Honeymoon Read online

  A woman's voice told me "we haven't seen Monsieur Rigaud for a long time." Could I write to him? "If you like, Monsieur. I can't promise he'll get it." So I asked her for the address of KLÉBER 83–85. It was an apartment block in the Rue Spontini. Write to him? But words of condolence didn't seem to me to be right either for Ingrid or for him.

  I began to travel. The memory of them faded. I had only met them in passing, her and Rigaud, and we had had only a superficial relationship. It was three years after Ingrid's suicide, one summer night, in Paris where I was on my own – in transit, more precisely: I was just back from Oceania and I was to leave for Rio de Janeiro a few days later – that I once again felt the urge to phone KLÉBER 83–85. I remember that I went into a big hotel in the Rue de Rivoli to make the call. Before giving the operator the number I paced up and down the lobby preparing what I was going to say to Rigaud. I was afraid of becoming speechless with stage fright. But on that occasion, no one answered.

  And the years followed one another, and the journeys, and the documentaries screened at the Salle Pleyel and elsewhere, without my mind being particularly occupied by Ingrid and Rigaud. The evening when I had tried one last time to phone Rigaud was a summer evening like this one: the same heat, and a sense of strangeness and solitude, but so diluted in comparison with the feeling I now have … It was no more than the impression of time standing still that a traveller has between two planes. Cavanaugh and Wetzel were to join me a few days later and we were all three going to leave for Rio. Life was still humming with movement and glorious projects.

  •

  Just now, before I went back to the hotel, I was surprised to see that the façade of the former Colonial Museum and the fountains in the square were illuminated. Two tourist coaches were parked at the start of the Boulevard Soult. Did the zoo stay open at night just before the fourteenth of July? What on earth could bring tourists to this district at nine in the evening?

  I wondered whether Annette would be entertaining all our friends next week, as we did every year on the fourteenth of July, on our big terrace in the Cité Véron. I was almost sure she would: she would need people round her, because of my disappearance. And Cavanaugh would certainly encourage her not to give up this custom.

  I walked along the Boulevard Soult. The apartment blocks were silhouetted against the light. Occasionally there was a big patch of sunlight on one of their façades. I noticed some too, from time to time, on the pavements. These contrasts of light and shade in the setting sun, this heat and this deserted boulevard … Casablanca. Yes, I was walking down one of those broad avenues in Casablanca. Night fell. The din of the televisions reached me through the open windows. Once again, it was Paris. I went into a phone box and looked in the book for the name: Rigaud. A whole column of Rigauds with their Christian names. But I couldn't remember his.

  And yet I felt certain that Rigaud was still alive, somewhere in one of these suburban districts. How many men and women who you imagine are dead or have disappeared live in these apartment blocks that mark the outskirts of Paris … I had already spotted two or three, at the Porte Dorée, with a reflection of their past on their face. They could tell you a long story, but they will remain silent to the end, and they are completely indifferent to the fact that the world has forgotten them.

  •

  In my room at the Dodds Hotel, I was thinking that all summers are alike. The June rains, the dog days, the evenings of the fourteenth of July when we entertained our friends, Annette and I, on the terrace in the Cité Véron … But the summer when I met Ingrid and Rigaud was truly of another kind. There had still been lightness in the air.

  When was the turning point in my life, after which summers suddenly seemed to me to be different from the ones I had known up to then? It would be difficult to decide. No precise frontier. The summer of Ingrid's suicide in Milan? I hadn't thought it any different from all the others. It's only now, remembering the deserted, sunbaked streets and the stifling heat in the yellow taxi, that I experience in retrospect the same malaise as I do today in Paris in July.

