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Like the bath, my old clothes could easily bring back poignant, painful memories. But I see in the clothes a symbol of continuing life. And proof that I still want to be myself. If I must drool, I may as well drool on cashmere.
Sweet Florence refuses to speak to me unless I first breathe noisily into the receiver which Sandrine holds glued to my ear. ‘Are you there, Jean-Do?’ she asks anxiously over the air. And I have to admit that at times I do not know any more.
He was the very model of the couldn’t-care-less doctor, arrogant, brusque, sarcastic, the kind who summons his patients for 8.00 a.m., arrives at 9.00, and departs at 9.05 after giving each of them forty-five seconds of his precious time.
My own crossing of Paris left me indifferent. Yet nothing was missing – housewives in flowery dresses and youths on rollerblades, revving buses, messengers cursing on their scooters. The Place de I’Opéra, straight out of a Dufy canvas. The treetops foaming like surf against glass building fronts, wisps of cloud in the sky. Nothing was missing, except me. I was elsewhere.
And by a curious reversal, the people who focus most closely on these fundamental questions tend to be people I had known only superficially. Their small talk had masked hidden depths. Had I been blind and deaf, or does it take the glare of disaster to show a person’s true nature?
Capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of happiness, move me more deeply than all the rest. A couple of lines or eight pages, a Middle Eastern stamp or a suburban postmark … I hoard all these letters like treasure. One day I hope to fasten them end to end in a half-mile streamer, to float in the wind like a banner raised to the glory of friendship. It will keep the vultures at bay.
Mithra-Grandchamp is the women we were unable to love, the chances we failed to seize, the moments of happiness we allowed to drift away. Today it seems to me that my whole life was nothing but a string of those small near-misses: a race whose result we know beforehand, but in which we fail to bet on the winner.
