The Elegance of the Hedgehog (25 page)

A
ll it takes is one experience of being blind in broad daylight and able to see in pitch dark to wonder what sight is all about. Why do we see? While climbing into the taxi that Kakuro had ordered, I think about Jacinthe Rosen and Anne-Hélène Meurisse, who noticed nothing of me beyond what they could see (on Monsieur Ozu’s arm, in a world of hierarchy), and I am struck with incredible force by this proof that sight is like a hand that tries to seize flowing water. Yes, our eyes may perceive, yet they do not observe; they may believe, yet they do not question; they may receive yet they do not search: they are emptied of desire, with neither hunger nor passion.

And as the taxi glides through the early twilight, I become thoughtful.

I think of Jean Arthens, his scorched pupils illuminated with camellias.

I think of Pierre Arthens, his sharp eye, with the blindness of a beggar.

I think of these avid ladies, their greedy gaze unseeing, futile.

I think of Gégène, his sunken eyes with neither life nor force, seeing nothing beyond his own fall.

I think of Lucien, ill-suited to vision, because obscurity often, in the end, proves too strong.

I think even of Neptune, whose eyes are a doggy nose that does not lie.

And I wonder how well I myself can see.

H
ave you seen
Black Rain
?

Because if you have not seen
Black Rain
— or, in a pinch, Blade Runner — it will surely be difficult for you to understand why, when we go into the restaurant, I have the sensation that I am on the set of a Ridley Scott film. There is that scene in
Blade Runner
, in the snake woman’s bar, where Deckard calls Rachel from a mural videophone. There is also the call girls’ bar in
Black Rain
, with Kate Capshaw’s blond hair and naked back. And those shots lit as if through a stained glass window, with a brilliance of cathedrals, surrounded by all the penumbra of Hell.

“I like the light in here,” I say to Kakuro as we sit down.

They have led us to a quiet little booth, filled with a solar light circled with shimmering shadows. How can shadows shimmer? They shimmer, that’s all there is to it.

“Have you seen
Black Rain
?” asks Kakuro.

I should scarcely have believed that between two people there could exist such a congruity of tastes and thought patterns.

“Yes,” I say, “at least a dozen times.”

The atmosphere is brilliant, bubbly, racy, plush, crystalline. Magnificent.

“We are going to have an orgy of sushi,” says Kakuro, unfolding his napkin with panache. “I hope you don’t mind, I’ve already ordered; I want you to discover what I consider to be the very best Paris has to offer in the way of Japanese cuisine.”

“I don’t mind at all,” I say, my eyes open wide, because the waiters have placed before us several bottles of saké and myriad little bowls filled with clusters of tiny vegetables that have clearly been marinated in something bound to be very tasty.

And we begin. I fish for a piece of marinated cucumber, only nominally either marinated or cucumber, as it has been transformed into something that is delicious beyond description. With his auburn wooden chopsticks Kakuro delicately lifts a fragment of . . . mandarin orange? tomato? mango? and skillfully causes it to vanish. I immediately dip into the same bowl.

It is a sweet carrot for a gourmet god.

“Happy birthday, then!” I raise my cup of saké.

“Thank you, thank you very much!” We touch our cups together.

“Is this octopus?” I ask, for I have just found a crinkly little tentacle in a bowl of saffron yellow sauce.

The waiter brings two thick little wooden trays, without edges, covered with pieces of raw fish.

“Sashimi,” says Kakuro. “There is some octopus here, too.”

I am lost in contemplation of the masterpiece. The visual beauty of it is enough to take your breath away. I squeeze a little chunk of white and gray flesh between my clumsy chopsticks (that’s plaice, elucidates Kakuro obligingly) and, determined to find ecstasy, raise it to my mouth.

Why do we go in search of eternity in the ether of invisible essences? This little whitish chunk is a far more tangible morsel thereof.

