Honeymoon (2 page)

"Remember us to the crew in Brazil," Cavanaugh said.

He was referring to the film crew who had already left, and were waiting for me on the other side of the Ocean at the Hotel Souza in Rio de Janeiro. Well, they'd have to wait a long time for me … After forty-eight hours they would begin to feel vaguely worried. They'd phone Paris. Annette would answer, Cavanaugh would pick up the earpiece. Disappeared, yes, I'd disappeared. Like Colonel Fawcett. But with this difference: I had vanished at the very start of the expedition, which would worry them even more, because they would discover that my seat in the Rio plane hadn't been occupied.

I told them I'd rather they didn't see me into the departure lounge, and I turned round towards their little group with the thought that I would never see them again in my whole life. Wetzel and Cavanaugh still looked very dashing, no doubt because of our profession which wasn't really a profession, but simply a way of pursuing childhood dreams. How much longer would we go on being old young people? They waved goodbye to me. I was moved by Annette. She and I were exactly the same age, and she'd become one of those slightly faded Danish beauties who used to attract me when I was twenty. They were older than I was at that time, and I was grateful for their tender protection.

I waited until they left the building and then made my way towards the boarding gate for the Milan plane. I could have gone straight back to Paris on the sly. But I felt I had to put a distance between them and me first.

•

For a moment, in that transit lounge, I was tempted to leave the airport and follow the same itinerary through the streets of Milan as in the past. But that was pointless. She had come to die here by chance. It was in Paris that I had to pick up her traces.

During the return journey I let myself drift into a state of euphoria such as I hadn't experienced since my first trip to the Pacific Islands when I was twenty-five. There had been many other journeys after that one. Was it the example of Stanley, or Savorgnan de Brazza, of Alain Gerbault, whose exploits I had read of in my childhood? Above all, it was the need to escape. I felt it in me, more violently than ever. There, in the plane taking me back to Paris, I had the impression of having escaped further even than if I had flown, as I should have, to Rio.

•

I know a lot of hotels in suburban Paris, and I had decided to switch regularly. The first in which I took a room was the Dodds Hotel, at the Porte Dorée. There I ran no risk of bumping into Annette. After I had left, Cavanaugh had certainly taken her to his flat in the Avenue Duquesne. Perhaps
she hadn't heard of my disappearance right away, because no one – not even Wetzel – knew that she was Cavanaugh's mistress, and the phone must have rung in vain at our place, in the Cité Véron. And then, after a few days of their honeymoon, she would finally have gone back to the Cité Véron where a telegram – I suppose – would be waiting for her: "Rio crew very worried. Jean not on plane
18
th. Phone Hotel Souza Rio urgently." And Cavanaugh would have gone to join her at the Cité Véron, to share her distress.

Personally, I don't feel the slightest bit distressed. But elated, highly elated. And I refuse to allow all this to be overdramatized: I'm too old, now. As soon as I run out of cash I shall try to come to an understanding with Annette. A phone call to the Cité Véron wouldn't be wise, because of Cavanaugh's presence. But I shall easily find a way to make a secret date with Annette. And I shall ensure her silence. Up to her, from then on, to discourage anyone who might want to go and look for me. She's clever enough to cover my tracks, and to cover them so successfully that it will be as if I had never existed.

•

It's a fine day today, at the Porte Dorée. But the heat isn't as oppressive and the streets are not as empty as in Milan that day eighteen years ago. Over there, on the other side of the Boulevard Soult and the square with the fountains, groups of tourists are crowding round the entrance to the zoo, and others are going up the steps to the former Colonial Museum. It has played a part in our lives, that museum, which Cavanaugh, Wetzel and I used to visit as children, and the zoo too. There we dreamed of far-off countries, and of expeditions from which there was no return.

And here I am, back at my point of departure. I too, in a few minutes, will buy a ticket to visit the zoo. A few weeks from now there'll probably be a short article in some paper or other announcing the disappearance of Jean B. Annette will follow my instructions and get them to believe that I vanished into thin air during my last trip to Brazil. Time will pass, and I shall appear after Fawcett and Mauffrais in the list of lost explorers. No one will ever guess that I landed up on the outskirts of Paris, and that that was the aim of my journey.

