She got undressed and slipped on a bathrobe, one of the ones she always wore after a performance and that she had left there. She entered the bedroom. A man was stretched out on the bed, whom she immediately recognized and with whom she had rehearsed a duet at Studio Wacker, a certain Georges Starass. Dancing with him, she had felt something she’d never felt with any of her other dance partners, as if this contact was more intimate than a simple exercise, so intimate that she’d wanted to prolong it.

  Now the two of them were alone in the room, and after a few moments she again had that feeling, just like the other day at Studio Wacker, of dancing with him on the same rhythm, in perfect harmony … And soon stronger and stronger cries followed on shorter and shorter intervals. Each time, she felt a lightheadedness that expanded to infinity.

  At noon that day, we were supposed to go pick up Pierre at the Dieterlen School. I had asked Hovine to drive me there, since it was snowing. I wanted to save Pierre from the school cafeteria, where he had to eat most days. Was it my experience of boarding schools in the mountains, when it snowed as early as November and we huddled in the covered playground during recess after leaving the dining hall, still hungry? I tried to convince the ballerina to spare Pierre the ordeal of the cafeteria, especially in winter, but she looked at me strangely. Apparently she didn’t understand my qualms. And yet, I intuited that her childhood and adolescence had been harder than mine. No doubt she deemed that eating in the cafeteria was no big deal for a child.

  On the way, I asked Hovine about the ballerina and Pierre. But he answered evasively, as if he was afraid of betraying a secret and that the ballerina would find out. Didn’t she sometimes tell him he was “too talkative”? Talkative? That wasn’t the impression he gave me. When I was with him, there were notably long moments of silence between us.

  “So you think we should leave him at the cafeteria?”

  “Oh, it’s no great hardship.”

  He smiled at me. He, too, I imagined, had had a difficult childhood and adolescence.

  “The main thing is that we look after him,” he said. “The ballerina doesn’t always have time, what with her rehearsals and ballets.”

  Then, in a tone that might have been sarcastic or admiring, I couldn’t tell which:

  “You know, the ballerina is a great artist.”

  We were early and we waited for Pierre in front of the Dieterlen School. He was the only one to come out, as if he received special treatment. His classmates were in the cafeteria. It suddenly occurred to me that we might be setting him a poor example. Too bad. He knew we were going to a restaurant and he’d be able to choose the dessert he liked best.

  After lunch, we took Pierre to a movie theater on Avenue de l’Opéra where they were showing Disney films. Then we went home to the apartment at Porte de Champerret. The ballerina was with a certain Georges Starass, a dancer I’d seen two or three times with her and Pola Hubersen. Kniaseff greatly admired his gifts, even though Starass managed his career somewhat haphazardly. You sensed that dance wasn’t his sole interest in life. He often missed rehearsals, and it wasn’t always certain that he’d show up onstage for a premiere. I’d gathered that he was to perform a duet with the ballerina at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. And it wasn’t the first time they danced together. Kniaseff had paired them on several occasions during the lessons at Studio Wacker.

  Pierre had holed up in the back bedroom to play by himself. I’d very much like to know what became of him. I did some research over the following years, but I didn’t know his family name, he who had no family. In dreams, I often gaze at a star in the clear sky, and I’m certain that its distant, irregular light is trying to communicate with me, a light in which bathe the ballerina, Pierre, Hovine, the regulars at Studio Wacker, the apartment at Porte de Champerret, my start in life.

  “Are you interested in the world of dance?” Georges Starass asked me.

  “It’s a matter of chance,” I specified. “Chance encounters.”

