16 The Man Who Walks
The Man Who Walks
Paris, First Anniversary Without You
My dearest, most beloved Pauline,
I am writing to you, just like you asked in your first and only letter, through my good friend, your cousin.
(By the way, Julie, it makes me happy to hear you’re pregnant, that it will be a girl named Fabienne.
You’ve chosen well with the name too. Send my congratulations to Alain.
I imagine you’re both very excited. We’ll have to quench our thirst to celebrate soon.
I’ll bring the champagne. You pick the day.)
Now, my beloved Pauline,
Over the course of this year, there have been many times I’ve wanted to talk to you.
About painters I’ve met, mishaps in the house or at work, neighborhood trifles, butterfly colors that have surprised me, trips I’ve taken, bookshops I’ve seen, music I’ve listened to that’s moved me while thinking of you.
Or about foods I’ve tasted with new flavors, and how I would have liked us to comment on each flavor, each nuance.
As you may have seen, I’ve held back. Desire has never been lacking.
Not a single day. Not to write to you, or see you, or touch you again.
If I haven’t dared, my love, it’s because I understood that your silence was to be met with silence.
I told you already that you would never have to complain about my behavior.
I would not be a nuisance or a burden. I would not make you uncomfortable or pursue you, no matter how much I longed to.
And that’s how it’s been until today. If you speak, I speak.
If you are silent, I am silent. Without reproach.
But today, Pauline, something happened that I had to tell you about. That’s why I filled my fountain pen, took out the finest paper I could find in the gallery, and sat myself down to write to you, certain that it wouldn’t bother you, especially once you hear the story.
Today, almost like he knew that it had been a year since our last kiss, the man who walks came into the gallery and went straight to the Warhol lithograph, the only one I have in the very back.
I think I told you about the man who walks, although I’m not sure you ever saw him.
The man who walks is a local neighborhood figure no one knows, where he sleeps, what he does, but for many years now, he walks up and down the rue de Seine, every day of the year, maybe twenty times a day.
He goes up one sidewalk and comes back down the other, from the river to Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
And back again. Always on foot. Summer and winter.
As if he’s counting his steps. No one knows for sure whether he’s alive or dead.
Whether he’s a clochard or boulevardier.
I’m inclined to think he’s neither, though he looks more like a disoriented beggar than a spy.
From what I’ve read, they don’t want spies who are past the age of sixty anymore.
The truth is, no one has ever seen the man who walks beg for money, and based on the way he dresses, he doesn’t seem short on money, but I can’t say for sure if he’s ever had any.
With all due respect, my thought is that he’s a poor madman with some disorder or lingering wartime trauma.
The man who walks is always alone. He doesn’t carry any packages and never takes his hands out of his pockets.
During the winter, it’s his coat pockets.
During the summer, it’s his pants pockets, which (it would drive you crazy) are inches too short.
It’s as if he hides his hands in an extreme gesture of shyness.
He doesn’t speak. He mutters, his mouth is twisted, and his Adam’s apple is pronounced in a way I’ve seen only in certain Russian men.
Well then: Early this afternoon, while I was on the phone behind the front counter, the man who walks opened the gallery door for the first time ever.
A historic moment, Pauline. He came in without wiping his feet on the mat and slipped his hand back into his pocket.
Before I hung up, he was already inside, without a bonjour or a wave.
Honestly I was startled. He didn’t say anything.
He nodded toward the back of the room, toward Andy Warhol’s Marilyn’s Lips.
Do you remember the lithograph of the five colored lips that used to hang beside the office door?
He approached it and said just one thing in an English that sounded Nordic to me: “It’s crooked. ”
I didn’t think so at all. But the man who walks, standing there, kept staring at Marilyn Monroe’s lips.
Then I asked him in English if he liked it.
And do you know how he answered? “It’s crooked.
” Without another word, he turned around and left just as he had come in—head down, feet dragging, and hands in his pockets.
An hour later I saw him pass by again on the opposite sidewalk, as he does so many times every day, rain, snow, or scorching heat.
I didn’t dare ask him what he’s looking for, where he’s from, or why he walks all day long.
I would have liked to know why on earth he wanders up and down like a ghost, why he never speaks to anyone, why there’s only one street in the world worth walking, what he finds so special about rue de Seine.
Should I have asked him these things, my dear Pau?
I honestly thought I had no right. I would have hated for the man who walks to feel that, rather than helping him, I was only curious about him for the sake of gossip.
Poking my nose into his business might have put me in a position of superiority, don’t you think?
In the end, I thought, let everyone live their bitter comedy as best they can.
Let them do as they please. No one is anyone to demand explanations.
That’s what a private life is, isn’t it?
Once he was gone, I hurried to fetch the magnetic level and set it on the frame.
At first glance it looked straight to me.
I’d have bet my life on it. But, to my surprise, the bubble was slightly off.
The picture did indeed slope on one side more than the other.
The culprit, I saw immediately, was a nail at the back that had worked loose.
