9 Like the World Around Them Didn’t Exist
Like the World Around Them Didn’t Exist
The taxi driver from Croissy-sur-Seine knew the general overview of Paris’s neighborhoods and zones.
He wasn’t a Parisian taxi driver. He wasn’t a specialist of the city.
After lunch, when the well-dressed customer, wearing her earth-toned suit, got into the car and asked him to take her to the intersection of rue de Seine and Visconti in the sixth arrondissement, he thought he could manage it.
He knew rue de Seine well—it was the one that starts at the river, behind the Institut de France, and leads to boulevard Saint-Germain, close to the church.
He even knew that, being such a narrow street, barely only a lane wide, traffic flowed from Saint-Germain toward the river.
But rue de Visconti must have been very small, because he had never even heard the name before.
Since the client, a foreigner, didn’t seem to know where she was going either, he—using the logic honed over more than twenty years behind the wheel, which allowed him to hide his shortcomings as a rural taxi driver—would enter rue de Seine from the top and slowly make his way down until he found where rue Visconti crossed it.
He occasionally glimpsed her in the rearview mirror.
She looked like an actress—one of those women who is sure about their own charm.
Playing a guessing game, he asked the woman with the large earrings if she worked in film.
“No,” Paulina answered curtly. “Well, your face looks very familiar,” the country taxi driver insisted, just before entering the trap that is the Parisian outskirts, always gray and congested.
She stopped responding. She was the type of actress who didn’t want to talk, he concluded, suddenly losing the urge to be friendly.
Beautiful but rude. Paulina, restless in a way she found unrecognizable, was in no mood for pleasantries, much less to make small talk with a stranger whose French she struggled to understand.
The situation unsettled her. She had begun to feel uncomfortable that very morning, with the question Julie had asked her on her first day as a married woman.
The day after the celebration, the sun had taken its time to rise.
Everyone had woken up very late. Paulina had eaten a bit of fruit and cheese in the kitchen with the newlyweds, who had just woken up.
Afterward she called home. Isabel answered.
She told her not to worry, that Gina was fine and had gone out with her father to buy the newspapers and wash the car.
Paulina had good timing. She knew her husband’s habits and schedules better than anyone.
Saturdays in the Castro–Homs household were even more predictable than their weekdays.
“Should I tell him, madam, to call you at your cousin’s house when they’re back?”
“No need, Isabel. Tell Manuel that the wedding went well, that the weather was good, and that everything turned out the way Júlia deserved . . .”
“Don’t you want to speak with Gina, madam?”
“Of course, of course . . .” Paulina couldn’t stand the maid’s insinuations, and even less the tone she used every time she threw a stone and hid her hand. “Give her a big kiss. If it can’t be today, I’ll talk to her tomorrow. I’ve got to hang up now, Isabel. It’s a long-distance call. Bye-bye.”
She hung up on the maid mid-speech.
“Don’t hold back on account of us.” Alain acted generously with his wife’s family’s house phone.
“I’m sorry, these calls are expensive.”
After hanging up, Paulina kept her fingers on the receiver like it brought her closer to her daughter.
“How’s Gina?” Her hair still wet from her first shower as a married woman, Júlia inquired about the baby of the family.
“She’s all good, according to the witch.” She made the newlyweds laugh. “I get the feeling she doesn’t miss me at all, little Gina . . . Feels like no one misses me, really.”
She added, “And least of all Isabel, who in the twenty-four hours has definitely made herself the lady of the house. I can just see it.”
And suddenly, as if she sensed a hornet’s nest nearby, as if she had a built-in emotional danger detector, Júlia asked her a question that, under normal circumstances, would have seemed perfectly ordinary.
“What are you doing this afternoon?”
Bull’s-eye.
What could she tell her beloved cousin now?
It was crazy not to be able to tell her the truth.
After all, it had been Júlia who introduced her to her friend Jean-Pierre.
She had been the one who had seated them together at the table.
Plus, Paulina had no intentions in going to see him.
He had been kind, she had been distant, and it didn’t seem right to snub him if he had offered to show her his art gallery and the antiques street . . .
But did she have to tell Júlia who she’d be spending the afternoon with?
And who cared? What harm was there in saying?
But why couldn’t she bring herself to do it?
