A Fleeting Sorrow Read online

  “So what about that round on me?” Paul repeated, leaning on the counter directly opposite the owner, who was still eyeing him suspiciously.

  It should be noted that the times when a customer would offer drinks all around had long since passed. One did not offer free drinks to one’s fellow man anymore without some compelling reason. The time of “freebies” was dead and gone. The internal revenue had seen to that: gifts could not be accepted or tolerated, and certainly not written off (a subject that had given rise to a heated conversation during a recent dinner party). Paul remembered theorizing nostalgically about how much better off turn-of-the-century gentlemen had been than we are today. They may have been taken for everything they had by the courtesans of the era, but at least they had derived some pleasure from their ruin, and it was not accompanied by the barbarity that marked the tax department’s methods of money stripping. Which reminded him: what was he going to leave his wife? Or rather: his women. The recent recession had hurt him badly, and at this point he owned only one-third of his architectural firm, which, to put it mildly, was struggling. And the Poissy project, which was so near and dear to him, where aesthetics and ethics had finally come together in a single, major work, this project of which he had so rightly been proud and for which he had fought for two years, now seemed, he was amazed to discover, empty and unimportant. In the space of one brief hour he had distanced himself from a project that had long been the focal point of his professional life, a project that, only yesterday, had excited him and fired his imagination. But what, he thought, could withstand the knowledge that death lay just around the corner? Not only what, but who? A great love, perhaps? . . . Which left him out: he had no great love in his life. And never would.

  The owner, meanwhile, had played his role and poured drinks for everyone in the cafe. Glasses were raised to Paul, and he could see, behind the raised glasses, inquiring looks, as if the customers wanted to know what it was they were celebrating. And once again a wave of shame washed over Paul, a feeling of embarrassment that he was not like everybody else, that he had become a man without a future, a man without any plans or projects, a man henceforth stripped of all desire. How many fellow creatures had he passed unknowingly in the night, people who, like himself, had been deprived of all their inner resources, and at the same time felt ashamed? No, it was safe to say that there was nothing romantic about not having a future. The charm of living, of life itself, was built on the notion of time with a capital T, time in the Proustian sense of the term. Proust! Now there was another rub: he had vowed to read, or reread, all of Proust before he died. Now he would not have the time, assuming of course he still had the desire. As if he could still desire anything . . . Unless he could bring himself to tell someone the awful truth; share the bread of sorrow with those who cared about him the way he had always shared with them the bread of plenty. And there were legions with whom he had shared his bounties. Then he thought of those he had neglected, dropped, forgotten. He had been loved for his good health, his high spirits, his equilibrium, his zest for life, his curiosity, his forgiving nature. What would be left of all those qualities three months from now? Nothing.

  He looked at the clock above the bar: one o’clock. He had arrived at the hamster’s at eleven. And he had been there for about an hour. Only an hour. Or: what an endless hour? You could look at it either way, and apply either criterion to the longest, the most serious, the most insignificant, hours of the rest of his life. He motioned to the owner in the direction of his store of white wine, and at the same time he took a banknote from his pocket and slapped it on the counter.

  “Another round. One more round for everybody,” cried the owner and the waiter in unison, who now realized that they had a live one here, an authentic big-time spender in their midst. Once again glasses were raised to Paul, and toasts offered: “Thanks.” “To your good health.” “Appreciate it.” “Another glass of white wine over here.” “Here’s looking.” The fact was, Paul was not only good-looking, there was something engaging and easygoing about him. Plus a certain rugged quality that made men, as well as women, like him instinctively. (Women tended to detect something troubled beneath the outwardly peaceful surface, however.) But for the moment he was the anonymous newcomer at the Zinc du Port, as his new haven was called.

  “And what are we drinking to?” inquired Paul’s neighbor, who had had the foresight to empty his glass before asking, to avoid having to toast a nutcase or a cuckold, if it turned out Paul was either. Or worse. This way — having downed his wine — his honor was intact.

  “Let’s say . . . to your good health,” Paul responded. “To mine. To the good health of everyone. To life!”

  “Here, here!” chorused the barflies and regulars. “Here, here!” And with the ice now broken, several clients felt it their obligation to thank this unknown patron of the bottle and offer a round in turn. The owner, grateful to this generous stranger for having single-handedly doubled his afternoon business, began looking at him with greater and greater affection as one bottle after another was emptied.

  The café was a clean, well-lighted place, and when all was said and done this wonderfully pleasant white wine, which little by little was replacing the blood in Paul’s veins, was pretty treacherous. It had become impossible for any gentleman worthy of the name to refuse a proffered glass of wine; and if some customers did not feel obliged to pay a whole round, they nonetheless felt it their bounden duty to offer a glass to the “newcomer.”

