He would later realise that the wide-awake Richard Rivière inside him had tried to sound the alarm. Wasn’t this man clearly nervous, though a skilled enough actor to give himself away only by a sudden sweat in the chilly air of this autumn morning?
He would also realise, later, that he had refused to understand out of sadness and weariness, perhaps even that he had understood but wouldn’t accept it, because sadness had suddenly got the better of him.
He looked past the man’s shoulders at the mountain, still covered with snow, and the bright, frozen sky beyond.
Nine years he’d been living in Annecy, and he’d never got used to the mountains. They left him cold, wary, vaguely hostile, because he enjoyed none of the pleasures they seemed to offer, and he found them unfriendly, stupid and portentous in the way they loomed over the city.
He had never wanted to learn how to ski, he did not like the atmosphere of the resorts, the pointlessness of such arduous exertions.
Sometimes he woke with a start in the night, shivering as if shaken by a huge icy hand, and then he got up, went to the window, and found the mountain looking at him in the dull grey darkness.
The idea that it would always be there, when he got up and when he lay down and long after he was dead, immovably there and watching, discouraged him.
He lay down again with the disagreeable feeling that he wasn’t his own master, that at any moment the mountain could blow a cold breath down his neck.
It could feel his dislike, and it scorned him, that was what he was thinking, and he had no-one to tell of it.
“I’d like to be paid by bank transfer,” he heard himself announcing, his voice almost hostile.
“Of course,” the man answered warmly.
Richard Rivière took a contract from his briefcase and handed it to the man, who sat down behind the wheel of the car to look over it.
He stayed outside, shivering, suddenly unable to rejoice at having so effortlessly made a sale that would bring him a tidy profit. What would he do now, what desire would enliven the days to come?
For the past several months, ever since he took out a loan to buy that four-wheel drive for resale, each new day dawned with that question, which he’d managed to turn into something exciting and even ennobling: Would this be the day that he sold the car?
Much of the pleasure he felt on waking each morning, much of the good cheer he displayed both at home and at work came from the idea of earning five thousand euros for doing virtually nothing. And now it was done, and he felt only a weary gloom, and now he dreaded the prospect of an existence stripped of that motivation.
And what, for that matter, would he do with the money? Nothing tempted him that he didn’t already own, and what did he actually have? Nothing much, compared to what his colleagues or wife thought important.
Sometimes he thought he spent money only to justify his urge to make money, and he alone knew his enthusiasm was feigned, that his interest in clothes, and now even in cars, was an act, borrowed from a personality he scarcely remembered as his own, now alien to him, and unpleasant, too. Visits to the city’s most lavish restaurants, multicourse menus, pricy wines he could not appreciate, every delight he felt obliged to indulge in left him bored or withdrawn.
Nothing in this world, he thought, quite met his desires, but what those desires were he couldn’t say.
That reticence before everything that should have made him happy, everything he seemed to want from his work, from his cogitations and calculations, dated back to the year after he’d left Langon. Oh, he saw it now, even if he had denied it at first. He saw it.
He was sick, in a way, but his illness had no name, and wasn’t easily described, even to himself. Was it nostalgia?
It was not what he once knew, what once was, that he missed; what he missed was what should have been, or could have been, had he only known how to go about it.
Because he missed not Clarisse Rivière but the woman Clarisse Rivière should or could have been, a woman he didn’t know, a woman he couldn’t so much as imagine, and that, he thought, was nobody’s fault but his own.
Through the windscreen he saw the man sign his name at the bottom of the contract, where he himself had already signed. That was that.
The buyer got out of the car, displaying a broad expanse of raspberry socks and, just above them, two slender shins, orange-tanned and hairless like his face and his soft hands, every fingernail highlighted by a white pencil line under the tip.
There was something comical about such fastidious grooming, Richard Rivière thought to himself, and yet once again he felt inadequate before that younger, taller, fitter, better-looking man, he felt horribly heavy and worn and provincial.
At such times he always feared a resurgence of the faint south-western accent he’d struggled to disguise even when he lived in that part of France, as a precaution, on the theory that losing it couldn’t possibly hurt and might one day prove useful, and because it made him secretly proud not to speak like his parents. But his accent had not gone away, he knew, he’d only tamed it, and emotion could always bring it back. He had particular difficulty saying cette rather than c’te, and so at work never referred to a car as cette voiture, sticking to the far less risky ce véhicule.
“You can pick it up as soon as the money’s in my account,” he said, casually kicking one foot towards the four-wheel drive.
“You’ll have it the day after tomorrow,” the man said.
He blew on his forelock, flashing a practised, perfect smile. How charming and slim he was in the blue mountain light! A master skier, obviously, able to cut pure, complex lines in the snow, like his signature’s long, self-assured strokes.
Richard Rivière had planned to offer him a cup of coffee in the apartment if the deal went through, but now he didn’t feel up to it. Suppose Trevor appeared in his old pyjama bottoms, hangovers from his teenage years, and possibly bare-chested, his hair unkempt, suppose he spoke to the customer with that irritating way of giving a caustic turn to the most ordinary words, having already judged you too dull-witted to notice the sarcasm, or his contempt for you
— between his exasperating stepson, whose every supercilious little manoeuvre he knew all too well, and this man who to his deep shame intimidated him, Richard Rivière had lost all confidence in his ability to stifle his accent.
What cruel joy Trevor had felt, one evening when they were celebrating his mother’s birthday and Richard had drunk a full bottle of champagne, on hearing his stepfather wisecracking with a Toulouse accent! Weeks afterwards, Trevor was still forever shouting Merci bieng! and erupting into a mirthless laugh, hard and triumphant, as if he’d finally put his finger on the most contemptible thing about Richard Rivière.
The man drove off in the strange, battered little car he’d come out in — not his, he’d immediately made clear, but on loan from the garage while his own was being serviced.
Wasn’t it odd, Richard Rivière mused, that a man so obsessed with his appearance should go putt-putting around in such a ridiculous car? Or was that merely the sign of an elegance too self-assured to care what others might think? If so, why was the man so bent on informing him that it wasn’t his car? What did he care if Richard Rivière was surprised?