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CHAPTER 1
HIS EYES WERE BLUE, FROM WHERE I WAS. HE LOOKED tired. He looked as if he'd been waiting there for a long time, although that was impossible. Neither of us could have known in advance which way we'd be going that day. I'm a mature man, I'm fifty-four, but in some respects I'll never be mature enough. For example, the way I sometimes get scared when I meet someone. Mostly you just run into people, and it doesn't lead to anything. Actually, our lives are full of things that lead to other things, and it's hard to believe that in this case it hadn't led to anything in all those years. But he looked familiar, from where I was. From where I was, it might still have been possible, somehow, to turn around and walk away, even though obviously I would never have turned around and walked away of my own accord. But a car might have started, in which case I'd have had to get out of the way, or I might have looked the other way and not seen his reflection in a shop indow. I'd have reacted by saying to myself what does that guy want with me? And I'd probably have ignored him, I'd probably have forgotten him. His face looked drawn, but his hair wasn't gray. I've almost lost my hair. Sometimes I run my hand through it, and there's nothing there. My ex-wife used to laugh when I did that, and I don't think I took it well. I don't like taking a wrong turn, but it'd be right to say that when we met again we'd both taken a wrong turn. Maybe our lives, too: lots of wrong turns placed end to end, you can never reconstruct the whole journey.
* * *
His clothes were almost as all-purpose as mine. He'd been wearing them longer than I had. His shoes were polished, in spite of the wear and tear. At that moment, he'd already resumed his place in my life, and I in his. But had we ever really been friends? He was carrying a computer case, and of course I could never have imagined how important it was in his life. It was a long time since he'd last had his own things, in his life, and he kept all those papers in his case, in an ashamed kind of way. He was pretending too. He'd always pretended, I told myself later, remembering things from long ago. But I wasn't so sure of that in the days that followed. His eyes were blue, and he was carrying that fake case. By the time we were pushing thirty, his good times were already behind him, as far as I knew. He'd already had a beautiful wife, a beautiful apartment, and we'd stopped seeing each other except from time to time, although I often felt like calling him. I didn't know why he was where he was. He didn't tell me, he was long past explaining things. Try to find out what happened, and you never get the answers you want. Try to figure out how the earth turns, how people live and die, notice the changes on the streets, and there's too much missing, when you get down to it. How are you doing? Neither of us said things like that, things like, how many years has it been? What have you been doing with yourself all this time? He didn't have time for things like that, with his case in his hand. All he said was hey, I thought it was you.
"Me too. It is Jean, isn't it?"
"Yes, don't you recognize me?"
"Yes, yes, of course I do."
We shook hands, didn't say any more, just carried on walking together. We were in the area near the station, where I almost never go, not since I moved. But for no particular reason, I sometimes make a detour and go back there, stay an hour, without talking to anyone.
* * *
He didn't live in the neighborhood anymore either. There was a time when he hadn't lived anywhere in particular, to be honest. A day here, three nights there, even sometimes in hotels that didn't have names, only street numbers, surrounded by recent Eastern European immigrants and the customary Arab, he was a bit old for that. We walked back up the street, without meaning to we found ourselves going in the same direction, the two of us. We sat down in a café on Rue d'Amsterdam, pretty much halfway along the street. A place where for a long time now, maybe forever, people have been crossing diagonally to gain a few seconds, on this side of the street, on the way toward one of the side entrances to the train station, near the big post office. It was because of his case that I realized. How could a guy like that get to this point? I'm not the only one to ask myself that question, not that he talked much about it. His hands also seemed as if they came from another time. It's crazy, but that's how it is. We were at the back of the café, where it was dimly lit. Above the bar were posters advertising special offers, the week's happy-hour cocktails. That kind of thing shows me I'm from another time really. I'll never be able to manage. Every time that idea comes into my head, I get scared, I don't know what to do to get rid of that feeling. Although sometimes, I like it. They didn't have happy hours in the bars we used to go to together in the old days. There was a time when I often went to England for my work, and there too, I noticed it, time must have passed everywhere, often in the same way. In the light of the booth, his face looked drawn. He was carrying a shadow with him, along with all the rest, the lines, the deep marks left by our lives. Which of us was the first to ask what the other wanted to drink? I can't remember. I'd really like to remember everything, I might be able to trace the crack he'd slipped through, the crack through which he left again, even if I couldn't help him. I like helping people, though, in life. I'm not a good Samaritan, or a bad one, it's the way I was born, period. How can I explain it?
