The Confidant. Helene Gremillon

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СКАЧАТЬ rearrange the nature of things. It was true, too, that I had long hoped for something between us, but things had turned out differently. She must have been married by then; at twenty, that was normal – I had deliberately aged her a year or two, to hurt her feelings a bit. I had seen the wedding ring on her finger. I was pretending. I was playing the part of the man who does not chase after women, who no longer hopes. The man whom one need not fear. As a child I had never used any tricks to secure her affections, but on that 4 October 1943, with my eyes glued to the ground to avoid her gaze, I could hear myself saying the exact opposite of what I was thinking. I was obligingly opening the way for her to tell me whatever she liked, with no regard for the past. What of her life, today? Was she happy?

      Oddly enough, Annie replied with a confession.

      ‘I must tell you, Louis, that you have always been the first. The first to kiss me, the first to caress my cheek, my breasts, the first who knew that there were days when I wore nothing under my skirt.’

      Annie reminded me of all those first times; she remembered everything better than I did.

      ‘Why did you never tell me this?’

      She looked up at me.

      ‘What’s the point in telling a man that he was the first? Do you tell the twelfth man that he was the twelfth? Or the last that he was the last?’

      I did not know what to say.

      Did she hope, by pouring out all her memories, that I would forgive her for everything that never happened between us? The truth is, she began to change when she first started spending time with that Madame M.

      Annie stood up abruptly, as if suddenly embarrassed to be near me. She offered me a chicory coffee, apologising that, because of the rationing, she no longer had any real coffee, or any sugar. She was nervous, opening all the cupboard doors as if she didn’t really know what she was doing. Her apartment was very small. I watched her bare feet moving about her few square metres of living space. Her kitchen – a sink and a hot plate – was next to her bed, fortunately, for had she so much as left the room I might have doubted her very presence. I hadn’t seen her for three years. For three years I’d had no news of her at all. At no time did I suspect she might be living in Paris like me. I looked at her fingernails, her peeling red varnish; in the village she never used to wear any. Seeing her again like this: it seemed too good to be true. Outside it was pitch black. I was suddenly overwhelmed by desire for her. She handed me a steaming hot cup.

      ‘So, do you remember Monsieur and Madame M.?’

      How could she ask me such a thing?

      I rang the post office first thing next morning. The postmark indicated that the three letters had been mailed from the fifteenth arrondissement. Perhaps there was a number in the postmark that I had missed and that would indicate precisely which letter box had been used. I could go and put up a poster asking the famous Louis to contact me.

      But their reply was unequivocal: there was no way to know. I couldn’t exactly go putting posters on every letter box in the fifteenth arrondissement, I had plenty of other things to do, never mind the number of weirdos who would call me for all sorts of reasons, but never about the letters.

      The letters had to mean something to someone, and somewhere in Paris there must have been another Camille Werner who was expecting them. She was the one I had to find. Sure at last that I had hit on the solution, I embarked on a search for all the homonyms. Shit! I would never have thought there could be so many Werners in Paris. I really have to stop swearing like this all the time, Pierre is right: it’s not very feminine, it’s hardly the way to make Nicolas come back to you. Shut up, Pierre. Don’t talk to me about him. I don’t go talking about the girls you sleep with, do I?

      I called every Werner in the telephone directory to ask them 1) whether there was anyone by the name of Camille in their family, 2) did they by chance know anyone by the name of Annie? I met with a few polite, reserved ‘no’s. But some of the other reactions were quite surprising. There was one woman who hung up on me, terrified to hear an unfamiliar voice. There was one who didn’t know any Annies, but she knew an Anna, was I sure I wasn’t looking for an Anna? And then there was one who had scarcely had time to pick up the phone before her husband started shouting at her to hang up, telling her it was robbers, that’s what they always do in the holidays, to find out whether anyone was at home.

      But no sign anywhere of another Camille Werner.

      Tough luck, Louis. He would have to go on writing to me for no good reason.

      By Tuesday a new envelope was waiting for me, just as thick, but all alone now in my letter box. The same stationery, a very smooth parchment; the same handwriting – a distinctive capital ‘R’, the same size as a lowercase letter, slipping effortlessly into the heart of a word – and the same smoky scent, a perfume that reminded me of something or someone, but I couldn’t figure out who or what.

      Monsieur and Madame M. were a very wealthy young couple. Both sets of their parents had flawlessly fulfilled their duty as overzealous forebears by dying unusually young and unusually rich. Their last will and testament was dripping with real estate, but the M. couple chose to settle in L’Escalier, to our great misfortune.

      L’Escalier was the name given to a fine estate in the middle of our little village, as out of place as a swan among starlings. Children thought of it as a haunted manor house; young people as a romantic château, and those who had reached an age where one’s sole entertainment was the misfortune of others viewed it as a potential source of iniquitous family disputes: consequently, L’Escalier belonged more to the collective unconscious than to any ordinary owner. When the M. couple moved in, it was like a violation, and everyone felt dispossessed by the intrusion of these strangers. Everyone except Annie, who was looking forward to an opportunity for new paintings. She had already painted the estate from every angle the high stone wall would allow, and although the wall had crumbled here and there, it nevertheless did continue, like some old guard dog, to dissuade any intruders.

      One morning two servants – a man and a woman – arrived with a load of baggage and furniture. Luxury items were part of the journey; this was a major move. The trunks were overflowing with carpets, paintings, chandeliers and all sorts of artefacts.

      ‘They’re cleaning the house from top to bottom, they’ve piled everything in the courtyard, come and see, it will make a nice painting.’

      I had followed Annie to the elm tree where she was in the habit of sitting. She liked to show me her canvases, to see what I thought of them. Her painting was rather good. She had captured perfectly every trace of the sudden agitation at the house – the shutters flung open, the dust blowing out of the windows, the grounds as they were cleared and began to look like proper grounds again. Annie was quite pleased, except for her portrayal of the man.

      ‘I’ve made a mess of him – he walks with a limp but in the picture you can’t tell. I can’t paint anyway, so when he’s a cripple, it’s even harder.’

      I pointed out to her that it must be a family who were moving in. She asked me why I thought so. I pointed to the crib and the pram on her canvas. Strangely enough, although she had painted them, she hadn’t seen them. Can human beings sense danger to a point where they deny it? Annie was absorbed in a silent reverie. I could tell as much, her brush was already circling round a child caught in its mother’s skirts.

      *

      When I try to understand the reasons behind the whole tragedy, I always come to the same conclusion: if Annie had not been passionate about painting, СКАЧАТЬ