Although he went as much as possible to parks, high overlooks, and other beautiful places, he found beauty even in commercial quarters and industrial districts – in the spring sun shining on a wall, or in small bits of greenery clinging to nothing or having arisen from cracks in crumbling concrete. He delighted in form, warmth, and the breeze, in shades of color, and in changing light. He sometimes walked all day, stopping in a restaurant and, without looking at prices, ordering exactly what he wanted. He didn’t care if, when walking through a dangerous place, as he often did, he would be attacked or even killed – although he thought it best to stay alive until the second day of August, after the Acorn servers were purged. He slept when he wished, ate when he wished and what he wished, and did what he had always wanted to do from the time he had first learned music but had never found the courage to start: he began to write a symphony.
It came naturally, if slowly because of all the parts. He would dream the music with fidelity that exceeded that of music in the world, awaken to note the themes for all the instruments, and later in the day or evening fill them in note by note. He had always dreamed music but never written it down. Not only because he had never seemed to have had the time, but because it had always seemed too close to Beethoven – not Mozart or Bach – and he assumed that no one was interested in a symphony-length, Beethoven-like cadenza by Jules Lacour. Now it didn’t matter who was interested or not. He wrote it because it called out to be written, and he calculated that if he kept up the pace it might be finished by the end of July.
He would talk, sometimes for hours, to his mother and father, whom he hardly knew; to Luc, imagining him as a young man; to Cathérine; and to Jacqueline. He paced the huge room, gesticulating and speaking out loud especially to Jacqueline’s photograph, not quite as if she were there but rather as if he were communicating with someone on the other side of a glacial crevasse or a small river. He spoke to Cathérine in a way in which he was unable to speak with her when he was with her. He told his parents what his life had been like, and that he had never forgotten them and never would. And he spoke to élodi, apologizing for allowing himself to take her lead or having led her on – he was not sure which.
Early in May, he decided to go to the Louvre. It was not for edification, to study, or to learn, but rather to look at the paintings and marbles without intellectual exercise and let their colors and forms flow through him as if someone in charge of the museum had ordered the opening of windows and doors to allow the fresh air of spring to pour into the galleries.
Though Paris was immense, he hoped at every turn of every corner to see élodi coming down each newly opened prospect. He dreamed that he might then finally embrace and kiss her, the gift of coincidence enclosing them briefly, as if in parentheses. It hadn’t happened, and he ached to think that it would not.
A LIFETIME OF PROFESSION and practice allowed Jules to hear music without any kind of electronic device. The stores of his memory and his precision of pitch enabled him to reproduce the sound of music without physically hearing it, although the inexplicable thing was that even so, without the actual sound it did not have the same transcendent power. He had always been annoyed by speculations about Beethoven’s deafness. How could Beethoven have continued composing if he couldn’t hear? The answer was simple. He heard music despite his deafness as precisely as if he had had the ears of a newborn. It was all inside. But whether or not at that point in his life he could enjoy it was an open question.
Without benefit of the implements stuck in the ears of entire upcoming generations, Jules listened to whatever music he wished, and wherever he was it enhanced form and motion. Clouds scudding by were fine enough, perhaps even captivating, but with music they seemed to hint at the answer to all questions in their graceful obedience to the rhythm, syncopation, and counterpoint present in all things. The pulsing of electrons, flashing of stars, harmonies of orbiting planets, the apparently disjointed movements of traffic coursing through the arteries of a city, or of blood faithfully flowing throughout the body for a hundred years without cease, were set to one elemental interval of motion. All the variations were only the symphonic components weaving in and out of the main theme. Music opened up and made apprehensible everything as it ran together and pointed in one direction too distant and bright to be intelligible but perfectly comforting nonetheless.
As he walked through Paris, music deepened the sight of everything. From jets inscribing white lines across a powder blue sky, to leaves shifting only a few millimeters in bright sun, or the grace of a woman moving through a garden, never had the world seemed so beautiful and forgiving.
AT THE LOUVRE, Jules was not conventional. His approach was somewhat like experiencing a sauna in reverse. In the Finnish style, you heated yourself to almost boiling, then plunged into ice water, which clarified and calmed. But rather than hot followed by cold, Jules would spend half an hour in the statuary hall, staring at the marbles until everything dissolved into motionless white. Cleansed, as it were, he would move to the painting galleries, where form and color would rush in, the wealth and density of the imagery as overwhelming as being taken by the wild surf of a remote ocean.
Given a limit to what he could absorb, he always had to rest, which he would do in the Louvre’s bookstore. Every time he visited Cathérine and David he brought presents: books and prints for them, toys for Luc. Because Cathérine didn’t know that everything would end in August, and he had recently spent more than three thousand Euros on copper engravings and reproductions of Greek marbles, she was on the verge of having him committed.
With his arms full of books and toys, he moved toward the cash registers. Standing off to the side in a passage that led from the center aisle, was élodi. As he approached her, without taking her eyes from the book in which she was absorbed, she stepped to the side and politely excused herself, until she saw that it was he, and then it was as if she had walked into a wall. They looked at one another for a wonderfully long time.
“What’s that?” he finally asked, about the book she was holding.
She held it up: Les Ma?tres du Marbre, Carrare 1300-1600, by Christiane Klapisch-Zuber. On the cover was a picture of a quarry.
“Carerra marble is a most interesting subject, isn’t it,” Jules said, gently teasing. “The last – I would guess – thirty or forty cellists I’ve taught always had a book about marble with them during their lessons. When I’d leave the room and come back, they’d be reading it, and I’d have to clap hands to get them out of the trance.”
Never at a loss, élodi replied, “Okay, that’s me. And you? You’re buying toys?” It was an affectionate and emotional accusation.
“You’ve heard of second childhoods? This is my fourth.”
She looked at the pile in his arms. “‘Babar Goes Fishing Magnetic Catch and Release Game?’” She read further, “‘Ages three to five?’”
“Did you ever play it?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Then how would you know? It’s very calming if you play while listening to Erik Satie. It makes you feel like Daubigny painting on his boat. That was always a dream of mine, that on a boat drifting down the rivers of France I would paint what I saw on the banks.”
“Then why music?”
“It’s superior, and more discernible, in that it fully occupies you until it ends. Then it’s gone. It’s linear, it vanishes, it leaves you both sad and fulfilled. And I inherited it. It was my father’s profession and now it’s mine. Also, I draw like a two-year-old. You stopped coming.”