Consolation (52 page)

1902.

1902, for Christ’s sake!

Such genius.

And because he got lost, he ended up looking into a shop window full of bakery equipment.
N.Y. Cake Supplies
. He thought of her, thought of all of them, and spent a fortune on cookie cutters.

He had never seen so many in his life. Every possible, imaginable shape . . .

He made a pile, of dogs, cats, a hen, a duck, a horse, a chick, a goat, a llama (yes, there were llama-shaped cookie cutters . . .), a star, a moon, a cloud, a sparrow, a mouse, a tractor, a boot, a fish, a frog, a flower, a tree, a strawberry, a kennel, a dove, a guitar, a firefly, a basket, a bottle and, uh, a heart.

The salesgirl asked him if he had a lot of children.

Yes, he replied.

He went back to the hotel exhausted and loaded down with carrier bags like the good little bloody stupid tourist that he was, and he couldn’t have been happier.

He took a shower, then donned his penguin suit, and spent a delightful evening. Howard gave him a big hug and called him, ‘My son!’, and introduced him to a load of fascinating people. He spoke at length with a Brazilian man about Ove Arup, and managed to find an engineer who had worked on the shells of the Sydney Opera House. The more he drank, the more fluent his English, and he even wandered out onto a terrace overlooking Central Park, chatting with a pretty young girl in the moonlight.

He eventually asked her if she was an architect.

‘Nat meeee,’ she drawled.

She was . . .

He didn’t grasp what she said. He added that that was great, then listened to her spew a load of bullshit about Paris, which was
so romantic
, and the cheese was
so good
, and the French were
such great lovers
.

He looked at her perfect teeth, her manicured fingernails, her skinny arms, listened to her non-Queen’s English, offered to get her another glass of champagne, and got lost on the way.

He bought some Sellotape and a pad of paper in a Pakistani corner store, hailed a taxi, yanked off his fake shirtfront, and stayed up late.

He wrapped each one separately: the dogs, the cats, the hen, the duck, the horse, the chick, the goat, the llama, the star, the moon, the cloud, the sparrow, the mouse, the tractor, the boot, the fish, the frog, the flower, the tree, the strawberry, the kennel, the dove, the guitar, the firefly, the basket, the bottle and the heart.

All of it nicely bundled and mixed up in a package, she’d be none the wiser.

He fell asleep thinking about her.

About her body, a little.

But mostly about her.

About her, with her body round her.

It was a huge bed, a sort of double-size obese King Size, so how was it possible?

That this woman, whom he hardly knew, was already taking up all the room?

Yet another question for Yacine.

He had his breakfast brought out to the patio, and on the hotel letterhead he drew the tribulations of a badger in New York.

His own tribulations, that is.

His pockets full of badger grease, his peregrinations around Strand’s, his reading session surrounded by bums and rebellious teenagers (he went to a lot of trouble to make sure he reproduced the graphics on the T-shirt one of them was wearing:
Keep shopping everything is under control
), his smooth badger fur in his fine tuxedo, his tail wagging in the breeze as he chats on the terrace with a badgerette who keeps badgering him about France, his night spent tearing off bits of Sellotape, getting it all stuck in his claws and . . . no . . . he wouldn’t tell her about how cramped the bed was . . .

He found the postal code for Les Marzeray on the Internet, went to the Post Office, and wrote
Kate and Co
. on the parcel.

He flew back over the ocean, immersed in the disparate lots of Downe and Barnet.

Terrible.

Then he read the letters Wilde wrote in prison.

Refreshing.

Upon arrival, he was annoyed at having lost five hours of his life. He put together his ‘solvent tenant’ file, went by Laurence’s, put his clothes, a few CDs and a few books into a bigger suitcase, and left his key ring out where she was sure to see it, on the kitchen table.

No. She wouldn’t see it there.

On the shelf in the bathroom.

A completely idiotic gesture. He still had loads of things to pick up, but oh well . . . Let’s chalk it up to that dandy’s bad influence. The same one who, after everyone had abandoned him and he was dying in a drab Paris hotel room, with wallpaper that he despised, still had the swagger to declare, ‘Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.’