He didn't talk at first. He looked as if he needed rest. He also seemed to be contemplating something, a kind of map of his life, a whole bunch of forks in the road, our encounter being one path, or a kind of crossroads. I don't know how to talk about these things. We don't like to say these things. But we see them in the faces of the people we meet. The fact is, nothing about these things changes with time. For years, they've been giving tents to poor people so that they don't die of cold during the night. But we weren't in winter anymore, so why did I think of that when I saw him? He was clasping his case to his chest, sitting on the imitation leather banquette. He'd insisted on my taking the banquette, as if that was still one of the generous gifts he could afford. But I played a stupid game with him, without even being aware of it, and said I had to go take a leak. He nodded slowly, with a big, cracked smile, and finally took his place on the banquette. When I came back upstairs, I saw him sitting there with his case clasped tightly to his chest. A steel cannabis leaf in the colors of the Jamaican flag was hanging from the zipper, and later I saw a whole bunch of guys like him and me with cannabis leaves in the colors of the Jamaican flag, but not all of them were down on their luck. I sometimes feel like telling jokes, like with him. He was waiting for me to say something, as if he really wanted me to take responsibility for the stupidity of this reunion.
"Let me look at you."
I said that, or maybe I didn't, but from that first time, I could never look at him enough, a bit like when you're in love, and you'd like to have a woman's face and body permanently in front of your eyes, so as not to offend them. Of course I thought he'd changed a lot. Maybe we both simultaneously recalled dates and events, memories we could have shared. He didn't open up in that café, didn't relax his smile. But I recognized him when he jutted out his lower lip and blew upwards. That was something he always used to do when we were teenagers. Maybe that stupid gesture was something he thought was seductive, the way other people use their smiles.
"Do you ever hear from André?"
He stopped smiling. André was another guy with blue eyes and a smile. André Lebars? Yes, that's the one. He made a face, no, he hadn't heard from him lately. Why should he care about him anyway? That was kind of the impression he gave me at that moment. He didn't want anyone standing between us, I sensed then that he'd decided to hit me up for a loan.
It started when I turned forty, like most guys I know. I sponsor a little orphan, a little Haitian boy as it happens, and every year I keep the letter he sends me, a completely stereotypical letter to the white man who sends him a check for twenty-five euros every month. A year after my divorce, I also started volunteering in a hospital, but that way of doing good didn't suit me all that much, because often, the next day, I'd start to feel symptoms, and more than once I fell ill. How can you give a hand to someone who's dying anyway? I never figured out the answer to that. There were support groups too, with shrinks, only it bored me, and I stopped, it wasn't my thing. Then I met a woman I was hoping to get love from, but nothing like that happened. I was forty-four when I discovered that you can hope to get love in return for a washing machine, two installments on a car, and other things like that. When I realized that, I was cured of that woman, and of others too in the long run. I wasn't seeing much of Benjamin at the time. Just after our separation, I tried to live close to him, I'd call him every two or three days, but even during the times when he needed me I often disturbed him. So I found myself calling him less often, he was growing up. I'm very proud of him, he's done well so far. But I can't say anything about that pride because I think all I've done is pay, since he was eleven, and he's twenty- six now. I missed all that, I sometimes tell myself. He soon got into the habit of living with a sporadic father, his mother didn't set him against me too much, I let things go during the divorce proceedings in order not to hurt them. Two years later was the time of the woman with the installments who needed a washing machine, a time also of unemployment and depression, and I couldn't pay the alimony in time. A bailiff came at seven in the morning. I've never dared to ask Benjamin if his mother told him.
* * *
He looked around him from time to time. The waiters were young, there was a blonde woman in black behind the cash register, looking at her cell phone. She couldn't have been much more than thirty. She kept up an amused conversation with each of the guys coming and going between the bar and the back room. We were in one of the booths, the kind that seemed meant especially for people on their own. He often walked past this café, he told me later. I can't really remember when he told me that. It was still one of the pleasures he could afford on Rue d'Amsterdam. It wasn't the only one, obviously. But apart from the papers in the case for his laptop, which he'd also had to sell, he had almost nothing left. He'd found a little ground-floor apartment, which he rented in La Garenne- Colombes. I offered him a cigarette to replace the words we didn't say during that first meeting. He took it without thinking, with two white fingers that must have made me think of the claws of a bird of prey. I often lack imagination, so when I talk about myself I can't help talking about him, and when I talk about him I'm talking about me. Because it was him, because it was me. I learned that in class, was I still sitting at the same desk as him, or next to Marc-André? Anyway, it stayed with me. It's the same with Martin Luther King's speech, I Have a Dream, and also Tired of Waiting, we must have been in eighth grade. He'd left school. His mother had found a job in Marseilles, they'd lived there for a year. Then when he came back, we talked again, but we didn't have the same life anymore, and he wasn't at school. He lit it greedily, as if he'd been craving it for a long time. Cigarettes are expensive.