  Georges Starass and the ballerina talked of their upcoming rehearsals at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. Were these for The Young Man and Death, which Babilée had once performed? Or simply Swan Lake? Or a revival of Train of Roses? I don’t remember. It will come back to me later. And besides, it no longer matters in the slightest. I wasn’t listening to them. I had met a curious publisher the previous week in a café near the church of Saint-Séverin, a certain Maurice Girodias. We’d started talking because he happened to be sitting at the table next to mine. He had been publishing in Paris a series of English-language novels that were banned in the Anglo-Saxon countries, and he had just opened a res- taurant and theater in a space right near there, on Rue Saint-Séverin. If I liked, he’d take me to see it. At first, I was taken aback by his friendliness toward me. But I had listened to him with a level of attention that he probably didn’t expect from a young person my age.

  After visiting the two floors of his restaurant, then the basement, a vaulted cellar that he wanted to turn into a nightclub, he asked if I knew English. I answered in the affirmative, and he proposed that I work on a book, a typescript of about eighty pages, to which some episodes had to be added. I said I accepted. There are so many ways to get your start in literature … And when, that afternoon in the apartment at Porte de Champerret, Starass wanted to know “what I did in life” and I noticed the ballerina’s unease when she thought I’d have nothing to answer, I declared in a firm voice, “I write books”—which provoked the ballerina’s astonishment, and even a frown, as if I’d just told a lie. But I soon left the living room to go join Pierre in the back bedroom. He was working on a puzzle, one of those huge puzzles that I’d bought for him in a toy store on Faubourg Saint-Honoré. I helped him fit a piece to the others. The window looked out on the courtyard and on the gray, frozen winter afternoon, the kind of harsh winters that used to exist back then.

  At the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, she continued rehearsing Train of Roses with Georges Starass. She had never been attached to a partner by so strong and strange a bond, never felt so powerfully that tension in her body, as if heated white-hot by dance. She knew the bond would not last. When the rehearsals and performances were over, life would pull them onto different paths.

  One evening, as she was coming out of the metro at George-V to join Starass in Pola Hubersen’s apartment, she thought about Madeleine Péraud, a doctor who had treated her at age fifteen, when she was just joining Studio Wacker; about the woman’s patient explanations of complicated things that she eventually came to understand, and about the books on mysticism she helped her discover by having her copy out the most striking passages in a school notebook. One word, among so many others the doctor used, came back to mind: incandescence. She had even given her a short book with a chapter titled “Incandescence.”

  Incandescence, beatitude, rapture, ecstasy: those terms often recurred in the books the doctor had given her, and she remembered the impression they’d made on her when she read them for the first time. She had ended up thinking that you could use the same words in relation to dance.

  From the metro station, she followed the avenue up to Pola Hubersen’s apartment. The latter was away for two weeks and, whenever the ballerina spent a few hours alone with Starass, it was in that apartment. Night had fallen, a mild night even though it was in the month of December. Soon there would be a final rehearsal of Train of Roses with Starass on the stage of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. And then, the following evening, the premiere of the ballet, the curtain calls and applause, during which the body remains tense from the effort, then relaxes. And after that, she would likely never see him again.

  That evening, as she approached the apartment, she felt an acute sensation rise in her that would grow more intense when they were in the room together. They had rehearsed that morning, and now he was waiting for her in the bedroom. She tried to walk with calm steps and it made her heart beat faster. It was like the feeling that comes over you as you go onstage to join your dance partner. But more violent.

  She slowly pushed open the door to the building, and when she was at the foot of the staircase she paused for a moment. To climb the stairs, she forced herself to re-create the somnambulist’s step that she had used in Balanchine’s ballet. On the landing, she took the keyring from the pocket of her coat. She couldn’t settle her nerves and the keys fell. The hall light went out and she felt around for them in the dark. She had trouble fitting the right key in the lock, owing to the trembling of her hand.

