The Truth about Marie
Jean-Philippe Toussaint








Moving through a variety of locales and adventures, The Truth about Marie revisits the unnamed narrator of Toussaint’s acclaimed Running Away, reporting on his now disintegrated relationship with the titular Marie — the story switching deftly between first- and third-person as the narrator continues to drift through life, and Marie does her best to get on with hers. Like all of Toussaint’s novels, The Truth about Marie’s plot matters far less than its pace and tempo, its chain of images, its sequence of events. From pouring rain in Paris to blazing fires on the island of Elba, from moments of intense action to perfectly paced lulls, The Truth about Marie relies on a series of contrasts to tell a beguiling, and finally touching, story of intimacy forever being regained and lost.






Jean-Philippe Toussaint




The Truth about Marie





SPRING — SUMMER





I


Later on, thinking back on the last few hours of that sweltering night, I realized we had made love at the same time, Marie and I, but not with each other. At a certain moment in the night — during a sudden heat wave in Paris, for three straight days the temperature reached thirty-eight centigrade and fell no lower than thirty — Marie and I were making love in Paris in two apartments a mere half mile apart, as the crow flies. We couldn’t have imagined at the night’s start, or later, or at any time for that matter, it was simply inconceivable, that we’d see each other that night, that before sunrise we’d be together, even for a brief moment in each other’s arms in the dark, staggering hallway of our apartment. Seeing that Marie made it back home (to our place, or to her place rather, since it had been more than four months since I’d moved out) at almost exactly the same hour I made it back to my small one-bedroom apartment where I’d been living since our separation, not alone, I wasn’t alone — but who cares who I was with at the time, that’s not what matters — we can almost pinpoint the moment, at one twenty, one thirty at the latest, Marie and I were making love at the same time in Paris that night, both of us slightly tipsy, our bodies sweating in the half-light, the air heavy and stagnant in the room in spite of the open window. Thick, stormy, almost feverish, the heat weighed down our bodies, made our movements sluggish. It was a little before two in the morning — this I’m sure of, I looked at the time when the phone rang. But I prefer to be cautious as to the exact chronology of the night’s events, as we’re dealing with one man’s fate, or rather his death, though it would be a while before we would know if he’d survived or not.

I never really learned his name, an aristocratic name, complete with particule, Jean-Christophe de G. Marie had returned to her apartment on rue de la Vrillière with him after dinner, it was the first time they were spending the night together in Paris, they had met in Tokyo in January at the opening of Marie’s show at the Contemporary Art Space of Shinagawa.

It was just after midnight when they got back to the apartment on rue de la Vrillière. Marie had gone to get a bottle of grappa from the kitchen, and they sat down in the room at the foot of the bed, amid a riot of pillows and cushions, stretching their legs casually on the hardwood floor. The heat was thick in the dark apartment on rue de la Vrillière, where Marie had kept the shutters closed throughout the day in a futile attempt to keep the place cool. Marie opened the window and poured the grappa while seated in the half-light, she watched the liquid fall slowly out of the skinny silver measuring spout as it filled the glasses, and the sweet fragrance of the grappa went straight to her head, the taste filled her mind before it reached her tongue, this taste ingrained in her after many summers, this fragrant, almost syrupy taste of the grappa that could only remind her of Elba, the memory of which abruptly and spontaneously came to her mind. She closed her eyes and took a sip, leaned toward Jean-Christophe de G. and kissed him, her lips moist, the sweet taste of grappa on her tongue.

A few months earlier, Marie had copied a program onto her laptop that allowed her to download music illegally. Marie, who would have been the first to be surprised if told that what she was doing was illegal, Marie, my pirate, who paid an enormous sum to have a whole staff of lawyers and international legal experts fight against any infringement of her fashion line in Asia, Marie now stood up in the half-light and crossed the room to download a sweet and catchy song on her computer. She found an old, slow song, the kitschiest and most sentimental imaginable (I hate to admit that we have, her and I, the same tastes), and she started dancing by herself in the room, unbuttoning her shirt, gliding back toward the bed, barefoot, her arms like sinuous snakes describing fantastic arabesques in the air. She sat back down next to Jean-Christophe de G., who slipped his hand gently under her shirt, but Marie arched abruptly and pushed him away in ambiguous exasperation, perhaps as a way of saying “get your paws off me” as she felt his warm hand on her bare skin. She was extremely hot, Marie was extremely hot, she was dying from the heat, she felt sticky, sweaty, itchy, she had trouble breathing in the stale, stifling air of the room. She ran out of the room and came back from the living room with a fan that she placed at the foot of the bed, plugging it in and setting it immediately on high. It started up slowly, its blades quickly and loudly gaining speed until they blew a steady current of air. Facing the fan, their faces were whipped by the blowing air and their hair fluttered in front of their eyes, with Jean-Christophe de G., the closest, struggling to catch a loose bang, and Marie, docile, head lowered, welcoming the blast of cool air, her hair flying about, a wild-eyed Medusa. Marie and her exasperating love of open windows, of open drawers, of open suitcases, her love of disorder, of chaos, of bazaars and fabulous messes, of whirlwinds and storms.

They had ended up taking off their clothes and holding each other in the half-light. Marie, at the foot of the bed, became still, she had fallen asleep in Jean-Christophe de G.’s arms. The fan had been switched to low and its cool air mixed with the heat of the stormy night. The room was quiet, lit only by the blue glow of the laptop screen on sleep mode. Jean-Christophe de G. slipped gently out of Marie’s embrace and got up, naked, in two stages, feeling weighted down, first helping himself up with one hand, then slowly standing up straight, he shuffled silently over the creaking floorboards to the window and he stood there gazing out at the street. Paris was numb with heat, the temperature no lower than thirty centigrade even at almost one o’clock in the morning. In the distance, an out-of-sight bar was still open and shouts and laughter broke the night’s silence. A few cars passed under the halos of the streetlamps, a pedestrian crossed the street heading toward the Place des Victoires. On the opposite sidewalk, directly across from the apartment, stood the Banque de France silent and imposing. Its heavy bronze security gate was closed, the surrounding street still and quiet, and suddenly Jean-Christophe de G. had a dark foreboding, convinced that something tragic would interrupt the calm of this humid night, that, at any moment, some scene of violence would erupt before his eyes, spreading shock and death, and alarms would go off behind the security gate of the Banque de France, and the street below would be the site of car chases and shouts, of utter confusion, of doors slamming and gunshots, the sidewalk immediately invaded by a swarm of police cars whose flashing lights would shine on the surrounding façades in the night.

Jean-Christophe de G. stood naked at the window of rue de la Vrillière apartment, and he was staring out at the night with a diffuse feeling of anxiety in his chest, when he spotted a flash of lightning in the distance. A sudden gust of wind struck his face and bare chest, and he noticed that the sky was completely black at the horizon, not a summer-night black, transparent and tinted blue, but a dense black, menacing and opaque. Large storm clouds were gathering in the neighborhood, drifting inexorably over the Banque de France and covering the last vestiges of blue in the night’s sky. Lightning flashed again in the distance, this time by the Seine, near the Louvre, mute, rippling, prophetic, with no proper bolt, no thunderclap to follow, just a long horizontal discharge of electricity that ripped through the sky and lit up the horizon with an uneven and silent blaze.

A cooler air entered the room in violent gusts. The wind sent a shiver up Marie’s back and she took refuge in bed, wrapping herself up in the covers. She took off her socks and threw them at the foot of the bed, while Jean-Christophe de G. began getting dressed in the half-light — he was getting dressed while she was undressing, both going through the same motions but to different ends. He put his pants and jacket back on. Before leaving he went and sat on the edge of the bed next to Marie. He kissed her on the forehead in the half-light, then gave her a peck on the lips, but these kisses lasted longer than those of simple good-byes, becoming prolonged, intense, they fell into each other’s arms again and he slid into the bed, fully dressed, pulling her close to him under the covers, in his black jacket and cotton pants, still holding his briefcase in one hand, which he soon dropped the better to hold Marie. He had her naked body against him and he was caressing her breasts, she moaned quietly as he slid her tiny panties down her thighs, Marie helped him with this by lifting her pelvis, and Marie, panting, her eyes closed, unzipped Jean-Christophe de G.’s pants and took out his cock, hurriedly, determined, with a certain urgency and a gesture at once firm and delicate, composed, as if she knew exactly where she wanted to go, but, once there, she no longer knew what to do. She opened her eyes, startled, sleepy, feeling tipsy and tired, and she realized that, above all, she was tired, the only thing she really wanted to do at the moment was sleep, in Jean-Christophe de G.’s arms, maybe, but not necessarily with his cock in her hand. She stopped suddenly, and, since she had to do something with the cock she still held in her hand, she squeezed it, gingerly, two or three times, out of curiosity, gently, she held it firmly in her hand and stroked it, watching the result with no little interest and wonder. What was she expecting, for it to fly off suddenly? Marie had Jean-Christophe de G.’s cock in her hand and she didn’t know what to do with it.

Marie ended up falling asleep. She dozed for a few minutes, or maybe he was the first to fall asleep, they stirred quietly in the darkness, continuing to kiss each other from time to time, in a mutual state of half-sleep, drifting off in each other’s arms, caressing each other languidly in their slumber (so this is what we call making love all night). Marie had undone the top few buttons of Jean-Christophe de G.’s shirt and was stroking his chest listlessly, and he welcomed this, he was hot, he was sweating fully dressed under the covers, his cock hanging out, abandoned, stiffening briefly and twitching with intermittent spasms, all while Marie ran her hand over his chest, under his damp and shapeless shirt, its sides sagging and slack around him. She kissed him sweetly, softly, she was also sweating, her head hot, and, without realizing it, she started to search his pockets, she slid her hand into his coat pocket, curious to know what that hard object with sharp angles was at his waist when he took her in his arms. A weapon? Could he have a weapon in his pocket?

The room’s window then closed slowly on its own, before swinging open and slamming back violently, the glass pane reverberating with the shock, while the rain began abruptly pouring down in giant drops on the street. Marie watched the rain fall in the night through the window, a curtain of black rain moving laterally through the beams of the streetlamps, carried by strong winds. Thunder sounded, several times in a row, accompanied by a whole network of lightning, great electric shocks branching out in every direction. The rain doubled in force and began entering the room, dripping from the windowpane onto the floor under the windowsill. Naked under the covers and sheltered from the storm, Marie felt cozy, her senses alert in the darkness, her eyes lit up by the lightning, savoring the sensual pleasure one feels nestled in a warm bed during a storm, the window open in the night, the sky slashed by lightning and nature seemingly coming undone. The lightning startled her at times, and, with this stab of terror, intensified the erotic pleasure she felt lying in the warmth of the covers while the storm raged outside. But unlike the violent storms on Elba at the end of summer, which purified the air and immediately cooled the whole island, this night’s storm had something tropical and pernicious about it, as though the rain was unable to lower the temperature, and the air, charged with a residual humidity and an excess of atmospheric electricity, remained heavy and thick, stifling, harmful. Jean-Christophe de G., lying motionless in bed, fully dressed, sweat beading up on his forehead, hadn’t even opened his eyes. He continued to sleep deeply on his back, unperturbed by the rumbling of the thunder, its dying echo fading into the uninterrupted patter of the pouring rain. Marie hardly paid him any attention when he threw back the covers and got out of bed in his suit, all dressed and ready to leave. She watched him walk out of the room with a sleepwalker’s step, stiff and slow-moving, in his socks, carrying his briefcase, perhaps with the intention of going home, Marie wasn’t sure where he was going, she heard him walk down the hallway, then the slam of a door, maybe the front door, and Marie glanced over at Jean-Christophe de G.’s shoes lying at the foot of the bed — it must have been the bathroom door that slammed. Jean-Christophe de G. stayed in the bathroom for a few minutes before returning the same way he’d left, with the same awkward step, stiff, mechanical, his face pale, livid, bloodless, in socks and sweating profusely, he took one step into the room and collapsed.

Marie didn’t understand what had happened right away, she thought his fall was due to the alcohol, she waited in bed for a moment before getting up to help him. But what soon scared her was that he hadn’t lost consciousness, she saw him wriggling around on his back in the half-light, writhing helpless on the hardwood floor, holding his chest with both hands as if it were locked in a grip he couldn’t break out of, and she saw him grimace in pain in the darkness, his teeth clenched, his lips heavy, stiff, as if numb, his breathing no longer regular, and struggling to speak, his garbled words a stream of unintelligible sounds, trying to explain to her that he had no feeling in his left hand, that it was paralyzed. Marie, who’d knelt down beside him, leaning over him, took his hand in hers. He said he didn’t feel well, she needed to call a doctor.

Marie dialed one of the emergency numbers, 15 or 18, and she paced the room while waiting for someone to pick up, walking over to the window to stare out absently at the rain falling in the dark street, before going back over to Jean-Christophe’s writhing body and kneeling down next to him again. Marie, naked, on her knees, immobile in the half-light, her hands trembling, holding the phone to her ear as it continued to ring, the silhouette of her naked body suddenly and repeatedly defined by the lightning illuminating the entire room, Marie, who let loose her panic once someone finally answered, unleashing a rush of imprecise and unfinished explanations, Marie, baffled, lost, aghast, left the operator equally confused as he tried to calm her, repeating the same two or three succinct questions, the responses to which couldn’t be simpler — her name, address, the nature of the problem — but Marie couldn’t handle being asked questions at this time, Marie had always hated being asked questions, Marie wasn’t listening, she wasn’t responding, she was babbling frantically, incomprehensibly, without giving her name or address, she was explaining that even at the restaurant he’d felt something, a pain in his shoulder, but it only lasted a moment and then passed, how could she have known — and the operator had to interrupt her to ask once again, firmer this time, her address, “Your address, Miss, give me your address, we can’t do anything without your address”—and it was Jean-Christophe de G. who, lying on his back, pale and sweating profusely, a blank stare in his eyes, his bottom lip quivering, looked at Marie with concern and without strength, trying desperately to figure out what was going on, he was the one who, reading Marie’s face for signs of what was being asked and finally understanding the situation, snatched the phone from her hands and gave the address to the operator, “2, rue de la Vrillière,” he blurted it all out at once as if ordering a cab, then, spent by the effort, he passed the phone back to Marie and fell back into a daze on his side. The operator then explained to Marie that he was sending an ambulance right away and told her in a calm and steady voice that, if he goes into cardiac arrest or loses consciousness, she should try to resuscitate him by pressing down firmly and with both hands below his sternum and by performing mouth-to-mouth. The storm had hardly abated and intermittent flashes of lightning — interrupting total darkness with blinding light — would fleetingly fix every detail of the room in a phantasmagoric white brightness. Marie was straddling Jean-Christophe de G.’s fully dressed body, and, one hand over the other, her arms extended, her hair disheveled, clumsily, in a panic, she pressed down with all her strength on his sternum to give a jolt to his thoracic cage, then, as he remained unresponsive to these efforts, she leaned over him and shook him roughly, hugged him, kissed him, and then rested her palms on his cheeks, transmitting her warmth, planted her lips against his and stuck her tongue in his mouth to breath some air into him, as though she wanted to make up for the pathetic display of her clumsy efforts with a mad act of passion, which, though unlikely to give sufficient oxygen to the helpless man, could perhaps give him a surge of energy and vitality. For Marie was trying to transmit life itself to Jean-Christophe de G.’s unconscious body by blowing frantically into his mouth every which way while holding him tightly in her arms, yet, remaining locked in this embrace on the hardwood floor of the room, Marie began to feel the touch of death come into contact with her naked skin — death grasping at the striking nudity of Marie’s body.

Marie heard an ambulance’s siren far off in the distance, she ran to the window, her bare feet splashing through a tiny pool of rain that had formed on the floor. Marie, naked, leaning out the window, braving the wind and rain, tried to spot the ambulance coming up rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs, then discerned in the distance the first flashes of the ambulance’s lights accompanied by the growing sound of its siren, and then there wasn’t one but two emergency vehicles bolting through the night and surging onto rue de la Vrillière with their blue and white lights spinning and flashing in the falling rain, a large white ambulance and another medical vehicle that drove onto the sidewalk and parked at the building’s entrance. Two figures got out of the latter, while the paramedics from the former slammed their doors and ran out into the rain, ducking their heads in the downpour, carrying all sorts of medical bags and backpacks. The whole group ran on the sidewalk, hustling to get into the apartment, but they remained stuck down below, their rush brought to an abrupt halt, the front door remained jammed in spite of their repeated attempts to jar it open and force their way in. One of the crewmembers turned back around, backed all the way to the street, and looked up at the building. His face whipped by the rain, he finally spotted Marie at the window and yelled to her that the door was locked. Marie gave him the entry code immediately, but got confused, gave him the old one, she didn’t remember, gave the new one, shouted it several times between her cupped hands, and ran down the hall to open the apartment door. She stepped out onto the landing and heard the door buzz and open below, hurried footsteps already resounded in the entryway, and she heard the long strides of the paramedics bounding up the stairs and almost instantly they appeared before her in the darkness. Without so much as uttering a word they entered the apartment. The blue glow of her laptop in sleep mode provided the only light. There were five crewmembers, four men and one woman. They charged down the hallway determinedly and, wasting no time, headed into the bedroom without asking their way, as though they knew exactly where it was, as though they’d always known where the room was located, and, before anything else, before even glancing at the body asprawl on the ground, before examining it or even paying it the least attention, they went to adjust the light in the room, in which there was no ceiling light but rather a multitude of small lamps Marie had collected over the course of many years, the Tizio from Richard Sapper, the chrome-headed Artemide Tolomeo, the Titania from Alberto Meda and Paolo Rizzatto, the Itty Bitty from Outlook Zelco, all of which the paramedics turned on at once, the five paramedics heading to the four corners of the room to turn on all the lamps at once — and it wasn’t until then that, standing among the paramedics in the middle of the room, Marie realized that, with the room’s light at its full brightness, she was completely naked.

With the same determination, characterized less by speed than by precision, scrupulousness, and an impressive economy of gesture, the paramedics undressed Jean-Christophe de G. directly on the floor, they lifted him to remove his coat and undo his shirt, opening it at the collar, causing buttons to fly off as they pulled on either side of the shirt, stripping him in this way to uncover his chest, while the doctor had already begun to check his heartbeat with a stethoscope. One paramedic, crouching beside the patient, took his pulse, then strapped a blood-pressure cuff around his arm and squeezed the inflation bulb, noting that the pressure was very weak, hardly perceptible, virtually nonexistent, as was his carotid pulse. He needed to be put on a ventilator immediately, and they placed a transparent mask over his mouth and nose, carefully controlling its airflow by means of an oxygen pump. Another paramedic, kneeling on the ground, had opened a medical kit at the foot of the bed, next to where the small glasses of grappa had been left, and was preparing to give him an IV. He’d lifted Jean-Christophe de G.’s inert arm in order to disinfect the skin around his wrist with alcohol, then, wasting no time, he located a suitable vein solely by the touch of his hand, tightened up the tourniquet he’d tied, removed the lid of the needle, and stuck the point in at an angle. Then, with the sound of ripping tape, he opened the bandage and placed it over the IV on Jean-Christophe de G.’s arm to hold it in place for the moment. There were medical kits and cases strewn about the room, opened and spilling over with syringes, rubber tubes, and accessories vacuum-sealed in clear plastic bags. Kneeling on the hardwood floor, the doctor began lathering Jean-Christophe de G.’s chest with a translucent and slimy gel, applying and spreading it like butter with both hands to soften and desensitize his skin, and, having taken a disposable razor out of its plastic case, small, blue, rudimentary, a mean little disposable razor whose toothpick handle offered little purchase, he began shaving his chest rapidly, in great even strips, from top to bottom, perfunctorily as a daily habit, with little care, scraping his skin, clearing a space rather than really shaving, effecting a slow movement in the end, a sort of exaggerated comma in the crux of the sternum, then flicking the blade to remove its foamy glop of gel and tiny hairs before quickly placing a network of electrodes on the reddened, irritated skin. There lay Jean-Christophe de G.’s body in the middle of the room, surrounded by a shifting mass of white figures hardly distinct from one another, the blinding light of a 400-watt halogen lamp shining on his chest, which a paramedic had run out to get to increase the light in the room — but, even with the combined effort of all Marie’s designer lamps turned on together, the room was no brighter than a boudoir. Standing in the room, dressed in a short-sleeved tunic, the paramedic held the lamp by its base over the inanimate body, its adjustable head fully twisted to shine on Jean-Christophe de G.’s ghostly white, electrode-covered chest. The room had now taken on the look of a surgical unit.

