“That’s not going well?”
“It’s going fine – Polish television, Russian television, Brazilian television, African television. It sells books, but it’s like bleeding in the water. Though I don’t want to do it anymore, I have a young family. I wish I could retire to a cottage by the water’s edge in Antibes and put a line in the sea. All day.”
“Five million Euros would do it,” Jules said, “although you wouldn’t have a guestroom.”
“I have to keep on working, but really, television makes me sick.”
“Why not just stop television?”
“My income would decline by seventy or eighty percent. You’re lucky. Believe me. Privacy is royal.”
“I know,” Jules said. He did.
“What are you doing in your privacy, of which, truly, I’m envious.”
“There’s a difficulty.”
“What? The girl again?”
“She’s a student, my student.”
“Nothing wrong with that. I married one. If we were lake dwellers in four hundred B.C. and I was a chieftain in white furs I’d have an even younger wife.”
“Fran?ois, this is not four hundred B.C., we’re not lake dwellers, and I’m not a chieftain in white furs.”
“How can you fault yourself for being in love?”
“Because obviously I’m crazy. I lose all sense at the first appearance of a lure. I’d be a terrible fish. I fall for images, voices, and, God knows, women I meet sometimes just for a moment. Not because I’m frivolous, but because I see in them their true qualities. I penetrate too fast, right to the core – which is so often angelic. It isn’t that every woman has this, but that so many do.”
“You know that a lot of them would snarl at you and deny the entire proposition. I don’t mean to pun,” Fran?ois said.
“Perhaps the ones who would, would be moved by rage that they themselves aren’t angelic. When jealousy finally cracks, it releases insatiable anger. And people who aren’t innocent don’t believe that innocence exists. People who aren’t good don’t believe that goodness exists. Alcoholics believe that everyone drinks. Thieves think that everyone steals. Liars think that everyone lies. And those who don’t lie, believe even liars.”
“You see the beauty and goodness in women. So what else is new?”
“I didn’t say I discovered anything, but the fact remains that they’re superior to us – not by action but by existence. They don’t have to work at it, as we do, and as far as I can see, we do so mainly to be worthy of them. Anyway, what am I doing? I’m trying to re-create something that was lost, to make perfect something that was imperfect but still the best thing in my life. Nature has brought me to where I am, and will allow me peace only if I accept it. But leaving them behind is really difficult.”
“I’ll bet that as many hours as you’ve spent imagining it you haven’t even kissed her.”
“No. Nor should I. Even if at this late hour it was not foolish to love anyone else, I still couldn’t be unfaithful to Jacqueline.”
“It’s not as if she was always faithful to you.”
For Jules, it was as if a bomb had exploded nearby and knocked the wind out of him. (This had happened once, in Algeria, and he knew what it felt like.) “What?” he asked, as he recovered, observing in Fran?ois a moment of panic quickly made unobservable by his long practice in debate.
“I mean, she died, Jules. She left you.”
“That’s not what you meant, because you said always, and that doesn’t fit.”
“It is what I meant.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s not as if I haven’t known you forever, Fran?ois. I know what you meant. Why did you say that? Who told you?”
“Do you really want me to say, Jules? Because it would be better if I ….”
“Yes. You have to.”
“Do I really?”
“If you ever want to see me again.”
“Then I won’t see you again, ever, because no one told me,” Fran?ois said. “No one had to. Jules, it was a long, long time ago, and we were all so young.”
Even as he dismounted from the wall, Jules reeled. It was as if he were falling off a cliff and nothing was left of the world. After he jumped down, he couldn’t look in Fran?ois’ direction, much less at him. Instead, he turned and blindly made his way up the hill, the fountains on his right still bursting forth unpredictably.
Jacqueline’s Photograph
THOUGH OFTEN DIVERTED as the streets connected and meandered, Jules went on foot all the way west to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, dreading the moment he would arrive home, except that he knew the many hours of walking would make sleep easy when otherwise it would have been impossible. Were he not continually moving through fresh air and light he would have no escape from fear and despair, as only the walking put off his nausea and helplessness.
Months before, as if the war there were not enough, huge mudslides had made whole villages in Afghanistan disappear in a trice. It was the kind of thing, like ferry sinkings, that appears regularly in the newspapers, eliciting a second or two of abstract sympathy before the reader goes on to news of sports, business, and celebrity. Grief for one person is almost unbearable. Grief for hundreds or thousands is beyond the capacity of the emotions. So such things glance only briefly against them before they migrate to the faculty of reason.
But in May, just after the mudslides, the newspapers published a picture of an Afghan woman – her entire family, her house, her village, as the newspaper said, “lost to the earth.” God knows how many infants and grown sons and daughters had already been taken from this woman, and now she had nothing. She was pictured kneeling on endless bare ground with not a feature left where once had been the village where her life had unfurled. She was dressed in red and purple flowing around her in profusion, hiding everything but her face.
Because her skin was as cured, brown, and creased as old leather boots, it was impossible to tell if she were thirty-five or ninety. Beneath her left arm she cradled what a Westerner might have thought were bath mats. Upon closer inspection, Jules realized that they were enormous flatbreads, all that was left to her. Where would she go? How would she live? You could tell from her expression, particularly from her eyes, that she expected not to live. Jules understood only too well that this was the ever-present foundation upon which rests all that is done to remain above it.