The door opens and slams shut. The bookseller jumps; he had been concentrating on the little blue phosphor screen of the cash register. He stands up on his stool to get a better look at the window. A man, an old man he corrects himself, is leaning against the door. What is he doing there? Whaaam! Baaang! No use — the storm has the upper hand again and is keeping him outside.
The bookseller sighs, extracts himself from his stool, prays it isn’t a tramp in want of shelter whom he will have to refuse, politically and incorrectly. He is quickly reassured: it is a neat little old man, coat of decent cloth, silk scarf, head bare and iced over like a skating rink, a little old man asking the building not to let him down, struggling against indifferent elements. The bookseller opens up, lets out a distant smile, but the old man doesn’t seem to notice.
Rudely, the wind gets into the bookshop first, flipping up the jackets of the books standing nearby. It makes a noise of irritated literature. The old man starts, but is grateful at once, and smiles at the bookseller.
Thank you, he says, thank you very much, young man.
Young man! He would like to protest against this false youth, but of course there is no point. Some people still call sixty-year-old waitresses Mademoiselle… And besides, it is always amusing to pass for what one is not.
The storm is fierce…, he offers, pulling up his shirt collar with one hand and holding the door with the other.
The old man begins his entrance without acknowledging it. He only says “thank you” again, pushes off from the wall he was leaning on, sways dangerously into empty air before his hand comes down firmly on the doorframe. The bookseller notices that the man has no gloves and that the bones of his hands look like old mechanical spider legs. His smile disappears. This is a very, very old person — an unusual thing in weather like this. His slow gait contrasts with the insistence of the wind, as though to say that the storm may run all it likes, but he is only good for slowing down and gasping. His clumsy movements make him lose his balance. His free hand gesticulates in front of him, like a blind woman’s, as though the old man wanted to tell death and the ghosts to get out of his way.
The bookseller looks nervously at the shelves full of books while the storm takes the place by assault. Too much damp risks warping the books or dulling the glossy, perishable covers. He grows impatient, afraid of catching flu; his clothes are like his books, handsome but not warm. Come on now, sir, a little effort… But the man cannot go faster than his age, and breathes too hard for it to be healthy. He is like a worn-out engine, thinks the bookseller, drowned in old oil, sucking in vain at the last charge of a flat battery.
The old man’s left foot lands inside the bookshop, the body settles onto it while the right foot hesitates before venturing out. The bookseller looks and stops looking. He is cold. He has time to observe the deserted street, the snow crawling and dancing, wearing a Hebrew veil before the Pharisee crowd of buildings. The somewhat lunar spectacle of the city under siege frightens him suddenly.
The old man crosses the threshold at last. The bookseller shuts the door at once. The books are in a flutter, and so is the old man, who turns his head, perhaps to announce — though it isn’t necessary — that he is about to pass out. The bookseller catches him in time. The man clings to him, coughs deeply, a great cough that almost lifts him off the floor. The bookseller grimaces and tries to turn his face away from the jet of germs going past. Thick sweat covers the man’s ravaged face. The bookseller recognizes the symptoms of a high fever. Tomorrow, he thinks, he may be dead; I am holding a pre-corpse in my arms. He is an old tree with distant branches, thin and sapless, a hollow face, a lean skin sucked clean of its fat, reacting badly to the passage from cold to warm, reddening, going blue. Where are the teeth? There, behind the black hole that serves for a mouth — teeth gone yellow or rusted, held in by nothing but a numb nerve. The bookseller doesn’t quite know what to do, thinks about it, but has no time to suggest anything before the old man pats him on the arm.
It’ll be all right now… thank you… thank you…
The tone of his voice announces the opposite.
Are you sure you don’t want to sit down?
The man doesn’t answer; he must be deaf. He straightens up instead, indicating that he is able to walk on his own. He heads off at once, with surprising assurance, towards a book that he opens with a single finger; he stands still for a few moments, wheezing and giving out small sounds one takes immediately for the ruminations of a slightly showy mind — an old doctor, thinks the bookseller, lifting the sheet off a patient to see how far the illness has gone, while he can barely keep on his own feet — lets the cover fall and lifts another.
