Lovers on All Saints' Day

At the Café de la République

YOUR NAME AND ADDRESS are typed on the envelope, as I didn’t want you to recognize my handwriting and throw the letter away without even opening it. This is the sentence at the top of the page on which I tell Viviane about what has happened to me over these last few months — without going into too many details about the illness, because I don’t even have any myself — and ask her to come with me to visit my father. Now, for the first time since I posted it, I think she might not come, and I feel I wouldn’t blame her. I said to meet at the Gare d’Austerlitz — the railway stations are practically the only places in Paris open on Sundays — and I’ve sat down to wait for her on a bench that smells like bleach and the coffee a tramp is drinking very slowly beside me and the sweat of weekend joggers. The cold has let up a little bit: it’s now possible to see people carrying their sweaters as they walk, days are getting longer and dawn now breaks without fog, and the last layer of gritty ice on the sidewalks has melted away. Whole centuries seem to have passed since November. Would these first months of single life or solitude have been the same for her? When I see her coming, I rush over to meet her so she won’t have to come into the entrance hall, because she, perhaps the woman most sensitive to cold in existence, is still wearing her overcoat and scarf despite the newspapers saying that winter ended a week ago, and she’s always detested going into warm places because of the extravagant unwrapping and wrapping up again involved. I don’t know how I should greet her; she reveals the same awkwardness. We don’t kiss. We don’t shake hands. Viviane’s gaze passes over my shoulders and hair, avoids immediately focusing on the inflammation on my neck. The white and polished midday light bathes her face with a deceptive pallor. I’m not surprised that, six months after our separation, she still strikes me as unusually beautiful. But nobody has ever said we should stop finding a woman attractive once we’ve left her.

“So, you didn’t tear up the letter,” I say to her.

“No. But I do want to ask you that we get this over with as quickly as possible.”

“You bought some new earrings.”

“A couple of weeks ago,” says Viviane. “Where are we going?”

“To République. You’ve been to the apartment, I don’t know if you remember.”

“Your father’s still there?”

“Still there. What’s the matter?”

“It can’t be healthy. Isn’t it full of bad memories, ghosts?”

“Of course,” I say. “But they only scare the guests.”

“You know what I mean,” says Viviane, irritated. “Don’t play the fool.”

My mother left the apartment on Rue de la Fontaine-au-Roi when I was sixteen years old. Her departure was foretold, and no one held out any hope during her brief resolution to force herself to restore family life: those were the good intentions that anticipate the definitive decision, and that was obvious even to my father. Until we were officially engaged, I hid certain aspects of that process from Viviane. At the time I thought and said that it pained me to touch on the subject; now, that conviction has deserted me. When I finally told her about all that, of the nights when my father would come home drunk and furious with my mother for leaving him and their son, kicking doors and startling me awake in the middle of the night, Viviane reproached me for taking so long to tell her. She complained about my silences, about the walls I seemed to put up around myself. She complained about not feeling needed. Referring to my mother, she said, in a moment of rage, that I had probably been happy about it, because all my life I’d been happy when I was able to do without someone: an occasional girlfriend I decided not to see anymore, a friend who silently drifted away until he stopped talking to me, guests whose stay was reaching its end. She was always disturbed by the ease with which I excluded others or allowed them to exclude themselves.

We wait for the metro on the Bobigny side. The trains still run aboveground at first. The car we get into is empty, except for two North African women who are sitting on the drop-down seats as if they preferred to be uncomfortable, as if they felt unworthy of the spaciousness of the main benches. Viviane turns away from me, and her face, during the dark stretches between stations, is reflected in the glass as if it were a mirror. Behind that face, deep in the black wall, is mine: suspicious eyebrows, Mediterranean fisherman’s nose, bandage. My attention goes back to Viviane. When she squeezes her eyelids shut, I notice she’s not wearing any makeup. When we said hello, she’d successfully pretended, but now that talent is beginning to evaporate.

“Please don’t cry,” I say.

“Why not? So your father won’t imagine things?”

I don’t say anything. I don’t want this day to start with an argument.