  For a long time – and this particular time with greater force than usual – summer has been a season that gives me a sense of emptiness and absence, and takes me back to the past. Is it the too-harsh light, the silence of the streets, those contrasts of the shade and the setting sun, the other evening, on the façades of the buildings in the Boulevard Soult? The past and the present merge in my mind through a phenomenon of superimposition. That's where the malaise must come from. It's a malaise that I don't only feel in a state of solitude, as today, but at all our fourteenth of July parties, on the terrace in the Cité Véron. I can still hear Wetzel or Cavanaugh saying to me: "What is it, Jean, is something the matter? You ought to have a glass of champagne …" or Annette would press herself against me, stroke my lips with her finger, and whisper in my ear with her Danish accent: "What are you thinking about, Jean not? Tell me you still love me?" And I can hear bursts of laughter around us, the murmur of conversation, music.

  •

  That summer the malaise didn't exist, nor did this strange superimposition of the past on the present. I was twenty. I was returning from Vienna by train, and I'd got off at Saint-Raphaël. Nine in the morning. I wanted to get a bus to Saint-Tropez. Searching one of my jacket pockets, I discovered that all my remaining money had been stolen: three hundred francs. I immediately decided not to ask myself any questions about my future. It was a fine morning, and the heat was as oppressive as it is today, but in those days that didn't bother me.

  I had stationed myself just outside Saint-Raphaël, hoping to hitch a lift along the coast road. I waited about half an hour and then a black car stopped. The first thing that struck me was that it was the woman who was driving, and the man was sitting at the back. She leaned out of the open window. She was wearing sunglasses.

  "Where are you making for?"

  "Saint-Tropez."

  She nodded, as a sign that I could get in.

  They didn't say a word. I tried to think of something to say, to get the conversation going.

  "Are you on holiday?"

  "Yes, yes …"

  She had answered absent-mindedly. He, on the back seat, was studying a map that was much bigger than the Michelin maps. I could see him clearly, in the rear-view mirror.

  "We're just coming to Les Issambres."

  She looked at the signs on the side of the road. Then she turned her face to me:

  "Would you mind if we stopped for a moment at Les Issambres?"

  She said this quite naturally, as if we'd known each other for a long time.

  "We'll stop, but then we'll go on to Saint-Tropez," he told me with a smile.

  He had folded his map and put it down beside him on the seat. I reckoned they were both about thirty-five. She was dark, and had light eyes. He had short hair brushed back, a massive face and a slightly squashed nose. He was wearing a suede jacket.

  "This must be it … The chap's waiting for us …"

  He leaned over towards her and put his hand on her shoulder. A man in a summer suit, carrying a heavy black briefcase, was pacing up and down in front of the iron gate outside a villa. She parked the car on the pavement, a few metres away from the gate.

  "We'll only be a moment," she said. "Can you wait for us in the car?"

  He got out first, and went and opened the door for her. When she was out, he shut the door himself. Then he put his head through the open window.

  "If you get bored, you can have a cigarette … There's a packet in the glove compartment …"

  They walked up to the man with the briefcase. I noticed that he had a slight limp, but he held himself very straight, and put his arm round her shoulder with a protective gesture. They' shook hands with the man with the briefcase, who opened the gate and let them precede him.

  •

  Looking for the packet of cigarettes in the glove compartment, I knocked a passport out of it. Before I put it back, I opened it: I couldn't say wheth
er I did so automatically or whether I was prompted by simple curiosity. A French passport in the name of Ingrid Teyrsen, married name Rigaud. What surprised me was that she had been born in Austria, in Vienna, the town I'd been living in for a few months. I lit a cigarette, but the very first puff made me feel sick. I had spent a sleepless night in the train, and I hadn't eaten since lunch the previous day.

  I didn't get out of the car. I tried to ward off my exhaustion, but every now and then I fell into a kind of doze. I heard the murmur of a conversation and opened my eyes: they were standing near the car with the man with the black briefcase. They shook hands, and he strode off across the avenue.

  I opened the door and got out of the car.

  "Wouldn't you like to sit in front?" I asked the man.

