Stefan cast his eyes around as if to seek understanding from the waiters watching for customers at the Italian restaurants.
“What’s…” he began but Jonathan hissed through clenched teeth, “You don’t like Andrea, do you?”
Stefan stared at him goggle-eyed.
“You don’t like her because she’s just like you,” continued Jonathan, speaking as if he were also listening to himself. “She eyes men in that same way and then…”
Stefan stepped up to him, slowly, as if he were an injured bird.
Two waiters stopped talking; their coal-dark eyes glowered beneath the awning.
“Why do you leave them?” Jonathan jabbed Stefan’s chest with his finger.
“Who?”
“Those birds of yours!”
Stefan gazed at him and, tilting his head to one side, said slowly, as though to a toddler, “Because I’ve got a wife.”
Jonathan shook his head.
“No, no! I mean why do you pick them up? Why do it at all? Understand?”
Stefan walked up to him, sheltering them both from the waiters’ sight.
“Sorry, old chap,” he said quietly. “But I don’t understand.”
Autumn smelled of flowers and it wasn’t clear where the scent was coming from since leaves were rustling in the trees, fumes drifting from cars and police horses, leaving odors more suited to a nineteenth-century street.
With the start of a new school year, Jonathan returned to his routine: he drove the children to school, wrote, fetched them and, when Megi came home and began preparing dinner, took his gym bag and left. Andrea already waited for him in the church. They went to her place and made love on Simon’s bed.
He couldn’t settle his thoughts for a long time after his return; they skipped in euphoria and made him want to run, hold witty discussions, learn Spanish. In order to cover his tracks, he tapped the keyboard while allowing images from an hour ago to scud before his eyes: Andrea snuggling on top of him, her slender thighs wrapped around his hips, his eyes and lips covered by his lover’s dark hair.
In October, Simon left for a whole two weeks. Jonathan wanted to make the most of the time, even though his going to the gym every day might have appeared suspicious. Andrea was the one who showed caution for them both and, as was her wont, was sparing with herself and forced him to wait for her invitation.
He was furious. Why hold on to the rhythm of their first dates? The speed at which they see each other ought to have equalled the strength of the emotions which carried him. He pressed her because she was now the only one he wanted to make love to; her body seemed semifluid and unearthly, their fucking ecstatic.
He stopped enjoying Megi. He waited for his wife to fall asleep at night and only then went to bed. He lay there, still feeling the weight of Andrea’s head on his shoulder, recalling the murmur of their whispering, the tangle of words, the moisture of their tongues, the merging of English and Polish, French and Swedish.
Once, when he’d had enough of waiting for Megi to fall asleep, he silently picked up his phone, which at night he kept beneath the bed and, hiding it behind a bottle of water, started to leave the bedroom. Suddenly, the light of a message flashed on the screen and, magnified by the plastic bottle, fell on Megi’s face.
Only after a while did he dare to look at her. She was asleep… But if she had woken up then, if she’d read what was painted on his face, illuminated by the bluish glow, he would have answered with sheepish simplicity: “I love her. I want to be with her.”
The Pavlov Dogs yapped in Jonathan’s head even as he jogged around Cinquantenaire Park; and – wonders never cease – the point at which he usually grew tired was when he passed one of Brussels’s strange statues, the statue of a dog. The subject was attracted to him like filings to a magnet – Antosia told him how her friend’s bitch had run away during a walk and come back pregnant, then Megi came across a second-hand clothes shop right next to the statue of a dog like the one in Tintin. Their daughter begged them to take in one of her friend’s puppies when they were born; his wife was fascinated by the fact that the bronze dog was peeing.
Jonathan absorbed the information and, although not everything suited his story, something filtered through; be it the nervy peeing here and there of the leader of the mongrel pack or the polygamous personality of the prettiest bitch. Something even made him call one of his chapters “Pushing to get down in the gutter.”
His students appeared after the holidays in practically the same line-up. Cecile said it was rare for people to go back to writing after the holidays, just like when learning a foreign language.
Jonathan entered the building with a certain thrill. The stone statues in little hats seemed to greet him; the man sitting in the glass-fronted kiosk marked “Information” welcomed him as one of his own. A moment later, gray-haired Geert, sun-tanned Ariane, Jean-Pierre in the immortal jacket that served him throughout all the seasons of the year, and British Kitty, now with longer hair, walked in; only the oldest participant, Nora, was missing. Jonathan asked whether they’d written anything during the holidays – they answered with smiles full of embarrassment, and Ariane pulled a thick notebook bound in cream canvas from her bag.
“My daughter gave this to me,” she said. “I’ve been writing in it for some time now.”
“What are you writing?” They leaned toward her; Ariane opened the book. The sentence on the first page looked like embroidery on a kitchen wall-hanging.
“What’s that maxim?” asked Kitty.
“It’s a sentence from The House of Spirits. I love that book!”
They leaned over the entry.
“…‘if you call things by their name, they materialize…,’” Geert translated the beginning.
“…‘and you can no longer ignore them because…”,” continued Kitty.
“‘If,’” Ariane corrected her. “‘If, however, they remain in the realm of words unuttered…”
“‘… with time they may vanish into thin air.’” Geert adjusted his glasses.
They fell silent. A tram rumbled past the window.
“That fits in with the former subject we studied.” Jonathan smiled. “To ‘The Semantics of Love.’”
“Former?” Ariane pulled herself up. “But that’s why I’m writing in this book!”
“Really?” Jonathan was pleased.
Ariane answered with a smile; Geert nodded.
“But isn’t it a stupid subject?” Jonathan let out.
Jean-Pierre stopped sprawling over two chairs and sat up straight.
“It’s broad,” he said after some thought.
Geert agreed.
“A lot falls into place because of it. I hear more, feel more.”
“Me, too.” Kitty laid her hand over her pretty bust. “After all, you did tell me to write with tenderness.”
“Buy yourself something like this.” Ariane leaned over to her, indicating her notebook. “No, wait, I’ll buy it for you!”
“But going back to that quotation,” said Geert, “I wonder… What if things that have been given a name do become real?”
“I’ve got a practical question,” said Ariane. “Does anyone know where Anaïs Nin hid her diaries?”
“In a bank safe,” replied Jean-Pierre. “Before that idea occurred to her she used to keep her secret one somewhere at home covered with an “overt” one. But later on, when she had piles of them – and some of them almost got lost during her travels – she decided to keep them in a bank safe.”
“And Henry Miller, where did he keep his?” asked Ariane.
Jean-Pierre looked at her derisively.