The bookseller shrugs, makes sure his customer isn’t going to collapse again, straightens a few jackets, shifts volumes here and there that were already perfectly aligned, wipes away the droplets the wind brought in. One must look busy when one is spying on one’s customers. But since he cannot strike up a conversation — the old man pays him no attention — he goes back to his counter.
A relative silence settles. The usual noises one no longer hears, a storm one only watches because it is the first, an agitated room temperature, hot, warm, cold, hot, the vicissitudes of an old building, and then, from time to time, the old man’s footsteps and his heavy breathing, something between shortness of breath and tuberculosis, thinks the bookseller.
Are you looking for a particular book?
No answer. The old man trots. All one hears is his sick breathing. Trots, catches hold of things, knocks books about. Deaf. Blind. Old. In front of a fat American brick he hesitates, then lifts it with an effort and brings it up to his eyes. He must be blind, because his face labours over each letter of a title that is very short. Having grasped what it is about, he puts the book back briskly, almost throwing it, his gaze already searching for something else and apparently unconcerned with whether the book is where he took it from. And indeed, to the bookseller’s great displeasure, the man has got the wrong pile. He grimaces, but doesn’t dare say anything.
The old man moves on, goes round the central block where the new titles are laid out in an order owing more to necessity than to any respect for genre. The bookshop resembles the old man. Tiny, it is buckling under the outsized weight of fashionable books; it would like to keep up with the current, but everything moves too fast. It puts on a little make-up, to be sure, a few posters with garish images that don’t go with the woodwork; the floors creak — warmly, one might say — and welcome the walker, invite him to respect the books which, lying flat or standing up, keep modestly quiet about their contents: breathless dramas, obsequious essays, ordinary obscenities, cerebral vulgarities. A good old dying bookshop.
Since he has nothing else to do — all the orders are ordered, the reservations reserved and the returns returned — the bookseller rests his eyes idly on the old man, who goes on lifting books and who must see nothing at all, since he is blind. It must be an automatic gesture, he tells himself. The old fellow can’t be making anything of these new titles. Even the kind of binding has changed. The paper yellows in no time and there are so many pictures on the covers that one wonders what all that mascara is hiding. A rat’s mask? The bookseller smiles at his own find.
A bookshop has become a sort of tower of Babel whose foundations are rebuilt every week, he cogitates. Does it now and then rise a storey or two, only to have them brought straight back down to earth by the constant updating of the new titles. It gets wearisome; a title is a title. Look at a river long enough and you end by forgetting it holds water. The bookseller has grown used to living at ground level. He hardly reads anything anymore. It is too hard to retain anything at all from this torrent of promising, lying titles. If you apply the iceberg theory… So the critics remain his only scouts. And even then — how is one to trust the moods of people one hardly knows, except to know that this one dislikes that, and that one dislikes this, and another champions lost causes, and the last, who is really the first, reads only the beginning of each book to form his opinion, being himself probably out of his depth, hunting for the rare pearl in this heap of paste, lost in the great north of the young. He, the bookseller, reads only the blurbs on the covers. It comes to the same thing. Word of mouth is nothing now but a sport reserved for transmitters of disease, or serves as radio gossip. We have lost the old efficiency, he tells himself, when a work of art, a masterpiece or a turkey was known to the small intelligent society of the city, and when each person could quickly — failing to get round the whole problem — at least get round the question. Tastes did not scatter as they do nowadays, concludes the bookseller, who had almost forgotten his customer. Where has he got to, anyway?
He looks for him, doesn’t find him, then suddenly sees the sparse, glimmering head, barely higher than the latest Larousse illustré. Still trotting. An old man in a bookshop is a curious thing. He is like an old rat that no longer has the teeth to devour books. The storm adds a little more gloom and mystery to the figure. The bookseller wonders what he is looking for. Ought he to help him? He calls out again: “Do you…” — but the head has vanished behind the Petit Robert. He hears a “unh!” followed by a dull thud. He rushes over. The old man must have knocked something down on his way past.
Shit!
The man lies stretched out among the books he brought down with him. Embarrassed, the bookseller first gathers up the new volumes so they won’t get any more soiled. Then he bends over the old man, motionless, notes that he is breathing… and finds himself reassured.
Sir… sir?
No answer. That’s right, he is deaf.
Sir!
