Little Misunderstandings of No Importance Read online

  Life’s an appointment—what I’m saying is very banal, Monsieur, I realize; the only thing is that we don’t know when, where, how, and with whom. Then we think: if I’d said this instead of that or that instead of this, if I’d got up late instead of early, today I’d be imperceptibly different from what I am, and perhaps the world would be imperceptibly different, too. Or else it would be the same and I couldn’t know it. For instance, I shouldn’t be here telling a story, proposing a riddle that has no solution or else that has always had an inevitable solution, only I don’t know about it and so, every now and then, rarely, when I’m having a drink with a friend, I say: Here’s a riddle for you, let’s see how you solve it. But then, why do you care about riddles? Do you go in for puzzles and the like, or is it just the sterile curiosity with which you observe other people’s lives?

  An appointment and a journey, this too is banal, I mean as a definition of life; it’s been said any number of times, and then in the great journey there are other journeys, our insignificant trips over the crust of this planet, which is journeying also, but where to? It’s all a riddle; perhaps you find me a bit odd. But, at that time, I had come to a standstill; I was stuck in a morass of boredom, in the lethargic mood of a man who is no longer very young, but not completely an adult, who is simply waiting for life.

  And instead Miriam came on the scene. “I’m the Countess of Terrail, and I have to get to Biarritz.” “And I’m the Marquis of Carabas, but I seldom leave my estate.” That’s exactly how it began, with this exchange. We were at Chez Albert, near the Porte Saint-Denis, not exactly a stamping ground for countesses. In the afternoon, after I’d closed the shop, I went to this bistrot for a drink. It’s gone now and, in its place, there’s one of those establishments that sell human flesh on film—it’s the times. Albert would have liked to be buried at Père-Lachaise, because Proust is there, but I think he wound up in the cemetery at Ivry, another sign of the times. The old days—I don’t mean to hark back to the past—but they were different, they really were. Take today’s motor cars: the engine’s all squeezed in—you could wrap it up in a handkerchief—and there’s not even room to take the carburettor apart. Albert wasn’t exactly my partner, but he might just as well have been because he got hold of many of the cars. He’d been a racing driver before there were macadam roads, when drivers wore special goggles to keep out the dust. He was a wee slip of a man, grown melancholy from standing behind the bar, who laughed only when he’d had a glass too many. At such moments he drew off some Alsatian beer and put a pitcher of it on the bar, just like in a cowboy film, exclaiming: “Speed!” Speed had done him in, but not too much; he was lame in one leg and his left hand had lost its grip. He was the one to get hold of the car that had belonged to Agostinelli, that is, to Proust. Lord knows how he did it. Agostinelli was Proust’s chauffeur, and a good fellow; together they visited all the Gothic cathedrals of Normandy. I don’t know if there was anything between them, and it doesn’t really matter. Proust, as you know, had his particular tastes. Anyhow, to go back to what I was saying, during my first year of Literature at the university I’d written a paper that I thought I might turn into a thesis, but then I dropped out; the Sorbonne and its professors seemed pointless to me. My thesis was to be entitled What Proust Saw from a Car. Obviously the car, not Proust, was what interested me. One fine day I made up my mind and sold the piece for publication in two instalments in a third-class magazine, a feeble imitation of Harper’s Bazaar (I’m not telling you the name, so you won’t find it) and, God knows how, it fell into Albert’s hands. He took that for granted; everything fell into his hands. And then, you know how life is, like a woven fabric in which all the threads cross, and what I want one day is to see the whole pattern. That’s why, one evening, I went to Chez Albert with a copy of the magazine under my arm and ordered a drink. I was wandering about Saint-Denis because I’d been told that, in the area, there was a body shop owned by an old man who repaired vintage cars. I was a proper mechanic, because I grew up in a garage at Meudon, the town where Celine lived. Not that I knew him; he was a bad egg, they say, but a good doctor, apparently, especially to the poor. Albert saw the magazine under my arm. “There’s a piece in there about Proust’s car,” he said, “by a lunatic who signs himself the Marquis of Carabas.” “I’m the Marquis of Carabas,” I said, “but for the moment I’m what they call fallen on hard times. I’m looking for the Pegasus body shop, where I hear there’s a job.” Albert looked at me hard, as if to see whether I was joking, but I wasn’t; I was in low spirits. “Don’t take it so hard, my boy; the shop’s in that courtyard over there, and so is Agostinelli’s car, which I brought in last Sunday. I bought it at a junkyard in Suresnes, where they didn’t have the foggiest idea what it was. Now it’s only a matter of putting it back into working order.”

