Lovers on All Saints' Day (11 page)

I dialed Fauchey’s number three times. A recording kept saying the telephone was switched off or out of range.

Then I phoned my father. I put up with his preliminary sarcasm, the indirect complaints about my absence—he asked if I was coming to take revenge after my banishment to the Isle of Ur—and I put up with the terrible excuses he offered for not seeing me: activities he gave up after my mother left, seeing friends who’d gradually left him alone since he started drinking. I didn’t hang up, despite his comments, and maybe that’s why my proposal had an air of a considered resolution, not of affection or nostalgia, impressions that would have provoked his flight.

“I was planning to stay home this weekend anyway,” he’d told me. “Come on over, bring your wife and a bottle of whiskey.”

—

M
Y FATHER
’
S BUILDING
is in a neighborhood of cobbled streets, which is nonetheless hostile and dark. There’s lots of graffiti, but not the ingenious epigrams you might see in other cities around the world, more like abstract signatures that look a bit like battle crests. The apartment has plaster walls, and the neighbors’ moans of pleasure or confrontations are, more than merely audible, shameless or intrusive. I hear, before knocking on his door, the movements of a tired body. My father has aged: he is no longer the man whose solidity was visible in the strength of his back, in the determined and sure expression in his Bedouin eyes. In his youth he was a boxer; I never learned to raise my fists, and as soon as I had enough words to invent my own philosophy, I considered him barbarous and atavistic for wanting me to assume poses seen on a Greek amphora. But I never told him that; I’d never had the courage to confront him in ways that obliged me to hold his gaze. When he opens the door, I think he doesn’t look like he’s been drinking, and the fear that his behavior will shock Viviane, or make her regret even more having come with me, disappears. My father is wearing a brown corduroy overcoat with patches on the elbows and twill cotton trousers of a vague gray.
“Les enfants,”
he greets us. But he does not invite us in.

“I feel like going out,” he says. “There’s a café here on the corner as bad as any other.”

We go back down the stairs, following him. He’s losing his hair: a sparse patch is visible among the gray curls on his head. I point it out to Viviane; she nods and smiles a little. From the other side of a wall we hear the voice of a man saying something in a language I didn’t understand.

“Fucking gypsies,” says my father. “When will they get used to talking like normal people. Did you walk here?”

He doesn’t look at us when he asks this question, and I don’t immediately realize he means us.

“No, we took the metro, monsieur,” Viviane says.

“Lazybones,” says my father. “How can you go down into that filthy tube on a day like this?”

The owner of the Café de la République, I discover, knows my father as well as a lifelong friend. He himself opens the door for us, and the four of us walk to a corner table wedged between the slot machine and the Formica counter, at the back. The coppery mirrors reflect a stained image back at us. It’s obvious this is my father’s table: whenever he arrived somewhere for the first time, he worried about where to sit, saying that customers who waiters identify with their own tables get better service, get to make calls—the telephone is an old-school model that still accepts coins—and can use the washroom even if they haven’t ordered anything. Only once we’re sitting down does my father ask me what’s on my neck.

“Nothing, a little swelling,” I tell him. “I’m on antibiotics, it’ll be fine.”

He doesn’t ask anything more. His curiosity has been satisfied.

It’s been so long since I last saw him that I’ve almost lost the habit of feeling intimidated: experiencing that sensation again might have annoyed me, but today timidity is far away, separated from me like a frog pinned out, ready for dissection. My father begins by ordering three glasses of cider—he doesn’t consult us, doesn’t ask what we want—and the serious stuff soon begins. A bottle of Four Roses appears on the glass table, among viscous circles and cigarette ash.

Viviane, aware that her role consists of filling with dialogue the silences that have always flowed between my father and me, begins to talk. Her talent for choosing phrases, for showing interest in other people’s concerns without appearing contrived or fake, for expressing sharp opinions on matters totally alien to her, has never ceased to surprise me. She tells my father he should go back to journalism, asks him if he doesn’t miss contact with reality.

“The problem is that reality’s a penniless whore,” he says. “People complain because the papers manipulate information and all that, but the truth is that reality couldn’t care less, as long as it gets well paid for being written about.”

He lifts his glass of whiskey to his lips, and the slot machine lights blink in the liquid and turn it into a urine sample for medical tests.

“That’s why it’s better to devote yourself to fiction, like this one.”