He shakes him without ceremony. The man starts, seems to become aware of his state.
It’s all right, it’s all right, he says in a voice that is entirely unconvincing. He tries to get up; the bookseller helps him.
Come and sit down over here.
To his great surprise, the old man answers “thank you, I need to” between two coughs. The bookseller is afraid of catching germs. He has noted, in passing, the French accent that had escaped him at first. The man drops onto the chair. With a trembling hand he begins, clumsily, to unbutton his coat. The bookseller helps him and the old man does not have to be asked twice. He takes advantage of this brief moment to observe him again. His diaphanous skin, mottled or frankly purpled in places, can no longer hide the networks of blood that form a strange web over him. Seeing it, one hesitates to say whether it is life weaving its kingdom or death knitting the mesh of its net ever finer.
Old age is a strange phenomenon, the bookseller observes, while he takes off the old man’s heavy coat. Gestures are made vaguely, the breathing speaks in an undertone, the many veins and fatty deposits betray the body’s inability to fight the viruses and bacteria which, like patient lichens, cover a bark grown less and less flexible. There are also those invisible little creatures that dry the oil from the joints, making painful the movements that were once so easy to produce. Whether it is a matter of violence or of a caress, everything seems to demand too much effort. And so the old let themselves drop, become the unfit, wet their trousers or soil their dresses. The bookseller is a little afraid of growing old; he does not look forward to the moment when he will have to beg the good Lord to let him die, as some do, when the noise of their creaking bones has become unbearable, when their heart makes them dizzy, their liver poisons them, their kidneys acidify them and their bladder floods them! As for me, he says to himself, they’ll have to shut me up, put a bullet in my head, before it gets too grotesque.
There, the man is out of his coat; his shirt is soaked, but, the bookseller notices, he smells good. A quality eau de Cologne wraps his body, and the bookseller cannot help thinking of the lotions the ancient Egyptians used to mummify the dead.
The old man lets himself be observed without knowing it; he has closed his eyes, his mouth slightly open. The back of the throat is cavernous, the teeth are no longer visible there. The bookseller imagines it swollen with tonsils hanging like old breasts, just barely good for absorbing the smell of the air passing through, then sending back a fetid and weary breath.
The old fellow still doesn’t move, veins on his eyelids. Now and then a twitch at the left side of the lips, followed by a snuffle, a sort of daytime snore. A rumbling in the belly announces some metastasis or other, or a bad digestion. The damp on his forehead worries the bookseller. With a respectful hand he touches it. It is burning. The old man notices the gesture, opens his eyes, smiles. The bookseller withdraws his hand at once, embarrassed.
Thank you, the old man says again.
You aren’t well, the bookseller answers, without really asking the question — barely an assertion, spoken in a tone of intimacy that surprises him.
The old man smiles faintly. He says, looking around him:
I am very well, Monsieur (the bookseller notes once again the accent and the courtesy). I am only going to die soon…
He closes his eyes again.
“Not in the shop” is the bookseller’s first thought, and then he thinks better of it just as the man opens his eyes again and notices the bookseller’s foolish expression.
Oh, don’t worry, he says, amused, I’m not going to do *that* here.
The bookseller opens his mouth to protest, but finds himself ridiculous. He was going to say “it doesn’t matter”, meaning “if you do it here”. His thoughts get tangled. Dying. He takes in what the old man has said. Dying. The man has kept his sardonic smile. The bookseller stays mute. The old man closes his eyes again, breathes hard; more gurgling in the abdomen makes him grimace.
You’re in pain, the bookseller says again.
For all answer, more gurgling, followed by a terrible fit of coughing. The bookseller steps back by reflex before the rain of bacteria. The old man does not put his hand to his mouth; his face reddens, the cough is deep. He may cough blood, thinks the bookseller. He is angry with himself again, finds himself heartless.
Wait, I’ll get you a glass of water.
He runs to the back room, comes back with a cup. The man takes it and swallows the contents greedily, hiccups and grimaces.
Thank you, thank you.
Another pause, during which both of them stay silent. The bookseller scratches his head. He has time to grow bored.
