In the train people were reading their newspapers, staring at nothing at all through the windows, fingering their cellphones right up to the very last minute of a very hard day, or who knows what. I walked by Le Cercle, it was turning cold now, and I wondered if there was anything more I could do. Probably not. I ended up going inside anyway. I sat on the corner barstool for a while, and then I went home, still on foot, in hopes of wearing myself out a little.
Two days later I went to the dentist’s, which hurt like hell, then in the afternoon I went to let the delivery men in. So now everything was ready to go, we could start up again. I left a message on the boss’s wife’s cellphone. I said “The deliveries came, everything’s in good shape, also Amédée’s getting worried. Incidentally, I haven’t heard a thing from the new girl.” I hung up, that was that.
I realized people were starting to talk in the neighborhood. The folks across the street were making up stories, the guy in the newsstand where I went for my paper was asking me “Is it true?” Rumors were flying around the Asnières station.
“What’s going on in that café of yours?”
“Nothing at all, as you see.”
“They’re not having work done?”
“No, they’re not doing a thing.”
It was already Thursday, and for two nights I’d slept straight through, like a fifty-six-year-old baby who’s been paying into Social Security for thirty-eight years, give or take. Funny-looking pay stubs we used to have. I’d worked in places I could hardly even remember. I’d spent six months in the café across the street, for example, twenty-two years ago, and I had absolutely no memory of it. Or was I just too drunk that year? I’d run around with a lot of women when I was younger, before and after my divorce, and I’d worked in Paris bars a week at a time. I’d even done a season at a vacation club in Agadir because of a love affair that hadn’t worked out, a woman from Bois-Colombes, I wanted to marry her. I spread out my whole life on two tables in the back of the dining room. I was making seventy francs a month when I started out. Sorting through all that brought back a good chunk of my life, people’s faces, customers I got on with, and some I didn’t, and women too, bars and addresses that left big blank spots in my head. Where did all the time go? You don’t know, Pierrot? Le Cercle would probably be my last bar, to tell the truth. Jacqueline Serradura will have been my last girlfriend. A few weeks after I ran out on her I realized I could never replace her. And then after that I wasn’t so sure. But anyway. Strange feeling, having all that laid out in front of you, and not seeing anything more to come. Still, I wasn’t dead yet. Two or three times I nodded off over my pile of papers, and when I woke up I went right back to it. From some years my pay stubs were clean and orderly, other years they were one hell of a mess, wine stains, smudges, little blots of whatever. I aged a lot, watching over that empty café.
Now and then the phone rang, I kept hoping it would be them, this whole thing had dirty trick written all over it now that I thought of it. I got one wrong number, then somebody who wanted to reserve a table for ten, and twice there was no one on the other end, not quite what I had in mind. Once I was done sorting through my trimesters, I did a few crossword puzzles. I also had a chance to finish that Primo Levi book, he’d ended up throwing himself down the stairwell in his apartment building, he’d seen too much. Would he have been interested in other guys of no particular interest, would he have deigned to talk to someone like me? I missed having the young man in black around, it would have been nice to talk all this over with him, maybe he knew more about it than I did? I wiped down the counter one last time before I left that evening, then I lowered the shutter. I still had thirteen and a half trimesters to go before I was eligible for the full pension and my supplemental retirement. I’d managed pretty well in my life, really.
One night I called Sabrina, she was feeling better now. I told her they’d both ended up disappearing, but she was only half listening. It was obvious she didn’t know much about any of this. What she did know she must have preferred to keep to herself.
“Don’t worry, Pierrounet, you can always come eat at my place!”
She laughed, I heard her children in the background, for them everything was fine, in a way, everything was just fine in her suburban housing project. I was smiling like an idiot when I hung up. In the end I hadn’t managed that well, actually. It’d take me another whole lifetime to make it right.
On Friday I came to Le Cercle later than usual. I didn’t set off first thing because I was busy giving my two-room apartment in Les Grésillons a good clean. I stopped by the newsstand on my way in, I’ve always got on well with Monsieur Akilami, that’s the guy’s name, he’s done a lot of traveling compared to most people around here, they have their few weeks’ paid vacation and that’s it, usually.
“So I suppose you’re out of work, my poor friend?”
He really wanted to know what was up.
“Yeah, laid off, it would seem.”
“You worked long enough for a pension?”
“Don’t know. We’ll see.”
So, along with Le Parisien, I got the paper where they print job listings for my line of work, which is serving drinks to people who pass through your café for ten minutes or an hour, or as long as it takes to eat a meal. They’re your equals, and often they’ll leave you a tip on their way out, but whatever they’ve left hanging in their lives hasn’t budged a bit. Some of them will come back to see you again and again, year after year. Pierrot my friend, you would have made a great poet. A few trimesters short of your full pension, you could have thrown yourself down the stairwell, with Monsieur Primo Levi’s paperback clasped in your scrawny arms. Of course, you only live on the third floor, so you probably would have wound up with nothing more than a broken leg, or a twisted ankle, or a cracked-up coccyx, or a dislocated knee, but that’s certain death in your business, no legs, no job. There was plenty of work to be had, from what I’d seen in that paper. I wouldn’t be the youngest applicant for any of those jobs, of course. But on the other hand, I’d be the only one capable of watching over a café closed for no apparent reason, and that was where my meditations on the meaning of my life stood when the telephone rang. It made a lot of noise in the empty café. This time I knew the voice on the other end of the line. I could hear his wife in the background, I even got the feeling they weren’t alone. I didn’t have anything to say about it. I wasn’t even all that surprised, in the end. It had come over him like a sudden urge to pee, I told myself, but in fact no, ever since his daughter went away, and, I realized later, ever since the end of his fling with Sabrina, his mind was made up. He didn’t dare breathe a word of it to his wife, who’d been following after him for so long. End result: we were all out on our asses.