The Dreamers (7 page)

‘Here,' said Théo, pressing the electric razor into Matthew's hands. ‘Use this.'

For a moment Matthew was uncertain how to respond; and it was by hesitating as he did that he
forfeited
his chance to dissemble. All at once Théo
scrutinised
his features, the features of a housebroken mama's boy, as intently as his father had done the evening before.

‘You don't use a razor, do you?'

Isabelle slid off the bathtub and approached Matthew.

‘Let me see!'

These two white vests, these two pairs of white underpants, one of them bloated at the crotch, the other undershadowed by the dark silhouette of a triangular mound – nothing was more calculated to arouse him, to thrill him to the core, and at the same time to alarm him.

He backed off, only to be pinioned against the closed door, on which a variety of dressing gowns and bathrobes were hanging up.

When Isabelle extended a hand to caress his cheek, he held her off at arm's length.

‘Stop it. Leave me alone.'

Brother and sister retreated. They had come to expect docile submission to their banter and teasing. They
imagined that Matthew had become immune to it, as they themselves were immune to the boisterous
give-and
-take of their own mutual raillery. It startled them to confront, in so enclosed a space, his huge, hurt eyes, eyes that devoured his face, devoured the cramped bathroom, craned against its walls and ceiling, its
lintels
and cornices, like a pair of outsized apples by Magritte.

‘All right. I don't shave,' he answered sulkily. ‘What of it?'

‘Nothing,' murmured Isabelle, smirkingly contrite.

‘My father was the same,' he went on. ‘He didn't shave till he was in his twenties. It's not uncommon.'

‘Of course not. It's just …'

‘What?'

‘Unusual for an American, no?' said Isabelle. ‘More like a Mexican.'

‘A Mexican?'

‘A Mexican Hairless.'

‘What's a Mexican Hairless?'

‘It's a dog,' said Isabelle. ‘And what's interesting about it is that it isn't hairless at all. It has hair where people have hair. The question is, have you?'

‘What?'

‘Have you hair … there?'

Without embarrassment, she indicated the spot on her own body.

Love is blind but not deaf.

Matthew felt his lower lip tremble. In a moment or two it would have dissolved into a nerveless, blubbery pat of redcurrent jelly. His mouth awash with
toothpaste
and water, he abruptly left them.

Walking along the corridor back to the spare room, he could hear a quarrel erupt between Théo and Isabelle, then the slamming of a door. Out of breath, still in his underclothes, rubbing his chin with a towel, Théo caught up with him.

‘Don’t take it so seriously,’ he said, sliding his arm about Matthew’s shoulders. ‘It’s nothing to what I get every day of my life.’

‘Too late. I’m leaving.’

‘Leaving? You haven’t had breakfast yet.’

‘I never eat breakfast.’

‘But we were going to invite you to stay on.’

‘What?’

‘Our parents are off tomorrow to Trouville. For a month. And we thought you might like to move your
things here. You don’t have to return to that room of yours, do you? You haven’t paid up in advance?’

‘No …’

‘Well, stay. Isa will be disappointed if you don’t. We talked it over last night.’

That was a slip of the tongue. Since, on the evening before, Isabelle had risen from the table first, she and Théo shouldn’t have been able to communicate with each other until morning. But Matthew’s mind had begun to dwell on arguments less petty and more potent.

He had been offered privileged access to a secret world, a world from which he had always been
excluded
, a planet far from the solar system of average, upright citizens who, like mediaeval astronomers, tend to confuse that solar system with the universe itself. It was a world of which he had known nothing a mere twenty-four hours earlier. Its inhabitants he had
frequented
only when it had taken their fancy, like Caliphs or angels, to roam incognito through the ordinary world of average, upright citizens.

This planet, orbiting as it did around the place de l’Odéon, already boasted entangled legs, unmade beds, a communal bathroom that was warm, moist,
dewy-windowed
and redolent of suspect odours, as well as other mysteries which remained as yet unveiled but might be made accessible in their turn.