The bookshop door opens, whaaam! A woman comes in. Baaang! Going to have to get that fixed, thinks the bookseller, frowning at what he considers an intrusion. He gets up to greet his customer. The woman smiles at him, says “sorry” with a glance at the door. He produces his own smile, the one for the occasion, the smile of trade, which looks more like a rictus of non-aggression than any real expression of happiness, and says “it doesn’t matter, I’ve got to get it fixed.” The old man is silent. The bookseller worries while he talks to his customer. She is bored, wants entertainment. Is the old man dead? The bookseller is convinced of it; it is too dark where he is sitting. Imperceptibly he steers the woman in the opposite direction. Novel? Thesis? Essay? She opts for the novel. The bookseller narrows his field of search. What sort of thing do you like? She shrugs, then reddens slightly. “Sensual.” The bookseller, a professional of pages and of manners, translates: “erotic.” “Very good,” he says, in his academic voice that goes down anywhere and that means, a shade nastily perhaps, “I’m not getting involved.” “Any author in particular?” (Not Sade, I hope, he murmurs to himself.) She shrugs once more. He understands; it’s a tic. “Have you read Le Boucher?” She shakes her head. “Very good.” The bookseller’s voice is more pedagogical now. He rummages along a shelf, throws a glance in the direction of the old fellow, whom he can barely see — only his eyes, strangely round and still. Panic takes hold of him. He concentrates on his search, seizes the novel in question, taking care to present the spine to the customer. She smiles, doesn’t look, heads straight for the till instead. A little surprised, the bookseller follows her, climbs onto his stool. “Will that be all?” She shrugs and adds: “Is it… explicit?”
Sorry?
The woman seems to take offence, but says nothing. He is hardly going to make her repeat it! Realizing his blunder, it is his turn to redden.
Er, yes, quite…
Very good.
The bookseller sighs. She didn’t ask him to tell her the story, and just as well, because he hasn’t read it. He is going on the diagnosis of one of his customers, who had announced, cold, in the crowded shop: “gets you hard!” The woman hands him her debit card. The bookseller taps at the console. The little machine opens the telephone line, dials the number; there are optical noises, a small pause and then a strange sound, a grinding that bodes no good, a dialogue of insects meeting to exchange coded information. One last electric hiccup and the connection is made. The two human beings listen contentedly. The bookseller has time for a furtive look at the lady. Oval gaze, ample coat, a woman who takes care of herself for want of a man to do it for her. The nails? Chiselled like an orgasm. “She must screw like a goddess,” thinks the bookseller, who is also going without. A slight erection announces itself when he suddenly sees her — in his mind, of course — throwing her coat wide open, stark naked underneath, the heat of her breasts ringing like little electronic bells. Bells? Ah… yes, the transaction is approved. Back to business. Tear off the receipt, keep one copy, put the other in the bag, hand back the card, smile at the lady, say something banal. Handing her the book:
You’ll see. It gets you hard.
She opens her eyes far too wide. He tries to remain impassive while being shocked at his own boldness.
She leaves in a hurry. She certainly won’t be back.
Unless she is — one summer day, a light little blouse, the bra showing breasts that lament, swollen, in tears, telling the men “we are far too hot.”
The door goes Bang! again. The bookseller jumps once more. Recovers himself.
You don’t do things by halves when you’re chatting up a woman, says the old man weakly, from behind the dictionaries.
The bookseller answers, still shaken by the customer’s visit:
What?
This evening is unreal; the storm has grown. It flings gritty flour against the window. The bookseller looks at the time. The old man isn’t deaf?
What has got into me?
He says it loudly enough for the walls to hear. The old man coughs. The bookseller pulls himself out of his sleepwalking and goes back to his client. The old man smiles at him. He looks better.
Are you always like that with your women customers?
The bookseller reddens.
Er, no, to tell you the truth, I don’t know what came over me.
The old man snickers, but his laugh is lost at once in a hoarse, thick cough. The bookseller wants to help, doesn’t know how, puts his hand on the old man’s back, pats it; the old man makes a sign. “It’ll be all right,” followed by a long terminal cough. “Disgusting,” thinks the bookseller, “he’s going to put germs everywhere.” Each time the man coughs, his skin covers itself with a thick layer of sweat that bodes nothing good. The bookseller fetches a clean cloth and hands it to him.
Thank you, you are a good man.
