Day breaks and the photo is illuminated once again. Marie-Thérèse
Réveillé and Carla Devade look off to the left, at an object beyond Henric’s
muscular shoulders. There is recognition or acceptance in Carla’s gaze: that
much is clear from her half-smile and gentle eyes. Marie-Thérèse, however, has a
penetrating gaze: her lips are slightly open, as if she were having difficulty
breathing, and her eyes are trying to fix on (trying, unsuccessfully, to
nail
) the object of her attention, which is presumably moving. Both
women are looking in the same direction, but it’s clear that they have quite
different emotional reactions to whatever it is they are seeing. Carla’s
gentleness may be conditioned by ignorance. Marie-Thérèse’s insecurity, her
defensive yet inquisitorial glare, may result from the sudden stripping away of
various layers of experience.
Any moment now, J.-J. Goux might start to cry. The voice that warned
him of the devil’s presence is still ringing, though faintly, in his ears. He is
not, however, looking to the left, at the object that has attracted the women’s
attention, but directly at the camera, and an infinitesimal smile is creeping
over his lips, a would-be ironic smile confined, for the moment, to the safer
domain of placidity.
When night falls over the photograph again, J.-J. Goux will head
straight for his apartment, make himself a sandwich, watch television for
exactly fifteen minutes, not one more, then sit in an armchair in the living
room and call Philippe Sollers. The phone will ring five times and J.-J. will
hang up slowly, holding the receiver in his right hand, raising his left hand to
his lips, and touching them with two fingers, as if to check that he’s still
there, that the person there is
him
, in a living room that’s not too
big, not too small, crowded with books, and dark.
As for Carla Devade, having lost her acquiescent smile, she’ll call
Marie-Thérèse Réveillé, who will pick up the phone after three rings. In a
roundabout way, they’ll talk about things they don’t really want to talk about
at all, and arrange to meet in three days’ time at a café on Rue Galande.
Tonight Marie-Thérèse will go out on her own, with nowhere in particular to go,
and Carla will shut herself in her room as soon as she hears the sound of Marc
Devade’s key sliding into the lock. But for now nothing tragic will happen. Marc
Devade will read an essay by a Bulgarian linguist; Guyotat will go to see a film
by Jacques Rivette; Julia Kristeva will stay up late reading; Philippe Sollers
will stay up late writing, and he and his wife will barely exchange a few words,
shut away in their respective studies; Jacques Henric will sit down at his
typewriter but nothing will occur to him, so after twenty minutes he’ll put on
his leather jacket and his boots and go down to the underground parking garage
and look for his Honda in the dark; for some reason the lights in the parking
lot don’t seem to be working, but Henric can remember where he left his bike, so
he walks in the dark, in the belly of that whale-like parking lot, without fear
or apprehension of any kind, until about halfway there he hears an unusual noise
(not a knocking in the pipes or the noise of a car door opening or closing) and
he stops, without really understanding why, and listens, but the noise is not
repeated, and now the silence is absolute.
And then the night ends (or a small part of the night, at least,
a manageable part) and light wraps the photo like a bandage on fire, and there
he is again, Pierre Guyotat, almost a familiar presence now, with his powerful,
shiny bald head and his leather jacket, the jacket of an anarchist or a
commissar from the Spanish Civil War, and his sidelong gaze, veering off to the
right, as if into the space behind the photographer, as if directed at someone
near or at the bar, perhaps, standing or sitting on a stool, someone whose back
is turned to Guyotat and whose face would be invisible to him unless, and this
is not unlikely, there is a mirror behind the bar. It may be a woman. A young
woman, maybe. Guyotat looks at her reflection in the mirror and looks at the
back of her neck. Guyotat’s gaze, however, is far less intense than the gaze of
this woman, which is plumbing an abyss. Here we can reasonably conclude that,
while Guyotat is looking at a stranger, Marie-Thérèse and Carla are looking at a
man they know, although, as is usually (or, in fact, inevitably) the case, their
perceptions of him are entirely different.
Let’s call these two beyond the frame X and Z. X is the woman at the
bar. Z is the man who is known to Marie-Thérèse and Carla. They don’t know him
very well, of course. From Carla’s gaze (which is not only gentle but
protective) it could be inferred that he is young, although from Marie-Thérèse’s
gaze it could also be inferred that he is a potentially dangerous individual.
