French Rhapsody Read online

  ‘Yes, I understand,’ she said, having got a grip on herself. ‘Don’t worry, Aurore. We’ll just wait for the sun to come out again and then he’s all yours.’

  ‘Aurore!’ JBM called after her. ‘I don’t know how long we’re going to be pissing around for. Can I put you in charge for this morning? You’ve got everything with you, haven’t you?’

  ‘Everything, yes.’

  ‘England, Russia?’

  ‘Everything, yes,’ she repeated.

  ‘Perfect. You can get started then, while I’m … play-acting on a station platform,’ he moaned, heading back into position.

  A quarter of an hour later, the light still wasn’t good and they agreed to take a break. Sitting cross-legged at the foot of a pillar, Aurore had spread out in front of her two folders, three iPhones and two tablets and, stopping to put headphones in, had got out pen and paper and begun taking notes while talking to someone in Russian. JBM walked over to her.

  ‘All OK?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ she whispered.

  ‘I’m going to grab a coffee at Le Train Bleu. See you in there.’

  Aurore nodded. The photographer came and sat next to Domitile, who was scrolling through the shots on the digital screen, and his gaze fell on Aurore.

  ‘She’s pretty. I’d like to take her picture – do you think she’d mind?’

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ Domitile replied without taking her eyes off the screen. ‘Under no circumstances are you to approach her.’

  *

  JBM pushed the revolving door of the famous brasserie and a maître d’ came straight over to greet him.

  ‘I’d like to have a coffee.’

  ‘A coffee …’ the maître d’ echoed. ‘I’ve got the little rooms off to the left here,’ he said, visibly frustrated, ‘but I’m going to find you something better.’

  He clicked his fingers at a passing waiter.

  ‘A coffee on table 12!’ he instructed.

  ‘Thanks,’ mumbled JBM.

  ‘You’re welcome, Monsieur Mazart,’ the maître d’ replied with a smile.

  JBM followed the waiter and sat at an empty table in the main dining room. At the surrounding tables, a couple were finishing their lunch, as were a quartet of businessmen who lowered their voices and did their best to hide the fact they were talking about him. A few tables back, a lone woman sat watching him with a slight smile on her lips. Resting her elbow on the tablecloth, she was cupping her chin in the palm of her hand. It seemed as if she might sit there for ages, contemplating JBM. He was looking back at her when suddenly his expression became one of astonishment. He mouthed, ‘Bérengère?’

  She slowly nodded her head as she made out her name on his lips. JBM pushed back his table, stood up and walked towards her.

  The seven or so metres between them seemed like an ocean of time, a kind of uncertain limbo in which each step counted for several years. By the time he reached her table, thirty years would have flown by. Bérengère, who would for ever be twenty in the mind of JBM, now appeared before him in the body of a fifty-year-old woman.

  ‘Hi, Jean,’ she said as he stood before her. ‘I missed my train,’ she told him with a shrug, as if she felt the need to explain why she was there.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said the waiter, holding a tray. ‘Will you be having your coffee at this table, Monsieur?’

  JBM glanced at Bérengère and wavered for a moment: should he impose upon her, or have his coffee taken to his own table? Bérengère cut in, ‘Put it here, please,’ and JBM sat down.

  The long fringe that used to fall over her eyes had gone, and she now wore her hair in a bob. Her face had changed, of course, but was in many ways still very similar to that of the girl of the 1980s. The veil of years had barely fallen over it, casting a very slight mist over the features she had once had. Those former features kept coming back to superimpose themselves on this new face, as though trying to fit – which they did pretty well, in fact – like geometric fractals seeking an anchor point before the equation is fixed. The look in her eyes was unchanged, with an ironic glint in their depths that seemed to say that life plays some awful tricks on us, and who knows what the future will hold, but it doesn’t really matter after all. Judging by the few words she had spoken, her voice was still the same too – soft, slow, a touch serious. A voice he had not heard in thirty-three years.

  ‘Well, this is a surprise,’ said JBM.