The words echo strangely in his head and his first reaction is to protest, to say “no, you don’t know me, I’m not good, I’m empty.” Instead he contents himself with smiling, gulping down the compliment like a famished nestling.
Perhaps you shouldn’t have gone out this evening, in weather like this… and in your condition.
The old man looks him over amiably.
I told you. I’m going to die.
A pause; the man looks straight ahead, then around him.
What can I do? asks the bookseller.
Do you have an antidote?
The old man snickers again and the whole business starts over: cough, sweat, a dab of the cloth, thank you.
Forgive me, he says, after taking a long time to get his breath back, one doesn’t die every day.
On second examination the sentence seems false, too detached. The bookseller is wary and, at the same time, cannot help noting the man’s lamentable state.
How old are you?
Eighty-three, young man.
You’re very ill…
Ah, that… it isn’t hard to see!
What’s wrong with you?
The old man smiles, pretends to search.
Cancer, pneumonia, kidney failure, glaucoma — but not deaf… and I have all my wits, he concludes proudly.
The bookseller is not put off.
Why are you here?
Whaaam! Bang! What now? The bookseller raises his head.
My God!
It escaped him. The sight before him is frightening. A woman is waiting, her coat open over a soiled dress. She is horribly mutilated, her face blue, one eyelid the size of a golf ball, dressings on her neck. When he speaks, his voice cannot find its proper place.
Can I help you?
Silence. Motionless, swaying slightly. He hears a strange sound, then understands that she is crying. The old man, beside him, coughs. The bookseller steps forward, but the woman steps back. He stops. He repeats his question:
Can I help you… madam?
She shakes her head. He thinks that she is pretty, that something terrible has happened to her — raped? Yes, surely that, or beaten by her husband, which is the same thing. He holds out a hand, trying not to frighten her, but she opens the door briskly and flees, leaving the bookseller at a loss. Ought to call the police… Baaang! The old man coughs again. The bookseller is short of breath.
How people suffer, my God, how people suffer.
The old man has spoken and it astonishes him again. He had stayed hidden, after all, and can have seen nothing.
How do you know she was suffering? asks the bookseller, staying where he is, in the middle of the central aisle, his gaze fixed on the door, as though he hoped the woman would come back.
Perceptiveness, says the man in a very slow voice, knowing where it is going, having probably said these words too often by now. I told you, I’m not deaf. A woman crying — that says everything. They moan, yes they do, but when they really cry, it’s serious, believe me. And that one, from the sound of her, is lost… but to tell the truth, I think she followed me. I saw her at the café earlier…
Still motionless, the bookseller says, thoughtfully:
She was covered in bruises…
His heart is pounding. He should have kept her there, he thinks, come to her aid, softened her fears.
That’s life, says the man, and that I can hear.
The bookseller goes back to him, a little shocked.
But a moment ago you weren’t answering me… you acted as though you were deaf.
The man laughs at that, pleased with his trick.
And if I hadn’t felt like talking to you?
That’s rude, retorts the bookseller, not knowing whether he should play along or take the man for senile and cracked.
The old man shrugs.
I haven’t the time for that anymore… but yes, it’s true, I was rude. And you are kind, *you*.
I don’t understand.
I’ve come from *Chez Gérard*, two streets from here…
Ah, says the bookseller. He understands. *Chez Gérard*, the competition in a manner of speaking, a multimedia bookshop wired into everything that moves, staffed by people who think themselves scholars before they’ve grown hair and who know ISBN numbers better than the real history of books. On this point, however, the bookseller does not dwell too long, conscious of his own growing ignorance in the field… He is not an *exemplary* bookseller either.
Did they serve you badly?
The man laughs, and shouldn’t have, because pneumonia doesn’t like laughter and sets off another voracious fit of coughing. This time the bookseller thinks he is done for.
Come now, come now, you must calm down.
The old man manages a smile. The bookseller asks gently:
Another glass of water?
The man shakes his head.
Give me a book instead.
Which one?
It doesn’t matter.