“Don’t you think he’s going to realize we’re not together anymore?”

Her resentment toward me is visible, and it’s obvious she’s been nurturing it with dedication. At first, months earlier, I used to stop and wonder what Viviane was feeling, what questions were going through her mind, or what sorrows, what things she’d be regretting. I soon stopped, out of fear of the small private abyss that this solidarity opened in front of me. Lovers are not made for pondering the consequences of their own actions. Viviane asks me:

“How long has it been since you last saw him?”

“A year, more or less. There’s no reason he would have found out about us. So this is the favor I’m asking of you.”

“I already know that, don’t hassle me so much. Leave me alone for a while, please.”

She looks at me. The sadness in her eyes is almost intolerable. It hurts her to be with me, see me, and hear my voice for the first time in four months. If she agreed to come, I think, it’s because she knows as well as I do how much her presence facilitates relations with my father, and because she understands my desire to avoid explaining anything, describing my life, going into my reasons for leaving her: she understands, in fact, that I’d rather give my father the impression that my family is intact and that the son of a wife who left will not inevitably abandon his own marriage. We’ve been talking in shouts, as people do so the roar of the metro won’t carry away their words, and the women looked at us out of the corners of their eyes, as if through their veils. I feel like insulting them. Then I realize they’re looking at my face, not a banal dispute between former lovers. Viviane has also noticed, and with the hand still wearing her wedding ring — or has she put it back on this morning, perhaps she was even lucid enough to think of that — she touches my cheek and jaw and the bandage covering the swollen lymph node. She examines it.

“It might not be anything serious, right? It might be something else.”

I say yes, the doctors don’t know yet.

“I hope you’re not lying to me.”

“I explained everything in the letter, Viviane,” I say, letting my head drop. “Can we not overdramatize this, please?”

“Don’t be like that. Look at me.”

I obey.

“That’s better,” says Viviane. “You’re ill, I have a right to worry.”

This encounter must be much more difficult for her than it is for me. She has no hidden motives; I, however, am thinking all the time about this visit I’ve decided to pay, and for which Viviane is instrumental. Perhaps she’s now grown used to my absence, after who knows what efforts, and then I show up and write to her asking that we see each other again. I want to question her: Have you gotten used to it? Viviane, have you stopped loving me? I don’t, perhaps because it would be an awful way of playing dirty. I want to play fair with Viviane. I owe her a lot, and I know it. I thank her for coming, for putting up with this. But at the very moment I speak, the car fills with noise, because the train has gone into a tunnel.

“What did you say?” she asks me.

“Nothing, nothing,” I say. “I like it better when the train is aboveground.”

Viviane doesn’t reply.

“Here we are.” I nudge her gently with my fingertips. “We have to get off here.”

Of course I am ashamed of my cowardice; I don’t know if the harm I’m doing to Viviane is justified. But seeing my father is, today at least, a necessity. When we come up outside, my shoes are heavy as if I were walking on sand.

—

FIVE WEEKS after leaving Viviane, while reading an uninteresting essay by Georges Perec one night, I felt a hardness under my jaw. Bending my chin down, as one often does when reading in bed, I felt like I had a glass marble stuck to my skin. I spent the whole night bending my neck, lowering my chin, moving my head; discovering all the positions in which the marble made its presence known. Up till then I had never been ill: illnesses were things that happened to other people, someone else’s anecdotes or passing difficulties. A week later, after blood tests had been done, when each doctor whom another doctor referred me to evaluated the same symptoms and asked the same questions about pain, about my family medical history and possible fatigue, I began to experience a new sensation. As I crossed Paris by metro for another appointment or to pick up the results of the latest test, I was afraid, because each time a doctor touched my throat, I felt certain — it was an exaggerated but not entirely false certainty — that the marble had doubled in size. I was afraid because all the doctors asked me to undress, although for me it was a simple inflammation in a place that had nothing to do with my armpits, my elbows, the backs of my knees, or the flesh of my abdomen, and, nevertheless, the doctors pressed all over, with their fingers of greenish latex, looking for other inflammations. The first time this happened, a young doctor on Avenue de la Motte-Picquet told the woman who had recommended him to me what she then told me over the phone later that day. I don’t know if he confided in her with the express intention that she would repeat it to me, almost word for word, as she in fact did. “Xavier says that you shouldn’t worry too much. If it really is cancer, we’re going to find out relatively quickly.”