  And that’s what we spent the summer doing. “This one’s not for sale,” said Albert. “It’s the car in which I want to run my last race, destination Père-Lachaise, with a little band behind, playing En passant par la Lorraine.” Lorraine is where he came from, of course. I don’t know if you can visualize Proust’s car, but probably you’ve seen a photograph of it. It was a monument, with headlights like searchlights, which served, on the trip through Normandy, to light up the façades of the various cathedrals. When Proust and Agostinelli arrived in a town after dark, they drove through the empty streets up to the cathedral square, stopping on a slight incline so that the headlights would point upwards and illuminate the tympanum. “Agostinelli …” Proust would say, and open the volume of Ruskin, which was his bible. This is all true: he wrote it up in the Le Figaro of 1907 under the title Impressions de route en automobile. Of course, I was never quite sure that our car really had been Proust’s. In the junkyard where Albert had bought it there was no registration paper and it was impossible to trace the original owner. But, in the glove compartment, there was a pair of gloves, which Albert insisted were the real thing. If he liked the idea, what was wrong with it? Only the car wasn’t used for his funeral; but that’s another story.

  When the owner of the repair shop died, I took over. For some time I had been a silent partner. Monsieur Gélin had given me a free hand and I had made a pile of money, partly thanks to Albert, who found the vintage cars. Sales were my affair; I created a mid-city headquarters for public relations because we couldn’t receive prospective buyers at the shop. It was a microscopic but handsome set-up on the fashionable Avenue Foch: a waiting room and a panelled office with two leather-upholstered chairs and a brass plate on the door: PEGASUS. DE-LUXE VINTAGE CARS. I received customers twice a week—Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning—as advertised. Most of the time I was bored to death because there was seldom more than one buyer a month. But seven or eight sales a year yielded all the money I wanted. Albert managed to find old wrecks that cost him a song and he had made connections with a repair shop in Marseilles which sold us museum pieces for a pittance. All we had to do was fix them up, but that was quite a job. I enjoyed it, and I took on a bright, nimble-fingered young assistant, the son of one of Albert’s cousins, called Jacob who, like him, came from Lorraine. For three or four years we restored a bit of everything: Delages, Aston Martins, a Hispano-Suiza, an Isotta Fraschini, and even a 1922 Fiat Mefistofele, the most beautiful racing car in the world. That one wasn’t a car, really; it was a torpedo, a copy of the 1908 original, and in 1924 it set a world speed record. The customers were usually Americans, rolling in money, mad about Europe, with an abominable accent and a craving for vintage cars. They pictured themselves as so many Fitzgeralds, geniuses and wastrels, drunk on champagne, Montmartre, and Sous le ciel de Paris. Those, too, were the days. People had been scared by bombs and the slaughter in the trenches and they wanted to celebrate and feel themselves alive: let’s laugh and have fun; life’s a gift to be enjoyed; we don’t want to be like the foolish virgins. There was an Egyptian, one of our best customers, a jovial, fat fellow; he wanted a car every three months, one for every season, he sa
id, laughing like a child. He drank like a sponge and wrecked the cars, one after another. Eventually he came to a bad end; the French police arrested him, I never knew why; for political reasons, they said, but your guess is as good as mine. Albert wanted me to get married. “Get yourself a wife, Carabas,” he used to say. “You’re over thirty and you need the right kind of woman. What’s a man to do, in the house, after he’s spent the day fixing a hood? Time slips by, without our noticing, and you’ll be an old man before you know it.” Albert was a bit of a philosopher, like every good mechanic. You may not believe it, Monsieur, but the study of automobiles is very instructive: life’s a gearbox, a wheel here, a pump there and then the transmission, which links it all up and turns power into movement, yes, just the way it is in life. Some day I’d like to understand the workings of the transmission that ties the components of my life together. It’s the same idea; just open up the hood and study the humming motor, then tie up all the minutes, people, and events and say: here’s the engine block (that stage of my life); here’s Albert (the starter); here am I (the pistons with their valves) and here’s the spark plug that sets off the spark and gives the word to go. The spark was Miriam, of course, as you probably realize, but what was the transmission? Not the obvious one, as I told Albert, which was a Bugatti Royale, but the real, hidden one, which ties all the components together and causes a car to move just the way this one moved, with its rhythm, pulse, acceleration, speed and final slow-down.

  “There’s no resisting a Bugatti Royale,” I said to Albert. “I’m going.” He looked up from wiping the bar and I thought I saw a shadow of melancholy cross his eyes. “It’ll give you problems,” he said, “you know that better than I do, but I understand. It’s your race. You’ve always been stuck between the starting line and the track and now you’re in a position to run. You’re too young and the fascination of risk is too strong.”

