At times, spurred on by nothing more than a single detail Marie had shared with me, or let slip, or which I’d discovered, I’d allow myself to build the scaffolding of further developments, distorting the facts occasionally, transforming or exaggerating them, even romanticizing them. I may have been mistaken about Jean-Christophe de G.’s intentions, I could easily doubt his sincerity when he confessed to have been betrayed by one of his own. I was capable of believing the defamatory rumors and of finding more reason to suspect illicit dealings. I’m not sure to what extent he was personally implicated in the affair he was accused of, and I ignored the question of whether the rumors of the blackmail of which he was supposedly a victim were well founded (although Marie had told me one night she’d had the feeling he was carrying a weapon during the last days of his life). I may have been mistaken in many of my assumptions about Jean-Christophe de G., but never in those about Marie, I knew Marie’s every move, I knew how she would have reacted in every circumstance, I knew her instinctively, my knowledge of her was innate, natural, I possessed absolute intelligence regarding the details of her life: I knew the truth about Marie.
Of what really went on between Marie and Jean-Christophe de G. the few months they knew each other, during the period of this relationship, which, if one were to make an exhaustive list of all the times they’d met, would amount to no more than a few nights spent together, four or five nights, no more, in between the end of January and the end of June (to which we might add a weekend in Rome, one or two lunches, and a few museum visits), no one can really be sure. I can only imagine Marie’s gestures when with him, her mood and her thoughts, on the basis of information witnessed or inferred, known or imagined, and combined with the grave, painful moments I knew Jean-Christophe de G. to have endured, joining in this way a few incontestable truths to the cracked and incomplete mosaic, full of gaps, contradictions, and inconsistencies, of the last months of Jean-Christophe de G.’s life seen through my eyes.
From the very beginning I’d been mistaken in many respects about Jean-Christophe de G. First, I continued to call him Jean-Christophe whereas his name was Jean-Baptiste. I even suspect I’d done this intentionally so as not to deprive myself of the pleasure of getting his name wrong, not that Jean-Baptiste was a better name, or more elegant, than Jean-Christophe, but the latter simply wasn’t his name, and this posthumous jab, however small, however simple, gave me great pleasure (had his name been Simon I’d have called him Pierre, I know myself). What’s more, I’d always believed that Jean-Christophe de G. was a businessman (which, in truth, he was, in a sense), and that he was a connoisseur of art, that he was a dealer or a collector of international art, and that this was how he’d met Marie in Tokyo. But if it’s true that he purchased artworks from time to time (even if only old paintings, designer furniture, or jewelry from antique shops), this was not his principle occupation. Jean-Christophe de G., like his father, but especially like his great-grandfather, Jean de Ganay, was a prominent figure in French horse racing, a breeder, owner of horses, and member of the French racing society (La Société d’Encouragement pour l’Amélioration des Races de Chevaux en France). It was in this respect, as a horse owner, that he’d gone to Japan at the end of January. He had a horse competing in the Tokyo Shimbun Hai, and it’s only by chance that, being in Tokyo at this time, he’d gone to the opening of Marie’s exhibition at the Contemporary Art Space of Shinagawa. And it was here, the night her exhibition was open to the public, that he’d seen Marie for the first time, that he’d met and conquered her (in what order we can only speculate, since it must have happened almost at once).
Ganay’s racing colors — yellow jersey, green cap — had been selected at the beginning of the twentieth century by Jean-Christophe de G.’s great-grandfather, who presided over the Société d’Encouragement from 1933 until his death. This renowned Society, founded with the mission of improving the breeding and racing of horses in France, was created a century earlier by Lord Henry Seymour, also known as Milord the Bastard (who knows where this curious nickname originated, an underworld name, from the mob, from his working-class past, his crooked deals, his sinister ways?), and it is to this Society that we owe the modernization of the Longchamp racetrack, the creation of race officials, and the institution of the first measures, still rudimentary, of testing against doping with saliva samples. It is also worth noting that we owe the establishment of the first antidoping regulations in horse racing to one of Jean-Christophe de G.’s ancestors, given the extent to which the last six months of Jean-Christophe de G.’s life were embroiled in the Zahir Affair, named after his thoroughbred competing in the Tokyo Shimbun Hai.
But it wasn’t so much the horse’s failure to compete in Tokyo as the circumstances of that failure that had affected Jean-Christophe de G. and cast a pall over the final months of his life. Talk had already spread upon the horse’s return to France, and the scandal was even harder to deny in that it had never been made public. Officially there was no Zahir Affair, there were no charges or accusations, but rumors spoke of illicit substances detected in the horse’s urine (although there was no explicit mention of anabolic steroids, there was talk of masking agents capable of preventing their detection), and of suspicions that there were ties between the horse’s trainer and a nefarious Spanish veterinarian who moved in cycling and weightlifting circles (where he no doubt benefited greatly from his veterinary knowledge). The official reason given for Zahir’s dropping out of the Tokyo Shimbun Hai, and the long and inexplicable series of sicknesses and complications that followed, cited a root abscess at risk of infection on the day of the race, for which an injection of antibiotics and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs was administered to ward off a potential fever, but nobody believed in good faith that a simple root abscess was sufficient cause to cancel on the spot a trained horse’s tour through Asia, especially one treated daily by a team of veterinary specialists. Jean-Christophe de G. withdrew Zahir from all scheduled races immediately and without explanation, abruptly canceled his participation in the Singapore Cup and the Audemars Piquet Queen Elizabeth II Cup in Hong Kong, fired the trainer without so much as a second thought, and, not without some regret, dismissed the rest of Zahir’s entire crew. Once back in France the thoroughbred was removed from the public eye and sent to the Rabey stud farm in Quettehou, Manche, a Ganay family property, and no one saw the horse for the rest of the year.
After his quick decision to exfiltrate the horse from Japan Monday morning, the day after the race, Jean-Christophe de G. canceled all Zahir’s engagements for the rest of the year and, after some dozen phone calls, arranged for the horse’s return trip to Europe himself, then, fearing complications with customs officials, he called a long-time friend, an official from the JRA, the principal organization for Japanese horse racing. After this conversation, he decided to leave that very day and to personally escort the horse to Europe. Then he called Marie and invited her to join him, which to his great surprise she accepted without question or any display of emotion. But after the call Marie felt suddenly sad, nostalgic, as she realized that she’d be returning to Paris without me, whereas only a week had passed since we’d arrived in Japan together.