So Charles went.

7

NEVER HAD HE
worked as hard as during that month of July.

Two of their projects had got past the first round. One was not terribly interesting – an administrative building that would pay the bills; the other, more exciting but far more complicated, was one that Philippe cared greatly about. The design and realization of a new urban development zone in a new suburb. It was a huge project and Charles was not easy to convince.

The land was on a slope.

‘So what?’ retorted his associate.

‘Well, let me give you just a random example . . . Here, last January 15, for instance: “When a slope is necessary in order to overcome a difference in level, it shall be less than 5%. If it is above 4%, a landing will be installed at the top and the bottom of each gradient and every 10 metres continuously. A support railing will be required at any point where the level is broken at a height of more than 0.40 metres. If this should prove technically impossible, due in particular to the topography or the disposition of existing edifices, a ramp of greater than 5% will be tolerated. This slope may attain 8% over a length less than or equal to two metres and up to . . .”’

‘Stop.’

He sat down at his work table, shaking his head. Somewhere in the midst of all those arcane Ubuesque figures, regulations were notifying them that the average slope on any plot earmarked for construction must not exceed 4%.

Oh?

He thought of the huge danger represented by the Rue Mouffetard, the Rue Lepic, the Fourvière Hill in Lyon, the
stradine
struggling up the hills of Rome . . .

And the Alfama and Chiado districts in Lisbon, and San Francisco . . .

Come on. Get to work. Let’s flatten and level and make it all uniform, since that’s what they want, to transform the country into a gigantic suburban sprawl.

And obviously it must all be sustainable development, right?

Naturally. Of course.

He consoled himself with keeping the footbridges for the end. Charles loved to draw and cogitate suspended walkways and bridges. There, at least, you could see the trace of the hand of man.

Where the void was concerned, industry still had to make concessions to the designer . . .

If he could have chosen, he would have been born in the 19th century, at a time when great engineers were also great architects. The most successful projects, to his mind, were those where certain materials were used for the first time. Concrete by Maillart, steel by Brunel and Eiffel, cast iron by Telford . . .

Yes, those fellows must have had a good time . . . Engineers in those days were also entrepreneurs, and they corrected their errors when they came to light. As a result, their errors were perfect.

The work of someone like Heinrich Gerber, Ammann or Freyssinet, or Leonhardt’s Kochertal viaduct, or Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge. And the Verrazano . . . Well, you’re wandering off, now, yes you are. You’ve got an urban development zone on your plate so zone in on it and get out your urban land use code.

‘. . . up to 12% on a length equal to or less than 0.50 metres.’

But perhaps something good would come of all his doubts. If you set yourself up to win, you’re also setting yourself up to lose. If you wanted a deal at any price, you’d end up being timid and conservative in your dealings. Not to shock . . . Philippe and Charles did agree on that point, so he worked on the project like a madman. But relaxed.

Supple, sloping.

Life was elsewhere.

He had dinner nearly every evening with young Marc. Together they discovered, at the end of the most improbable cul-de-sacs, the back rooms of dingy little bistros still open after midnight, where they would eat in silence and sample beers from all over the world.

Drunk with exhaustion, they always ended up declaring that they would write a guidebook.
A Very Sloping Gullet
, or,
Urban
Intoxication
Zone
, and then finally,
finally
, their genius would be recognized.

Then Charles would drop him off by taxi, and collapse on the mattress on the floor of his empty room.

A mattress, a duvet, soap, and a razor: that was all he had for the moment. He could hear Kate’s voice, ‘this Robinson Crusoe lifestyle saved us all’, and he fell asleep naked, rose with the first light, and got the impression that it was here, at this point, that he was beginning to build the bridge of his life.

He spoke several times by telephone to Mathilde, told her that he had left Rue Lhomond and was camping on the other side, at the foot of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève.

No, he hadn’t picked his room yet.

He was waiting until she got back . . .