That was not the case: we did not know relatively quickly. The diagnoses continued to be imprecise, and I continued to walk around Paris — now almost all the doctors I saw were in the 15th arrondissement, which, at least, meant I didn’t have to spend the whole day underground in the metro — with the feeling that something was getting away from me: time, the city I was beginning to hate, the simple truth, daily calm. Unidentifiable lytic detritus, the detection of macrophages, all this was like a keyhole, barely suggesting the illness with a hermeticism resembling poetry. People’s curious glances soon began to try my patience. But then I’d get home, look in the mirror, and forgive them, for it was impossible to pretend that the deformity on my face might not attract attention. It had transformed into half a sphere, as prominent as if someone had sewn a pocket onto my left jawbone, and it was tender and the skin covering it was a lighter color, milky like the water in a puddle. I was tormented by the lack of symmetry, the bulge I’d occasionally catch sight of on my shadow, the hindrance if I looked back over my left shoulder; but more than anything else, my lost invisibility, the notoriety my face acquired in any public place. I was no longer nobody, now I was a person among the abstract assembly of people in the metro. I didn’t know, until that moment, the importance I gave to the possibility of being incognito, and now, suddenly, everybody I crossed paths with on the street was like a relative who looked at me from afar until realizing, by the time they were at my side, that no, we’d never seen each other before. I learned to hate. At a pedestrian crossing at the Jardin du Luxembourg, a woman waiting beside me to cross Rue de Vaugirard approached me to ask, point-blank, what that was I had on my face; the youngest daughter of Madame Schumer, my landlady, refused to greet me with a kiss, and her expression revealed disgust and fear at the same time. She was an eight-year-old girl, but I felt contempt for her (and for all the rest of the children I saw outside, clean and healthy, unaware of their bodies) and avoided her from then on.

The same day I had a chest X-ray and an MRI, I received a call I didn’t get to in time because I was in the shower trying to wash the blue gel the doctor had smeared on the scanner wand off my neck and chest: a cold lubricant that left me feeling, on the way home, that my cotton clothes were constantly sticking to my skin, not like sweat, but like dry nectar. The absurd possibility that it had been my father calling lodged in my head. It was absurd, because he didn’t know I was no longer married, didn’t have my new phone number, and knew nothing of my indecipherable illness; it was absurd, above all, because my father never had any reason to want to talk to me. Now, imagining it had been him who called seemed unusual for me, almost fantastical, except for the fact of probable death. In the cinema, walking along the Canal Saint-Martin, over breakfast, the probability I was dying of lymphatic cancer had begun to dog me. Maybe I still had a few doctors to consult; I still hadn’t received test results proving it irrefutably, but I had already stopped feeling I had more than enough time.

A couple of days earlier, then, I made up my mind. I’d just undergone the last tests: several punctures that extracted a sepia-colored liquid from the swollen lymph node, a liquid that would be left to ferment for three days on a saucer like the ones we used in school to separate salt from water, and which would, according to Dr. Fauchey, give us fundamental information about the nature of my illness. I didn’t actually see the instrument used: I felt a sharp itch but no real pain, because the skin covering the node lost sensitivity and became almost dead tissue. While I was waiting for the results, I went out for a walk through Montparnasse, perhaps trying to catch a little of Parisians’ feigned frenzy, but my impatience obliged me to look for a pay phone and call the doctor. His secretary answered; she said that Fauchey was out of town until the weekend. “Call him on Monday,” the woman had said, and I felt something like hatred toward her. “Does the doctor have a mobile?” I asked, and heard a no, first of all, and then a long silence on the other end of the line. “Give me that number,” I said. “I might have… I might be very ill and not know it. It’ll be your responsibility, mademoiselle.” The threat was infantile, but effective. The strange thing was my difficulty in pronouncing the name of my possible illness. For some time now the word itself, seen by chance in the display window of the Odéon medical bookshop or even in a magazine horoscope, would provoke slight dizziness and an empty feeling in my stomach.

