A Singular Man

  EMMANUEL BOVE

  A SINGULAR MAN

  TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH BY DOMINIC DI BERNARDI

  THE MARLBORO PRESS

  First English language edition.

  Copyright 1993 The Marlboro Press, Marlboro, Vermont.

  Translation copyright 1993 by Dominic Di Bernardi.

  Originally published in French under the title Mémoires d'un homme singulier Copyright Calmann-Lévy 1987.

  Clothbound edition: ISBN 0-910395-94-2

  Paperbound edition: ISBN 0-910395-95-0

  Table Of Contents

  RICHARD DECHATELLUX

  MY LIFE

  TODAY

  A SINGULAR MAN

  RICHARD DECHATELLUX

  It is not some story that I propose to tell. I haven't the patience for that. This is too grave a moment. What should I do? My God, what should I do? The paper bag I hooded over the light bulb is scorched. I have been sitting at my table for two hours already. It was raining hard outside. Now I no longer hear anything at all. The stars may be shining in the black sky. My, how solemn I am! By what right am I adopting the tone of one who is suffering? Oh, let's not bother ourselves hunting for an answer.

  The days had gone by one after the other, each identical to the last, for four years, four whole years. How could I have let time trickle away like this? How could I have said goodbye to all dignity? I had got to the point of spending fourteen hours, sixteen hours in bed, of letting the bells and chimes of noon find me standing before my wash basin. It is unbelievable. Once dressed, I would lunch in a small restaurant behind St. Sulpice, two doors down from a shady hotel. The number of jokes I've heard cracked about this neighborhood! Just think, a by-the-hour hotel for lovers two steps from a church! I would linger at table. It was never I who fought to catch the waitress' attention. My obliging nature was established with all the habitués. Little by little they had developed the practice of entrusting me with all sorts of errands. Howsoever foreign the place may be, wherever we take up our abode we end up with as many obligations there as in the bosom of our family. I would strike up friendships and have fallings-out with people who meant nothing to me. Everything so transpired that I seemed to owe allegiance to the group that I was part of without knowing why.

  To give you an idea of the kind of events that absorbed my attention, I shall relate a minor incident. For a long time the owner of my hotel had been planning to remodel. Each passing week brought in new estimates, schemes dreamt up by new contractors. Perplexed, he would consult me. He was afraid—and I couldn't blame him—of getting in over his head. "You might do best to wait for more favorable circumstances." was my invariable advice to him, for all I asked was that he keep the place in repair. I had no money. I foresaw that with renovations the tone of the hotel would rise a notch. I would be expected to follow suit. Initially, they would take into account that I was a customer of long standing. But later on?

  "What would you say if, for a start, I just had the place repainted?"

  "That's not a bad idea. But if I were in your shoes, I'd wait until I was able to have all the work done at one go. I take the liberty of telling you this because you're asking my advice."

  "You're probably right," he answered in a manner hinting at respect.

  However, the next day, the painters set down their paint-buckets in the vestibule.

  On the day of the letter I got in late. I had the feeling I would not be able to go to sleep. I wanted to talk, to be amongst people, but it turned out that everybody had something to do. At the restaurant the customers had left earlier than usual. There was no one in the lobby of the hotel. The Odéon theater, two or three of whose columns were visible at the end of the street, was closed that night. I went back out. On rue Cujas there was a café that extended a good way in from the street, sometimes I would run into familiar faces there. But the lights in the back room were not even on. What great disappointment over such a trifle! That was when I made the effort to accept my aloneness, to give its proper importance to the relief a human presence might afford me. I would wait for the next day to come. I would do some reading. I would smoke some cigarettes. I would lay familiar objects out around myself. I already had a picture of the lonely man I was going to be in my hotel room. He was not without a certain grandeur. However I did not decide to go home. I opened the doors to other cafés. They had turned, on that particular night, into bourgeois doors. They were not to be jerked shut behind you. Until now I had never suspected how fragile they were. People turned around to see who had opened them. And the rain kept coming down tirelessly, invisible in the darkness. "But why is going to bed more than I can face?" I cried out.

