Someone Else by Tonino Benacquista
“I’ve had a Château Talbot.”
“Which year?”
“ ’82.”
“Bastard! It’s a masterpiece!”
Between two mouthfuls, between two sips of Chablis, between two images on the screen with the sound turned off, between two bursts of laughter, they made love. Much later, she slid under the sheet, found Nicolas’s hand, put it over her left breast, and closed her eyes. Her breathing became deeper and deeper, slower and slower; he felt her drifting away.
He savoured one last mouthful of wine, in silence, happy. He now knew what he was looking for when he was drunk: it was not the detachment of the third glass but the here and now of the first, staying there as long as possible. He did not need that big-night-out sort of drunkenness, the one that unleashes passions and flirts with the absolute, is timeless and stands outside life itself. His intoxication had its head in the clouds but its feet on the ground. He did not long to lose all his faculties like most alcoholics, he wanted exactly the opposite, to get right up close to the moment and to appropriate it, like this evening, in that bed, next to the sleeping body of the woman who made his heart beat. He allowed himself to live in the present without asking whether it might be a trap or whether he would have to pay for it later. At last the evidence was there for him to see, and he started to dream of a tomorrow where all that really mattered would be there when he woke up. If he could just capture that evidence, to keep snatches of it, he might manage to keep his everyday confusion at bay. If only he could hang on to the message of its sweet euphoria through until morning . . .
If only.
An extraordinary idea came to him, an idea that was just too simple. Without even thinking twice, without taking his left hand off Loraine’s breast, he grabbed from the bedside table the headed paper and the biro with the hotel’s name on it. He wrote what came into his head, put the pad back down, pressed himself up against Loraine, buried his face in her neck and went to sleep.
When he woke up she was no longer there. He was not surprised by this and tried to find her smell on the pillow. Suddenly he looked up, fumbled over by the bedside table to get the pad, and made out what he had written the night before:
Take what Loraine offers you without trying to find out more about her.
Remember to clean your shoes at least once a month.
In the B file, use Cécile’s idea on the IBM project, turn it around a bit and let the marketing people think they got it right before anyone else.
If you spend too long listening to the storm brewing without actually breaking, you’ll waste your life waiting for some disaster which will never happen.
What a perfect feeling: he had found a friend.
Thierry Blin
He had never been so frightened as he was that morning. The moment he woke up he had to battle with his own overpowering fear by persuading himself he was a good man, a man who saw his dreams as reality and his longings as orders. On the way to the clinic he almost managed to convince himself. His fears regained the upper hand, however, when the nurse asked him to put on the strange white nightshirt which tied up at the back like a straitjacket.
At precisely 8 o’clock, he went into the clinic’s admissions office and was treated to a Vermeiren in every sentence. He was then shown to his room, where he anxiously answered all the questions asked by a woman dressed in white, who made sure he took a pill to help him relax. Psychiatry has inventoried the different kinds of sick mind which lose touch with themselves, and it has given them complicated names – his condition must have had one of its own. If he had known this wretched word, he might have tried to find a cure – he just needed to be in a different department. Rodier had given him one last chance to change everything on the spot, perhaps Joust would too? The latter came in, drawled a few words out of habit and started tracing lines on his patient’s face in silence. The tranquillizer was beginning to take effect; even if he had still wanted to, Blin could no longer change his mind. All of a sudden his shoulders dropped and his whole body started to float. A rapt smile spread across his lips when he saw someone approaching with a stretcher. In the operating theatre, he looked in Joust’s eye one last time; it already did not matter any more, as if Blin’s consciousness were slowly leaving his body to slip into Vermeiren’s. The anaesthetist injected a whitish fluid into his vein, making his arm feel warm, and he asked him to count to five. It was the last face he saw before losing his own.
*
He had not invented this pain, it really was there but it was not making him suffer, it was keeping itself busy, without waking him. He was every piece of his body at the same time, his veins, his blood, his heart, which was beating slowly; he was his muscles and his own sleeping strength.
*
Someone put a damp compress over his lips; something a woman would do, he thought. He could sense her moving about the room from small signs: the clink of a glass, the squeak of her shoes on the parquet, her clearing her throat. He desperately wanted to open his eyes but his eyelids remained sealed, which was terrifying. If he had still had the strength, he would have given in to panic, but the bandaging round his jaw meant he could not cry out. Another dose of painkillers and tranquillizers soothed him.
Not being able to speak again for the rest of his life would not have mattered to him all that much. The power of speech? He didn’t give a damn. After all, he was only an eye, that had become his job and in that job the less you talked the better it was. Spotting, grasping, discerning, catching. The rest was just photos you could show in silence because they needed no commentary, a report you typed out trying to find exactly the right word. No need to speak. Discretion guaranteed.
Towards the end of the afternoon, he heard different footsteps, more assertive.
“It’s me,” said Joust. “Don’t try to speak. I’ve come to see if everything’s all right with your eyesight. Don’t worry if your eyelids are a bit stuck together, that’s normal.”
