student and still believed that one day the world was going to fall at my feet.
The Renault pulled up in front of a mansion in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods of Paris. That’s how it seemed to me, anyway. One of the pseudo-artists got out of the car and rang a bell. After a while, a voice from the darkness told him to move, no, suggested that he move a little to the right and lift his chin. The orderly did as he was told and lifted his head. The other one looked out the window of the car and waved in the direction of a television camera that was observing us from the top of the gate. The voice made a throat-clearing sound (at that point I knew that I would soon meet a man of the utmost reserve) and said that we could enter.
Straightaway the gate opened with a faint squeaking sound and the car drove in along a paved drive that snaked through a garden full of trees and shrubs, with a slightly overgrown look that owed more to whim than to neglect. We stopped beside one of the wings of the house. While the orderlies were removing my body from the trunk, I looked at the building in dismay and awe. Never in all my life had I been inside a house like that. It looked old. It must have been worth a fortune. I couldn’t say any more without stretching my knowledge of architecture.
We went in through one of the service entrances. We crossed the kitchen, which was spotless and cold like the kitchen in a restaurant that has been closed for many years, and then we followed a dim corridor at the end of which we took an elevator down to the basement. When the doors of the elevator opened, there was Jean-Claude Villeneuve. I recognized him immediately. The long white hair, the thick glasses, the gray gaze that seemed to belong to a helpless child, while the firm narrow lips denoted, on the contrary, a man who knew very well what he wanted. He was wearing jeans and a white, short-sleeved shirt. I was shocked, because in the photos of Villeneuve that I had seen, his clothes had always been elegant. Discreet, yes, but elegant. The Villeneuve before me now, by contrast, looked like an old rock star suffering from insomnia. His gait, however, was unmistakable; he moved with the same unsteadiness that I had seen so often on television, when he stepped up onto the catwalk at the end of his autumn-winter or spring-summer shows, almost as if it was a chore, hauled out by his favorite models to receive the public’s unanimous applause.
The orderlies put my body on a dark green sofa and took a few steps back, waiting for Villeneuve’s verdict. He approached my body, uncovered my face, and then without saying a word went over to a little desk made (I assume) of fine wood, from which he extracted an envelope. The orderlies took the envelope, which almost certainly contained a considerable sum of cash, though neither of them bothered to count it, and then one of them said that they would come back at seven the next morning to pick me up, and they left. Villeneueve ignored his parting words. The orderlies went out the way we’d come in; I heard the sound of the elevator and then silence. Paying no attention to my body, Villeneuve switched on a television monitor. I looked over his shoulder. The pseudo-artists were at the gate, waiting for Villeneuve to let them out. Then the car drove off into the streets of that highly exclusive neighborhood and the metal gate shut with a brief squeaking noise.
From that moment on, everything in my new supernatural life began to change, in accelerating phases that were perfectly distinct from each other, in spite of their rapid succession. Villeneuve went over to what looked like a standard hotel minibar and took out an apple juice. He removed the cap, began to drink straight from the bottle and switched off the security monitor. As he drank, he put on some music. Music I had never heard, or maybe I had, but when I listened carefully it didn’t seem familiar: electric guitars, a piano, a saxophone, a sorrowful and melancholic piece, but strong as well, as if the composer’s spirit was determined not to yield. I went over to the stereo hoping to see the name on the cover of the CD but I couldn’t see anything. Only Villeneuve’s face, which looked strange in the semi-darkness, as if being on his own again and drinking the apple juice had given him a hot flush. I noticed a drop of sweat in the middle of his cheek. A tiny drop rolling slowly down toward his chin. I also thought I could see him trembling slightly.
Then Villeneuve put the glass down beside the CD player and approached my body. For a while he looked at me as if he didn’t know what to do, though he did, or as if he was attempting to guess what hopes and desires had once agitated the contents of that plastic body bag, which were now at his disposal. He stayed like that for some time. I didn’t know what his intentions were — I’ve always been an innocent. If I’d known, I would have been nervous. But I didn’t, so I sat down in one of the comfortable leather armchairs in the room and waited.
With extreme care, Villeneuve unwrapped the parcel containing my body, rucking the bag up under my legs, and then (after two or three endless minutes) he removed it entirely and left my corpse naked on the sofa, which was upholstered with green leather. He stood up straightaway — he’d been kneeling — took off his shirt and paused, but keeping his eyes on me, and that was when I stood up too, came a little closer and saw my naked body, slightly fatter than I would have liked, but not too bad — eyes closed, an absent expression on my face — and I saw Villeneuve’s torso, a sight very few people have seen, since the great designer is renowned for his discretion among many other qualities (the press, for example, has never published photos of him at the beach), and I tried to read his expression and guess what would happen next, but all I could see in his face was diffidence; he looked more diffident than in the photos, infinitely more diffident in fact than he looked in the photos in the fashion and gossip magazines.