I haven’t devoted myself to fiction. I’ve published one travel book, after a short journey around Tibet, and the royalties have allowed me to pay the rent punctually and go to the cinema occasionally, and I get by, in the meantime, thanks to the contract I’ve signed for two more books. My father is a man who always wanted to write, and didn’t manage it. He worked as a journalist, first conducting conventional interviews for
Libération
and then, before my mother’s departure, writing more personal
crónicas
(literary chronicles, they used to be called) with the devotion of someone who’s just discovered his destiny. He must have read cheap translations of Tom Wolfe books dozens of times, and ended up writing two or three pieces his colleagues respected. Then, one Saturday as we were coming back from the racetrack, my father began to speed up a couple of blocks from home. I don’t know how he guessed, or if some specific fact allowed him to link a chain of coincidences ending with the incredible deduction that, over the course of that morning, my mother had left. But when we got to our building, he had only to greet the concierge to imagine what the mailbox would have confirmed. He didn’t even bother to open her parting letter. He already knew what it said, he told me later: it was the same as his last arguments with my mother.

He stopped working for several months. He ran out of money; the pressure of his obligations weighed heavily on him. Then something resembling a resurrection occurred, because he returned to the
Observateur
with a magnificent story on the most notorious fraud in the history of French sport. A popular singer, known to gamble, was implicated, as was a former functionary of de Gaulle’s government. I don’t remember how much he got paid for that article, but it was an excessive sum; offers began to arrive from all over, and I remember finding envelopes from
Esquire
and
Harper’s
in the mailbox. One day, his editor came to see him at home. I opened the door. A man in jeans, a silk shirt, and a jacket with patches on the elbows came in and said hello to my father. “Letters have arrived at the magazine,” he said. “I need to verify the facts in your text or we’re going to get sued.”

“I don’t understand,” said my father. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t look at me like that, man, I’m not questioning anything. Pierre hasn’t been able to verify your facts or find the informants you quote.”

“But I did. I found them and I talked to them. I thought you were on my side.”

“In the article you mention a hotel. You interviewed your main source there, the guy from the Olympic Committee, or whatever it was. Anyway, the one who knew all about the fraud.”

“Yes. That one.”

“Which hotel was it?” said the editor. “I need you to take me there. I need someone, a waiter, a bellboy, anyone, to recognize you.”

“It was the Ibis. The Ibis at the airport.”

“That’s what we thought. From the noises you describe in the text. But we called, and they have no record of a guest by the name of your source, and nobody remembers seeing anyone interviewed in the lobby.”

“All right, all right. It wasn’t in that hotel.”

“In the article you say it was.”

“That was to protect him. You saw the information the guy gave me. I wasn’t going to publish his address.
Merde
.”

“Don’t get upset. Just give me his phone number.”

“I don’t have it.”

“Tell me where he lives.”

“I don’t know,” said my father. “It was a while ago, I don’t keep files on the people I interview.”

The editor lowered his voice, as if what he was about to say was disgraceful to him, more than to my father.

“That piece is pure bullshit, and you know it. I’ll see you tomorrow at the office.”

They did not see each other at the office, because my father sent a resignation letter so he wouldn’t have to wait to be asked. By then, he had started drinking; the incident did nothing but confirm his reputation. A little while later, when I told him I was looking for student accommodation in Nanterre, he said: “I thought so. The rats are always the first to abandon a sinking ship.” I made excuses: it was true in part that I was sick of the daily trip from Paris to the university—the desolate cars of the RER, the crowds of sad men and women coughing over the previous day’s newspapers—but he was determined to believe that I despised his failure and was leaving him to sink alone. He never said so, of course. I had to interpret, to deduce it, as usual, from various comments here and there.

“So, how’s the fiction going, then?” asks my father.

I know he’s not expecting an answer. I think of saying
I’m not the one who writes made-up things, Papa
. But I don’t.

“Fine,” I say at half volume. “It’s going.”

My father stands up and we watch him walk toward the washroom. He leans on the backs of chairs, on the shoulder of a shaven-headed teenager who’s playing pinball, and on the doorknob, which is meant to look like an uncut diamond, a plastic prism so opaque that light does not reflect off it.

“He’s an expert,” I say. “I’ve never seen anyone so adept at the art of walking while drunk.”

“He’s already drunk?” asks Viviane.

“Of course he is. Don’t tell me you hadn’t noticed.”

“Well, he’s a charming drunk, your papa. The exact opposite of what you always told me.”

“What did I tell you?”

