The Confidant Read online

  Her figure, still shaken by a slight cough, restored fullness and coherence to everything around me. She began to sing. She was not naturally joyful and I was always surprised to see her become animated and engage her entire torso the moment the organ sounded. I did not yet know that song was like laughter, and one could invest it with anything, even melancholy.

  Most people fall in love with a person upon seeing them; in my case, love caught me off guard. Annie was not with me when she moved into my life. It was the year I turned twelve—she was two years younger, two years minus a few days. I began to love her the way a child does, that is, in the presence of other people. The thought of being alone with her did not occur to me, and I was not yet old enough for conversation. I loved her for love’s sake, not in order to be loved. The mere fact of walking past Annie was enough to fill me with joy. I stole her ribbons so that she would run after me and snatch them brusquely from my hands before turning on her heels brusquely. There is nothing more brusque than a little girl in a fit of pique. It was those scraps of cloth that she rearranged clumsily in her hair that made me think, for the first time, of the dolls in the shop.

  My mother owned the village haberdashery. After school we both went there: I to join my mother and Annie to join hers, for Annie’s mother spent half her life there, the half she did not spend sewing. One day, as Annie was walking past the shelf with the dolls, I was suddenly struck by the resemblance. It was not only the ribbons; she had the same fierce white and fragile complexion as the dolls. At that point my youthful powers of reasoning got the better of me, and I realised that I had never seen any of her skin other than what her neck, face, feet and hands could offer. Exactly like the porcelain dolls! Sometimes when I went through the waiting room at my father’s surgery I would see Annie there. She always came alone to her consultations with my father, and she would sit there, so small in the black chair. When her asthma overwhelmed her she resembled the dolls more than ever, her coughing fit spreading like rouge over her cheeks.

  But of course my father would never tell me that she had the body of a rag doll, even if I asked him about her. ‘Professional secret,’ he would reply, tapping me on the head before tapping Maman on the backside. And she would smile back at him with that smile I found so embarrassing.

  As any resemblance is reciprocal, the porcelain dolls made me think of Annie. So I stole them. But once I was in the refuge of my room, I was inevitably struck by the fact that their hair was either too curly or too straight, their eyes too round or too green, and they never had Annie’s long lashes that she curled with her index finger when she was thinking. These dolls were not made to resemble anyone in particular, but I held it against them. So I went to the lake and tied a stone to their feet, then watched without sorrow as they sank effortlessly, my thoughts already on the new doll I would take and who would bear a greater resemblance to Annie, or so I hoped.

  The lake was deep, and the spots where one could bathe without danger were rare indeed.

  That year at the centre of the world there was me, and there was Annie. All around us lots of things were happening that I couldn’t care less about. In Germany, Hitler had become chancellor of the Reich, and the Nazi party exercised single party rule. Brecht and Einstein had fled while Dachau was being built. It is the naïve pretension of childhood to think one can be sheltered from history.

  I skimmed the letter, and had to go back and reread entire sentences. Since Maman’s death I had no longer been able to concentrate on what I was reading: a manuscript I would normally have finished in one night now required several days.

  It had to be a mistake. I did not know anyone called Louis or Annie. I turned the envelope over, but it was definitely my name and address. Someone else with the same surname, in all likelihood. The man called Louis would realise soon enough that he had made a mistake. I didn’t dwell on it any longer and finished opening the other letters, which really were letters of condolence.

  Like any good concierge, Madame Merleau had not been fooled by this flood of mail, and she handed me a little note: if need be, I must not hesitate, she was there.

  I would miss Madame Merleau, more than I would miss my apartment. The one I was moving into might be bigger, but I would never find a concierge as nice as she was. I didn’t want to go through with this move. Couldn’t I just stay in bed, here in this studio which scarcely a week ago I could hardly stand? I did not know where I would find the energy to drag all my stuff over to that place, but I no longer had the choice, I needed an extra room now. And besides, the papers had been signed and the deposit had been made; three months from now someone would be here in my place and I would be there in someone else’s place, and they in turn would be in the place of . . . and so on. Over the telephone the mover had told me it had been proven: if you followed every link of that chain, you invariably came back to yourself. I hung up. I couldn’t care less about coming back to myself, all I wanted was to come back to my mother. Maman would have been happy to know I was moving, she had never liked this apartment, she only came here once. I never understood why, but that’s the way she was, sometimes she took things to extremes.

