I tried to get back to my subject, my mission: to convince her to come to Chile and write a report on the situation there. We had to show the world that the resistance was real; that, for example, Red Ax was in full operation. We had to increase international solidarity. That could be very meaningful for us. She agreed, but quickly went back to talking about Europe. “You know,” she said, “the Pope being Polish helps. Even though he’s a tireless reactionary when he pontificates about sex. What can you do?” she exclaimed, “Voilà l’homme providential,” that’s a providential man for you.
I turned on the light and went up the four flights of stairs. When I got there, the light went out. I started knocking blindly at doors. Suddenly, one opened up behind me, and I saw Pauline smiling in a stream of warm light. Now, at night, the silk blouse was raw and natural, dense, with a tasteful cut. A golden ring hung around her neck. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and her breasts made their weight and presence known. Her jeans were black and her high-heeled shoes showed her long toes with their rounded nails. I felt small. My green T-shirt. . I felt ugly, boring and provincial next to that sophisticated woman and her apartment in the rue de Bourgogne. What the hell was I doing there? I heard voices, peals of laughter. I left my umbrella dripping in the porcelain umbrella stand, smoothed my hair, and went in. The smell of pipe smoke.
After a quick introduction, I sat down on a big Chesterfield sofa with somewhat worn-out springs, next to Dorel, a Romanian sculptor who was smoking a pipe. Its smell was inviting. His wife, Clarisse, was enthralled as she listened to Giuseppe. Whatever he was telling her must have been very entertaining. His accent was Italian. “My fiancé,” Pauline told me. “Giuseppe is a documentarian,” she said. Dorel lived in Paris and considered himself an exile, though no one had forced him to leave Romania.
“It was a necessity of the soul,” he explained, blowing smoke toward the ceiling. “The truth is,” he told me, “an artist can’t breathe there.” I myself was feeling a certain agitation that, against my will, turned into a sigh. Not for anything in the world did I want Dorel to think I was bored. Giuseppe’s gaze had me perplexed; that’s what was troubling me. I didn’t notice anything else.
Dorel got up to change the music. He wanted to hear Brassens, “because there hasn’t been anything better than him in France in decades,” he said in a challenging tone. No one rose to the bait. Pauline had gone to the kitchen. I hid my eyes in the depths of the Bordeaux wine in my glass. I thought I felt her fiancé’s eyes on me: Giuseppe. I looked up and sought him out: he was laughing with Clarisse, who rested one bare foot on top of the other. The room we were in had high ceilings and the lighting was low and intimate. The Chesterfield sofa with beat-up leather went well with the brand-new Wassily chairs that reminded me of herons. Behind me a white beech shelf full of pocket edition paperbacks went up to the ceiling.
Brassens: Le singe, en sortant de sa cage / Dit: “C’est aujourd’hui que je le perds!” / Il parlait de son pucelage, / Vous avez deviné, j’espère! / Gare au goril. . le!1 Giuseppe was looking at me with a half smile. Brassens: Bah! soupirait la centenaire, / Qu’on puisse encore me désirer, / Ce serait extraordinaire, / Et, pour tout dire, inespéré! / Le juge pensait, impassible: / “Qu’on me prenn’ pour une guenon, / C’est complètement impossible. .” / La suite lui prouva que non! / Gare au gorille!2
I couldn’t help but laugh, and I covered my mouth with my hand. Giuseppe pointed at me. We all moved to the greenish provincial-style dining table that was at one end of the room. Brassens in another song, sung in a grave and ironic voice: Mourir pour des idées, l’idée est excellente. .3 Giuseppe, across from me, refills my glass without asking. He doesn’t look at me. I observe his black velvet jacket, his abundant white hair falling over his ears, his forehead that wrinkles as he concentrates on my glass, the fine lines radiating from his eyes, his small mouth with full lips that rest one on top of the other, the protruding nose, audacious, thin, lively — a nose that differentiated itself from the apes billions of years ago. I return to the slight, elegant curvature of that nose that divides into two halves, the same as his chin. I’m twenty-four years old, I think to myself. He must be forty-three. He’s an old man, I think. Brassens: Mourrons pour des idées, d’accord, mais de mort lente. .4
Pauline, in one of her comings and goings from the kitchen, invited me to talk about Chile. The soupe à l’oignon burned my tongue. I don’t remember what I said. I do remember that Giuseppe proposed an idea to me: I should invite Lech Walesa, the Polish labor leader, to speak in Chile about Solidarity. Everyone loved the idea, including me. But I loved even more Giuseppe’s Italian-accented French and, more than anything, the fact that he’d had the idea for me. Pauline assured me that the European press would all follow behind Walesa, and that of course she wouldn’t miss it. Would the dictatorship let him into the country? Everyone talked at once and I didn’t understand anything. In the hubbub I could only distinguish the donc’s, bon’s, quant meme’s, and voilà’s. Giuseppe let more Bordeaux fall into my glass. His gray eyes flitted around and came to rest on mine like a bird on a branch. The branch trembled, but held him.
Dorel clears away the plates but doesn’t stop talking. He’s telling us about Broken Kilometer by Walter de Maria. He’d seen it before in photos, of course, but to have those rows of bronze rods lined up in front of you is another matter. “The purity,” he says, “of that folded distance.” Afterward he went with Walter, he told us, to a Chinese bar that you had to pass through a sushi restaurant to get to. “Trés New York, tu sais.”
Giuseppe disappears to make coffee. “Brassens is boring!” shouts Clarisse.
“Dorel loves this junk left over from the fifties!” laughs Giuseppe from the other room. Clarisse puts on Paco de Lucía. She starts to dance flamenco. She’s not bad, to tell the truth. You can tell she’s taken classes, but it’s not just that. She has grace. She pulls Giuseppe up by the hand. Giuseppe resists, and finally feints a dance to that soleá, his feet hint at a tapping, it’s just a glimpse and the flame is lit, the stance of his torso, the attitude of his arms and face are exact, the passion and intensity are there, but he practically doesn’t move, it’s just the possibility, the insinuation of a dance. He breaks off, laughing hard, and goes back to serving coffee.
“Giuseppe,” I tell him, “you’ve danced an imaginary dance for us.”
“Did you like it?” he asks me, his mouth full of laughter. The scent of his woody cologne reaches me. He’s just returned from making a documentary in South Africa. “There’s a protest in the streets,” he tells me, “the police come with enclosures that they put up quickly to cage the protestors right there, as if they were animals.” We’re talking now, as we eat a practically liquid Camembert on thin slices of apple. Giuseppe prepares them and hands them to me. Impossible for anything to pair better with the Bordeaux cabernet. No one interrupts us now. He talks to me about Kruger Park, about a lion couple he saw making love like lions, he tells me how he saw gay lions, pour tout dire inattendu, and yes, he tells me laughing, anche tra i leoni ci stanno i culatoni, even among lions there are fags, and he tells me about a program he’s seen on TV, about a she-lion who lives among the rocks with her mate and two cubs. Another male comes along. They fight. The female comes to her mate’s defense. The recently arrived one kills the other male and defeats the female. At some point, she gives in to him. Then he attacks the cubs — the mother gets up and defends them, but in the end she gives up again. The winning lion kills the other’s babies and stays with the mother. She accepts it. He says with perplexed eyes, the eyes of a child: “A drama from Sophocles, n’est-ce pas? Excuse me, I’ll be right back,” he says. “I’m going to the bathroom to have. . a lovely piss.” We laugh.