Marie had gone into the bathroom to throw on a T-shirt, and she was now pacing the room, confined to the extremely small space unoccupied by the paramedics. She didn’t know what to do, where to stand, she’d gone over to the window and closed the shutters to keep the rain from coming into the room. She’d given up asking the paramedics questions, it was pointless, the gravity of Jean-Christophe de G.’s state needed no explanation. Besides, the paramedics, in a circle around the body, didn’t pay her the least attention, they were studying the electrocardiogram reader, the tiny bright screen of a cardiac monitor built into a medical case that lay open at the patient’s side, and from time to time they exchanged a few words in a whisper, one of them getting up on occasion to carry out a specific task, fetching a missing instrument or delivering an injection with the IV. Marie witnessed then an abnormal haste among the group, a spreading tension among the paramedics that caused a sudden acceleration in the performance of their tasks, with a nervous shuffling to and fro and a tangle of hands at work above the inanimate torso, a telling indication that Jean-Christophe de G.’s condition had taken an abrupt turn for the worse. The doctor, in a act of extreme urgency, sat up to press down on the patient’s sternum, before hastily placing two great electric paddles connected by means of cables to a defibrillator on Jean-Christophe de G.’s electrode-covered chest, one paddle on the upper part of the chest and the other between the ribs. Wasting no time, the doctor asked the paramedics to stand clear and, assuring that no one was in contact with Jean-Christophe de G.’s body, proceeded to perform a ventricular defibrillation by delivering a brutal electric shock, causing the patient’s chest to shake on the floor, from top to bottom, while the electric charge went through to the myocardium. Then, falling back onto the floor, the body lay motionless, and Marie understood then that Jean-Christophe de G.’s heart had stopped beating. Marie approached the paramedics and looked down at the stripped body, its face hidden by the oxygen mask, its white inanimate flesh dotted with electrodes, skin like a fish, cod or flounder, and Marie couldn’t help thinking that it was this same motionless body that she’d held in this room less than an hour earlier in that very spot, this body stripped naked and dispossessed, objectified by a whole array of medical apparatuses, shaved, hooked to an IV and ventilator — this body reduced to its bare substance, bearing no sign of Jean-Christophe de G’s personality. She realized then that up until this moment she hadn’t really looked at his body, not once throughout the whole night, not even while making love had she taken an interest in his body, she’d hardly even touched it, hadn’t paid it the least attention, being concerned as she always was with her own body alone, caring only for her own pleasure.

The first defibrillation having failed, the doctor gave it another try at a stronger charge. After a moment of silence, with all eyes fixed on the monitor’s bright screen, the electrocardiogram’s straight line began to oscillate slightly, Jean-Christophe de G.’s heart started beating again. A paramedic added a dose of antiarryhthmic medicine to his IV, and he was given more morphine. His condition seemingly stabilized, the doctor decided to transport Jean-Christophe de G. to a hospital at once. He gave no order or instruction, and yet everyone knew just what to do, the paramedics rose and prepared to leave, they began picking up the tools strewn about the floor and returned them to their cases, with some of the men already taking kits and bags down to the ambulance. Marie observed this silent ballet, a series of precise centrifugal movements away from Jean-Christophe de G.’s unmoving body, left alone for the first time in the center of the room, hooked to an IV and a small oxygen pump resting on the hardwood floor. The paramedics returned from the ambulance with a stretcher, which they set up in the room, adjusting the poles and unfolding the legs, checking its structural stability and the tautness of its canvas before carefully lifting Jean-Christophe de G. onto it. They laid a blanket over his lap, strapped him to the stretcher, tightened the straps around his thighs, and carried him out of the room, a paramedic scurrying alongside the stretcher in the hallway with the IV and oxygen pump. The crew left the apartment quickly with Marie trailing barefoot on the landing, she tried to activate the automatic light but it wasn’t working, and she watched them go down the stairs in the dark. They proceeded slowly through the darkness of the stairwell, one step at a time, keeping the stretcher level and studying the angles and curves of their passage to avoid scraping the walls or hitting the banister. At the foot of the stairs, one paramedic broke from the group to open the door. They walked outside and vanished from Marie’s sight at the precise moment I got to the building, the sole onlooker adrift in the street at three o’clock in the morning.




At first I hadn’t understood a thing when Marie called me in the middle of the night. The rain fell heavily through the open window, the storm continued to rage, and I heard the phone ring in the darkness of the one-bedroom apartment where I’d been living for the last few months. As soon as I answered I recognized Marie’s voice, Marie who after calling an ambulance had called me — right before or right after, I’m not sure which, the two calls must have been made moments apart — Marie, upset, confused, bewildered, had called me for help, pleading with me to come quickly, without any explanation, come quick, she told me hurriedly, come right now, hurry, it’s an emergency, beseeching me, begging me to get to rue de la Vrillière at once.

Marie’s call — it was a little before two in the morning, this I’m sure of, I looked at the time when the phone rang — had been extremely brief, neither of us able nor really wanting to talk, Marie had simply called for help, and I was speechless, paralyzed by the fear of a late-night call, a feeling confirmed, exacerbated even, by the irrational and violent onrush of embarrassment, annoyance, and guilt I felt immediately upon hearing Marie’s voice. For, as I recognized Marie’s voice on the phone, my gaze was fixed on the body of a young woman sleeping next to me in my room, I was gazing at this body lying motionless in the half-light, she wore nothing but a tiny pair of baby-blue silk panties. I stared at her bare side, the curve of her hip. I was gazing at Marie confusedly (Marie, her name was also Marie), and, with a sense of shock and unease, I foresaw the confusion awaiting me in night’s final hours. Make no mistake, I had no trouble distinguishing between Marie and Marie — Marie wasn’t Marie — but I knew immediately that I was incapable of being two people at the same time, simultaneously the person I was for this Marie in my bed and that person I was for Marie — her lover (even if we’d stopped living together since I’d moved into this small one-bedroom on rue des Filles-Saint-Thomas after our trip to Japan).

It was two thirty in the morning when I left my small one-bedroom on rue des Filles-Saint-Thomas to go help Marie. Outside the sky was dark, black, immense, invisible, and an unbroken sheet of rain falling through the yellow light of the streetlamps blocked the horizon. I threw myself straight into the downpour, my jacket’s collar raised, and I started in the direction of the Place des Victoires, stooped under the rain, its heavy drops blurring my vision. The thunder rumbled in the distance, in regular intervals, and the rain spewed out of an insufficient number of sewage drains, as if boiling up from below, streaming down the street gutters with the impetuousness of small urban torrents, ravaging and heedless. I reached the Place de la Bourse, silent, abandoned, the staid columns of the Palais Brongniart shining in the night’s darkness. The esplanade was deserted, its surface pounded by an oblique curtain of rain and covered with a pool of splashing, windswept water. I could hardly see ahead of me, I didn’t know where I was going, I closed my jacket tightly around me in a futile attempt at self-protection. I kept turning the wrong way then would run back in the opposite direction, nearly losing my balance on the slippery sidewalks. Reflections from the streetlights shimmered here and there on the wet pavement, and from time to time I discerned through a sort of aqueous fog that the rain held over my eyes the ghostly headlights of a car passing in the distance, moving as if in slow motion, inching along, slogging through the water, its headlights piercing through the flood.

I was still running when the Place des Victoires came into sight, I saw suddenly in the horizon the connected façades of the private houses and the three-headed streetlamps lit in the beating rain, and, in the middle of the plaza, rearing, immense, the equestrian statue of Louis XIV, which looked as though it were fleeing the storm. My concern quickly turned into panic when I reached rue de la Vrillière and saw, in the night, police lights in front of Marie’s. I walked the last stretch on wobbly legs, soaked from head to foot, still moving forward, full of emotion, out of breath, my heart racing, but no longer running, walking slowly, graceless, as if holding back each step and yet advancing against my will, no longer wanting to go on, imagining the worst, an accident, a late-night assault, and, thinking then about Marie with worry and affection, I remembered that night when an alarm on rue de la Vrillière had startled us from our sleep. We didn’t get up immediately, certain it was just another car alarm set off for no reason in the middle of the night, bound to wake up the entire neighborhood before turning off just as mysteriously as it started, but this alarm was harsher, more disconcerting than the usual car alarm — I’d never heard one like this, as if it had been designed for unknown catastrophes, sounding in the night to warn inhabitants of some nuclear accident — and it only came to an end after forty minutes, during which Marie and I had time to get up and go over to the window, Marie struggling to stay awake, her cheeks hot, her eyelids heavy, dressed in one of those baggy and threadbare T-shirts she always wore to bed, I could smell the scent of her warm sleepy body standing beside me. Side by side at the window, we relished at length the complicit, tender intimacy of the moment, I’d put my arm around her waist and we stared in silence at the dark walls of the Banque de France, exchanging from time to time an amused look, observing what was going on without trying to make sense of it, all of this taking place in what seemed a suspended moment in time, dynamic and intense, a moment of pure nothing, an emptiness charged with an invisible energy ready to explode at any instant, a gap continually animated by little events, unrelated, trivial, small in scale, occurring at regular intervals so that right when we’d be ready to go back to bed the tension would flare up again and put us back on guard, the arrival of a police car in the night, for example, greeted by two or three security guards, who seemed to have cordoned off the bank, or, ten minutes later, the slow and partial opening of the bank’s heavy bronze gate, with nothing to follow, apart from a guard poking his head out briefly in the night, and nothing more before the heavy bronze gate was then closed, filling the street once again with a diffuse sense of imminent threat, rendered even more palpable by its very invisibility. I never did find out in the end what had actually happened, I leafed through the papers the following days but found no information regarding the incident, and of this night I’ve retained only the exquisitely sensual memory of my silent intimacy with Marie.

I was still about a hundred feet from the building, and I’d stopped running, I was walking briskly, picking up my pace and slowing it down at the same time, in the same contradictory movement, the same propelling force, the same conflicted stride. I came to an abrupt stop when I saw the flashing lights at Marie’s door and I was nearly frozen in my tracks, fear having paralyzed my legs, making my last steps impossibly heavy, resistant. I continued to move forward nonetheless, and I perceived a light through the ambulance’s wet windows, a yellow light in that intimate space where the injured are laid, then my attention was drawn to the door of Marie’s building opening in front of me. I discerned nothing at first but the arm, white, of a paramedic holding open the door, then I saw the other paramedics leave the building in turn, four or five of them total, in white tunics, and there was a human form on the stretcher, my heart began to pound when I saw that there was someone on the stretcher — this someone could have been Marie, I had no idea what had happened, Marie had told me nothing on the phone — but it wasn’t Marie, it was a man, I could see his socks sticking out from under the small blanket covering his body. I gleaned nothing but isolated details, focused, removed from their context, caught only in passing, his socks, dark, imposing, as if this man would henceforth be reduced to these, his wrist, horrid, to which the IV was attached, a livid wrist, yellow-hued, cadaverous, his face pale, on which I focused closely, scrutinizing its features to see who this was, but in vain, his face, completely covered by the oxygen mask, was perfectly invisible. This human form, shirtless, a black sports coat thrown over the top of the stretcher and a briefcase stuck in between two transversal poles at its base, was not moving. I was standing there motionless on the sidewalk when I felt the presence of someone watching the scene. I lifted my eyes and saw Marie at the window, chin resting in her palms on the second floor of the building, Marie, her eyes fixed on the stretcher, and I understood the whole situation right then and there. In a flash, I knew without a doubt the man being carried away on the stretcher had spent the night with Marie and that something had happened to him and not to Marie (Marie was safe and sound, nothing had happened to Marie). And it was at that moment that Marie saw me, our eyes met for an instant in the night, it had been more than two months since we’d last seen each other.

I opened the heavy door of the building and started up the stairs toward Marie’s apartment. Her apartment door was open on the landing, and I stepped inside, I made my way silently down the hallway. As I entered the room I noticed immediately the presence of a pair of shoes near the bed. It was the sole indication that the man had been in her room. Everything else of his had disappeared, nothing attested to his having been there, not the slightest trace of the medical attention he’d been given less than five minutes earlier, no stray medical equipment, bandages or tubes, left behind. I looked at this pair of shoes at the foot of the bed, abandoned carelessly (one was upright on its sole and the other was tipped over on its side), elegant Italian shoes, sharp and powerful and at the same time slender, of delicate material, rawhide or calf-hide leather, a classic pair of wingtips firm and smooth, certainly very comfortable, faithful to the reputed excellence of Italian shoes, the best of which truly fit like gloves over one’s feet, of an indefinable color, fawn or chamois, its laces extremely thin and sturdy like fishing line, with a velvety, almost fury upper, bordered by a multitude of tiny decorative perforations subtly underlining the topstitched line of the seams, and, traced in the lining — a new lining that likely retained a slight scent of fresh leather — a discreet and seemingly coded golden inscription. I looked at these empty shoes, abandoned at the foot of the bed, they were all that was left of the man. Of him, as in the fabled image of a lightning-struck man, nothing remained but his shoes.

Marie heard me come into the room but she didn’t turn around. She waited for me to join her at the window, and we stood there side by side in silence, watching the ambulance speed off in the night. It went off toward the Seine, the echo of its siren fading little by little before disappearing altogether. Then, slowly, Marie moved closer to me, gently, sleepily, she touched my shoulder without uttering a word as a tacit sign of appreciation for my being there for her.

I was soaked, dripping wet, water streamed down the sleeves of my coat to form a small puddle at my feet on the floor. When outside I didn’t feel a thing, I didn’t even realize I was wet. My coat was now like a formless wet rag hanging from my shoulders, my shirt stuck against my chest, the fabric of my clothes stretched and weighed down by this syrupy rain, even my socks, swashing inside my shoes at every step, left me with that awful physical sensation that can only come from wet socks. I took off my socks and shoes, which I left near the window, and I walked through the room barefoot, letting the water drip from my outstretched arms, leaving trails of rain in my wake. I unbuttoned my sticky wet shirt and I looked around the room. It had hardly changed since I’d left, there was a new desk, but all in all it looked the same as when I’d moved out. I saw my old dresser still right where I’d left it, with my clothes probably still inside, the bulk of my clothes I hadn’t had time to take. I crouched down in front of it and opened its drawers, rummaged through the clothes, a mess of sweaters, shirts, pajamas, an old bathing suit stretched out at the waist. I grabbed a shirt and some other clothes to change into, began undressing.

Marie had remade the bed carelessly and sat against the wall to smoke a cigarette in the half-light, her legs making a Z under her XL T-shirt. She’d turned off all the lamps except for one near the bed, whose light was dimmed. She sat there silently for a long time, distraught, a vacant look on her face, then, in a soft voice and without looking at me, she started to tell me about Jean-Christophe de G., taking a drag of her cigarette from time to time, she told me she’d met him in Tokyo earlier that year at her exhibition’s opening at the Contemporary Art Space of Shinagawa, she told me about his work and many projects, he was a businessman and art connoisseur, told me she saw him again a few times in Paris when she’d come back from Japan, three or four times in the first few months, then less frequently, they’d spent a weekend together in Rome, but really they hardly knew each other. Marie explained all this to me without considering the pain it might cause me, and I kept silent, asked no questions. I’d taken off my jacket and shirt and I was drying my back with a large white bath towel as I listened to her. I began to take my pants off, not without some difficulty as the material stuck to my skin, then I removed my boxers, letting them fall down to the ground at me feet. Marie continued to talk, her need to talk, to confide in someone was clear, she went over the night in detail, looking for the signs that could have warned her, a certain sluggishness, shortness of breath, spells of dizziness, the sense of unease he’d felt at the restaurant. I was standing naked in the half-light and no longer paying her much attention, I dried my neck, my sides, I rubbed the towel around my thighs, I scrubbed between my legs (and I must admit it felt quite nice).

I was still buttoning my shirt, my bare legs on the hardwood floor, when I glimpsed my reflection in the mirror on the mantel, one of those large gilded mirrors you find in Parisian apartments, its pediment in the shape of a decorative flame in plaster molding depicting an elegant tangle of intertwined acanthus leaves. I took a step forward and saw my reflection move in sync in the patinated depths of the mirror, its surface flecked and discolored and splotched by patches of darkness, my dark face disappearing into its shadows. The room around me faded into the surrounding darkness, the softened edges of the furniture could hardly be discerned, Marie’s desk where her computer was lit appeared without detail. I saw myself there, faceless, standing in the room where I’d lived for almost six years. Marie was still sitting against the wall. From where I was standing I heard nothing but her voice, her neutral and empty voice, telling me that Jean-Christophe de G. was married and that was why she wasn’t with him in the ambulance, an act of prudence in a way, so that his wife could be notified when he got to the hospital. But now she wondered how she’d find out about his condition, she didn’t even know which hospital they were taking him to.

I walked around the room and took the bottle of grappa from the ledge of the mantle. Marie lifted her eyes toward me, and I saw her expression change immediately. Her attitude had taken a sudden turn, her look of sorrow gave way abruptly to one of coldness, of fierceness, she became distant and firm in her stubbornness, her face tensed in a grimace, her jaws clenched, this expression of cold rage and fury that I knew so well from when she tried to hide her feelings lest she begin to cry. Now she shot me an angry look, an expression I’d never seen splitting the corners of her mouth into tiny nasty wrinkles, and hate quickly flared up in her eyes. Why was it that each time we were together there was always a moment when, suddenly and without warning, she hated me with a passion.

Marie must have felt caught when she saw me grab the bottle of grappa. Perhaps she’d understood that this bottle gave her away, that, here in this room at this time, it called attention to itself, glared immodestly, indecently even — and she was right. Once I’d noticed the bottle I knew she’d had some grappa with Jean-Christophe de G. this very night, and, from this, I could easily imagine what took place between them in this room. She knew right away that, given this one tangible detail, this lone bottle of grappa, I could imagine her whole night, could see in detail what went on between them — down to their very kisses, down to the taste of grappa in their kisses — as in dreams, where a sole detail from our own intimate experience can unleash a rush of imaginary details no less vivid, and she knew that, now having a tangible reference on the one hand (the bottle of grappa) and a visual reference on the other (my witnessing the stretcher leaving the building in the night), I was now able to fill in the empty space between these two points of reference, and reconstruct, recreate, or invent what Marie had lived in my absence.

Marie remained seated for a while, silent, pensive, arms crossed, staring with an exasperated expression at my wet clothes on the dresser, then she jumped to her feet and told me to get rid of that dead weight, my dresser, right now and for good. This had gone on too long, she’d been living with this piece of shit in her room for five months now, it had to be moved to the ground floor immediately, not a second longer would this be tolerated, it had to go now. This wasn’t a suggestion, it was an order. She couldn’t bear to look at it any longer, this worthless commode, she said “commode,” she called my dresser “commode” with visible disgust, her contempt seemed to attach to the word itself: commode. Commode. She stormed over to this commode, her thighs bare under her baggy white T-shirt, and she tried to lift it, in a rage, with one hand, any which way, but there was nothing to grab onto, there were no handles or edges, its finished wood was all decorative curves impossible to grip. I walked over to the other side of the dresser to help her and we struggled to lift it up off the ground, raising it a mere ten centimeters at most, it was extremely heavy, before dropping it right back down, Marie let go of it, let it fall hard to the floor, made no effort to let it down gently, it pounded the floor violently, the angle of its feet crashing down loudly and chipping the hardwood floor. Marie, barefoot, jumped out of the way as it fell, she was losing patience, becoming enraged, she told me I knew damn well we couldn’t move it like this, it was too heavy, we had to empty it, and, opening the drawers, she started scooping up my clothes in armfuls, which she threw on the floor, telling me to move my stuff, to get my fucking junk out of that commode.

Then she didn’t say anything, she fell completely silent, she watched me do as she’d asked, standing still, her head slightly lowered, a vacant look on her face, her impatience having subsided, or now held in check. Her rage gave way to sorrow, a cold sadness, a passive despondency, she was spent, she gave up, she left everything to me. I tried to calm her, appease her, I continued to empty the dresser, drawer by drawer, making piles of clothes of more or less equal size on the floor, T-shirts, pullovers, dress shirts, a wild heap of underwear, of gloves, of scarves, of winter hats, then other piles, smaller, spread thin, disparate and variegated, a belt, balled-up ties, my old nut-hugger bathing suit stretched at the waist, whose touching, ridiculous presence here was rather humiliating for me. It seemed like a pitiful display of ragged gear at a secondhand dealer’s stall, set up there in the dimness of the room, and there was something macabre in this display, as if the clothes, when not being worn, signified the absence or disappearance of their owner. And wasn’t that precisely what this was about, my disappearance, the gradual effacement of my presence in this room where I’d lived for several years?

We started on our way, holding the dresser barely above the ground as we moved forward, but we failed to make it through the door on the first try. We had to put it down again and tip it on its side, lift it at an angle to pass through the doorframe and reach the hallway. Bent by the weight of the dresser, Marie in a T-shirt and me in my shirt and no pants, we shuffled down the hallway wearing next to nothing. Marie wasn’t speaking, but she’d calmed down, she was silent, careful, focused on the task at hand, she jutted out her bottom lip and blew a stray hair out of her eyes. She looked at me pleadingly (but there was nothing I could do, my hands were full too), and then she smiled at me, she gave me a shy, complicit smile from across the dresser, her whole face beaming, maybe the first time she’d smiled at me in five months. Our eyes met and we considered the absurdity of the situation, the madness of trying to haul this piece of junk to the ground floor in the middle of the night. We continued to smile at each other as we shuffled down the hall, our two bodies on each side of the dresser moving in unison, bound together, united, close to one another, as though we were dancing, borne along by the dresser’s own force which, like a song or tune, imposed its rhythm on us and dictated our speed, with only a couple of feet separating us, joined in the intimate promiscuity of this impossible task. There was a mutual feeling of complicity, of affection even, an attraction drawing us together, communicated through our eyes and spreading down to our hands, an invisible pull, a sort of magnetic charge, strong, powerful, ineluctable, as if, during the five months of our separation, an irresistible swell of emotion had been rising in us undetectably that could only end with us in each other’s arms this night. Marie’s pain that night could only be assuaged with her in my arms, she had an irrepressible, physical need to be comforted, to be caressed and held, to feel loved, cared for, and perhaps I also needed this, the fear and concern I’d felt this night gave me the same need to hold and caress her since the moment I stood by her at the window, when I was incapable of taking her into my arms immediately to console her, hold her body tightly against mine. We stopped there in the hallway, put the dresser down at our feet, and we were looking at each other in the half-light, speechless, but we understood each other, we’d always understood each other. I loved her, yes. It may be very imprecise to say I loved her, but nothing could be more precise.

