The Most Beautiful Book in the World (3 page)

Whereas Wanda has not changed so much; but she has no fear that he might recognize her. Her hair is lighter now, she is hidden by her dark glasses, her voice has become much deeper, her accent is Russian, and above all, there is her fortune—she has thwarted any possibility of identification.

She goes first into the small hut, and straightaway exclaims, “How magnificent!”

She quickly outstrips the entire group: they will not have the chance to see the wretched paintings through their own eyes, they will see them through hers. She grabs hold of each canvas and finds in each a reason to be astonished, to marvel. For half an hour, taciturn Wanda Winnipeg becomes more enthusiastic, talkative, and lyrical than they have ever seen her. Lorenzo cannot believe his ears.

Most astounded of all is Cesario. Mute and gaunt, he wonders how the scene unfolding before his eyes can possibly be real; he is waiting for the cruel laughter or sarcastic remark that will confirm they are merely mocking him for their own amusement.

The rich visitors' exclamations of praise are effusive now: Wanda's admiration has proved contagious.

“It's true, it's original . . .”

“It looks clumsy but in fact it's incredibly masterful.”

“The Douanier Rousseau and van Gogh and Rodin must have made a similar impression upon their contemporaries,” asserts Wanda. “Well now, let's not waste the gentleman's time any longer: how much?”

“Pardon?”

“How much do you want for this painting? I dream of hanging it in my apartment in New York, on the wall at the foot of my bed to be exact. How much?”

“I don't know . . . a hundred?”

As soon as he says the figure, Cesario immediately regrets it: he's asking too much, he'll see his hopes dashed.

For Wanda, one hundred dollars is the tip she'll leave the hotel concierge tomorrow. For Cesario, it will be enough to pay his debts at the art supply store.

“One hundred thousand?” repeats Wanda. “That seems reasonable. I'll take it.”

Cesario has a buzzing in his ears: on the verge of apoplexy, he wonders whether he has heard correctly.

“And this one, would you sell it for the same price? It would go perfectly on the big white wall in Marbella . . . Oh, please . . .”

Mechanically, he nods.

Vainglorious Guido Farinelli, well aware of Wanda's legendary eye for a bargain, and not wanting to be outdone where expense is concerned, sets his heart on another atrocious canvas. When he tries to negotiate the price, Wanda interrupts him, “My dear Guido, I beg you, don't go skimping on the price when you're in the presence of such talent. It's so easy and vulgar to have money, whereas to have talent . . . and such talent . . .”

She turns to Cesario.

“It's destiny! A calling! A mission. It justifies every wretched thing in life.”

Calling everyone back to order, she places her checks on the table, makes arrangements for her chauffeur to come fetch the paintings that evening and leaves Cesario dumbfounded, white spittle around the edge of his lips. All his life he has dreamt of just such a moment, and now that it has happened he cannot think of a thing to say, and barely manages not to pass out. He feels like weeping, he would like to keep this beautiful woman here and tell her how hard it has been to keep going through eighty years without an ounce of attention or consideration, he would like to confess to her the hours that he has spent alone at night in tears and telling himself that perhaps he was nothing but a useless wretch after all. Thanks to her, he has been purged of his woes and doubts, he can believe at last that his courage has not been for nothing, and that his stubborn persistence has served a purpose after all.

She holds out her hand.

“Bravo, Monsieur. I am very very honored to have met you.”

 

 

 

 

 

S
he looked sullenly at the rain pounding the Landes forest.“What nasty weather!”

“You're mistaken, darling.”

“What? Just have a look outside. You'll soon see how it's pouring down!”

“Precisely.”

He moved onto the terrace, venturing into the garden only as far as the first raindrops and, nostrils flared, ears alert, head thrown back the better to feel the damp breeze on his face, sniffing the mercury sky with his eyes half-closed, he murmured, “It's a fine rainy day.”

He seemed to mean it.

That day, she became categorically certain of two things: that he annoyed her, profoundly, and, if she could, she would never leave him.

 

Hélène could not remember having ever experienced a perfect moment. When she was little, she often surprised her parents with her behavior—constantly tidying her room, changing her clothes the moment there was the slightest spot on them, braiding her hair over and over until she obtained an impeccable symmetry; she shuddered with horror when they took her to see
Swan Lake
because she alone noticed that there was a lack of rigor in the alignment of the dancers, that their tutus did not all drop down together, and that every time there was a ballerina—never the same one—who disrupted the harmony of the movement. At school, she took great care of her things, and if any clumsy oaf happened to return a book of hers dog-eared, she would burst into tears, and by the same token, in her secret consciousness, feel bereft of the frail trust she placed in humanity. As an adolescent she concluded that nature was no better than mankind when she noticed that her two breasts—which were lovely, according to general consensus—were not shaped the same, and that one of her feet obstinately required a size 8 whereas the other was an 81/2, and that her height, despite all her efforts, refused to go beyond five foot seven and one-third inches—five foot seven and a third—is that any sort of a number? As an adult, she dabbled in law studies, going to lectures above all in order to scout for a fiancé.