Thierry felt the doctor’s fingers opening his eyes. A hazy beam of light sharpened the pain. Having set his mind at rest, Joust put the bandage back in position.
“Everything’s fine. Have a good night. I’ll be here at 9 o’clock in the morning.”
Before leaving the room, Joust asked the nurse whether she was on duty for the night.
“No, it’s Inès, sir.”
The thought of being watched over by an Inès comforted Thierry, who fell asleep for several hours.
*
The night had been heavy with dreams, but none of them stayed with him, not even one image; perhaps a tired, distant memory punctuated by sips of water and waves of anxiety cut dead by the sleeping draught. He had heard the faraway sound of a radio from a neighbouring room, a halo of music which made his internal journey feel somehow like a treasure hunt. Still not sure that he had found the treasure, he had dug and delved; his exhausted limbs were proof of that.
Joust took his bandages off in one swift move, and checked that his incisions had not let him down. Blin managed to open his eyes a little; the layout of the room came back to him as a series of impressions, and his eyes came to rest on a little red bottle.
“I’ve put a drain into the forehead to drain off the blood. It’s already stopped flowing.”
He had not felt anything round his forehead, apart from a belt of discomfort, which he had put down to the bandaging.
“You could say a few words if you’d like to.”
He declined with a shake of his head.
“I suppose you’d like to see yourself? I could hold a mirror up for you, but you’ll see nothing but wounds. Everything went very well, but you may find it quite a shock. Well?”
He shook his head again. He was not all that impatient to see his face in the raw. Vermeiren was not completely finished, and he was afraid that Blin might be shocked by him. Before slipping back into his mummified state, he tried to read Inès’s expression. Perhaps – somewhere between the strips of flesh, the cuts, staples and trickles of
Thierry had spent the last few days before the operation feeling cocooned. The world was hazy, the sounds of the city and the people around him muffled. In fact he had watched himself doing things as if he were already no longer Blin, but had Vermeiren walking beside him, ready to take over. Paul Vermeiren had legally existed for more than a week now, with an identity card and a birth certificate. Claiming professional interest while he went through files with Rodier, Blin had extracted precious information about how false papers were made and how to get hold of them. Rodier had given the names and areas of expertise of a few specialists who were known for their reliability. Of these, those who were most in demand created false identities using real cards stolen from issuing offices. In return for a crippling sum, they could provide a whole set of false papers which were undetectable because they were real. Thierry Blin had been prepared to pay. His first act as a citizen was to open a bank account in the name of Paul Vermeiren and to put 150,000 francs into it – the under-the-table payment on the sale of the house in Juvisy. He had been carefully emptying out two-thirds of his old bank account, taking cash payments week by week for a year, which gave him 400,000 francs. Part of this money had been used to pay for Joust, his false papers, the deposit on his new home and the lease on his future agency. He had not been able to sell off anything from Blin’s life for fear of awakening suspicions, not even the drawings and lithographs that had been lying forgotten at the back of his shop for years. He could have got a good price for them from a specialist secondhand shop which did not care where things came from, but the formidable Brigitte, his accountant, would soon have noticed had they gone. Since she had been working for the new manager at the shop, she had tried to see Thierry again by claiming there was some issue with taxes. She missed him, she just did not have the courage to admit it to him.
“Tell me, Mademoiselle, this boy’s not giving you too much trouble, is he?”
“He’s a good worker, he understands everything I tell him, he keeps the books up to date – a perfect client. He’s just deadly boring.”
“A few more months and I’ll be back.”
One thing he had always liked about her was her doll-like figure; she knew this and was trying to play on it, now more than ever. Her long hair, her high cheekbones and peachy pink cheeks, her shiny satin dresses . . . He would never have imagined the real reason she wanted to see him: having heard that Nadine had left him, Brigitte had come to try her own chances with him. Instead of which, he simply signed the papers she handed him, without even looking at her.
On the morning he went into the clinic he had left the apartment in Convention leaving some valuable pieces of jewellery in a drawer, a cooling cup of coffee on the corner of a table, a book open on a coffee table, and a window still ajar. Nothing to make anyone think he had been planning to leave.
What happened next followed a script he had rewritten endlessly until he had perfected it. The concierge, amazed to see the mail piling up, called Nadine, who came and opened the apartment with the key Thierry had given her. She then went to the police station to register his disappearance. She filled in the form, gave the most accurate description possible, without forgetting distinguishing features (the V-shaped scar to the right of his groin which intrigued her and disgusted her at the same time), and gave them a recent photograph, probably the big black-and-white one that she had taken for her collection of portraits. The Missing Persons Bureau took over from there, calling the hospitals, the mortuary, the missing man’s doctor and dentist, going to his apartment and questioning some of his friends, perhaps also some customers from The Blue Frame. Vermeiren knew the figures: of the 3,000 people who went missing in the Paris area every year, five per cent of cases were never solved. He had played all the cards to make sure he was one of those 150 people and fell into the “pointless to search” category until the end of time.