I’m not sure if I was the one who approached her first, gently closing the small gap that separated us, or if it was she who had tacitly beckoned me on by taking the first step in my direction, but we were facing each other now, motionless in the half-light of the hallway, silent, we were looking at each other with infinite intent. I thought we were going to kiss, but we didn’t, our tongues or lips didn’t touch, we did nothing more than stand there with our bodies pressed together in the dark, our cheeks and necks grazing, like trembling horses, frightened and touched. Without venturing anything bolder, our hands filled with lightness, with reserve, with delicacy and consideration, as if we were dangerously brittle, or our skin scorching hot, and our touching unthinkable, taboo, we barely grazed shoulders and touched each other with only the tips of our fingers, our eyes wild and our bodies sensitive to every touch, I nuzzled my nose into the crease of her neck to breathe in the scent of her skin. Then, like rushing water held behind a dam for too long and suddenly released, we threw ourselves violently at one another, entangling our bodies, locking together in complete abandon of body and soul, holding each other tightly, feeling the warmth, comfort, and consolation of the other, our arms appearing suddenly to be many, hurried, flung every which way, hands soft, feverish, groping wildly, I squeezed the back of her shoulders, ran my hands over her cheeks, her forehead, through her hair. I touched her cheeks gently with my hands, and I looked her in the eyes. The hands and the eyes, the only two things that matter in life, in love, in art.

Our bodies entangled and our eyes closed, we caressed each other frantically, but we weren’t kissing, we couldn’t kiss, a sort of ban prevented us from doing so, an unspoken rule, imperious and invisible, too many things were converging at this moment, too many emotions, such as pain, concern, and love, all mixing together in our hearts, there must have been a slight lull, a pause to catch our breath, she swept a loose curl from her face, and I saw then a wild gleam in her eyes, a look of freedom, of lust. Her back arched against the wall, her thighs bare under her white T-shirt, Marie was challenging me with her eyes — there was a sort of defiance in her gaze, something taunting, sexual, perverse, as if willing and ready for anything. She leaned back against the wall as if to invite me, and I pressed my body to hers, feeling her pubic hairs through the threadbare fabric of her T-shirt. She had nothing on under her T-shirt, and I slid my hand up her shirt, felt the smooth skin of her quivering stomach under my fingers, our bodies fused together, caught in the moment, she moaned as she dug her face passionately into my neck, her thighs were hot, moist, I caressed her stomach and slid a finger into her vagina, gently, and a shiver, hot, wet, sweet, ran up my spine.

It lasted only a minute before Marie slipped away gracefully, she slid out of my arms and was gazing at me tenderly in the half-light. Tears had run down her cheeks when I was holding her, and she hadn’t tried to hold them back, nor had she dried her eyes, they were silent tears, almost invisible, tears that had streamed down her cheeks as naturally as a heartbeat or a breath of air. Marie, stunning, her eyes welling with tears in the half-light, Marie, torn between contradictory impulses, a passionate desire competing with her self-restraint, Marie who’d had as much need to give herself to me as to keep her distance, Marie who’d needed to hold me as tight as possible for comfort and consolation and who’d put up no fight against the physical desire she felt rising in her when I’d taken her in my arms, Marie who’d drawn me to her with that defiant look, as if challenging me to touch and caress her, no sooner had she felt all this than she broke away from my arms, whose clasp she undid with care, as though she’d simply realized the impossibility of loving each other at this moment.

I hadn’t realized it right away, not immediately, nor shortly thereafter, but much later the thought came to mind, in a flash and by chance, in a sort of panic and shock — in spite of the difficulty, impossibility even, of putting into words what had transpired, what, in the course of my life, had occurred to me in a natural sequence of silent and ineluctable facts, but which, once articulated, suddenly became incomprehensible, or shameful, as, perhaps, certain homicides evoked before an Assize Court, seemingly plausible acts when committed, become shocking, unspeakable, abstract with the passing of time and once placed under the implacable light of words — that this was the second time, that night, that I’d stuck my finger into a woman’s body.




Back in my small one-bedroom apartment on rue des Filles-Saint-Thomas, the place was deserted, Marie had left. The bed was empty and unmade in the drab light from open window, its top sheet tossed on the floor, wrinkled, balled-up. I bent down to pick it up and saw then in the middle of the bed, on the bottom sheet, two or three drops of dried blood. These were not round, red or regular spots, but rather two parallel streaks, a large and a small one (the smaller was a miniscule replica of the larger), which, after some sort of contact or friction, had spread over two or three centimeters, the stain of which had almost disappeared, its edges hardly discernible, two streaks ingrained in the white cotton of the sheet, my bed marked by two russet dashes in the form of small and skinny cephalopods or of the armored limbs of a shellfish.

Marie, the other Marie, had told me that night, I’d understood, she’d made it clear to me, it wasn’t said explicitly when after eating we’d returned to my place on rue des Filles-Saint-Thomas, but she’d kept her tiny panties on all night and I didn’t try to take them off, I’d understood without her telling me, we’d kissed on the bed when we got back, the room was broiling, we were sweating in my single bed, both of us dripping in sweat, the sheets sticking to our clammy backs, we were kissing and frolicking around in the heavy darkness of the steamy night, I was gently playing with the soft fabric of her tiny light blue silk panties, stretching and pulling at the elastic, the rain fell violently through the open window, and we were holding each other half naked in my small bed, eyes closed listening to the storm rage like those on Elba, I no longer knew where I was, nor whom I was with, sketching gestures with one Marie that I’d finish with the other, lost in love’s limited repertoire — caresses, nudity, darkness, humidity, tenderness — and it wasn’t until much later that I realized I had, on the tip of my finger, a bit of menstrual blood.

And, mentally following the trajectory of these few drops of blood on my finger, I imagined the absurd loop linking Marie to Marie this night. This blood, soon without any definable color, consistency, or viscosity, lacking any veritable material reality, as my fingers came into contact with diverse materials throughout the night, sheets, clothes, wind, fading a bit more with each contact, softening in color, before the rain washed it away completely, these few specks of blood, which although no longer materially present were nonetheless symbolically significant, had caused me to trace mentally their course from Marie’s body, their source, through all the successive places I’d passed that night, for I must have carried that mark with me everywhere I went, from my room in my small apartment on rue des Filles-Saint-Thomas to the landing of my floor, down the staircase and soon onto the street, through Paris, down rue Vivienne, then rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs, in the rain and lightning, as though fire and water must naturally attend the mad course of those invisible blood particles on my finger as I raced to Marie’s.

I was looking at those drops of dried blood on my bed, knowing where they came from, but, in a sort of mental confusion and daze, I associated this blood with Jean-Christophe de G., as though this were his blood, as though, in my bed, there were a few drops of Jean-Christophe de G.’s blood, blood that Jean-Christophe de G. would have shed that night in Marie’s apartment, blood belonging to him, a masculine blood — blood of drama, violence, and death — and not the feminine blood it actually was, not the delicate blood of life and femininity, but of catastrophe, and, in a sudden paroxysm of irrational fear — or lucidity — I understood then that if Jean-Christophe were to die this night, I’d have to explain why there was blood on my sheets, I’d have to defend the fact that there was human blood in my bed, this vertiginous blood at once dead and alive — this unspeakable blood — which led me to link Marie to Marie the night of Jean-Christophe de G.’s death.

Marie called me in the early afternoon to inform me of his death. Jean-Baptiste is dead, she told me (and I didn’t know what to say, having always thought his name was Jean-Christophe).




II


Jean-Christophe de G.’s real name was Jean-Baptiste de Ganay — I found this out a few days later when coming across his obituary in Le Monde. It offered a brief and somber account of his life. A few lines in small font with no mention of the circumstances of his death. The names of his relatives. His wife Delphine. His son Olivier. His mother Gisèle. Nothing more, the notice similar to a brief announcement. I meditated for a while on his birth date, 1960, which suddenly seemed so distant to me, lost in the past, already deeply buried in a distant twentieth century, hazy and unapproachable, another time altogether for future generations, more so than the nineteenth century for us, due to these two ludicrous numbers at the beginning of each date, this strange and incongruous 1 and 9, reminiscent of the surreal Turbigos or Almas, city districts whose numerical correspondence on the telephone pad provided the first digits of the old Parisian telephone numbers. He was a man of our time, a contemporary in his prime, and yet his date of birth already seemed strangely archaic, as though it had expired in his lifetime, a date stuck in the past, soon without any currency and patinated by time, as if from the outset it bore within itself, like a corrosive poison hidden inside, the seed of its own dissolution, its definitive disappearance in the vast rush of time.

For a while I thought that the only time I’d ever seen Jean-Christophe de G. was the night of his death. I’d hardly caught a glimpse of him that night. He’d appeared before my eyes lying flat on a stretcher, carted out of the building at rue de la Vrillière like a figure from a dream, or a nightmare, a specter spontaneously conjured up from nothingness and then vanishing, his image, at once complete, coherent, and detailed, had suddenly materialized before me out of nothing, it came from nothing and returned to nothing, as though created ex nihilo from the very substance of the night — the brusque appearance of this man inert on a stretcher, the frightening pallor of his face behind an oxygen mask, featureless and depersonalized, his sole heraldry, his colors, reduced to his socks, black, fine, delicate, of fil d’Écosse cotton, whose texture and splendor and silver sheen I can still imagine so vividly! I thought, at that moment, it was the first time I’d seen him, but I’d already seen him a few months earlier in Tokyo. I remember the day, in Tokyo, I’d seen him by chance alongside Marie, they weren’t arm in arm but may as well have been, they were together, this had struck me immediately, a man older than she, well into his forties, close to his fifties, not without charm and elegance, he was stylish, sporting a black cashmere overcoat, a dark scarf, his thinning hair combed back. This is the only image I have of him, but his face is without detail and will undoubtedly remain so since I’ve never seen a picture of him.

In the days following Jean-Christophe de G.’s death I looked him up on the Internet and was surprised to find many hits pertaining to him personally, as well as to his family and ancestors. I was able link this information to that which Marie had shared with me, those rare moments when she confided details about their relationship to me. The night of his death Marie had told me how she’d met him in Tokyo at her exhibition’s opening at the Contemporary Art Space of Shinagawa. For obvious reasons, Marie had chosen not to carry on about Jean-Christophe de G. during the days following his death, she was still in shock, she avoided questions concerning him, but she let slip a few details during a dinner we had at the beginning of summer before her trip to Elba, intimate details she regretted having shared shortly thereafter, indiscreet remarks about their private relations, details upon which I seized immediately to dwell and expand on in my imagination. I’d also learned from Marie some information about the drama that had cast a shadow over the last months of Jean-Christophe de G.’s life. I had thus filled in the missing details and examined the murkier zones of his background, buying into the gossip and rumors, giving credence to the scandals mentioned in the press, pure slander, without proof, unmotivated — for there is no evidence, to this day, that Jean-Christophe de G. had ever consciously broken the law.

At times, spurred on by nothing more than a single detail Marie had shared with me, or let slip, or which I’d discovered, I’d allow myself to build the scaffolding of further developments, distorting the facts occasionally, transforming or exaggerating them, even romanticizing them. I may have been mistaken about Jean-Christophe de G.’s intentions, I could easily doubt his sincerity when he confessed to have been betrayed by one of his own. I was capable of believing the defamatory rumors and of finding more reason to suspect illicit dealings. I’m not sure to what extent he was personally implicated in the affair he was accused of, and I ignored the question of whether the rumors of the blackmail of which he was supposedly a victim were well founded (although Marie had told me one night she’d had the feeling he was carrying a weapon during the last days of his life). I may have been mistaken in many of my assumptions about Jean-Christophe de G., but never in those about Marie, I knew Marie’s every move, I knew how she would have reacted in every circumstance, I knew her instinctively, my knowledge of her was innate, natural, I possessed absolute intelligence regarding the details of her life: I knew the truth about Marie.

Of what really went on between Marie and Jean-Christophe de G. the few months they knew each other, during the period of this relationship, which, if one were to make an exhaustive list of all the times they’d met, would amount to no more than a few nights spent together, four or five nights, no more, in between the end of January and the end of June (to which we might add a weekend in Rome, one or two lunches, and a few museum visits), no one can really be sure. I can only imagine Marie’s gestures when with him, her mood and her thoughts, on the basis of information witnessed or inferred, known or imagined, and combined with the grave, painful moments I knew Jean-Christophe de G. to have endured, joining in this way a few incontestable truths to the cracked and incomplete mosaic, full of gaps, contradictions, and inconsistencies, of the last months of Jean-Christophe de G.’s life seen through my eyes.

From the very beginning I’d been mistaken in many respects about Jean-Christophe de G. First, I continued to call him Jean-Christophe whereas his name was Jean-Baptiste. I even suspect I’d done this intentionally so as not to deprive myself of the pleasure of getting his name wrong, not that Jean-Baptiste was a better name, or more elegant, than Jean-Christophe, but the latter simply wasn’t his name, and this posthumous jab, however small, however simple, gave me great pleasure (had his name been Simon I’d have called him Pierre, I know myself). What’s more, I’d always believed that Jean-Christophe de G. was a businessman (which, in truth, he was, in a sense), and that he was a connoisseur of art, that he was a dealer or a collector of international art, and that this was how he’d met Marie in Tokyo. But if it’s true that he purchased artworks from time to time (even if only old paintings, designer furniture, or jewelry from antique shops), this was not his principle occupation. Jean-Christophe de G., like his father, but especially like his great-grandfather, Jean de Ganay, was a prominent figure in French horse racing, a breeder, owner of horses, and member of the French racing society (La Société d’Encouragement pour l’Amélioration des Races de Chevaux en France). It was in this respect, as a horse owner, that he’d gone to Japan at the end of January. He had a horse competing in the Tokyo Shimbun Hai, and it’s only by chance that, being in Tokyo at this time, he’d gone to the opening of Marie’s exhibition at the Contemporary Art Space of Shinagawa. And it was here, the night her exhibition was open to the public, that he’d seen Marie for the first time, that he’d met and conquered her (in what order we can only speculate, since it must have happened almost at once).

Ganay’s racing colors — yellow jersey, green cap — had been selected at the beginning of the twentieth century by Jean-Christophe de G.’s great-grandfather, who presided over the Société d’Encouragement from 1933 until his death. This renowned Society, founded with the mission of improving the breeding and racing of horses in France, was created a century earlier by Lord Henry Seymour, also known as Milord the Bastard (who knows where this curious nickname originated, an underworld name, from the mob, from his working-class past, his crooked deals, his sinister ways?), and it is to this Society that we owe the modernization of the Longchamp racetrack, the creation of race officials, and the institution of the first measures, still rudimentary, of testing against doping with saliva samples. It is also worth noting that we owe the establishment of the first antidoping regulations in horse racing to one of Jean-Christophe de G.’s ancestors, given the extent to which the last six months of Jean-Christophe de G.’s life were embroiled in the Zahir Affair, named after his thoroughbred competing in the Tokyo Shimbun Hai.

But it wasn’t so much the horse’s failure to compete in Tokyo as the circumstances of that failure that had affected Jean-Christophe de G. and cast a pall over the final months of his life. Talk had already spread upon the horse’s return to France, and the scandal was even harder to deny in that it had never been made public. Officially there was no Zahir Affair, there were no charges or accusations, but rumors spoke of illicit substances detected in the horse’s urine (although there was no explicit mention of anabolic steroids, there was talk of masking agents capable of preventing their detection), and of suspicions that there were ties between the horse’s trainer and a nefarious Spanish veterinarian who moved in cycling and weightlifting circles (where he no doubt benefited greatly from his veterinary knowledge). The official reason given for Zahir’s dropping out of the Tokyo Shimbun Hai, and the long and inexplicable series of sicknesses and complications that followed, cited a root abscess at risk of infection on the day of the race, for which an injection of antibiotics and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs was administered to ward off a potential fever, but nobody believed in good faith that a simple root abscess was sufficient cause to cancel on the spot a trained horse’s tour through Asia, especially one treated daily by a team of veterinary specialists. Jean-Christophe de G. withdrew Zahir from all scheduled races immediately and without explanation, abruptly canceled his participation in the Singapore Cup and the Audemars Piquet Queen Elizabeth II Cup in Hong Kong, fired the trainer without so much as a second thought, and, not without some regret, dismissed the rest of Zahir’s entire crew. Once back in France the thoroughbred was removed from the public eye and sent to the Rabey stud farm in Quettehou, Manche, a Ganay family property, and no one saw the horse for the rest of the year.

After his quick decision to exfiltrate the horse from Japan Monday morning, the day after the race, Jean-Christophe de G. canceled all Zahir’s engagements for the rest of the year and, after some dozen phone calls, arranged for the horse’s return trip to Europe himself, then, fearing complications with customs officials, he called a long-time friend, an official from the JRA, the principal organization for Japanese horse racing. After this conversation, he decided to leave that very day and to personally escort the horse to Europe. Then he called Marie and invited her to join him, which to his great surprise she accepted without question or any display of emotion. But after the call Marie felt suddenly sad, nostalgic, as she realized that she’d be returning to Paris without me, whereas only a week had passed since we’d arrived in Japan together.

The window in her hotel room was wet, streaked with raindrops, dotted lines sliding slowly down the pane, moving in fits and starts, their course interrupted abruptly for no apparent reason. Marie had just hung up the phone and was standing motionless at the large bay window, pensive, looking out gravely at Shinjuku’s administrative center, and she watched the city slowly vanish under the rain and fog, her gaze fixed on nothing in particular, beset with that dreamy melancholy incited by the passage of time, by the realization that something is coming to a close, and that, at every second, little by little, the end is approaching, the final moments of our loves and our lives. Presently, an hour before leaving Tokyo, she thought about me — the person she had broken up with in this very place, in this hotel room we’d shared the night we got to Japan, this room where we’d made love for the last time, this bed where we’d loved each other, this unmade bed behind her where we’d clawed and held each other. Marie would have liked to erase me from her thoughts, now and forever, but she knew quite well this wasn’t possible, that I could appear in her mind at any moment in spite of her wish, subliminally, a sudden immaterial memory of my personality, my tastes, a small detail, my way of perceiving the world, an intimate memory to which I was inextricably bound, for she realized that, even when absent, I continued to live on in her mind, to haunt her thoughts. Of my current location she hadn’t the slightest idea. Was I still in Japan, or had I too changed my plans and taken an earlier flight to Europe? And why hadn’t I tried to contact her? Why hadn’t I called or written since my return from Kyoto? She didn’t know, she didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to have anything to do with me, understand, never — enough of me now.




When, in the afternoon, Jean-Christophe de G. came to pick up Marie at the hotel, she wasn’t ready, her room was still a mess, the bed unmade, her suitcases flung open. Marie had arrived in Japan with three hundred pounds of luggage distributed unevenly among various suitcases and trunks, hatboxes and poster tubes, and, although able to leave some bags and suitcases in Tokyo (the exhibition at the Contemporary Art Space of Shinagawa would last several more months), she’d nevertheless accomplished the feat of returning with as much as she came, if not in weight then at least in volume and number of bags, accumulating, like natural outgrowths of her suitcases, a whole host of sacks and bags of all sizes, in leather, in canvas, or in paper, some sturdy, white, and rectangular, with tan handles of reinforced plastic, others loose and sagging and filled with knickknacks, Takashimaya’s decorative logo of blooming red roses adorning the front, stuffed with presents she received or planned to give, purchases of wild silks and other fine material, obis and trinkets, diverse trifles and souvenirs, paper lanterns, seaweed, tea, in bulk or in individual bags, and even fresh products, small vacuum-packed containers of fugu sashimi kept for the past couple of days in her hotel room’s mini-bar among canned beer and tiny bottles of alcohol. Jean-Christophe de G. called her room twice from the lobby, urging her, tactfully, to make haste, reminding her of how little time they had, the horse and cars were waiting. Marie then had a sudden spurt of energy, dashing back and forth through the room, her arms waving and flitting this way and that as she threw her things together in a rush of panic and goodwill (Marie always made up for being late with a final and sudden push before the finish line, constantly arriving at meetings flustered and out of breath, in a show of haste and with a dramatic entrance, even though often an hour late), then, returning to her natural pace, she finished packing absently, carefully placing her last few things in her bags, looking over her belongings arrayed on the large unmade bed, listlessly placing her bags at the door, without of course closing anything (Marie always left everything open, windows, drawers — it was exasperating, she’d even leave books open, turning them over on her night table next to her when she was done reading).

