I have not heard from him again. Where is he? It has been a long time since I last met the modern person in whom I thought I could anticipate a new world. And I, too, have not stayed the same as during my years in that first suburb.
Without especially holding myself aloof or participating, I learned just enough about people to have life brush me in passing and hardly exert any pressure. During those few years I did not hear bad things about anyone (it was quite different for my son in school, but he did not tell me about that until much later).
The settling, spreading uphill, hardly noticeably yet steadily, was dense and at the same time scattered, and I felt as if my house were protected by the many harmless strangers and their almost constant presence, as quiet as it was palpable; I often forgot to lock up.
The majority of the residents were older, yet quite far from being frail; primarily former retailers and railroad employees, who lived for their inconspicuous, yet on closer inspection practically sculpted, vegetable gardens, and otherwise, too, seemed to be constantly out and about, going for cigarettes or the paper, betting on horses in a certain café, then streaming together from every direction for the Sunday market in front of the station (as now in the bay), knowing in advance and in detail what would be there, and where; I once heard two local people exchange in passing what still echoes in my ear as the customary greeting of the place: “We have it good here, don’t we?” — “Yes, we have it good here!”
In my memory at least I have only people like that as neighbors, and there was a similar couple, a man and his wife, who took care of Valentin when I was away, with whom I sometimes sat for a while after I got back, and not merely out of politeness, also enjoying the apples from their own trees that they served (while on the other hand my son later told me story after story about the mustiness peculiar to their house, a different kind in every corner).
In my imagination they are all still alive, even though most of them meanwhile are probably in the ground, and when I occasionally venture across there, over the two hills, I no longer encounter a single one of them; the greeting, if I get to hear it at all, is different from before. The descendants of the Portuguese, the largest foreign group there, often no longer use their language with each other, or speak it with a French accent. The graves of the Armenians and also the Russians increasingly display, under their own, far-traveled script, lines of the locally customary Roman script.
And the few people from that population of whom I had perhaps a less good opinion during my time there must be doing worse things today, yet even they cannot have turned into complete villains, but at most, appropriately for those suburbs, stock types or minor characters from gangster comedies: for instance, the doctor, the only one in the neighborhood, who filled out prescription after prescription, never really looking at the patients, and in the same breath wrote out a bill, to the bottom line of which would be added, as I said to myself, the profit from the volleys of medications, especially for small children, shared, according to a secret agreement, with his accomplice, the proprietor of the pharmacy, two streets over and around the corner, where, even without my telescope, with the naked eye, I could see the parents of the district coming out, laden as if for all eternity with accordion-sized boxes (and at least once I was one of them myself).
But what do I really know of that place today? Other than that the brooms of the still mostly black street sweepers are now made of plastic rather than of twigs; that the photo automat at the railroad station now takes colored rather than black-and-white pictures; that the one homeless person who used to sleep up in the woods has meanwhile become several?
All that time the shelter up on the railroad platform had no glass in its door, and once, when I went to push it open, I tumbled into dead air. Now glass has been installed. And from the upstairs apartment where I dragged my son to his piano lesson no tinkling can be heard now.
I, too, did no one any harm there, did not get worked up even once, and wanted it to be that way always.
On the other hand, I gradually came to recognize that I also did not take anyone seriously, and this was true not only of the local residents filing past but then also of my absent friends. I hardly wanted to hear about them anymore. I was dissociating myself. My going it alone, in my place and domain, seemed so much richer in content than any togetherness. I barely skimmed my friends’ letters, and then did not answer them. The simple fact that they were constantly doing things and appearing in public made me indifferent to them; if one of them had appeared before me with his activities, I would have scoffed at his scheming.
Yes, from a distance I was unserious, and at the same time hardened toward my friends. And at the side of my son, too, toward whom I outwardly seemed so attentive and patient, I quite often caught myself merely feigning interest. Certainly I listened to him, but I had no heart for the child. Did that not become clear from the fact that I would forget him if he was away for more than a couple of days? Why did all the world treat me in his absence as a single person, someone without attachments who could be enlisted for the craziest adventures?
If I seem to be making myself out as worse than I was at the time, my intention is not to ask to be refuted but rather to have something to tell. Can it be that this was the only way for me to get started? When I was in boarding school, crammed in like a sardine with the others at Mass, didn’t I invent sins or upgrade venial failings to atrocities so I could slip away to the confessional in back, from which I would emerge energized and proud of my stories?
But then I did become more closely acquainted with someone in the region: the later petty prophet of Porchefontaine.
At the time he was proprietor and chef of the restaurant in the hollow of the Fontaine Ste.-Marie, by the clearing in the middle of the woods, as now at a restaurant by the railroad embankment in the suburb of Versailles: since then both of us have moved our base of operations two valleys to the west in the Seine hills, and each of us still finds himself at about the same distance from the other. Between our houses there is a similar set of foothills to cross.
In that period in my lire — which, for all my idleness, was a time of preparation — he became for me something that meant more than friends: an adversary whose acumen awakened my own; a misanthrope on whose rationality I honed the substance of my illusions; a tester in the face of whose deliberate heartlessness my own heart opened up as if in the presence of a secret.
The entire person attracted me as just such a secret. He was as he was; in contrast to me, he did not merely feign disgust and distaste; and yet that could not be all there was.
Even though he was my double as no one had ever been before, and finally the one I welcomed, there had been a time when he had made entirely different choices. At moments I was convinced my thoughts mirrored his exactly, yet when I articulated them, the tone was wrong. Only when they came from his mouth did they sound authentic. Again unlike me, he stood by his condemnation of the world. No, he was not my mirror. And at the same time, when I was by myself, I experienced — a word that otherwise only my friend the priest can use without embarrassment — longing for him; likewise for his place.