Someone Else by Tonino Benacquista
He found himself in a little room off a larger one where a woman draped in a blue satin Chinese dress was uncovering aluminium trays of nibbles. She turned her head when she heard Paul arrive, and greeted him with a smile.
“Hello.”
He looked at her questioningly.
“Did you see the ad?”
“Yes.”
“It’s this way, come with me. I’m Brigitte Reynouard,” she said, holding out her hand to him.
. . . Mademoiselle?
How could he have forgotten that her name was Reynouard? This woman who knew Blin’s social security number by heart, his account numbers, the little secrets of his daily life and his moods; he had not even taken the trouble to remember her surname. He had only ever called her “Mademoiselle”. Brigitte wanted to take his leather jacket for him; still feeling dazed and awkward, he felt happier keeping it on. There she was, standing facing him, just as she always used to be, smiling whatever the circumstances. Blin could decode Brigitte’s smile; she could express any emotion with those lips. I don’t know you, but thank you for coming, whoever you are, she was saying now to this stranger. Her long straight hair in a synthetic black fell over her blue satin shoulders.
“Would you like to follow me? The others are already here.”
Brigitte looked people in the eye, she shook hands firmly and kissed those she knew better with eager sincerity, as if she genuinely derived pleasure from brushing her cheeks against other people’s. Greeting Vermeiren she had felt no particular emotion, apart from the happiness of sharing this gathering with yet another friend. Paul had just undergone the first test before he even had the wretched drink in his hand.
“These are people who were close to Thierry Blin, maybe I shouldn’t be here.”
“What matters is that you wanted to come. Can I ask who you are?”
He had prepared an answer and had rehearsed it out loud, as if playing a part.
“Paul Vermeiren, I’m a private investigator. He contacted me a couple of years ago to trace a drawing by a well-known artist which had been entrusted to him. A complicated business, but it turned out well for him.”
“A drawing?”
“Yes, by Bonnard.”
“He never mentioned it to me. But I knew everything that was in the shop, I did his accounts.”
“He contacted me because he wanted to be discreet. I think it wouldn’t matter now if I say he was hoping he could keep the drawing.”
“That last year he would have done anything to get money.”
“I only saw the ad by chance, yesterday morning. It gave me quite a shock, particularly the words left us.”
“It gave us all a shock.”
“Is he dead?”
She shrugged her shoulders, turned her palms up and sighed. “God alone knows.”
“Was this get-together your idea?”
“Yes.”
Mademoiselle . . . I wasn’t thinking of you when I wanted to leave everything behind. Blin didn’t deserve you.
“Come on, I’ll introduce you to some of the people I know.”
“I’d rather not talk about the business with the drawing. Just introduce me as a customer from the shop.”
“I understand.”
It was a large room, and there were about twenty people talking quietly, glass in hand. Like a good hostess, Brigitte introduced Paul to “one of Thierry’s oldest friends”.
Didier was still just as wet, just as blond, still wearing one of his many shimmering shirts with hidden buttons.
“Paul Vermeiren, a customer of his.”
That was just the thing to say to Didier to stifle his interest in a new arrival. Didier liked nothing better than shaking the right hands; someone who was just a customer of Blin’s was of little interest.
“Didier Legendre, a childhood friend of Thierry’s.”
They had met when they were in the fifth form; could you still call that childhood? Didier was one of those people who improved on the truth, not to pretty it up but to make the most of what little they had to say. He talked freely about going jogging in the Jardin du Luxembourg at 7 o’clock in the morning, summer and winter; in fact, he had done it exactly twice, in July, on the stroke of 10 o’clock. He boasted that he knew Barcelona “like the back of his hand” and forgot that Nadine, exasperated by how slow he was, had snatched the map from him to get them back to where they were meant to be. He said a dozen when he really meant eight, he said masses when he was talking about several, and he never failed to round reality up rather than down. Given who was there, though, Didier was actually the only one who could claim to be a childhood friend of Thierry’s.
“Did you hear about this from the ad?” asked Paul.
“No, Nadine told me.”
