Electrico W (17 page)

“It’s—it’s meant to be your husband’s surname. You’re … you’re going through a divorce.”

“What about you? What’s your name? I know you’ve already told me, but I was angry and I don’t remember it.”

“Balmer.”

“Balmer … And I’m Palmer, is that right?” she asks. “That’s completely ridiculous. And what’s your first name, you fool. Do you really think I’d call the man of my life by his surname?”

“Vincent.”

“Vin-cent Bal-mer …” she lets the syllables hang in the air, to let their perfume take hold of her. “And I’m Manuela. Manuela Freire. Your story’s totally absurd. Which is why I believe it. It’s like Catholic faith … 
Credo quia absurdum
, right?”

She stops talking, slips her sunglasses onto the top of her head, and looks at me for a long time. It’s then that I realize I dared approach her and embark on this because her face looked familiar, you could even say like a friend.
If she were seventeen with slightly longer hair, she could be the twin sister of the very young actress in
Thirty Years Without Seeing the Sea
. That first feature by an unknown filmmaker enjoyed far too little success, but the actress took it to heart. What was her name? Clémence Guatteri? Constance Guettari? It doesn’t matter.

The story is easily summarized: a teenage girl, probably running away from home, sets off from an anonymous suburb, hitchhiking her way to meet her boyfriend in northern Germany, in Lübeck, where he works as an apprentice chef in a French restaurant. Filmed in parallel is the story of a Polish hitchhiker in his thirties armed with a tourist visa—secured God knows how—who arrives on the outskirts of Paris, on the last leg of his journey to the Mediterranean which he’s dreamed about his whole life. They meet at a gas station. She’s been caught stealing biscuits by the manager, who’s about to call the police, so the man steps in and pays for them for her. He instantly falls in love with this very young girl and when she tells him she’s going to meet up with her boyfriend in Lübeck, he says he’s heading home to Gdańsk. Lübeck isn’t far out of his way, and he suggests they travel together. During those few days traveling he protects her with great tact, aware of how lost and yet determined she is, how full of confidence but ready to snap like a thread stretched too tight. And yet she is so luminous and expects so much of life that she is the one to show him the world. She talks and
he just listens, fascinated, never admitting his profound distress. He feels his love for her is forbidden, scandalous, and he suffers at the thought—or the impression—that he’s too old to deserve her. She’s drawn to him, but too inexperienced to interpret her confusing feelings. When they arrive in Lübeck and, in front of him, she calls her boyfriend to announce jubilantly that she’s there, the Pole realizes the boy wasn’t expecting her, doesn’t want her anymore. She hangs up and bursts into tears, he comforts her and she’s ready to give herself to him, in despair, in a desperate craving for tenderness too, but he loves her too much to want her at that price. He offers her a train ticket back to Paris. She accepts, they exchange an awkward kiss on the station platform, and she steps onto the train, distraught. He doesn’t have enough money left to see the Mediterranean, and hitches a ride home. He actually lived in Lublin, much farther south than Gda?sk.

Thirty Years Without Seeing the Sea
is a succession of sensitive, allusive tableaux. The filmmaker must have been fresh out of film school: the framing, camera movements, and even the film’s rhythm betray its influences, from Tarkovsky to Nicolas Roeg, but in the arts there is no sentiment more stupid than a fear of being influenced. The film ends with a very long tracking shot: the girl standing in the train corridor, her cheek resting against the window, her eyes dry and red, watching the rain. Then the camera gradually pans, and the shot is no longer lost in a
drowning landscape but begins, as the girl herself does, to see a new landscape appear. The sky is clearing, the sun’s going to come out.

I remember sitting alone in the darkened room, seeing how intense and dazzling that girl was, suddenly filled with the conviction that I had never truly lived, and I couldn’t help my tears flowing.

Manuela Freire has the same fine features and radiates the same charm. Yes, ten or fifteen years later, that runaway teenager, now grown calmer, serene even, could easily cut her dark hair and look like her sister.

I make an automatic nervous gesture, bringing my fingers up to my mouth. Manuela raps her index finger sharply on the back of my hand.

“You could at least stop biting your nails, it’s disgusting. Do you know, your friend’s completely fascinated by a hideous cherry-red butter dish? What’s her name, by the way?”

“Irene.”

“She’s not bad. Well, if you like that type. That girl’s the sort to fuel a few fires. I’m guessing she showed you a thing or two, didn’t she?”

She takes a sip of her coffee, watches me cheerfully.

“Ah, she’s moving a bit. O-kay. She’s moved a whole yard. Now she’s completely focused on a soup tureen. Does this Irene of yours like soup?”

“E—excuse me?”

“Soup. S-o-u-p. Broth, consommé, bouillon?”

“I—I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? Now, that’s a bad sign. You have to know everything a woman likes and dislikes, if you want to keep her. How old are you?” she adds, frowning.

I hesitate for a moment. “Thirty … thirty-nine.”

“Really?”

She knits her brow like an angry schoolteacher and I stammer awkwardly, “Yes, yes, I promise you, it’s true, I’ll be forty in June, next year.”

She laughs properly for the first time. She has pretty little teeth in perfect ivory.

“It’s okay, I believe you, I believe you. In fact, I’m even going to pay you a compliment, it’ll relax you: you look younger than that. I’m thirty-three.”