  Eventually I spotted a certain Cyprien, a sad person in search of an audience. He was standing in front of the bar, holding forth. The Rights of Man. Off with Their Heads, and No Long Speeches. His country was waiting for him. From time to time he broke off in order to sing a few bars from the Carmagnole. I felt at such loose ends that I walked up to him, all ears, ready to take him seriously. He fell silent.

  "What did your father used to do?" I asked in the hope that such a personal question might snap him back to reality.

  "You're acting chummy with me now?"

  He raised his voice, called on the cashier to witness my lack of respect. We had been bumping into one another in that part of town for the past three years.

  "Doesn't seem to me we've ever been on familiar terms, not to my knowledge," he declared solemnly.

  "What a fool!" I muttered on my way out.

  "What did you say?"

  He followed me to the door. I watched him for a few moments, looking at him through the glass. I wasn't there anymore but he was going on with his insults and his threats. Sincere indignation, ah yes, I know all about that. Then I walked away. The falling rain scissored the lights. I pressed my five spread fingers to my throat to keep my overcoat collar up around my neck. I thought of that bare hand of mine gleaming like some star within the strangeness of my appearance. It was only ten-thirty. I walked down boulevard Saint-Michel. "Racing finals, all the racing finals," the newspaper hawkers were shouting. The finals? Could it be that there were people who had not yet heard them, who had not had time to buy a paper?

  This lot that had been bestowed upon me, what a singular one it was! In my mind arose an image which, that Sunday evening, seemed to fit my situation exactly. Could I not visualize myself as that racer, a cut above the rest but given a handicap it never surmounts, so that it comes in sixth for example?

  I finally decided to go back to my hotel. Nobody was at the desk, or rather, yes, back there was that stupid chambermaid who mounts guard whenever her employers are away, and to whom it does not occur to take advantage of the trust placed in her in order to give herself some importance. They had forgotten to shut my window. It had rained into the room, and the droplets on the wooden floor robbed me of the sensation of intimacy I had been awaiting.

  Fortunately, for three weeks I had had a pleasant neighbor, an Austrian. I noticed light under his door. And actually I think his name was Nachtmann. I felt an urge to knock. But up until now we had exchanged hardly more than a word or two, and it could be that he wasn't alone. The only thing I had heard him say—and the words were rhythmed with the care that denotes the foreigner—was "Please, monsieur, after you." Even so, to make his acquaintance was very tempting that evening. I would have rapped discretely. Once. Once more. A third time.

  "Who's there?"

  "Your neighbor."

  "What neighbor?"

  "You know, the man to whom you said, 'Please, after you' the other day."

  He would have opened the door. I would have offered some childish excuse. Matches. I would have apologized, we would have talked, and between us fellow-fe
eling would have come into being.

  All that was ridiculous. I locked my door. Sleep, that was what I was going to have to do. Nachtmann must be alone on the other side of the wall. No sound of voices. From time to time I heard him tapping his pipe. Oh hotel-owner, 'tis well that you do not hear him, you who have shortly to cope with so many expenses. Then he started pacing. What kind of work did this man do? What were his ambitions in life? Weren't they too lofty for him? Perhaps he's a doctor fresh out of school, or a journalist. Better that I never speak to him. I felt ashamed. He had a job. He was young. He believed in himself. I wouldn't be able to hide from him that I had been living in this hotel for four years. He would have smiled politely, but what scorn deep in his heart!

  I took off my overcoat, then my hat. I shut the window. I checked to see that the objects belonging to me were all in their places. It was a habit I had. All my habits were waiting for me. They had followed me into this room. They had grown more numerous with each passing year. Yet it would take very little to enable me to be free of them. All it would take would be one event that removed me from everyday life. I put off going to bed. I had to stay dressed in order to move about, to walk, to defend myself. What was there then that had me so on edge tonight? Richard's letter. Richard (what a suggestive first name!) asked me to put my visit off for two weeks. Two weeks! "His schedule's not all that heavy, not to my knowledge!"

