Life: A User's Manual (20 page)

Since then we have lived continually on the run. For a year I believed I could get away from you. I know now that I cannot. You will always have luck and money on your side; it is pointless believing I will ever succeed in getting through the holes in the net you have cast, just as it is illusory to hope that you will ever cease to pursue me. You have the power to kill me, and you believe you have the right to do so, but you won’t make me run any further: together with my husband François, and Anne, to whom I have just given birth, I shall live from now on, without shifting, in Chaumont-Porcien, in the Ardennes. I await you with serenity
.

For more than a year I made myself give no sign of life; I sacked all the detectives and investigators I had hired; I closeted myself in my flat, hardly went out, lived on ginger crackers and tea bags, using alcohol, tobacco, and maxiton tablets to maintain myself in a sort of pulsating fever which gave way at times to bouts of complete torpor. The certain knowledge that Elizabeth was waiting for me, went to bed each night thinking she might never awake, kissed her daughter each morning almost surprised to be still alive, the feeli

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

On the Stairs, 5

ON THE LANDING of the second floor. The Altamonts’ door, framed by two dwarf orange trees emerging from hexagonal marble plant pot-holders, is open. Through it exits an old family friend, who obviously arrived too early for the reception.

He is a German industrialist called Hermann Fugger, who made a fortune in the early postwar years selling camping equipment, and has since moved into one-piece floor coverings and wallpaper. He is wearing a double-breasted suit, whose sobriety is overcompensated for by a mauve scarf with pink polka dots. He carries under his arm a Dublin daily –
The Free Man
– on which the following headline can be read:

NEWBORN POP STAR WINS PIN BALL CONTEST

and also a small display box advertising a travel agency:

EGYPT

ITS SUN

ITS EVENINGS

ITS FIRMAMENT

Hermann Fugger has in fact arrived very early on purpose: an amateur cook, he spends his time regretting that business does not permit him to be at his stove more often, dreaming of the ever less likely day when he will be able to devote himself entirely to the culinary arts, and he was planning to cook his own recipe this evening for leg of wild boar in beer, whose knuckle end, he claims, is the most delectable thing on earth, but the Altamonts angrily refuse.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Louvet, 1

THE LOUVETS’ FLAT on the first floor right. An executive’s living room. Walls hung with yellow leather; a sunken grate in a hexagonal fireplace, and a made-up fire on the point of flaming; an integrated suite of audio-visual equipment: stereo, tapedeck, TV, slide projector; sofa and matching armchairs in buttoned natural leather. Purple, cinammon, and toast-coloured hues; a low table tiled with small brownish hexagonal tiles, supporting a dish-bowl containing a set of poker dice, several darning eggs, a miniature bottle of angostura bitters, and a champagne cork that is actually a lighter; a pack of matches advertising the San Francisco club it comes from,
Diamond’s
; a naval officer’s desk, with a modern imported Italian lamp, a slender skeleton of black metal which can be made to hold almost any position; an alcove hung with red curtains and a bed buried under tiny multicoloured cushions; on the rear wall, a large watercolour depicting musicians playing antique instruments.

The Louvets are away. They travel a lot, on business and for pleasure. Louvet looks – perhaps a bit too much – like the image people have of him, and which he shares: English fashions, Viennese moustache. Madame Louvet is a very stylish woman, coming on forty, who likes to wear culottes, yellow check waistcoats, leather belts, and chunky tortoiseshell bracelets.

There is a photograph showing them on a bear hunt in the Andes, in the Macondo area; they are posing with another couple who can only be described as exercises in the same style: all four wear khaki combat jackets full of pockets and pouches. In the foreground, Louvet half-squats with one knee on the ground and a gun in his hand; behind him his wife is seated on a deckchair; behind the deckchair the other couple are standing.

