And Christine, Consuelo, Sonali, Marie-France, Ingrid … The references were ever more brief, ever more disinterested. You became preoccupied with your work and with talking a lot about your friends there, about their national idiosyncrasies, their dealings with you, with meetings and salaries and trips and even retirement benefits. You didn’t want to tell me that that place, like all places, in the end creates its own quiet conventions and that you were falling into the pattern of an international official. Until a postcard arrived with a view of Montreux and your cramped writing telling about a meal in a fabulous restaurant, and lamenting my absence, signed with two signatures, your scrawl, and an illegible — but carefully copied below — Claire.
Oh yes. You were gauging this one carefully. You didn’t present her like the others. First it was a new job you were going to be recommended for. Then that it was involved with the next meeting of the council. Then, after that, how you enjoyed working with your new friends but that you missed the old ones. Then, that the most difficult thing was getting used to the document officials who didn’t know your work habits. Finally, that you had had the luck to work with a “compatible” official, and in the next letter: her name is Claire. And three months before, you had sent me the postcard from Montreux. Claire, Claire, Claire.
I answered: “Mon ami Pierrot.” So you weren’t going to be honest with me any more. How long has it been Claire? I wanted to know everything, I demanded to know everything. Juan Luis, hadn’t we been best friends before we were brother and sister? You didn’t write for two months. Then came an envelope with a snapshot inside. The two of you with the tall jet of a fountain behind you, and the lake in summertime; you and she leaning against the railing. Your arm around her waist. She, so cute, her arm resting on a flower-filled stone urn. But it wasn’t a good snapshot. It was difficult to decide about Claire’s face. Slim and smiling, yes, a kind of Marina Vlady, slimmer but with the same smooth long blond hair. Low heels. A sleeveless sweater. Cut low.
You admitted it without explaining anything. First the letters relating facts. She lived in a pension on the rue Emile Jung. Her father was an engineer, a widower, and he worked in Neuchâtel. You and Claire were going swimming together at the beach. You had tea at La Clémence. You saw old French films in a theater on the rue Mollard. Saturdays you had dinner at the Plat d’Argent and each of you paid his own check. During the week, you ate in the cafeteria of the Palace of Nations. Sometimes you took the tram and went to France. Facts and names, names, names, like a guidebook: Quai des Berges, Gran’ Rue, Cave à Bob, Gare de Cornavin, Auberge de la Mère Royaume, Champelle, Boulevard des Bastions.
Later conversations. Claire’s preference for certain films, certain books, concerts, and more names, that river of nouns in your letters (Drôle de Drame and Les Enfants du Paradis, Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Radiguet, Schumann and Brahms), and then Claire says, Claire thinks, Claire feels. Carné’s characters live their freedom as if it were a shameful conspiracy. Fitzgerald invented the modes, the gestures, and the disillusion that continue to nourish us. The German Requiem celebrates all profane deaths. Yes, I replied. Orozco has died, and there is an enormous retrospective in the Bellas Artes. And so on, round and round, all of it written out, as I had asked you.
“Every time I listen to you, I say to myself that it’s as if we realized that we need to consecrate everything that up till now has been condemned, Juan Luis; to turn things inside out. Who mutilated us, my love? There’s so little time to recover everything that has been stolen from us. No, I’m not suggesting anything, you know. Let’s not make plans. I believe as Radiguet does that the unconscious maneuvers of a pure soul are even more singular than all the possible combinations of vice.”
What could I answer? Nothing new here, Juan Luis. Papa and Mama are very sad that you won’t be here with us for their silver wedding anniversary. Papa has been promoted to vice president of the insurance company and he says that’s his best anniversary present. Mama, poor thing, invents some new illness every day. The first television station is broadcasting. I’m studying for finals for my junior year. I dream a little about everything that’s happening to you; I pretend to myself I get it out of books. Yesterday I was telling Federico everything you’re doing and seeing and reading and hearing, and we think perhaps if we pass our exams we could come visit you. Aren’t you planning to come back someday? You could during your next vacation, couldn’t you?
You wrote that fall was different now you were with Claire. On Sundays you often went for walks, holding hands, in silence; the scent of decaying hyacinths still lingered in the parks, but now it was the odor of burning leaves that pursued you during those long walks that reminded you of ours years ago on the beach, because neither you nor Claire dared break the silence, no matter what came to your minds, no matter what the enigma of overlapping seasons with their juxtaposition of jasmine and dead leaves suggested to you. In the end, silence. Claire, Claire — you wrote me — you have understood everything. I have what I always had. Now I can possess it. I’ve found you again, Claire.
I said again in my next letter that Federico and I were studying together for an exam and that we were going to Acapulco for the last days of the year. But I crossed that out before I sent you the letter. In yours you never asked who Federico was — and if you could ask me today, I wouldn’t know how to answer. When vacation came, I said I would not accept his calls any more; I wouldn’t see him at school any more. I went alone, with my parents, to Acapulco. I didn’t tell you anything about that. I didn’t write for several months, but your letters continued to arrive. That winter, Claire came to live with you in the room on Bourg-de-Four. Why think about the letters that came after that? They’re here in my purse. “Claire, everything is new. We had never been together at dawn. Before, those hours meant nothing; they were a dead part of the day, and now I wouldn’t exchange them for anything. We’ve always been so close, during our long walks, at the theater, in restaurants, at the beach, making up adventures, but we always lived in separate rooms. Do you know what I used to do, alone, thinking about you? Now I don’t waste those hours. I spend the whole night close to you, my arms around your waist, your shoulder pressed to my chest, waiting for you to wake. You know that, and you turn toward me and smile with your eyes closed, Claire, as I turn back the sheet, I forget the places you have warmed through the night and I ask myself if this isn’t what we always wanted, from the beginning, when we played and walked in silence, holding hands. We had to sleep beneath the same roof, in our own house, isn’t that true? Why don’t you write me, Claudia? I love you, Juan Luis.”