Waiting for Marie in the lobby, Jean-Christophe de G. settled final matters pertaining to the horse’s transport. He was sitting on a couch in the lobby in the company of four Japanese men, each with a laptop and electronic planner, sent there to replace the former trainer’s crew and to make sure the horse made it to the airport and past customs safe and sound. The four Japanese men all wore navy-blue blazers with pockets bearing the crests of various private clubs and were discussing practical matters with Jean-Christophe de G., shuffling through paperwork and certificates that they studied in a whisper. The horse trailer was parked at the hotel’s entrance, its long and still silhouette could be seen through the lobby’s bay windows, its aluminum body just the same as a rock star’s trailer, with two barred windows on each side, the whole grooved mass gleaming under the golden lights of the hotel’s entrance. The trailer’s back door was open and its ramp lowered to air out the rear and give the thoroughbred some fresh air, and three men in light jackets, hired hands or assistants, stood guard at the trailer’s entrance next to the driver, an old Japanese man in a jumpsuit, starched and gray, opened at the neck to reveal the knot of his tie, smoking a cigarette as he surveyed the hotel’s surroundings. As the wait went on longer than anticipated, the workers took advantage of the lull to change the horse’s water, one of the elegant Japanese men in a navy-blue pocket-crested blazer quietly slipped away into the lobby with a metal bucket, new and shiny, engraved with a blazon and initials, similar in color to the trailer, as though it was an accessory of the latter, one piece of a larger set, and he returned from the lobby with a slow-moving, ceremonial gait, carrying the bucket back to the trailer, his hands covered in clear antiseptic gloves (who knows whether he filled up the bucket in the hotel restroom, or if he had emptied out its contents, manure and urine-soaked hay, thus cleaning out the bed of the trailer).

As soon as Jean-Christophe de G. saw Marie enter the lobby — she was walking slowly, her course unswerving and her eyes pale in the chandelier’s light, a vacant look on her face, trailing in her wake a host of hotel employees in black livery who followed her with two golden luggage carts, a varied heap of bags piled high on each — he interrupted his improvised meeting and stood up quickly to greet her, politely offering to carry her small plastic sack of fugu sashimi. We have to leave right now, we’re late, he told her, uncertain of what he should do with the sack of fugu sashimi he now held in his hand, and Marie didn’t respond, she didn’t say anything, followed him silently, insouciantly — Marie, fixing her gaze on nothing in particular, in skirt and black boots, her long leather coat draped over her arm, its loose belt dangling and dragging on the floor behind her. A rented Japanese limousine awaited them outside the hotel (with large cream leather seats, small embroidered coverings over the headrests, and an adjustable armrest with electronic buttons inscribed with the word MAJESTA), and several hotel employees assisted in unloading Marie’s many and disparate bags, placing them in the trunk and front seat of the limousine, while the four Japanese men in navy-blue pocket-crested blazers gathered their belongings and got into a small minibus parked nearby, its doors bearing some sort of golden insignia. There were so many bags on the luggage carts that the employees had to load some in the minibus. Sitting shoulder to shoulder in their narrow seats, impassive among a growing mass of beribboned boxes, designer handbags, tiny frilled sleeves for small precious items, the four Japanese men watched as the bellhops continued to place bags by their sides. Perhaps they were lawyers or jurists, or members of a Japanese horse-racing society, one of them had his hair dyed and sported a pocket handkerchief of bright mauve, which spilled elegantly out of his chest pocket (the sign of an artist, bohemian, veterinarian?).

The convoy began on its way, slowly winding down the hotel’s private access road, the small minibus leading the pack, followed by the limousine and the imposing aluminum horse trailer, which struggled around the bends and made wide turns with infinite precaution. They drove on for a quarter mile without any difficulties, enough time to leave Shinjuku’s administrative center behind them, before speeding onto the freeway in the direction of Narita. But, almost right away, they were caught in traffic. They crept along, stopping and starting in traffic, before being stopped for a longer period in the evening’s gray drizzle. Through the foggy rear window, Marie saw the aluminum trailer’s monumental silhouette, its powerful headlights piercing through the rain in the day’s waning light — the trailer at a near stop, majestic, rocking slightly on the wet pavement, its tires and axles creaking. Marie looked at the trailer immobile behind her in the rain, this immense and incongruous vehicle, dark and mysterious, run aground in the Tokyo traffic, with its two barred windows on each side, behind which reigned the living presence, quivering, hot, of an invisible thoroughbred.

Jean-Christophe de G. hadn’t taken off his coat, hadn’t even removed his scarf. Sitting back in his seat, separated from Marie by a large adjustable armrest, he made call after call, speaking to various people in English, his knee shaking steadily, frantically tapping the ground in time with his foot, then, hanging up — without however putting the phone away, already poised to dial another number — flashing a tense smile at Marie and tenderly touching her bare arm, unconvincingly, almost mechanically, his leg still twitching nervously, uncontrollably. Jean-Christophe de G. knew the customs office at the cargo zone at Narita closed at seven and there would be no possibility of extending their hours (theirs were inflexible hours, Japanese hours), arriving late wasn’t an option, the slightest derogation of policy was out of question. In other words, either they get the horse to the airport before seven and board the plane, or they arrive late and the horse remains stuck in customs in the cargo zone of Narita Airport with all the attendant consequences.

Jean-Christophe de G. knew the horse’s papers were in order, its vaccinations records updated, its permission for transport validated, but he feared a final complication with customs, some required document of which he was perhaps unaware, and, all while sharing his concerns with Marie, he dialed more numbers on his phone. In fact — and Marie only realized this at the present moment — the people with whom he’d been speaking one after another since they’d left the hotel were none other than the four Japanese men just ahead of them in the minibus. He spoke with them without interruption, not with one of them in particular, a sort of designated spokesman, but with all four alternately, depending on the question at hand or the specialization of each, their phones rung or vibrated incessantly in the small minibus, forcing them to answer in turn, striving to reassure Jean-Christophe de G. with the same few words incessantly repeated, always agreeing, never saying no, favoring an ambiguous or oxymoronic yes (yes, I don’t know), which only alarmed him even more.

Traffic had cleared, the rain had picked up violently and was now accompanied by gusts of raging wind, whose assaults rocked the metal body of the trailer as it sped down the freeway. Narita Airport was in sight, indicators of its imminent approach thronged the freeway, on one side the Narita Hilton, on the other a giant billboard with an ANA advertisement glowing in the rain and night. The airport itself was surrounded by a double row of metal fencing topped with barbed wire, behind which stretched a vast, deserted space, the dark and mysterious extremities of the airport. The convoy slowed down as it approached the airport and moved into one of the lanes of the police checkpoint. Several police officers wearing transparent jackets directed traffic in the rain in front of a large gate, similar to those of highway tollbooths, waving vehicles forward with fluorescent batons. One officer stepped into the minibus to quickly check the passports of the Japanese men, which they had out and ready, and he wasted no time, pointing at each passport as he passed down the aisle before getting out of the vehicle, while another officer stepped out of a kiosk and walked over to the limousine. Jean-Christophe de G. rolled down the automatic window with an electronic button on the armrest and handed the officer his passport in the night, as well as the horse’s passport, because the horse had a passport too, a personal ID, official, coated in plastic, impossible to forge (with picture, birth date, and pedigree). The officer opened Jean-Christophe de G.’s passport, looked at his picture, and returned it to him, then he opened the horse’s passport and leaned into the car to take a quick look at Marie’s face (but, even in the dark, it was impossible to confuse Marie with a horse). Jean-Christophe de G., realizing the misunderstanding, asked Marie — Marie, aloof, distracted — to please show the officer her passport. But Marie could never find her passport when she needed it, and, suddenly roused from her reverie, as if caught off guard, her face already betraying the tiresome futility of the search to come, she was overcome by a mad frenzy, that strange mix of panic and goodwill she displays when looking for something, desperately digging through her purse, turning and shaking it in every which way, taking out credit cards, letters, bills, her phone, dropping her sunglasses on the ground, trying to stand in the limousine and twisting around to check her skirt’s back pocket, the pockets of her leather coat, of her sweater, positive she had it with her, that damn passport, but not knowing in which pocket she’d put it, in which bag it could possibly be, twenty-three bags exactly (without counting the plastic sack with the fugu sashimi, in which she also glanced just to be sure) — all in vain, the passport was nowhere to be found. She had to get out of the limousine — Jean-Christophe de G. kept his cool, telling her not to worry in a calm tone, checking his watch in a panic — and she opened the trunk in the rain, took out her bags, and dug through them on the wet ground, under the officer’s cold, indifferent gaze. I must have left it at the hotel, Marie said, and she said this without the slightest trace of concern, almost with excitement, as though to imagine the worse — being at a security checkpoint in Narita without her passport — thrilled her, intoxicated her even, already aware of how funny this would all be in hindsight. This whimsy, this lightness of being, this ravishing insouciance, enchanting and radiant, a clear display of Marie’s charm at its best, was delightful as long as one wasn’t directly involved. Jean-Christophe de G., for his part deeply involved at the moment, grabbed her firmly by the arms (his gallantry beginning to crack), and he asked her to think about where she’d put her passport. I have no idea, Marie told him — he was beginning to annoy her now with all his questions — and she suggested it might be in her leather suitcase with her plane ticket. She took out this suitcase from the trunk and found her passport immediately, which she presented to the officer, who hardly looked at it before approving (after all, it was only a routine security check for people entering the airport).

They got back into the limousine and the convoy headed toward Narita’s cargo zone, following the arrows on the big green signs lit up in the night, Cargo Building n° 2, Cargo Building n° 3, ANA Export, Common Import Warehouse, IACT. The three vehicles followed one another down a deserted road lined with official buildings. On either side of the road, blue and white runway lights speckled an otherwise vast expanse of darkness. They drove on in the night, the road was no longer lit, silhouettes of immobile planes could be seen parked here and there in the distance. They drove onto a soaked hardstand, the three vehicles slowly following each other, their headlights piercing the darkness, moving past a row of giant hangars through whose immense doors shone a green-tinted artificial light. Each hangar bore huge stenciled letters indicating the different cargo zones, E, F, G, and the convoy stopped at the entrance of unit F.

Narita Airport’s customs office closed in less than ten minutes, and the four Japanese men quickly got out of their vehicle and ran into the hangar, carrying paperwork and official documents under their arms. Jean-Christophe de G. and Marie followed at their heels, Marie in skirt and black boots, her leather coat folded over her arm, which she put on without breaking stride to protect herself from the cold drafts in this dark, humid space. The hangar, a vast space of more than twenty thousand square feet, looked like an abandoned fish market after closing time when the stands are shut and the workers are spraying down the floor with hoses. The lights were turned off in most of the sections, there were boxes covered with tarps, there were empty shelves, a freight elevator was stationed nearby, duckboards strewn on the floor. Here and there forklifts moved to and fro through empty alleys, driven by workers in hardhats and white gloves transporting goods to the few open sectors, tiny islets of bustling activity violently lit by white fluorescent lights, where warehouse workers carried boxes toward lifts, boxes of goods of all sorts, vacuum-sealed or in worn cardboard boxes riddled with tags, crates of fresh produce poorly tied. The customs office was at the back of the hangar, at the center of a space reserved for airlines, their check-in counters empty, nothing remaining but a few makeshift signs posted here and there on the walls, KLM Cargo, SAS Cargo, Lufthansa Cargo.

In the customs office the four Japanese men talked to a customs official, a man with a sickly pallor, his face livid, emaciated, wearing an official’s hat bearing the airport’s insignia and a masuku over his mouth, a mask of white gauze that covered his mouth and nose to protect him from microbes. He was going over a document concerning the transportation of the thoroughbred when, seeing Jean-Christophe de G. come into the office, he dropped what he was doing and bowed to offer his apologies, telling Jean-Christophe de G. in English through the thin layer of gauze covering his mouth that he was sorry for making him wait in the cargo zone and that he’d try to board the horse without further delay. Jean-Christophe de G. considered the officer incredulously, realizing from his hissed apologies, filtered twice over (by the language barrier and the thickness of the mask material), that getting the thoroughbred through customs successfully, which project had caused him such anxiety, and whose success, only seconds earlier, he believed to be compromised, had just been taken care of without any complications.

Jean-Christophe de G. had stepped out of the hangar and was waiting for the horse’s travel stall to arrive so that they could proceed with the boarding. The trailer’s driver had opened the back door of the vehicle and lowered the metal ramp in the rain, while the other workers gathered around the back end of the trailer. Two of them looked like Yakuzas or young Japanese thugs, wearing belted bomber jackets with orange lining, while the third worker, wide-framed, stocky, entirely bald, his neck wide and thick, his skin like buffalo horn, was perhaps just as Japanese as the others, but would have fit in in any of the world’s cities, Moscow, New York, with his rock star’s bodyguard look and the tiny, international slits of his eyes, a natural citizen of the world. Apparently they weren’t authorized to touch the horse, they were only there to look after the horse’s safety, prevent anyone from getting too close. And they didn’t do any more than what was asked of them, pleased as they were to keep watch by the vehicle, their imposing presence alone acting as a strong deterrent. The travel stall hadn’t arrived yet, and two of the four Japanese men had stepped inside the trailer to try to calm the horse, to appease it, gently petting its neck. Since after the firing of Zahir’s trainer that same morning, and not only the trainer but the whole crew, including the traveling “head lad” (which, in hindsight, was a grave mistake, even Jean-Christophe de G. had to admit this), the thoroughbred no longer had a stable-hand, it had lost its regular stable-hand, its trustworthy stable-hand who had traveled with it since its birth, who had always been by its side, who fed it in new settings and led it around the paddock before races, the only one with whom the horse felt comfortable.

The travel stall finally reached the lot, borne aloft on a flat trailer like a parade float, towed by a small electric vehicle that carried it in its wake. The tow vehicle went around the various cars parked near the warehouses and came to a stop by the minibus at the hangar’s entrance. Lufthansa’s station manager was to oversee the handling of the horse, walkie-talkie in hand, wearing a black slicker over his suit in the rain. Two technicians stepped out of the tow vehicle and climbed onto the trailer, unbolted the doors, and set up an inclined plane by means of which the horse could reach the travel stall, a sort of watertight caisson, metallic and ridged, on whose surface bits of yellowish orange Lufthansa stickers remained partially stuck. Marie had taken shelter from the rain in the hangar and observed the proceedings from a distance. All the doors were open, but the horse remained invisible in the depths of the trailer, where all eyes were now fixed. There was no sign of the thoroughbred’s presence apart from a few quiet whinnies coming from inside the trailer and a strong horse smell, a pungent mix of hay and manure, combining with the smell of rain and the stench of kerosene.

Then, slowly, the thoroughbred’s croup emerged — its black croup, smooth and shiny — as it stepped backward, its back hooves seeking holds on the ramp, loudly clinking on the metal and stamping in place, wildly nervous, shying to the side before being brought back on track. Its only form of harness consisted of a halter and a lead, and it wore a short rug of luxurious purple velvet on its back, its legs carefully wrapped with protective bandages and Velcro-strapped travel boots, the bulbs of its heels and its tendons double wrapped to prevent cuts and scrapes. Eleven hundred pounds of fury, of strained nerves, and of excitement had just appeared in the night. Its coat black with a fine sheen, its muscles pronounced, it was descending the ramp backward, the two Japanese men in navy-blue blazers pushing all their weight into its shoulders lest it slip, holding on to the lead, tugging it and keeping it taut. The horse wasn’t cooperating, the stubborn beast, turning its head in an attempt to break loose, snorting, fighting, shivers spontaneously shaking its mane like visible waves of tension and excitement. Its physical strength was astonishing, a beastly electric energy emanated from its body. The two Japanese men seemed overwhelmed by their task, losing their footing, their blazers swinging open and their ties thrown over their shoulders, they grunted and groaned out stifled and vain calls for help, their hands and faces trembling, their emotions on edge. Immobile on the ramp, the thoroughbred stood stock still, stepping neither forward nor backward in spite of the men’s efforts, who continued to pull on the lead to no avail. Lufthansa’s station manager, walkie-talkie in hand, walked up to the trailer and no one moved, not the horse, stationed mid-ramp — immobile, furious, imperial — nor the onlookers, entranced by the sheer force of this unflinching stallion, its long and powerful muscles, tense, bulging, and the contrast marked by the graceful step of its legs, the finesse of its pasterns, skinny and narrow, delicate like a woman’s wrists.

The horse, after a brief and frightening kick, took two or three firm steps back, brutally pounding its hooves down, tossing its head back, and twisting its body in a rage, carrying the two Japanese men with it, forcing them to jump off the ramp to follow its wild movements. Everyone instinctively got out of the horse’s way, fled toward the hangar, except the two Japanese men who put all their weight against the horse’s body, lodged themselves under its shoulders, trying to stop it from moving, to slow it down, but they were borne along by its power, swept away by its energy, and having no choice but to follow its every move, they tried to redirect its path toward the travel stall as they ran beside it. The travel stall awaited the horse atop the flat trailer, its doors open, which two technicians were prepared to close immediately behind it, but the horse reared up at the foot of the ramp, leaped back and turned around, then raged past Marie and Jean-Christophe de G. The two Japanese men had lost control, their last hope was not to let go of the lead, the thoroughbred was breaking free, bucking, twisting and shaking its hindquarters, its hooves clacking loudly. It bolted off in the rain, weaving through the different cars parked in front of the hangar, caught suddenly in the headlights of a car parked in the lot before charging the hangar, forcing the onlookers to scramble out of the way and rush inside the building.

Bright fluorescent lights ran in rows along the hangar’s ceiling, and the rain continued to fall in sheets in the night, aslant, almost horizontal in the wind. The two Japanese men had regained control of the horse, they had turned it around and were firmly guiding it by the loop of the halter. Back to where they had begun, at the horse trailer, they went around the cars while keeping as much space as possible between the horse and vehicles as they moved through the lot in the direction of the travel stall. Thunder rumbled in the distance, lightning slashed the sky from time to time above invisible runways. The horse had been brought to a walk, far from the lights of the warehouses, through the rain and half-light of the lot, both Japanese men on the same side of the horse, escorting it in the night in their soaked blazers. The thoroughbred followed them, seemingly docile, abrupt and unexpected convulsions shot down its spine intermittently. They had almost reached the loading trailer when, catching sight of the stall, the thoroughbred’s body tensed up, the horse bucked and pivoted in one movement, its ears folded, it began to neigh, its mouth open as if ready to bite, baring its teeth in the night, it jumped back and took off, dragging the two flailing Japanese with it in its wake.

The thoroughbred had escaped, had vanished into the night, but not before being brought to a sudden halt, tangled in its lead, onto which one of the Japanese men held tightly, seemingly incapable of letting go, as though he’d wrapped the lead around his arm, or tied it around his wrist, as though he couldn’t untie it or even consider letting go, as though the thought of letting go and allowing the horse for which he was responsible to get away was inconceivable, and so, holding on with all his strength, already knocked off his feet, he turned backward on his knees, then was back on his feet and pulling again, attempting to tie the rope around his waist, momentarily holding his ground before falling flat on his face on the asphalt, and holding on even then, dragged along through puddles of water and sprays of blood, the frightening image of a water skier who’s lost all control, no longer able to find his feet, tossed around, lifted off the ground, then crashing back down, dragged in this way for thirty or so feet before finally letting go of the horse. Zahir galloped off into the night, already disappearing in the distance. He had instinctively fled toward the darkest areas of the airport, racing through the depths of the lot and across the barely lit access road to make a dash for the tarmac. Most witnesses of the scene were well aware of the danger, and while some ran onto the lot to help the two injured Japanese men — one had already stood up and was walking through the car headlights with a pronounced limp, heading back to the hangar, while the other was motionless, had lost consciousness, flat on his back on the asphalt in a black, shiny pool of water, his face smeared with blood — others made phone calls, warning the airport authorities, scrambling and jumping in vehicles to chase after the horse, doors slammed and tires screeched as vehicles shot off at top speed, the driver of the trailer got into the minibus — the trailer was too heavy and slow for the task — with rope and other materials, a thick hemp rope rolled up tightly that he held like a lasso, three vehicles had already sped off in the night in pursuit of the horse and were flying through the hangar’s vast lot, headlights piercing through the beating rain, zigzagging through puddles and barely avoiding collisions, Lufthansa’s station manager at the wheel of his small technical vehicle, Marie alone in the back of the limousine driven by the white-gloved chauffeur, and the others, all the others — including Jean-Christophe de G. who had taken matters into his own hands and was giving orders — hired help or bodyguards, the trailer’s driver, the custom officials, everyone who hadn’t stayed behind to help the injured man had piled into the small Subaru minibus, packed in tight on its three rows of seats among Marie’s bags and suitcases.

