What I now understood was that ever since my childhood, Charlotte's Atlantis had enabled me to glimpse the mysterious consonance of eternal moments. Without my knowing it, they had traced the pattern of another life, as it were; invisible, inadmissible, alongside my own. Thus a carpenter who spends his days making chair legs or planing planks does not notice that the lacework of the shavings forms a beautiful ornament on the floor, shining with resin; one day, its clear transparency catches a ray of sunlight breaking through the narrow window piled high with tools, and the next, the blue-tinged reflection of snow.
It was this life that now revealed itself to be essential. Somehow, I did not yet know how, I must let it unfold within me. Through the silent work of memory I must learn the notation of these moments. Learn to preserve their timelessness amid the routine of everyday actions, amid the numbness of banal words. Live, conscious of this timelessness…
I returned to the cemetery just before the gate closed. The evening was clear. I sat down on the threshold and began writing in my address book, long since useless:
My situation beyond the grave is ideal, not only for discovering this essential life but also for recreating it, by recording it in a style that has yet to be invented. Or rather, this style will henceforth be my way of life. I will have no other life than these moments reborn on a page…
For want of paper my manifesto was soon going to peter out. Writing was a very important action for my project. In this high-sounding credo, I declared that only works created on the brink of the grave or indeed beyond the grave would withstand the test of time. I cited the epilepsy of some; asthma and the cork-lined room for others; exile, deeper than any tomb, for yet others… The pompous tone of this profession of faith was soon to disappear. It would be replaced by the pad of rough paper that I purchased the next day with the last of my money, and on whose first page I would write very simply:
CharlotteLemonnier: Biographical Notes.
Indeed that very morning I left the family vault of the Belvals and the Castelots forever… I had woken up in the middle of the night. An impossible, crazy thought had just crossed my mind, like a tracer bullet. I had to utter it aloud to gauge its extraordinary reality: "What if Charlotte were still alive?"
Stunned, I pictured her coming out onto her little flower-covered balcony, bent over a book. For many years I had received no news from Saranza. So Charlotte could still be living much as before, as she had during my childhood. She would be over eighty now, but in my memory this age did not touch her. For me she always remained the same.
Then the dream flashed into my mind. It was probably its aura that had just woken me. To find Charlotte again, to bring her to France…
The unrealistic nature of this project, formulated by a vagrant stretched out on the stone slabs of a family tomb, was so evident that I made no effort to spell it out to myself. For the moment, I decided not to think about the details, to live, and to keep this unreasonable hope at the heart of each day. To live off this hope.
I was unable to get to sleep again that night. Wrapping myself in my coat, I went out. The warmth of the late autumn had given way to a north wind. I remained standing, watching the low clouds, which were gradually becoming infused with a gray pallor. I remembered that one day, in an unsmiling jest, Charlotte had said to me that, after all her journeys across the vastness of Russia, for her to come to France on foot would have had nothing impossible about it…
To begin with, during my long months of poverty and wanderings, my crazy dream was to seem very similar to her sad bravado. I would picture a woman dressed in black entering a little frontier town in the very early hours of a dark winter morning. The hem of her coat would be caked with mud, her big shawl drenched with the cold mist. She would push open the door of a café at the corner of a small sleeping square, would sit down near the window, beside a radiator. The patronne would bring her a cup of tea. And looking through the window at the quiet fronts of the half-timbered houses, the woman would murmur softly, "It's France… I have returned to France. After… after a whole lifetime."
15
When I left the bookshop I walked through the town and began to cross the bridge poised above the sunlit expanse of the Garonne. I recalled that old films had a time-honored trick for skipping over several years in the lives of their heroes in a few seconds. The action would be interrupted, and this legend would appear on a black background with an unashamed frankness that had always appealed to me: "Two years later," or "three years went by." But who would use this outmoded device nowadays?
And yet on entering that empty bookshop in the middle of a heat-stunned provincial town, and on finding my latest book on the shelf, I had just that impression. "Three years went by." The cemetery, the family vault of the Belvals and the Castelots. And now this book in the colorful mosaic of jackets under the sign "New French Novels"…
Toward evening I reached the forest of the Landes. I wanted to walk, for two days or perhaps more, sensing that beyond this rolling country covered in pine trees the ocean lay perpetually in wait. Two days, two nights… Thanks to the Notes, time had acquired an extraordinary density for me. Despite living in Charlotte's past, it seemed to me that I had never experienced the present so intensely! Those landscapes of days gone by threw into a singular relief this patch of sky between the clusters of pine needles; this glade lit by the setting sun like a river of amber…
In the morning, back on the road (a gashed pine trunk, which I had not noticed the previous evening, was weeping its resin – what the local people called its gemmé), I remembered, for no special reason, those shelves at the back of the bookshop, "Eastern European Literature." My first books were there, sandwiched, and at the risk of inspiring giddy megalomania in me, between those of Lermontov and Nabokov. All this was the fruit of a pure and simple literary hoax on my part. For the novels had been written directly in French and rejected by publishers. I was "some funny little Russian who thought he could write in French." In a gesture of despair I had then invented a translator and submitted the manuscript, presenting it as translated from the Russian. It had been accepted, published, and hailed for the quality of the translation. I told myself, at first bitterly, later with a smile, that my Franco-Russian curse was still upon me. But whereas in childhood I had been obliged to conceal my French graft, now it was my Russianness that failed to find favor.
That evening, settled down for the night, I reread the latest pages of my Notes. In the fragment jotted down the previous evening I had written,
A boy of two has died in the big izba facing the apartment block where Charlotte lives. I see the child's father propping up against the handrail on the front steps an oblong box draped with red cloth – a little coffin. Its doll-like dimensions terrify me. I need immediately to find a place under heaven, or on earth, where one could imagine this child still alive. The death of a human being younger than oneself calls the whole universe into question. I rush to Charlotte. She perceives my anguish and says something to me that is astonishing in its simplicity: "Do you remember how we saw a flight of migrating birds in the autumn? They flew over the courtyard, yes, and then they disappeared. That was that, but somewhere in distant lands they are still flying. It is only because our eyesight is too weak that we can't see them. It's the same with people who die…"