At first, I made sure to spend time in the different lounges in the hotel. Later, when it was clear that she never went into them, I took to walking along the streets that ran parallel to the line of beaches and boulders where that side of the city ended. I snooped around a few other possible hotels. Perhaps she had chosen not to follow my recommendation about the Royal Marina after all. Perhaps because it was expensive, or because it was uncomfortable, or impractical; whatever the reason, I didn’t want to include among the several possibilities the fact that she might be avoiding me. In reality, she couldn’t have guessed I would be there. Much less that I was following her.
Even I hadn’t completely admitted to myself that that’s what I was doing. On the contrary: while I was at the Marina, I tried to anticipate her and her tastes, to go over to her side, to focus on things in the way I imagined she would have chosen to frame them. As I left my room each morning, I would set to work and assume the task of being her; after tracing her possible routes on foot, I would return to my room every evening convinced that I knew her a little better.
It took me a while to realize that this way of being in the city, of seeing it through her eyes, was a new variation on a secret game I had made up for myself during my boyhood as an only child. I called it (or perhaps I never called it anything at the time and the name became attached to the memory later, in some particular moment I have now forgotten) “The Road to the Gallows.” It must have sprung from inappropriate things I’d read or violent films I almost certainly shouldn’t have been watching. The game was simple: it consisted of imagining that I was looking at everything around me for the last time. In convincing myself that the tedious walk to school or the long trek to the park or the bus ride to run some errand was in fact my last journey, that I was a condemned man on the way to his execution.
It allowed me to use that gift all children have for boundless self-pity — and the children who have it in greatest measure are the know-it-alls who learn to see everything, including themselves, through misunderstood books. Given the humble simplicity of the game’s methods, the power of their effects never ceased to amaze me. I had only to decide that the game was underway, I had only to force myself to imagine that I would never again turn this corner or pass this shop front or greet this shopkeeper for the unremarkable corner or drab shop front to be transformed into a thing of transcendental importance. The day-to-day scenery, the familiar sequence of side streets and tree beds, immediately became painfully real, burned into my retina. I had no compunction — children don’t — about mustering the sentimentality necessary to work myself up to the point of tears. Farewell, streets! Farewell, doors and doormen! This was the last time — truly, the very last! — that I would see these sights I knew so well. The most wonderful thing about the pretense was that, for just a second, as the game came to its silent, secret climax, they became things I was seeing for the first time.
En route to the imagined gallows, I was the listener to whom I told my own stories, the audience for whom I filmed and projected my impressions. It occurs to me now that my present pursuit might be a more complicated variant of that same game, made up by a more complicated variant of the same child, who is tired of creating his own fun and has ended up looking for other companionship.
There were a lot of hotels in the city. I could reject most of them at a glance. They were too private, or they were too indiscreet. With their miniature gardens and their ten or fifteen bedrooms, they imitated the capacious summerhouses that the haute bourgeoisie of the drier provinces built in the area a hundred years ago. They imitated them, or else just inhabited them; many of those pretentious chalets — which the owners, in their day, called hôtels even though they were private houses, adopting the French sense of the word (the term “chalets” wasn’t yet in use) — had not survived the divvying-up of the inheritance handed down from the founding patrician. They had been sold off in a hurry and converted into real hotels at last, in an unusual display of etymological justice.
The bourgeoisie’s tastes had changed, too. Or maybe they were just never as haute again after that. A lot of the houses had been demolished and now found their plots occupied by apartment blocks, their paint corroded by sea-spray, their ground floors lined with woeful shops selling beach gear.
For my part, I hardly went to the beach. She would have found it depressing: the permanently wet sand, the bland sea, the waves bashing uselessly against the rocks. It did offer the strategic advantage of excellent visibility for hundreds of yards in every direction, in spite of the haziness brought on by the afternoon mist. But I never saw her there. Just the retirees who walked the whole length of the beach at low tide, their pant legs rolled up and their feet purple with cold.
Gradually, I withdrew toward the center of town, far from the summer vacation district with its empty streets and small, boarded-up chalets. Because there was also a wintertime city, which pretended to believe it sat hundreds of miles from the coast. The natives there were very careful to look down their noses at the beach. Only very rarely would they set foot on the promenade (and never before dusk), and they always wore long sleeves, even in August. I remembered that right from my first visit, their limpid pallor and their habit of burying themselves in cardigans and scarves in the middle of June made them easy to tell apart from the out-of-towners with their bare-chested tans.
The downtown was neither pretty nor ugly. I felt suddenly wearied by everything again: the verdant, preened park; the dazzling, bustling cafes at teatime; the hours forming lumps as they drained slowly away through a city that knew it had nothing to offer in the low season and was rallying itself for winter. I didn’t allow myself to be taken in by all this pretense of collective resignation: I knew as well as the inhabitants themselves that even in summer, no beach or boulevard can throw off the veil of primness that has smothered them every single day of the last hundred years, since the supposedly glorious era of those long summer holidays enjoyed by the great and the good.
I would go back to the hotel as night was beginning to fall. At about the time the streetlights were turning on, a dampness would drift in off the sea and turn to mist. One only noticed it on finding that his jacket was wet through, or when a droplet of water, having condensed in secret, would creep gently down his cheek.
There was just one nice afternoon. At the last minute, the eternal clouds parted and the sun came out and spread its warmth like a guest arriving late with breathless excuses. I started to feel itchy under my sweater. The streetlights turned on in spite of themselves and shone uselessly in the warm air. Even I felt annoyed, practically offended. When the good weather reached me, I had already changed tack and was reluctant to take my coat off. The idea of going back to the hotel and shutting myself away in my room was awful. And I couldn’t count on the cafés, either, because I could see from the street that they were now empty — their customers were drifting with seeming nonchalance down discreet side streets toward the promenade, alone or in little groups, all of them pretending they weren’t on their way to watch the sun set over the sea. Unseasonable sparrows chirped on the sidewalks and the sand lining the tree beds dried out. It all made the possibility of finding her feel slimmer.
I was in a bad mood now, and as a last resort, I walked into a movie theater. The girl at the box office warned me that the show had started half an hour earlier. I hadn’t even checked what the movie was. I just wanted to take refuge in the darkened room, then come out and be met by the autumn night.