Hotelles (38 page)

33

June 15, 2009

I
got back to the house late—and Sophia very early, I supposed the next morning, since the house had been empty when I returned. From what I could gather, she had ended up abandoning the pile of old photos and going out in search of fun. I left the gate and door open for her. I didn't hear the sound of her parking in front of the villa or pushing open the creaking doors. I had fallen into a weary sleep.

 

TWENTY-ONE MISSED CALLS, SEVEN MESSAGES.

That is what was waiting for me on my phone when I awoke. I was a little surprised that David had not come to get me in person. Or at least sent one of his factotums. But who knows: maybe Armand hadn't given me away, though that struck me as surprising. And then, when I thought about it, it occurred to me that it was Monday, the beginning of the workweek, when every second of his schedule was already completely full. Tied up with his CEO duties. That his future wife had suddenly vanished was no doubt disagreeable, a stone in his polished shoe, but it was also a minor event compared to the crucial deadlines awaiting him at work.

“Hey, darlin'!” I said to Sophia, who was wearing an old T-shirt and ancient panties.

Her brown curls fell over a tired face. The night had no doubt been long and well lubricated. Maybe even horizontal, too. With her, anything was possible.

“Whoa . . . softly!”

She was holding her head between her hands, covering her ears.

“Long night?”

“Hmm . . . I've had
longer
,” she simpered, underscoring her salacious double meaning. “But not bad.”

I waved my hand at her, playing my part as the prude. “Don't tell me. No really, don't.”

“I'm not up for it anyway.”

“Breakfast?”

“Definitely! Double long espresso or nothing.”

The night's storm had given way to bright sunshine. The sky was clear as we drove into town, where we sat down at a table outside by the beach. There weren't many other customers. The waiter, a plump and affable young man, seemed delighted to serve two young “beautiful and sophisticated ladies.” He gave us lots of presents: an additional ration of coffee, extra jam and butter, freshly pressed orange juice instead of the bottled kind we had ordered.

 

Is it possible to be sexually attracted to a man whose every atom disgusts you?

That is the big question this season in magazines. A writer and journalist, known for her commitment to feminism, recently published a novel in which she reveals her steamy relationship with a politician who was ruined by a sexual scandal two years ago. In the book, she describes her fascination for this man she calls a “pig,” who is twenty years her senior, a notorious orgy-goer, and whose addiction to sex led to his professional and very public fall. Her tell-all about how she fell for him has been a major source of fascination and scandal.

As I read various opinion pieces about her book, I can't help but wonder if I, too, have felt that kind of attraction. Not really for ugly or untouchable men. But I should probably consider why older men seem to have so much power over my young self.

An obvious answer would be that I'm subconsciously trying to find someone to replace my absent father. But there's something else. Something rawer, more animalistic in this preference. The hairier, more rugged body; the way the member is darkened by time; the heavier weight of the scrotum in my hand; the musky smell—I love the physical attributes of these old apes. I could never prefer the rosy freshness of young macaques. To please me, a man's body has to be more than a delicate caress. It has to be like an exfoliating glove, capable of scratching my skin. I've also noticed: though it's less abundant, older men's semen is stickier, thicker. I like it better.

 

Handwritten note by me, 6/15/2009

 

AFTER EATING, WE SPENT A
long time looking at the sea. A statue of Alfred Hitchcock, a crow on each shoulder, stared at us. It reminded me of the villa on the cliff, a fairly convincing and disturbing allusion to the Bates residence in
Psycho
.

“It's for the festival,” the waiter explained. He was a little too talkative for our taste.

“Festival?” Sophia raised an irritated eye in his direction.

“Yeah, the festival of English cinema. Oh, you have to come. There will be a lot of people, stars and everything!”

Our silence eventually won out over his parasitic babel, and we carried on with our mute staring. The day promised to be gentler, the squawk of gulls and scent of seaweed hanging on a gentle breeze.

Sophia broke our silence:

“So did you find some interesting stuff?”

“What . . . ?”