To take up residence in the flat, for however brief a spell, would be a mistake: that he surely knew. Not to take up residence would be no less of a mistake. The thing was to make the right mistake, not the wrong one.

When Isabelle came to grace his forehead with a prim, sisterly kiss and apologise, with what certainly sounded like sincerity, for her callousness, Matthew said yes. They would collect his belongings from the hotel room later that day.

It transpired that the flat did after all contain a wing of sorts, one inhabited exclusively by the young people. They had even given it a name:
le quartier des enfants
. On Matthew’s way to the kitchen, where all three of them sat with elbows on the table and dunked buttered tartines into their bowls of coffee, he realised how far from the centre of the household their bedrooms were.

Since he had always had too fragile a constitution to have been packed off to summer camp as a child, and thus had never known the experience of breakfasting outside his own family circle, Matthew was determined
to preserve the memory of that very first morning as, in its pristine state, unwrinkled by projection, one
preserves
the negative of a film. But his determination ended by investing each of his gestures with an
unwarranted
solemnity. Like Queen Christina, he felt he was touching that coffee bowl, that spoon, that sugar shaker, for the last rather than the first time.

It rained all day and the three friends stayed indoors. Having withdrawn early to his study to tend his
inspiration
, the poet manifested no further interest in Matthew’s welfare. His wife had gone shopping for the trip to Trouville.

The boys spent the day lounging about Théo’s
bedroom
as bonelessly as cats, chatting, devising movie quizzes with which to test each other’s memory,
bringing
Théo’s albums up to date.

Isabelle, for her part, had no patience with their
infantile
pastimes. She read a novel by Queneau, voraciously turning its pages as though the foot of every page
heralded
some stunning reversal whose consequence would only be divulged at the top of the next. From time to time, she uncoiled her angular limbs, stretched over to a small record-player on the carpet and set its needle
down on a record, invariably the same scratchy number, Charles Trenet’s ‘
Que
reste-t-il de nos amours?
’, to which she was addicted.

When Isabelle stirred herself to play the song yet again, for what must have been the ninth or tenth time, her brother glared at her.

‘If I have to listen to that record once more, I swear I’ll break it in two.’

Isabelle’s eyes opened wide in amazement.

‘You like Charles Trenet.’

‘Wrong. I used to.’

‘Listen to him, Matthew. Théo’s seen
Laura
eight times – eight times, can you imagine? And he orders me to stop playing one little record. Well, I won’t.’

Attempting to feign nonchalant unflappability, she set the needle back down.

After the statutory crackly hiss, the record clearing its throat, Trenet’s voice rang out.

Théo galvanised his long lazy frame into life and Isabelle at once installed herself in front of the record-player to shield it from him. A clash of arms seemed inevitable. Then:

The needle had stuck.

Instead of appeasing Théo’s rage, the accident fuelled it. Striving to push him away with her fists, Isabelle protested in a high, girlish shriek.

‘Stop it, stop it! Wait! Matthew, tell me. What film?’

‘What?’

Isabelle was still trying to fend off Théo.

‘Name a film –
arrête, je te dis!
– name a film in which a needle gets stuck in a record. Forfeit to pay if you can’t answer.’

‘A needle gets stuck in a record?’

‘Quick, quick, or you pay the forfeit!’

Matthew racked his memory and finally trumpeted, ‘
Top Hat!
’

‘
Top Hat?
’

‘Remember? Fred Astaire is tap-dancing in his hotel room above Ginger Rogers’ suite and the record sticks?’

Isabelle reflected for a few seconds, trying to summon a mental image of the scene.

‘He’s right, you know,’ said Théo.

‘Then bravo, my little Matthew!’ Isabelle cried.

‘But, Isabelle, what would the forfeit have been?’

‘Ah,’ said she, ‘that would be telling.’

And that was how the game began.