*
Paul Vermeiren could have come out twenty-four hours after the operation but, worried about ending up alone with himself when he did not really know who he was, felt happier spending an extra night at the clinic. Joust was satisfied with what he had seen of his patient’s face and suggested an appointment the very next day – Day 3 according to his calculations – to take the stitches out of his eyelids, and another one, Day 7, for those under his eyes. They would then see each other only once more, on Day 15, to take the staples out of his mouth, chin and cheekbones. As well as the bandages which completely covered his face, Joust advised him to wear a tightly fitting hood between now and then to avoid any problems around the forehead. Looking like something from a horror film, he went back through the admissions department and asked for a taxi.
“To take you where?”
“4 Allée des Favorites at Cholong-sur-Cèze.”
He clarified this for the nurse, who could not have cared less: “That’s where I live.”
*
“You’ll be happy here.”
These simple words from the estate agent, who was too prosaic to be dishonest, had made his mind up. Why pass up on the opportunity to be happy somewhere, and why should it not be in a simple house way out in the suburbs in what seemed like a patch of countryside: a little place surrounded by trees, beyond the village and timeless. Three of the windows overlooked a tiny road no one ever used, the others looked out over the garden, which had no clear boundaries. A weeping willow, two pine trees, a magnificent maple and a cherry tree. Paul felt like an ageing country squire still clinging to his land to console himself for all the other privileges he had lost. The house was sound and just the right size for him: a sitting room with a fireplace which took up one whole wall, a bedroom which looked out over the garden, and a kitchen which smelled of wood and ash.
Thierry Blin had actually always been the city type. He had wanted to be at the heart of things, in the place from which all the arteries flowed, and even if the beating of that heart had sometimes been too insistent, he could not have contemplated living anywhere else. The world had been beneath his windows; he had felt he was in the bull’s eye. He had always been afraid of missing something and thought he had enough energy to face up to the big city. Since humans themselves had become his bread and butter, he had wanted the exact opposite; after days and nights of tailing people, of nervous tension and complications, he needed to set his head straight, far from the madness of others.
Paradox: since his exile, he had never felt so close to Paris. If he could see that City of Light from the top of the bell-tower at Cholong, what was the point of having it at his feet? How can you get a feel for a city when you are caught up in all its torments? Babylon is only Babylon when you see it from afar.
Lying on a chaise longue with his nose in the air, a tartan rug over his knees and a book in his hand, he was waiting out his convalescence in peace. He went back to the kitchen to check on his cauliflower cheese and to open his mail, which had the name Vermeiren all over it. Paul Vermeiren existed as far as society was concerned. The mechanism had set in motion of its own accord. You just had to respect a few rules, to ask nothing of anyone, and never complain. Then, the odd extra citizen went completely unnoticed.
“Is that a Flemish name?” the Telecom employee asked him when he came to install the line.
“It’s Dutch originally, but quite a long way back.”
All he had left on his face were a few plasters at the corners of his temples. He no longer found it difficult looking himself in the face. The brown contacts gave his eyes a full, deep gaze which sat well with his hair and the texture of his skin – these were the eyes he should always have had, and their slightly elongated shape made his whole face smile, giving it a malicious twinkle. Paul was more proud of his chin than anything else; it gave him a legitimacy, an assurance he had always lacked, a boost to his virility, an unexpected completeness which meant he would never again need the camouflage of a beard. He took pleasure in shaving and massaging his utterly hairless chee
Paul Vermeiren found time for everything and was enthusiastic about everything: cooking, walks, reading under a tartan rug, evenings by the fireside, nights spent watching films, interminable lie-ins, hot baths at any time of day or night. His convalescence even gave him the time to test some long-held dreams and to clear up a few mysteries. He had always wondered how something could stay up in the air, revolving on its own axis, describing a curve, making a complete revolution and coming back to the hand. Perhaps he was not too old to achieve miracles. Every day he learned how to throw a boomerang, on his own with a book open at his feet. He saw this movement as a combination of science, elegance and humility in the face of nature; as a way of paying homage to the mysteries of physics, which fascinated even our primitive forebears. Like a true aborigine, Paul took time checking the feel of the wind, taming it, and circling trees with his deft parabolas. During the hours of apprenticeship when his boomerang disappeared in the undergrowth, he would scour great expanses of meadow with all the patience of a water diviner. The locals would say hello and watch, amused, as he threw – a fad? the latest craze from Paris? – not realizing for a moment that this man was recreating a ritual gesture which pre-dated tractors and cows and perhaps even green grass.
*
“I’ll see you again on Day 60, and that will probably be the last time,” Joust told him on the morning of Day 30. Clearly proud of his creation, the good doctor asked whether he could take photographs to impress future customers. Vermeiren refused with some regret. Back in his car, he drove beneath the windows of the apartment in Convention, curious to see whether it had already been let, then he stopped for a moment outside the café where he and Nadine used to meet. That was where they had spoken to each other for the last time on Day −5, when they had been apart for four months.