“In the house. You searched through all the drawers, right?”

“Oh, right . . . Yeah, I mean, almost. Nothing very conclusive.”

“What were you hoping to find?”

The question was not really “what” but “whom.”

Considering the Barlet brothers' secrecy surrounding Aurora Delbard and the role she played in their life, it was more disappointing than surprising that she was absent from the family archives. I hesitated a moment before sharing this information with my friend, then told her everything I knew about the subject.

“If I'm following you, they completely erased that girl from their past?”

“So it would appear . . .”

“That's fishy, I agree . . . ,” she said. “But at the same time, if a girl died because of some rivalry that you had fostered between your sons, would you really want photos of her around your house. Really?”

She was right. Sometimes editing the past is not motivated by dark intentions. Often, when it comes to private dramas, people try to hide things out of pain and a sense of decency. The surest way of forgetting is to eliminate all traces of the tragedy.

“You're not wrong,” I admitted.

“But if you want, I can help you search. I'm sure there are still things you haven't seen hidden in the back of some cupboard.”

I accepted her offer of help, and we headed back to Brown Rocks. This time, we took the coastal path, which is only accessible during low tide. The narrow granite road is only partially paved and hugs the foot of the rocky Malouine Point. From there, we had a perfect view of Saint-Malo and the rest of the bay, the islands Grand and Petit Bé, Cézembre and Conchée. Midway, a red-and-white sign posted a warning:
swimmers,
beware
violent
current.
danger.

After the ridge, I thought I recognized the area such as Louie had described it in the back of his limousine: the wall at the base of the villa with a little white door and a few steps leading to the path. Beneath that, large rocks peeked through the water, jagged granite as sharp as blades, between which a foot or leg could easily get caught.

“She died here.”

I pointed the spot out to my friend, my voice wan.

“Here?” she asked. “But that's still the shore . . . You can't drown here! That's ridiculous!”

It was true that at low tide the danger seemed pretty slim. But with a little more water, the ocean's swells could easily trap and submerge anyone. The tide was strong and fast in the area.

As though to confirm, someone walking along the shore pointed to a man in a wet suit who had clearly been carried off by a wave and thrown onto a sandbank some hundred fifty feet from shore. From where we were, it didn't seem far, and yet he looked really disoriented. After hesitating a few minutes, precious time in such circumstances, he ended up throwing himself in the water and fighting against the current to make it back to land.

We didn't say another word until we got back to the house. We opened all the shutters to let some fresh air through the tall windows. Then we started emptying all accessible drawers onto the dusty parquet flooring. Two of them proved impossible to open, however. And our efforts to unlock them with hangers and an old screwdriver were in vain.

Amid the ancient fumes of furniture polish and developing chemicals, we spent the following hours crouched on the ground examining each photograph, and even going over the ones I had surveyed the night before again. The findings were not miraculous—still no picture of Aurora—but there were some pretty shots. Among them were some of Andre and Hortensia, both before and after the death of the young woman. Before, their expressions were, of course, much happier than after. And there was one of Louie, young, smiling wide and carefree, his face rounder than today, in a tender embrace with a beautiful blonde. The woman had a wild look, and I barely recognized her as Rebecca. But it was her. And she was already just as affected, wearing a striped sweater reminiscent of Jean Paul Gaultier or Étienne Daho, the height of cool at the time.

“Well,” Sophia lamented, “they did a good job of cleaning up.”

“Yes . . . It's strange . . .”

“Strange?”

“I mean . . . Aurora left so little behind . . . It's almost like she wanted to disappear.”

She clearly found my remark disconcerting but did not give it more thought and instead dived back into the piles of yellowed paper.

No use telling her where I was going with this theory. Like the women in
Secret Women
, Aurora could have decided to get rid of all traces of herself, as a kind of supreme plot to punish the Barlets for mistreating her. But the similarities stopped there: Ania Oz's Amazons hid from the world so as to reemerge in the end triumphant, and Aurora, well, she was dead. Her punishment had been considerably worse than the one reserved for those who had pushed her to such tragic extremes.

