He has taken a seat in a café, a too-hot drink between his lips. Outside, everything is running at full throttle; passersby search for air while cars spit out theirs. Men have removed their jackets and hung them any which way from their briefcases. Many plunge into the cool of restaurants; others hurry back to the office after grabbing a meal at the fast-food place on the corner. Women in suits too tight and surely too hot, girls on vacation with their blouses open, boys casting childish eyes at them, round as marbles. Cold, hot, cold, hot. No half measures in this stifled, hurried world.
By noon it will be a celebration for asthmatics; the smog will clog their gills. The elderly, having ignored the warnings broadcast by the media, will walk even more slowly, struggling to cut through the viscous texture of the crowd. According to the weather forecasters, the heat will not be ending anytime soon.
Rémi smiles, inhabited nevertheless by a sad nonchalance. He had entered the sauna, paid, left the city behind in the changing room and, dressed in the regulation towel, explored the nearly deserted common rooms. A few sleepy night owls watched a timid masturbator imploring them to bring the night to a close together. Rémi knew the ritual. A light rectal touch, a hastily staged scene, a word slipped with the tongue between the ear and the other senses, some good-natured camaraderie, just long enough to believe themselves united and immune for life. Rémi had been tempted to play the Good Samaritan, but the man did not interest him. He was about to enter an empty cubicle when his eyes met Stéphane’s as he read in the next room. Instant smiles, contract sealed. Stéphane had put down his book. Rémi had approached him.
“Right now?”
The question was direct, but gently spoken.
“Your name,” Rémi had asked.
“Stéphane.”
“Your lips now.”
Rémi closes his eyes and tilts his head back. He recalls the gestures made. He is sad, certainly, and happy, overcome by the intensity of the encounter. Sad after love because nothing changes. Everything races and nothing moves forward.
He tries to empty his mind, but in vain; his thoughts are running at full throttle too.
To distract himself, he studies the café. The air conditioners provide enough coolness to make the place pleasant despite its bland décor. Struck by indolence, patrons swallow hot drinks and pastries. Cold. Hot. He watches their lips move. Laughter, swallowing, pouts, mouths dried by boredom, joyful moisture, conversations, soliloquies, sighs, secrets. Yet he cannot make out their syntax.
There was a time, during his years as a waiter, when he was a better polyglot, when he had to put out his feelers to earn a generous tip. There was also a time when he was simply happier, less complicated. Now…
He stretches. This now is much older, heavier than the past. More intimate too. More personal? He drives away the answers and drinks his coffee. More nervous, yes; anxious, his old friend Marthe would say.
He will have to write to her. She has an email address now, but their contacts remain infrequent. He misses her and the abstract truths she dispenses as though they were old wives’ tales. With Hélène, her travelling companion, she had just completed her third journey around the world. “I’ll end up biting my own tail, going around in circles like this,” she had told him over the phone. He had replied that she did not have one. She had laughed from far away, in her hotel in Mozambique. “That’s not what the shaman told me yesterday…” “What were you doing with a witch doctor?” Again she had laughed; he had noted her lovely mood, like the ringing of tiny bells. “Why not?”
Indeed, why not? When she called him like that, he regretted a little that he had not continued the journey with them. But that was so far away now.
Now. At this moment. He separates the syllables in his head. Eight years have passed since that other now, when Marthe, Hélène, the late Gustave, and he had set out to enjoy the proceeds from the sale of Léo’s paintings. Barcelona, Madrid, Bordeaux, Paris, St. Petersburg, Beijing, Tokyo, Sydney: a dizzying journey filled with beautiful memories. Sometimes he left the group to moor himself in a lover’s heart. He would rejoin his companions a few days or weeks later. They remained discreet, except for Marthe, of course, who could never resist an inquisitorial remark. “Will you ever be faithful?” Marthe’s false questions did not unsettle him. “I am faithful, just not constant.” “You men are all the same…” “That’s not much of a psychoanalyst’s observation.” She would shrug and ask him to recount his adventure. She wanted to know everything.
During a second stay in France, he met Fernand one evening while his old friends were attending an outdoor concert.
“That one is quite something,” Marthe had commented, adding, “He’s the man for you.”
“Are you throwing me out?”