  When she walked into the salon, she saw his coat folded over the back of the sofa, just where she had seen it the first time. She walked to the sofa, with the lightest possible step, to avoid making any sound. She sat down, her bust rigid and still, knees pressed together, and remained there in the twilight, thinking of him waiting for her in the bedroom. She hesitated about which hallway to take to go join him, and that hesitation, the time she voluntarily left suspended, gradually lifted her to the point of incandescence. The usual hall off the foyer, or the longer one that led to the bathroom? She heard herself whisper for her own benefit: “The longer hall … ”

  She stood up and started down the hall, maintaining her light sleepwalker’s step, but her heart was beating so hard that she suddenly felt short of breath.

  Girodias gave me the typescript, whose title was The Glass Is Falling. The novel, or rather the novella, was written by a certain Francis La Mure. It was the meticulous description of a group of English women and men who had been vacationing for a long time in a ski resort in Engadine, and their interrelationships, casual yet marked by a certain sexual license.

  I asked him if I really needed to add chapters and whether the author would agree to it. He smiled to himself and told me the author would agree. I immediately got to work without asking any further questions.

  I worked in the small room I was renting from Ver-zini, on Rue Chauveau-Lagarde. Ultimately, I wrote only two short chapters, toward the end of the book, and interspersed some paragraphs of varying lengths into the preceding ones. Counting my small cuts to each page as well as my word changes and deletions of modifiers, I’d say it was really more of a copy edit. Before the novel appeared in Girodias’s series, with its green covers, the latter wanted to give me a set of galleys and for us to “celebrate” with a private dinner in his restaurant on Rue Saint-Séverin. He had asked me to meet him there at around eleven at night. The restaurant was deserted. What were we in fact celebrating, the publisher and I? A novel, The Glass Is Falling, by Francis La Mure, on which I had worked; but I told myself that no one would ever know about it.

  That night, I walked along the quays. Shoved into the pocket of my coat were the proofs of The Glass Is Falling, and I wasn’t sure yet whether I’d show them to the ballerina. She was rather hardheaded and would tell me, in her sarcastic voice: “Yes, but the book isn’t yours, it’s by Francis La Mure. And besides, it’s in English.”

  Clearly, I couldn’t compete with her art. And while the “great artist,” as Hovine said, evidently felt affection for me, I always wondered whether she took me seriously.

  Despite those doubts, the act of walking along the quays settled me. I had known them for so long … I was familiar with every building entrance, the slightest window or antiques dealer’s display, one after another, up to Rue du Bac.

  Passing by the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire, I regretted not living there, as that spot had always struck me as a magnetic focal point of Paris, at the border of two banks. You just had to cross the bridge to find yourself on the Right Bank, and when you looked out at night from the window of your room, toward the Louvre and the Tuileries Gardens, you felt the future before you, full of promise. To the left of the hotel entrance, behind the plate glass on the ground floor, I saw the bar still lit and two people at a table in back. For a moment, I felt like going in to join them. Perhaps they were waiting for me. Or maybe I was the one who had arranged to meet them there. After all, I was still in that period of life called the “time of encounters.”

  I had arrived in front of the Gare d’Orsay, decommissioned long before. A dim light shone inside, and if you leaned toward the padlocked fence, you could make out in the semidarkness the former concourse and a row of wooden ticket windows that must have dated from between the wars, or even from the turn of the century. They were much smaller than modern ticket windows, as if people in those days weren’t the same size as today. And yet the empty concourse reminded me of the one at the Gare d’Austerlitz, on the evening when the ballerina, Hovine, and I had gone to meet Pierre’s train. Yes, once long ago, there had still been crowds in the concourse of Orsay station, and three people—a woman and two men—had come to meet a child and, like us, they’d stood at the entrance to the platforms and tried to spot him amid the flow of passengers. Then they had walked up the platform and seen him disembark from one of the last cars, with his suitcase. And I ended up persuading myself that it was us: for the same situations, the same steps, the same gestures are repeated throughout time. And they are never lost, but inscribed for eternity on the sidewalks, walls, and train station concourses of this city. The eternal return of the same.

