The President's Hat (5 page)

The winter sun shone through the net curtains, casting pools of light on Fanny's breasts. She slowly opened her eyes. The events of the previous night came back to her bit by bit, unlike dreams which drift away the moment you wake up: Édouard under the sheets, listening to her; Édouard scrambling to his feet; Édouard inspecting the initials inside the hat, then the sound of the door slamming shut and, ‘You could have saved me a wasted weekend.' Then his footsteps in the corridor.

So it was over. It wasn't a dream, it really was over. Never again would Fanny return to the hotel room in Batignolles; never again would they fix secret dates in Paris or at Norman ports; never again would she turn on the Minitel in the middle of the night looking for Alpha75. It was over. How could you disappear from someone's life just like that? Perhaps, when all was said and done, it was just as easy to leave someone's life as to enter it. A stroke of fate and a few words could be enough to start a relationship. A stroke of fate and a few words could end it too. Before it, nothingness. Afterwards, emptiness. What
was left of Édouard? Zilch. Not even a poxy present to pin her feelings on. No cigarette lighter, no key-ring, no scarf, still less a photo of the two of them together or a letter with his handwriting on. Nothing.

She lay there for a long while, the patches of sunlight warming her breasts and belly, before turning her head to the left. Still sitting on the sheet, the hat had not moved an inch. She remembered that you weren't supposed to put hats on beds, a stupid old wives' tale like the ones about ladders and black cats. Fanny didn't believe in that sort of hocus pocus. All this fuss over a hat, she mused. So who was this F.M.? If only he knew what a chain of events his felt Homburg had set in motion …

She tried to put a face to the man she had invented the previous evening, that wonderful lover who had given her a hat just like his own and had her initials put in it as a sign of his affection. No man she had ever known would do such a thing, would ever have such class, such panache. Was he tall, slender, or average build? Did he have brown, blond or grey hair?

No face came to mind. She had lied for the first time in as long as she could remember and it had worked. At no point had Édouard stood up and declared, ‘I don't believe you! You're lying.' No. The idea that Fanny might be spinning a yarn had not even crossed his mind. For that matter, it occurred to her, he had never read a single one of her stories. She was reminded of the subject of the competition: ‘A True Story'. The story of Fanny and Édouard had come to an end. And all because of a hat. That was the tale she must tell.

From the moment she had sat down at the table of the little café on Place Félix-Lobligeois, she had not put down her pen. She filled page after page of the pink notebook with her rounded handwriting, drawing little circles on top of every ‘i'. The words told the story of her split from Édouard, the misunderstanding over the hat and all the feelings she was experiencing: relief, anxiety, sadness and nostalgia. Towards the end of her account, she wrote: ‘This hat was no longer of use to me; it had served its purpose, and even though it bore my initials, I resolved to leave it somewhere in the city.'

Leave the hat behind? Fanny chewed the end of her pen. It struck her as a romantic idea. If she discarded the hat somewhere in Paris before getting her train, her story could reflect the truth right up to the end. This small act of sacrifice might even bring her luck. Filled with doubt, she looked up from her page to see a gypsy and her daughter walking towards her. Fanny smiled and turned away.

‘I don't want anything,' she said.

‘I'm a clairvoyant, I'll tell you your fortune,' said the woman, whose dark-brown hair was swept up under a red headscarf. She had a tattoo between her eyes and a line under her bottom lip.

‘No, I'd rather you didn't,' Fanny insisted, smiling once again, ‘really.' She looked down at the child, who was staring at her oddly.

‘Yes, I'm going to tell you.'

Fanny shook her head and withdrew her hands.

The woman placed her dark, papery hand on the hat but pulled it away again immediately as though the felt were boiling hot. ‘It's not yours, this hat.' Her expression had changed – she looked almost frightened. Her hand hovered above the hat. ‘This is a man's hat, he is very powerful,' she said, crossing herself.

‘Oi, you! Stop bothering the customers!' shouted a waiter with a grey goatee.

‘No, it's all right,' Fanny told him.

‘It's not all right, young lady. This is my terrace and I'm not putting up with that.'

‘Whose hat is it?' Fanny asked regardless.

‘You know him, everyone they know him.'

‘No,' replied Fanny, ‘you're wrong, I don't know him.'

‘Yes, you do.'

‘Well then, tell me his name.'

