She presses the play button. A woman’s voice. Panic. Ange has discovered everything and is challenging her to a duel. Marion has got hold of her number and wants an explanation because she doesn’t understand why she treated her like that. But the voice says neither Ange nor Marion; it says her name. For a few seconds, she thinks that she has left herself a message but has forgotten all about it. She is suffering from a split personality. Schizophrenia is the medical term for it, if memory serves her right; so that could be the problem. But as she listens, she realizes that it’s not her voice. I got your number from Maxime, I’m sorry to disturb you like this, I wanted to tell you. . The voice stops. I wanted to tell you that I’ve left him, I wanted to say thank you. The actress then takes several seconds to hang up. The red light stops blinking. She could almost cry. Not from sadness or joy. Something else, but she doesn’t know exactly what. It’s not every day that someone says thank you to her. For the duration of the message, the roles were reversed. She became another person’s guardian angel. And that despite the fact she never thought she could protect anyone from anything, least of all without knowing about it.
The next day, in the middle of the afternoon, she is outside the entrance to Parc Monceau. She spent all morning thinking about the actress, about Maxime, about their break, about the remark of hers that led to it. She feels as if she has rescued the actress, and since the previous day a sensation of lightness hasn’t left her. Hence the desire for green open spaces. She has chosen Parc Monceau because she has never been there before. Entering the park, she reflects how one person can change the life of another, without meaning to, by a sentence or a gesture. A gesture or a sentence that someone else could repeat dozens of times without having any effect. Without ever realizing it, a person can change another’s life. Couples are lounging on the grass and children are rough-housing with their parents. Lone men and women are reading or getting bored on the benches. Whenever she is in a park, she is always faced with the same dilemma. All those orderly paths overwhelm her. A park should be explored instinctively, without markers. But the walkways impose their fixed itineraries and lead to artificial crossings, which force one to choose different sections of the park over others. The only way to get to know the place is to follow the layout of paths, to explore them all without exception. At each fork, however, one of the paths has to be abandoned and might never be found again.
Near the pond, she notices a man sitting with his back against the trunk of a willow tree. His legs are stretched out in front of him and he uses them to support the notebook he is writing in. Through sheer concentration, he keeps the world at a distance. Further along, she sits down by the water’s edge but continues to spy on him. He doesn’t look up; he is galloping forward without moving a muscle. She imagines herself doing the same thing: emptying her head onto one page after another. But what would she write about? Her days at the offices of the SNCF! The man has lifted his head and is looking out at the surface of the water. She has never met a writer before. Do you write? For a moment she thinks she is hearing her own thoughts. But then she spots a pair of black feet in sandals just beside her. He is there every day, a man’s voice announces from on high. The new arrival has settled onto the grass twelve inches away from her. She tells herself that maybe she knows him, but no, she has never seen his face before. No doubt, she is not the sort of woman who needs to be asked permission. She should perhaps stand up, tell him that she’s taken, married, but she can’t bring herself to lie. The man has turned his attention to the surface of the water, perhaps looking for inspiration as well. Do you write? She shrugs her shoulders. At least he’s someone who tries to be funny. She can pass herself off as a prostitute, but not as a writer, an authoress, she isn’t sure what term she should use. You could be. Well, he must take her for an idiot, unless it’s the best compliment he can come up with. Actually no, she couldn’t be. And so what does she do, apart from spying on poets? The question takes her by surprise. She doesn’t spy on poets. She doesn’t know any. In fact, he’s the first one. . she’s seen. . in her life probably. . she’s never come here before. He was joking. She at once wishes she could take back her dumb reply. It must be some deep-rooted need of hers to justify herself to strangers. Especially since he doesn’t even seem to be trying to pick her up. His name is Atoki, and he insists on knowing what she does for a living. She hasn’t the faintest idea why he’s so curious. She thinks of a whole list of professions: accordion player, tiger tamer, Sunday-school teacher, champion jockey, chimney sweep, striptease artist, lunar astronaut. She has no end of choices to become something she is not for him. Tell me the truth. This Atoki person is really starting to get on her nerves. She’s an SNCF train announcer, there, that’s all. Happy now? Atoki stares at her as if he hasn’t understood. He wants to know what SNCF stands for. She may be naïve, but either this guy is pulling her leg or he was born on another planet. SNCF, the railway company. Atoki seems impressed: he has never met anyone with that profession before. It sounds like a good job to him. You’re not from around here? Atoki is a refugee, he was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo. His words sound like the opening lines of an advert for an NGO or an adoption agency. She doesn’t know where the Democratic Republic of Congo is in Africa; she prefers not to ask. Which is just as well because Atoki seems none too keen to talk about his native country. He wants to ask questions. He tells her that it must be quite something to talk into a microphone and address hundreds of people at the same time. Actually, once you get used to it. . He wants to know if she ever feels like saying the first thing that comes into her head. Changing a departure time or the number of a platform, for example. If you want to get fired, that’s a good way of going about it. Of course the idea has some appeal, but she has never thought about it. Over time, certain prohibitions have the power to merge into what is normal and violating them becomes inconceivable. It’s hardly in her interest, in any case, to defy the unwritten rules of what is pompously referred to as professional behavior. Atoki’s full attention is on her; she tries to understand the reasons for this blatant interest. A foreigner, slightly disoriented, tries to fit in, to form ties, to understand through its inhabitants the place where he has been assigned to live. Because he will probably spend the rest of his days there. The distance this man has travelled to end up sitting next to her in Parc Monceau in Paris must be the equivalent of five years of métro rides for her. She has never been to another country, not even Switzerland or Belgium. She has never been a refugee or a foreigner. And yet she thinks she can guess: no points of reference, a permanent sense of incomprehension, of rejection, of being stigmatized. And so foreigners of all sorts find themselves in parks because all parks are similar. Parks don’t reflect the tastes of a society as much as buildings do; in a park an immigrant can feel a little at home. Atoki is still not satisfied. He now wants to know what aspect of her work has astonished her the most. She makes a face. Atoki waits, as if unaware of the incongruity of his question. It feels as if she is taking part in a television quiz. What kind of thing? Anything. She is about to say, nothing, that her work is monotonous, that she sits down behind a microphone every day to read out stoically whatever she is asked to read, that the words are always the same, that the trains are rarely ever late, that everything is timed down to the last minute, that unforeseen events are kept to a minimum, that she produces nothing, invents nothing, that the only people she has contact with are her colleagues, who avoid her and whom she avoids, that many travellers are convinced that what they are hearing is a synthetic voice and not a real person. If she were born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, then yes, there would be astonishing things to relate, but in her case, honestly. Poor refugee. To have travelled all those miles and to stumble across her, who can’t even come up with a single original anecdote to tell him. Oh but actually, there is something. Atoki waits with baited breath. Recently she met a strange man in a café who was pretending to be a tramp. Although she had never seen him before, the tramp knew her. The tramp had never taken a train but he slept in the station and heard her announcing the departures and arrivals. And it was from her voice that he recognized her.