12 Fifteen Minutes Before the End of the World #5
He backed off. He saw a tear in Paulina’s eye and knew to be quiet. He let the drop slide down her cheek, put his hand to her face, wiped it away with his thumb, and caressed her other cheek.
“There are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen. And this is our week.”
“That’s beautiful, Jean-Pierre.” She tried not to cry.
“It’s Lenin.” He raised his eyebrows, mischievously. “I told you. I’m a man of the left.”
They laughed. They laughed together again, freely, to get rid of their nerves. It hadn’t all been orgasms, looks, and conversations throughout the four days. They had also laughed a great deal, heartily, free from everything. The two of them alone in the world.
“Should we eat?”
“Let’s make love . . .”
They didn’t say it though it was on the tip of their tongue. Neither dared. But both of them knew that the unfinished sentence would have continued in a tormented and conclusive “for the last time.”
“You’ll have to help me with something.” She sat down on the edge of the bed. “Can you pull off my boots?”
The silence between bodies enriched the farewell.
She put her boots on by herself. She fastened the clasp of her bra, and before pulling the T-shirt she had bought on Saint-Honoré over her head, she went into the bathroom to brush out her hair with the long-bristled brush she always carried in her bag.
“What time does your plane leave?”
“I wanted to be at Orly by five.”
“We’ll have to hurry.”
It’s better that way, Paulina thought. That way the farewell could be shorter.
She hadn’t wanted to think about it for even a moment, but now that it was approaching, one thing was clear: They shouldn’t linger.
Hardships are best gotten over as quickly as possible.
Jean-Pierre hauled the suitcases over the cobblestones of rue du Trésor to the garage where he kept his car.
She didn’t want to say goodbye to the apartment, or the elevator, or the cul-de-sac of Le Marais where she had discovered the most intimate version of herself.
She had never been so far from home and yet so close to herself.
In the car—a Citroen with a big trunk, ideal for transporting paintings—they spoke very little.
Neither of them wanted words to take on the weight of farewells.
The grayness of Paris’s outskirts didn’t inspire anyone to say anything even vaguely romantic.
Jean-Pierre hesitated over whether he should make one last attempt.
Would it be too brazen to say “Stay here”?
He was tempted to give in and say, “Look, Pauline, my beloved, my love, you’re wrong to leave, you’ll be happy here, and you know it, even if you can’t admit it.
You know you’re going back to a husband who no longer excites you, to a life you live by pure inertia, the way you get used to the hum of the refrigerator. ”
“Wow, your car smells nice.”
He held back. He believed Pauline had already put on her armor for returning home.
“I like the lemon air freshener. It lasts about ten days. After that . . .”
He didn’t say it. He didn’t dare say that everything fades quickly.
At the last moment he couldn’t bring himself to parade his cynicism.
Paulina wouldn’t have understood. And she didn’t deserve it.
She was leaving because she had a ticket, because even before leaving Barcelona she had known she would return home on Tuesday to her five-year-old daughter and to a husband they had prudently avoided discussing for four days.
Once on the highway, when he was in fifth gear, she placed her hand on the gearshift, and Jean-Pierre didn’t let go of it until it was time to put the car in neutral for the parking slip.
“All your clothes are in that suitcase?” Jean-Pierre unloaded the car, showing no outward signs of effort. The struggle was internal.
“I gave things to Julie. So it wouldn’t weigh so much.”
“I won’t know how to act when I see your cousin.”
“Just be yourself. That’s the best thing.”
The elevator took them straight to Air France’s international departures terminal.
“Should we have a coffee?”
“I’d rather do it inside. These things . . . it’s better to be inside and do them inside the airport.”
“Then let’s go.” Orly was a second home for Jean-Pierre. Between art fairs and butterflies, he took about thirty flights a year.
“Keep our story to yourself.”
“Of course, Pauline.”
“I’ll write to you soon . . .”
“You know where to find me if I ever go missing, right?”
Paulina looked down. Jean-Pierre lifted her chin with two fingers so she could look up at him again.
“Have a good trip.”
“You too.”
A laugh escaped them, unwillingly, just as Paulina’s “You too” had slipped out in reflex, a purely cultural formality. They kissed quickly on the lips, a brush of a kiss, and she wanted to be the one who, before letting go of their hands, said the last thing.
“I love you. With every letter . . . do you hear me? Je t’aime.”
She saw in Jean-Pierre’s eyes the red veins of missed opportunities. They couldn’t say anything more.
Shattered, she went through security. Her heart pumped, all at once, anger, disappointment, sadness, a jolt, anxiety, excitement, remorse, and already, in that very moment, the longing for the four days she was leaving behind.
The policeman, protected by glass like a zoo monkey, looked at her photo and mechanically looked up to check her face.
She wasn’t the first woman he had seen crying at the airport.
It was the first time in years—this he did notice—that the woman in the ID photo looked more beautiful than the one standing in front of his cage with her sorrow held in.
The monkey-policeman stamped the seal—Orly-Paris-France, 16 June 1981—continuing to chew his gum.
“Allez-y.”
“Merci,” she muttered as she slipped the document back into her bag.
Past the checkpoint, she didn’t turn around.
She walked on toward the future, toward the past. She couldn’t let herself do anything else.
She didn’t want Jean-Pierre, in the last moment he saw her, to see a tear.
She didn’t dare look back at him. She ran the risk of turning around and flying—despite taboos and customs agents—straight into his arms. She knew that a single gesture from Jean-Pierre would have been enough to send everything to hell.
Just one kiss blown with two fingers as he held his briar-root pipe, and Paulina wouldn’t have had the willpower to lose herself down the terminal among Toblerones and perfumes.
Had she turned around, though, she would have found Jean-Pierre alone, standing under the dim terminal light, hands in his pockets, pipe between his teeth, eyes wide open.
He had the look of a guilty man listening, without any possible appeal, to his sentence.
The verdict—cold and merciless—didn’t let him even blink.
He was sure he was letting the love of his life slip away, and this time it was happening right under his nose, and he wondered whether he had fought hard enough to stop it.
Like in a German requiem, he bore the pain in unconditional solitude.
As soon as the arrivals screen at El Prat Airport announced that the Air France flight landed, Gina climbed onto her father’s shoulders. She wanted at all costs to be the first to see her mother when the translucent glass automatic doors opened.
The plane’s engine gave its final sigh, stopped on the runway, at 8:21 on a Tuesday, the day when there was a little more love in the world. And a little more sorrow, too, because you never get one without the other.
“Mama! Mama, over here! What did you bring me?”