Herve Le Tellier - The Intervention of a Good Man

He stops by the side of the road, a little way before a narrow stone bridge. He opens his cell phone and dials her number. Just then, not far away, the angelus rings.

A deluxe dinner .

Poet, poet .

A little gift that has to wend its way .

You’re calling me right when the angelus is ringing, our heroine shouts to smother the bell’s high-pitched sound. This is how he discovers just how close he is to her house. He scans the surrounding countryside but sees no bell tower. He tells her when he is leaving, suggests they have dinner together. There has been no war or battle, and yet he wants to make peace. But — even though it is half past six — her mother is already preparing a meal. She says they could meet in two hours’ time, in the usual place, for a drink.

Our hero goes back to the hotel. He has his dinner on the pub’s sunny terrace, choosing a deluxe Thai chicken curry. A dish that turns out to be a sort of chicken supreme, only more bland.

He heads back up to his room. From her desk at reception, the young Pole gives him a friendly, almost conspiratorial wave, but the elevator door closes. How strange, our hero thinks, there’s a woman I could easily fall in love with, in the space of a few hours. He can see in her a spontaneous sincerity, a sense of mischief devoid of calculation or artifice. That young woman knows who she is, he speculates, so much so that she’s bound to have the nerve to step fearlessly into someone else’s shoes. Perhaps that is the characteristic that makes great actors. If he dared (but he will not), he would lay at this girl’s feet the extravagant love he bears within him for another. The emotional equivalent of making a transfer from a bank account. But would she accept the deposit?

Our hero lies down on the bed, runs his eye along the stucco moldings and the shadows on the ceiling. He knows what he is suffering from, recognizes obsessive love. He contracts it only — and the logic is implacable — when he is with the sort of woman who refuses to let herself love him. From experience, his prognosis is for a rapid convalescence, total recovery, and no relapses. But, right now, this reassuring diagnosis does nothing to help him.

His head is spinning, he sits on the edge of the bed, gets to his feet, and picks up the car keys. He does not want to linger here, in this empty room where he had anticipated being with her.

Once again he arrives at the rendezvous well ahead of schedule. What difference does it make, given that Scotland has now been reduced to a colossal hourglass knocked on its side, and through which time refuses to sift.

While he sits in his car, he very quickly, too quickly, writes a little poem in his black notebook. Because, at times like this, our hero poetizes. He has a degree of talent for it, and compensates for his stylistic weaknesses and approximate technique with an acute sense of self-mockery and a touching simplicity. His poem begins:

There where the A32

Meets the scenic S70

which gives the number 2 the unusual role of offering up an inevitable rhyme with his beloved “you,” or something more despairing about “what to do,” or the two.

Let us summarize it briefly here: in this piece of doggerel our hero explains that (1) although hurt, he will not resign himself to the facts, and (2) he still hopes to see our heroine again in Paris. A meteorological parable concludes the poem with an “ond” rhyme that is neither “blond” nor “fond.”

Our hero writes the poem down in fine cramped letters, then tears the page out carefully and stows it in his shirt pocket without folding it.

He waits. All he gets to do in these two days is wait and invent devices to cheat the waiting process. He is an expert.

As soon as our heroine arrives, as soon as her bicycle is wedged into the Nissan Almera’s trunk, where — let’s say this again just in case this book should reach the car designer’s desk — you cannot fit a bike, our hero offers to take her wherever she would like to go. She chooses the closest tavern, that improbable pub overlooking the A32 that has already been mentioned.

Our hero could not have chosen a better place for a last meeting. As it takes a good minute to get there by car, he hands her his poem, its fifteen easy lines. She reads it, smiling, amused. This takes five seconds, and she folds it in two.

About a few sartorial details .

A general remark and a cultural reminiscence .

Ze last moment .

She leaves the bike in the trunk. At the pub they order two glasses of beer and go to sit outside, the area is completely deserted.

It is getting dark and growing chilly. All our heroine is wearing over her shoulders are a T-shirt and a black cardigan that she zips up. The shadowing curve of her breasts disappears beneath the wool. She pulls the woolen sleeves down over her hands, shivering, and the stretched stitches afford glimpses of the lightly tanned skin along her arms. Our hero just cannot take his eyes off her. Only three months ago, this young woman did not exist. How, then, has she become such a major part of him, when she herself asked for nothing?

With no trace of irony, she clinks her glass against his. He would rather not know what they are drinking to. To his leaving? To the peacefulness of their breakup? To Scotland’s mild summer? Silently, he drinks to l’Amour , and everything he knows about it. Its 2,700 miles, from its source in the Argun region to its mouth on the Tatar Strait, opposite Sakhalin. He keeps his bad joke about the River Amour to himself. A pity he doesn’t realize that the river’s English name, Armur, is closer to the word “armor” than to “love,” and — worse — that armur means “muddy” in Buriat.

Our hero takes a sip from this dark, bitter beer that he does not like, which is precisely why he chose it. He had to give the whole debacle a degree of harmony.

Once again, what they say to each other is meaningless, every word has been said before. He still occasionally tries to paraphrase, she does so less and less. The smiles they exchange reveal her weariness and his sadness, and no words can measure up to these. They have both stopped pretending. She hasn’t built any sort of wall around herself, our hero acknowledges. No part of her cleaves toward me, and there’s nothing about me she is having to resist. You can suppress desire only when desire is weak enough to be suppressed. Ovid, Blake, and plenty more said it long before he did, but right here, now, our hero really couldn’t give a damn. He thought he was leaving in order to save whatever could be saved from the sinking ship. He now realizes there may never have been a ship.

There are also silences between them. He makes less effort to fill them than she does. He imagines she feels guilty. Because she often feels guilty. Once, after making love, she astonished him by whispering that pleasure like that was a sin. A sin. He could not remember ever having heard the word.

To spare her from feeling awkward, he too starts furnishing the pauses. He decides to make her laugh. And succeeds, it is easy. But it was not a good idea, so painful is the sound of her laughter.

The level of beer is going down too slowly in their glasses. Our hero wishes he could find the courage to get it all over with, to cut the episode short. But he has only the courage to bear its being prolonged.