Paul could not see her there, but could not express his surprise to Didier.
“I don’t know her.”
“She was Thierry’s girlfriend. One of the last people to speak to him.”
He and Blin had lost touch: the lacklustre nature of their exchanges and Didier’s determination to assert himself in any conversation had become intolerable. He was the sort of man who hogged the ball by tripping up anyone who came near, but never actually scored.
“The few times I met him, I felt I was dealing with someone discreet, always in control. Not the sort of man to disappear from one day to the next.”
“There was something tortured about him, he was already like that when he was a boy. The fact that he disappeared is incredible in some ways, but if you knew him really well, it’s not all that surprising.”
“Really?”
“It would be difficult to sum it up in a few sentences, but when we used to stay up all night together, smoking our first cigarettes and telling each other about our first girls, he was already talking about who he was going to become. He was convinced he was going to bring the house down.”
They had smoked, that was true, but they certainly had not “told each other about their first girls”, those sort of conquests were still a myth in their young minds. As for “bringing the house down”, that was just adolescent nonsense, a teenager’s obsession with what the future held, dying to stand out from the crowd – so ordinary it was rather touching.
“We enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts together. I’m still drawing, it’s my job in fact, but using modern equipment: I create virtual pictures. Thierry wanted to be a painter and he ended up opening his framing shop.”
At the time, you encouraged me to. You talked about the nobility of being a craftsman, a refusal to accept the world gone mad around us. Now, Didier Legendre made posters using circles and squares in every colour under the sun, creating an impression of relief which a child could achieve by pressing the right buttons. He had even unashamedly asked Thierry to frame some of them. Now, Blin had become Vermeiren, the man he had always wanted to be, and no one else had remained that faithful to their dreams.
“He felt he’d been robbed of a childhood that didn’t measure up to his hopes.”
Paul had to recognize that there was an element of truth in this.
“Do you know, I once went back to one of our favourite places, along the tracks near the station in Choisy-le-Roi, heading towards Juvisy. At one point there was a sort of hollow under the rails. You could get four people in there, hunched together, waiting for a train to go over. You can’t imagine the violence of an experience like that, it went on for ten or fifteen seconds, it seemed like forever. We would scream with all our might to blot out the sound of the train and our fear, too. That’s what we were like, Thierry and me.”
Paul knew he would stoop pretty low, but not so far as to borrow other people’s memories. Waiting for the train, kneeling under the rails – neither of them had done it, only someone called Mathias, who was afraid of nothing, and even let a banger off inside his fist once.
“I went back there because I was thinking of him. I didn’t dare do it again!”
The hollow had been filled i
“We saw less of each other in recent years. We didn’t need to. I knew he was there, he knew I was there, that was enough. He would have set off straight away if I’d called for help at 2 o’clock in the morning, and vice versa.”
God preserve me from needing someone like you at 2 o’clock in the morning. Blin had become critical of this friendship which had never really been one. It had all become too much one evening in a billiards room on the Avenue du Maine when Didier had spent the evening watching with delight as a group of beginners missed their shots. Thierry realized, too late, that Didier found other people’s mediocrity reassuring. There was nothing to rival pleasure like that.
“Ah, do you know Anne?”
Didier used her arrival as an opportunity to slip away and not come back. Paul found himself trapped with the formidable Anne Ponceau, who looked more spruce than ever despite a tendency to portliness which was now irreversible. Ash-blond hair, hazel eyes, and still the careful poise in her voice. Nadine had introduced her to Thierry as her elective sister. They were bound to get on, except for the fact that Thierry was not the family-orientated type. Anne, you came . . . You didn’t seem to think very highly of me. Maybe I was wrong, maybe I mistook your discretion for indifference. Anne had a lot going for her and just one flaw: psychoanalysis. She was one of those people who thinks that, just because they themselves have being lying on an analyst’s couch for years, they can see into other people’s souls.
“He never recovered from his father’s death. Thierry always suffered from a fear of being abandoned, a lack of protection. For a long time he was looking for a father figure he could identify with.”