  ‘Yes.’ Bérengère smiled and looked down at her coffee. ‘Life’s full of surprises.’

  ‘You’re still just as beautiful,’ he added after a pause.

  ‘You old charmer,’ she murmured and looked up at him.

  What do you say to the woman you were in love with more than thirty years ago when you bump into her at a train station? A woman you know you’ll only spend a few minutes with, and never see again? It was like drawing a tarot card from a fortune teller, as if life had decided to do you a favour, not by offering a second chance, but by giving you a kind of knowing wink. Bérengère interrupted his thoughts.

  ‘Well done,’ she said, clinking her cup against his, ‘for everything you’ve achieved in the last thirty years. But I always knew you’d do it.’

  ‘Thanks,’ mumbled JBM. ‘How about you? What have you been up to?’

  ‘Not quite as much as you have.’ She smiled. ‘I took over my parents’ hotel.’

  ‘Le Relais de la Clef?’

  ‘You remember the name?’ she asked, taken aback.

  JBM nodded.

  ‘Well, not a lot has changed in the last thirty years. The region is still making wine – the best in the world – the tourists still come and the Romanée-Conti is still just as expensive,’ she laughed, running her hand through her hair.

  JBM laughed along with her, but chose not to mention the memory that was coming back to him. When they spent the weekend there once, one of the winemakers from the prestigious estate that produced the most sought-after wine on the planet had offered each of them a glass, straight out of the vats. Ever since, despite having it offered to him several times, JBM had always politely refused to drink it, coming up with all kinds of excuses – he wanted the scent and taste of Romanée-Conti to remain for ever associated with the memory of Bérengère.

  ‘Your parents …’ JBM asked cautiously.

  ‘My father is no longer with us, and my mother moved to a retirement home in Beaune. What about yours?’

  JBM shook his head.

  ‘Are you married?’ he went on.

  ‘I was … We separated, and he died five years ago.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I know you’re married,’ Bérengère carried on. ‘Do you have kids?’

  ‘Yes.’

  JBM was finding it hard to shake the image of that sunny afternoon on the Romanée-Conti estate from his mind. It was an episode he had hardly ever thought about, but in the space of a few seconds it had come back strongly, almost violently, like a buried fossil brought shiny and whole from the ground. An afternoon in the early 1980s, when they were young and had, as the trite yet very true expression goes, their whole lives ahead of them. And life had flown by, like a letter in the post.

  ‘Girl or boy?’ Bérengère asked when he failed to elaborate.

  ‘Boys,’ said JBM, coming back down to earth. ‘I have two sons. I never had a daughter,’ he added with a note of regret.

  Bérengère lowered her head slightly, still holding his gaze.

  ‘You?’

  ‘I have a daughter.’

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Thirty-three. How old are your sons?’

  ‘Twenty-two and twenty-four.’

  ‘Time flies …’

  ‘Yes,’ murmured JBM. ‘I can’t believe I’m here with you.’

  Bérengère nodded.

  ‘What about Pierre? What’s he up to these days?’ she asked brightly.

  ‘Pierre … passed away last year.’

 
‘I’m so sorry, Jean …’

  ‘It’s fine.’ He smiled sadly and added, ‘I think it would have amused him to see us sitting here together. It’s funny, I was talking about you barely a couple of hours ago – well, not you directly, but the songs.’

  ‘It was a sign,’ said Bérengère.

  ‘Maybe,’ JBM said softly. ‘Maybe if you think about someone hard enough, you might just make them appear.’

  ‘Were you thinking hard about me?’ she asked in mock astonishment.

  JBM smiled back at her, unsure of the most tactful way to reply. In the end he didn’t have to: Bérengère’s phone buzzed as a text message arrived. She turned it over, looked at the message briefly and put it down again as another one came through, swiftly followed by a third.

  ‘You’re in demand,’ remarked JBM.

  Bérengère nodded.

  ‘You and I went to see a film,’ he went on, ‘at an arthouse cinema on Boulevard Saint-Michel, a black and white film which had a scene shot in here, at Le Train Bleu.’