Not many of the young women had as many affairs as Hélène did. Those who came close to her performance collected lovers because of their sexual appetite or mental instability; with Hélène, on the other hand, it was a matter of idealism. Each new boy seemed, at last, to be the right one; in the stunned delight of their meeting and the thrill of their first times together, she managed to attribute to him the qualities she dreamt of; a few days and nights later, when the illusion had faded and he appeared to her as he actually was, she would abandon him as fiercely as she had charmed him.

Hélène suffered because she was trying to force two mutually repellent requirements to coexist: idealism and lucidity.

At the rate of one Prince Charming a week, she eventually became disgusted with herself and with men. In ten years the naïve and enthusiastic young girl had become a cynical and disenchanted thirtysomething. Fortunately, this had no repercussions on her looks, for her blonde hair continued to ensure her sparkle, her sporty liveliness made her seem cheerful, and her luminous skin retained an eminently kissable pale velvet texture.

When Antoine noticed her at an attorneys' arbitration committee, he was the one who fell in love. She allowed him to pursue an ardent courtship, because he left her totally indifferent. Thirty-five years old, neither handsome nor ugly, pleasant, his hair, eyes, and skin uniformly beige, the only thing that was extraordinary about him was his height: perched up at six foot seven, he would apologize to his classmates for his superior height with a constant smile and a slight hunch of the shoulders. Everyone agreed that his brain was better equipped than most, but no amount of intelligence could impress Hélène, who deemed that she was not lacking therein, either. He showered her with calls, witty letters, bouquets, and invitations to very original parties, and proved himself to be so amusing, so loyal and lively that Hélène, somewhat for a lack of what to do next and largely because she had not yet managed to pin a specimen as gigantic as this one in her herbarium of lovers, allowed him to believe that he had conquered her.

They slept together. The joy it gave Antoine far outweighed any pleasure Hélène may have experienced. She did nevertheless tolerate the continuation of his suit.

Their affair had already lasted several months.

To listen to him, she was the love of his life. When chatting in a restaurant, he could not help but include her in all his plans for the future: as a lawyer he was in demand all over Paris, and he wanted her to be his wife and the mother of his children. Hélène merely smiled and said nothing. Out of respect, or out of fear, he did not oblige her to reply. What were her thoughts?

In fact, she was at a loss to formulate them. To be sure, this affair was lasting longer than usual, but she avoided keeping tally or trying to draw any conclusions. She found him—how could she explain it?—“pleasant,” yes, she would not choose a stronger or more affectionate word to describe the sensation that kept her, for the time being, from breaking it off. Since she would be rejecting him anyway, why hurry?

In order to reassure herself, she had established an inventory of all Antoine's faults. Physically, he looked thin, but in reality, was not: with his clothes off, his long body revealed a little baby's tummy that, without a doubt, would prosper in the years to come. Sexually, he made things last, rather than repeating them. Intellectually, although he was brilliant, as demonstrated by his career and his degrees, he did not speak foreign languages nearly as well as she did. Morally, he showed himself to be trusting, naïve to the limits of ingenuousness . . .

However, none of these failings could justify the immediate suspension of their relationship; Hélène was touched by his imperfections. That minimal cushion of fat between his genitals and his navel provided a reassuring oasis on his long bony male body; she enjoyed laying her head there. A drawn-out moment of pleasure, followed by a deep sleep, suited her better now than an incoherent night with a stud and short naps interrupted by brief moments of pleasure. The precaution he exercised in his forays into foreign languages was in proportion to the absolute perfection with which he practiced his native tongue. As for his earnestness, she found it restful; in society, it was always the mediocrity of individuals that Hélène noticed from the very start—their narrow-mindedness, their cowardice, their envy, their insecurity, their fear; no doubt because she was also acquainted with these feelings, she recognized them keenly in others; Antoine, on the other hand, ascribed noble intentions to people—their motives must be worthy, ideal—as if he had never raised the lid on someone's mind to look in and see how it stank and swarmed.

She sidestepped any and all attempts on Antoine's part to introduce her to his parents, and so they had Saturdays and Sundays free to devote to the leisure activities of city-dwellers: cinema, theatre, restaurants, browsing in bookshops and exhibitions.

In May, the opportunity to take four days off work had incited them to go away: Antoine invited her to a villa-hotel in the Landes, set on the edge of a pine forest by white sand beaches. Hélène was accustomed to family vacations on the Mediterranean; she was looking forward to discovering the ocean and its thundering waves, and to admiring the surfers; she had even planned to go and sunbathe in the nudist dunes . . .

Alas, no sooner had they finished breakfast than the storm that had been brewing was upon them.

“It's a fine rainy day,” he said, leaning against the railing overlooking the garden.

While Hélène had the feeling she was suddenly in prison behind the bars of rain, doomed to suffer endless hours of boredom, Antoine was starting his day with an appetite equal to the one he would have had under a brilliant blue sky.

“It's a fine rainy day.”