“No, but you shouldn’t waste your life in the company of old people like us.”
“I’m not young anymore…”
She had looked at him with cold, maternal eyes.
“Will you always be so afraid to love, Rémi?”
“Is that a challenge?”
“You’re more macho than Léo.”
“Coming from you, I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Don’t take offence, my boy.”
Defeated, he had instinctively lowered his shoulders.
“Fernand is a handsome young man…”
“When will you see my lovers as anything other than little boys?”
She had smiled and answered softly.
“I’ve reached the age when I’m allowed to beautify everything. Besides, that one is very handsome. He must be fun in bed.”
“Beauty does not make the lover.”
“I know, Rémi.”
“So this is goodbye?”
“How could anyone say goodbye to you?”
“By telling me Fernand was made for me.”
She had laughed. Before joining Gustave and Hélène, who were waiting in the car, she had slipped him the papers for a bank account opened in his name. She had been planning it for a long time. Submissive and ashamed, like a child before his mother, he had taken her in his arms.
“I miss you already,” she had concluded.
Rémi swallows a little coffee, as if to help the rest of the memories go down.
Three years in Périgord, living by the meandering rhythms of the Garonne and the tourists, and above all by the demanding cadence of a breadmaking lover; nights kneading skin as much as dough, taking pleasure in leaven and lips, learning a new trade, new words and ways of doing things. A time of relative grace. The peace of a mole.
He sighs. Marthe had been right to suggest that he stay, but she had still been wrong about Fernand. Dreams are always short-lived and inevitably grow complicated. Fernand was no exception.
Despite his joviality and exuberance, it was out of the question for this baker, beloved by all, to display his sexual preferences openly. Macho to the point of comedy, he ostentatiously flirted with women who understood his game perfectly well and willingly played along with the masquerade, because Fernand was so good and so handsome.
Rémi came to hate this lie above all else. He had been forced to leave, tired of having to exit the country every six months to renew his visitor’s visa. He had had enough of playing the tourist, even in bed.
Fernand had wept profusely; that had not prevented him from replacing Rémi a few weeks later. Men, Rémi knows, say goodbye easily; they never surrender their hearts completely. No use making a tragedy of it, then, since the chances of finding happiness increase the more Zen-like one becomes about letting go.
No doubt this was what Marthe failed to grasp, having herself been betrayed by Léo. The old psychoanalyst’s knowledge and experience would never manage to counter what seems branded in DNA upon the entrails of desire.
Rémi had not cried, had only tightened his lips a little, perhaps even a great deal, he concedes. One of those moments when, for the first time, you hear the whisper that is only that at first, an insignificant whisper, a fine sound that insists and swells, grows simpler: the sandpaper of time, of life the carpenter. Ssssch-ssch, ssssch-ssch, the smile erased. Ssssch-ssch, sssschssch, the lies eradicated.
Upon returning home, Rémi had established a small bakery. Victor, whom Rémi had left to follow Marthe, returned to him almost by magic, appearing at the bakery counter, unconsciously guided there by his former lover’s unannounced return. Victor lived alone.
Rémi had smiled at the coincidence. Both of them had changed, certainly, and travelled different roads, which had been more than enough for them to lie to each other about the true chances of success for this second love at first sight. Rémi had believed in it at first. Victor was reassuring, affectionate, and comfortable in his own skin.
Nothing to complain about in their first year: mutual friends, rediscovery, the constant demands of the new business, so many things to do, furnishing both comfort and discomfort. Not too much to complain about in the second year. Victor became an important notary and neglected the house. The gears of their daily life began to miss, warning of trouble ahead. Whole weeks went by without their seeing each other, Rémi leaving early and Victor returning late. The machinery lost momentum and Rémi began to show signs of impatience.
It takes little to weaken a dam. All it takes is a moment of boredom and the unambiguous gaze of a customer lingering over the last three loaves of the day, his lips parted, his teeth enamelled as white and hard as his youth, his eyes saddened not by the lack of choice but by the fear that he might not get to have the baker. And the baker returns his smile, silently locks the door, and shuts himself in the basement with the young hoodlum, not even a criminal, merely a hoodlum who boasted of exercising every freedom.