The bookseller turns round and takes the first book that comes to hand. The old man takes it, lays it on his knees, places his hands gently on top of it, closes his eyes and says not another word. He is still breathing just as hard. Pneumonia, he said. Is it contagious? No — it’s tuberculosis that is, unless it’s… The bookseller has no choice but to stay silent himself, and the machinery of shilly-shallying, inventing and fabulating takes over. Perhaps the old man is waiting for him to start a conversation. And yet he seems to be asleep. That is no doubt how one dies, thinks the bookseller: first sleeping a little, standing or sitting, waking with a start, then plunging back into slumbers swarming with dreams, swallowing whole afternoons at times. In the end, from so much dreaming, one takes to one’s bed, one begins to see the waking hours as brief and nasty nightmares, and at the very end one no longer wakes. One sleeps. The heart, the veins, the brain take the hint, simply stop living, concentrating on the slow wave of the black river. That’s beautiful, thinks the bookseller, I ought to write that down.
He looks at his watch; eternity is going in circles. The old man’s voice is gentle; so he wasn’t asleep after all.
I’m saying goodbye to them all…
He opens his eyes, smiles at the bookseller, who understands, and finds himself suddenly and profoundly moved, and stupid. He looks at the book the old man is holding. A media nonentity. He feels pity: the old man is saying goodbye to wind. He coughs a little before speaking.
What did you do, in life?
The bookseller is certain of it: the man’s eyes have invisibly drowned in sadness.
Nothing. I was nothing worth speaking of…
The bookseller protests:
Come now, we’ve all been something…
The old man stops him with a sharp movement of the finger.
If that’s what you’re talking about — I was a teacher.
The old man’s accent flows gently between the words.
Where are you from?
The question seems to bore the man.
France. Dieppe.
The bookseller thinks about this.
You knew the war.
Ah, that I did! (*his eyes darken*) But I don’t want to talk about it. I lost everything there, my family, my children, my parents…, except my daughter, who was with me, outside the city, when the bombing destroyed what I held dearest in the world…
With trembling hands the man opens the book the bookseller had given him, brings it up close, glaucoma obliges, turns a few pages, snickers:
Pfft! Pretentious… (*He shuts the book quickly.*) This is shit you’ve given me!
I know.
The bookseller laughs. It amuses the man too, though he lets out a sigh of regret between two clearings of the throat.
To live all these years and end up saying your farewells over a piece of shit…
I can give you another book, if you like.
No, no! the old man hastens to add, it doesn’t matter and it never will, believe me.
He casts a glance around him, sees nothing there, but seems to know the place.I used to come here often… back when it was the other owner. A fine fellow. What became of him?
He died, three years ago now. I’m his son. Pascal.
His son? Ah, but of course…
The old man has extracted a memory from somewhere, looks at it the way a child looks at a toy, tires of it quickly. Moves on to something else. The bookseller does not remember this gentleman. He spent his childhood nosing about among the books his father sold, and gradually took over the succession and the running of things. He has not been out of his bookshop much — rather as though it had brought him into the world and would, at the end, bury him when the time came. He has no children; he will be able to do nothing but sell up when he no longer has the strength to work, or the back to stand up to Chez-Gérard-the-wired. The man must be confusing the place, or the date, because his face really means nothing to him. He doesn’t want to contradict him, though. That has stopped mattering too. The man was a reader — probably one of those who fling themselves naively at new words, ready to be carried off by truths that too often get bogged down in grammatical convolutions. The likeable readers, that is; the first readers, the ones who set out on the adventure loading their bags with cock-and-bull stories, with intimate or mystical sensations. Readers? Mostly women, in fact, patient as mothers, breaking up their serious reading with novels of the shivers, with those shivers and those loves they only half obtain in the table-of-contents world of men.
…my condolences, says the old man politely. I didn’t know. Since they put me in that home, I’ve been cut off from the world.
They let you out in weather like this?
The old man laughs, coughs, spits, coughs.
Certainly not! I’m visiting my daughter. She’s easier to give the slip. She was saying her prayers when I went out. And when she says her prayers, she looks like a mummy…
The man has a brief surge of energy. The bookseller adds, condescendingly:
She’s going to scold you.
If I come back alive!
The bookseller doesn’t like that, and the old man notices, laughs, coughs, coughs again. Spits.
Are you so afraid I’ll die in your arms?
No, not at all, he tries to defend himself, you say it in such a…
… light way?
If you like.
And how old are you?
Forty-one.
What did your father die of?
Old age.
How did he talk about his death?