‘You give me money, give me twenty francs.'

‘No, I don't have twenty francs for that.'

‘Give me fifteen.'

‘No, I'm sorry.'

‘Will you leave the young lady alone!'

The gypsies stepped away as the waiter came over, flicking his tea towel as though trying to scare off cats.

‘They'll tell you any old rubbish and then you look down and find your wallet's gone. They pulled the same trick last week,' he grumbled.

Fanny watched the woman and her little girl disappear around the corner.
You know him
. It was ridiculous, how could you know the owner of a hat you'd found on a train? She must not let herself be put off. She had to finish her story; she had poured two and a half years of her life into it. If she could land the Prix Balbec, it would be the best possible consolation prize for an unhappy love affair.

An hour and a quarter later, Fanny was beginning to doubt anything interesting ever happened in parks. Her feet had taken her far beyond Batignolles to the gates of Parc Monceau on Boulevard de Courcelles. She had gone in, passing the usual park wildlife of children and old people. As she stood on the main path looking at the row of benches, it occurred to her to place the hat on one of them. The fourth one along was empty; she put it down there and retreated to watch discreetly from the bench opposite. No one had seen her do it; now all she had to do was wait.

But since then, nobody had stopped or even turned to look at the solitary black hat. She wasn't so sure now about her poetic gesture; after all the hat belonged to her, it even had her initials inside it, and what did it matter really if the ending of her story was true or not?

Just as she was getting up to retrieve it, a bearded man in jeans and a sheepskin jacket stopped beside the bench. He
seemed to hesitate for a moment before sitting down. He was wearing round, black-rimmed glasses and must have been about sixty. He turned to look at the hat, observing it as though it was a silent, mysterious creature. He reached for it and turned it over. Then, bizarrely, he held it up to his nose and seemed to sniff it. He smiled and glanced at his watch, then he stood up, turned back to face the hat, paused, and snatched it up again. Fanny watched him leave. He held the headwear in his hand, without putting it on. He disappeared out of the entrance to the park.

Fanny took out her fountain pen and wrote: ‘The man with the grey beard took the hat away. Who was he? I will never know.' She suddenly felt incredibly tired. Perhaps it was only just sinking in that she had really left Édouard. After a brief dizzy spell she could not bring herself to record in her story, Fanny stood up and went the same way as the man who had taken the hat.

She passed through the wrought-iron gates and stopped on the pavement. ‘He is very powerful,' the gypsy had said, crossing herself. ‘You know him, everyone they know him.' Fanny could not take her eyes off the cover of
Le Nouvel Observateur,
which had been blown up and plastered all over the newspaper kiosk. The picture showed François Mitterrand with a red scarf around his neck, a dark coat and a black felt hat on his head. He was staring into the camera with a mischievous glint in his eye, and Fanny had the distinct impression the President was looking straight at her.

Sicilian lemon, bergamot, green mandarin, tangerine, cypress, basil, juniper berry, cumin, sandalwood, white musk, ylang-ylang, patchouli, amber and vanilla. Pierre Aslan identified the scent as Eau d'Hadrien, created by Annick Goutal in 1981. But there was also another perfume on the hat, a more recent addition: bergamot, pink jasmine, sweet myrrh, vanilla, iris and tonka bean. Pierre could have recited the ingredients of the second scent forwards or backwards. It was that mythical perfume Solstice. His perfume. Invented by him, Pierre Aslan, the nose.

He could not have said why he had picked up the hat. He had long since given up trying to find reasons for his bizarre behaviour, which had previously been a source of such confusion. He sniffed the hat again: there were definitely two perfumes, Eau d'Hadrien, for men, and Solstice, for women. The felt of the hat was impregnated with Eau d'Hadrien; Solstice was only just beginning to take its place.

Pierre Aslan, who hadn't created anything for eight years now, was not in Parc Monceau by chance. For the last five years he had been seeing a psychoanalyst, Dr Fremenberg, and had formed the habit of walking in the park for quarter of an hour or so each week before his appointments. Five years of spending six hundred francs a week for very little result. In less than ten minutes it would be time for another of these silent sessions to begin. Fremenberg practically never spoke. As a committed Freudian, he practised a form of free-floating attention, a listening technique that gave the patient the impression that his analyst was thinking about something else or was actually asleep.

