“What does this mean, in turn? With your eyes open you can look at this room and perceive, down to the smallest detail you are able to resolve, everything that’s in it. Close your eyes, and you have only an approximation, notes. Now, think of all the visuals you take in within a few seconds, walking from room to room, or watching television, or flying above the city and looking down at its ten million lines, colors and angles, all of which you can remember only as a sketch, and only an instant later. Take the train from Paris to Marseille, and through the window, because you can receive the image of every blade of grass and every stone in a stream, you take in more discrete information than can be packed into a thousand – ten thousand – national libraries. Think of all you’ve seen, in full color, high resolution, and motion, in your entire life. Do you remember it? Only imprecise sketches of a very limited part of it.
“In terms of volume and processing, the mind’s chief activity is taking in visual information. Its second-most active function is getting rid of it. It’s as if there are a billion little clerks who continually sort, identify, and jettison. We cleanse, dump, and dispose of most of what we receive.”
David was intrigued. Although doing her best not to be, so was Cathérine.
“What happens when you’re as old as I am? To begin with, I’ve taken in twice as much information, useless and otherwise, as you have. By definition I’ve exercised the facility for erasing things twice as much as you have. Also, as the time left to me rapidly narrows, I reject with greater and greater vigor that which isn’t important – just as, because I can’t take them with me, I lose attachment to my possessions. I’m also clearing out the attic in here,” he said, pointing to his head.
“The facility for getting rid of what I don’t need is working at high-speed and not always flawlessly. In general, I hardly need to know about movies. How could whatever is helping me clean house have predicted that this evening it would have been useful had I remembered this one?
“I’m not embarrassed or disturbed that I’ve lost so much, anymore than a farmer would be embarrassed or disturbed that the wind has blown the chaff from the threshing floor and left only the wheat. You may not understand this until you’re much older, but to people of my age it’s given, if one will take it, that things become at once more beautiful, more intense, and more inexplicable. You learn to see with your emotions and feel with your reason. If at its end the life you’re living takes on the attributes of art, it doesn’t matter if you’ve forgotten where you put your reading glasses.”
“PLEASE,” DAVID BEGGED. “I can drive you. There’s no traffic, and I’ll be back in an hour.”
“That’s not necessary. I like to walk, and the trains are running.”
“When you change at Nanterre you might be standing in the cold for an hour.”
“It’s not that late, David. I won’t have to wait more than ten minutes, if that. And I don’t mind the cold.”
“At least let me drive you to the station. And this time of night, Jules, the trains are not necessarily safe.”
“Here? They’re perfectly safe. And I don’t have to worry about such things anymore.”
“Yes, yes, I know. Nor did you worry about such things when you were younger. I know that, too.”
“I didn’t, especially when I was a soldier.”
“You’ve never been bothered by ….”
Jules interrupted. “Only in the middle years, when my family was in tow. Then I’d worry a lot. Now that’s your job.”
The train ride was smooth and dull. Unlike the old cars that creaked because there was so much wood in them, the new ones whined. Everything inside was plastic, glass, or steel, and fluorescent light reflected coldly from the glass of windows blackened by the night. Part of the coach ceiling, slanted over the steps leading to the upper-level seats, was a color that did not exist in nature, at least not in the temperate regions: a pinkish, melon color, neither cantaloup nor orange, that was at least faintly nauseating. Every time Jules rode the RER, there it was. And every time he saw it he thought of the immensely tall African he had seen, wearing pants of exactly the same color, who had bumped his head ascending to the second level. Angry at himself, he had hit the plastic panel with one fist, swearing at it in an African language as if it were alive, before striking it with the other. Jules was in total sympathy.
He didn’t want to miss his stop, but in the hypnotic rocking of the carriage he was half asleep even though the closely set ties were concrete and the welded rails had no joints. Brilliantly colored, moving images from his past rose in rapid, random succession.
In August of 1966, on the train from Paris to Bordeaux, he had finished with the army, Jacqueline was twenty-two, the windows were open, and fragrant air rushed by. Every color outside glowed as in a medieval miniature, even the flags at military bases, whipping in the breeze. At an American base next to the rail line a thousand tanks were visible in row after row. As Jacqueline and Jules were served framboise in the dining car, they watched them in their endless ranks. A huge American flag and the Tricolor furled and unfurled above the base, both the colors of blood, snow, and the sea.
Another image, from years later, when Cathérine was a little girl and they stayed in a shack between Contaut and the sea. Always high strung, Cathérine had had trouble sleeping, but not at Contaut, where the sound of the waves allowed her to find deep rest a minute or so after she closed her eyes. The first time she returned to Paris from Contaut she thought she’d never fall asleep again, and would lie awake for hours. They took her to a doctor, who gave them sleeping pills, which they accepted out of politeness but then threw away. Instead, Jules bought forty jewelry chains with tiny, delicate links, and a box of Cuban cigars. He gave the cigars to anyone who wanted them, and put the chains into the wooden box, which, when rocked back and forth sounded remarkably like the ocean. After a few minutes, she would be fast asleep.
Perhaps because at Contaut they had left their worries in Paris, and for two weeks were relieved of making a living, paying bills, going to school, and answering mail or the telephone, parents and child made a bond as strong and yet as invisible as the forces holding fast in the atom.
Contaut then was still a naval base. Seaplanes that patrolled the Bay of Biscay made their home and found shelter on the enormous lake that stretched south, and the German fortifications on the Atlantic beaches were as intact as if squads of infantry were still inside. But they were empty, forbidding, dark, and piled with sand. The biggest one was shaped like a German helmet, with firing slits looking out at the surf, its massive concrete the color of gunmetal and pin-striped with impressions of the long-vanished wooden cement forms.
One summer they ran out onto the beach the way one does arriving at the open ocean after a long drive. Turning from a distant blue so deep it was painful, they saw that, undermined by the tide, the fortress had rolled over onto the sand. Firing-slits pressed against the ground, steel doors ajar, the interior full of seawater and echoing like a shell that holds the sound of the waves, it could no longer stand in what its builders had vainly conquered only a generation before.