He had never had such long conversations with her before, and he realized how much she had matured over the last few months. She talked to him about her father, about Laurence, about her little half-sister; she asked him if he had seen Led Zeppelin in concert, and why Claire had never had children, and was it true, this business about bumping into a door?

For the first time, Charles talked about Anouk to someone who hadn’t known her. During the night, long after he’d kissed Mathilde goodnight, he found it perfectly normal. To have shared Anouk with a heart that was the age he’d been when . . .

‘But you loved her – like, you were
in love
?’ she’d asked eventually.

And as he hadn’t been able to reply right away, while he searched for another word, a word more accurate and fair and less compromising, he heard her give a jaded grunt, which twenty years on had the effect of a slap in the face, bringing him back to his senses:

‘What a dork I am . . .’ she added. ‘Like, how else can you love someone?’

*

On the 17th, he squeezed the huge paw of his Russian chauffeur for the last time. He had just spent two days tearing out the few hairs he had left over a phantom construction site. Pavlovich had disappeared, most of the men had gone over to the Bouygues project, the few who’d stayed behind threatened to sabotage the works if they weren’t paid
syu minutu
, two hundred and fifty kilometres of cables
had
shrunk to twelve, and they still needed that authorization in order to –

‘
What
authorization?’ he fumed, without even bothering to switch to English. ‘What sort of blackmail is it this time? How much do you want altogether, for fuck’s sake?’

And where was that bastard Pavlovich? Gone over to Bouygues as well?

The project had been a shambles from the start. It wasn’t even their project to begin with, it was a friend of Philippe’s, an Italian bloke who had come and begged them
di salvargli
, to save
l’onore
and his
reputazione
and
le finanze
and
lo studio
and
la famiglia e la Santa Vergine
. He came that close to kissing their fingers on signing . . . Philippe had accepted; Charles said nothing.

He suspected that beneath it all there was a sort of devious underhand game being played, the sort to which his incorruptible associate held the secret. If they rescued the site, it meant they’d have Whosit in their pocket, and Whosit was Thingie’s right-hand man, and Thingie had 10,000 square metres to rebuild somewhere else now, and . . . In short, Charles had read the plans, thought it would be an easy job, had grabbed his dog-eared Tolstoy and, like the little Emperor, had set off with six hundred thousand men to show them what great tacticians the French were . . .

And like Bonaparte, he went home devastated.

No, not even. He couldn’t give a damn. He’d simply held Viktor’s hand in his own for a little while, and felt his knuckles, and their smiles, crack a little. In another life, they would have been good comrades . . .

He handed him a wad of roubles that he had on him. Viktor grumbled.

‘For the Russian lessons.’

‘
Nyet, nyet
,’ he insisted, still squeezing his knuckles.

‘For the kids . . .’

There, okay. He set him free.

Charles turned around one last time, and saw not the desolate plains, or the remains of famished soldiers with their frozen feet wrapped in rags or sheepskin, but a last tattoo. A barbed wire the length of an arm raised very high, to wish him lots of
shchastye
in his life . . .

*

It was hard going home, however. To live like an eternal student when life was a non-stop hectic joyride was one thing, but to skid to a stop when you had no more home – that was another sort of thrashing . . .

He didn’t have the courage to take a taxi, so he mulled over the debacle in the RER.

A wretched journey. Dreary, and filthy. To the left, tower blocks, Roma camps, and to the right . . . Why call them Roma camps, anyway? Why be so tactful, when slum would be the proper word? Let us pay tribute to globalization for allowing us to enjoy the same sights as in other countries . . . Everywhere you looked on the ballast, nothing but refuse and rubbish – and then he remembered that it was somewhere around here that Anouk had passed away.

Nana in his pissoir, and Anouk back where she had started . . .

In just such a mood, of terrible waste, he reached his own camp on the other side of the Gare du Nord.

He went straight into his partner’s office and opened his kitbag.

‘
Terror belli, decus pacis
. . .’

‘I beg your pardon?’ sighed Philippe, frowning.