Obituary writers imagine that they can summon up the whole course of a life. But they know nothing. Eighteen years ago, lying on my couchette, I read the paragraph in the
Corriere della Sera
. My heart missed a beat: the woman who had taken her life, as the barman had put it, was somebody I had known. The train stayed in the station in Milan for a long time, and I was so shattered that I wondered whether I oughtn't to leave the carriage and go back to the hotel, as if I still had a chance to see her again.

The
Corriere della Sera
had got her age wrong. She was forty-five. They called her by her maiden name, though she was still married to Rigaud. But who was to know that, apart from Rigaud, me, and a bureaucrat or two? Could they really be blamed for such a mistake, and after all wasn't it more reasonable to give her maiden name, the one she had gone by for the first twenty years of her life?

The hotel barman had said that someone was going to come "to sort out all the problems". Was that Rigaud? As the train began to move, I imagined myself face to face with a Rigaud who would no longer have been the same man that he was six years before, given the circumstances. Would he have recognized me? In the six years since they had crossed my path, Ingrid and he, I hadn't seen him again.

But I had seen Ingrid once in Paris. Without Rigaud.

A silent, moonlit suburb was going slowly by outside the window. I was alone in the compartment. I had only switched on the night-light above my couchette. I would only have had to arrive in Milan three days earlier, and I could have met her in the hotel lobby. I had thought the same thing, that afternoon, in the taxi taking me to the Piazza del Duomo, but I hadn't known then that it was Ingrid.

What would we have talked about? And what if she had pretended not to recognize me? Pretended? But she must already have been feeling so far away from everything that she wouldn't even have noticed me. Or if she had, she would have exchanged a few strictly conventional words with me before leaving me for ever.

•

You can no longer climb the big rock in the zoo, the one they call the Chamois' Rock, by the steps inside it. It's in danger of collapsing, and is enveloped in a kind of net. The cement is cracked in places, revealing the rusty iron rods in the armature. But I was glad to see the giraffes and elephants again. Saturday. A lot of tourists were taking photos. And families who hadn't gone on holiday yet, or who wouldn't be going, were coming into the Vincennes Zoo as if it were a summer resort.

At the moment I'm sitting on a bench facing Lake Daumesnil. Later, I shall go back to the Dodds Hotel, which is very near, in one of those blocks flanking the former Colonial Museum. From my bedroom window I shall look out at the square and the play of the fountains. Could I have imagined, at the time I met Ingrid and Rigaud, that I'd land up here, at the Porte Dorée, after more than twenty years of journeys in far-off countries?

When I got back from Milan that summer, I wanted to find out more about Ingrid's suicide. The phone number she'd given me when I had seen her alone in Paris, for the first and last time, didn't answer. And in any case, she'd told me that she no longer lived with Rigaud. I found another number, the one Rigaud had scribbled down when they had taken me to the station in Saint-Raphaël, six years before.
KLÉBER 83–85
.

A woman's voice told me "we haven't seen Monsieur Rigaud for a long time." Could I write to him? "If you like, Monsieur. I can't promise he'll get it." So I asked her for the address of
KLÉBER 83–85
.
It was an apartment block in the Rue Spontini. Write to him? But words of condolence didn't seem to me to be right either for Ingrid or for him.

I began to travel. The memory of them faded. I had only met them in passing, her and Rigaud, and we had had only a superficial relationship. It was three years after Ingrid's suicide, one summer night, in Paris where I was on my own – in transit, more precisely: I was just back from Oceania and I was to leave for Rio de Janeiro a few days later – that I once again felt the urge to phone
KLÉBER 83–85
.
I remember that I went into a big hotel in the Rue de Rivoli to make the call. Before giving the operator the number I paced up and down the lobby preparing what I was going to say to Rigaud. I was afraid of becoming speechless with stage fright. But on that occasion, no one answered.