  It was one-thirty, two o’clock. They had all apparently forgotten the sacred ritual of lunch. Paul’s fellow barflies were turning out to be really nice guys, aside from one obsessive type who couldn’t stop telling him — for the third time, as Paul recalled — about the top five winners among his wife’s many lovers, a story that of course fell apart in the end. Then there was another guy who claimed he worked for the secret police and knew every sordid detail of political malfeasance in the corridors of power, which he went on about at great length without offering any specifics. And he would inevitably finish with: “Not a word, okay? Just between the two of us. Word of honor, right? From my lips to God’s ear . . . Believe me: my lips are sealed!” and he would punctuate his bellowed secrets by bringing his forefinger and his glass — which seemed at this point to be working at cross-purposes — simultaneously, and ever more frantically, to his mouth.

  Without trying to keep up with the guzzlers, Paul was downing one glass after the other and chain-smoking as well. And the more alcohol he absorbed into his system — he was an appreciative social drinker, but not an alcoholic by any means — the more he went about setting his life in order. An hour before he had been an unwelcome stranger in this cafe, into which he had walked at random, and now he felt increasingly that he was a welcome guest (albeit a guest all the more appreciated in that he was paying for most of the rounds). He was the friend, the neighbor, the equal of all these guys, who also were beginning to think of him as their friend, their neighbor, their equal. Sickness and death retreated before him, offering a thousand excuses as they departed: true, he was going to die, but the more he thought about it the more he reminded himself that it was the hamster’s word against his. True, he perhaps had only six months to live, but he was determined to live them like a real prince. He’d go head to head with these germs or microbes or whatever they were; he had, thank God, both the character and courage to face them without flinching. He would die, but death implied moving to another life, going to another planet, for something within him — his soul perhaps? — was immortal. Not in the grandiose, or even Catholic, sense of the term, but in the positive, upbeat, living acceptation.

  His red blood was probably too red, even if it was, as Helen claimed, from a long line of blue bloods — Helen had recently and secretly become enamored of the aristocracy. His blood, which, now that he thought of it, had probably turned into the French flag — blue, white, and red — with the addition of all this white wine . . . where was he? ah, yes, this blood woul
d stand him in good stead for a good long time. How about all those cases he had heard about, incomprehensible and little understood — especially by the doctors and specialists, to be sure — where people had been given only a short time to live and had defied all the predictions by living for another twenty or thirty years? Why shouldn’t he be in that category? It was just as crazy to think that he would die as it was to believe he’d survive, when all was said and done. Or else he would go to Lourdes and pray for a miracle, yes, he’d go with Helen on one arm and Sonia on the other — which would be a miracle in itself — and both the women would pray for his recovery at the same time they were praying for their rival to be struck down on the spot. He pictured their three silhouettes in front of the grotto, which in his mind’s eye looked more like the grotto of Louis II of Bavaria than the grotto at Lourdes, but that was because he had seen the Visconti film and had never been to Lourdes. Paul burst out laughing at the thought, but the laugh was ill-timed because it came just as the man next to him was describing what had gone wrong between his wife and her third lover, and the man was so vexed he got up and stalked away. The man from the secret police took advantage of the situation to slip onto the empty barstool next to Paul.

  “Tell me, pal, what exactly are we celebrating? I mean, no kidding. I won’t tell a soul, I promise, you can count on my utter, I mean utter, discretion. My lips are sealed! But I would like to know. Must be something special. Your mother-in-law just die?” And he roared with laughter at his own joke.

  “No, can’t say she has,” Paul said. “At least not yet. But that’s not a bad idea. Not a bad idea at all,” he went on, for the fact was Paul detested his mother-in-law.

  It made such good sense! He hated his mother-in-law, and he cheated on his wife with a younger mistress: he was truly the prototype of the mediocre Frenchman. The only difference between him and his peers was that he was destined to die earlier than most; and besides, what made it different was that he was aware of it. So on with the celebration! Celebrate without saying what or why you’re celebrating.

  That’s the way it was. It was absurd, but nobody should be under the mistaken impression that he was going to spend his last months trying to figure out “why.” Like most of his friends and acquaintances, he spent his life — and had done so since he had been old enough to earn his own living — answering questions that began with “what.” The “whys” and “wherefores” would have to remain the province of adolescents and philosophers. There was nothing to indicate they should become the province of the dying — or, more accurately, the future dead. For Paul felt more alive than he had ever felt, thanks no doubt to the white wine he had drunk, to the alcohol that had in this century been the object of so many unjust attacks; alcohol, which was the friend of man, the panacea of his soul, his body’s faithful accomplice. How could one not recognize its countless virtues? The immediate, therapeutic effect; the powerful, positive, efficient results it produced? How could one denigrate alcohol-the-benevolent, the wondrous gift of the gods that had the rare ability to lift life’s burdens from one’s weary shoulders, to gladden the heart of the poor and downtrodden, render dullness poetic, give courage to the meek and the timid? Not to mention its ability to introduce immoderation into the world of general mediocrity. How can we not fail to give thanks to this admirable crutch, which has the capacity to bring comfort to whatever in the human spirit is lame or crippled? Why don’t we spend more time and effort examining the relationship between alcohol and intelligence, the origin of and profound affinity between the two? Now Paul was able to think about his foreshortened life, and the importance of his death, with resignation, lucidity, and equanimity, as peacefully at this moment as an hour earlier it had horrified and panicked him. Now Paul could contemplate calmly the possibility that he could take care of the problem himself, in six months or in two days if he wanted to, since he had at his disposal his trusty hunting rifle. Two hours before, that idea had struck him as terrifying, melodramatic, impossible; now the solution seemed to him both relevant and convenient. He had entered this bar a lamb; he was leaving it, thanks to the wine, a lion.