  ‘La Maman et la Putain by Jean Eustache, with Jean-Pierre Léaud, Bernadette Lafont and Françoise Lebrun.’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  He closed his eyes for a few seconds, opened them again and, looking at Bérengère, lifted his finger and began to recite:

  ‘“I like this place a lot. I come here when I’m feeling down. The people here are usually just passing through. It’s like a Murnau film, always going from the city to the country, from day to night; it’s the same here: on the right,”’ said JBM, pointing to the revolving door leading out of the brasserie to the station, ‘“trains, the countryside … On the left,”’ he said, turning towards the windows, ‘“the city …”’

  He stopped talking.

  ‘God,’ Bérengère muttered solemnly, shaking her head. ‘What an amazing memory … Please tell me you’ve seen it again since?’

  ‘No, never,’ JBM replied almost sadly.

  She closed her eyes and opened them again to look at her watch.

  ‘I have to go. My train’s already here.’

  ‘I’ll walk with you.’

  ‘The light’s fantastic,’ said the photographer.

  ‘We wanted it, we got it,’ Domitile chipped in from behind the test screen.

  ‘Head up, thank you. That’s good. You seem a bit more tense than earlier,’ the photographer remarked.

  ‘Relax, JBM. You’re terrific, imperial,’ boomed Domitile.

  ‘The Emperor died on St Helena, Domitile, and he didn’t die of poisoning, as some people say. He died of boredom,’ replied JBM, holding his pose.

  ‘Well, that won’t happen to you,’ retorted Domitile. ‘Look up a bit – perfect!’

  Even more than the emotions that had been churned up by seeing Bérengère again – emotions he couldn’t share with anybody – something about this brief encounter was niggling him, as if he had missed something.

  Bérengère

  It’s easy to forget people, faces, names. I don’t have a clear picture of Alain, for example, the guitarist in our band, who was studying medicine and whose father was also a doctor. When the time came to send off the demo tape, we had to give an address in case the record company wanted to call us in. Putting down five different addresses seemed likely to cause confusion, so we stuck to one: if a letter arrived, the person who received it would let the others know. Vaugan, living out in Juvisy, warned us that post in his area often went missing; JBM was renting a studio but didn’t intend to stay long, and was thinking of moving to live in a hotel all year round. His brother was living with a woman but they were on the verge of splitting up; Lepelle was sharing an art studio-cum-flat with other students from the École des Beaux-Arts, and I was on strained terms with my landlord, who thought I had too many visitors to my attic room. Alain’s address – an apartment block in the eighth arrondissement whose lobby could be accessed without an entry code during the day because Alain’s father was a doctor who received patients there – seemed the best idea, especially as there was a new Portuguese concierge who could be relied upon to distribute the mail conscientiously. But no letter ever came.

  Even if I close my eyes and try to summon his face, I can’t quite see it – it’s like a name on the tip of my tongue. Alain had brown hair, cut in a mullet. I think he liked me, but I was going out with JBM, so he couldn’t do anything about it. He gave me a forty-five of ‘Les Mots Bleus’ by Christophe. He loved the song and claimed it had kicked off the new-wave movement – an opinion none of the rest of us shared. Having since heard it countless times on the radio and on TV, I’ve ended up coming round to his view – there was something pure and cold, something deeply purposeful about Christophe’s song, which was ahead of its time. Maybe it was just a present after all, maybe Alain never did have feelings for me. It was all so long ago.

  Another face has slipped out of my memory – the boy who played the synth. I can’t picture him at all, not even an outline; all I know is I think his hair was blond or mousy; even his name escapes me. I do remember Stan Lepelle – who at the time wasn’t Stan but Stanislas. I’ve seen his face many times since, most recently only a week ago in an article in Le Monde about his giant brain installation in the Tuileries. He’s changed a lot – now he has his hair short, but it used to be very curly, and he’d wear leather cuffs around his wrists. I would never have dreamt he would make a career in modern art. He used to say he had only gone to the Beaux-Arts to keep his parents happy – better for him to go to art school after his baccalaureate than hang around making music. He was good at art, but it wasn’t what he was really interested in. His thing was drums – he knew the names of all the great rock drummers by heart, and went as far as to question how talented the Stones drummer Charlie Watts really was. If there was one person out of all of us I thought would make a career in music, it was him. Him and Vaugan, of course. Vaugan was overweight at the time, with a chubby baby face accentuated by his pudding-basin haircut. He was quite a shy boy. He kept to himself.