  Still, I had to let Madame Merleau know that I was moving out and thank her for her note.

  ‘Oh, don’t mention it, it’s the least I can do.’

  Whenever anything happens, a concierge already knows about it. She was clearly sorry for me, and she invited me to come in for a few minutes if I felt like talking. I didn’t feel like talking, but I went in for a few minutes all the same. As a rule, we had always chatted at the window, never inside her loge. If I had not already known that this was a difficult moment for Madame Merleau, her invitation alone would have sufficed to make me understand. After she had closed the curtain behind us, she switched off the television and apologised.

  ‘The moment I open that bloody window, people look inside. They can’t help it. I don’t think they’re really curious, but it’s unpleasant. Whereas when the television is on they hardly look at me. Fortunately the screen is enough to distract them. I couldn’t stand to hear it blaring in my ears all day long.’

  I felt ashamed and she noticed.

  ‘Forgive me, I wasn’t saying that about you. You don’t bother me.’

  What a relief! I was off the hook—not part of the run-of-the-mill mediocrity.

  ‘With you it’s not the same. You’re nearsighted.’

  I was startled.

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I know because nearsighted people have a particular way of looking. They always look at you more intently. Because their eyes are not distracted by anything else.’

  I was stunned. It was like being handicapped, with everyone pointing at you. Was it that obvious?

  Madame Merleau burst out laughing: ‘I’m having you on. You told me yourself. Don’t you remember, the day I told you about my fingers, you said it was sort of the same thing with your eyes. “Life is all about being dependent on your body’s every little whim,” that’s what you said. I thought your explanation was terrifying and I remembered it, the way I remember everything I find terrifying. You have to always remember what you say and who you say it to, otherwise some day it might come back to haunt you.’

  She leaned over to pour some coffee, but just then her hand began to shake with a violent tremor and the boiling liquid spilled onto my shoulder. I blew on the burn to cool it but above all so I would not have to look at Madame Merleau. I was terribly embarrassed to have witnessed her infirmity.

  Before she became the concierge, Madame Merleau had been a tenant in the building. She arrived shortly after I did, two or three months, I think. The sound of her piano resounded throughout the building, but no one complained, her students were committed and the lessons never turned into an ordeal. On the contrary, the ongoing concert was quite pleasant. But as the weeks went by the piano was heard less and less, and I assumed t
hat her students were getting married. Married people didn’t take lessons any longer. Then the piano stopped altogether, and one day it was Madame Merleau herself who opened the window to the loge as I went by. She had acute rheumatism in her joints. The doctors conceded that it was an early onset, and that this sometimes happened, in particular with professional musicians, as their joints tired more quickly, by virtue of being called upon to play. They did not know exactly when, but eventually she would lose both the control and the mobility of her fingers; she was not to worry, she would still be able to use her hands for everyday things—eating, washing, brushing her hair, doing the housekeeping, but she would no longer be able to use them for her profession, or at least not in all the subtle ways she had known up to now. In a matter of weeks she would lose the precious mastery that her hands had taken so many years to acquire.

  She was completely devastated by the news. How would she live? The money from her lessons was her only source of income, she had no savings, and no one on whom she could rely, even for the time it would take to find her bearings. No parents, no children.

  Then she heard that the concierge of the building was leaving. For several weeks people told her that she was the wrong age and didn’t have the skills required for such a position. But she decided to submit her application to the owner, who agreed to give her the position. She bade farewell to her piano. She reasoned that an unfulfilled passion was too burdensome, and that one must know how to leave it behind in order to let another passion take its place. Why not astrology, for example? It would go well with her new profession as concierge, the know-all, gossipy side. And it would enable her to forestall her fits of clumsiness. If she had known she was going to spill the coffee today, she would not have offered me any. She smiled.