Isabelle, for whom everything had to be given a name, even those things that need no names, christened it Home Movies. The idea was this: they would be calmly going about their business, together or separately,
reading
, playing backgammon in front of the fire, assigning stars to the films listed in
L’Officiel des Spectacles
– it
tended
to be the most humdrum of occupations – when one of them, besieged without premeditation by some idle memory, would come to a halt, re-enact a snippet of
mise en scène
for the benefit of the other two and call out ‘What film?’ or ‘What scene?’ or else ‘Name a character who …’

Later that same day, for example, filing newspaper cuttings he had been accumulating for years, Théo 
placed a glass paperweight – the type which, inverted, produces a miniature snowstorm – on top of them. Then, with a reckless sweep of his shoulders, perhaps deliberate, perhaps not, he knocked it on to the carpet. Without even giving him an opportunity to pose the prescribed question, Matthew and Isabelle cried out in unison, ‘
Citizen Kane!
’

That was an easy one. But, with time, the game became more and more difficult. On another morning, in the kitchen, this exchange could be heard between Matthew and Théo.

‘Théo, I wonder –’

‘Matthew, would you –’

A pause, then:

‘Go ahea -’

‘Sorry. What was –’

A further pause.

‘I just want –’

‘I meant to –’

It was then that Matthew pounced.

‘Name a film!’

‘What?’

‘Come on, Théo. Name a film, just one film, in which two people keep trying to speak at the same time.’

What ensued were mingled protestations of ‘Don’t tell me, don’t tell me!’ and ‘Time’s up! Forfeit!’ – until Théo either named the film or paid the forfeit.

The forfeits had, to start with, a strictly monetary basis. A franc, two francs, fifty centimes, depending on the victim’s resources and the victor’s whim. But they would rapidly grow bored with such trifling prizes, which, in truth, as their meagre funds were eventually to be pooled, came to seem all very pointless. No, just as a hierarchy of trials, ordeals and challenges would transform this game, one that had started so harmlessly in childish pranks and giggles, into a sacrament and a liturgy, so, in their turn, would its forfeits acquire an entirely new significance.

Let's return to that first afternoon. Théo and Matthew left the flat at five o'clock. Théo's mobylette stood
padlocked
and chained at the foot of the stairs in the apartment building's hallway. The plan was that he would ride to the hotel with Matthew on the pillion seat, deposit his passenger in front of it and return home, leaving Matthew to pack his bags and make his own way back to the flat in a taxi. But there would be a detour in his itinerary, one he hadn't dared divulge to
Isabelle, for he intended to take a turn round the
Cinémathèque
to see whether, by chance, it had reopened its doors. Fearing his sister's viperish tongue, he swore Matthew to secrecy on pain of torture.

Yet someone who entreats you not to divulge a confidence will almost certainly blurt it out again before you do. So it proved here. So quickly, indeed, that by the time Matthew re-entered the
quartier des enfants
, Isabelle was already privy to a secret which not even the rack would have drawn from his own lips. Need it be said, the
Fermé
sign was still attached to the Cinémathèque grille.

Matthew, too, had his secret. It was Tuesday, the day on which he was accustomed to go to confession. Which is why, after Théo had sped away, he walked off in the opposite direction from his hotel and took the metro to the avenue Hoche.

There, in the English church, in an alcove directly facing the confessional, stood a plaster Madonna with a globe of the world, like a basketball, clutched in her hands over the sculpted folds of her robe. Her pale head tilted to one side. Her halo, ringed by a garland of stars, resembled an electric fan in motion. Her glazed,
unfocusing
eyes were open but looked closed, as though
false pupils had been pencilled on to the surface of her eyelids.

Matthew knelt before her and prayed for something which it isn't regarded as proper to pray for, something which, if ever it came to pass, he would be compelled to confess and repent.

In vain he struggled with himself not to articulate, even wordlessly, his blasphemous appeal. Alas, the trouble with the flesh is not that it's weak but that it's strong.

In fact, the Virgin heard his prayer. And even if her painted eyes did not shed any tears, Matthew's did – which is itself a kind of miracle.