  But first I must go back, because that isn’t where our conversation ended, I mean the conversation between Miriam and myself, when I told her I was the Marquis of Carabas but I had no mind to leave my estate. “Don’t joke, please,” she said. “I’m not joking,” I replied. Then she repeated: “Don’t joke, please.” And picking up her glass, distractedly, as if what she was about to say were the most natural thing in the world, “They want to kill me,” she added. She said it with the voice of a woman who has seen, drunk, and loved too much and so was beyond lying. I stared at her, like a fool, not knowing what to answer and then I objected, ignobly, “What’s in it for me?” She emptied her glass, hurriedly, with the melancholy smile of disillusionment. “Very little,” she said; “you’re quite right, practically nothing.” She left some change on the table and wearily pushed back her hair. “Excuse me,” she said, and went away. Besides her glass she had left a matchbox with Miriam written on it, and a telephone number. I didn’t call; better pass it up, I said to myself. But the following Saturday, I met the Count. I was in my office on the Avenue Foch, summer was at hand and through the window I could see the new green leaves on the trees. I was reading a book by an Italian dandy who drove to Peking at the turn of the century—I don’t remember his name—when the Count came in. Of course, I didn’t know at first who he was. He was a stout man, no longer young, with a short reddish beard, wearing a navyblue blazer, light-coloured trousers, and old-fashioned sunglasses and carrying a newspaper and a cane, a rich banker or lawyer type of fellow. He introduced himself and sat down, crossing his legs awkwardly because of his weight. “I believe my wife contacted you about a job proposal,” he said deliberately, “and I’d like to clarify the terms.” His tone of voice was flat and bored, as if the matter did not concern him and he wanted to get rid of it with a cheque. “We have an old car,” he went on, “a 1927 Bugatti Royale, and my wife has got it into her head to take it to Biarritz, to take part in a rally at San Sebastian.” As I had foreseen, he pulled out a chequebook and signed a cheque for an amount more than the price of the car. His expression was more and more bored; as for me, I was sparked up, but I tried to keep cool. There are plenty of drivers around, I nearly said. If you put an ad in the paper there’ll be a flock of applicants; as for me, right now, I’m sorry, but I’m very busy. Instead, he got in first: “I want you to turn down my wife’s offer.” And he held out the cheque. It stayed in his hand, because I was staring at him stupidly, taken by surprise. At the same time I had a feeling that there was something fishy about the whole story; it was too vague and contradictory. I don’t know why, perhaps just instinctively, I said: “I don’t know your wife or anything about a job proposal. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” It was his turn to be taken aback, I was sure of it, but he didn’t flinch. He tore up the cheque and threw it into the wastepaper basket. “If that’s so,” he said, “please excuse the interruption. My secretary must have made a mistake; goodbye.” As soon as he’d left, I called the number Miriam had left me. The Hôtel de Paris answered: “The Count and Countess have gone out. Do you want to leave a message?” “Yes, it’s a personal message for the Countess; tell her that the Marquis de Carabas called, that’s all.”

  It was a genuine Bugatti Royale, a coupé de ville. I don’t know if that means anything to you, Monsieur; it’s quite understandable if it doesn’t. Albert and I went to fetch it, in a little garage on the Quai d’Anjou, behind a wooden door opening onto a courtyard as musky as an English house, with the Seine running below. Albert couldn’t believe his eyes. “It’s impossible,” he said, “impossible,” caressing the long, tapering fenders; I don’t know whether you get the idea, but the Bugatti has something of a woman’s body about it, a woman lying on her back with her legs out in front of her. It was a superb specimen, the body in excellent condition, the damask velvet upholstery in fairly good shape aside from a few moth holes and a single tear. The main problem—at least at first sight—lay in the wheels and the exhaust pipes. The engine seemed unaffected by its long idleness and in need only of being roused from its slumber. We roused it successfully and drove it to the shop. The elephant on the hood was missing, and this was an unpleasant surprise, because you can’t take a Bugatti Royale to a rally without its elephant. Perhaps you didn’t know, but at the top of the radiator the Royale had a silver elephant sculpted by Ettore Bugatti’s brother, Rembrandt. It wasn’t just a trademark like the Rolls Royce’s Spirit of Ecstasy or the Packard swan, it was a symbol, undecipherable, like all symbols; an elephant standing on his hind legs, with his trunk upraised and trumpeting, in a gesture of attack or mating. Is it too glib to say that these two go together? Perhaps so. But just imagine this: a Bugatti Royale on its haunches, climbing a slight incline, with fenders flared, ready to gather speed and intoxication, with power throbbing behind a fabulous radiator grille and, atop it, an elephant with upraised trunk.

