Day breaks and the photo is illuminated once again. Marie-Thérèse Réveillé and Carla Devade look off to the left, at an object beyond Henric’s muscular shoulders. There is recognition or acceptance in Carla’s gaze: that much is clear from her half-smile and gentle eyes. Marie-Thérèse, however, has a penetrating gaze: her lips are slightly open, as if she were having difficulty breathing, and her eyes are trying to fix on (trying, unsuccessfully, to nail) the object of her attention, which is presumably moving. Both women are looking in the same direction, but it’s clear that they have quite different emotional reactions to whatever it is they are seeing. Carla’s gentleness may be conditioned by ignorance. Marie-Thérèse’s insecurity, her defensive yet inquisitorial glare, may result from the sudden stripping away of various layers of experience.
Any moment now, J.-J. Goux might start to cry. The voice that warned him of the devil’s presence is still ringing, though faintly, in his ears. He is not, however, looking to the left, at the object that has attracted the women’s attention, but directly at the camera, and an infinitesimal smile is creeping over his lips, a would-be ironic smile confined, for the moment, to the safer domain of placidity.
When night falls over the photograph again, J.-J. Goux will head straight for his apartment, make himself a sandwich, watch television for exactly fifteen minutes, not one more, then sit in an armchair in the living room and call Philippe Sollers. The phone will ring five times and J.-J. will hang up slowly, holding the receiver in his right hand, raising his left hand to his lips, and touching them with two fingers, as if to check that he’s still there, that the person there is him, in a living room that’s not too big, not too small, crowded with books, and dark.
As for Carla Devade, having lost her acquiescent smile, she’ll call Marie-Thérèse Réveillé, who will pick up the phone after three rings. In a roundabout way, they’ll talk about things they don’t really want to talk about at all, and arrange to meet in three days’ time at a café on Rue Galande. Tonight Marie-Thérèse will go out on her own, with nowhere in particular to go, and Carla will shut herself in her room as soon as she hears the sound of Marc Devade’s key sliding into the lock. But for now nothing tragic will happen. Marc Devade will read an essay by a Bulgarian linguist; Guyotat will go to see a film by Jacques Rivette; Julia Kristeva will stay up late reading; Philippe Sollers will stay up late writing, and he and his wife will barely exchange a few words, shut away in their respective studies; Jacques Henric will sit down at his typewriter but nothing will occur to him, so after twenty minutes he’ll put on his leather jacket and his boots and go down to the underground parking garage and look for his Honda in the dark; for some reason the lights in the parking lot don’t seem to be working, but Henric can remember where he left his bike, so he walks in the dark, in the belly of that whale-like parking lot, without fear or apprehension of any kind, until about halfway there he hears an unusual noise (not a knocking in the pipes or the noise of a car door opening or closing) and he stops, without really understanding why, and listens, but the noise is not repeated, and now the silence is absolute.
And then the night ends (or a small part of the night, at least, a manageable part) and light wraps the photo like a bandage on fire, and there he is again, Pierre Guyotat, almost a familiar presence now, with his powerful, shiny bald head and his leather jacket, the jacket of an anarchist or a commissar from the Spanish Civil War, and his sidelong gaze, veering off to the right, as if into the space behind the photographer, as if directed at someone near or at the bar, perhaps, standing or sitting on a stool, someone whose back is turned to Guyotat and whose face would be invisible to him unless, and this is not unlikely, there is a mirror behind the bar. It may be a woman. A young woman, maybe. Guyotat looks at her reflection in the mirror and looks at the back of her neck. Guyotat’s gaze, however, is far less intense than the gaze of this woman, which is plumbing an abyss. Here we can reasonably conclude that, while Guyotat is looking at a stranger, Marie-Thérèse and Carla are looking at a man they know, although, as is usually (or, in fact, inevitably) the case, their perceptions of him are entirely different.