  I drew shut the curtains. I was tired of playing this role of the person whom you sometimes glimpse from the street walking to and fro in his room, heedless of all others.

  I got into bed. But I couldn't fall asleep. Richard's letter filled me with an uneasiness which became torture once I turned the light out. In the end, I had to get up. I read the letter over again. It was four lines long. "I don't have time to see you this week nor next. I'm very busy. Let's put off your visit for two weeks. Kindly come for lunch on that Monday the 17th of December." The lines were undated, unprefaced by any friendly salutation, and unsigned. Not just any Monday, but that Monday the 17th. Something determined in this letter's tone suggested an evolution unknown to me. Was the darkness accountable for this? My thoughts grew increasingly muddled. All that I was, all that I possessed, I owed to Richard Dechatellux. If he had discovered some means of getting rid of me, was I about to relive the appalling moments I had already been through? Given the late hour, and the fact that after all nobody depended on me, I went back to bed. After a few instants I fell asleep.

  I woke up amidst silence. I had heard neither the humming of the electric vacuum nor the street noises which when coming in through opened windows kept the chambermaids from responding to buzzers pursuing them from floor to floor. Noon was approaching. Right away I thought of the letter. Far from restoring the incident to its proper proportions, daylight made it appear to me even more serious. I recalled what I had learned about the way incidents come about. As a younger man I would have thought that ties like ours could be undone only over a period of time. Richard would have handled it tactfully. Were he to cut me off it would only have been after investigations and preparations. Presently I was finding out that you don't necessarily inch your way toward an explosion. The oldest friendship can be broken off abruptly, without an explanation, even without a reason. And while dressing, I considered the pointlessness of my worrying if everything was now over and done with.

  Although our relations were those of two members of a family, I didn't dare call on Richard uninvited. Did his letter authorize me to overstep the rules? It was possible, after all, that I had misconstrued it, that I had detected in those four lines a meaning they did not contain.

  Nevertheless, once I was ready I got the idea to go for a stroll past the house where he lived on rue de Rome. The weather was gray. The owner of the hotel was in the hallway. Ever mindful of improvements, he was wondering, as he stood before the partition to a little office, whether removing it might not damage the adjoining walls. Ordinarily I would stop. I was the only guest who indicated any interest in all those questions. He never dreamt that this was pure kindness on my part. He believed—and I do indeed wonder how he could have so deluded himself—that I attached as much importance to beautifying the hotel as he did. "Once this partition's been removed," he said to me, "the lobby will be larger." So absorbed was I with my worries that somebody else's problem had never left me so untouched. I barely responded. But as soon as I had gone a few paces down the street I felt something extraordinary. Dread. It was dread. I had just realized that I was going to pay dearly for my indifference, that Heaven would not fail to have its shot at me. And I almost retraced my steps.

  I boarded the bus that runs between place Saint-Michel and the Gare Saint-Lazare. The approach I had in mind was making me feel better. For hadn't I imagined that Richard had fled, that the chief purpose of his letter was to allay my suspicions, to slow my inquiries, to place me before a fait accompli? I wanted to see his apartment windows, make sure his shutters weren't closed, that the carriage entrance stood open, that traffic was continuing normally in the rue de Rome, that the local shopkeepers were again waiting on their clientele, that nobody, in the vicinity of the house, appeared to have anything up his sleeve.

  It was one-thirty when I got to the restaurant. Berthe—a first name long since out of fashion—was sitting amid my usual tablemates. She joined me for lunch every rare now and then, maybe once a month, and always unannounced. She would arrive late. I would almost always be having my coffee. I would get up in order to sit with her off to one side. This time the opposite occurred.

  After a few seconds of conversation, she remarked: "Those friends of yours are as nosy as concierges!"

  "How so?"