  ‘You cannot go to work with your sweater in such a state. Go back upstairs and fetch another one. I’ll take this one to the dry cleaner’s, it will be ready this evening. I am so sorry.’

  ‘Please don’t bother, it’s fine like this.’

  ‘I insist.’

  I wasn’t one to insist so I went back upstairs. She could not be expected to know that I didn’t have a single clean sweater in my wardrobe, that in fact I had nothing at all in my wardrobe, that all my clothes were on the floor and I walked all over them without caring. Just like Papa, I thought to myself, the moment I felt a bit of cloth underfoot: ‘Pick them up, pick them up, please, you always pick up Papa’s clothes, pick up mine, too!’ But Maman did not pick them up. I managed to find one jacket that did not stink of cigarettes—it really was time to quit smoking.

  Madame Merleau waved goodbye to me from the window. As the curtain fluttered closed I thought of how once the last survivor of a family is dead, there is no one left to receive letters of condolence. With all that, I had completely forgotten to tell her that I was moving, but at least we didn’t talk about Maman. Madame Merleau did not seem to be any more at ease in the realm of mourning than I was; so much the better.

  That evening, when I came home, I was surprised not to find any letters in my box: the end of the letters of condolence already. Meagre takings, Maman. When I opened the door to my flat the smell of cleaning seized me by the throat: everything had been put away, the dishes I had not had the strength to wash for several days were now done, my laundry had been washed and ironed, and my sheets had been changed. A flickering light came from the door to the sitting room. Perhaps Maman’s white ghost would smile at me the moment I entered the room.

  The television had been left on, without the sound. Madame Merleau. Hanging in plain view from the wardrobe handle was my sweater, and she had left my letters on the table. A mixture of disappointment and gratitude overwhelmed me, and no doubt tears would have taken over, had my attention not been drawn to a letter that was bigger and thicker than the others. I opened it. Just as I thought. Him again. Louis was continuing his story where he had left off.

  Annie and I attended the same school. Our institution was housed in a single building, but despite this apparent permissiveness, honour was intact, and the rules governing the division of the sexes were well and truly respected. The girls were on the ground floor, and the boys were upstairs. As a result of this chaste state of affairs, several days could drag by without my catching a glimpse of Annie, during which time I was reduced simply to imagining her curling her eyelashes with her studious index finger, or to trying to guess which footsteps were hers when pupils went up to the blackboard, then moments of sudden delight when I recognised her cough.

  I hated those two storeys. I hated them all the more given the fact that the arrangement had not always been like this. In the old days the girls used to be upstairs. My cousin Georges, for example, was lucky enough to see the girls’ panties as they came down the stairs four at a time—white ones, pink ones, blue ones, he filled his head with them as he gazed through the gaps in the stairway, all the better to admire the rainbow unfurling miraculously before him come rain or shine. But there we are, as is often the case, my generation had been sacrificed because of the idiocy of the previous one. Their lecherous ogling had not gone unobserved by Mademoiselle E., the headmistress, so the boys ended up on the upper floor, and without our shoes, which we had to take off so as not to make any noise. There we were for the girls to spy on in turn and make fun of the holes in our socks as we came down the stairs, shoving each other savagely to be the first out of doors. Because whoever was first out of doors was the winner; of course there was no reward, but at that age, the challenge itself was enough, particularly when the girls were watching. The number of bruises and falls that ensued must have worried Mademoiselle E., but she never went back on her decision, and morality continued to prevail over safety.