In Arabic Zahir means visible, the name comes from Borges, and even further back, from the myths of the Orient, in which legend has it that Allah created the first thoroughbreds with a fistful of wind. And, in Borges’s eponymous story, Zahir is a being who, once perceived, cannot be forgotten, nor can he rid himself of this terrible virtue. There wasn’t the slightest trace of Zahir in the lot, he’d dissolved into the night, he’d evaporated, melted, black on black, into the shadows. The darkness of the night was impenetrable, as though the thoroughbred had managed to slip into its very substance, and the night had swallowed the horse up and consumed it immediately. Cars flew at top speed toward the horizon, their windshields whipped by the rain, their bodies jolted at each bump of the road. Reaching the end of the immense lot, stopped at a ledge beyond which there was nothing — dark wet grass, an empty space that stretched out of sight — they had to face the truth, Zahir had disappeared. In the distance sirens could be heard resounding in the night, an ambulance had reached the hangar to see to the injured Japanese man, and fire trucks were lining the runways to set up roadblocks, all landings and takeoffs had been interrupted, the airport authorities couldn’t risk allowing planes to land as long as there was a thoroughbred running wild on the airport’s premises. The pursuers were then forced to slow down, to abandon their initial haste for a more patient pursuit in the night. They drove cautiously along a small, dimly lit road and remained silent in their vehicles, surveying their surroundings. They stared intently out the windows, on the lookout for any sign on the horizon, a shift in the shadows, a stirring in the air, the horse’s breath, listening attentively in the darkness of their vehicles, the drivers alert at the wheel, listening for any noise from the runways that would alert them to the horse’s presence, a mere neigh, a snort, a brief sputter of hoofbeats on the asphalt. There was nowhere to hide on the airport’s perfectly flat surfaces, not a single obstacle, no trees or bushes, nothing blocked the horizon. At the end of the road they went around a roadblock and drove onto a runway, still creeping along, silent, probing the night, scrutinizing the darkness with careful eyes, when, suddenly, charging out of nowhere, with the same unexpectedness as when he’d disappeared, Zahir’s black and powerful body materialized in the beam of the headlights, at once galloping and at rest, mad, his eyes gleaming with terror, his coat black and wet, as if suddenly defined against the night into which he had, just moments before, dissolved.

Then, in an instant, the three vehicles accelerated, in hot pursuit of the horse, they were no more than a hundred yards away from it, chasing the galloping beast in the night, its mane blowing in the wind, its legs moving rapidly in a desperate gallop, its hooves pounding the asphalt furiously. They kept it in the beams of their headlights so as not to lose it, they had it in their line of sight, following this raging figure in its tortuous course, turning left when it turned left, breaking off to the right when it did, the three vehicles speeding side by side on the immense, deserted tarmac, trying to keep it from turning around and escaping, to close in on it, all the vehicles working together to trap it, Jean-Christophe de G. was calling the shots from the minibus, giving orders to his driver and at the same time the chauffeur of the limousine via Marie’s phone — he’d called Marie in the limousine, Marie’s cell phone had rung in her purse and she’d heard Jean-Christophe de G.’s voice in the dark, his careful tone, calm, authoritative, asking her to relay his instructions to the chauffeur, and Marie was scrupulous in her task, her phone held to her ear, she listened dutifully to his instructions and immediately repeated them in English to the chauffeur — so that the three vehicles advanced in close formation, eliminating all possible escape routes, Jean-Christophe de G. coordinating the pursuit from the front seat of the minibus, controlling the distance between each vehicle, making minor adjustments to their alignment, ordering the other cars to keep their headlights directly on the fleeing horse, so that it would feel followed by a mobile and blinding stripe of light, horrifying and dazzling like a line of fire. They were on the verge of trapping it when it did a brusque volte-face, spinning around like a top on the tarmac, its body twisting in a swirl of muscle and a spray of rainwater, and, without pause, it galloped directly at the vehicles, fixed in the beams of their headlights, its eyes wild, savage, mad, its mane flapping in the wind, flinging mud and sweat in every direction. It was galloping at the vehicles, picking up speed on the Narita tarmac as though preparing to take on the obstacle in front of it, this shifting phalanx of vehicles charging it, as though ready to leave the ground, to take flight into the sky, a winged Pegasus vanishing into the darkness to join the thunder and lightning. As soon as he saw it turn around, its abrupt change of direction, Jean-Christophe de G. saw the danger and shouted an immediate order, urging the other vehicles to honk, all together, to lay on their horns while charging the horse. They all charged it together, honking, hoping to scare it and force it to retreat, while it continued to charge them, as if hoping to break their formation. Momentum favored the vehicles, charging in an unbearable blare of horns, three piercing horns sounding simultaneously as they advanced side by side in the night, and the horse, stopping suddenly, trying to plant its hooves down firmly, skidding on the wet tarmac, stumbling in front of the vehicles and getting right back up, panicked, fled frantically toward one side, galloped straight ahead before reaching the farthest extremes of the airport, where it found itself blocked by Narita’s double-layered security fence. It galloped alongside this fence for a few yards, still caught in the headlights of its pursuers, then it slowed, began to trot, indecisive, it stopped beside the high security fence, behind which stretched a parking lot where rows of JAL buses were parked in the half-light. Lightning slashed the sky intermittently, casting a fleeting white light over the tops of the orange and white buses parked in rows behind the fence. The vehicles formed a semicircle around the horse at a distance of about twenty-five yards, surrounding it completely, their headlights fixed on its immobile body. Doors opened, people stepped out onto the tarmac. They continued their pursuit on foot unperturbed by the beating rain, moving toward the horse while remaining in close formation, one of the helpers bent down and grabbed what he could find to throw, rocks, pebbles, dirt, air, to hem the horse in, keep it at arm’s length, or perhaps ward off his own fear, until Jean-Christophe de G. ordered him to stand back. He ordered everyone to stand back, to remain still and quiet. Not a move, not a sound. The horse stood stock-still, backed against the fence, unable now to flee or hide, and it watched them, immobile, panting, out of breath, its sides expanding and contracting with every breath.

Then Jean-Christophe de G. approached it, alone, empty-handed. The horse remained still, watched him approach. Jean-Christophe de G. was walking toward it in the rain in an elegant dark coat, his hands empty, with no lead or rope or strap, nothing to attach to the horse or with which to tie it down. Calme, he said, calme, Zahir, it’s okay, he repeated in a whisper. He was only a few feet away, he could feel the horse’s pulsing energy, the wild energy of a frightened animal. The horse continued to watch him approach, immobile, making rasping and harsh sounds in its throat. Its coat was wet, lathered in rain and grimy sweat, with which miniscule mud particles had mixed, dirt, pebbles, and bits of asphalt. It must have fell a number of times on the tarmac, because it was injured, its knee was split open, gashed with a dark wound. Jean-Christophe de G. was almost within arm’s reach. He continued to move forward, keeping his eyes fixed on the horse and offering it his hands, white, empty, open, as to show it he had no weapon, no rope even, nothing, his hands empty, his eyes steady and his hands empty — the hands and the eyes — not to mention his voice, his human voice, enveloping, sensual, seductive, modulating and inflecting his tone, the better to coax the horse. Calme, he said, it’s okay, Zahir, calme, he repeated. He was just within reach, but he didn’t touch the horse, he let it observe his hands first, his two big white hands held steady under the horse’s eyes, giving the horse all the time it needed to look them over, smell them, take in their scent, and the horse looked at his hands, sniffed them, its wet nostrils sticking to his fingers, docile and sniffing cautiously, perhaps it had recognized the scent, perhaps it was familiar with Jean-Christophe de G.’s smell. It didn’t even flinch when Jean-Christophe de G. placed his hand on it, touched it, petted it, slowly, delicately, as though caressing a woman, as though he was running his hand down a woman’s body. The horse welcomed this, it seemed to enjoy being touched by those hands both firm and delicate, only this warm and reassuring touch could calm it after the fear and terror it had just experienced. Jean-Christophe de G. placed his head by the horse’s jowl and spoke into its ear, appeasing it with his gentle voice, his spellbinding tone, he patted its head, scratched around its eyes. Voilà, he said, voilà, très bien, Zahir, très bien. He spoke to the horse in French, he always spoke French to his horses, French, the language of love — and often betrayal, too, love’s darker side. For Jean-Christophe de G.’s love was hardly sincere, or at least not without an ulterior motive, the concern in his voice and the gentleness of his hands were all calculated, he was already plotting his next move, preparing the trick he’d play on the horse while he continued to pet it softly, it was the only way, he couldn’t have acted with such aplomb, such swiftness and grace, he couldn’t have demonstrated such panache had he not mentally broken down each step and calculated every move before acting, like a magic trick, or sleight of hand, a matador’s veronica: in one movement, he took off the scarf he wore around his neck, lifted it in the air — the black silk flapping in the night with red moiré reflections — and, quickly throwing the scarf over the horse’s head, he tied it around Zahir’s eyes, blindfolding him. He tied the scarf tightly so that no light could penetrate, as in a game of blind man’s bluff, and knotted its two ends to the halter’s crownpiece to hold it in place. The horse took a step back toward the fence, its eyes covered, and stopped, blinded, conquered. At once, from the circle of the silent spectators, the trailer driver rushed out to help with the long hemp rope rolled up like a lasso, knelt by the horse, tied the rope around one of its legs, knotted it, then pulled it to force the horse to keep its knee bent. Bound thus by the rope, struggling to stand and seeing nothing, Zahir offered no resistance. Only then did Jean-Christophe de G. pick up the lead off the wet ground, and he proceeded calmly toward the three vehicles, walking Zahir with the leash, like a giant black dog of disproportionate size (obedient, limping on three legs, blindfolded).




The hangar at the Narita Airport freight zone was in a great frenzy when Jean-Christophe de G. and Marie pulled up in their limousine a few minutes later. Blue and white sirens spun in the night outside unit F, and dozens of firemen thronged the hangar’s entrance. Police officers in reflector vests had cordoned off the area with red glow-in-the-dark cones. Jean-Christophe de G. and Marie glimpsed an ambulance speeding off with the injured Japanese man. Marie was silent in the limousine, she was looking at Jean-Christophe de G. seated next to her in the dimness. She’d just seen a new side to his personality. She was struck by the way in which he’d taken charge of the situation, how he’d taken matters into his own hands and given orders to everyone, herself included, this had impressed her greatly (because no one gives orders to Marie — at best, they encourage her, at worst, offer a suggestion).

After getting out of the limousine they found no one to escort them, not a single member of the airport staff there to take them to their plane. The Lufthansa station manager had stayed with the horse and asked via his walkie-talkie for the travel stall to be sent to where they’d caught Zahir and to proceed with the boarding there. After a moment, an airport vehicle with all its lights off, resembling a sort of spectral shuttle, pulled up in front of the hangar to take them to the plane. They loaded the bags in the shuttle, transferring Marie’s suitcases from the trunk of the limousine to the black rubber floor of the minibus. They were moving back and forth between the vehicles in the rain, carrying bags and suitcases, which they piled haphazardly inside. The shuttle started on its way, and they stood still in the half-light amid the sprawling disorder of Marie’s bags piled on the floor. The rain poured outside, and the runways could be discerned in the night through the wet windows, some fading completely into the darkness, others strung with rows of blue and white lights spaced at regular intervals. They passed a small, dimly lit road and continued straight ahead in the night. The shuttle drove on a few more minutes in the dark and then came to a stop, the automatic doors opened violently onto the windy night, and they quickly unloaded their bags. No sooner had the last bag been placed on the ground than the driver, eyes raised in the rearview mirror, slammed the automatic doors of the minibus, and the shuttle left in the night, leaving them alone on the tarmac.

Rising before them, immense, swollen, and out of proportion, was the imposing mass of a Boeing 747 Lufthansa cargo plane. There was no way to board the plane, no steps or ladder, all the exits were closed, prohibited, the front left door as well as those of the baggage hold in back. Water streamed down the white lacquered body of the plane as the rain continued to pour. Intimidated by the formidable dimensions of the machine towering before them — almost thirty feet high with a wingspan of at least two hundred feet, its two vast wings casting black shadows under their imperial reach — they stood in awe on the tarmac. The steady hum of a set of air conditioners mixed with the deafening roar of an auxiliary engine running in the tail cone. The plane seemed ready to leave its parking area, the various attachments and rubber pipes serving to fuel the plane and load the freight had been removed, a few service vehicles remained on the tarmac around the plane, scissor lifts at rest, diesel generators, stair trucks, and tiny maintenance vehicles, the whole ensemble like a swarm of miniscule symbionts tending to an immobile giant. A dim light shone on the flight deck, behind the narrow convex windshield of the cockpit, a thin slit at the top of the plane’s nose. Perhaps the pilots were looking over the route and studying their maps, waiting for instructions from the control tower in the half-light of the cockpit. Marie took a step forward and began shouting and waving her arms in the night. She was at the foot of the plane and was waving her arms like a ramp agent directing the plane on the tarmac, a tiny figure making huge gestures in the rain, trying to get the pilots’ attention, gesturing with increasing enthusiasm, caught in the joy and pleasure of the moment, unperturbed by all the inconvenience, even feeling overwhelmingly happy to be there in the rain, stuck outside on the tarmac with all her bags, Marie’s twenty-three bags, her large pearl-gray valise, her small dove-colored wheeled suitcase from Muji, her raffia purse with zippers at both ends, a large duffle bag fastened with a string laced through a row of eyelets, a computer case, a vanity case, not to mention more recent purchases, elegant cream-colored bags of glazed paper soaking in the rain, and three huge travel bags ready to explode (none of which were closed properly, Marie never closed anything, clothes spilled out, small objects thrown in at the last minute spewed over the sides, a toilette case sat lopsided atop a pile of clothes, with the toilette case itself open, from which a blush brush escaped as well as an open toothpaste container), and, taken by whim, by a sense of lightness, of insouciance, of fancy, Marie began running around her bags on the tarmac, discovering a stunning likeness of form and a subtle coherence of color as she looked at the sprawling heap of her bags at her feet: a camaïeu of beige, ecru, and leather, with dove and sand-colored touches throughout (she’d find elegance in a shipwreck, Marie).

Jean-Christophe de G. had stepped away to make a call, he paced slowly in the rain in his elegant dark jacket, one hand in his pocket and the other holding his phone to his ear, glancing up at the flight deck to try to catch the crew’s attention, but in a less conspicuous way than Marie’s, he was trying to place himself clearly in their field of vision. His was no more successful than Marie’s and he returned to wait by her side. Lufthansa’s station manager arrived shortly thereafter, getting out of his car and rushing over to them in the rain in his big black slicker to offer his apologies, confused that no one was there to assist them with boarding, undoubtedly a communication problem with the crew. Many Japanese ramp agents in gray jumpsuits had emerged from various technical vehicles and were busying themselves around the airplane’s freight-loading zone. The horse’s travel stall had been placed on a scissor lift, and several technicians scrambled about in the rain around the metal caisson, working by light of flashlights and electric lanterns. Lufthansa’s station manager supervised this process as he talked to one of the Japanese men in a blazer who had joined him. Marie was observing the scene from a distance when, slowly, a door opened at the front of the plane. One of the pilots appeared above the abyss, his silhouette outlined in the doorframe. As soon as steps were placed below the door Jean-Christophe de G. and Marie began loading their bags onto the plane. They’d loaded their last bags and were heading up the stairs when, at their side, they saw the horse’s travel stall floating weightlessly in the air, with the living thoroughbred inside, slowly rising in the night up to the fuselage of the Boeing 747 cargo plane. Reaching the cargo hold, the lift, after a brutal jolt, shook the stall violently, was pushed horizontally into the dark opening of the hold, and then the stall disappeared into the bowels of the plane.

Once inside the plane, Marie was unpleasantly surprised to notice there were no passenger seats. Packages stacked in her arms, she entered the immense hold, dimly lit, where containers were stowed. The floor, bare, metallic, streaked with rain from the loading of the freight, was covered with a mechanical roller that facilitated the transportation of pallets into the hold. Jean-Christophe de G. went over to the thoroughbred’s stall at the other end of the hold and Marie followed him, watching where she stepped, avoiding the roller track on the ground, worried, disoriented in this unwelcoming, harsh space. When, after a ninety-degree turn, the horse stall was positioned along the plane’s longitudinal axis, it began gliding automatically down the roller, which the station manager controlled from a control panel on the side of the plane’s interior. The travel stall, wet, dripping, glided along in the darkness of the hold, clattering loudly down the metal rollers in the convex belly of the plane. Two technicians walked alongside it to guide its path and assure that it remained on track. The stall passed through the hold before coming to a stop at the front of the plane, in the nose of the Boeing 747, where it was locked to the floor with cleats. The Japanese man in the blazer quickly inspected the stall to make sure it was properly stowed. Then, explaining to Jean-Christophe de G. that there hadn’t been time to examine the thoroughbred since they’d caught it, he handed his employer a medical case so that Jean-Christophe de G. could see to the horse’s injuries. Lufthansa’s station manager exchanged a few more words with the pilot before getting off the plane via the front steps, and then the doors of the plane were shut one by one.

Led by the pilot through the hold, among rows of boxes and containers, Jean-Christophe de G. and Marie reached the upper deck. They had followed a narrow floor-lit path, passed a section of five hundred vacuum-sealed office photocopiers arrayed in the half-light. The pilot then pulled down a straight telescoping ladder, opened a hatch, and invited them to come up. The plane’s upper deck was no more passenger-friendly than the main deck. There were only a few seats in this hollow space reserved for the loaders accompanying the merchandise. The floor was covered with a thin, worn carpet and behind the cockpit was a single row of seats, narrow, rudimentary. A Japanese man was already seated there, in sweat suit and socks, dozing in his seat, a sleep mask covering his eyes. Apart from this man and the pilots, they were alone in the plane. No sooner had they settled in their seats than the captain opened the door of the cockpit and asked Jean-Christophe de G. to travel with the thoroughbred in the hold, since they were about to depart, and it’s standard procedure when race- horses are transported for someone to be present to comfort the animals at the moment of takeoff.

Jean-Christophe de G. and Marie went back down to the hold. The lights had been dimmed for takeoff and, apart from the green lights of the emergency exits and the spectral blue lights lining the ceiling, darkness reigned in the depths of the plane. The Boeing 747 had begun on its way, had left its parking area and moved slowly in the night toward the runway in preparation for takeoff. A powerful wind rattled the fuselage and violent gusts shook the cargo at the back of the hold. The plane stopped at the beginning of the runway, awaiting authorization for takeoff from the control tower. Leaning forward, Marie looked out a small rain-struck window, its surface covered in a thin film of streaming water. She saw iridescent lights, white, yellow, sometimes red, steady or blinking, far off in the night, obstruction lights around the edges of the terminal and runway lights on the ground, blurring together with the airplane’s beaming headlights through which torrential rain continued to fall.

Jean-Christophe de G. unbolted the stall door and stepped inside with the horse. Zahir, motionless, head lowered, seemed calm in his stall, he was no longer blindfolded and the hemp rope that had been tied around his leg had been removed. He wore a short velvet rug on his back, and his pasterns were still somewhat protected by shoddy neoprene braces, stained with filth and mud, a multitude of brown splashes from the chase. Jean-Christophe de G. didn’t have time to examine the horse’s wound, for the captain made an announcement over the loudspeaker, brief, dry, hardly comprehensible in the crackling static of the speakers, and the plane began to move, started to gain speed on the runway, its whole body trembling, the stall door swinging wildly, which Marie tried to hold onto, all the cargo in the hold rattling in a clinking and straining of chains and straps, hooks, hoop irons, bungee cords, and clasps.

Jean-Christophe de G. held Zahir tightly by the bridle, his face planted flat against the horse’s neck, and he was talking to the horse in a soft voice to calm it. The horse, frightened by the growing thrust of the engines and their roar in the hold, fidgeted anxiously, shying and twisting its head. The plane continued to build speed and streaks of light filed by at increasing speed outside the exit door’s window, and when, with an irresistible push from the engines, the Boeing 747 cargo plane rose from the ground to take flight, Marie almost lost her balance, her surroundings blurring momentarily, and she had the sudden desire to race back up to her seat. She took a few steps in the dark toward the hatch, hesitant, wobbling, her arms extended for balance, but immediately she retraced her steps, realizing she’d never make it up alone. The plane was rocked violently in the air. It struggled to steady its ascent as it continued to gain altitude, tossed relentlessly by a hostile wind. It was passing through thick rain clouds, knocked around by the wind, and torrents of rain pounded the plane’s body. Thunder rumbled outside, and lightning flashed in the night outside the hold’s windows, its brightness reflected on the ceiling in streaks of terrifying white light, electric, zigzagging.

The atmospheric conditions eventually calmed and Marie was able to join Jean-Christophe de G. in the travel stall. The horse was calm, seeming defeated, as though under a strong sedative. Marie slid into the stall, crept along the side of the thoroughbred in the half-light. The travel stall was metallic, its space dark and narrow, damp under its elegant, quilted blue felt padding, and the floor, sturdy, rubbery, was partially covered with a bed of straw into which Marie’s feet sank as she walked. The plane continued to rise toward its cruising altitude. The turbulence hadn’t let up, and at times Jean-Christophe de G. put his hand against the stall wall to keep his balance while he examined the horse’s wound with a pocket flashlight. He had no veterinarian training properly speaking, but he’d had many an occasion in the past to take care of his own horses, dress a wound or administer a shot. Zahir’s knee was gashed, dead flesh and torn skin had curled away from the wound and begun to stiffen. Jean-Christophe de G. took out a handkerchief from his pocket and carefully cleaned the wound, removed some hairs stuck to the open gash, then, opening the first-aid kit the Japanese man had given him, he dug through its contents, tiny bottles, vials, creams, compresses, rolls of gauze, scissors. He took his glasses out of his jacket pocket and carefully put them on in the stall, it was the first time Marie had seen him wearing glasses (he’d avoided putting them on in front of her until this moment, as if waiting for the right time, and Marie was delighted to make this touching discovery in the hold of a plane), and he read the label of a bottle from Schein Inc. laboratories, Povidone topical solution, along with a long notice written in English in small type, which he skimmed through, holding the bottle right up to his eyes (yes, that’s it, iodine, perfect, he said, we can add a few drops of this to disinfect the wound).