  "No … no … I have to sit in the back because of my leg … I still can't quite bend it … An old injury to my knee …"

  It was almost as if he was trying to reassure me. He smiled at me. Was he the Rigaud mentioned in the passport?

  "You can get in," she said to me with a charming frown.

  She opened the glove compartment and took a cigarette. She drove off with a slight jerk. He was sitting sideways on the back seat, with one of his legs resting on it.

  •

  She drove slowly, and I had difficulty in keeping my eyes open.

  "Are you on holiday?" she asked me.

  I was afraid they would ask me other, more precise questions: What's your address? Are you a student?

  "Not really on holiday," I said. "I'm not quite sure whether I'll stay here."

  "We live in a little house near Pampelonne beach," she told me. "But we're looking for something else to rent … While you were waiting for us we were visiting a villa … It's a pity … I find it too big …"

  Behind us, he remained silent. He was massaging his knee with one hand.

  "What I liked was the name: Les Issambres … Don't you think that's a nice name?"

  And she looked at me from behind her sunglasses.

  •

  At the entrance to Saint-Tropez we turned right and took the road along the beaches.

  "From here on, I always take the wrong road," she said.

  "You go straight on."

  He spoke in a low voice, with a slight Paris accent, which gave me the idea of asking them whether they lived in Paris.

  "Yes, but we may come and live here for good," she said.

  "And you, do you live in Paris?"

  I turned round towards him. His leg was still lying across the seat. I had the impression that he was giving me an ironical look.

  "Yes. I live in Paris."

  "With your parents?"

  "No."

  "Leave him alone," she said. "We aren't the police."

  The sea appeared in the background, slightly below the road, beyond an expanse of vines and pines.

  "You've gone too far again," he said. "You should have turned left."

  She made a U-turn, and only just avoided a car coming in the opposite direction.

  "Aren't you frightened?" he asked me. "Ingrid is a very bad driver. In a few days, when my leg's better, I'll be able to drive again."

  We had turned into a little road at the beginning of which was a signpost: TAHITI-MOOREA.

  "Have you got a driving licence?" she asked me.

  "Yes."

  "Then you can drive instead of me. It'd be wiser."

  She stopped at a crossroads, and I was getting ready to take her place at the wheel when she said:

  "No … no … Not right away … Later …"

  "It's on the left," he told her.

  And he pointed to another signpost: TAHITI-MOOREA

  •

  The road was now nothing but a track bordered by reeds. We had driven round a wall with a navy-blue door in it. She stopped the car outside the door.

  "I'd rather go home by the beach," he said.

  We continued along the reed track and came to a piece of ground used as a car park for the Moo rea restaurant. We parked the car and then crossed the deserted terrace of the restaurant. We were on the beach.

  "It's a bit farther on," he said. "We can walk there …" She had removed her espadrilles and taken his arm. He still limped, but in a less pronounced fashion than before. "There's no one on the beach yet," she said to me. "This is the time of day I like best."

  The property was separated from the beach by a wire fence with holes in it. We slid through one of the holes. About fifty metres farther on there was a bungalow which reminded me of the motels on American expressways. It was in the shade of a little pinewood.

  "The main villa is over there," he told me.

  In the background I could make out, through the pines, a big, white one-storey building in the Moorish or Spanish style, which surrounded a swimming pool with blue mosaics. Someone was bathing in the pool.

  "The owners live there," he told me. "We rented their gardener's house from them."

  •

  She came out of the bungalow in a sky-blue swimming costume. We had waited for her, he and I, sitting on the deck chairs in front of the sliding glass doors.

  "You look tired," he said. "You can rest here. We're going down to the beach … just in front …"

  She looked at me in silence, from behind her dark glasses. Then she said:

  "You ought to have a siesta."

  And she pointed to a big pneumatic mattress at the foot of a clump of pines by the side of the bungalow.

