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, none of this would ever have happened. I am as certain of this as are those who maintain that if Hitler had not failed his entrance exam to art school the world would have been a better place. The young girl painting caught Madame M.’s eye, and that is why she invited her to come in for a few minutes, the time it took for a cup of tea. Otherwise they would never have met; they would have remained mutual strangers kept apart by everything since birth.
Some people said, ‘Madame M. is bored all on her own’; others added, ‘and she is still so young’. The entire village tried to find an explanation for this unnatural friendship between a bourgeoise from a high-ranking family and their little Annie. After they had rejected the excuse – too humiliating – that ‘rich people like the poor when they are nice-looking’, they finally opted for the commonsense explanation that ‘rich people like artists’, and I think they were right.
Everyone got used to them spending time together, and were even rather proud of them. Everyone, that is, except me. I took a dim view of their friendship. Annie, who was anti-social by nature, seemed to have found in that young woman the type of person one meets only once in a lifetime: the one who can replace everyone else. Once she had got into the habit of stopping off for tea with Madame M., Annie gave up all her other habits, including me. She cut herself off from my life, or rather, she cut me out of her life, without the slightest compunction, and without giving me any explanation as to her sudden detachment. She did not ignore me, what she did was worse: she still greeted me with that horrible little wave that was proof she had seen me, but never again with the other wave that was an invitation to join her. Love is a mysterious principle, falling out of love more mysterious still, and one can know why one loves but never, truly, why one has ceased to love.
Things could have stopped there, I could certainly have swallowed my gnawing irritation, my jealous resentment, but the arrival of Monsieur and Madame M. in L’Escalier was about to turn into an irreversible tragedy.
So did I remember them?
‘Annie, you might as well have asked me if I remembered that we had lost the war.’
Visibly feverish, she did not stop stirring the spoon in her cup. ‘Don’t compare things that cannot be compared.’ Annie slowly hitched her cardigan onto her shoulders. I could not take my eyes off her; her eyes were riveted elsewhere. I sensed that it was not only our ‘first times’ that she had to tell me about. She had simply reminded me of those times in order to earn the right to tell me what really mattered, the way one forces oneself to inquire politely about one’s interlocutor before launching into a monologue where one speaks only of oneself.
‘I have something to confess, Louis. I have to tell you what really happened