"Do you still smoke?"
I smiled, without meaning to.
Yes, even though I'm over fifty I still smoke, though less than before.
"Five a day, something like that," I said, as if I needed to justify myself to him.
He didn't seem to be listening. But even though he didn't look as if he was listening, I had plenty of time to realize that he hadn't forgotten any of the things I'd said to him, or done for him. We smoked for a while in silence. A couple came and sat down in the booth next to ours, in the tinted light, which seemed to come from a fluorescent tube. The waiter took our orders. I was thinking about Benjamin, what was he up to right now? Sometimes, in all those years, I thought I was going to see him, turning a corner in Paris, without our having talked. And so, because I wanted it so much to happen, when he did see me it came at the right time, he'd been feeling sad, or he'd even been thinking about me. Not about his monthly check, or his cell phone contract, like when he was starting out in life, but about me, his father. He looked at the end of his cigarette and asked me if I'd ever been to Cuba. No, I'd never been to Cuba. Still haven't.
"You never liked traveling."
He was the same as he'd always been, ever since he was a child, obsessed with traveling. I pushed him further on this. "How about you, still roaming?"
He shook his head. He looked toward the couple we'd seen come in when we'd sat down. "A bit, but after a while, you know ..."
He made a broad gesture that ended in mid-air, just like that.
"Did you get tired of it?"
I wanted to set my mind at rest about his love of traveling, which had been with him since childhood.
"After a while, you know ... You can't spend your whole life traveling, you need to set down roots somewhere."
I nodded, I think. I have roots, I told myself later. But what could that mean to a guy like him?
"I'd like to be able to go back to Africa one last time."
I immediately remembered the book in his bedroom when we were children.
"By the way, how's your mother?"
He didn't seem surprised by my asking him about his mother. In fact, he even seemed pleased.
"Not bad for her age."
He leaned slightly in the direction of the bar. Outside, the noise of the crowd walking down toward Cour du Havre. The same noise for years. I've often forgotten it.
"I don't see much of her, she lives in an apartment in Marseilles, with a cousin of hers. But she's fine, I mean, she forgets a lot of things."
"In Marseilles?"
"Yes, the rents are too high in Paris. She has a cousin down there, they share a small apartment. They're old now. Do you know what I mean?"
I said yes, of course I know what you mean.
I already knew that later, when I got home, other fragments of the story we shared would come back to me from time to time and keep me awake. I'd always liked his mother even though, like mine with me, we both knew they didn't need us in their lives, and that in some way we were like enemies because we'd been born. His mother was the concierge of an apartment building, and also worked as a cleaner. In the evening, sometimes, she'd go dancing with her friends in clubs in Argenteuil, La Garenne, and Paris. She loved dancing. He'd go with her, as soon as he became a teenager. I remembered I envied him that. Now the couple was embracing, what age could they be? When the guy listened to her talking, that little blonde with extensions, he'd look up at the ceiling, with a smile on his lips, his body strained toward her. My wife took the decision to get a divorce after reading an American book called Mars Versus Venus. Or something like that. She only ever read in bed, slowly. For three months, that book was on the coffee table in the living room. Benjamin also noticed it. I don't know why the scenes of happiness that I see, in cafés or elsewhere, always remind me of that book lying on the coffee table in the living room all that time, and I'm not able to wipe out the memory.
"Did you see Mom's book?"
"Yes, Benjamin, it'd have been hard not to see it."
I must have given him some kind of awkward answer like that, it was already thirteen years ago.
"Why don't you talk to her? Don't you know what to say to her? Why?" I remember I took it badly at the time. He was angry, he already knew what was going to happen. I asked him to shut up, and later, when the two of us were alone, my son and I, I tried to explain. But I couldn't find the words, and as for him, he was busy tapping away on his computer, he didn't want to talk about it anymore.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Guys Like Me"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Librairie Arthème Fayard.
Excerpted by permission of New Vessel Press.
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