There was a safety deposit box in Charles Rose’s name at the Federal Bank of Commerce, where Fabrice Mansaré was welcomed warmly. After depositing the briefcase and small case, he left empty-handed. The sun was very bright, provided you stuck to the side of the street that followed the axis of its rays, and that was what Fabrice Mansaré did, until he realized he hadn’t eaten anything since morning.
He made his way into a nearly deserted restaurant in Chinatown. Fabrice Mansaré asked to be seated at the back.
The menu was bounteous in French, even more so in the original. He ordered in Cantonese, steamed hairy crab though it was out of season, and ate it down without a word.
But his mind was racing. A dormant few weeks, he thought to himself, and he was unsure what they had cooked up for him. He thought about Alice’s birthday eight days from now, a date supposed to remind him of something, but what?
We believe the fine art of waiting can be accessible to any old johnny-come-lately; nothing could be further from the truth. Waiting is a martial technique lost to the mists of time, acquired only with the greatest of difficulty.
It’s not a matter of distracting oneself, but rather of plunging wilfully into the very heart of boredom, simulating it if need be, to perfect the training regimen and trigger the ominous peripeteia that takes us into that state of reclusion and sensory deprivation – and, while you’re at it, low-intensity torture – all things it’s so much easier to just choose not to think about.
Fabrice Mansaré spends several hours of each day like this, behind drawn curtains, seated on an ordinary chair, methodically clearing his mind. He classifies the ideas that occupy his mental space, attempting to control their nature and rate of flow. Certain matters of the kind that normally escape our vigilance – song choruses, nursery rhymes, insistent leitmotifs – he diligently evacuates and laboriously replaces with others, apparently more rational and ostensibly easier to control, like the creation of an algorithm, the drawing of a map, or the logistics of a rescue operation. But such material soon runs out. Fabrice Mansaré is concentrating on not thinking of anything, convinced that therein freedom lies. Does it, though? Because after a long and very real period of mental respite, something starts creeping its way up, those old, sticky obsessions and confused, poorly lit scenes Fabrice Mansaré knows are part of his past life, buried in a loam packed far too loosely, as if with the express intent of ensuring that he’d be haunted forever. And, instead of chasing them away, the infinitely receptive Fabrice Mansaré directs his dim projector at them, casting ever more light on this dusty scene, patiently conjuring back to life, back into a thorny form, a parody, a gaze he’s known before and that, with enough time, he just might expand into an almost complete face, or perhaps a texture of skin he recalls frequently caressing and which, in his memory, is among the most unimpeachably soft things he has ever been blessed to touch; and perhaps, on days when he has truly achieved heightened perception, a state of clarity, what appears to him are colours, copper highlights dappling dark skin. A sudden green flash lights up this vast sad gaze and there emerges, dug up from a forbidden stratum of his memory, that skin’s sharp fragrance.
Fabrice Mansaré shudders. It’s five o’clock. He’s cold.
No, he’s hot. The thermal stimuli continue to contradict each other, until they reach consensus: hot on the outside, cold on the inside. Where is the opposite? His naked body seems to be covered in a viscous liquid, and seminal fluid is smeared across the head of his erect cock, which he grabs and satisfies without further ado, a matter of hygiene.
The curtains, once open, show a grey street where taxis and people hurry by on their way home from work. Motors rev in response to the call of the traffic lights. Horns honk. Evening falls. Fabrice Mansaré turns on a little light.
Renée came back from the storeroom with a few boxes of glasses. ‘We’ll need more,’ she thought out loud, laying the glasses in a straight row on a long table draped in white, ‘we broke a lot last month, we’re almost out.’
Alban Wouters raised his head. ‘Really? You’re right, the glasses, I’ll go buy some more before the people get here.’
‘You’ll have to hurry,’ Renée said, ‘it’s starting in just over an hour.’
Alban Wouters checked the clock, a circle marked by four black lines that only ever conceded an approximation of the time. ‘Already!’ he remarked, amazed. ‘Well, let me finish my letter and I’ll run out to Moulin Frères.’ Renée set off to the storeroom for wine. ‘Are we okay for wine?’ ‘Okay,’ confirmed Renée, ‘it’s just the glasses.’ The gallery owner wrote down a few words that seemed wholly unequal to the task of transposing with the requisite tact the subtleties of his current thinking. I’ll send the letter tomorrow, he thought, giving up, I’m running out of time. I’m leaving now. ‘You can greet the people, I won’t be long.’ ‘And Bruno?’ asked Renée with concern. ‘When will he be here? I might not be able to handle everyone myself.’ ‘Bruno,’ Alban Wouters conceded, with a gesture conveying his powerlessness on the question of Bruno, ‘you know, Bruno and time.’
As Alban Wouters made his way from the gallery, a tram finally pulled out of the terminus at Porte du Midi.
‘I don’t like being late,’ said Simone, who was one of the passengers.
‘I told you we should have taken a cab,’ said Faya, from the window seat next to her.
‘Spoken like someone who isn’t paying,’ grumbled Simone. Then silence.
They’d been bickering on and off most of the day. Yet the morning had got off to an auspicious start: Faya brought Simone breakfast in bed. ‘Sorry, the toast is a little burned,’ she apologized, placing the tray on the sheet from which Simone’s head and arms poked out. ‘I’ll be back with coffee,’ she said, before clodhopping back down the stairs to the kitchen. Simone rubbed her eyes, then cast her gaze around the room in search of a robe; the one within easiest reach was hanging from the open closet door. Faya was grinding the coffee beans. Simone stepped onto the cold floor, put on the robe, and jumped back into bed as fast as she could, head stuffed under the pillow. She heard the coffee maker whistling for a good minute before Faya, distracted by a magazine or something else perhaps, finally turned off the element, causing the whistling to peter out. Simone heard an ‘Oww!’; Faya was congenitally incapable of handling hot drinks without clumsily scalding a finger.
‘Coffee is served!’ Faya declared as she triumphantly re-entered the bedroom.
‘You forgot the butter,’ Simone observed.
‘The butter!’ Faya yelled, already turning around and heading back down to the kitchen before Simone could say, ‘It’s fine, come here.’
The toast was cold, an observation Simone passed over in silence. Then Faya finally came back with butter and spread it on a slice of toast she bit into with gusto. Crumbs colonized the quilt.
‘Are zhou happy, ah leash?’ asked Faya, mouth full and eyes wide open.
‘Of course!’ Simone said, perceiving her own grudging tone but doing nothing to sweeten it.
‘Maybe zhou wuh radder eat croi-ahnts?’ guessed Faya.
‘Right,’ Simone mocked. ‘Because you would have walked out to the village, in the cold, to get croissants.’
‘You’re harsh,’ said the aggrieved Faya. ‘I bring you toast and coffee, and this is how you thank me?’
‘Fair enough,’ Simone said, ‘but who’ll pick up all the crumbs?’
‘Me, of course,’ Faya protested. ‘What do you think? C’mon, drink your coffee, it’s getting cold.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Simone said at last. ‘I don’t know what’s up with me this morning. The closing at the gallery, maybe. I never feel comfortable at those things. But that’s just how it is. I never know what to say, especially to Alban. He’s