  He had every intention of coming back to the Zinc du Port, and if he returned on a Sunday he would surely be invited to lunch, together with a few other privileged regulars, to share the specialty of the house, cooked up by the owner’s wife: stuffed cabbage. The cafe owner really liked him, Paul could tell, and it wasn’t just superficial. So did the other customers. And he swore by all that was holy that he would indeed come back. If in six months he hadn’t managed to find a free Sunday to join these fine people for lunch, then he simply wasn’t worthy of living any longer. And that was a fact.

  IV

  THE SUN HAD FINALLY WON the battle of the weather, its enemy, the lowering clouds, having beaten a hasty retreat across the sky, and Paul was about to congratulate the sun on its victory when he thought, No, congratulations were not in order; it was the wind that had done it. In the weather war, what a difference between the bright sun, which one took for granted, and the rain, which displayed its black squadrons, paraded its scudding clouds, to mark its victories.

  Lunchtime was over, and he couldn’t remember whether he had made an appointment with someone or other. If so, he had stood the person up. He drove aimlessly up and down the streets, then pulled up and stopped in front of the Left Bank Air Terminal, the Invalides. The Alexander III bridge, its freshly gilded ornamentation sparkling in the slanting autumn sun, lay directly ahead of him. It was on a day like this — in fact at this very spot — that he had met Mathilde — that is, met love, for she had loved him as deeply as he had loved her. But for her, love had lasted only a year.

  Mathilde, whom he had forbidden himself to think about for so many years now. Mathilde . . . Was he going to die without having seen her again? Probably just one more of those inconceivable, incomprehensible things of life. After all, the notion of dying without having seen Mathilde again was no more absurd than the idea of living without her had been at a certain point in his life. . . . One thing he was sure of in any case was that during the brief time he had left he had to turn his back on the past. He could in no wise wallow in what his life had been up till now, for the simple reason that it was someone else’s life. Another man, a man who had never even thought about death, much less assigned a specific date to the dread event. He must learn to live without a past — for that past would be inexact, untrue — as he had to learn to live without a future, since he had none. He must learn to live in the present. Easier said than done! And yet, irony of ironies, how often had he boasted in his other life — his life before today — that he lived only in and for the present. And how often had others reproached him for that carpe diem attitude. For him, it fitted what he considered his epicurean character, his lust for life, his tendency to do his own thing come what may — all of which gave comfort to his pride and pleasure. But on the threshold of what lay ahead of him, there was no longer any word or theory that could justify pleasure for pleasure’s sake. The terms “sensuality,” “paganism,” “present,” “pleasure,” and “happiness” made as little sense as did “masochism,” “perversion,” “heroism,” “narcissism” — dry, meaningless words used to explain or justify the various and often contradictory behavior that constituted any person’s life, changes that could just as easily stem from overeating at lunch as they could result from unrequited love. There was nothing, absolutely nothing he was sure of any longer. Yes: he was certain of having been miserable or happy; he was sure of having done his best to control his feelings in one way or another. He was sure of having been ambitious when he was twenty, of having dreamed of building palaces and stately structures — dreams that very quickly had to be modified, scaled down to solidly constructed houses, in which the bathrooms didn’t fall apart the first time there was a flood and the roof didn’t leak the first time it was hit by a strong wind. That was the basic task of any architect worthy of the name, wasn’t it? No easy task, either, especially
if you were a government employee or had to answer to the state.

  The more he thought, the more confused he became. He only wished he could have talked to a real friend, someone like Michael, who had known him for years. Michael, who had been his closest friend in college, then at engineering school, with its classrooms blue with cigarette smoke; and later, during the years they studied architecture together. Michael, whom he had known since they both were teenagers, Michael with whom he had shared girls and the wonders of Paris for four years — or was it five? — shared in the way you do when you’re twenty: the world is your oyster, and life is a song — dramatic, immoderate, comical. They had spent whole nights roaming the length and breadth of Paris together, reciting poetry at the top of their lungs — Apollinaire, Eluard, Rene Char, Baudelaire — to any and all who would hear, or to no one but the wind. Along the quais of the Seine, in crowded nightclubs, standing on park benches. They had wandered and they had rambled, and — sometimes mournfully, sometimes cynically — they had made love with girls who found their antics “adorable.” Michael would not have failed him, would not have pretended that he didn’t understand or couldn’t really believe what Paul was telling him. And Michael would certainly not have kept him waiting while he took phone call after phone call, would not have thought his ridiculous little business affairs were more important than Paul.