Who else knows Z? No one, or at least there is nothing to suggest that his
presence is of any concern to the others. Maybe he’s a young writer who at some
stage has tried to get his work published in
Tel Quel
; maybe he’s a
young journalist from South America — no, from Central America — who at some
point tried to write an article about the group. He may well be an ambitious
young man. If he’s a Central American in Paris, as well as ambitious, he may
well be bitter. Of the people sitting around the table, he knows only
Marie-Thérèse, Carla, Sollers and Marc Devade. Let’s say he once visited the
Tel Quel
office and was introduced to those four (he also once
shook hands with Marcelin Pleynet, but Pleynet’s not in the photo). He has never
seen the others in his life, or only (in the cases of Guyotat and Jacques
Henric) in author photos. So we can imagine the young Central American, hungry
and bitter, in the
Tel Quel
office, and we can imagine Philippe Sollers
and Marc Devade, wavering between puzzlement and indifference as they listen to
him, and we can even imagine that Carla Devade is there by pure chance; she has
come to meet her husband, she has brought some papers that Marc left behind on
his desk, she’s there because she couldn’t stand being alone in the apartment a
minute longer, etc. What we can’t imagine (or justify) in any way at all is
Marie-Thérèse’s presence in the office. She is Guyotat’s partner, she doesn’t
work for
Tel Quel
and she has no reason to be there. And yet there she
is and that is where she meets the young Central American. Is she there on that
day because of Carla Devade? Has Carla arranged to meet Marie-Thérèse at the
office because she knows that Marc will not be coming home with her? Or has
Marie-Thérèse come to meet someone else? Let’s return, discreetly, to the
afternoon when the Central American came to the office on Rue Jacob to pay his
respects.
It’s the end of the working day. The secretary has already gone home,
and when the bell rings it’s Marc Devade who opens the door and lets the visitor
in without meeting his eye. The Central American crosses the threshold and
follows Marc Devade to an office at the end of the corridor. He leaves a trail
of drops on the wooden floor behind him, although it stopped raining quite some
time ago. Devade is, of course, oblivious to this detail; he walks ahead talking
about something or other — the weather, money, chores — with that elegance that
only certain Frenchmen seem to possess. In the office, which is spacious, and
contains a desk, several chairs, two armchairs, and shelves full of books and
magazines, Sollers is waiting, and as soon as the introductions are over the
Central American hails him as a genius, one of the century’s most brilliant
minds, a compliment that would be par for the course in certain tropical nations
on the far side of the Atlantic but which, in the
Tel Quel
office and
the ears of Philippe Sollers, verges on the preposterous. In fact, as soon as
the Central American makes his declaration, Sollers catches Devade’s eye and
both of them are wondering whether they’ve let a madman in. Deep down, however,
Sollers is eighty per cent in agreement with the Central American’s appraisal,
so once he has set aside the idea that the visitor might be mocking him, the
conversation proceeds in an amicable fashion, at least for a start. The Central
American speaks of Julia Kristeva (and winks at Sollers as he mentions that
eminent Bulgarian), he speaks of Marcelin Pleynet (whom he has already met), and
of Denis Roche (whose work he claims to be translating). Devade listens to him
with a slightly wry smile. Sollers listens, nodding from time to time, his
boredom increasing with every passing second. Suddenly, a sound of steps in the
corridor. The door opens. Carla Devade appears, wearing tight corduroy trousers,
flat shoes and a disconsolate smile on her pretty Mediterranean face. Marc
Devade gets up from his chair; for a moment the couple whisper questions and
answers. The Central American has fallen silent; Sollers is mechanically
flipping through an English magazine. Then Carla and Marc walk across the room
(Carla taking tentative little steps, holding her husband’s arm), the Central
American stands up, is introduced, and obsequiously greets the newcomer. The
conversation is immediately resumed, but the Central American’s chatter veers
off in a new direction, unfortunately for him (he changes the subject from
literature to the matchless beauty and grace of French women), at which point
Sollers completely loses interest. Shortly afterward, the visit is brought to a
close: Sollers looks at his watch, says it’s late; Devade shows the Central
American to the door, shakes his hand, and the visitor, instead of waiting for
the elevator, rushes down the stairs. On the second-floor landing he runs into
Marie-Thérèse Réveillé. The Central American is talking to himself in Spanish,
not under his breath but out loud. As their paths cross, Marie-Thérèse notices a
fierce look in his eyes. They bump into each other. Both apologize. They look at
each other again (and this is surprising, the way their eyes meet again
after
the apology), and what she sees, beneath the expedient mask
of bitterness, is a well of unbearable horror and fear.