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.”

—

MY 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.”

—

THE 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.

Noticing I was watching her, Viviane fastened the towel around her waist like a man — she knew that few things could excite me as much as seeing her like that — and came back into the bedroom to get dressed. Our bedroom was narrow. A map of the world covered the widest wall; on the IKEA bedside table Viviane had a vase sometimes containing an iris and sometimes a sprig of chamomile. She chose a blue sports bra: she was going to have to do a lot of walking over the course of the day, up and down lots of stairs in the metro. The previous day she’d brought me a gift of an unvarnished pinewood shelf to put up on the wall, beside the closet, for my first editions; this morning, turning to tell me something, she banged her head on the shelf to which her body had not yet become accustomed. We laughed, but the impact was a hard one, and the screws crunched and a goose egg came up on Viviane’s forehead. I made her sit down on the bed, went to get some cotton balls and iodine, and improvised some modest first aid. I said good-bye to her at the door with a kiss to her forehead, and felt on my lips the heat and roughness of the grazed skin damaged by the blow.

Right afterward, repeating the whole time (as if someone might be listening) that I needed exercise, I put on a gray sweatshirt, stuffed a couple of white T-shirts in a knapsack we’d bought in a temple in Jokhang, and jogged down the five flights of stairs. My body decided on its own to take Rue Monge toward Gobelins, and I kept jogging without feeling the muscles in my legs, leaving behind the tiny apartment Viviane and I had lived in since our marriage. I was alone, even in the midst of the people who crowded the sidewalks, and I recognized the privilege of that solitude. I tried to imagine the feeling of absolute certainty, separate from the desire I felt for Viviane, and that destroyed our relationship because it was accompanied by the fear of abandonment; I thought of the feelings I’d discovered when I left my parents’ house — or my father’s, who was living alone by then — yes, that was certainty, that was absolute confidence, for dependence on someone else would no longer intimidate me and neither would the fear of looking at my reflection in the mirror one day and seeing what I saw in my father’s eyes: imbalance in the black iris, the shining cornea of men who are lost.

I didn’t stop until I no longer recognized the neighborhood around me, and even then I didn’t stop completely. I must have walked for more than half an hour, first along Port-Royal and later through Montparnasse. Then I leaned on the back wall of the Hôpital Necker — where later I would go for an MRI — and tried to weigh up my life that afternoon or plan an itinerary, to keep my head from falling into an uncontrollable disorder or to name what had just happened, with the terrible awareness we get once we’ve hurt the person we love. On the corner of Rue du Cherche-Midi, a woman with purple hair and a mink coat was sweeping up her dog’s excrement.

—

“WAIT A MINUTE,” says Viviane, laughing her head off. “I’m dizzy, I need to stop for a second.”

We’re at the entrance to Jussieu, the closest station to the apartment I don’t live in anymore. Viviane has few inherited traits, but one of them is some kind of middle-ear disorder that makes her vulnerable to the most unexpected bouts of dizziness. When she has too much to drink, the symptoms get mixed up, and sometimes the situation gets so serious that she has to sit down — on the floor of the shower, in the middle of the street — and just pray for the world to stop spinning.

“You want to know what I think?” I ask her. “I think the princess has a very refined palate. The princess can only drink Lagavulin’s, that’s the thing.”

“You talk like you know what that is,” Viviane says.

“Well, neither do you.”

“You’ve never even seen a bottle that good,” she says.

“Neither have you,” I say.

“But friends of mine have,” she says. She waits a moment and adds: “There is something you don’t know.”

“What’s that?”

“I masturbated yesterday. For the first time since you left.”

Viviane laughs. I laugh, too, an accomplice to her game.