A fifth person, no doubt the guide whose job it was to go with them, stands a little to the side: a tall man with close-cropped hair, looking like an American GI; dressed in camouflage fatigues, he seems totally rapt in reading a cheap detective novel with an illustrated jacket, entitled
El Crimén piramidal
.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Lift Machinery, 1

THE LIFT IS out of order, as usual. It has never worked really well. On the night of the fourteenth to the fifteenth of July 1925, barely a few weeks after it was installed, it got stuck for seven hours. There were four people in it, which allowed the insurance to refuse to pay for the repair, since it was designed for three people or two hundred kilograms. The four victims were Madame Albin, then called Flora Champigny, Raymond Albin, her fiancé, then doing his military service, Monsieur Jérôme, who was then a young history teacher, and Serge Valène. They had gone to Montmartre to see the firework display and had walked back by way of Pigalle, Clichy, and Batignolles, stopping at most of the bars for a glass of dry white wine or a drop of well-chilled rosé. They were therefore rather more than merry when the event occurred, around four in the morning, between the fourth and fifth floors. After the first moment of panic, they called the concierge: it wasn’t yet Madame Claveau, but an old Spanish woman who’d been there ever since the early days of the building; she was called Madame Araña and really looked like her name, as she was dry, dark, and hunched. She came, dressed in an orange dressing gown with green branch motifs and a sort of cotton sock serving as a nightcap, ordered them to be quiet, and warned them not to expect to be rescued for several hours.

Left alone in the grey light of dawn, the four young folk, for they were all young then, made a list of their assets. Flora Champigny had scraps of roast hazelnut in the bottom of her handbag, and they shared them, but regretted it immediately as it increased their thirst. Valène had a lighter and Monsieur Jérôme had some cigarettes; they lit a few, but obviously they’d have preferred a drink. Raymond Albin suggested they pass the time with a game of
belote
and got a greasy pack of cards out of his pocket, but saw straightaway that the jack of clubs was missing. They decided to substitute for the lost jack a piece of card-sized paper on which they were going to draw a face both ways up, a club (
), a capital J, and even the jack’s name. “Baltard!” said Valène. “No! Ogier!” said Monsieur Jérôme. “No! Lancelot!” said Raymond Albin. They argued in whispers for a while, then agreed they really didn’t have to name the jack. Then they tried to find a piece of paper. Monsieur Jérôme proposed one of his visiting cards, but it wasn’t the right size. The best they found was the back of an envelope that Valène had got the previous evening from Bartlebooth to tell him that owing to Bastille Day he would not be able to come tomorrow for his daily watercolour lesson (he had already told him that orally a few hours earlier, at the end of his last session, but the letter no doubt demonstrated one of the characteristic traits of Bartlebooth’s behaviour, or perhaps simply provided an opportunity to use the letterhead he had just had printed on a magnificent
hazy
vellum paper, almost bronze in colour, with his monogram in modern style inscribed in a lozenge). Obviously Valène had a pencil in his pocket, and when they had managed to use Flora Champigny’s nail scissors to cut out a correct-sized piece of envelope more or less neatly, he dashed off a very presentable jack of clubs with a few strokes, which provoked his three companions into whistles of admiration for the good likeness (Raymond Albin), for the speed of execution (Monsieur Jérôme), and for the intrinsic beauty of the drawing (Flora Champigny).

But they then ran into another problem because, brilliant as it was, the substitute jack was too easy to distinguish from the other cards, which in itself was not reprehensible except in
belote
where the jack does in fact play an important role. The only solution, Monsieur Jérôme then said, was to use an otherwise ordinary card, say the seven of clubs, as the jack of clubs, and to draw a seven of clubs on another piece of envelope. “You should have said so in the first place,” grumbled Valène. And in fact there wasn’t enough envelope left. What’s more, Flora Champigny, tired no doubt from waiting to be taught to play
belote
, had gone to sleep, and her fiancé had ended up following her example. Valène and Monsieur Jérôme thought for a while of playing two-handed, but neither was very keen, and they soon gave up the idea. Thirst and hunger more than weariness gnawed at them; they began to tell each other of the best meals they’d ever had, then to swap recipes, a domain in which Monsieur Jérôme turned out to be unbeatable. He hadn’t quite finished listing the ingredients needed to make eel pâté, according to a recipe going back (he said) to the Middle Ages, before it was Valéne’s turn to drop off. Monsieur Jérôme, who must have drunk more than any of the others, and wanted to carry on having fun, tried for a few minutes to wake him. He couldn’t, and to pass the time he began to hum some of the hits of the day, then, getting into his stride, began to improvise freely on a tune which in his mind must have been the closing theme of
L’Enfant et les Sortilèges
, of which he had seen the Paris premiere a few weeks before at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées.