“I’m not disturbing you, am I?” he asked in a flat voice. “I was in the neighborhood.”
“Oh, really?” I replied good-humoredly. In his situation, I think I’d have thought up a better excuse. But I can’t really be sure of anything. He stood up, I asked him to excuse me while I looked in my mailbox. In the past few years, looking in my mailbox has stopped making me anxious, I’m not paying alimony to Benjamin’s mother anymore. For a long time, I only had to be a few days late to find the bailiff ’s papers in the mailbox. Now I’m more scared of news you don’t expect, news about people from the old days; we knew them and loved them, or we didn’t know them well and didn’t like them much, but they catch up with us and tell us they’re dead, or sick, or alive and well and looking for traces of their past. Anyway, there was nothing in the mailbox that day.
“How are you fixed for time? Come up and have a drink.”
“I don’t want to disturb you,” he repeated, and at that point, the desire to make fun of him came over me again, we waited for the elevator.
He looked through the window, then, from the buildings in the distance, he shifted his gaze to the end of my street, which was even livelier in April. I’d put down my briefcase and taken off my jacket, he turned toward me. For a brief moment, we looked at each other without saying anything. I think my mind was elsewhere. On the way home I’d had the idea of suggesting to Benjamin that he come for dinner one of these evenings. He was very busy with his preparations for leaving, and the closer it got, the less they felt like living in Zurich. Who wanted to be twenty-seven in a place like that, in the research lab of a big chemical company? That’s why I think Jean’s visit must have felt like an intrusion. Why had he chosen me, me rather than Marc-André, who’d actually found him a job? Was it because I live alone, and he doesn’t?
“Don’t just stand there, sit down. What’s going on?”
He resumed the same vague air, as if worried by the drafty air, just like earlier on the stairs.
“I don’t know. I won’t stay long.”
I made up my mind not to let myself be irritated by his remarks. During all those years of being unemployed and on welfare, he’d always been idle, and maybe that kind of dialogue was the only kind he could bring off.
“Is it the job?”
He gave me a weary, slightly boyish smile. “Yes, they’re real oddballs, things haven’t gotten better with the years, from what I can see … Didn’t Marc-André say anything?”
His tone just a little shrill, falsely mild, no, I don’t know anything. He was the same age as us and he talked like a teenager, and not just any teenager. I handed him a beer, and he took the top off it as if he was scared that if he did it badly he might blow up the building.
“Do you want a glass?”
“No, thanks.” He stood up. “I’d like to talk to you. Tell me if you have something to do, you’re not obligated to listen to me.”
All the same, he’d chosen me, he explained why me as he went along. We talked what, two or three hours, something like that? I confess I’d forgotten a lot of things from the old days, and even from the last few years of my life, but I remembered them completely thanks to him. Sometimes his voice was hoarse, sometimes it was only a thin thread. It began at school according to him, when he’d been moved to technical high school. Do you remember? Yes, I remembered. He’d spent a year in that school at Quatre-Routes, he’d been separated from us, Marco and me and the others, that was where he’d first been affected. He was speaking slowly too. That surprised me, because to be honest I’d have expected more vehemence on his part. He’d had a bad patch that lasted several months, he’d stayed in bed in his room, his mother was the concierge of an apartment building. Yes, I remembered.
I think I can even see him in those days. I remember the big covered entrance next to the little record store on the square by the station where we used to buy 45s. I remember a woman with very white skin, and the black hair that she wore pulled back. He was fifteen, and he couldn’t get out of bed. He’d lost the will to live. But that didn’t mean he wanted to die, and although he couldn’t explain it, all his life it had affected him from time to time. He’d finished his beer. I offered him another. I told myself that we were going to spend all night like this, if only I could find a way to cut things short, then, afterwards, I stopped thinking about it. He’d recovered without knowing why, that first time. He’d been to see several doctors in Paris, his mother had made inquiries. She was intelligent and very poor. He still loved her as much as ever. The doctors talked to them about adolescence, severe depression, attacks of melancholia. He told me that, attacks of melancholia, with a slightly self-satisfied smile. Melancholia. Not without hope, it seems to me, he repeated the word several times, as if it might make him more interesting. After a while, I realized he was talking almost in the dark, and I suggested we go into the kitchen, maybe he’d like to stay and have a bite to eat? I locked myself in the bathroom for five minutes and phoned Marie to tell her I had an un-expected visitor. I’d call her back later, how late would be OK? He’d taken up his favorite position, on a stool. He kept his arms crossed. When I asked him to take a stick of butter from the refrigerator, he noticed the drawings by Benjamin that I’d kept, some of them were almost fifteen years old. There’d been a time when my son always made a drawing for me when he left on Sunday night. It seems to me these drawings protect us, him and me, even though, in a way, it’d be better if I removed them. Under magnets, I also keep urgent notes, reminders of things to do, and tickets from the dry cleaner. He smiled as he looked at them, as if he didn’t quite believe them. That’s your son, Benjamin, isn’t it? How old is he now?
He continued his life story in broad strokes, but, as always, he kept coming back to his childhood, his life with his mother, it was just the two of them. Then he told me about his first love, a girl he’d met at the skating rink in Asnières. Do you know it? Yes, I knew it. A vague smile came and died on his lips, once again, when I confirmed that yes, I knew it, I knew where it was, or I vaguely remembered some figure from Asnières or Colombes, La Garenne, all those places of ours from the old days. We’d been there together, in the old days. He hadn’t heard from this woman in three or four years. In all that time he’d had more or less nothing but welfare to live on. His mother also helped him a little, as best she could, since he had told her his situation. He’d hung around. He’d stripped wallpaper, kicked his heels outside DIY centers hoping to be hired for the day. He’d learned the geography of night shelters, municipal baths, and food banks. It wasn’t really new to him, his mother and he had always lived hand to mouth. I thought again about the ground-floor apartment he’d invited us to. The open window onto the inner courtyard. Those windows would have to be repainted almost every year. The family opposite, a couple and their two children, I remembered the little girl sitting on her tricycle, the clumsily paved-over cobblestones. He’d loved that girl. As only guys like me can, he said, and I filed his expression away in a corner of my mind to try to understand it. And what about me? I realized that he chose these high-flown phrases because he found it hard to explain things more deeply. I didn’t dare interrupt him, he didn’t stop talking while we ate.