essay (another four hundred pages), bring the manuscript back to Paris in October 1944, a few months after the Liberation, and leave it on a bus, a loss he will get over surprisingly easily, frequently telling his students that it was actually a fairly superficial piece of work, an academic’s distraction, and that at the age of fifty he felt the time had come instead to write a novel, whose action would be located in the same Auvergne where he lived for four years without seeing a thing, buried in his writing and with his nose, bristling with grey hairs, constantly to the grindstone. The other absent tenants on Claude’s floor are an elderly Alsatian couple, the Schmoegles, the husband a former officer in the Coloniale7 and since his retirement a technical adviser to a company manufacturing lead soldiers. No one knows what became of them when Paris fell and we shall hear no more of them; perhaps they died in the general exodus, hastily buried without anyone taking note of who they were. The fact that their apartment is empty will soon be passed on by the concierge to the German police, who will requisition it for one of their informers, who in turn will be denounced by the same concierge at the Liberation, be arrested and have his throat cut in a cellar, to be succeeded by an FFI colonel8 who will finally take his ease among the late Schmoegles’ belongings.
In the silence insomnia gnaws at Jean. He knows it will make his frustration worse, but he cannot stop himself from fantasising. He has to clench his teeth, get up and go out on the balcony, where the sudden numbing autumn cold freezes his temples. Quai and Pont Saint-Michel, Quai du Marché Neuf and the forecourt of Notre-Dame are deserted. Jean remembers a film by René Clair, Paris Asleep, that Joseph Outen had showed at his film club in Dieppe in the heyday of his cinema period. Alas, it is not the charmingly cocky Albert Préjean, his cap tilted over his ear, who is making the most of the sleeping city, but a German motorcyclist, fatly girdled in black leather and preceded by a brush stroke of yellow light, whose machine rips into the silence as it dashes past. What message can be urgent enough for the rider to wake up thousands of sleeping Parisians along the road to his destination? And talking of films, where has poor Joseph Outen got to? Has he been killed, taken prisoner, wounded? Did he make it back to Normandy, to a new hobbyhorse and another pipe dream? Freezing, Jean closes the window, moves across to the communicating door, and hears the parquet floor creak in Claude and Cyrille’s bedroom. The door opens, and in the doorway a figure is vaguely outlined against a black background. Claude closes the door behind her.
‘You’re not asleep,’ she murmurs in a reproachful voice.
‘Nor are you.’
He stretches his hand out towards what he guesses to be her bare arm, grasps it, and presses his thumb against the vein beating in the crook of her elbow. Her skin is warm and smooth. Claude, usually sensitive to all physical contact, does not pull her arm away.
‘That motorcyclist woke us both,’ she says.
‘I wasn’t asleep, I was on the balcony.’
‘In this weather?’
‘In this weather.’
He goes on stroking the crook of her elbow and the skin whose taste he so longs to know.
‘Why aren’t you afraid?’
‘Of you? Never.’
‘I’m an idiot.’
‘Don’t say that! I can’t bear it. And I wouldn’t love an idiot anyway.’
It is the first time she has said it. An icy shiver runs down his spine that he finds it hard to make sense of.
‘You said you love me.’
‘Of course. Could you have doubted it? Would I be here if I didn’t love you?’
‘So?’
‘So we wait … Go to sleep. Cyrille will wake up.’
At daybreak he leaves for Rue Lepic, to wash and shave. The elation he feels makes the human beings pressing into the entrances to the Métro look sadder and greyer than usual. He notices how much thinner they are already. The well-fed crowds of 1939 have given way to men and women whose clothes flap around them. Poor diet makes them more sensitive to the cold. Jean usually walks back, varying his route. It’s his only way of maintaining his physical fitness, under threat from the sedentary existence he leads. He longs to have his bicycle with him but it is out in the country, in Normandy, assuming no one stole it during the exodus. He decides to write to Antoinette.
Jesús is already up. Winter and summer, he rises at five, lights his stove with wood from a friendly joiner in Rue de l’Abreuvoir, boils the water for his coffee or something with the colour of coffee if not the taste.
‘I wouldn’ min’ meetin’ this girl!’ he says.
‘She isn’t a girl!’
‘So she’s what?’
‘A … woman … Thanks very much … So you can suggest she poses naked for you straight away, I suppose.’
They laugh at this. Before going to his easel Jesús does ten minutes of weight training in his underwear. In the mornings he works for himself, but no collages now, no borrowed technique. He had plenty of excuses; anyone coming from Jaén has a good excuse. Everything’s fascinating and new when you haven’t seen anything yet, but two or three visits to museums quickly reveal Surrealism showing its age, and now Jesús has decided not to listen to or admire anyone but himself. The result is landscapes. And for him these mean a return to Andalusia every time: scorched earth, melancholy vegetation, an oily sea, skies crushed by light. As he remembers the landscapes of his childhood, he feels such thirst for austerity and absolutism that he simplifies his colours to their extreme. From a short way away the spectator could be looking at abstract canvases and must examine them close up to grasp the pictures’ tormented life.
‘You understand, my friend. I am ’appy, ’appy … I do wha’ I wan’. And I tell you, fuck La Garenne … Fuck ’im, fuck ’im …’
In truth, Jesús is a long way from being able to send La Garenne packing, and at ten o’clock when his model arrives he bundles his canvas into a wardrobe and whips out a sketchbook. Jean leaves for the gallery. Blanche has the keys and is already there as he arrives. Through the window the sight of her scrawny figure fills him with pity, even though, despite the endless stream of insults and obscene remarks La Garenne subjects her to, she has somehow always managed to cling to something like dignity. She has a distinguished voice, which verges on affectedness in her pronunciation of certain words, as though she intended to remind whoever might get the wrong impression from her physical appearance that she remains a Rocroy. She has only just turned forty, yet it is impossible to guess how old she is. Bad luck ages people: they go grey, bags appear under their eyes, their shoulders droop, their legs become so thin they look like broomsticks. Handling Jesús’s series of drawings for La Garenne’s specialist clientele, she smiles unembarrassedly, observing how ‘saucy’ they are, which is the very least that might be said of them.
In front of the building in Rue Lepic a German car was parked. Sitting on the bonnet, a blond soldier with soft features and cap at a rakish angle lit a cigarette and smiled at a girl who hurried on her way. Jean went up. Madeleine was sitting in the studio’s only armchair. Her elegance jarred with its tattered upholstery and missing foot, replaced by three books. She looked like Lady Bountiful, come to console a poor artist. Behind her back Jesús made a frustrated gesture of apology for Jean’s benefit. Since coming to Paris Jean had avoided Madeleine,