What he had never been able to bear about Anne was the way she turned everyone into a child or, even worse, saw them as an interesting object of observation, which made her a sort of entomologist, passionate about these theories she put forward with such conviction. She could spend the whole of a dinner party, or sometimes even a weekend in the country, trying to find psychoanalytical explanations for the events of the day, from a plane crash to a mislaid pot of mustard. She could represent those around her as kindly little creatures betrayed by their merciless subconscious. Blin had enjoyed dropping deliberate Freudian slips into conversation – “fighting a liar” instead of “lighting a fire” – to see her go into a state of spontaneous combustion; the ensuing logorrhoea would have been worthy of a minor publication in the author’s name. Was this not the same Anne who had said one evening during the course of a sentence: “My mother was a Catholic, my other father a Protestant.”
“And, actually, Thierry’s mother never got over her husband’s death. Nothing was ever the same again.”
Interesting hypothesis. Anne had never ventured to say this in front of Blin himself. A strange situation having his own family dramas summarized when he himself had never been aware of them. Losing his father had been painful, but he had never felt that it had broken them, either himself or his mother.
“What matters is whether that can shed any light on his disappearance,” said Paul.
“There must be a connection. Thierry was afraid of the process of analysis. It would probably have helped him get through this crisis.”
Anne had tried more than once to urge him towards the psychoanalyst’s couch; indefatigable preaching which was truly in keeping with her personality. I went about it another way, Anne. It’s still too early to say whether I’ve got myself right, but at least I’ve tried. Paul would like to have seen the look on her face if he admitted it all to her now, that he had changed his face, his name, his job, his home, his girlfriend, that he had organized his disappearance and that he was there now, with her, listening to her making loud pronouncements like “Thierry was afraid of the process of analysis.” Anne had absolutely no scruples about interfering with other people’s lives or guessing what might become of them. She used a basic framework of ideas she had read about, and cobbled them together into the cast-iron certainties she could use till the end of her days. Trying to find predictable aspects in everyone was to deny the irrational element in each of them, the hint of poetry, absurdity and free will. Some kinds of madness were beyond any logic, and most – like Thierry Blin’s – were not recorded in the great books on pathology.
Between sips of this drink in his own memory – a rather strong punch – Paul stopped to look at certain faces. With each pair of eyes, each turn of a head, each new arrival, he expected to be struck down by the wide-eyed astonishment of someone recognising Blin’s shadow behind his features.
If they talked about him enough, they would end up seeing him everywhere.
In the meantime, he was passing the test with flying colours. His moment of truth had not yet come. Now that Anne had thrown herself into the arms of one of Nadine’s friends – Mireyo, or some odd-sounding name like that, Blin had hardly known her – he could at last, slowly and methodically, tot up those who had bothered to get here to remember him.
He spotted, amongst others, the young framer who had taken over his boutique, standing talking to Mme Combes and various other customers from The Blue Frame. Paul was almost touched that they were there, especially the doctor, a kind, wealthy, brilliant man, who was extraordinarily polite and who had never actually paid for the display cabinet Blin had made him for his symposium on occupational medicine. Outside this little group, which was not mingling with the others, there was Roger, the man who had introduced him to framing at the Louvre. Paul wondered how he had caught wind of this gathering, and went over to him, saying hello as if out of pure courtesy, and held his glass out to clink it against Roger’s. Roger was a real framer, the sort who sees it as an art to which a whole life can be dedicated. He was eloquent only in exercising his profession, the rest of the time he listened shyly, as he did now with Paul Vermeiren. His cousin Clément was there too, one of the last vestiges of a rather rootless family. Blin had never enjoyed a grandmother’s jam or had rows with country cousins. Christmas dinner had never involved more than four people. Clément, the son of his mother’s only brother, had lived in Vietnam until he was eighteen, then in Djibouti until the age of thirty-five; they had not spoken more than three times since his return. Paul noticed the completely unwarranted presence of Jacques and Céline, a couple who had been neighbours on the Rue de la Convention. Thierry had left them, and that simple word gave some sort of impact to the fact that they had known him; the little whiff of heresy made the trip worthwhile. Had Blin fallen into a crevasse? Had Blin been kidnapped, exiled, sequestered by some sect, bumped off by poker players with Mafia connections? Had Blin started a new life somewhere else? What cruel irony: he would live on in their memories because he had stepped out of their world with no explanation. Becoming a minor news item was the best way of ensuring you are not forgotten.