We’ve left my father lying on his bed. The effort required to get him up the spiral stairs has not been negligible. Viviane got lost under his left arm, I was carrying his head on my shoulder like a marble bust. The smell of his metallic breath has stayed on my clothes, that mixture of whiskey, toothpaste, and betel nut. Before we left the Café de la République, my father began to hum “Février de cette année-là,” the song he chose to learn by heart a long time ago, before an interview with Maxime Le Forestier that never took place in the end. By the time we covered him with his yellowing bedspread — Viviane had instinctively shaken it out, and the lightbulb at the entrance transformed the dust into floating flour — he’d started repeating the same bit of the tune over and over again, and Viviane, taking pity on him, filled out his monotonous delivery with any old line here and there, Tu peux venir chez moi, or perhaps Les yeux pleins de brouillard. Still beside the bed, she asked me in a whisper if my mother had slept on this same mattress. I confessed that I hadn’t noticed and would never notice that sort of detail, but it always seemed normal to me that she did. Then my father grabbed my hand, squeezed it between both of his, and said:

“Come back on another day.”

And then, in a harsher tone:

“Not for your sake, though. It’s your wife, who does actually know how to carry on a conversation like friends from the old days.”

Now we’re walking down the streets we’ve walked together thousands of times, arriving from somewhere to the bed that used to be ours and no longer is. I look at the windows of the buildings on our street, and I think how the lives of others fascinate people and that perhaps somebody, at this very moment, is spying on us from behind a half-open blind, and is pleased to see us together again, to see Viviane with a spring in her step like before. And that person will not think of my confusion or my sadness, because I’m the one who chose to leave.

“I’ve passed by here so many times,” I say. “I’ve thought of coming to see you, to find out how you were.”

“And your knees shook, I imagine.” Viviane bursts out laughing. “It’s true, your cowardice is beyond redemption.”

When we get to the apartment, I notice that Viviane has not let herself go, that her life has not given way to incoherence. In the sink is just the small breadboard with traces of honey and hazelnut spread and the fuchsia-colored plastic glass from this morning’s breakfast; there are no dirty dishes piling up on the drying rack, no jackets hanging carelessly over chair backs. Les yeux pleins de brouillard, sings Viviane. I ask her to change the tune, and she, laughing, says she doesn’t remember any others and she likes that one because the mention of fog in the eyes has made her think of a recently awakened Le Forestier, his hair still a mess, rubbing sleep out of his eyes the way I used to before starting to write. I’ve almost forgotten the unmistakable signs of her contentment, the way she forgot about everyone else when she was happy. She couldn’t care less that a guffaw might make her seem rough or masculine; she couldn’t care less about her posture.

“I’ll be right back to say good-bye,” she says on her way into the bathroom. “You don’t mind, do you? I won’t be two minutes, it’s just that I’m about to burst.”

I hear her close the door. That’s not a familiar sound; the sound of water running out of the cistern, however, is familiar, as Viviane always flushes it to cover her own sounds when there’s a stranger in the house. Tonight, I am the stranger. I look around: on top of two boxes of books I haven’t had time to collect sits a new lamp, with a silver base and translucent glass; my screwdriver set is open and spread out beside a small revolving CD rack that Viviane had just picked up at a flea market and hadn’t put together yet. Everywhere I see signs of a changing life. Every object tells me that the minuscule order I belonged to no longer exists.

Then Viviane reappears.

“Okay, that’s better.”

“Are you still dizzy?”

“I had a lot to drink, but don’t worry, I’ll be fine.”

“You’ll be fine tomorrow.”

“Yes,” says Viviane. “Tomorrow I’ll be better, but I did drink a lot. I still feel a little drunk.”

We could make love, and we both know it. There is a sort of impunity in the air, as if the whiskey we drank and the visit with my father — in which no one embarrassed the other, nor have there been insults or old reproaches — might allow us this small luxury. I sense our fear, and remember having once thought that our love was a shared fear of being alone. Now, the exaltation we feel needs, like any crime, a barely perceptible push. Somehow, I know that Viviane hasn’t slept with anyone since we split up. We could make love and tomorrow we could pretend it had been an accident. I could even stay the night here; it would be, for a few hours, as if nothing had changed in our lives.

“I told you not to get in touch again,” says Viviane. “But I want you to call me when you get the test results.”

“All right.”