She reaches for her sunglasses on top of her head and brings them down to the bridge of her nose. Not seeing her eyes makes me uncomfortable, I feel more and more at her mercy.

“And, just out of curiosity, why did you choose me?”

“Well …”

“There wasn’t much choice, is that it?”

I’m fumbling for words, but she’s not waiting for an answer: “Aha, your wannabe Sherlock Holmes has now moved to the other side of the store, and because it’s on a street corner, she’s watching us through the windows.”

She catches the waiter by the sleeve, with all the familiarity of a regular, and orders a coffee.

“Would you like one too? You’re paying for the coffees. It’s just we’ve been here awhile. I’m back at work at four o’clock. And I have some shopping to do …”

“I’m—I’m so sorry. Do you work nearby?”

“Yes, right there,” she says, pointing to a large stone building which looks like a stock exchange.

“At the theater.”

I think I understand now: “So, you’re an actor?”

She laughs. “Yes, yes, an excellent actor. I play the part of the chief accountant every day. They all believe in me.”

She tenses her biceps, Hercules-style.

“Hey, I can’t see your girl anymore. She must have given up. Or maybe she’s taken up another position without my noticing. So, shall we go and do my shopping, then? After we’ve had coffee. Tell me about yourself.”

THE QUARTER OF
an hour it takes to drink a coffee is enough to sum up a life—mine, anyway.

If we don’t drown ourselves in details, it gives us a not unhappy childhood in Lyon between a fairly absent father, a manager in a bank branch, and a Portuguese mother who taught primary school; not very turbulent teenage years in Paris; history studies culminating in a master’s degree; and a small gift for writing which earns me first some freelance work for newspapers, then a job with a daily, in
the arts department and later the society section. As for love, a few relationships that never lasted, meeting Irene, her rejection which made me crazy about her. Lastly, my father’s suicide, just two months ago.

I didn’t hide anything, embellish or blacken anything either, nor did I try to submerge less glorious episodes in misplaced humor. I also related the one notable event: that lost M16 bullet in Nicaragua. A couple of inches farther to the right and writing my obituary for the paper wouldn’t have been an easy job. I found it soothing to share these confidences sincerely. I also mentioned the novel about Pescheux d’Herbinville that I kept going back to, and my translation of Jaime Montestrela’s
Contos aquosos
.

“The what? By who?” Manuela asked.

I took out the book; she slipped her sunglasses back onto her head opened the book in the middle, and didn’t land on the best of the tales.

She handed the book back, not very convinced.

“Are you really translating it?”

“Bit by bit. I like unfashionable authors, the ones who failed to produce a major famous work by which they’ll be remembered.”

Manuela smiled. She got it. Yes, I feel a sort of kinship with people who fail. Their wanderings forgive my weaknesses, and I don’t hate the fact that posterity is so unfair toward them. The wrong done them absolves me from my own inability to create, from my laziness and fickleness.

“What about your novel, what’s it about?”

“About the mathematician Évariste Galois and his murderer.”

“Is it a detective story?”

“No, Galois really did exist, he died in a stupid sort of duel between two friends, in May 1832. It’s thought his adversary was called Pescheux d’Herbinville, but there’s another name out there too. In his last letter, written the night before the duel, Galois wrote something wonderful, more about the Republic than mathematics: ‘Remember me, because fate has not given me enough life for my country to know my name.’ And it’s true, his work was found twenty years later. Even so, I’m not getting anywhere with it.”

“Finish it by 2032. Then at least you could make the most of the bicentenary.” She pulled a face, screwing up her eyes. “You’ll notice I’m giving you my most gorgeous
smile. She’s still there, your Irene. I can see her again, on the far side of the shop, through the glass. I hope I’m pretty enough to compete with her. I’m not too old for you, am I? I
am
over thirty, you know!”

“You’re—you’re very …”

“I’m teasing you, and you’re going to say something silly.”

Manuela’s blue dolphin was leaping over the sun. It intrigued me. She saw me looking at her wrist and this made her smile.

“Ah, the dolphin?”

“Yes. It’s very pretty.”

“It’s a kid’s thing. I had it done when I was sixteen, the day after someone very close to me was buried … Slit wrists. I was in a terrible state. I had it put right where the razor would go, so that, if I ever had the same idea, the dolphin would stop me. Dolphins save men. Why not women?”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It was a long time ago. I don’t think I ever really contemplated suicide. I just had my grief inscribed on my skin. An aesthetic act, in a way, almost shameless. Come on, let’s go and do the shopping, and you’re paying for the coffees.”

She stood up, took my arm, and dragged me off.

“It’s not unpleasant having someone at your mercy.”

WE WENT INTO
one of the large stores on the rua do Carmo, and Manuela led me straight to the lingerie department on the second floor. In the still prudish Portugal of the 1980s, the range was hardly exuberant, but alluring underwear has never been my specialty. It was an era of women’s liberation, and these emblems of sexual subjection were not part of the seductive palette favored by women I knew.

Manuela couldn’t have cared less. She was enjoying asking my opinion about bras and slips. She liked ochre and cream best, ignoring the blacks and purples that dominated that world. Holding a white silk corset with gray-beige lace edging, she leaned toward my ear.