she says. ‘A toy for little rich kids that they won’t let anyone else play with.’
She is thoughtful for a moment, frowning.
‘Not his typical reading material,’ she says.
The illustrated magazines that the young boys hide under the mattress cannot escape Manuela’s shrewd gaze, and the Pallières boy seemed at one point to be consuming them assiduously, however selectively, as exemplified by one particularly dogeared page with an explicit title: The Saucy Marchionesses.
We laugh and converse for a while longer about one thing or another, in the calm space of an old friendship. These are precious moments for me, and I am filled with anguish at the thought that a day will come when Manuela will fulfil her lifelong dream of returning to her country for good, and will leave me here alone and decrepit, with no companion to transform me, twice a week, into a clandestine monarch. I also wonder fearfully what will happen when the only friend I have ever had, the only one who knows everything without ever having to ask, leaves behind her this woman whom no one knows, enshrouding her in oblivion.
We can hear steps in the entrance and then, distinctly, the cryptic sound of fingers on the lift’s call button; it is an old wood-panelled lift with a black grille and double doors, the sort of place where, in the old days, if there had been room, you would have had an attendant. I recognise the footsteps, it is Pierre Arthens, the food critic who lives on the fourth floor, an oligarch of the worst sort who, from the very way he squints whenever he stands on the threshold of my dwelling, must think that I live in a dark cave – even though what he is able to see is bound to prove the contrary.
Well, I have read his brilliant restaurant reviews.
‘I don’t understand what he’s talking about,’ said Manuela; for her a good roast is a good roast and that’s all there is to it.
There is nothing to understand. It’s a pity to see such a worthy wordsmith blindly wasting his talent. To write entire pages of dazzling prose about a tomato – for Pierre Arthens reviews food as if he were telling a story, and that alone is enough to make him a genius – without ever seeing or holding the tomato is a troubling display of virtuosity. I have often wondered, as I watch him go by with his huge arrogant nose: can someone be so gifted and yet so impervious to the presence of things? It seems one can. Some people are incapable of perceiving in the object of their contemplation the very thing that gives it its intrinsic life and breath, and they spend their entire lives conversing about mankind as if they were robots, and about things as though they have no soul and must be reduced to what can be said about them – all at the whim of their own subjective inspiration.
As if on cue, the footsteps suddenly grow louder and Arthens rings at my lodge.
I stand up, careful to drag my feet: the slippers in which they are clad are so very typical that only the coalition between a baguette and a beret could possibly contend in the domain of cliché. In doing this, I know I am exasperating the Maître, for he is a living ode to the impatience of mighty predators, and this shall contribute to the diligence with which I very slowly open the door a crack to reveal my wary nose, which I trust is red and shiny.
‘I’m expecting a courier package,’ he says, eyes squinting and nostrils pinched. ‘When it arrives, would you bring it to me immediately?’
This afternoon Monsieur Arthens is wearing a large polka-dot lavaliere that is too loose on his patrician neck and does not suit him at all: the abundance of his leonine mane and the floppiness of the silk cloth conspire to create a sort of vaporous tutu, causing the gentleman to forfeit his customary virility. Confound it, that lavaliere reminds me of something. I almost smile as it comes back to me. It’s Legrandin, and his lavaliere. In In Search of Lost Time, the work of a certain Marcel, another notorious concierge, Legrandin is a snob who is torn between two worlds, his own and the one he would like to enter: he is a most pathetic snob whose lavaliere expresses his most secret vacillations between hope and bitterness, servility and disdain. Thus, when he has no wish to greet the narrator’s parents on the square in Combray, but is nevertheless obliged to walk by them, he assigns to his scarf the task of floating in the wind, thereby signifying a melancholy mood that will exempt him from any conventional greeting.
Pierre Arthens may know his Proust, but, for all that, he has developed no particular indulgence towards concierges; he clears his throat impatiently.
To recall his question: ‘Would you bring it to me immediately?’ (The package sent by courier – rich people’s parcels do not travel by the usual postal routes.)
‘Yes,’ I reply, beating all records of concision, encouraged by his own brevity and by the absence of any ‘please’, which the use of the interrogative conditional did not, in my opinion, entirely redeem.
‘It’s very fragile,’ he adds, ‘do be careful, I beg you.’
The use of the imperative and the ‘I beg you’ does not have the good fortune to find favour with me, particularly as he believes I am incapable of such syntactical subtleties, and merely uses them out of inclination, without having the least courtesy to suppose that I might feel insulted. You know you have reached the very bottom of the social food chain when you detect in a rich person’s voice that he is merely addressing himself and that, although the words he is uttering may be, technically, destined for you, he does not even begin to imagine that you might be capable of understanding them.
‘Fragile how?’ I ask therefore, somewhat listlessly.
He sighs conspicuously and on his breath I detect a faint hint of ginger.
‘It is an incunabulum,’ he says and towards my eyes, which I try to render as glassy as possible, he directs the smug gaze of the propertied classes.
‘Well, much good may it do you,’ I retort with disgust. ‘I’ll bring it to you just as soon as the courier arrives.’
And I slam the door in his face.
The prospect that this evening Pierre Arthens will sit at his dinner table and entertain his family with a witty remark about his concierge’s indignation over the mention of an incunabulum (no doubt she imagined that this was something improper) delights me no end.
God knows which one of us looks more of a fool.
Journal of the Movement of the World No. 1
Stay centred on yourself without losing your shorts
It’s all well and good to have profound thoughts on a regular basis, but I think it’s not enough. Well, I mean: I’m going to commit suicide and set the house on fire in a few months; obviously I can’t assume I have much time at my disposal, therefore I have to do something substantial with the little I do have. And above all, I’ve set myself a little challenge: if you commit suicide, you have to be sure of what you’re doing and not burn the house down for nothing. So if there is something on the planet that is worth living for, I’d better not miss it, because once you’re dead, it’s too late for regrets, and if you die by mistake, well, that is really, really stupid.
So, obviously, I have my profound thoughts. But in my profound thoughts, I am playing at who I am – hey, no way around it, I am an intellectual (who makes fun of other intellectuals). It’s not always brilliant, but it’s very entertaining. So I thought I ought to make up for this ‘glory of the mind’ side with a second journal that would talk about the body