“You told me physical strength. You told me moral weakness. But what I see is quite different. Of course, it’s only the second time I’ve ever met him, or the third.”

“You’re right. It’s just that I barely know him.”

Viviane smiles. I get impatient.

“Now what?”

“The two of you make me laugh,” she says. “Your irony, your sarcasm. Even if you don’t admit it, you’ve inherited all that.”

I interrupt her: I’d rather avoid the psychology I used to get so often when we were a couple. I ask her, instead, how she is, how she’s been feeling. Viviane sets her glass down on the table.

“I don’t want to talk about us. This is not going to happen again, so it’s not something you should get used to.”

“I didn’t . . .”

“I came with you today because I know it’s important, or at least I believed what you said in your letter. But that’s as far as it goes. Don’t come looking for me again.”

“Understood.”

“Understood?”

“Yes, Viviane. Understood.”

“Okay, now, tell me something. Is it true you’re on antibiotics?”

“Of course not. I don’t even know what I have.”

“Ah, okay. Because I was going to say you shouldn’t be drinking any whiskey if you’re on antibiotics, let alone as much as this.”

Viviane has suddenly adopted a lighthearted, playful attitude, as if she wanted to forget about the bandage over my lymph node. The whiskey is an indispensable factor, of course. But Viviane’s behavior, by way of the brief alcohol-induced euphoria, is genuine and transparent. I’ve always liked that about her: there are no strategies or double intentions in Viviane. She is a woman who says what she thinks and never keeps things that need to be said to herself. Perhaps—I can’t say I hadn’t considered it—leaving her had been one of those mistakes that nothing can rectify. And for a while now that fear has been joining the others, and I’ve often wondered if I’d lost her by now, if I’d lost her forever. And then I don’t know if I’m frightened by the words or the fact of being stuck in the middle of the reality they describe. Mistake. Forever. Lost. Words like these scare me more than anything else.

When my father gets back, Viviane takes his arm to help him fall onto his chair, precise and rough like the ballast of a balloon.

“I wanted to ask you a favor, monsieur,” Viviane says, filling all three glasses up to the top. “Tell me about your son, tell me about his childhood. He’s so secretive, it’s impossible to get him to talk about himself.”

“Well, if this is how things are going, I’ll get lost,” I say. “Nobody’s going to force me to sit through this torture. Besides, I have to make a call.”

Above my father’s upper lip are white specks. His facial hair is dense and coarse, and when he’s shaved inattentively, like today, it’s inevitable that bits of toilet paper and loose threads from a napkin get stuck to his face. As I stand up and walk away toward the telephone, I hear him say:

“Agreed, my dear. But first, let’s order a nice steak. I’m starting to need some food to go with this drink.”

—

T
HE FINAL DAYS
of our marriage passed by in the midst of a perfidious affability, at least on my part. I was attracted to Viviane; I hadn’t lost interest in her conversation; she wasn’t docile, but she knew how to make me feel that spending time with me satisfied her, which is perhaps the highest tribute a lover can hope for. I, for my part, used absurd euphemisms to name the rift or absence I’d begun to feel, those words that explode if you’re not careful, like a box of fireworks or a father-son relationship. On the morning of November 6 last year—I remember the date because a local magazine ran a devastating review of my book that day, not criticizing the book but rather my father, the man who had faked an article years earlier—that morning, as I said, as I watched her from bed, I knew as if someone were whispering it in my ear that we no longer had much time left together. I sat up in bed, all my senses focused on this woman. Viviane never closed the bathroom door (she always teased me about my exaggerated modesty) and now, unexpectedly, she was a Pierre Bonnard figure, a faceless woman drying her legs with a towel the color of tropical fruits, or rather the towel was caressing her, encircling her thighs, preparing the surface of her skin for the application of seaweed moisturizer. Never had I liked a woman this much: Why was I thinking of leaving? It had been her idea to travel to Tibet, as long as we could find a hotel where they spoke French or English. She was the one who banned me, during the time it took to write the book, from getting distracted by banal articles, saying we could easily live on her salary from the importer for a short time. Perhaps that had been the only thing I’d been sure of lately: without Viviane, I would never have finished that book. And in spite of that, there I was, sitting cross-legged on top of the sheets of the unmade bed, receiving the scent of her deodorant and the steam from the shower, watching her and desiring her and thinking of leaving her. My forehead was damp and so were my palms, and it took me a few seconds to understand: neither the steam nor the radiators were to blame. I was sweating.