  I crossed over Pont de la Concorde, and the prospect of returning to my room caused me some apprehension. At the entrance to my building, I’d have to press the light switch and again see that wan, feeble light in the stairway and especially in the endless corridor, each door with its enamel plate. And I was afraid the light would be the same in the apartment at Porte de Champerret, where the ballerina would surely be out, and where I risked waking Pierre and Hovine. It was as if that light impregnated my life, even in daytime. A light that was never clear.

  Still, at the edge of Place de la Concorde, it seemed to me that the streetlamps shone more brilliantly than usual and that I was coming out onto a great clearing or an esplanade by the seaside. A breeze was blowing, coming from the Tuileries, or from the start of the long forested avenue, to the left, leading toward the Champs-Elysées. The square was like an oasis in the dark. I breathed in deeply and recovered my buoyancy and natural insouciance. I no longer felt afraid of confronting the wan light of the stairs and corridor. The more I walked, the less my feet touched the ground, like the dancer in the ballet Train of Roses. And with that thought, I started laughing uncontrollably.

  Sometimes Pierre and I talked, on Thursdays as we came home from the movies. I tried to understand what his life had been like before his arrival that evening at the Gare d’Austerlitz. But a child’s recollections are as fragmentary as the ones remaining from my youth. When I think about those few scraps—the ballerina, Studio Wacker, Pola Hubersen and her apartment, Hovine and his herringbone coat—it’s like the memories Pierre kept, of a moment, a place, a few phrases he had overheard. And never, later on, would he be able to reconstruct the entire scene, as he did when he finished his puzzles.

  He told me, for instance, that the train that had brought him to Paris that evening came from Biarritz. The ballerina had never wanted to provide this detail, other than by an evasive statement: “It was somewhere in the Basque Country.” Questions about Pierre bothered her, and no doubt she blamed herself for having abandoned him. As for him, had he been aware of their separation? Apparently not, for he had forgotten the part of his childhood that preceded Biarritz, when his mother might have been around. Only two images from that period had remained in his memory: a clock on a sloping lawn whose face was composed of flowers, on the border of an avenue where they had set up a funfair. He had gotten into a red bumper car with someone who would forever remain unknown to him. There was a dog somewhere, but he couldn’t say where.

  Of Biarritz, he remembered “Saint Mary’s,” his first school, where they gave you a “cross” each week when you’d been a good pupil, and the place where he lived, near the school and the “chateau Gramont.” And the very tall waves that frightened him on stormy days, and the words “Toro de fuego,” which he had often heard but didn’t understand. And also the face of the woman who took care of him, but he had never wondered who she was, exactly. Enough to make you believe that children never ask questions and find nothing out of the ordinary.

  I took him to the Bois de Boulogne when it was nice out. The bus, the lakes, the boats, the Chalet des Iles with its miniature golf …

  Most of the time, during our walks throughout Paris or on bus rides, we didn’t speak. The silence between us was a much stronger bond than words. We were like those people who walk side by side, never saying a thing but always taking the long way around.

  The other day, in this year 2022, I was walking on Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. A car was parked along the sidewalk, almost at the intersection with Rue Vavin, and a man was sitting at the wheel, his window lowered.

  “Hey, you … Mr. Elegant … ”

  He was leaning out the car door, staring straight at me. A man about my age. His skin was slightly pockmarked. And his hair was still brown. But maybe he dyed it.

  I continued on my way. Behind me, I heard again, this time louder:

  “So, Mr. Elegant … You don’t recognize me anymore?”

  I don’t know what abruptly came over me. I made a sudden about-face and strode back to where he was. I said with surprise in my voice:

  “Are you calling me ‘Mr. Elegant’?”

  We had been living through difficult times for the past three years, the worst I’d ever known. And the world around me had changed so quickly that I felt like a stranger in it. I was wearing an old black parka, rumpled tan trousers, and shoes with crepe soles. No, this wasn’t a time for playing at being elegant. More like for keeping a low profile.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6