Back in my small one-bedroom apartment on rue des Filles-Saint-Thomas, the place was deserted, Marie had left. The bed was empty and unmade in the drab light from open window, its top sheet tossed on the floor, wrinkled, balled-up. I bent down to pick it up and saw then in the middle of the bed, on the bottom sheet, two or three drops of dried blood. These were not round, red or regular spots, but rather two parallel streaks, a large and a small one (the smaller was a miniscule replica of the larger), which, after some sort of contact or friction, had spread over two or three centimeters, the stain of which had almost disappeared, its edges hardly discernible, two streaks ingrained in the white cotton of the sheet, my bed marked by two russet dashes in the form of small and skinny cephalopods or of the armored limbs of a shellfish.
Marie, the other Marie, had told me that night, I’d understood, she’d made it clear to me, it wasn’t said explicitly when after eating we’d returned to my place on rue des Filles-Saint-Thomas, but she’d kept her tiny panties on all night and I didn’t try to take them off, I’d understood without her telling me, we’d kissed on the bed when we got back, the room was broiling, we were sweating in my single bed, both of us dripping in sweat, the sheets sticking to our clammy backs, we were kissing and frolicking around in the heavy darkness of the steamy night, I was gently playing with the soft fabric of her tiny light blue silk panties, stretching and pulling at the elastic, the rain fell violently through the open window, and we were holding each other half naked in my small bed, eyes closed listening to the storm rage like those on Elba, I no longer knew where I was, nor whom I was with, sketching gestures with one Marie that I’d finish with the other, lost in love’s limited repertoire — caresses, nudity, darkness, humidity, tenderness — and it wasn’t until much later that I realized I had, on the tip of my finger, a bit of menstrual blood.
And, mentally following the trajectory of these few drops of blood on my finger, I imagined the absurd loop linking Marie to Marie this night. This blood, soon without any definable color, consistency, or viscosity, lacking any veritable material reality, as my fingers came into contact with diverse materials throughout the night, sheets, clothes, wind, fading a bit more with each contact, softening in color, before the rain washed it away completely, these few specks of blood, which although no longer materially present were nonetheless symbolically significant, had caused me to trace mentally their course from Marie’s body, their source, through all the successive places I’d passed that night, for I must have carried that mark with me everywhere I went, from my room in my small apartment on rue des Filles-Saint-Thomas to the landing of my floor, down the staircase and soon onto the street, through Paris, down rue Vivienne, then rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs, in the rain and lightning, as though fire and water must naturally attend the mad course of those invisible blood particles on my finger as I raced to Marie’s.
I was looking at those drops of dried blood on my bed, knowing where they came from, but, in a sort of mental confusion and daze, I associated this blood with Jean-Christophe de G., as though this were his blood, as though, in my bed, there were a few drops of Jean-Christophe de G.’s blood, blood that Jean-Christophe de G. would have shed that night in Marie’s apartment, blood belonging to him, a masculine blood — blood of drama, violence, and death — and not the feminine blood it actually was, not the delicate blood of life and femininity, but of catastrophe, and, in a sudden paroxysm of irrational fear — or lucidity — I understood then that if Jean-Christophe were to die this night, I’d have to explain why there was blood on my sheets, I’d have to defend the fact that there was human blood in my bed, this vertiginous blood at once dead and alive — this unspeakable blood — which led me to link Marie to Marie the night of Jean-Christophe de G.’s death.
Marie called me in the early afternoon to inform me of his death. Jean-Baptiste is dead, she told me (and I didn’t know what to say, having always thought his name was Jean-Christophe).
II
Jean-Christophe de G.’s real name was Jean-Baptiste de Ganay — I found this out a few days later when coming across his obituary in Le Monde. It offered a brief and somber account of his life. A few lines in small font with no mention of the circumstances of his death. The names of his relatives. His wife Delphine. His son Olivier. His mother Gisèle. Nothing more, the notice similar to a brief announcement. I meditated for a while on his birth date, 1960, which suddenly seemed so distant to me, lost in the past, already deeply buried in a distant twentieth century, hazy and unapproachable, another time altogether for future generations, more so than the nineteenth century for us, due to these two ludicrous numbers at the beginning of each date, this strange and incongruous 1 and 9, reminiscent of the surreal Turbigos or Almas, city districts whose numerical correspondence on the telephone pad provided the first digits of the old Parisian telephone numbers. He was a man of our time, a contemporary in his prime, and yet his date of birth already seemed strangely archaic, as though it had expired in his lifetime, a date stuck in the past, soon without any currency and patinated by time, as if from the outset it bore within itself, like a corrosive poison hidden inside, the seed of its own dissolution, its definitive disappearance in the vast rush of time.
For a while I thought that the only time I’d ever seen Jean-Christophe de G. was the night of his death. I’d hardly caught a glimpse of him that night. He’d appeared before my eyes lying flat on a stretcher, carted out of the building at rue de la Vrillière like a figure from a dream, or a nightmare, a specter spontaneously conjured up from nothingness and then vanishing, his image, at once complete, coherent, and detailed, had suddenly materialized before me out of nothing, it came from nothing and returned to nothing, as though created ex nihilo from the very substance of the night — the brusque appearance of this man inert on a stretcher, the frightening pallor of his face behind an oxygen mask, featureless and depersonalized, his sole heraldry, his colors, reduced to his socks, black, fine, delicate, of fil d’Écosse cotton, whose texture and splendor and silver sheen I can still imagine so vividly! I thought, at that moment, it was the first time I’d seen him, but I’d already seen him a few months earlier in Tokyo. I remember the day, in Tokyo, I’d seen him by chance alongside Marie, they weren’t arm in arm but may as well have been, they were together, this had struck me immediately, a man older than she, well into his forties, close to his fifties, not without charm and elegance, he was stylish, sporting a black cashmere overcoat, a dark scarf, his thinning hair combed back. This is the only image I have of him, but his face is without detail and will undoubtedly remain so since I’ve never seen a picture of him.
In the days following Jean-Christophe de G.’s death I looked him up on the Internet and was surprised to find many hits pertaining to him personally, as well as to his family and ancestors. I was able link this information to that which Marie had shared with me, those rare moments when she confided details about their relationship to me. The night of his death Marie had told me how she’d met him in Tokyo at her exhibition’s opening at the Contemporary Art Space of Shinagawa. For obvious reasons, Marie had chosen not to carry on about Jean-Christophe de G. during the days following his death, she was still in shock, she avoided questions concerning him, but she let slip a few details during a dinner we had at the beginning of summer before her trip to Elba, intimate details she regretted having shared shortly thereafter, indiscreet remarks about their private relations, details upon which I seized immediately to dwell and expand on in my imagination. I’d also learned from Marie some information about the drama that had cast a shadow over the last months of Jean-Christophe de G.’s life. I had thus filled in the missing details and examined the murkier zones of his background, buying into the gossip and rumors, giving credence to the scandals mentioned in the press, pure slander, without proof, unmotivated — for there is no evidence, to this day, that Jean-Christophe de G. had ever consciously broken the law.