Maybe she felt guilty—preemptively—of what exactly she wasn’t quite sure.
Perhaps Júlia’s innocent, seemingly harmless question had opened her eyes to a reality she preferred not to acknowledge.
She had felt comfortable around Jean-Pierre, and she wanted to see him again.
These were two truths she couldn’t suppress.
She just wanted to see him, plain and simple.
But if that was the case, why didn’t she dare tell Júlia, the one person she never kept secrets from, that she had arranged to meet Jean-Pierre at his gallery at four o’clock? Why hide it? If she wasn’t doing anything wrong, why did she feel like she was?
“Don’t stay in Croissy, woman,” said Alain, still half asleep. “You’ll wither away here.”
“Stay bored? No. Maybe I’ll go down to Paris,” she said, pretending to mull it over on the spot. “Are the shops open on Saturday afternoons?”
“Yes. Well . . . it depends. I answered too quickly. Where do you want to go?”
“To the center. Maybe toward the Rive Gauche, I was thinking, the Latin Quarter, behind . . .”
“That whole area, yes, of course. Take a taxi from the station.” Júlia, ever the busybody, had the tendency to manage other people’s lives in the blink of an eye.
“Look, we’ll arrange for one to pick you up, because you can’t always find a taxi in Croissy when you want one, especially on Saturdays.
Depending on which you get, they can be a bit rickety.
We may be half an hour from Paris, but we’re still in a village . . .”
“The Tour de France doesn’t even pass through here,” Alain said, sadly.
“All right, I’ll do that.”
Paulina felt a weight lift off her shoulders. It was better to say nothing and go about her own business in secret.
Visconti—her first surprise—turned out to be the architect of Napoleon I’s tomb. The street’s blue sign declared it proudly. He had nothing to do whatsoever with cinema or Italian neorealism.
Her second surprise was far less pleasant. Disturbing, even. The Galerie Anouk was closed.
The lights were off, and it didn’t look as if anyone were inside. It was at number 44, rue de Seine. Yes, this was Galerie Anouk. But it was already twenty minutes past four. There could be no mistake, but the shop was dark, and Jean-Pierre was most definitely not there.
She rang the bell. Rien de rien.
She waited at the door, but even after two minutes, no one opened.
In her fluster, she hadn’t noticed that there was a painting with a torn piece of newspaper glued to it in the shop window. Beneath the Le Corbusier collage were some words glued to the glass door: “Un quart d’heure avant la fin du monde.”
This had to be the right gallery.
She checked the name again. Galerie Anouk, written in thin, elegant, modernist white block letters. This was the place, no doubt.
Either I misunderstood, or he forgot, or something happened to him. Or worse, he stood me up.
But she would never have thought Jean-Pierre could be the sort of man who would . . .
Paulina looked far down the street, first one way and then the other. It was too hot for anyone to be out walking. Four tourists with a guidebook open in their hands stopped every now and then in front of the shop windows. At nearly half past four on a June Saturday, the street looked dead.
With so few people around, maybe Jean-Pierre had decided not to open the gallery and had been unable to reach her. Maybe . . .
And at that moment of poorly processed uncertainty—when she had decided to give herself five minutes before hailing a cab to go cry for being so dumb in a random corner of the city where no one was expecting her, where not even her own shadow could spot her—Paulina thought she heard Jean-Pierre whistling in the distance.
She spun around, but she couldn’t see him anywhere. She looked back inside the gallery. There was nothing there either.
He came into view through the reflection in the glass, a blurred silhouette, appearing among a pile of fruit crates from the shop directly across from Anouk.
Jean-Pierre, having traded in his pipe for an apple, came out casually, unhurried.
His hair was freshly combed, his white shirtsleeves were rolled up, and he had a lilac tie.
She found him even more attractive than she had the day before.
The daylight highlighted the tanned skin on his forehead and arms.
“The best painting on this street is that spread of fruit crates. Have you noticed the colors, the composition? If you’re able to find a better work of art on this street, I’ll buy it from you . . .”
“Everything good?”
Paulina realized that the self-assured Jean-Pierre had no intention of apologizing. In fact, he didn’t even seem to realize that she had experienced the vaguest feeling that she’d been stood up. He crossed the street calmly and took out a key from his pocket as he greeted her with two kisses.