A breath. A strange sensation. Cold taking hold of me. A tear flows, then nothing. That’s how I die. On a dirty sidewalk, while Valerie is waiting for me.
[He collapses on the ground. We hear a cry offstage.]
[Curtain.]
Christmas[8]
by Christophe Mercier
Faith has been broken
Tears must be cried
Let’s do some living
After we die
Pigalle
There are better places than a restaurant in the 9th arrondissement to be spending Christmas Eve, that’s for sure. Even though I’ve been a regular there and a pal of the owner — the successive owners — for the last twenty years, for as long as I’ve lived in the neighborhood.
Actually, Chez Léon is not exactly near my home, but going there gives me a reason to walk a bit. Well, it’s not that far, really... I live on rue de la Grange Batelière — a well-read client, there are some, told me that George Sand had lived there as a child, I think — and Chez Léon is at the corner of rue Richer and rue de Trévise, almost across from the Folies Bergère, where busloads of American and Japanese tourists in search of “Gay Paree” pour out every summer. It makes for a 200-yard walk and allows me to get cigarillos at the café-tabac on the corner of Richer-Montmartre. That café is run by a couple, both tattooed and particularly unpleasant, but fun to watch. And watching people is what I do for a living.
Because I’m a private detective. A “private eye,” as they say in American novels. But there’s nothing glamorous about my life: I don’t have a fedora and I don’t wear a trench coat (well, yes, I do wear one, because it often rains in Paris.) Nobody thinks of Humphrey Bogart when they see me; I don’t go see his films anymore since the Action Lafayette movie house closed (to be replaced by a cut-rate supermarket) because they’re not shown anywhere else in the neighborhood, and I don’t watch them on TV either because I find them irritating. I find them irritating now, I mean. But thirty years ago, I used to like the dark romanticism of those movies and sometimes I tell myself that without The Big Sleep, I wouldn’t have picked this line of work. Back from the Algerian war, I probably would have been a pastry cook like my dad, and I would have been disgusted with napoleons by now. Good thing I finally saw The Big Sleep. Although...
It really is a rotten job, especially after thirty years, and it does wear you out. Now, whatever’s left of my hair is white, I have trouble walking (arthritis, from too much time keeping watch in the rain, hidden behind the column across from the Ritz, waiting for an unfaithful wife), and I look more like Maurice Chevalier in Love in the Afternoon than Bogart; Maurice Chevalier plays another movie private eye but this one is closer to reality. To mine at least. Now there’s a movie I would gladly see again. But the first time I saw it — a terrible copy with Italian subtitles showing at a small film festival at the Action Lafayette — it somewhat depressed me. (Originally, it was because of the two movie theatres — the Action Lafayette on rue Buffault and Studio 43 on rue du Faubourg Montmartre, now replaced by a hair salon — that I chose this neighborhood in 1985, a time when you could still find a rare film by combing all of Paris.) It’s a comedy but it’s only funny to non — private detectives — or private detectives who don’t raise their daughters alone — which still gives it a pretty large audience.
Now that my daughter no longer lives with me and she’s with her mother in Nantes, I wouldn’t mind seeing it again, with a touch of nostalgia even. For without Lola — my daughter’s name is Lola, not Ariane like Chevalier’s in the movie — I’m bored. She’s been gone six months, studying Public Relations at a school paid for by her mother (and her rich step-father) in Nantes, a city her name predestined her to, probably. A dirty trick from my ex-wife to lure her there, obviously. She was supposed to come back for Christmas but the rich stepfather invited her to Chamonix and she’ll only get here on the second week of her break, after New Year’s.
All this to say that, as far as Christmas Eve goes, I had no choice. If I was to spend it by myself, I might as well go to Chez Léon instead of staying all alone with my TV, my canned foie gras, and my lukewarm champagne. I was told they wouldn’t have any mother-in-laws going yackety-yak or revelers celebrating there.
So, on that Christmas Eve, the first one without Lola, it was raining. And what’s worse than Christmas alone in a restaurant to escape from an old two-room apartment in a dark building in Paris’ 9th arrondissement, except Christmas alone in a restaurant to escape from an old two-room apartment in a dark building of Paris’ 9th arrondissement in the rain.
It had been raining for the last two days. I had spent them hanging around the Royal Monceau to catch a super-rich but unfaithful emir whose wife had hired my services, and I had been gazing at the gloomy twinkle of the garlands in the trees of avenue Hoche, under the indifferent eyes of the passersby; sheltered under their umbrellas, they were looking down to avoid the puddles on the sidewalk, busy with their last-minute Christmas shopping. The Arc de Triomphe, way at the end, never seemed so dismal, and my arthritis had flared up.
On that day of December 24, I had returned home late in the morning, after a stake-out of several hours, and I had made myself a hot Irish toddy (boiling whiskey and cloves). After that, I had buried myself under the eiderdown quilt passed down to me by my great-grandmother.
I had slept a good chunk of the day and after I woke up, I listened to some Bach Christmas cantatas to get into the spirit of the day, comfortably settled in my Voltaire armchair, bundled up in three blankets with a Jack Daniel’s. Keith Richards listens to classical music too, I suppose. He did break a leg when he fell from the stepladder in his library... We must be about the same age. I fantasized for a while about old Keith listening to Bach, then I put on some Stones for good measure. I started with “Time Waits for No One” because of Mick Taylor’s solo (he’s the greatest guitarist they ever had) and because the bourbon, the rain, Christmas by myself, arthritis, and my elusive Arab sheikh and all had put me in a morose mood. After a third Jack Daniel’s, a very hot bath, and the complete recording of Exile on Main Street, I felt a little tipsy, no longer in the Christmas spirit, but reinvigorated and even combative. A combative melancholy, so to speak, an energetic melancholy like in “Let It Loose.”
I slipped into gray pleated pants, white shirt, bow tie, and the narrow-waisted, shiny dark red jacket with thin black threads that makes me look like a pimp, according to Lola; then, armed with my huge red umbrella and a dry raincoat, I was on my way to Chez Léon.
It was 9 p.m., the festive Parisians were celebrating at home, and rue de la Grange Batelière was empty.
I felt like having a drink somewhere, to take part in the upbeat mood of a crowded bar on a holiday evening, or to take in the gloomy atmosphere of an empty bar on a holiday evening. I’ve always liked to hang out over a beer, at night, in train station bars, preferably in the suburbs right outside Paris.
But the wine bars across Drouot were closed, and the dark, dismal glass walls of the auction hall loomed against the sky blurred by the vague drizzle that had followed the afternoon rain. I had rarely seen the neighborhood so dead. More than dead even, deserted, as if the inhabitants had fled to escape a Martian attack, as if they all had been stricken by the plague.
I kept on walking along rue Drouot up to the Grands Boulevards. After a day spent softening in the warmth of my bed and a half-bottle of bourbon, it felt good to walk a bit and my arthritis was no longer bothering me. On boulevard des Italiens, a group of lost, jolly Americans swooped down on me — I was the only living soul in view — and asked me where the Grand Café was. It always gives me pleasure to speak English, as I don’t get to use it often in my profession, so I gladly gave them the information. Grateful or completely drunk already, they made as if to drag me along; I had a really hard time declining the invitation without offending them. I finally convinced them that I was expected somewhere else. A white lie which was hard to tell. Not because I mind lying, but it made me realize how poor my English is, even though I like to use it.