  "They wanted me to tell them who you are, what you do. I'd say that's about the limit in tactlessness, wouldn't you?"

  Try as she did to appear sincerely shocked, I suspected that Berthe had not risen to my defense with any special ardor. Her loyalty could only have been that of a woman who was once your mistress, and who is nothing but a friend now. I didn't so much as bat an eyelash. It was all one to me. For Berthe and the others I felt nothing but indifference. They were free to run me down if they felt like it. Moreover, tattlings do not really affect us. However great the ill-will that we feel being directed our way, it almost never strikes home.

  "Do you know what intrigues them most?" she asked.

  Berthe and I had done some scheming together. What schemes they had been, my God! Their source had been the lowest form of selfishness. To be in a position to carry them out we had not shrunk from plotting to jeopardize others' interests, from causing harm to elderly people. But before going ahead with them, we broke up.

  I scrutinized Berthe. She had forgotten what the excuse of being together had permitted us to imagine. She had forgotten, whereas I remembered. In this one fact lay all the difference between us. So then, was it not natural that she now be playing this apparently devoted role of the person who listens to what the adversary says in order to betray him afterward?

  "It's your means of existence," Berthe went on. "I told them you received money from your family. I could say that, couldn't I?"

  "Why couldn't you say it? You know perfectly well that it hasn't the slightest importance."

  We left the restaurant and I said goodbye to Berthe. She had been a distraction. Nevertheless my thoughts kept returning to Richard. My rue de Rome expedition had only temporarily reassured me. I went into a post office and telephoned Richard. "Who's calling?" the maid asked. "Don't hang up, don't hang up—" Somebody had answered the phone. That was all I needed.

  Three days passed. To me they seemed interminable. Nothing irritated me so much as waiting. I had waited, in my life, for too many events, events that were to take months to come to pass, even years. All that was now over. I no longer awaited anything or anyone. I had stopped making plans. I had stopped making appointments. Berthe, on parting, would always ask me to tell her when we were to meet next. "Come by whenever you like. It will be clear enou
gh if I don't happen to be in." Only my relations with Richard remained punctual. I was obliged to accept it. He would mark my visits on the calendar. Twelve days, still twelve days to go until December 17th.

  A week passed, cheerlessly. I looked toward that December 17th as I had towards the date when I was to be discharged. The wait became longer and longer. The afternoons were endless. Three o'clock. Four o'clock. How hard it was to abide these far away dates! How right I had been to keep clear of them to the extent it had been in my power to do so! Could not the many mistakes I had committed be ascribed, in part, to the impatience they filled me with? Had I not just committed another?

  An Englishwoman getting on in years lived in the hotel—or rather, like me, resided there. Of what unhappinesses did she preserve memory, to what employment had she put the some sixty years she seemed to have lived, just who was that uncle mired somewhere in Devonshire, that brother who every year spent a few hours in Paris? I did not try to find out. I suspected that she plucked her facial hairs for, on certain days, she had the bloom of youth. A patina seemed to have been brushed over the neutrality of her clean, spotless clothes. I often ran into her in the hotel office where she liked to linger about, for however simple and familiar her behavior, she was unfailingly treated with respect. In spite of the interest I showed in the hotel's remodeling, her presence would relegate me to the background. And, I may add, I would remain there for quite some time, for the owner, while under her spell, didn't think to restore to me my former importance.

  One fine day this woman took a sudden shine to me. I must have made some remark that remained with her. Unless the attentions she was the object of had encouraged her to show her true colors. From there on, every time she came upon me she would stop me and oblige me to follow her into the office. But this friendship remained circumscribed. We were friends inside the hotel, but once outside, we unhesitatingly went our separate ways. This could not last. Our relations had become too cordial for me—a Parisian, after all—not to propose to this foreigner that we take some sort of outing together. I stalled as long as I was able. I was all in favor of the relations you establish in the course of everyday life, provided they did not go beyond simple fellowship. This was no longer the case.