Oh look, the barber . . . the barber’s come . . .
How could Paul have known that the barber was not the sort to bear a grudge. Once, when he had been walking past The Blue Frame, Blin had sworn at him for throwing his cigarette packet on the ground. He had flown into a blind fury: people who did that sort of thing were inferior beings with absolutely no thought for life or other people; they were condemned to remain puerile till their dying day, because they had a long way to go – too far – to change. The man had listened, speechless, and had made apologies which Blin, in his rage, had not wanted to hear. His anger swiftly turned to embarrassment; he never went back to the man’s salon. Now, the barber was there with this drink to Blin in his hand. Paul could not resist the urge to go and talk to him.
“Hello, I’m Paul Vermeiren, I was a customer at Thierry Blin’s shop but I don’t live round there.”
“Jean-Pierre Maraud, we were colleagues. Well, what I mean is, we both had businesses in the same area.”
He took a handful of peanuts and swallowed them all in one go.
?
“I have a hairdressing salon.”
“I don’t have much call for them,” he said, stroking his smooth head.
Maraud was not particularly intrigued by Paul and was trying to listen to anecdotes from Mme Combes nearby.
“Did you cut his hair?” Paul persisted.
“A long time ago, yes, but there was a little incident, a stupid thing: I threw some paper down in the street and he never spoke to me again.”
“He probably regretted it, you know. Perhaps he didn’t dare go past your salon because he felt guilty.”
“He was right to get so angry. It made me wonder why I chucked things on the ground. Was it because I didn’t have any sense of the common good and I couldn’t care less about keeping the streets clean? Was it because I could picture some dustbin man coming along behind me? Or just because it was forbidden here, wasn’t that a good enough reason to allow myself to? I didn’t manage to allocate myself to one of those categories, but I was frightened of ending up in any of them, and that taught me a hell of lesson. I had, as he said at the time, a long way to go. That business with the paper on the ground acted as a trigger, a moment of awareness. Now, when I see someone throwing something away in the street, I feel sorry for them. I rate respect for the community pretty highly now. Thanks to Thierry Blin.”
Paul Vermeiren suddenly felt very hot; the drink was going to his head. He would have liked to chat to all of them, to hear them talk about Blin, to learn a bit about him. All of a sudden he recognized a voice and turned round in disbelief. A little voice from the past, with an unforgettable ring to it which he had forgotten. He tried to find where it was coming from. She was tiny, that girl. A voice that matched her size perfectly. And her little face was always slightly screwed up, her way of coming over all sweet and innocent.
. . . Agnès?
Are you here, Agnès?
Her hair had faded a bit, but she had stayed faithful to the Louise Brooks bob. So like a little imp popping out of a box. Even when she was only sixteen she just wanted to have children and look after them, she even wanted to look after other people’s, she wanted them all over the house. Blin had not yet known how to make them. Agnès had initiated him, barely older than him but so much more at home with all that. Her parents were divorced and she lived with her mother, who was the Blins’ neighbour. One day Thierry and Agnès had taken the train to go and spend the weekend with her father in Rueil-Malmaison. They wanted to play lovers like in the films, all candlelight and fishnet stockings, fake champagne and genuine fear, all the elements of a fiasco in one go. They didn’t actually make love until a week later, with no preamble or decorum, in the bedroom she had had since she was little, just a few yards from the sitting room where her mother was watching an episode of Dallas. Their relationship did not even make one complete revolution round the sun. How could he have guessed that, twenty years later, she would still attach any importance to it. There was a tall man with her, attentive and discreet. She had always dreamed of a giant to give their children a chance of being average. Slightly self-conscious, they were talking to one another to give an impression of belonging. They knew no one and no one knew them. Vermeiren went over.