Chaconne. Diana BlackwoodЧитать онлайн книгу.
there no fire escapes? It’s criminal. Do you realise that in the Parisian region there are almost as many people as in the whole of Australia? Imagine them all burping, farting, ejaculating, excreting. Imagine the sheer quantities of shit in the sewers. Imagine for a moment what it takes in energy and resources to get food and water and electricity to all these people. It’s a nightmare. Paris is one enormous, vulnerable ghetto … You can put your earplugs back in now. Good night.”
She had not expected to miss Ruth quite so soon.
Julien was sleeping serenely beside her. He had refused to go to bed leaving the shutterless window open: j’ai horreur des courants d’air. But Eleanor could not fall asleep in a room that was sealed against the outside; would not stew in her own CO2, as Mavis might have put it. She slipped out of bed and tiptoed naked to the window. Glancing at Julien and nervously biting her lower lip, she drew the curtains as slowly and quietly as she could. The window had the usual tall halves that opened inwards. She twisted the knob and opened the two panes just enough for her to feel the damp night air on her breasts. She stayed there listening to the hiss of rain and the background noises of the city until she began to shiver; then she carefully arranged the window so that the left half snuggled securely into its mate, allowing the passage of air from above and below. She closed the curtains to conceal what she had done. Julien would be none the wiser, and she could sleep at last.
In his letters Julien had made much of the studio flat in Rue Dauphine. At first Eleanor had assumed they would both live in it, that being together at last meant his razor and her things would share space in the bathroom. But two months earlier, having flown like a disoriented swallow into another antipodean winter, he had explained that their moving in together would be a good way for Eleanor to get off on the wrong foot with his mother, who had never quite shaken off her Catholic upbringing. Between the births of his sister and himself, he had reminded Eleanor, his mother had suffered five miscarriages, although quite what should be inferred from that sad tally was not made clear. As for the father, agnostic and worldly though he might be, he would view cohabitation as nothing more than a foolish distraction and therefore a threat to Julien’s chances in the agrégation, the examination that guaranteed the elect a teaching position for life.
Eleanor had met neither parent, despite having spent the best part of a month – the January after she and Julien had fallen in love – in the family’s house near Versailles. Monsieur and Madame Foucher were in Mexico visiting the sister and her children, and from time to time they would phone to check on Julien. He would reassure them that he was eating well and working hard and keeping the place in some sort of order. He had instructed Eleanor not to answer the telephone; it was simpler that way. If he was out, she should not pick up unless it rang three times, and then four, and then rang again, which would be his signal. The cleaning woman had gone back to Portugal for a holiday, and no one seemed to know Eleanor was there except Jean-Marc, Jean-Louis, Jean-Christophe and Daniel, all members of the communist cell at that grand institution to which Julien had been admitted, the École Normale Supérieure at St-Cloud. When she had the house to herself, Eleanor would peer at the family photographs in their silver frames, studying with an anthropological attention to detail the cut of the sister’s wedding dress and the composition of her bouquet, the embroidery on a christening robe, Julien and his father on skis, grinning. So much normality made her feel like a gargoyle.
At that time Julien was writing a long essay with the piquant title of ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un sujet?’ Sometimes he would say, when he had tired of investigating what a subject was and was not, and she had returned from walking the dog or pottering about on her own in a museum, that he needed her, camarade mon amour, to de-intellectualise him, to bring him back to his body, to life, to love. At such moments she felt whole and radiant; everything, or almost everything, seemed to make sense. There were, admittedly, certain objects in the house that scandalised her, though in fairness to Julien, they did not belong to him: the entire shell of a large sea turtle, polished to a sheen; a zebra skin mounted on a wall; a white baby grand that inhabited the formal living room with its shrouded furniture. The white piano alone, she had told Ruth, might account for his rejection of the ideological intoxication of the dominant class and his consequent resolve to live in indignation and political engagement with the proletariat. Worst of all, the piano was badly, mockingly, out of tune.
Eleanor was disappointed that her building lacked a concierge, that anyone could buzz and enter without being noticed and assessed. Instead there was only a grubby alcove that housed the letterboxes.
An ill-lit corridor led to a small, irregular courtyard that smelled faintly of urine.
“Dog or human?” she enquired.
“What do you mean?” said Julien.
The wooden staircase wound with a dizzying tightness, and the skirting that ran alongside it was the colour of spleen. Someone was cooking onions. A radio murmured behind one door; a whiff of Gauloises hovered about another. A middle-aged African in a shabby grey suit coat and a beanie trudged downstairs past them. When Eleanor greeted him, he looked up in surprise and gave a shy smile. Bonjour, monsieur, madame.
Studio, it turned out, was just a real-estate word for one room. It was on the third floor. Wasn’t there a story about Handel trying to toss a mutinous prima donna out a third-floor window? The room had a single bed against the far wall and a solitary window overlooking the courtyard. Your fate would be uncertain if you had to leap in desperation from that window, though a suicidal Schumann had flung himself from his fourth-floor apartment and survived.
“I brought you sheets and a quilt,” said Julien, “and I put some plates and cutlery in the cupboard. So, do you like the room? It’s a great neighbourhood. The Pont Neuf is at the end of the street.”
It was no more than eight strides across the greenish-yellow linoleum from the door to the bed. She would go bonkers in here. No wonder there were so many people on the streets: no one could bear such confinement.
“Of course. Oh, two hotplates and a cute little fridge. Two chairs and a little table. And even a bookcase.” Her voice rang ridiculously false – couldn’t he hear it? And where would she hang her clothes?
The narrow door to what must be the bathroom wore decades of cheap white paint. She turned the half-sized elliptical brass handle, more suited to a linen cupboard, and entered the cramped, tiled room. For a moment she thought she must have missed something, but the more she looked, the more the shower, like Piglet, wasn’t there. Bidet, toilet, handbasin – all the same off-white – towel rail, mirror, cabinet … Dismay began to bubble in her chest. But he had gone to such trouble to find this place! In Paris tens of thousands of people probably lived without a shower, and many endured worse privations, huddled in maids’ rooms under the canopy of zinc rooftops. Anyway, there might be such a thing as a communal shower somewhere in the building.
Nelson Mandela, Nelson Mandela, she repeated. That was a mantra against triviality that she and Ruth had come up with one day when the landlord was bothering them about something. She looked at her anxious face in the mirror and conjured Mandela in his prison cell one more time, but that only made her feel stranded and helpless. Besides, he was probably allowed showers. Then she thought of the funny letter Ruth would write back to her about the ablutions cupboard. She told herself firmly that Paris was what she had wished for, and Paris was what she now had. The room was transitional but also cautionary, reminding her that for the time being she must be patient.
“So … do you suppose there’s a shower somewhere in the building for people who don’t have one in their rooms?”
“I’d be surprised. I’ve never heard of such a thing. It’s not the Cité Universitaire.”
“There’s no shower in the bathroom.”
“I know that. There’s a bidet.”
“So what do people do?”
“They wash.”
“Or not, as the case may be.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Oh, you know, Ruth used to say …”
“You’re