  It wasn’t until twenty-five years later that I happened to catch a late-night TV programme, saw a man with a shaved head, heard the presenter say his name, and caught something in his eyes that convinced me it wasn’t someone else who shared his name: the divisive character in a black T-shirt and Sébastien from Juvisy really were one and the same person.

  When we were in the band, I knew he had a thing for a girl who lived on his road whom he often saw at the bus stop in Juvisy. He didn’t have the courage to speak to her, and vaguely told me about her while looking down at his shoes. Once I walked back to his parents’ place with him, and he whispered, ‘That’s her,’ as a pretty blonde girl passed us on the pavement. ‘Hi, Séb,’ she said. ‘Hi, Nathalie,’ Vaugan replied. ‘Talk to her – now’s the time,’ I urged him, but he shook his head and grumbled something he didn’t mean me to understand. Whatever happened to that girl, with her plaited blonde hair? Does she still remember Vaugan? Maybe not. Has she made the link between her old neighbour, fat Séb with the bowl-cut hair who played the bass, and the man now calling for France to pull out of the European pact and send all foreigners home? Fat Séb is probably nothing more than a blurry shadow from her past, a walk-on part without any lines, whom the camera never even focuses on; he passes through the back of the shot, a hazy, elusive figure.

  ‘Pierre passed away.’ ‘I’m so sorry,’ I replied. I saw Pierre once, strangely enough at Gare de Lyon. He was holding a painting that was all wrapped up, and was looking a bit flustered as he made his way out to the taxi rank, shouting ‘Mind your backs!’ to clear a path like a waiter in a restaurant. It made me smile. I didn’t say anything; he was already a long way away. That must have been a good twenty years ago. Pierre was a regular at parties thrown by art history students from the École du Louvre. Most of them were girls, and many came from very wealthy families and were already living in lovely studio flats paid for by their parents. We looked up to Pierre – he seemed just as knowledgeable as
our lecturers but was much younger than them – not yet thirty. He fell into an age bracket somewhere between us and our teachers, and we of course saw him as one of us. He was very eccentric, with his pocket watch and his cravats. One evening he brought his younger brother along to a party in a little flat on Rue Jacob. That’s how I met JBM. He asked to listen to our songs. I had a tape in my Walkman (with orange-foam-covered headphones) and went to get it out of my bag. He listened to the songs without saying anything; he just looked at me and slowly sipped his vodka. As the cassette played, I found myself unable to pull away from him. I was nineteen, he was twenty-three.

  ‘It’s very good,’ he said, taking the headphones off. ‘I really like it, but I think it could be better. You need to record it in a proper studio to get the sound quality right. Also, one of the songs has a really nice tune, but the words are a bit bland …’

  ‘You can write us some new ones then,’ I laughed – I wasn’t sure if he was taking our songs seriously or if we were really only flirting.

  ‘No, I wouldn’t know where to start,’ he said with a smile, ‘but Pierre might have some ideas. He’s written poems … Pierre!’ He called his brother over. And that’s how it all began.

  ‘Your song’s amazing,’ I told Pierre when he gave us his lyrics. ‘I didn’t write the chorus, though,’ he said modestly. ‘It’s Shakespeare.’ There was a spoken section that also wasn’t his; he had adapted it from Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier. I might not have JBM’s memory, but I can still remember it: ‘This is happiness, this is what you spent your whole youth looking for, this is the girl you saw at the end of all your dreams!’ It was very hard to pronounce. There was a trend at the time for songs in English. There was something about that track. I don’t know why it didn’t work out. I never had any regrets, either about the album or my year at the École du Louvre, that I failed by a whisker.