  Until the blessed day when this despised arrangement ended up working in my favour. And why not, I too wanted to be the first out the door. It was a completely pointless resolution of mine, which landed me with a fractured shinbone and kept me immobilised for several weeks. But all was not lost and the point was revealed soon enough: the very next evening, Annie came to the door of my room. Given that she joined her mother at the haberdashery almost every evening anyway, Annie had volunteered to bring me my homework. She stood up, braving the sarcasm of the classroom and the idiotic guffaws that would designate her as the very girl I wanted her to be, ‘my sweetheart’. She left me my lessons every day. Never before had I seen so much of her, and there I was, dazed, my leg stiff along with all the rest. I had to keep her there, longer than those few minutes she spent not knowing where to sit, and I not knowing where to look. We had both reached the age when our bodies had become important: hers was on display, and I could fantasise about it.

  I was afraid that she might grow weary of this dull mission, that she might delegate someone else to perform it in her place. So under the pretext of an ordinary homework assignment, I asked my mother to borrow some books about painting from the library and, as I waited impatiently for Annie to make her appearance—fearing all the while that someone else would come—I immersed myself in reading. I hoped that by speaking to her of her passion I might, in turn, become an object of passion myself.

  And that is how women painters became my new porcelain dolls, my new go-betweens in a love story for which I had not yet found the words. I told her about their lives in the most minute detail, and Annie listened attentively, without ever seeming surprised that I knew so much. I had succeeded: our minutes of conversation turned into hours.

  That year, Tino Rossi sang ‘Marinella’, which I chanted alone in my room, as I staggered round on my broken leg. ‘Annieeeella!’ We were not the only ones putting on a show. In Germany, Hitler launched the Volkswagen Beetle and violated the military clauses of the Treaty of Versailles. But as he could not be in two places at once, at the Berlin Olympic Games a black American was awarded four gold medals. In Spain, the civil war broke out, and at home in France, the Popular Front won the elections hands down.

 
; I couldn’t believe it, the correspondent still had it wrong. I had to find this guy and tell him he had the wrong addressee. But I had no way of tracing him. I couldn’t send his letters back to him: there was no return address on the envelope. There wasn’t even a signature; he did mention this ‘Louis’, granted, but ‘Louis’ who?

  And were they even letters? They hardly looked like letters: no ‘Mademoiselle’ or ‘Dear Camille’ to start with. No indication of place or date on the letterhead. And to top it all off, the ‘Louis’ in question didn’t even seem to be addressing anyone in particular.

  I was startled by the sudden ringing of the phone. Who could be calling me in the middle of the night?

  It was Pierre.

  I hardly recognised my brother behind that faint, reedy voice asking me whether I realised we were now orphans. That word swept everything away. He couldn’t sleep. I’d be right over. Could I stop and get him a pack of cigarettes? Of course.

  This was not the time to lecture him. Besides, I felt like smoking, too, and I had thrown out what was to have been my last pack that very morning.

  It is not other people who inflict the worst disappointments, but the shock between reality and the extravagance of our imagination.

  Annie and I always walked together from school to the haberdashery. We never left at the same time, but the distance between us gradually shrank along the way. Whoever was walking in front would slow down, while the one behind picked up speed, until the two of us were walking side by side.

  But years later, when we met again—on the fourth of October 1943, in Paris—Annie laughed and said I was the one who played both parts: either I caught up with her, or I let her catch up with me, but as far as she was concerned she swore she had never adjusted her speed. I did not seek to deny it; it was true that I wouldn’t have missed those walks with her for the world. In my mind, I called them our ‘lovers’ strolls’—words often help to rearrange the nature of things. It was true, too, that I had long hoped for something between us, but things had turned out differently. She must have been married by then; at twenty, that was normal—I had deliberately aged her a year or two, to hurt her feelings a bit. I had seen the wedding ring on her finger. I was pretending. I was playing the part of the man who does not chase after women, who no longer hopes. The man whom one need not fear. As a child I had never used any tricks to secure her affections, but on that fourth of October 1943, with my eyes glued to the ground to avoid her gaze, I could hear myself saying the exact opposite of what I was thinking. I was obligingly opening the way for her to tell me whatever she liked, with no regard for the past. What of her life, today? Was she happy?