Although of great simplicity the travel stall was not without its amenities, containing a large supply of fodder and hay, plenty of water, several five-liter containers. Jean-Christophe de G. filled a bowl from the spigot of one of the containers, and, crouching in the stall, had poured a few drops of saline solution into the bowl of water, to which he also added a touch of antiseptic, until the mix, which he stirred lightly with his fingertips, reached the light color of oolong tea, with a few darker streaks, the color of licorice, like curvy veins, sinuous lines floating on the water’s surface. He stood up carefully, rocked by the plane’s unsteady course, and he walked toward the horse on trembling legs, trying to hold the bowl steady as the water rolled and lapped, spilling over the bowl’s sides and onto the hay in tiny splashes. Jean-Christophe de G. held the bowl to his chest cautiously, protecting it from any further jerks or jolts, and he began dressing the wound, dabbing the dead skin with a damp compress, removing the scum stuck around the wound, pebbles, dirt, and other foreign bodies encrusted on the damaged skin tissue. The horse, staring blankly, looked numb, serene. Only once did it step back with force, abruptly, as though to demonstrate it could still be dangerous.

The plane encountered more turbulence. It started to rock and shake even more than before, the plastic containers clattered on the ground, straps swung uncontrollably from the stall wall, the first-aid kit tipped over and spilled out its contents on the floor, vials upturned, small scissors in the hay. The situation was becoming critical in the stall, Marie was forced to hold onto the edge of the trough lest she be tossed down at the horse’s feet, and, from the plane’s loudspeakers, distant, crackly snippets of pressing emergency announcements could be heard, of which they understood nothing, simply guessing they’d been instructed to return to their seats and fasten their safety belts. All the lights suddenly turned on simultaneously from the hold’s ceiling, throwing the premises into sharp, violent relief, casting a harsh light onto the stacks of pallets visible through the stall’s open door, and then the neon lights flickered on the ceiling before going out, not a single light remained, even the emergency exit lights had gone off. Alert, the horse became frantic in its stall, sensing the growing anxiety in the plane, stomping in place, stepping back, yanking its lead in every which way, tugging on the trough it was attached to. The horse wanted to turn around, and it reared up in the stall, stood on its hind legs, and began neighing, its long mouth open, suddenly baring its teeth and gums in the dark. Marie thought it had managed to get free and, frightened, she bolted out of the stall.

They both abandoned the stall at once, in the same rush of panic and desperation, they dropped the flashlight in their haste and made no effort to pick it up, scrambling along the side of the stall without looking back, refusing to go back, leaving the flashlight lit behind them in the hay, a small slanted beam of light shining between the horse’s legs. They dashed out of the stall and found themselves in the darkness of the hold, listening to the engines drone with immeasurable force. The horse raged furiously in the stall, lurching forward and back with little room to maneuver, it stepped on the flashlight and crushed it like a nut under its hoof, pulverized it with a loud crack, extinguishing in one blow the last sliver of light left in the hold. The stall was impenetrably dark now, hiding the horse’s black figure, its shifting, invisible body, raging noisily in its narrow compartment, locked in on all sides.

They ran away without knowing where to go, they couldn’t find the ladder to the hatch, they wandered side by side in the dark seeking a place of refuge, or even something they could hold on to. They tripped over the loading tracks, the protruding roller bearings and bolt ends, unable to make out the limits of the mechanical rollers aligned on the floor, leaving the designated paths and venturing onto one of the rollers, which were not held in place and began to spin under their feet at each step with the alarming sound of a conveyor belt beginning to move. They danced in place, shuffling their feet on a surface that slipped out from under them, carried by the rollers, flapping their arms pathetically to keep their balance, holding on to one another, but wobbling together, putting one hand down on the ground, Jean-Christophe de G. let go of the bowl, which rolled wildly on ground, they saw it bounce on the metal floor, brutally projected into the air at each jolt of the plane. Not without some difficultly they retraced their steps in the darkness, as though moving against the wind, stooped forward, following a narrow path along the plane wall. They stopped at the door to the hold, which rattled clamorously as though on the verge of becoming dislodged. They could feel the vibration of the fuselage in their bodies, its tremors, its minor shocks, the pressure from the air masses and unrelenting winds through which the plane was passing, knowing that no more than ten, twenty centimeters, the mere width of the plane’s hull, separated them from the night itself.

They crouched down by the door and didn’t move. In front of them, with the straining of cords and the grating of metal, large containers rocked on their bases. They saw through the window the steady blinking of the wing lights, brief, white, silent, intense. They no longer knew where they were. They heard what sounded like whimpers in the dark a few feet from them, Zahir had calmed down, he was making muffled sounds, slightly guttural, plaintive. Zahir struggled to stand, he was sweating, drooling, saliva swung from his mouth, he made no effort to stop it, a frothy foam gathered at the corners of his lips. Zahir seemed drugged, skittish at times, then overcome by exhaustion or indifference. Perhaps he had been given a tranquilizer after the chase, a discreet move, accomplished behind Jean-Christophe de G.’s back, an intravenous shot when no one was looking, a cotton ball soaked in alcohol to disinfect a cut on the horse’s neck and, stealthily, a needle stuck in the jugular. But Zahir’s heart, perhaps pounding at two hundred beats a minute at takeoff, continued to beat wildly, in spite of his being at rest now, of his exerting no energy, Zahir had figured out how to keep his balance in the stall, shifting his weight or moving slightly each time there was a little turbulence, putting his weight on his hind legs to offset the force of the jolts. Zahir felt sick, was nauseous, queasy. He kept still, defeated, eyes open, nostrils flared. He scratched the ground in anguish, made a hole in the straw with the tip of his hoof, a perfectly demarcated and useless hole. Zahir did nothing, was suffering, a diffuse feeling of suffering, light, sickening, and not even of suffering, but simply of nausea, unwavering, still, limitless. Nothing was happening. Nothing, the persistence of the real.

Zahir was aware of nothing but the certainty of being then and there, he had that certainty shared by all animals, silent, tacit, infallible. What lay outside his stall remained unknown to him, the sky, the night, the universe. The power of his imagination stretched no farther than the space in which he stood, his mind was stopped at the walls of his stall and could only return to the confusion of his own hazy consciousness. It was as if mental blinders prevented Zahir from imagining the world beyond his field of vision, cut off in every direction, dark, sightless, metallic. He was incapable of conceiving anything beyond the material limits of his stall, of mentally moving into the night through which the plane was flying, he didn’t feel any irrepressible urge to stretch these limits or go beyond them, and, supposing he were able to accomplish this, supposing he could cross the walls of the plane in thought — leaving his skin, passing through the fuselage — he would have leaped blindly into the sky, four horseshoes splayed in the air, Icarus burning his wings in an attempt to wake from a dream of his own making.

For Zahir was as much in the real world as he was in an imaginary one, as much in this plane as in the haze of consciousness, or a dream, unknown, dark, troubled, where the turbulence of the sky mirrors the intensity of our language, and, if in reality horses never vomit, are unable to vomit (it’s physically impossible for them to vomit, their physiognomy won’t allow it, even when they’re nauseated, even when their stomachs are full of toxic substances), Zahir, this night, spent, stumbling in his stall, falling on his knees in the hay, his mane stuck to his head, matted with dirt and dried sweat, his jaws loose, his tongue slack, chewing air, a bitter drool dribbling from his mouth, sweating, feeling horrible, trying to stand up in his stall, taking a step to the side on limp legs and again losing his balance, on the verge of collapsing unconscious in his stall, falling again, in slow motion, on his knees, going limp, his front legs tucked underneath him, his stomach heavy, bloated from fermentation, feeling food rise up his stomach, now breaking into a cold sweat and suddenly feeling the concrete, physical nearness of death, that sensation you feel when about to vomit, the sour saliva that fills your mouth as a warning, when your intestines contract and vomit shoots up your throat and enters your mouth, Zahir, this night, against his own nature, betraying his species, began to vomit in the sky in the hold of a Boeing 747 cargo plane flying through the night.




Already on the day of the race Zahir had been feeling sick. Seeing that he was unusually skittish, his trainer had decided to have him wear a racing hood, a black openwork cover strapped over his head like an iron mask, with holes for his ears, plastic blinder cups blocking his view from the sides. The thoroughbred, its view obstructed, its neck and head constantly shifting in an effort to widen its field of vision, was very agitated in the paddock. A packed crowd thronged the gates, where the horses filed by slowly in the gray drizzle, colorful rugs on their backs, led along by their stable hands. Zahir, black, powerful, febrile, shying more and more, kicking, dancing in place on the track, his impetuous hooves pounding the ground, elicited the concern of his stable hand, who’d never seen him like this, and who firmly gripped his muzzle to hold him back. On a large scoreboard, similar to the electronic arrival and departure boards in perpetual flux in airports, thousands of cryptic figures indicated the fluctuating odds of each horse before the race, horses whose mysterious names, written in enigmatic katakana, appeared in red electroluminescent diodes through the wet fog hovering over the racetrack. This was Marie’s first time at a racetrack, and she was caught in the excitement around her in the paddock a few minutes before the beginning of the Tokyo Shimbun Hai. She sat with Jean-Christophe de G. in a box reserved for horse owners, among a diverse group of trainers and racegoers, a mix of Western and Japanese people, jockeys here and there among smaller groups, focused, composed, large racing goggles over their padded caps, wearing skintight riding pants and holding crops, exchanging a few words with the owners before the race, amid a bouquet of colored hats and transparent umbrellas, the whole scene blurred behind the humid steam enveloping the paddock.

Marie, standing still, her arms crossed, became lost in thought while observing the jockeys’ uniforms, their motley mix of colors and patterns, and she imagined a designer line fashioned after jockey-wear, appropriating the geometrical motifs of their silks, combining arrangements of circles and rhombi, crosses, stars, with shoulder pads and braided ties, a plethora of polka dots, stripes, chevrons, suspenders, plaited designs and sharp facings, where, against magenta or solferino reds, she’d experiment with cherry sleeves, red poppy or mandarin caps, sorrel backs. She’d play with raspberry, daffodil, nasturtium, copper, lilac, periwinkle, straw, and corn shades, using delicate materials and Indian tissue, silks pure and mixed, taffeta, tussah, and kosa, and, for the final bouquet, she’d end the show with a cavalcade of models on the runway, a herd of galloping fillies, hair in the wind, wearing dresses of all colors: chestnut, black, roan, bay, palomino, agouti, Isabella, and champagne.

Marie asked Jean-Christophe de G. if in every language people referred to the color of a horse as its robe. Do they use the corresponding word in English, for example? Do they speak of a horse’s dress? Jean-Christophe de G. told her no, in English, they say coat—because of the weather, he explained to her, smiling, in France the horses are happy to wear a dress, in England, they need a jacket (and an umbrella, of course, he added stolidly). Jean-Christophe de G. and Marie had arrived at the Tokyo Racecourse in the early afternoon. They’d watched the first races from their reserved box seats on the top level of the stadium where, in luxurious private rooms, big panoramic bay windows looked out over the tracks with sweeping views of the entire stadium. A thick fog hovered on the horizon this day and filled the stadium with its mist. Listless, distracted, Marie watched the races from the bay window, following indifferently a surreal pack of thoroughbreds racing through the fog, her eyes drifting slowly along the walls on the opposite side of the track as the horses passed. Jean-Christophe de G. came to get her at times and they’d go through the glass door and into the grandstand to watch the finish outside, and, at once, in the humidity and wind, they’d be struck by the clamor of eighty thousand spectators cheering on the horses at the finish line, a wave of roars and frantic cries, a fury of fists lifted or pumping, the tumult peaking at the last stretch before slowly fading after the finish line had been crossed. The owners returned then to their private rooms, lounged in their boxes. Uniformed hostesses bowed as they passed, lowering their heads ceremonially, the owners going for a drink at the bar or reliving the race through one of the many television screens showing replays in the private rooms.

The horses’ march was nearing its end in the paddock, the jockeys were shaking hands with the owners. Here and there, waiting to mount their horse on the path, striding alongside them, the jockeys climbed onto their saddles in one movement, swift, graceful, and the horses’ march continued, the jockeys now mounted, still led along by the stable hands. Marie kept her eyes on Zahir’s jockey, an Irish man dressed in the Ganay racing colors, yellow jersey, green cap. He was adjusting the strap of his cap, fixing it around his chin, his legs still free on the horse’s sides, his boots not yet positioned in the stirrups. Leaving the paddock, the horses headed in the direction of the starting stalls, breaking into a light cantor on the track, the jockeys standing in their stirrups, as though floating suspended above their saddles.

The owners were already leaving the paddock. Jean-Christophe de G. and Marie rushed through the crowd in the grandstand to return to their box. They went down the vast hall of the lower level and strode quickly through the smoky area with its ticket windows and betting stations, tough-looking people in short jackets, arguing and bustling about, and they passed small puddles of spilled drinks and rain, with old betting tickets strewn about, as well as discarded food packages and racing newspapers open on full-page photos of jockeys, their colors faded, bordered on each side by headlines written in kanji. Hundreds of betters were waiting in line at the betting stations, glancing up at the hanging screens to check the latest odds, consulting their programs and marking the name of this or that horse. Some, seated on the floor, in suits, their shoes removed, ties undone, ate sticky rice with chopsticks without taking their eyes off the screens, slurping brown tea from small plastic cups, their shoes placed neatly in front of them. There was an unrelenting uproar in the room, the smell of rain and wet tobacco mixing together with wafts of soy and teriyaki. Jean-Christophe de G. and Marie had reached an escalator joining the first and second floor, then they took another to get up to the third. Announcements made in Japanese resounded without interruption from every speaker. On the upper level, the space was brighter, less smoky, the crowd thinner in the passageways. This level was a network of connected halls and glass walkways as in a large shopping mall, a raised maze of interior bridges, cafés, restaurants, and souvenir shops. A final private escalator led to the private boxes of officials and owners. A three-armed metal turnstile blocked its entrance, where hostesses in tight pink suits greeted guests and owners. Jean-Christophe de G. slid a magnetic card into the turnstile to pass through with Marie. They let themselves be carried up to the VIP rooms of the racetrack, side by side on the escalator, looking down on the bustling activity below, when Marie spotted me in the crowd.

She spotted me, there, alone, standing in the large passageway. She didn’t make a move, didn’t venture the slightest gesture of recognition, her heart had stopped beating. It had been several days since I’d vanished from her life, without once contacting her, she didn’t even know if I was still in Tokyo. She was nonetheless certain it was me, she’d recognized my demeanor, my profile as I stood with a basket of takoyaki, eating takoyaki with chopsticks, slightly removed from the rest of the crowd. The takoyaki steamed lightly in the basket, with small brown shreds of dried bonito finely grated into curly shavings that glowed and seemed almost alive in the heat.

What was I doing there? It was highly unlikely for me to be there, the probability of my going to the races in Tokyo on this one day was minimal (in the morning I came across an article in the Japan Times announcing the event), and the probability of Marie being there at the same time was virtually null. And here I was suddenly and unexpectedly in her presence, and I had seen her too, I saw Marie from a good sixty feet away, motionless on the steps of the escalator, accompanied by a man whom I didn’t know, an older man in an elegant dark jacket and cashmere scarf. She wasn’t on his arm but she was definitely with him, this much was clear, she was with him silently, she was with him violently, the tiny distance between them was even more violent in that they remained slightly apart — there was no contact between them, their shoulders may have brushed but a minute gap remained between their sleeves. I looked at Marie, and it was clear to me then that I was no longer there, that I wasn’t the one with her anymore, this man’s presence revealed nothing if not the reality of my absence. I had before my eyes the striking revelation of my own absence. It was as though I’d realized visually and all of a sudden that, for a few days already, I had disappeared from Marie’s life, and I knew at that moment she’d continue to live without me, she’d live on in my absence — and probably with even more intensity as I continued to think about her all the time.

Our eyes met, and I took a step in her direction, but I was stopped by the turnstile, and I understood instinctively that I couldn’t cross that line, without even asking the hostesses this much was clear to me. I kept my eyes fixed on Marie, Marie moving away from me, at once still and in motion on the steps of the escalator, as though trapped in a sudden thickening of reality, as though the world had congealed around her, Marie, paralyzed, incapable of moving in the opposite direction of the stairway, of breaking conventions and going down the escalator in the wrong direction, holding the railing and fighting against the current to join me and fall into my arms before the stunned eyes of the crowd. I watched Marie drift away from me with the slow rhythm of the rising escalator — Marie, motionless, distress in her eyes — I couldn’t keep her from going, couldn’t reach her, I was stopped at the foot of the escalator, and she couldn’t come to me, she gave me no sign, looking lost, sad, drifting away from me with the slow rhythm of the rising escalator. I watched her drift away from me with the feeling that she was passing to another side, drifting toward the beyond, an unspeakable beyond, beyond love and life, the fiery red depths of which I could see at the top of the escalator, behind the padded doors of the racetrack’s private rooms. The escalator carried them toward this mysterious territory from which I was barred, the escalator was the vehicle of their passage, a vertical Styx — metal steps with vertical ridges, black rubber handrail — carrying them to Hades.

Marie stood motionless, her eyes veiled, fixed, absent, letting herself be carried away by the escalator, powerless, saddened, and I didn’t take my eyes off her, going around the escalator and walking alongside her to keep the distance separating us constant, but I felt her drifting away from me irrevocably, my eyes locked on her to keep her in my view, feeling she was slipping away from me forever, and yet doing nothing to prevent this, making no effort to force my way past the turnstile to tear her away from her destiny. At that moment, I thought I was seeing her for the last time, I watched her slowly drift away from me on the escalator, and I wanted to take her in my arms one last time as a final good-bye. Right then I was certain that if Marie disappeared from my view at that moment, if she crossed the threshold of the heavy padded doors and stepped into the private boxes, it would be the last time I’d see her — and she’d die (but I didn’t realize then that if my horrible intuition was to come true in the coming months, it wouldn’t be Marie who was going to die but the man accompanying her).




III


The following summer Marie returned to Elba. Her father had died a year earlier, and nothing had been touched in his house in Elba since the previous summer, she hadn’t been back once this year, and the blinds had remained shut since she left. Marie returned to an abandoned house, dark and quiet, with a strong dusty, stagnant, wet wood smell throughout. She had to make some painful decisions, to clean out her father’s room and empty his office. She looked through some photos as she sorted various papers, she glanced with emotion at some old letters, some documents, notes, she emptied his dressers, buried her face in the wool of one of her father’s sweaters to recapture any faint trace of his smell. She remained resolute, crying softly, almost dryly, her few tears mixing with the mold and the dust of the house. Her eyes were red and itchy, as though she had asthma, and she sniffled softly, allowing her tears, salty, clear, light, to stream down her cheeks.

Marie had decided to stay in her father’s room on the second floor. She opened the windows all the way to air out the room, sluiced down the floor in the beautiful morning light, whose reflection shone on the room’s wet floor. She remade the bed, selecting a pair of batiste sheets, rustic and coarse, a little rough on the skin, the way she liked, and she piled her father’s things in boxes and suitcases that she moved to the hallway. She’d brought some fabrics from Paris to replace her father’s old curtains and bedspread, several arrangements of blue and green, the colors of La Rivercina, turquoise and indigo, azure and aqua green, ultramarine and olive, as many possible combinations as the apocryphal coat of arms of the Montalte house in Elba (with the salamander as its heraldic animal, as her father had decreed one day when one scampered across the terrace). Marie climbed onto a chair to attach the curtains to the large wooden rings of a curtain rod, and, beginning with this first night in July, she slept in her father’s room.

The following day Marie woke up early, greeted by a wan blue light filtering through the curtains. The sun had just begun to rise, and she went down barefoot to the first floor. She wandered around the dormant house and went out on the terrace, standing barefoot in the dawn’s faint light, her thighs bare under a baggy white T-shirt. The morning air was crisp, the breeze invigorating against her face and thighs. She went around the house and went into the small garden she hadn’t yet had time to visit. It was her father’s little garden, the entrance of which was protected by a rusty blue gate, which creaked when she pushed it open to go inside. A soft gray light shone on the garden, and invasive thorny broom and rampant tangled creepers blanketed the ground. Two wooden garden chairs lay folded against the surrounding stone wall, with honeysuckle climbing along its side, clinging to the gaps between the irregularly shaped stones of its surface. Of the herbs in her father’s terra-cotta pots, thyme, sage, and rosemary, nothing remained, only a hard crust of gray dirt, cracked and dry, a sole basil plant, perhaps escaped from the pots, had survived in the ground, among some bramble and the young sprouts of perennial palms bursting in tiny sprays, vegetal, green, thick, in the corners of the garden. Nor did anything remain of her father’s tomatoes — her father’s last tomatoes that she’d eaten last year crying alone in the kitchen — only a few skinny garden stakes, gnarled, arranged in an irregular line. Marie walked over to the knee-high stone wall, knelt down, and recognized there, twisted around a stem of dried reed that had served as a sort of prop, a worn, faded-blue string that her father had used in staking the tomato plants. She untied the string’s knot delicately, gazed at it at length, and then tied it around her wrist.