Now it was ten minutes into the session. Pierre lay on the green velvet Napoleon III couch, staring as usual at the African fetish in the alcove to the left of the window. The dark wooden statue was of a man with an elongated face, like Munch's
Scream
, whose abnormally small body was enhanced by an erect penis. Reflected against the wall of the alcove by the spotlight, the statue appeared larger than it was.

Fremenberg liked primitive art, especially statuettes, fetishes and canes. His consulting room had a good dozen of these wooden objects, sculpted by tribes who followed scary magic rituals dating back to the beginning of time. These trophies were displayed on modern plinths with brushed steel or black Plexiglas legs. Pierre had always found them abhorrent, displayed as they were totally out of context.

It wasn't so much the works themselves as seeing
them exhibited in the bourgeois setting of a
Haussmann-designed
apartment that rendered them hostile. They seemed to be suffering, and as a result to be emanating curses. Éric, his son, who was only interested in the top 50 and his skateboard, would have said they were ‘freaky'. And he would be right, thought Pierre, as Fremenberg cleared his throat briefly before lapsing back into silence.

In the beginning, when he had started coming to these inert sessions, Pierre had really made an effort to express his feelings. ‘You're there to talk about yourself …' his wife had said. ‘So talk, tell him what's wrong.' And Pierre had talked. He'd talked about the fragrances that hadn't worked, the scents that had resisted definition, particularly the one he called ‘angel's essence', in reference to the angel's share, those few drops of a vintage wine or brandy which evaporate through the cork, and even through the waxed cork covering. To Pierre, angel's essence was what you smelt when you sniffed a perfume, although it wasn't actually one of the ingredients. It wasn't listed anywhere. It existed without being there.

A sepulchral silence had greeted his confidences. Aslan was disappointed that for once his profession elicited no expression of interest. So he tried another tack. He talked about his marriage. He began by describing his wife, the famous pianist and Bach specialist Esther Kerwitcz, who travelled the world performing concert after concert and whose face often graced the pages of fashion magazines. Her beautiful green eyes could be seen in
Elle, Vogue, Le Figaro Madame, Vanity Fair
and even
Egoïste
, where Herb Ritts had immortalised her clasped hands as they
rested on the keys. These revelations were also received in oppressive silence.

In the following sessions he had spoken about his early childhood and how he had first become interested in scents while in his grandfather's Provençal kitchen garden. Neither the peppery smell of a rubbed tomato leaf, nor the mellow, enveloping odour of mint elicited the slightest reaction from his analyst. Even when Pierre had talked about his son Éric and how he worried about what would become of him, Fremenberg still did not react.

In three and a half months, he had not heard his analyst speak. He was greeted at the start of each session by a discreet handshake and a silent nod. No words were uttered; there was never a hello or a good evening. At the end of the session, the handing over of the 500-franc note, with its 100-franc brother, caused Fremenberg to give a severe little frown, as though the acceptance of money was a painful ritual that had to be endured.

One day, Aslan turned up unwillingly for his session and pulled a face as he stretched out on the couch. ‘I have to warn you that I slept very badly last night,' he began.

The silence of the consulting room was broken by a voice saying gravely, ‘A bad dream perhaps?'

And it seemed to Pierre as though Fremenberg spoke in the tone of a waiter offering a dessert, with that mixture of deference and authority that expects the listener to respond promptly.

Pierre described the dream that had disturbed his sleep. Carnivorous plants had climbed out of his wife's piano and rampaged through the flat until they reached the perfume
organ. Their spines and leaves had swept through the precious little bottles, knocking one of them to the floor where it smashed. But there was no odour. Pierre picked up the shards and sniffed them. Nothing. So he opened all the bottles and found they contained only water. The mutant plants began to bleed and shrivel on the floor, whereupon Pierre was seized by an irrational anguish. He had to save the plants or else the apartment would burst into flames. He had woken up just as the first flames had started licking at his study door.

As he finished describing his dream he turned to Fremenberg, who was taking notes with a Montblanc Meisterstück. His face looked completely serene, he was practically smiling. It had been a long time since Pierre had given anyone that much pleasure and it immediately made him feel more confident. ‘You see, Fremenberg is peculiar – everyone says so – but he is an excellent therapist; he's going to help you. You seem happier; it seems to me you're getting better,' Esther had said. Yes, at that moment, Pierre was feeling better.