“Only if you want to, of course.”

“Yes,” I say. “I’ll call you.”

Then it happens. I’ve seen it coming from a long way off, like a crash of locomotives. Viviane’s face has crumbled meticulously; the precision of her successive sorrows has been a painful spectacle. She starts to cry, and when I hug her and ask her what’s wrong, she keeps crying, as if the distress were a tangle of wool caught in her throat.

“Calm down,” I say. “What’s the matter, calm down.”

“I came with you today.”

“Yes.” I stroke her hair. “Thank you, Viviane.”

She pulls away from me.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“You know full well, don’t play the fool. I would rather not have spied on you, but now I’m glad.”

While she was talking about my childhood in the Café de la République, I called Dr. Fauchey from the pay phone. I heard the irritation in his voice, asking how I got his cell phone number, cursing his patients in general for the habit of interrupting his days off. After all that, he said tubercular infection and he said triple treatment, nine months. And I repeated each of these words as if they were a mantra against the evil eye. The infection was severe, the treatment was going to be expensive and serious; but it wasn’t what we’d feared. Fauchey asked: Had I undergone any abrupt changes in environment or diet? Had I been emotionally off balance, depressed? I answered no, none of that. The side of the phone was decorated with propaganda for the ’98 World Cup and the national lottery. My fingers scratched at the stickers, and shreds of blue, white, and red plastic like fish guts got lodged under my nails.

“I don’t really know why I didn’t tell you straightaway. Everything was fine without talking about that, we were happy.” I pause and say: “I can’t believe you followed me like that, secretly.”

“If we were still living together, I wouldn’t have done it. That’s the most ironic thing. All those stupid ideas about respecting the other person, not listening to each other’s conversations, not opening each other’s mail, it’s pure bullshit, you know?”

“The day was going well, Viviane. I forgot that I’m not with you and I got some good news. And I was able to be with my father.”

Then Viviane’s eyes opened wide. She’d found the magic formula, the alchemist’s secret.

“Don’t tell me…”

“What?”

“Were you saying good-bye?”

“Not at all.” I tried to smile. “Medical science has come a long way.”

“Don’t give me that. Were you? Did you think—”

“Let’s make love.”

“And what about me? Settle outstanding scores? Oh, please, how tacky. And you thought I wasn’t going to notice, you’d have to be pretty naive.”

“Let’s make love, Viviane.”

“Why can’t we be together?”

The sound of footsteps reaches us from the stairs.

“Wouldn’t it be easier if we were together?”

“Don’t start,” I say. “It’s not that simple.”

“Wouldn’t you like me to come with you to your appointments, open the envelopes and read you the results? Wouldn’t you like me to be by your side when they tell you on the phone that you’re not going to die?”

Odile, the next-door neighbor, arrives every Sunday at the same time. I know (because she told me herself once in the elevator) that she’s coming back from Compiègne, where she visits her boyfriend who’s been trying to earn a transfer to Paris for years. We both hear her huffing, getting out her keys, turning locks. Viviane turns on the light over the sink, lets the water run, and rinses her eyelids with delicate little pools that collect in her palms. She stays standing there, her back to me. She starts to speak. She doesn’t look at me but she starts speaking to me.

“What shoes do you have on?”

It takes me a second or two to catch on. I feel awkward as I look down at my feet, realizing I don’t remember having chosen what to wear this morning. Viviane repeats the question:

“Tell me. What shoes did you put on this morning?”

“The red ones. Why do you ask?”

“You bought those shoes on a Sunday. Your book had just come out, I think it was that same week, and the publisher hadn’t even paid you the advance. But that morning, while we had breakfast, we made plans to go bowling on Rue Mouffetard. And then you said: I like bowling, but I like bowling shoes even more. I said you should buy some. I told you I’d seen secondhand shoes in Porte de la Chapelle market, and that some of them were colored, like bowling shoes. What did you say to me?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You said that was all very well, but you didn’t have money to spend on colored shoes. What did I say? Do you remember?”

“You said…”

“I said you should give yourself an advance on your advance. That you’d earned it for working so hard on your book. That I loved you, and I was proud of you.”

