tonality of a murmur, the seed of a voice soaring in a perfect void, the fold of an elbow, a dimple hollowing a cheek, the texture of skin, a fine fuzz in the hollow of a lower back, the clamor of love. In New York, where he goes sometimes, it’s the subway turnstile, a gigantic sign flashing on Times Square, a rancid odor that grabs hold of him in the street, a brief jostling at the entrance to a movie theater, the strap of a burgundy bra glimpsed on the round shoulder of an elegant woman who, like him, is going to see Buñuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid, the big snail that crawls on the already-cold thigh of the little girl lying in the forest, the boots that the fetishist makes the maid wear at night.
Or else, still in Manhattan, the humming mosquito that keeps him from sleeping all night, caracoling nonchalantly through the overheated bedroom, with a perverse and exasperating grace avoiding the loud smacks dealt to the already-slick cheek and the bolsters thrown against the immaculate walls, a mosquito that in the early morning ends up flattened against a pile of blank sheets of paper, under the substantial weight of Joyce’s Ulysses, a paper tome that he uses for the first time as a fly swatter. Asterisks and perils, he thinks foolishly, both drowsy and on edge from insomnia. Then, that blank page stained only by the violet flyspeck of the flattened insect, as if the tiny cadaver constituted a mysterious footnote, the beginning of a work of fiction, that darkly stained page gnaws at him and keeps him from falling asleep: even dead, the mosquito continues to disturb him. Seized by a sudden idea, Prote envisages writing a novel entirely composed of footnotes. His fondness for the fragment encourages the idea. He gets up from his bed and sits in front of his computer. A star stamped nearly in the middle of the screen, then a few blank lines, then a series of dashes. After a page break, another star and he begins:
“I reside here below this thin black bar,” he writes before lighting a Lucky Strike. “This is my place, my den.” That’s luck for you … But haven’t I already read these words? (Twirling Nymphets)
*
* Three weeks before Easter, Abel Prote and David Grey decide to exchange their apartments for two weeks. It’s an entente cordiale, at least in appearance. After the storm, a lull rife with suspicion and ulterior motives. In Manhattan, Prote will live temporarily in the two-room apartment in SoHo where Grey normally lives: a light-filled living room with white walls, a large bedroom stripped of anything superfluous, where Grey does his translation work looking out onto a calm interior courtyard. As for David, he will reside during that time in Abel Prote’s Parisian apartment, a vast and somber residence situated on the ground floor of a former eighteenth-century mansion, in the middle of the Latin Quarter. Before leaving for New York, Prote gives him a tour of the place in order to supply Grey with all the indispensable practical instructions for his Parisian stay. Despite the blue spring sky, the lamps need to be turned on in the middle of the day. In the office and the living room-dining room, high windows with small panes look out onto a courtyard with uneven cobblestones where two large hundred-year-old chestnut trees hang over the multicolored flowers of the few flowerbeds carefully maintained by the building concierge.
In the middle of the bathrooms is a deep bathtub of enameled steel, standing on four clawed feet, each one clasping a shiny brass ball; the bulbous faucets provide a parsimonious stream that leaves traces of concentric rust at the bottom of the basin. Throughout the apartment, the paint, discolored and flaking in places, has clearly not been redone in many years. There are drab tapestries—depicting Diana’s bath, a hunting scene, the passing of a comet above a bucolic landscape where rural peasants seated on the threshold of their cottages raise their astonished eyes toward the black sky streaked with a thin pale stripe—all these images darkened with time suck even more light out of the rooms and accentuate the feeling of a permanent dusk. A great heavy armoire of dark wood, half embedded in the wall of the corridor, almost blocks the passageway entirely; its two doors don’t close properly. The apartment has belonged to the Prote family since the Second Empire. An only child, Abel inherited it after the death of his father, the publisher Maurice-Edgar Prote, killed in a plane accident at the end of the 50s, on his way back from New York, where he had gone to see publisher or writer friends and had met a few newcomers to the American literary scene. September 6, 1959, issue 4608 of the newspaper Le Figaro announced the catastrophe on the first page, next to a column consecrated to “the latest incident in the Far East”:
Not Long After Takeoff …
A SUPER CONSTELLATION FALLS AND SINKS INTO THE RIVER SHANNON
Of the fifty-six passengers and crew members, twenty-eight died, including the famous Parisian publisher M.-E. Prote.
Abel Prote intends to study the New York setting of (N.d.T.) himself and thus to contribute to what will, by mutual agreement, not be a simple English translation of his novel, but a new version, another book, written by three or four hands, shared between author and translator in a ratio that has yet to be determined. And let’s not forget the lovely little hands of the beautiful Doris, who perhaps will slide herself among this hairy bunch of male fingers to participate in their work, but also sometimes to divert their studious energy toward less austere activities.
In fact, Doris will arrive from New York at the end of the night and meet David at Prote’s apartment. Oddly enough, she will be crossing paths with Prote in the middle of the sky.
Alone in the lugubrious Parisian apartment since the owner’s departure around five in the evening (“Au revoir, bon voyage!” “Merci, bon séjour à vous”), David Grey wanders around for a moment from room to room, enters the living room, follows the obstacle course of old-fashioned furniture, sits in a deep madder red armchair with frayed armrests, and distractedly rereads a few passages of (N.d.T.). He spends two hours like this before undertaking an in-depth visit of the apartment. My author is on his plane, he thinks with sudden determination. Let’s go.
He leaves the dark and humid living room and decides to begin with the writer’s office, at the end of the hallway. It’s a large room, somber and silent, with a creaky parquet floor covered with old rugs. The two high windows are covered with heavy burgundy wall hangings. Several shelves filled with books, some faded, climb to the ceiling. David turns on the light.
A large painting, wider than it is long, soberly surrounded and illuminated by a brass wall light, is hung opposite the windows. David approaches, stops in front of it. A black vertical bar divides the canvas into two equal parts. On the left half, David notices a series of black horizontal lines on a white background, some long, some short, that run between two white margins. The right half of the painting repeats the same pattern: they appear to be pages of an open book painted on the two halves of the painting, especially because the vertical median line strongly resembles that shadow line where the left page and the right page of a book normally meet the central binding. But unlike a typical book, in which every odd page differs in its appearance and contents from the facing even page, it’s as if the painter wanted to duplicate the appearance and contents of the left page on the right. The painting depicts the same page twice, excessively enlarged. David draws even closer and notices with surprise that, seen from up close, all the words are illegible: the painter has depicted only phantoms of words. Not the words themselves, but in a way their mass, their symbol, the image of these words, if one can say that words have an image. Comparing the two halves of the painting, the translator notices that the copy on the right is not completely consistent: the small drips, the width of the margins, the length of the black lines, the spaces between the lines, and even the thickness of the blacks differ from their counterparts on the left. In fact, which half of this