The bookseller searches his memories, smiles all at once, because he sees now where the old man is going.
He talked about it all the time, joked about his own death at the slightest excuse. It depressed us, but he slapped his thighs.
The man nods.
Did he die at peace?
I believe so, yes.
Happy?
Yes. No regrets, he said. We talked a great deal in the last years of his life.
You were lucky.
The bookseller nods in silence. The two of them are quiet for a time.
And you, asks the bookseller, what has your life been?
The man narrows his eyes, visibly fighting his fever. He astonishes the bookseller: sick, unsteady, and all the same a restless and agile brain.
I have been an unhappy man all my life. From my childhood to this day, misfortunes have come down on me one after another.
He stops, as though asphyxiated by anger. Looks at the books.
Except those. Because I found a certain happiness in them, or rather the meagre consolation that the rest of humanity was as sad as I was.
That’s a very pessimistic conclusion…
But it’s the truth… (he raises a finger)… my truth. Eighty-three years of misery!
And what a cough! The bookseller will certainly be immunized for the rest of his days.
There’s no use in what you’re saying there.
Despite his coughing, the man appears about to grow angry again at the bookseller’s insignificant words. The bookseller is ashamed, becoming precisely aware of the emptiness he gives off. The man is so imposing; he is ill and he is angry. The bookseller attempts a diversion.
What have you read, in your life?
Everything that interested me — and I tell you, twenty-four hours a day was not enough for me…
Do you still read?
I do not! Not really. I haven’t the eyes for it anymore.
You must miss it.
The old man leans towards the bookseller, who finds himself obliged to place himself under the salvoes of a possible cough.
To tell you the truth, no, says the man, hunting in the pocket of his jacket for a handkerchief, a cloth one, which he brings up in front of the bookseller’s nose, then under his own. He blows it. It makes the noise of a bagpipe, whose measures only the old know, followed by a sort of rocky avalanche landing in the handkerchief. An old man has no manners, thinks the bookseller, who almost passes out. The man seems not in the least embarrassed, and instead looks at the bookseller intently.
Tell me honestly — do you believe in life after death?
The question throws him, even though he answers at once.
No.
Perhaps he ought to explain; he is angry with himself again. Perhaps the old man is trying to catch hold of something before drowning in time. But the man seems rather pleased with the bookseller’s answer.
Nor do I. I am going to die, I will no longer be, I will in fact never have been. The scientists say so, don’t they? Matter is only one state within a vast continuum of energy. I was not, I have been, and I will no longer be — and yet I was always there, I am still there, and I will always be there. Everything in my head will go up in smoke, eaten first by worms that will fart out my consciousness.
The bookseller’s eyes are round; he is trembling.
You are gloomy.
The old man looks him over with passion.
I am alive!…
Coughs, coughs, spits.
… but not for long.
And what does she make of all this, your daughter?
The man grimaces, disdainful.
Nicole? She’s older in the head than I am, and full of sins she wants forgiven. And I can’t even guess which ones. She has never slept with a man; she can’t have all that much filth to get her teeth into. (*He laughs, coughs.*) She thinks I’m an eccentric old crank who was never able to look after her and wasn’t clever enough to remarry and provide her with a stand-in mother. Mind you, she may be right…
All of it said in a single breath.
… and on top of that I’m poor. I leave her nothing, except a house in a well-off neighbourhood. I leave nothing to anybody.
He points a finger at his head, brings his face close to the bookseller’s, who really does not like it when he does that.
Everything I have is here, in my head. My books, my dreams, my pains. I’ve come to say goodbye to them. Here. I don’t need them anymore.
The bookseller is seized by a slight warm nausea. The air has thinned around them, while outside the storm blows gloomy airs like a bagpipe.
Doesn’t it frighten you…, the bookseller remarks nervously.
The man gasps, coughs too hard again, this time bringing his handkerchief to his mouth. He shows the bookseller the result: it is red and indescribable.
You see… even the cancer is leaving the ship.
The bookseller feels he is going to faint.
You had a family…, he says, without conviction, and to avoid further medical details.
Not for long. The bad God took it from me. After the war I gave everything up… but I didn’t come here to tell you my life.
Perhaps it interests me.
