to play with. I’m not so much to blame, you’ll see when you get here that I’ve repaired a lot of the things that were broken with the cement I bought in the English shop, I did what I could to keep from being a nuisance … As far as I’m concerned, going from ten to eleven is like an unbridgeable chasm. You understand: ten was fine, with a wardrobe, clover and hope, so many things could happen for the better. But not with eleven, because to say eleven is already to say twelve for sure, and Andrea, twelve would be thirteen. So now it’s dawn and a cold solitude in which happiness ends, reminiscences, you and perhaps a good deal more. This balcony over the street is filled with dawn, the first sounds of the city waking. Idon’t think it will be difficult to pick up eleven small rabbits splattered over the pavement, perhaps they won’t even be noticed, people will be too occupied with the other body, it would be more proper to remove it quickly before the early students pass through on their way to school.
A YELLOW FLOWER
W e are immortal, I know it sounds like a joke. I know because I met the exception to the rule, I know the only mortal there is. He told me his story in a bar in the rue Cambronne, drunk enough so it didn’t bother him to tell the truth, even though the bartender (who owned the place) and the regulars at the counter were laughing so hard that the wine was coming out of their eyes. He must have seen some flicker of interest in my face—he drifted steadily toward me and we ended up treating ourselves to a table in the corner where we could drink and talk in peace. He told me that he was a retired city employee and that his wife had gone back to her parents for the summer,as good a way as any of letting it be known that she’d left him. He was a guy, not particularly old and certainly not stupid, with a sort of dried-up face and consumptive eyes. In honesty, he was drinking to forget, a fact which he proclaimed by the time we were starting the fifth glass of red. But he did not smell of Paris, that signature of Paris which apparently only we foreigners can detect. And his nails were decently pared, no specks under them.
He told how he’d seen this kid on the number 95 bus, oh, about thirteen years old, and after looking at him for a spell it struck him that the boy looked very much like him, at least very much as he remembered himself at that age. He continued little by little admitting that the boy seemed completely like him, the face, the hands, the mop of hair flopping over the forehead, eyes very widely spaced, even more strongly in his shyness, the way he took refuge in a short-story magazine, the motion of his head in tossing his hair back, the hopeless awkwardness of his movements. The resemblance was so exact that he almost laughed out loud, but when the boy got down at the rue de Rennes, he got off too, leaving a friend waiting for him in Montparnasse. Looking for some pretext to speak with the kid, he asked directions to a particular street, and without surprise heard himself answered by a voice that had once been his own. The kid was going as far as the street, and they walked along together shyly for several blocks. At that tense moment, a kind of revelation came over him. Not an explanation, but something that could dispense with explanation, that turned blurred or stupid somehow when—as now—one attempted to explain it.
To make a long story short, he figured a way to find out where the kid lived, and with the prestige of having spent some time as a scoutmaster, he managed to gain entrance to that fortress of fortresses, a French home. He found an air of decent misery, a mother looking older than sheshould have, a retired uncle, two cats. Afterward, it was not too difficult; a brother of his entrusted him with his son who was going on fourteen, and the two boys became friends. He began to go to Luc’s house every week; the mother treated him to heated-up coffee, they talked of
A YELLOW FLOWER
W e are immortal, I know it sounds like a joke. I know because I met the exception to the rule, I know the only mortal there is. He told me his story in a bar in the rue Cambronne, drunk enough so it didn’t bother him to tell the truth, even though the bartender (who owned the place) and the regulars at the counter were laughing so hard that the wine was coming out of their eyes. He must have seen some flicker of interest in my face—he drifted steadily toward me and we ended up treating ourselves to a table in the corner where we could drink and talk in peace. He told me that he was a retired city employee and that his wife had gone back to her parents for the summer,as good a way as any of letting it be known that she’d left him. He was a guy, not particularly old and certainly not stupid, with a sort of dried-up face and consumptive eyes. In honesty, he was drinking to forget, a fact which he proclaimed by the time we were starting the fifth glass of red. But he did not smell of Paris, that signature of Paris which apparently only we foreigners can detect. And his nails were decently pared, no specks under them.
He told how he’d seen this kid on the number 95 bus, oh, about thirteen years old, and after looking at him for a spell it struck him that the boy looked very much like him, at least very much as he remembered himself at that age. He continued little by little admitting that the boy seemed completely like him, the face, the hands, the mop of hair flopping over the forehead, eyes very widely spaced, even more strongly in his shyness, the way he took refuge in a short-story magazine, the motion of his head in tossing his hair back, the hopeless awkwardness of his movements. The resemblance was so exact that he almost laughed out loud, but when the boy got down at the rue de Rennes, he got off too, leaving a friend waiting for him in Montparnasse. Looking for some pretext to speak with the kid, he asked directions to a particular street, and without surprise heard himself answered by a voice that had once been his own. The kid was going as far as the street, and they walked along together shyly for several blocks. At that tense moment, a kind of revelation came over him. Not an explanation, but something that could dispense with explanation, that turned blurred or stupid somehow when—as now—one attempted to explain it.
To make a long story short, he figured a way to find out where the kid lived, and with the prestige of having spent some time as a scoutmaster, he managed to gain entrance to that fortress of fortresses, a French home. He found an air of decent misery, a mother looking older than sheshould have, a retired uncle, two cats. Afterward, it was not too difficult; a brother of his entrusted him with his son who was going on fourteen, and the two boys became friends. He began to go to Luc’s house every week; the mother treated him to heated-up coffee, they talked of
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