And the years followed one another, and the journeys, and the documentaries screened at the Salle Pleyel and elsewhere, without my mind being particularly occupied by Ingrid and Rigaud. The evening when I had tried one last time to phone Rigaud was a summer evening like this one: the same heat, and a sense of strangeness and solitude, but so diluted in comparison with the feeling I now have … It was no more than the impression of time standing still that a traveller has between two planes. Cavanaugh and Wetzel were to join me a few days later and we were all three going to leave for Rio. Life was still humming with movement and glorious projects.

•

Just now, before I went back to the hotel, I was surprised to see that the façade of the former Colonial Museum and the fountains in the square were illuminated. Two tourist coaches were parked at the start of the Boulevard Soult. Did the zoo stay open at night just before the fourteenth of July? What on earth could bring tourists to this district at nine in the evening?

I wondered whether Annette would be entertaining all our friends next week, as we did every year on the fourteenth of July, on our big terrace in the Cité Véron. I was almost sure she would: she would need people round her, because of my disappearance. And Cavanaugh would certainly encourage her not to give up this custom.

I walked along the Boulevard Soult. The apartment blocks were silhouetted against the light. Occasionally there was a big patch of sunlight on one of their façades. I noticed some too, from time to time, on the pavements. These contrasts of light and shade in the setting sun, this heat and this deserted boulevard … Casablanca. Yes, I was walking down one of those broad avenues in Casablanca. Night fell. The din of the televisions reached me through the open windows. Once again, it was Paris. I went into a phone box and looked in the book for the name: Rigaud. A whole column of Rigauds with their Christian names. But I couldn't remember his.

And yet I felt certain that Rigaud was still alive, somewhere in one of these suburban districts. How many men and women who you imagine are dead or have disappeared live in these apartment blocks that mark the outskirts of Paris … I had already spotted two or three, at the Porte Dorée, with a reflection of their past on their face. They could tell you a long story, but they will remain silent to the end, and they are completely indifferent to the fact that the world has forgotten them.

•

In my room at the Dodds Hotel, I was thinking that all summers are alike. The June rains, the dog days, the evenings of the fourteenth of July when we entertained our friends, Annette and I, on the terrace in the Cité Véron … But the summer when I met Ingrid and Rigaud was truly of another kind. There had still been lightness in the air.

When was the turning point in my life, after which summers suddenly seemed to me to be different from the ones I had known up to then? It would be difficult to decide. No precise frontier. The summer of Ingrid's suicide in Milan? I hadn't thought it any different from all the others. It's only now, remembering the deserted, sunbaked streets and the stifling heat in the yellow taxi, that I experience in retrospect the same malaise as I do today in Paris in July.

For a long time – and this particular time with greater force than usual – summer has been a season that gives me a sense of emptiness and absence, and takes me back to the past. Is it the too-harsh light, the silence of the streets, those contrasts of the shade and the setting sun, the other evening, on the façades of the buildings in the Boulevard Soult? The past and the present merge in my mind through a phenomenon of superimposition. That's where the malaise must come from. It's a malaise that I don't only feel in a state of solitude, as today, but at all our fourteenth of July parties, on the terrace in the Cité Véron. I can still hear Wetzel or Cavanaugh saying to me: "What is it, Jean, is something the matter? You ought to have a glass of champagne …" or Annette would press herself against me, stroke my lips with her finger, and whisper in my ear with her Danish accent: "What are you thinking about, Jean not? Tell me you still love me?" And I can hear bursts of laughter around us, the murmur of conversation, music.

•

That summer the malaise didn't exist, nor did this strange superimposition of the past on the present. I was twenty. I was returning from Vienna by train, and I'd got off at Saint-Raphaël. Nine in the morning. I wanted to get a bus to Saint-Tropez. Searching one of my jacket pockets, I discovered that all my remaining money had been stolen: three hundred francs. I immediately decided not to ask myself any questions about my future. It was a fine morning, and the heat was as oppressive as it is today, but in those days that didn't bother me.