The old man snickers, seems suddenly tired, moved, ambivalent. His emaciated features lengthen as though pain were amusing itself by making elastic bands of his veins, stretching them and letting them go for all it is worth.
Could you read me something, monsieur?
He has asked it gently, almost with sadness. The bookseller is moved by it.
Have you a preference?
The old man shrugs, hiccupping, visibly worn out. The bookseller looks behind him, along the shelves. Zweig… He takes down Confusion of Feelings, knows there is a passage somewhere… near the end, on the right, if his memory is good. He hunts for a while; the old man has closed his eyes meanwhile. There it is. He clears his throat, anxious about the tone to use. He waits a few seconds more.
*Since that evening when this man, whom I revered above all others, unlocked his fate to me as one opens a hard shell — since that evening, forty years ago — everything our writers and poets recount in books as extraordinary, everything the plays mask upon their stages as tragic, still seems to me mere play, and of no consequence.*
The bookseller reads a few sentences more, then falls silent, seized by a strange cold. The old man looks at him, smiling, his eyes steeped in a delicate water.
Thank you, my friend, thank you…
He coughs; the bookseller feels the tears rising far too easily.
It’s so beautiful, the old man goes on, if only all books could be written that way…
He sighs, thinks.
Yes, if only all books had been able to give me drink like that…
You would have been happy?
The old man takes offence.
Ah! Happy!
He coughs again; the bookseller is angry with himself for upsetting him so.
Perhaps not happy — but people (he said “people” with an ounce of contempt), the public (the same contempt) would be obliged to listen to the truth. They would grow humble… God, how humble they would grow…
But there are books that start wars too…
The old man softens.
You’re right… the Bible, for instance. Perhaps there is no hope, then. Books have nothing to do with it, so long as hearts refuse to listen…
The bookseller stays silent this time, not knowing whether he should play devil’s advocate or become the henchman of the angels.
Help me up, please.
The bookseller complies.
My coat…
You’re leaving already?
I am certainly not going to linger here… I haven’t your age.
Is that a reproach, a cruelty? The bookseller doesn’t really try to decide. He is hurt.
The storm is at its worst. How are you going to get back to your daughter’s?
The man looks at him with contempt.
I have forty-two years more experience of walking than you have.
Cruelty it is, then.
But you can’t even stand up, and you cough like a sponge!
The old man’s face softens, darkens, hardens; he says, in a voice more Mediterranean than northern:
Leave me alone.
He buttons his coat himself and heads for the door with a dangerously jaunty step. It must be costing him all his strength, thinks the bookseller, who can only keep quiet before this display of pride.
Where are you going?
Nowhere, says the man without turning round.
Don’t you want me to read you something else?
No use, my good friend. I haven’t long left, I’ve told you already… So we shall not see each other again.
As he says it, he turns; his face seems to have obeyed the caprices of fate. Then he turns away without adding anything.
He reaches the door and leans against it, ready, thinks the bookseller, to collapse. Whaaam! Oooh — he is nearly carried off outright by the swing of the door. The storm comes into the bookshop without permission.
Adieu, monsieur…
The old man’s voice is sincere.
Adieu, monsieur…
The bookseller’s voice does the same.
Bang! The door shuts. Bang! In echo, inside his head. He watches the man’s silhouette swallowed up in the unfathomable storm, as though he were dying there, carried off by the waves, engulfed in nothingness.
A strange silence works its way into the bookseller’s head. He waits, standing, for something to happen. Because something has just happened, and he understands that he did not really catch it on the wing. He has to sit down, because his hands, his legs and his heart are shaking. An atrocious cramp suddenly saws through his belly.
For a brief moment he thinks he is dying, so strong is the pain. He can’t get air; the storm strikes at the windows.
And then nothing. He gets his breath back, gets the upper hand, comes back to the surface. He rises, returns to the counter, sits down. Closes his eyes, opens them, closes them again, opens them once more. Nothing has changed.
Where has the old man gone? What would he do in his place? The meeting was so brief. Like a shared happiness, or like a shadow that took them both under its wing and told them nocturnal, terrifying things.
The bookseller opens one of the books enthroned on the counter. Closes it. Opens another. With his eyes he goes round his bookshop. All that for nothing? The storm insists on whitening the streets of the city. Tomorrow the new titles arrive.