After showering, Marie made herself a tea, which she drank from a big bowl on the terrace, then she went to have a look in the toolshed. She dug through a pile of junk in search of a few tools, moved aside a wheelbarrow, and returned to the garden with a pick, a rake, and a pair of clippers sticking out of her pant’s back pocket like a comb. She began working in the garden, she clipped the creepers and bramble, whose scraps she raked into neat piles. She wore her father’s old straw hat, a pair of jeans, a white shirt, and rather kitschy flip-flops, with a plastic daisy in bloom in between her two big toes. Pulling up weeds, tearing out some fuller’s teasel, she cleaned up around where her father’s tomatoes had been with her bare hands. Standing on her toes, she rerouted long branches of honeysuckle, careful not to break its vines, which she transferred from the wall to a trellised espalier. Then she watered the garden, pensive, slowly moving around the enclosure while dragging behind her a rolled yellow hose, which slithered along like an obedient snake.

Below the house the horse’s paddock had been untouched since the previous summer. Marie crossed the old fence and went down formerly cultivated plots of land, now overgrown, their surfaces bumpy, rocky, uneven, where grass had shot up in irregular tufts around the ruins of small stone walls. She walked three hundred feet or so before stopping in front of the sea and gazing down at its expanse, blue, still, slack, its surface slightly ruffled at times by an imperceptible heaving. The sky met the sea at the horizon, and their two blues fused there, the deep blue of the sea and the paler, slightly hazy blue of the sky. All was calm around her, the silence of nature, the occasional chirping of birds, the flight of a butterfly, the tall grass of the property bent gently by a languid breeze.

Marie spent the summer alone at La Rivercina. Occasionally, in the early evening, returning from the beach, she’d wash her hair in the small garden, standing against the gate in her bathing suit, her bare feet in the soil or planted on a blue duckboard, her hair lathered with a soapy white foam whose vanilla scent seemed to hang in the air around her, and she ran her hands through her hair under the hose’s spray of warm water. She’d bend down to turn off the water and roll her hair up in a big white towel, after having let it drip at length, her head hanging upside down above the ground. She’d return to the house, her flip-flops slipping off her feet, barely attached, sliding on the ground and scraping against the terrace’s large, irregular flagstones. She’d lower the straps of her bathing suit one at a time, slide it down her hips and leave it carelessly on the kitchen floor, proceeding up the stairs naked, turbaned in white, her flip-flops clacking, daisies between her toes, her naked body pearled with beads of water glistening in the sun and trickling off her at each step.

Before leaving La Rivercina the previous year, Marie had boarded her father’s horses at the equestrian club of La Guardia. When her father was still alive, Peppino, the manager of the club, would see to the horses’ health, coming by La Rivercina at least once a month to check on them, inspect their coats, examine their teeth. Old Maurizio was happy to make sure the horses had water, and Marie’s father would give them a treat sometimes by bringing them an extra share of hay or a bucket of oats. He’d cross the paddock’s fence and walk up to the horses with his bucket, addressing them cheerfully from a distance (ciao, ragazzi, he’d say to them, and he’d pet their necks affectionately with the flat of his hand, and they’d snort and shake, sending swarms of flies away in the dust of the paddock).

Marie had taken a liking to Nocciola, the mare with beautiful eyes that she’d ridden for the first time the previous year, the day of her father’s funeral, when she’d escorted his hearse on horseback through the streets of Elba all the way to the cemetery. This year she’d gone to see Nocciola at the equestrian club at the beginning of July, and she’d wanted to ride her. She rode her at a slow pace, gently going around the riding stable, under the passive surveillance of Peppino’s daughter, a glum adolescent straddling the fence, a telefonino at her ear, speaking with a lilt that she punctuated at times with a brief salvo of eloquent gestures made with an upturned hand. The equestrian club comprised a scattered set of stone cottages spread around a sort of clearing, at one end of which lay a dusty track with a single building for the lounge and reception, a shed for the saddles and various harnesses, as well as simple stables with sheet metal roofs and wooden frames, reinforced with planks, where the horses spent the night. From outside the stalls, the dark manes of the horses could be seen waving in the air, while their legs were still under the stable doors, as though their upper and lower halves belonged to different animals. The riding stable felt at once closed and opened, surrounded as it was by white barriers and at the same time leading directly into the coastal scrub. On horseback, one’s view stretched far into the surrounding countryside, past the wild olive trees, all the way to the hill’s barren crest, where wind and successive fires had consumed most of its vegetation. It wasn’t long before Marie needed no help riding Nocciola, she saddled the mare herself when she arrived at the club, leading her by the bridle, mounting the saddle, and riding around the paddock at a slow pace, then, firmly kicking the horse’s sides, riding at a trot, and, after a week, at a gallop.

One morning, at the end of August, Marie, casting aside the old clothes she wore for riding or gardening, did herself up, she’d put on makeup in front of the mirror. Before leaving her room, she carefully applied her lipstick, which she softened by pressing her lips to the soft center of a toilet paper roll, leaving the silent vestige of a red kiss on the roll as she placed it back down on the marble counter. Marie left the property in her father’s old open-bed truck, and she drove serenely through the winding roads of Elba, the sea below her, blue, still, with warm air blowing through the truck’s open windows. Next to her, on the seat, sat a bouquet of wild flowers she’d arranged the night before in the kitchen, with a sense of refinement she demonstrated time and again when dealing with colors and fabrics, never forcing novelty or originality, just a small gesture, simple, confident, natural, bringing together, in a vase, the obvious and the impossible, three sprigs of fennel culled on the side of the road, two branches of a young eucalyptus taken from a tree in the garden, and a few clippings of bougainvillea with royal purple flowers she’d stolen from the terrace of a seaside residence.

Before arriving at Portoferraio, Marie had turned onto a small winding road that led to the cemetery where her father was buried. Once there, standing motionless, she bowed her head in silence a moment in front of his grave. She placed the bouquet of wild flowers on his grave and left without looking back, she returned to the car and took off without delay toward Portoferraio. She’d driven into the city proper and continued all the way to the port, blankly staring out the smudged windshield, its surface covered in a thick layer of dirt and resin from the pine tree under which the old truck had spent the winter. Marie drove along the quays slowly and parked the car by the harbormaster’s office. She got out and left the port on foot to go have an espresso at the counter of one of the many cafés on the esplanade by the docks. She sipped her espresso calmly, it was almost noon, she was in her full splendor, wearing white pants and a slightly faded parma pink shirt, and she watched the ships drift in and out of the port. After about twenty minutes, a boat coming from Piombino came into the port, and I was there, on the deck of the boat.

It was my first time in Elba since the previous summer, almost a year to the day since Marie’s father’s death. I took the same Toremar boat I’d taken the previous year, when I’d come back from China to attend her father’s funeral. As soon as the boat set sail, I took refuge in one of the cabins on the lower deck, and I sat lost in thought in the hot, dark shade of a stiff seat with metal armrests. I ended up falling asleep, dozing in the half-light, soothed by the hum of the motor, details from the night of Jean-Christophe de G.’s death filling my mind, without my trying consciously to put them together into any particular order. No, I settled only on snatches of that night in my half-sleep, making some vague conjectures — hypotheses and projected images — calling on different areas of my brain, having recourse to reason when developing hypotheses or evoking corresponding images from dreams. To a few confirmed and proven facts from that night, I added my own fantasies, mixing them together liberally in my mind, linking imaginary acts to real places in my half-sleep, mentally walking around the apartment on rue de la Vrillière, where I’d spent more than five years with Marie, moving in and out of rooms, opening the window and finding the gate around the Banque de France, Parisian streetlamps infusing the whole scene with a yellow light, while at the present moment I was sitting snugly on a boat silently crossing calm seas between the coast of Italy and the shores of Elba.

I knew that night contained its own objective reality — what had really taken place in the apartment on rue de la Vrillière — but that reality would always be out of my grasp, I could only circle it, approach it from different angles, go around it and attack it from the side, but I’d always come up short, as though what had actually happened that night was fundamentally unattainable to me, out of my imagination’s reach and irreducible to language. I could reconstruct that night in mental images with the precision of dreams, I could cover it in words with a formidable power of evocation, all in vain, I knew I’d never reach what had been the fleeting life of the night itself, but it seemed to me that I could perhaps reach a new truth, one that would take its inspiration from life and then transcend it, without concern for verisimilitude or veracity, its only aim the quintessence of the real, its tender core, pulsing and vibrant, a truth close to invention, the twin of fabrication, the ideal truth.

Toward the end of the trip, while the boat approached the shores of Elba, my thoughts began to drift toward another night Marie had talked about, the night of her return from Japan. I hadn’t been with her that night, but I saw in a similar way the events unfold behind my closed eyes, with the main characters materializing and taking shape in my mind, faceless and nameless, and yet they were not inventions or chimeras but real people whose lives must have corresponded to what I saw in my mind. Lulled by the hypnotic hum of the boat’s engines, I watched these characters move silently in my mind, and, even if I was absent from the scenes unfolding behind my closed eyes, even if I wasn’t actively involved, even if I failed to appear physically among the other figures, I knew I was intimately present, not only as the sole source of each evocation, but at the heart of each and every character, to whom I was bound in ways unknown, with hidden and secret ties linking us together — for I was as much myself as each one of them.

My imperfect knowledge of what happened the night of Jean-Christophe de G.’s death, the many murky areas surrounding the events of that evening, were hardly a handicap for me. On the contrary, this forced me to employ my imagination to a much greater degree, pressed me to provide all the details in my mind, whereas had I really been there I’d simply have remembered everything. No, I wasn’t there that night, but I’d followed Marie in thought with the same emotional intensity as if I had been, as in a performance executed without me, not from which I am absent, but in which only my senses participate, as in dreams, where each figure is no more than an expression of one’s self, recreated through the prism of our own subjectivity, sprung from our own sensibility, our intelligence and fantasies. Even if I wasn’t fully asleep, my mind was seized by the irreducible mystery of dreams, that force which allows you to create extraordinarily elaborate images and which then arranges them in a series with no apparent order, with vertiginous gaps, areas that vanish into thin air and characters drawn from our own lives who merge seamlessly, fuse, transform into new beings, and, despite this radical incoherence, these images awake in us, with a blistering intensity, memories, desires, and fears, all of which, as happens rarely in life itself, give rise to true terror and love. For there is no third person in dreams, never, it is always a matter of one’s own self, as in “The Island of Anamorphosis,” an apocryphal story by Borges in which the writer who first invents the third person in literature ends up, after a long process of solipsistic decline, depressed and conquered, renouncing his invention to switch back to the first.




I was among the first to disembark when we arrived at Elba. Marie was waiting for me at the quay, she watched me come down the gangplank, her gaze attentive, veiled, beautiful. There was love the moment we saw each other again, from the first look, even if my arms, my hands, drawn toward her uncontrollably, didn’t act on the impulse my eyes betrayed. Reaching the quay, I simply put my hand on her shoulder, silently, not knowing what to say, letting my hand slide down her bare arm, our first physical contact in two months. It was Marie who’d invited me to join her in Elba, but clearly that didn’t imply any change in our relationship — we were still separated, even if, by sheer circumstance, our relationship had become new, ambiguous, unexpected.

As strange as it may sound, I made Marie happy, I’d always made her happy. Besides, I’d noticed that I made women happy, not all women in general, but each one in particular, each believing herself the only one, by her singular perspicacity, her penetrating gaze, and her feminine intuition, to detect in me hidden qualities no other woman could identify. Each of them was in fact convinced that these invisible qualities, which they’d detected in me, passed unnoticed to everyone except herself, whereas in reality many a woman was the only one to appreciate my secret qualities and to fall under my spell. It’s true, however, that these qualities were far from apparent, and, if too nuanced or subtle, my charm could be mistaken for dullness and my sense of humor as lacking, as only a thin line separates finesse from drabness.

On the way to La Rivercina, I became carsick almost immediately, I felt nauseous as soon as the route began curving. Marie pulled over on a cliffside, and I rushed out of the car to throw up (what a seducer, oh how she must have missed me!). Hands on my knees, sweat dripping off my forehead, with nothing left in my stomach, I continued to dry heave, only spitting out saliva, long elastic strings that swung down at my feet in the gravel. Marie had walked off to pick some flowers along the side of the road, she was wandering idly among the coastal scrub on the cliff side, a sprig of fennel sticking out of her mouth, on whose end she chewed while making a bouquet of wild flowers. I could see her from my stooped position, and I imagined the fresh flavor of the fennel on her tongue. When she came back toward me, I sketched a smile of apology with my characteristic and winning diffidence.

While her father was at La Rivercina, Marie and I used to sleep together on the first floor of the house, and I wondered now which room Marie was going to give me. She led me through the dark rooms on the first floor, and I followed her silently, we passed her father’s empty office, its blinds were closed, I glimpsed a stack of boxes in the half-light. She led me to her room as if from habit, and I was relieved she still wanted me to sleep with her on the first floor. But I had some indefinable feeling as I stepped into the room. Everything was in perfect order, no stray towels or wet bathing suits balled up on the floor, no open drawers, no hair dryers abandoned on the ground plugged into a nearby outlet. No, the room was impeccable, the curtains drawn, carefully tied on each side of the window, a pile of folded towels was placed on a chair as in a guest room. I put my bag down on a chair, and it was only then that I realized Marie wasn’t sleeping there with me, she was staying in her father’s room on the second floor.

Later that afternoon, Marie suggested we go for a swim. We drove to a small deserted cove where the lapping of waves and the hum of insects hardly broke the afternoon silence of the shore. Marie strode up to the water in her bathing suit, she’d picked up a stone and was bent over pulling mollusks off the rocks, which she then popped in her mouth as she continued to amble down the shore, sucking on the shells before throwing them back into the sea with a listless, sideways flick of the wrist. She collected winkles from the cracks in the rocks, holding a small heap of them in her cupped hand. She continued on her way, pensive, crouching at a rock that jutted halfway out of the water, its surface covered in moss and green algae and concretions of crenulated shells, a compact mass of balanomorpha, and, gripping her stone tightly, she tried to detach some miniscule mussels, their shells bristling with braided filaments. She walked back over to me and dumped her booty at my feet, spreading her hands wide and letting fall a cascade of wet shellfish that clinked as they fell into a loose pile at my feet (I tried to dodge them in vain by wiggling my toes in the air). Then, leaping over my body on the rocks, she grabbed a T-shirt and a pair of shoes, with which she built a small enclosure for the shellfish, a natural reserve, a fish pool of diverse vongole to add to our spaghetti later that night.

Marie had returned to the shoreline. She stood with her feet in the water and her hands on her hips, lost in contemplation, observing a sea anemone gently floating underwater at her feet, sinking and rising to the surface with the waves, its tentacles deployed and undulating in the current like transparent strands of hair waving in the water. Then, resolute, she entered the water, her arms spread, lifting them high lest the waterline reach her armpits, letting out clipped shrieks of protest, brief sharp cries expressing the thermal difference between her body and the sea, before letting herself fall back into the water joyously, submerging her head completely underwater. She frolicked thus for a bit, then asked me to bring her her snorkeling mask. I joined her in the water, and she began rinsing the snorkeling mask by my side, spitting into it to clean the goggles. She adjusted it and put it on underwater, taking a quick look around under the sea. There are a ton of sea urchins, she told me excitedly, in a slightly nasal tone, her nose pinched by the mask, and, swimming away from me, she dove headfirst into the water, her feet kicking wildly in the air before fully disappearing into the sea. She’d completely vanished in the deep water, only tiny bubbles rising to the surface gave her away. Having no tool, no small knife or fork, she stayed underwater for a long time, surging up suddenly out of breath and glancing around for me, her mask askew, spitting water out of the snorkel like the vertical spray of a whale, with, in her hands, three beautifully mauve and slimy urchins, their quills, still moving, covered with miniscule mineral or vegetal deposits, bits of algae and tiny pebbles, debris of colored stones, shards of broken shells. She got back on her feet and headed to shore, swaying her hips as she pushed against the current, slicing the water with her thighs. She grabbed a large stone from the rocks and opened the urchins, partially, breaking open their tests with blows of the stone, one after another, straightening her arms over the water and then shaking the shells energetically to remove any sea waste. She scooped out an orange-colored strip with the back of her finger and tasted it, first for herself, with a quick flip of her finger, as she brought it up to her mouth, then she offered me one when I got out of the water, still wet, feeding me tenderly two or three pieces (and I delighted in the taste of her wet finger as much as in the fresh and delicious urchin strips that melted in my mouth).

We went back in the water to swim, the sun’s reflection broke and dispersed into silver glints each time we moved our arms in the water. Marie swam out to the open sea in her magnificent crawl, slow, steady, each movement precise, her arms lifting toward the sky and plunging back down into the sea with a slight delay, then she swam back to me and floated by my side, as though weightless in the water. Marie, elusive, swam toward me then away again, she was laughing, disappearing under the water. At times our legs brushed together, our bodies touched fleetingly in the sea, I caressed her shoulder as I tenderly removed some seaweed from her hair. Nothing was said, nothing stated explicitly, but more than once our fingers grazed and our hands lingered close together, our eyes met and remained locked for an instant. There was a sense of a familiar complicity between us, and I felt a strange mix of emotion and timidity. I wanted to take her in my arms, give myself to her in the sea, hold her body close to mine in the warm water. She swam back to me, her mask on her forehead, her cheeks glistening, she looked happy, and she smiled at me, beaming, mischievous, as though she’d just played a trick on me, and I saw then that she held her bathing suit balled up in her right hand.

Marie had taken off her bathing suit, she was naked in the sea by my side, and I followed with my eyes the fluctuating neckline of her liquid dress, which moved in synch with the water, at times conservative and reserved, a sort of crewneck sweater reaching her chin, and at other times more revealing, bold, daring, dropping all the way to her belly button when she floated on her back, lying weightless in the sea, her stomach and pubic hair glistening, her breasts emerging slightly through the tiny waves washing over her flat body. I didn’t take my eyes off her, following her bathing suit with my gaze, her emblem, the pirate flag of her nudity in the sea. We stopped face to face, and we smiled at each other, I considered Marie naked and masked before me. I approached her and gently squeezed her shoulder, she didn’t back away, her face became serious, she seemed ready to fall into my arms, when suddenly she saw a nacreous glint underwater — a Venus’s ear! — and, slipping out of my arms like an eel, she broke away from me and dove straight down toward the glimpsed glimmer, presenting me with — before vanishing all together — the most graceful noli me tangere conceivable: the curve of her ass plunging into the sea.

Marie was basking in the sun next to me on the rocks. Tiny beads of water covered her naked body, and the sun, drying her little by little, left almost invisible specks of salt on her skin, whose taste I imagined vividly on the tip of my tongue. After a moment, pensive, her eyes closed, she moved her hand gently in my direction and uttered in a soft voice these enigmatic words: “I wasn’t his mistress, you know,” and these words resounded briefly in the silence of the cove. She didn’t say whose mistress, but I’d understood, and I was grateful for her not having named him (as for myself, I pretended to have forgotten his name). Marie lay motionless on her back, her eyes closed, one knee bent, her hand flat against the rocks. The silence grew in the cove, broken only by the soft murmur of the waves lapping below. What was the point in telling me she wasn’t his mistress? That she hadn’t slept with him? This was highly unlikely, if not impossible, even if we could easily imagine that theirs hadn’t been a sexual relationship in a strict sense, or in juridical terms, according to which sexual relations are dependent upon penetration, by whose definition fellatio and cunnilingus are excluded (in short, the activities two people can enjoy without necessarily becoming lovers), but I doubt that was what she was trying to tell me, no, not that. Marie seemed serious, she looked bothered, and the tone she’d used had had the sad solemnity of a confession or admission. I continued to look at her, and I wondered why she’d felt the need to tell me on this day that she wasn’t his mistress (which, by the way, isn’t the same as saying that she hadn’t been his mistress, the past perfect tense she’d used — rather than the pluperfect — allows in its ambiguity this lie by omission). Perhaps she’d simply wanted to let me know she’d never felt attached to him, that she’d always felt free and couldn’t in any case be considered the mistress of a married man, that it was in a way the word mistress, with its social connotations more than its actual reality, that she objected to, denying the word could be applied to her given its incongruity with her situation. I don’t know. Or perhaps she’d simply wanted to let me know that, in the end, she didn’t love him, she hadn’t ever loved him, that, certainly she’d liked him, he’d come into her life at the right moment, she’d loved his kindness, his consideration, his gallantry, his easygoing personality, with him, life was simple, comfortable, reassuring — but ultimately it was someone else that she loved.

Marie and I spent a week together at La Rivercina, our flirting had become more brazen as we relearned each other’s personality, passing one another on the first floor of the house with our towels flung over our shoulders and a seductive gleam in our eyes, crossing paths intentionally in the garden, separating only to return to each other’s side as soon as possible. As the days passed, the distance between our bodies began to dwindle inexorably, becoming more and more tenuous, diminishing every hour, as if soon bound to dissolve altogether. Our bodies grazed, at night, on the terrace, as we cleared the candle-lit table, and our shadows hardly parted in the night, each secretly seeking the contact of the other in the dark. At times, at night, in the kitchen, while we prepared dinner, as I checked the tomato sauce simmering on the old gas stove, a wooden spoon in my hand, Marie would come up from behind me, and I’d feel the silent wave of her body against mine, her bare arm brushing past me as she added to the sauce a few sage leaves she’d picked from the garden, and sometimes I’d even feel her fingers on my cheek, scratching my stubble and teasing me for not having shaved. I’d grab her hand and pull it away, and I thought about how this same gesture could take on different meanings according to the way in which it was carried out, without ceremony or concern, or else accompanied with a stare and clear intent, a sudden gravity, slowing down the act to give it significance and meaning, as I’d done that night in the kitchen, ceding to this sudden impulse without having given it any thought beforehand, spontaneously, ignoring its consequences, holding her hand in the kitchen and gazing into her eyes, our hands and eyes momentarily suspended in time. She wore a baggy white shirt dampened by the humidity and had her old flip-flops on her feet, one of the daisies was in poor shape, probably damaged on some dirt path, looking as if its petals had been plucked (he loves me, he loves me not) by a stray and wistful hand, on the whole a touching spectacle. Marie suddenly looked serious, she became pensive and stepped toward me, and I wrapped my arms around her, for a moment we stood like that against the stove, holding each other in the kitchen, lulled by the delectable bubbling of the tomato sauce simmering over a low flame. It was only an isolated moment of intimacy, but I understood then that we’d perhaps never been as close as when we were apart.