She asked him how on earth a rainy day could be fine: he enumerated all the nuances of colors that the sky and trees and roofs would display when they went on their walk, and the savage might of the ocean, and the umbrella that would keep them close during their walk, and the joy they would feel rushing inside again for a hot cup of tea, and the languor which would ensue, and the opportunity they would have to make love several times over, and the time they would spend beneath the sheets telling each other their life stories, like children safe inside their tent away from the fury of nature . . .

She listened to him. The happiness he felt seemed abstract to her. She did not feel it. However, an abstract happiness is always better than no happiness. She decided to believe him.

That day, she tried to see things the way Antoine saw them.

When they walked through the village, she endeavored to notice the same details he did—the old stone wall, rather than the leaky drainpipe; the charm of the cobblestones rather than their unevenness; the kitsch of the shop windows, rather than their ludicrousness. She did indeed find it hard to wax ecstatic over the potter's craft—fiddling with mud in the 21st century when you could easily buy plastic salad bowls—for it reminded her of the dreadful arts and crafts classes in high school, where she was forced to manufacture old-fashioned presents that no amount of Fathers' and Mothers' Day celebrations could ever suffice to dispose of. She was astonished to learn that Antoine did not find antique stores to be melancholy; he appreciated the value of the objects, whereas for her they gave off a whiff of death.

As they were making their way along the strand, which the wind had not had time to dry between downpours, and she was sinking into sand that was as compact as cement in the process of setting, she could not help but grumble, “The ocean on a rainy day, thanks a lot!”

“But Hélène, what is it you want? The sea, or the sun? Here you have the water, the horizon, all so vast too!”

She admitted that before now she had scarcely ever looked at the sea or at the shore, that she had been quite happy just to enjoy the sun.

“That's an impoverished way of looking at things—reducing entire landscapes to the sun.”

She conceded that he was right. Not without a pinch of spite she realized, as she held his arm, that the world was a far richer place for him than for her, because he sought out opportunities to be astonished, and discovered them.

At lunchtime they found a table in an inn which, while elegant, had been designed in a rustic style.

“And it doesn't bother you?”

“What?”

“That it's not authentic—the inn, the furniture, the plates? That the whole décor was designed for customers like you, schmucks like you. High-end tourism it may be, but it's tourism all the same!”

“The place is real, its food is real, and I am really here with you.”

His sincerity was disarming. And still she insisted, “So, there's nothing you find offensive here . . .”

He gave a quick, discreet glance all around.

“I find the atmosphere pleasant, and the people are charming.”

“The people are horrible!”

“What are you saying? They're perfectly normal.”

“Well, look at the waitress, for example. She's terrifying.”

“Oh, come on, she's only twenty, she—”

“Yes. Her eyes are too close together. They're tiny and too close together.”

“So what? I hadn't noticed. Nor has she, in my opinion, because she seems fairly sure of her charm.”

“Good for her, otherwise she'd have grounds for suicide. And look at that one, the wine waiter: he's missing a tooth to one side. Did you notice that I couldn't bear to look at him when he came to take our order?”

“Look, Hélène, you're not going to refuse to communicate with someone just on the grounds that they're missing a tooth?”

“I am.”

“Oh, come on, that doesn't make him some subhuman who's unworthy of your respect. You're teasing me, there: humanity has nothing to do with perfect teeth.”

When he summed up his remarks in broad generalizations of the kind, she felt it would be awkward to insist.

“What else?” he asked.

“Well, take the guests at the next table, for example.”

“What about them?”

“They're old.”

“And that's a fault?”

“You want me to be like them! Flabby skin, a bloated tummy, droopy breasts?”

“If you'll only let me, I think I will love you when you're old.”

“Stop spouting rubbish. And what about that kid, over there?”

“What? What's the matter with her, the poor kid?”

“She looks like a right brat. And she has no neck. Actually, I suppose you should feel sorry for her . . . just look at her parents.”

“What about her parents?”

“The father's wearing a wig and the mother has a goiter!”

He burst out laughing. He didn't believe her, he thought she was picking these details at random with the aim of improvising some sort of entertaining skit. But Hélène really was disgusted by things that, as far as she was concerned, stuck out a mile.

When an eighteen-year-old waiter with flowing hair brought them their coffee, Antoine leaned over to her.

“What about him? He's a good-looking kid. I can't imagine you finding fault with him.”

“Can't you see? He has greasy skin, and blackheads on his nose. His pores are enormous—dilated!”

“I imagine all the girls in the neighborhood are after him.”

“And what's more, he's the ‘clean on the surface' type. Careful! Shaky personal grooming! He'll have athlete's foot. With his type you have to be careful on unwrapping.”

“Now there, you are absolutely making things up. I noticed he smelled of aftershave.”

“Precisely, that's a very bad sign! Truly clean boys do not drench themselves in perfume.” She nearly added, “Believe me, I know what I'm talking about,” but refrained from referring to her former life as a collector of men—after all, she did not know how much Antoine was aware of, for fortunately he had been to another university.