  I was lying on the mattress, staring at the sky and the top of the pines. I could hear shouts coming from the swimming pool, down below, and the sound of people diving. Above me, between the branches, the play of sun and shade. I let myself sink into a delightful torpor. Remembering it now, it seems to me that that was one of the rare moments in my life when I experienced a sense of well-being that I could even call Happiness. In that semi-somnolent state, occasionally interrupted by a shaft of sunlight piercing the shade of the pines and dazzling me, I considered it perfectly natural that they had taken me home with them, as if we had known each other for a long time. In any case, I had no choice. I'd just have to wait and see how things would go. I finally fell asleep.

  I could hear them talking by my side, but I couldn't open my eyes. An orange light was filtering through my eyelids. I felt the pressure of a hand on my shoulder.

  "Well? Have a good sleep?"

  I sat up abruptly. He was wearing linen trousers, a black polo-neck, and sunglasses. And she, a bath robe. Her hair was wet. She must have just been bathing.

  "It's nearly three o'clock," he said. "Will you have lunch with us?"

  "I don't want to impose upon you."

  I was still half asleep.

  "But you won't be imposing upon us in the least … Will he, Ingrid?"

  "Not in the least."

  She smiled, and looked intently at me with her pale blue or grey eyes.

  We walked along the beach to the terrace of the Moo rea restaurant. Most of the tables were empty. We sat down at the one that was protected from the sun by a green sun umbrella. A man with the physique of a former ski instructor came to take our order.

  "The usual," she said. "For three."

  •

  The sun enveloped the beach, the sea, and the Moorea terrace in a sheet of silence. And against this background of silence, the slightest sound stood out with unusual acuity: the voices of a group of people in swimming costumes at a table some way away from ours, whose conversation we could follow as if they were sitting next to us; the drone of a Chriscraft gliding over the calm sea and from time to time letting itself float, its engine switched off. And then we heard the laughter and shouts of the people on board.

  "If I understand rightly," he said to me, "you weren't making for anywhere in particular."

  'No."

  "You were just drifting …"

  Not the slightest irony in his voice. On the contrary, I detected fellow-feeling in it.

  "But unfortunately, I have t
o get back to Paris as soon as possible for my work."

  "What kind of work?"

  This time it was she who was questioning me, her pale eyes still fixed on me.

  "I write articles for geographical magazines …"

  I was only half lying. I had written a long article on the journalist and explorer Henry M. Stanley and sent it to a travel magazine, but I still didn't know whether it would be published.

  "And you've just come back from a trip?" he asked.

  "Yes. From Austria. Vienna."

  I was hoping to steer the conversation round to Vienna. She ought to know it well, seeing that she had been born there. To my great astonishment, she didn't react.

  "It's a very beautiful city, Vienna."

  It was no use my insisting. Vienna didn't mean a thing to her.

  "And you, do you work in Paris?"

  "I've retired," he answered with a smile, but in an abrupt tone which discouraged further questions.

  "I'm going to bathe. Will you wait here for me?"

  She stood up and took off her white bath robe. I watched her in the heat haze. She crossed the beach, then walked into the sea, and when the water came up to her waist she began to swim on her back.

  We met again in the shade of the pines by the bungalow. We played a game of cards they taught me whose rules were very simple. That was the only time in my life that I have played cards. And then we got to the end of the afternoon.

  "I'm going to do a bit of shopping," she said.

  He turned towards me:

  "Could you go with her? It'd be wiser … She hasn't got a driving licence … I didn't want to tell you, earlier … You might have been afraid we'd be stopped on the Saint-Raphaël road …"

  He gave a short little laugh.

  "I'm not afraid of anything," I told him.

  "You're right … Nor were we, either, at your age …" "But we're still not afraid of anything," she said, raising her index finger.

  •

  I always kept my passport and driving licence in the inside pocket of my jacket. I sat at the wheel. I had trouble in moving off and getting out of the Moorea car park, because I hadn't driven for some time.