After dinner I’d return to my room, I’d open the window and a rare breeze would pass through the room, through the hot nights on the Island. I’d lie down on the bed, I’d lie still in the dark, keeping the light off to prevent the mosquitoes from coming in. Since the first night I’d spent in this room at La Rivercina, Marie’s presence on the floor above me had haunted me, I knew she was right there above me, I’d hear her moving around in her room and I’d know what she was doing, I could follow her movements in the room in real time, I’d hear the weight of her steps on the wooden floor, and I’d know she was going from her bed to the oak armoire, I’d hear the quiet creaking of its hinges as she’d open it and I’d imagine her choosing a T-shirt for the night, whose color, smell and texture I could picture clearly. At times, the sound of her steps on the floor faded and gave way to the rush of water in the bathroom, the squeal of a faucet turning on and off in a chorus of aching pipes, then the patter of her feet returned to the room, light and swift. I’d hear Marie crawl into bed, and, after a moment, closing my eyes in the dark to concentrate more attentively, I’d hear her fall asleep. There was nothing physical or material about this, I couldn’t hear the quiet moans and whimpers she made while she slept, no more than the violent storm of sheets she’d set off toward three in the morning, when, pulling with all her might at a stubborn corner of the covers, she’d roll her shoulder furiously trying to turn over on her side, but I could hear the murmur of her dreams playing in her mind. Or could it be in my own mind through which Marie’s dreams now passed, as though, after thinking about her constantly, after evoking her presence, after living vicariously through her, I’d started to imagine, at night, that I dreamed her dreams.

I knew all the silences of the house, its nocturnal creaks, the descending scale of fitful coughs made by the refrigerator in the night, after which it would jolt and then resume its steady hum in the dark stillness of the dormant house. In the morning, waking up at dawn, I’d lie in bed listening to the birds’ first chirps, so quiet that their fluid modulations merged with the surrounding silence. The house was quiet, Marie and I were alone in this big deserted house, sleeping on different floors, the other rooms unoccupied or empty, her father’s office cleaned out, packed boxes ready to be taken away. All was still in the dormant house, I listened and heard nothing, not a single creak or rustle, Marie lay motionless in her bed, I knew she was asleep above me, and this distance between us, this small hindrance of a floor keeping us apart, this tiny separation made Marie even more desirable to me. Unable to turn toward her and gently squeeze her arm when I woke up, I had to imagine her presence on the floor above me, to recreate her in my mind. And so, behind my closed eyes, she took form progressively, slowly shedding her chrysalis as she appeared in my mind, lying on her bed, her eyes closed and her lips parted, her chest gently rising and falling with the rhythm of her breath, one leg under the covers, and the other, loose, hanging over the bed uncovered, the sheet folded snugly between her thighs.

One afternoon when we’d gone for a swim, I found the weather strange at our small cove without knowing how it was different from any other day. I sat down on the rocks and I watched Marie walk along the shoreline. The sea, spread under a veiled white sky, was uniformly gray. The water lapped gently on the shore, murky, slightly troubled, of a lead or lava-rock gray, like an artificial lake around a nuclear power plant. We entered this viscous sea, our bodies hardly cooled by its warm and oily water, swimming cautiously since Marie had spotted some jellyfish, she swam in front of me, tracing a path through the water to help me avoid them, all while turning around, rapt, to point them out (the more we were in danger, the more she shook her finger in frenzied excitement). We’d got out of the water, and we lay drying on the rocks, gazing at the gray sea lapping before us in this apocalyptic lighting. The humidity was high, the air stifling, insects buzzed nervously and stuck to our skin. There are days like this, at the end of summer, when the stagnant heat hangs heavy from sunrise to sunset, weighing down your body and numbing your mind, and finally I realized that my strange feeling at the cove was due to a total absence of blue in the surroundings. It seemed as though, with the help of some sort of computer image editor capable of removing one color at a time, all the blue had been entirely extracted from the setting without affecting the rest of the chromatic scale. All the blue had disappeared, the usual blue of this cove, the radiant blue, the striking blue of the sky and the sea, the Mediterranean’s endemic blue had vanished into thin air. All was haze from the heat and wooly white light. The air was still, windless, not even a slight breeze stirring the rushes in the cove — as though the wind was gathering its strength for the coming storm.




That night, Marie flew into my room at around four in the morning, she swung the door open and darted in, she was barefoot and in a T-shirt, confused, troubled, she came all the way over to my bed and told me that there was smoke in the garden, that the fire was at the gates of the property. I slipped on a pair of pants and followed her out onto the terrace, we wandered in search in the night through clouds of dust. Terrible gusts of wind, which had already knocked over the metal garden chairs, raged up the driveway intermittently. The deckchairs were battered by the wind, their canvas backs turned in and out alternately, whipped by each gust. I ran around the house in search of the fire, but I didn’t see anything, the night was black and windy, impenetrable, the trees sunk into the shadows, shaking together in a wild sway of branches, a whirl of leaves. Smoke now entered the terrace, still light and semitransparent, a few wind-borne plumes, curling slowly in the air. I turned off all the propane tanks in the garden and helped Marie to unravel the hose, to extend it and stretch it over the terrace and all the way up to the windows to protect the house. Marie ran back and forth on the terrace closing the shutters of the first-floor windows. She picked up the hose and went around the house, spraying each side in the night, lingering longer at the wooden shutters to soak them thoroughly, abruptly tugging the hose if she felt any resistance or if it formed kinks on the ground. The spray arched up to the second floor, and the house glistened under the shower. Water streamed down the sides of the house, and the weathered wood of the wet shutters shone in the night.

We didn’t know where the fire was, whether it was approaching or moving away from the property. We knew nothing, the fire was still abstract, distant and invisible, provoking even more terror in us for this very reason, filled as we were with an unimaginable and indescribable fear, when, all of a sudden, at the boom of an explosion in the distance, the fire appeared on the crest of the hill, rising in a sort of gasp, an unleashing of long-gathered energy, and it was then, immediately, that I saw not the few flames I’d imagined issuing from a bush in the garden but a veritable wall of fire on the hilltop in the distance, thriving and dynamic, jagged, blazing in the night in a rage of flames, red, yellow, orange, and copper, hissing and crackling, from which giant billows of black smoke rose to the sky. Although a good three hundred yards separated us from the blaze, we felt its heat at once, we felt its brightness, its power, its smell, its roar, and its speed, flames had already begun to race down the hill and spread toward us, popping and hissing in their pursuit. Marie and I, abandoning the hose without delay, leaving it there on the ground, partially rolled, still busy spraying the terrace, ran off toward the old truck parked in the driveway, Marie wearing only a T-shirt and her old flip-flops, which she’d managed to slip on without stopping, but which held her back more than they helped her to run I had only cotton pants on and a pair of old loafers. Marie jumped in at the wheel and we sped out through clouds of dust. The headlights shone on the road’s spectral surface, white and chalky, while wild shrubs swayed and shook on the roadside as we sped into the night.

Having reached a small white bridge, Marie slammed on the brakes, came to a full stop, looked behind her to reverse, then resolutely took the unpaved road that lead to the equestrian club. We’d hardly driven thirty feet over the bumpy undergrowth than we were stopped by a thick curtain of smoke blocking the road, but Marie didn’t slow down, she continued to speed forward, penetrating the curtain of smoke, at first white, light and volatile, then increasingly dark, an opaque mass of smoke, dense, stifling, whose odor filled the truck. Through the beam of our headlights we saw nothing but smoke and the yellow truck of a forest ranger parked on the other side of the road. Marie had stopped answering my questions, she drove with both hands gripping the wheel, continuing on for a few dozen feet until it became utterly impossible, at which point she stopped, opened the door, and fled through the smoke on foot, I tried to stop her, trailing behind her, she charged down the road determinedly, almost at a run through the dense smoke. Presently there was no horizon, no vegetation, the road had disappeared, we were completely enveloped in smoke. Marie reached the equestrian club, and, fearful, I called out for her, I asked her to come back, but she didn’t respond, she continued to charge forward, stooped and determined, her shirt lifted to cover her face, exposing her naked body, as she had nothing underneath. Many of the club cottages were on fire, a shed was in flames. Screams could be heard here and there, there was great confusion around the stables, locked, inaccessible, where the silhouettes of animals stamped and leaped, whinnying raucously in desperation, almost human in their intonation, and yet inhumanly violent. We proceeded through the smoke and we saw Peppino only a couple feet from a stable in flames, a handkerchief over his mouth, striving to free a bucking horse still tethered inside its stable. When the stable roof began to collapse, with a progressive dissolution of boards and sheet metal, Peppino jumped inside the stable, vanishing momentarily into the dense black smoke only to reemerge with the horse, man and horse surging out into the night in a ring of fire, as if ablaze, a halo of flames and incandescent sparks emanating from their dazed bodies. The horse was severely burned, its skin scorched and its muscles bared, a black syrupy liquid oozing from its sides. Peppino ran alongside the horse trying to calm it and take it to shelter behind the fire trucks. Eight other horses had been tied there to a tanker, bound together by the same rope, attached to each other as though in solidarity, a giant shifting mass pulling in every direction, jostling and turning every which way amid swinging tails and tossing manes, a compact conglomeration of agitated and panicked bodies, the sheen of their coats reflecting the fire, the whole beastly mob shaken incessantly by a nervous wave of agitation. They stuck to one another, twisting, drawing back, storming forward and pulling so hard on the rope that they’d knock the tanker off balance, its wheels lifting momentarily in the dust. Residual pockets of fire continued to burn all around in the paddock of the equestrian club, cottages were in flames, barns, stables, the ground itself, the grass ablaze here and there, and Marie suddenly took off toward Peppino. She zigzagged through a grassy area, where plumes of violet smoke hung suspended in the night’s trembling air. Marie made a beeline for Peppino, charging through the spreading fire, lifting high her flip-flops, picking up her pace, running, dancing in place as her feet burned, and Peppino pushed her back angrily when he saw her, furious and beside himself, chasing her away, and Marie turned back around, no longer aware of where she was going, lost, still running, turning in circles, the soles of her feet scorched. A fireman saw her and ran toward her, grabbed her and brought her back to me, leading her under his protective wing, while she laid her head gently on his shoulder.

The fireman ordered me to leave the premises immediately, and as I tried to return to the pickup with Marie, she walked beside me shielding her face with her arm. She began coughing, spitting, she hobbled along through the smoke, staggering down the rocky path. I lifted her, put her arm around my shoulder to give her support, she’d stopped walking, she dragged her feet in the dirt, her flip-flops scraping against the ground, kicking up small rocks. I opened the door to the truck and placed her on the seat, her body sunk down, she slid down her seat, limp. I sat her up, repositioned her in her seat, grabbed her left arm that was hanging out of the truck and placed it on her lap, slammed the door. I sat down at the wheel and started the truck right away. Unable to turn around, I drove straight ahead, reentered the equestrian club. Peppino and the few remaining rangers had given up protecting the buildings — it was too late, the club had completely burned down — they’d simply gathered together with the survivors around the tanker and, in shock, they watched me pass by, while the horses, neighing and panicked, their tails lashing, their manes swaying, kicked up a whirlwind of dust in an effort to follow me. I did a U-turn in the lot and exited the way we’d come, leaving the equestrian club behind us as I accelerated into the dust.

I drove on, speeding along, unperturbed by the road’s bumps, potholes, ruts, letting go of the wheel only to keep Marie from falling over, her body tipping over against my shoulder or abruptly lurching toward the windshield, causing me to grab her by the back of her shirt to keep her from hitting her head. I wasn’t sure if she was unconscious or not, I continued to drive through the fog, seeing nothing by the beam of my headlights, all was smoke, shadows, and the glow in the distance. Leaving the unpaved road, I headed toward Portoferraio, following a craggy coastline route. The wind from the sea shook the old truck, making the doors vibrate, and some stronger gusts pushed us over to the shoulder. I sped up, and I saw the shrubs jitter along the road, their branches swaying in my headlights, and the small trees of the undulating thicket bowed as we passed. I was shirtless at the wheel, my eyes unblinking, wild, mesmerized by the hypnotic unraveling of the road. I didn’t slow down when passing another car, didn’t turn my brights off, our fenders would touch, I’d swerve onto the side of the road and my tires would bounce unevenly in the gravel along the cliff ledge. I made out in the distance the darkened profiles of the great rocky coastal cliffs, whose tortured sides crumbled into the sea like the petrified bottom of one of Marie’s designer dresses, with its rumpled sheets, its pleats, its laminae, its vertical ridges and sharp jags fashioned by wind and storm. I heard the sea rumble below me, black, immense, churning, raging in a fury of foam, and I sped on along the craggy coastline, carrying in my wake this procession of phantom dresses of volcanic rock, dresses the color of lava or magma, which joined the basalt’s darkness with the metamorphic rocks, mixing together granite and porphyry, ophiolites, cipolin and limestone, mica sequins and glimmers of obsidian grains.

Marie had fallen next to me, slumped over on the seat, her eyes distant, her body tossed around by the car, her shoulders passive, shifting according to the curves of the road. Her T-shirt was blackened by the smoke, stained with fingerprints, bits of grass and mud, dirt, its cotton scorched in many places, specked with ash and other charred material. She’d lost one of her flip-flops, soot covered the straps and V attachment of the remaining one, and its daisy was black, dying, without petals. Her T-shirt hung askew, baring a shoulder and rising up at the thigh, but her nudity was far from carefree and charming, her body was bruised, she must have felt mortified for not having panties on. Make no mistake, Marie loved walking around naked, but if nudity agrees with the sea and open air, it clashes with fire, which gives it an unpleasant, if not unbearable, character. I dug through the glove box but found nothing to cover her with. I slowed down abruptly and parked on a seaside cliff. I had some trouble getting out of the pickup, the wind pushed against the door, its metal frame creaking, and I had to slip through the narrow opening I was able to make. I took a few steps against the violent wind and took off my pants, then removed my boxers. There I was, naked on the cliff, standing in the white beam of the truck’s headlights. I could see Marie’s silhouette seated in the truck, I saw the sea below, the dark vegetation waving furiously in the wind. I put my pants back on, twisting in place, and, opening the truck door, pulling hard, holding it open in the storm, I slid in and handed my boxers to Marie (here, put this on, I said, don’t say I never did anything for you). Marie looked at my boxers confusedly, and then she smiled, she gave me a shy, grateful smile. She took the boxers and slipped them on while I started the truck again in the night.

A little farther on, I was forced to slow down, the road was blocked, siren lights spun silently in the night. I got out of the old truck, leaving Marie asleep in the vehicle, and walked over to a small crowd of onlookers gathered on the road around some fire engines. The fire couldn’t have been far away, orange cinders could be seen in the undergrowth by the road, a few isolated flames flickered here and there above its length. The firemen had unrolled a fire hose, which dripped in the middle of the road, and a dozen campers watched them silently behind police tape set up by the Red Cross. They had been evacuated from a nearby campground, they’d rushed out of their tents and were now standing here, idle, with the look of refugees, young girls in nightgowns, a few odd objects in their hands, a toilet case, a bottle of water, ping-pong paddles. I wandered for a while among them on the road and walked over to a fireman who was giving explanations to a man in shorts seated on a Vespa whose motor continued to run. The fireman, helmeted, his neck protected with a sort of extended permeable hood, explained to him that the fire was spreading on Monte Capannello and that a pocket remained active on Monte Strega, the fire had reached Volterraio and two other valleys were still burning. Shirtless, I continued to amble down this smoky coastal road, when a Red Cross first-aid worker caught up to me without my seeing him and put a thermal blanket around my shoulders. I said nothing, I didn’t react in any way, I didn’t even thank him (I can’t imagine the stricken look I must have had), and I returned to the truck. I took the blanket off my shoulders and placed it carefully over Marie’s thighs as she continued to sleep in her seat, tucked her in gently.

I turned around then and headed back in the direction of the equestrian club. Marie had opened one eye but remained speechless, she stared out at the road in front of her. I drove slowly, I was spent, deprived of energy and strength. The wind had abated. The sun had begun to rise, on the horizon smoke and morning fog covered the sea. As we reached the small white bridge a couple of miles from La Rivercina, I slowed and turned onto the road that led to the equestrian club, driving carefully, avoiding potholes and bumps. The undergrowth thronging the road was completely scorched, blackened, charred, and a strong smell of fire penetrated the vehicle. The coastal shrub had burned like dry wood, after having run wild for several years, growing unevenly, never clipped or tended, drying after long months of drought and August’s torrential heat. Nothing remained of the tangles of rockrose and thorny broom, of myrtle, of strawberry tree and tree heath, choice combustibles, rich in flammable oils, which the fire must have set ablaze as soon as it came near. I pulled into the equestrian club slowly, and Marie grabbed my arm, I felt in my body the terror that seized her.

The equestrian club was deserted, spectral, the firemen had left, and the hill loomed, lunar, in the morning’s gray light, blackened trees showed their skeletal profiles, their limbs splayed, smoking, with here and there a last dying flame wrapping around a charred branch, curling back and dying for lack of combustible material. A thick layer of ash covered the ground, more white than gray, still hot, with, in various places, incandescent embers still smoking. The fire hadn’t been completely put out, it was spreading over the ground at the foot of a demolished stable, stray strands of straw burning slowly. Nothing remained of the club’s facilities, barns, cottages, all had burned, consumed on the spot, all was leveled, only charred debris remained, scattered mounds, piles of sheet metal and wood crumbling on the ground. We’d gotten out of the truck and were passing through the smoky ruins, grief-stricken, heading toward the small stone reception house, the only building spared by the fire, when Marie let out a cry and grabbed my arm, she covered her eyes after seeing three long white sheets spread on the ground in front of the door, three makeshift shrouds covering forms whose dimensions were unclear in the silent gray light of dawn, not human forms but clearly dead bodies of some sort, charred carcasses of animals.

We entered the small stone reception house, all the lights were off, and we didn’t notice right away that someone was there. Peppino was there, in the dark, lying on his back on a stone bench, one knee bent, wet compresses over his eyes, just rubber gloves, one over each eye. I wasn’t sure if he’d realized we’d come in, but he remained motionless for a moment, then, without moving the rest of his body, still lying supine, he took off the compresses, one by one, and looked at us, considered us in silence. His face was black, covered in soot, his shirt, his clothes were black — that is, they hadn’t been black initially, but had become so soaked in soot and smoke that they’d turned black. Without speaking a word, he put his legs down and sat up, and he stared at us blankly. His squinting eyes were red, irritated, even his eyebrows had been burned, the hairs of which had curled into tiny balls. After a long moment of silence, in a loud and grave voice, he asked, faltering and failing to hide his grief, if we’d seen his daughter, who’d just left to take the rescued horses to a pasture he owned in La Guardia. Marie told him no, we hadn’t, we hadn’t seen anyone. Then, not without some difficulty, he stood up, took a step forward, dejected, defeated, and, without a word, hugged Marie, what a nightmare, he told her, three horses were dead and Nocciola was severely burned, we’ll probably have to put her down, and, together, in sync, they began to cry, they cried in each other’s arms, white tears streamed down Peppino’s black cheeks, which he wiped away clumsily with his sooty hands, but to no effect, adding black to black.

After returning to La Rivercina, we’d gone to bed. The fire had destroyed a large part of the yard but had spared the house. Lying in my bed, I was motionless in my room, my eyes open in the dark, and I heard Marie moving around on the second floor, I heard the patter of her feet on the ceiling above me. I heard as usual the door of the armoire creak faintly as she opened it, and I knew she was choosing a T-shirt for the night, and then I heard her leave her room, I heard her steps moving down the hallway, I thought she was going to stop at the bathroom, but her steps continued and began coming down the stairs, Marie was coming down the stairs and she reached the first floor, I heard her cross the living room, I heard her steps getting closer and I saw the door in my room open and Marie appear in front of me in the dark, shedding her imaginary dimensions to materialize in reality, the limbs of my imagined creation now materializing in front of me in real flesh and blood. Marie crossed the room barefoot and slid into my bed, snuggled up against me. I felt the heat of her skin against my body. The sun had hardly begun to rise at La Rivercina, and we held each other in bed, we cuddled together in the half-light to comfort each other, the final distance separating our bodies was giving way, and we made love, we made love gently in the morning’s gray light — and your skin and hair, my love, smelled strongly of fire.




ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND THE TRANSLATOR


JEAN-PHILIPPE TOUSSAINT is the author of nine novels. His writing has been compared to the work of Samuel Beckett, Jacques Tati, and Jim Jarmusch.

MATTHEW B. SMITH has translated Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Camera as well as Running Away for Dalkey Archive Press.