Let’s call these two beyond the frame X and Z. X is the woman at the bar. Z is the man who is known to Marie-Thérèse and Carla. They don’t know him very well, of course. From Carla’s gaze (which is not only gentle but protective) it could be inferred that he is young, although from Marie-Thérèse’s gaze it could also be inferred that he is a potentially dangerous individual. Who else knows Z? No one, or at least there is nothing to suggest that his presence is of any concern to the others. Maybe he’s a young writer who at some stage has tried to get his work published in Tel Quel; maybe he’s a young journalist from South America — no, from Central America — who at some point tried to write an article about the group. He may well be an ambitious young man. If he’s a Central American in Paris, as well as ambitious, he may well be bitter. Of the people sitting around the table, he knows only Marie-Thérèse, Carla, Sollers and Marc Devade. Let’s say he once visited the Tel Quel office and was introduced to those four (he also once shook hands with Marcelin Pleynet, but Pleynet’s not in the photo). He has never seen the others in his life, or only (in the cases of Guyotat and Jacques Henric) in author photos. So we can imagine the young Central American, hungry and bitter, in the Tel Quel office, and we can imagine Philippe Sollers and Marc Devade, wavering between puzzlement and indifference as they listen to him, and we can even imagine that Carla Devade is there by pure chance; she has come to meet her husband, she has brought some papers that Marc left behind on his desk, she’s there because she couldn’t stand being alone in the apartment a minute longer, etc. What we can’t imagine (or justify) in any way at all is Marie-Thérèse’s presence in the office. She is Guyotat’s partner, she doesn’t work for Tel Quel and she has no reason to be there. And yet there she is and that is where she meets the young Central American. Is she there on that day because of Carla Devade? Has Carla arranged to meet Marie-Thérèse at the office because she knows that Marc will not be coming home with her? Or has Marie-Thérèse come to meet someone else? Let’s return, discreetly, to the afternoon when the Central American came to the office on Rue Jacob to pay his respects.
It’s the end of the working day. The secretary has already gone home, and when the bell rings it’s Marc Devade who opens the door and lets the visitor in without meeting his eye. The Central American crosses the threshold and follows Marc Devade to an office at the end of the corridor. He leaves a trail of drops on the wooden floor behind him, although it stopped raining quite some time ago. Devade is, of course, oblivious to this detail; he walks ahead talking about something or other — the weather, money, chores — with that elegance that only certain Frenchmen seem to possess. In the office, which is spacious, and contains a desk, several chairs, two armchairs, and shelves full of books and magazines, Sollers is waiting, and as soon as the introductions are over the Central American hails him as a genius, one of the century’s most brilliant minds, a compliment that would be par for the course in certain tropical nations on the far side of the Atlantic but which, in the Tel Quel office and the ears of Philippe Sollers, verges on the preposterous. In fact, as soon as the Central American makes his declaration, Sollers catches Devade’s eye and both of them are wondering whether they’ve let a madman in. Deep down, however, Sollers is eighty per cent in agreement with the Central American’s appraisal, so once he has set aside the idea that the visitor might be mocking him, the conversation proceeds in an amicable fashion, at least for a start. The Central American speaks of Julia Kristeva (and winks at Sollers as he mentions that eminent Bulgarian), he speaks of Marcelin Pleynet (whom he has already met), and of Denis Roche (whose work he claims to be translating). Devade listens to him with a slightly wry smile. Sollers listens, nodding from time to time, his boredom increasing with every passing second. Suddenly, a sound of steps in the corridor. The door opens. Carla Devade appears, wearing tight corduroy trousers, flat shoes and a disconsolate smile on her pretty Mediterranean face. Marc Devade gets up from his chair; for a moment the couple whisper questions and answers. The Central American has fallen silent; Sollers is mechanically flipping through an English magazine. Then Carla and Marc walk across the room (Carla taking tentative little steps, holding her husband’s arm), the Central American stands up, is introduced, and obsequiously greets the newcomer. The conversation is immediately resumed, but the Central American’s chatter veers off in a new direction, unfortunately for him (he changes the subject from literature to the matchless beauty and grace of French women), at which point Sollers completely loses interest. Shortly afterward, the visit is brought to a close: Sollers looks at his watch, says it’s late; Devade shows the Central American to the door, shakes his hand, and the visitor, instead of waiting for the elevator, rushes down the stairs. On the second-floor landing he runs into Marie-Thérèse Réveillé. The Central American is talking to himself in Spanish, not under his breath but out loud. As their paths cross, Marie-Thérèse notices a fierce look in his eyes. They bump into each other. Both apologize. They look at each other again (and this is surprising, the way their eyes meet again after the apology), and what she sees, beneath the expedient mask of bitterness, is a well of unbearable horror and fear.