The affair lasted three evenings, and when the impudent young man tried to enter his heart, Rémi, frightened, had sent him away. But very quickly, within a few weeks at most, time formed a shapeless, elastic bubble from which Rémi no longer wished to emerge. Lovers followed one another, the spices many, the territories intense and varied. Sauna, Internet, parks. Instant happiness, a lightness of being invented in books, both theoretical and undeniably demanding, false, as difficult to master as its opposite: an unbearable human condition.
Three years. Four, five. The couple held together, though Rémi did not know by what adhesive. He missed Fernand’s country skin, and the more nostalgic he became for it, the more he withdrew and forgot himself. Ssssch-ssch, ssssch-ssch.
Rémi escapes his memories for a while by watching the young waiter circle him by way of the other patrons.
“You’re as much a peacock as your fledglings,” Victor had once told him, having not been fooled for long. How had he known? An indiscretion, surely. The gay world may carry its ass high and very tight, but it also has an elephant’s memory, which it displays with a viper’s tongue.
Rémi puffs out his chest; the waiter nearly spills his water pitcher over a woman. It is true that he is proud, pleased still to be handsome and vigorous. He traces a finger around the rim of his coffee cup, skirting the hot lake. Without being asked, the young man brings him a glass of cold water. Rémi smiles and drains it in one swallow. It makes his head spin. Surprised or excited by the gesture, the waiter tries to pour him another. Rémi shakes his head, now more interested in returning to the path drawn by his memory than in trying to seduce the little runt.
Victor had not been fooled, then, but he had done nothing more, contenting himself with working harder, playing games on his computer, and gaining weight. They lived in Victor’s house. Rémi did his best to pay his share, but his income was modest compared with Victor’s. They loved each other, though they still slept in separate rooms. They settled for this union, which gave them mutual stability. Simple and complicated.
Neither really knew what the other was doing; they kept their own schedules, Victor surrounded by friends while Rémi entrusted himself to more fleeting chances. He had confessed to Victor many times. Victor listened and forgave him, or so he said. As with Fernand’s lies, Rémi came to hate Victor’s false forgiveness, which led nowhere except to maintain the bourgeois mask of appearances. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. One small certainty, ridiculous little nothings, were better than the royal road chosen by the proud. Victor was right, and Rémi had submitted, because one day we finally admit that we no longer know.
Victor is a good man. Rémi is a bad boy. The two sentences fit curiously together, he thinks, in this muddled past, in this reality that has now become worrying and busy.
Now.
He knows it only too well: he is dissatisfied.
He resents himself when he stays like this, burning fuel without moving. It was not like this before.
He sips his coffee.
That before no longer exists. Increasingly prone to absences, Rémi grows impatient with his inability to take stock of what he has gained, of his happiness too. Mathematics requires a knowledge of equations and formulas that eludes him, for whether seconds of inattention, minutes of absence, hours of daydreaming, or years of hard work, everything seems to accumulate in reverse, backwards, returning him toward an omniscient zero.
He sets down his coffee cup. Nothing new under the sun. He is growing old, and he is becoming aware of it.
A man enters; Rémi recognizes him as someone he once approached, loved, and brought to orgasm at the sauna. He greets him. The other man timidly says hello while turning toward the person entering behind him, seizing him by the shoulder to make his possession clear. Some sins are like that…
His birthday is in two days. He was told he had been born during a heat wave. He signals for more coffee. The waiter serves him before everyone else, unconcerned by the diplomatic incident he is provoking among the patrons, who are well aware of the hierarchy of orders.
Rémi snatches the espresso from him without saying thank you. The runt is overdoing it. He cups the mug in his hands as though trying to warm them and blows on the too-hot drink. Stéphane’s warmth accompanies that of the coffee. Rémi raises the cup to his lips too quickly and burns himself. Patience. He catches himself placing hope in this morning’s encounter. He checks his watch. Time did not wait for him before resuming its course.
Once more, he observes the café’s patrons. Does time really run? People break their backs living and act as though nothing were happening because, indeed, nothing is. Time is only a human measure. Failing to see it requires the courage of innocents whose hands are full.
He blows hard on his drink and lets the air-conditioned atmosphere bathe him. The café is on the second floor. Large windows offer a view of people passing and hurrying about, anxious at the thought of missing a single tick of the clock.