We spent our last hour at Brown Rocks searching every nook and cranny. This time, we weren't just looking for photos but for anything that could lead to Aurora or, more precisely, to any vestiges of her past.

All we found were scratched trinkets, old catalogues, and expired jars. We were about to throw in the towel, when Sophia cried:

“Look!”

Tucked between two pages of a pamphlet she had come across was a dirty and beat-up business card, which, by the looks of it, was pretty old.

     Jean-François Delbard

Notary

8 Placître

35400 Saint-Malo

Telephone : 99 32 69 45

Fax : 99 32 69 47

“Delbard, isn't that the drowned woman's name?”

“Yes,” I said succinctly.

I had never heard of Jean-François Delbard. Neither Louie nor Rebecca had ever mentioned him.

“Did you see the number?” Sophia insisted. “And the fax? This is old.”

It was. And it proved that a member of Aurora's family had lived and worked in the region, most likely before she had died, judging from the numbers—only eight instead of ten. A brother? An uncle? Maybe even her father?

“What's the area code for Saint-Malo again?” I asked.

She grabbed the first advertisement handy and said, “Zero, two.”

I punched the number into my phone's touch-screen keyboard and waited for it to ring. But instead, a recording informed me that it had been disconnected. For how long? A mystery. I dialed information, and the operator told me that no one by the name of Jean-François Delbard figured in her directory, nor in Dinard, nor in greater Saint-Malo. I even asked her to try again, with alternative spellings, but to no avail.

“Either he moved, or he also died,” Sophia concluded after I hung up.

Dead man. Dead woman.

Her passing observation actually made me think of something.

“You're amazing!” I exclaimed, hugging her.

“What did I say?”

“Come on, let's go. I'll explain once we're on the road.”

It only took us fifteen minutes to clean and lock up at Brown Rocks, leaving the house to its guarded secrets.

Happily, the records department at town hall in Dinard was still open. Unfortunately, there was no record of an Aurora Delbard, or even Barlet—neither a birth nor a death certificate.

Without skipping a beat, we went to see the people at Saint-Malo's town hall.

“Yes, I have an Aurora Delbard. Born April 12, 1970. Died December 25, 1989.”

“Fuck . . . ,” Sophia breathed, expressing what we were both thinking out loud. “She killed herself on Christmas day!”

Christmas night, in fact, and not in the summer, as Louie had claimed.

“Where is she buried?” I inquired.

“Are you family, Mademoiselle?”

“No . . . she was my fiancé's first wife.”

She must have felt sorry for me because she offered the following:

“We don't have that kind of information here. But considering the address you gave me . . . there's a chance she's at Rocabey Cemetery. If the family has a plot there, of course.”

She drew us a rough map on a brochure for tourists, and we hopped in the Beetle and rushed to the cemetery. Rocabey is a sad neighborhood in Saint-Malo, located between the train station and the merchants' port. Still, a sign at the entry indicated the celebrities buried there: Robert Surcouf, the most famous mariner of Saint-Malo, and the actor Daniel Gélin.

We wandered for several minutes before running into a grave digger with sideburns and a wheelbarrow. He scratched his head, and then remembered aloud:

“Oh, yes. Delbard . . . like the notary!”

Bingo.

“That's right.” I nodded. “Like the notary. By the way, Aurora and her . . .” I paused, hoping he would complete my sentence.

“His daughter, yes. Or maybe his niece. I might be confusing them with the Dolé family. Or maybe the Bazins.”

Sophia raised her eyebrows, as if to say we weren't going to get anything more out of him.

The Delbard family tomb was a slab of pink marble. It was fairly simple, with no portraits. It looked abandoned: no flowers or decorations, no sign of interest in their sepulcher. The surrounding vegetation was starting to invade. Clearly, no one was there to tend to it. There were four names listed: Amédée (1910–1985), Suzanne (1912–1999), Jean-François (1938–2005), and Aurora (1970–1989).