How could that wandering Nordic see it from the street, when he seems like a gawker?
I’d swear he never looks into shop windows.
Then, searching for an explanation, I thought about what day it was today, and perhaps you’ll find it naive, but I connected the dots.
Do you know the name of the original Warhol, my dear Pau?
I Love Your Kiss Forever Forever. Seized by a thoroughly irrational spirit, I thought it was a sign meant for me, for us.
The man who walks had come to deliver a message: Remember that today is a year since you gave Pauline your last kiss, and that it would be okay to write to her, to say hello, I’m here, I’m still here, for whatever you want, whenever you want, no rush, because life takes many turns, and in the moment we think this will be forever, in the moment we feel calm and settled here, but tomorrow we may be somewhere else.
When that moment comes, I’ll be by your side again, kissing your sweet lips be it four more days, or four months, or four years, or forty.
You never know. I will be with you and for you, always.
Yes, time has passed. A year, and you see that nothing has fizzled in me.
It’s been the shortest year because I’ve felt you close, and the longest year because I haven’t seen you.
As we discussed while you ate onion soup in summer at Les Deux Magots, there’s a “before” and an “after” to many things in life.
There’s a “before” and “after” coming of age, a “before” and “after” the death of parents, a “before” and “after” the first paycheck or the first time you make love, or the first time a friend lets you down.
(All of this is hurtful and disappointing, but it happens to all of us.) But in my life there is no “before” and “after” you.
There is only a “during.” Four days of fire and magic, and time stopped there.
Suspended in happiness with the discovery that love (with a capital L, like ours) is not possible without pain.
And welcome, dammit, to that nail in the heart.
There’s something I don’t know if I should tell you, because it is embarrassing even for me. But the intimacy of letters permits such things. So I’ll say it, and that’s that. I hope it won’t trouble you.
Twenty days after you left, not even a month yet, I went to the perfume section at the Galeries Lafayette, and bought myself a small bottle of Chanel No.
5, which they insisted on wrapping as a gift.
At home I removed the cellophane and the box and placed the bottle in the drawer where I keep emergency supplies: scissors, paper clips, a stapler, markers, envelopes, some tape, and now the little bottle of perfume.
Sometimes, not every day, I open it, close my eyes, breathe it in, and I’m back with you.
I smell your faint scent of flowers, bitter orange, and jasmine from the night of the wedding.
You never wore it again. You saved it for that special occasion (more for Julie than for me).
But each time I open the perfume, I feel the soft skin of your neck at my lips.
And with your permission, I kiss it. Your eyes laugh and crinkle as they always do when you laugh, like the time I tried to teach you to dance a sirtaki while we walked along the Seine on the way to my place.
Your back open in a dress that by now ought to be displayed in a museum of good taste.
A sirtaki on wet cobblestones. What pretension on my part, what ridiculousness, singing and dancing in a Greek fashion without really knowing how. But you laughed so much, my dear.
Did you know Coco Chanel asked for a women’s perfume that smelled like a woman, and they brought her No. 5? The miracle is that no two women smell the same. No two women react the same way to the same perfume. Your young, sweet skin is, I’d say, genuine Bourbon vanilla.
I’m doing well. I eat, I take care of myself, I hang and rehang pictures.
As you can imagine, tourists still have the same tastes: The more color, the better it sells.
No secret there. Lichtenstein comics, Jasper Johns flags, and now the collages of Gilbert and George, two young British artists everyone likes.
Not long ago I sold the Le Corbusier that was in the window the first time you came to the gallery.
Now, on the easel by the entrance, I’ve put up some political graffiti by Jacques Villeglé.
The poster look always catches the summer passerby’s eye.
It’s about time the heat arrived, by the way.
This year I used the Paris cold to roam the world.
Everything remains in place. I’ve searched for good weather, but above all I’ve searched for books.
Butterflies, you know. I found one in a catalog I bought in Buenos Aires, almost as beautiful as you.
Sometimes I look at it, so green and brilliant, and it almost smiles.
Actually everything smiles at me since I met you.
Is it the same for you, my dear Pauline, or am I too bold to imagine it to be the fact?
I’ll say goodbye by speaking again of the man who walks.
Have you ever listened to Schubert’s songs of the wanderer?
“Der Wanderer,” songs for baritone. Look for the disc.
Put it on in a moment of calm. Close your eyes and listen with your heart.
Think of me. I’ll be thinking of you. As always. Forever.
My dear Pauline, I can’t say I miss you, because I have you.
We have each other.
You already know that.
Jean-Pierre
PS: In the first letter I sent you, I mentioned a phrase from someone famous.
I didn’t remember it in full, nor did I know who wrote it.
It was Plato, the wisest of them all. Four hundred years before Jesus was born, he already knew how to say a truth as solid as a cathedral: “The greatest declaration of love is the one not made. The man who feels deeply speaks little.”
He was right. Don’t you think, my dear?