She says all this without looking at me, with her voice echoing off the tiled wall. Then she turns around.

“I saw an interview with you. Before Christmas, I think. Do you know the one?”

I know exactly which one. It’s the kind of interview I detest: the journalist peppers me with a list of prepared questions, and I have to answer each with one sentence, as if it were a test of mental agility. But Viviane doesn’t wait for me to reply.

“They asked you what your happiest memory was. You talked about the day we went up to Lake Yamdrok, said the sky was the same color as the water and that made you feel free. Right?”

She was right.

“Well, that’s a lie. Your happiest memory is from when you were a child. You were about ten, maybe. It was New Year’s Eve, and one of the neighborhood drunks went out to fire shots in the air just for the hell of it. Your father went out, took the pistol, and knocked him to the ground with one punch. You didn’t see him do it, but your friends told you the next day. They seemed to respect you more. But that wasn’t the important thing, it was the fact of feeling invulnerable if you were at home and your father was with you. That night you asked him to let you sleep with him. It was the only time he said yes.”

Viviane takes a deep breath. She suddenly looks tired. It’s not immediate, but an accumulated weariness, as if she hadn’t slept for a week. I take a step toward her. I touch her hair.

“I know you inside out,” she says. “It’s as if I’d lived inside you. I know why you do everything you do. But when you left I felt lost, I didn’t know what was happening, I had no one to explain it to me.”

My fingers get tangled up in her hair. I close my eyes, recognizing the rootedness of my hands in this movement.

“At first I hated you, you know? I thought you were cruel. I kept telling myself you didn’t deserve someone like me. Then I thought I was worthless. If I was unable to keep someone like you, I must be worthless. I was in love with you, that’s what it was. I still love you, of course, but before I loved you more than my own life. I don’t care if what I say sounds corny to you, I’m not a writer. That’s what I felt, that was—”

I kiss her. I don’t know if I kiss her so I won’t have to hear any more of her words, because each one of them hurts me and harms me. But I kiss her. It’s a quick kiss, barely a meeting of lips: Viviane puts her hand on my chest, gently, as if picking up a little bird off the floor, and pushes me away.

“I’d like to stay tonight,” I say quietly.

“You are not made to be with me. In fact, you’re not made to be with anybody.”

I think of my father’s eyes. The black iris, the shining cornea. I no longer hear Odile, the neighbor. She must be asleep, happy because she’s just spent the weekend with her boyfriend, impatient because she won’t see him for another five days.

“You better go,” says Viviane. “Tomorrow you’ll have to go to a pharmacy, I imagine, begin your treatment. We made a good couple. But you better go.”

It occurs to me that this might be the last time I see her. I feel sick for an instant, and my hand, as if by instinct, covers my lymph node. It’s a new movement: a sick man is an animal who learns new tricks. Sometimes, this gesture is a response to shame; other times, however, it’s a simple nervous tic. Like straightening my glasses on the bridge of my nose. Like touching Viviane’s hair. But now it’s time for me to go, although part of me doesn’t want to.

“Can I call you?” I say.

“Of course not. What for? Your moment of uncertainty is over, isn’t it? You’re not scared anymore.”

I leave. The stairs are dark; before closing the apartment door, I hear her say:

“Now you can go back to being independent.”

—

I PRESS THE SWITCH so a low-watt bulb lights the hallway for twenty seconds. I decide to take the stairs, as I did the last time I was in this building, and press the switches at each floor, and each bulb gives me a brief light, the twenty seconds necessary to get to the next floor and repeat the maneuver. That’s how I descend, from one floor to the next, from darkness to darkness, until I feel, as I make it to the sidewalk, the gray and cold of the night like fog in my eyes. I think Paris is small, and that, with a bit of luck, I’ll run into Viviane once in a while, at the market or the cinema. They’ll be those coincidences that tend to happen in a city like this, falsely grand and rather provincial, a city where people don’t often leave their own neighborhoods. I’ll see her face, we’ll exchange a couple of affectionate phrases. And that’s how, bit by bit, I’ll go on surviving.