  I wanted to stay on the sidelines. Albert called the Countess at the Hôtel de Paris to find out if she knew what had become of the elephant. It had simply disappeared; in any case, it was lost, he reported. The car had been standing too long; she says to make a copy. And so we had three weeks to do something about it, while we were touching up the engine and the upholstery. One cylinder needed adjusting, but that was not a big job. The upholsterer was a wily young fellow with a shop on the Rue Le Peletier, who sent antique fabrics to be repaired by the nuns of a certain convent. There’s nobody like a nun for a painstaking job, believe me, and their mending was invisible; it was all done on the reverse side, where it left a network of threads like a telephone exchange. The worst thing was the elephant. A sculptor of sorts offered to make a clay copy to be covered with metal, but bumps and jolts would soon have caused it to crack. Finally Albert thought of a cabinetmaker from Lorraine—this story is full of Lorrainers—who had a shop in the Marais, an old fellow who carved wood in naturalistic style. It was easy enough to find a photograph of the elephant, which we took to the old man, together with the exact measurements, telling him to make an identical copy. After that we had to see to the chrome plating, and that c
ame out satisfactorily. Of course, if you looked at the figure when the car was standing still you could see that it was a fake, but in motion it seemed like the real thing.

  The morning of our departure was quite an event. Albert had fallen completely into the role of father, and kept asking whether I needed this or had forgotten that. The day before I’d bought a leather suitcase—the car and the trip deserved nothing less—as well as a cream-colored linen jacket and another in leather and an Italian silk scarf. When I got to the Hôtel de Paris a liveried doorman opened the car, and, feeling like the Marquis of Carabas, I told him to call the Countess. A porter came with a valise and a vanity case; she arrived, on her husband’s arm, greeted me distractedly and got into the back seat. Here was the first surprise of the day. I had been fearful of seeing the Count again because I didn’t exactly like him, but he spoke to me as if we’d never met, playing the part to perfection. It was a Monday towards the end of June. “We’ll meet in Biarritz a week from today,” he said affably to his wife. “If you like you can send your driver to pick me up at the station—my train gets in at eight thirty-five in the evening; otherwise we’ll meet at the Hôtel des Palais.” I went into first gear, and she gave a brief wave of her hand through the open window.

  The second surprise was her telling me to take the Route Nationale 6, and her tone of voice, a dry, decisive tone which seemed to reflect a strong will or else some sort of phobia. I objected that this wasn’t the shortest way to Biarritz. “I want to take another route,” she said sharply, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t argue the point.” And there was a third surprise as well. When I first met her at Chez Albert she was so defenceless and such an open book that I thought I could read her whole life on her face; now, instead, she had withdrawn behind a mask of distance and reserve, like a real countess. She was beautiful, and that was no surprise, but now she seemed to me of an absolute beauty, because I understood that no beauty in the world is greater than that of a woman, and this, you’ll understand, Monsieur, put me into a sort of frenzy. Meanwhile the Bugatti glided over the gentle, inviting roads of France, up and down and along level stretches, the way our roads go, bordered by plane trees on either side. Behind me the road retreated, before me it opened up, and I thought of my life and the boredom of it, and of what Albert had said to me, and I felt ashamed that I’d never known love. I don’t mean physical love, of course, I’d had that, but real love, the kind that blazes up inside and breaks out and spins like a motor while the wheels speed over the ground. It was like that, a sort of remorse, an awareness of mediocrity or cowardice. Up to now my wheels had turned slowly and tediously over a long, long road, and I couldn’t remember a single landscape along the way. Now I was travelling another road, which led nowhere, with a beautiful and distant woman who was escaping or fleeing from I knew not what. It was a useless race across France, I felt quite sure, on a road as empty as those that had gone before. Those were my exact thoughts at that particular moment. Limoges was not far, we were deep in the countryside, where farmers were working among their fruit trees. Limoges, I thought, what does Limoges have to do with my life? I drew the car over to the side of the road and stopped. Turning towards her, I said: “Look here.…” Before I could say any more she laid a finger gently across my lips and murmured: “Don’t be a fool, Carabas.” Without another word she got out and came to sit beside me. “Go on,” she said, “I know that we’re taking an absurd route, but perhaps everything’s absurd, and I have my reasons.”