So the Central American, Z, is there in the café when the photo is
taken, and Carla and Marie-Thérèse have recognized him, they’ve remembered him;
perhaps he has just arrived, perhaps he walked past the table at which the group
is sitting and greeted them, but except for the two women, they had no idea who
he was; this happens quite often, of course, but it’s something that the Central
American still can’t accept with equanimity. There he is, to the left of the
group, with some Central American friends, or waiting for them, maybe, and deep
within him — nourished by affronts and grudges, fuelled by bitterness and the
chill of the City of Light — there’s a seething. His appearance, however, is
equivocal: it makes Carla Devade feel like a protective older sister or a
missionary nun in Africa, but it catches at Marie-Thérèse Réveillé like barbed
wire and triggers a vague erotic longing.
And then night falls again and the photo empties out or disappears
under a scribble of lines entirely traced by the night’s mechanism, and Sollers
is writing in his study, and Kristeva is writing in the study next door,
soundproofed studies so they can’t hear each other typing, for example, or
getting up to consult a book, or coughing or talking to themselves, and Carla
and Marc Devade are leaving a cinema (they’ve been to a film by Rivette), not
talking to each other, although, a couple of times, Marc and then Carla, who’s
more distracted, greet people they know, and J.-J. Goux is preparing his dinner,
a frugal dinner consisting of bread, pâté, cheese and a glass of wine, and
Guyotat is undressing Marie-Thérèse Réveillé and throwing her onto the sofa with
a violent thrust that Marie-Thérèse intercepts in midair as if she were catching
a butterfly of lucidity in a net of lucidity, and Henric is leaving his
apartment, going down to the parking lot and he stops again as the lights go
out, first the ones near the metal roller gate that opens onto the street, and
then the others, till there is only the light down at the back, flickering
helplessly, illuminating his multicolored Honda, and then it fails as well. And
it occurs to Henric that his motorbike is like an Assyrian god, but for the
moment his legs refuse to walk on into the darkness, and Marie-Thérèse shuts her
eyes and opens her legs, one foot on the sofa, the other on the carpet, while
Guyotat pushes into her, the panties still around her thighs, and calls her his
little whore, his little bitch, and asks her what she did all day, what happened
to her, what streets she wandered down, and J.-J. Goux is sitting at the table
and spreading pâté on a piece of bread and lifting it to his mouth and chewing,
first on the right side, then on the left, unhurriedly, with a book by Robert
Pinget open beside him at page two and the television switched off but the
screen reflecting his image, a man on his own with his mouth closed and his
cheeks full, looking thoughtful and absent, and Carla Devade and Marc Devade are
making love, Carla on top, illuminated only by the light in the corridor, a
light they usually leave on, and Carla is groaning and trying not to look at her
husband’s face, his blond hair in a mess now, his light eyes, his broad and
placid face, his delicate, elegant hands, devoid of the fire she’s longing for,
ineffectually holding her hips, as if he were trying to keep her there with him,
but he has no real sense of what she might be fleeing from or what her flight
might mean, a flight that goes on and on like torture, and Kristeva and Sollers
are going to bed, first her, she has to lecture early the next day, then him,
and both of them take books that they will leave on their bedside tables when
sleep comes to close their eyes, and Philippe Sollers will dream that he is
walking along a beach in Brittany with a scientist who has discovered a way to
destroy the world; they will be walking westward along this long, deserted
beach, bounded by rocks and black cliffs, and suddenly Sollers will realize that
the scientist (who is talking and explaining) is himself and that the man
walking beside him is a murderer; this will dawn on him when he looks down at
the wet sand (with its soup-like consistency) and the crabs skittering away to
hide and the prints the two of them are leaving on the beach (there is a certain
logic to this: identifying the murderer by his footprints), and Julia Kristeva
will dream of a little village in Germany where years ago she participated in a
seminar, and she’ll see the streets of the village, clean and empty, and sit
down in a square that’s tiny but full of plants and trees, and close her eyes
and listen to the distant cheeping of a single bird and wonder if the bird is in
a cage or free, and she’ll feel a breeze on her neck and her face, neither cold
nor warm, a perfect breeze, perfumed with lavender and orange blossom, and then
she’ll remember her seminar and look at her watch, but it will have stopped.