“Renée,” says Kakuro, “I am very happy to be celebrating my birthday in your company, but I also have a more pressing reason to have dinner with you.”

Although we have only known each other for three weeks or so, I am becoming familiar with Kakuro’s reasons. France or England? Vermeer or Caravaggio?
War and Peace
or our beloved Anna?

I wolf down another feather-light sashimi—tuna?—of a respectable dimension which might, I concede, have preferred to be divided in two.

“I did invite you to celebrate my birthday with me, but in the meantime, someone has given me some very important information. So I have something crucial to tell you.”

The piece of tuna has been absorbing all my attention, and does not leave me prepared for what is about to follow.

“You are not your sister,” says Kakuro, looking me straight in the eyes.

L
adies.

Ladies, if on an evening you are invited by a rich and agreeable gentleman to dinner at a luxurious restaurant, be sure you behave at all moments with equal elegance. If you happen to be surprised, or annoyed, or disconcerted in any way, you must preserve the same refinement in your impassivity, and, should a turn of phrase astonish you, you must react with the distinction appropriate to such vexations. Instead, because I am a country bumpkin who gulps down sashimi as if they were spuds, I begin to hiccup spasmodically and, aghast at the prospect that the fragment of eternity might well have become lodged in my throat, I endeavor with all the distinction of a gorilla to spit it out forthwith. All around us, silence has fallen. After many eructations and a last and very melodramatic spasm, I finally succeed in dislodging the guilty morsel and, grabbing hold of my napkin, I lodge it there in extremis.

“Should I say it again?” asks Kakuro who—dash it!—seems to be enjoying himself.

“I . . . kof . . . kof . . . ”

Kof kof
is a traditional response in the fraternal prayer ritual of the Gagauz tribes.

“I . . . that is . . . kof . . . kof . . . ” My conversation is evolving brilliantly.

Then, with a show of class that clearly seeks to best all my efforts thus far:

“Whaa??”

“I’ll say it again to make myself perfectly clear,” says Kakuro, with the sort of infinite patience one exercises with children or, rather, the simple-minded. “Renée, you are not your sister.”

And as I go on sitting there like a moron, staring at him:

“I’ll repeat it one last time, in the hopes that this time you won’t choke on a piece of sushi that—I might mention—cost thirty euros apiece and normally require a bit more care in their consumption: you are not your sister, we can be friends. We can be anything we want to be.”

Toom toom toom toom toom toom toom
Look, if you had one shot, one opportunity,
To seize everything you ever wanted
One moment
Would you capture it or just let it slip?

That’s Eminem. I confess that, in my capacity as prophet of the contemporary elite, I do on occasion listen to him when I can no longer ignore the fact that Dido has perished.

But, above all, I am greatly confused.

The proof of it?

Here:

Remember me, remember me
But ah forget my fate
Thirty euros apiece
Would you capture it
Or just let it slip?

That is what is going around inside my head, and it needs no commentary. The strange way that a tune can get stuck in one’s mind will always amaze me (not to mention a certain
Confutatis
, patron saint of small-bladdered concierges), and it is merely with passing, though sincere, interest that I notice that this time it is the medley that has prevailed.

And then I burst into tears.

At the Brasserie des Amis in a dreary banlieue like Puteaux, a patron who almost chokes, barely comes out of it alive and then bursts into tears, with her face in her napkin, would be priceless entertainment. But here, in this solar temple where sashimi are sold by the piece, my excesses have the opposite effect. A wave of silent reproach has enclosed me, and here am I, sobbing, my nose running, obliged to find refuge in an already seriously encumbered napkin in order to wipe away the marks of my emotion and attempt to hide a behavior that public opinion reproves.

Which only causes me to sob all the harder.

Paloma has betrayed me.

So, impelled by my sobs, it unravels in my bosom, this life spent in the clandestinity of a solitary mind, all these reclusive readings, all these winters of illness, all that November rain on Lisette’s lovely face, all the camellias restored from hell and come to rest on the moss of the temple, all these cups of tea in the warmth of friendship, all these words spelling wonder from the lips of my school teacher, these so wabi still lifes, these everlasting essences luminous with their own singular light, and these summer rains bursting in the delight of pleasure, snowflakes dancing the Melopoeia of the heart, and then, in the jewel case of old Japan, the pure face of Paloma. I am weeping, weeping uncontrollably—thick round lustrous tears of happiness, while all around us the world is fading, leaving nothing to the senses beyond the gaze of this man in whose company I feel like somebody, and who has taken me gently by the hand and is smiling at me with all the warmth in the world.

“Thank you,” I manage to whisper.

“We can be friends,” he says. “We can be anything we want to be.”

Remember me, remember me,
And ah! envy my fate.

I
know now what you have to experience before you die: let me tell you. What you have to experience before you die is a driving rain transformed into light.

I did not sleep all night. After—and in spite of—my infinitely gracious outpourings, dinner was marvelous: smooth, full of complicity, with long, sweet silences. When Kakuro walked me back to my door, he kissed my hand for a long time, and that is how we said goodbye, without a word, with a simple, electric smile.

I did not sleep all night.

And do you know why?

Of course you do.

Of course everyone must know that along with everything else—that is, a seismic tremor suddenly turning a thawed-out life upside down—something more must be jogging through my little fifty-something schoolgirl’s head. And what if I say it out loud: “We can be anything we want to be.”

At seven o’clock I get up, as if propelled by a spring, catapulting my indignant cat to the other end of the bed. I am hungry. I am literally hungry (a colossal slice of bread staggering under the weight of butter and cherry plum jam only serves to sharpen my Gargantuan appetite) and I am figuratively hungry: I am in a state of frenzied impatience to find out what will happen. I roam through my kitchen like a wild animal in a cage, I scold my cat who pays not the slightest attention, I indulge in a second round of bread-butter-jam, pace up and down putting things away that do not need putting away, and prepare myself for a third round of bakery consumption.

And then, all of a sudden, at eight o’clock, I calm down.

For no particular reason, and in the most surprising way, a great feeling of serenity trickles over me. What is happening? A mutation. I can see no other possible explanation; some people find themselves growing gills; in my case, ’tis wisdom.

I flop into a chair and life goes on its way.

A way which, incidentally, is hardly cause for exaltation: it occurs to me that I am still a concierge, and that at nine o’clock I have to go to the rue du Bac to buy some brass cleaner. “At nine o’clock” is a whimsical addition: let’s just say “at some point during the morning.” But yesterday, as I was planning today’s chores, I thought to myself, “I’ll go at around nine.” So I take my shopping bag and my purse and head out into the wide world in quest of a substance that will cause the ornaments in rich people’s houses to shine. It is a marvelous spring day outside. From a distance I can see Gégène extricating himself from his cardboard; for his sake I am pleased there is fine weather ahead. I think briefly of how fond the old tramp was of that arrogant grand master of gastronomy, and it brings a smile to my lips: for those who are content, class struggle suddenly seems less important, I muse, surprised that my rebellious consciousness has yielded in this way.

And then it happens: Gégène staggers. I am only a dozen steps away from him: I frown, concerned. He is staggering uncontrollably, as if he were on the slippery deck of a pitching ship, and I can see his face, his lost look. What is going on? I wonder, out loud, and hurry toward the pauper. Ordinarily Gégène would not be drunk at this time of day and besides, he holds his liquor the way a cow does its meadow grass. Woe of woes, the street is almost deserted; I am the only person who has noticed the poor man teetering on his feet. He takes a few wobbly steps toward the curb, stops, and then, when I am no more than six feet away, suddenly breaks into a run as if he were being pursued by a million demons.

And this is what happens next.

What happens next—like everyone, I wish it would never happen.

I
die.

I know with a certainty that is close to divination that I am dying, that I am about to expire on the rue du Bac, on a fine spring morning, because a tramp named Gégène, suddenly overcome with Saint Vitus’s dance, wandered onto the deserted street without a care for either man or God.

But that street was not so deserted after all.

I ran after Gégène, leaving my shopping bag and purse behind me.

And then I was struck.

It was only as I was falling, after a stunned moment of utter incomprehension, before the pain crushed me, that I saw what had struck me. And now I am lying on my back, with an unrestricted view onto the side of a dry cleaner’s van. It had tried to avoid me and skidded off to the left, but too late: I bore the full brunt of its left front fender. The blue logo on the side of the little white vehicle says “Malavoin Cleaners.” If I could, I would laugh. The paths of God are all too explicit for those who pride themselves on their ability to decipher them . . . I think of Manuela, who will feel remorse until the end of her days over this death by dry cleaning—can it be anything other than a punishment for the double theft of which, through her great fault, I was guilty? Now the pain is overwhelming me; the pain in my body, radiating, sweeping through me, succeeding brilliantly in being nowhere in particular and everywhere at once, wherever my body has a nerve to feel; but also the pain in my soul, because I have thought of Manuela, whom I will leave behind, alone, and never see again, and this sends a stabbing pain straight to my heart.

They say that in the moment of your death, you see your entire life. But passing before my wide-open eyes—they can no longer make out either the van or its driver, the young woman who had handed me the plum-colored linen dress and who is now crying and wailing without a care for propriety, nor do they see the passersby who ran over after the accident and who are all talking to me non-stop with none of it making any sense—passing before my wide-open eyes that can no longer see the outside world is a procession of beloved faces, and as each one goes by, my thoughts are wrenching.

With respect to faces, the first one is a little muzzle. Yes, my first thoughts go to my cat, not that he is the most important one of all but, before the real torment and the real farewells begin, I need to be reassured regarding the fate of my four-footed companion. I smile to myself, thinking about the big fat windbag who has been my partner through these years of widowhood and solitude, and I smile sadly, tenderly, because, seen from death, our close relations with our domestic animals no longer seem to be something minor to be taken for granted, given their everyday nature; ten years of a lifetime have crystallized in Leo, and I take the measure of how the ridiculous, superfluous cats who wander through our lives with all the placidity and indifference of an imbecile are in fact the guardians of life’s good and joyful moments, and of its happy web, even beneath the canopy of misfortune. Farewell, Leo, I say to myself, saying farewell to a life I did not think I would be so reluctant to lose.

I entrust the fate of my cat to Olympe Saint-Nice, with the deep relief of knowing with the utmost certainty that she will take good care of him.

Now I can confront the others.

Manuela.

Manuela my friend.

Now that I am about to die I shall say
tu
to you at last.

Do you recall all our cups of tea in the silk of friendship? Ten years of tea and saying “
vous
” to teach other and, at the end of it, a warmth in my breast and a hopeless gratitude toward someone or something, life perhaps, for having graced me with your friendship. Do you know that it is in your company that I have had my finest thoughts? Must I die to realize this at last . . . All those hours drinking tea in the refined company of a great lady who has neither wealth nor palaces, only the bare skin in which she was born—without those hours I would have remained a mere concierge, but instead it was contagious, because the aristocracy of the heart is a contagious emotion, so you made of me a woman who could be a friend . . . How easy would it have been to transform the thirst of a poor woman like me into the pleasure of Art, to conceive a passion for blue china, for rustling foliage, for languid camellias and all the century’s eternal jewels, all these precious pearls in the endless movement of the river, if you had not, week after week, offered your heart, and made with me the sacrifice to the sacred ritual of tea?

How I miss you, already . . . This morning I understand what it means to die: when we disappear, it is the others who die for us, for here I am, lying on the cold pavement and it is not the dying I care about; it has no more meaning this morning than it did yesterday. But never again will I see those I love, and if that is what dying is about, then it really is the tragedy they say it is.

Manuela, my sister, may fate keep me from being for you what you were for me: a safeguard against unhappiness, a rampart against banality. Carry on with your life, and think of me with joy.

But in my heart the idea that I shall never see you again is infinite torture.

There you are, Lucien, on a yellowed photograph, as if on a medallion, the way I see you in memory. You are smiling, whistling. Was it like this for you too, the feeling that it was my death and not your own, the end of our gazes long before the terror of going into the darkness? What remains of a life, exactly, when those who spent it together will now have both been dead for so long? Today a strange feeling has taken hold, that I am betraying you: by dying, I am truly causing you to die. Is it not enough in this ordeal to feel that others are becoming distant—must we also put to death those who were still alive only through us? And yet you are smiling, and whistling, and I too am smiling. Lucien . . . I did love you well, after all, and for that reason, perhaps, I deserve to rest. We’ll sleep in peace in the little cemetery, in our village. You can hear the river in the distance. They fish for shad and gudgeon there. Children come to play, shrieking their heads off. In the evening, at sunset, you can hear the angelus.

And you, Kakuro, dear Kakuro, who made me believe in the possibility of a camellia . . . Only fleetingly do I think of you today; a few weeks do not provide the key. I hardly know you beyond the person you were for me: a heavenly benefactor, a miraculous balm against all the certainties of fate. How could it be otherwise? Who knows . . . I cannot help but feel my heart ache over that uncertainty. And what if? And what if you had made me laugh again and talk and cry, washing away all those years of feeling tainted by sin, restoring to Lisette her lost honor through the complicity of an improbable love? What a shame . . . You are fading into the night, and at this moment when I know I shall never see you again, I must give up all hope of ever knowing what fate’s answer might have been . . .

Is this what dying is about? Is it so pitiful? And how much time is left?

An eternity, if I still do not know.

Paloma, my child.

Now it is your turn. You are last.

Paloma, my child.

I did not have any children, because it did not happen that way. Did I suffer because of it? No. But if I had had a daughter, it is you she would have been. And with all my strength I implore that your life be worthy of all that you promise.

And then, an illumination.

A true illumination: I see your lovely face, grave and pure, the pink frames of your eyeglasses and the way you have of fiddling with the hem of your sweater, of looking me straight in the eye and stroking the cat as if he could speak. And I start to cry. To cry from the joy inside. What do these onlookers see as they bend over my broken body? I do not know.

But inside me, the sun.

How to measure a life’s worth? The important thing, said Paloma one day, is not the fact of dying, it is what you are doing in the moment of your death. What was I doing in the moment of my death, I wonder, with an answer ready in the warmth of my heart.

What was I doing?

I had met another, and was prepared to love.

After fifty-four years of emotional and psychological wilderness, hardly touched by the tenderness of someone like Lucien, who was little more than a resigned shadow of my self, after fifty-four years of clandestinity and silent victories inside the padded walls of a lonely mind, after fifty-four years of venting my futile frustrations upon a world and a caste I despised, after these fifty-four years of nothingness, where I met no one and was never with another:

Manuela, always.

But also Kakuro.

And Paloma, my kindred soul.

My camellias.

I would gladly share a last cup of tea with you.

And then a jolly cocker spaniel, his ears and tongue dangling, runs across my line of vision. How ridiculous . . . but I would still like to laugh. Farewell, Neptune. You are a ninny of a dog, but I suppose death makes us run off the rails somewhat; perhaps it is you I shall think of last. And if there is any meaning behind it, it is beyond my grasp.

Ah, no. Wait.

One last image.

How odd . . . I can’t see any more faces . . .

It will be summer soon. It’s seven o’clock. At the village church, the bells are ringing. I see my father, his back bent, his arms straining, he’s turning the June earth. The sun is setting. My father straightens, wipes his brow with the back of his sleeve, comes away home.

End of the day’s toil.

It will soon be nine o’clock.

Peacefully, I die.