Paul Auster - Invisible

I finished my novel late last summer (2007). Soon after that, my wife and I began organizing a trip to Paris (her sister’s daughter was marrying a Frenchman in October), and the talk about Paris got me thinking about Walker again. I wondered if I could track down some of the players from the unsuccessful revenge drama he mounted there forty years ago, and if I could, whether any of them would be willing to talk to me. Born was of particular interest, but I would have been glad to sit down with any of the others I managed to find-Margot, Hélène, or Cécile. I had no luck with the first three, but when I googled Cécile Juin on the Internet, abundant amounts of information came flying up onto the screen. After my encounter with the eighteen-year-old girl in Walker’s manuscript, I wasn’t surprised to learn that she had grown up to be a literary scholar. She had taught at universities in Lyon and Paris, and for the past ten years she had been attached to the CNRS (the National Center for Scientific Research) as part of a small team investigating the manuscripts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French writers. Her specialty was Balzac, about whom she had published two books, but numerous other papers and articles were mentioned as well, a whole catalogue of work spanning three decades. Good for her, I thought. And good for me, too, since I was now in a position to write to her.

We exchanged two short letters. In mine, I introduced myself as a friend of Walker’s, told her the news of Adam’s recent death, and asked if it would be possible for us to get together during my upcoming visit to Paris. It was short and to the point, with no questions about her mother’s marriage to Born, nothing about Walker’s notes for Fall , simply a request to meet her in October. She wrote back promptly. In my translation from the French, her letter read as follows:

I am devastated to learn of Adam’s death. I knew him briefly when I was a young girl in Paris many years ago, but I have never forgotten him. He was the first love of my life, and then I did him an ugly turn, a thing so cruel and unforgivable that it has been weighing on my conscience ever since. I sent him a letter of apology after he returned to New York, but the letter came back to me, marked Addressee Unknown .

Yes, I will be happy to see you when you come to Paris next month. Please be warned, however. I am a silly old woman, and my emotions tend to run away from me. If we talk about Adam (which I assume we will), there’s a good chance that I will break down and start crying. You mustn’t take it personally.

Fifty-eight wasn’t old, of course, and I doubted there was anything about Cécile Juin that could be described as silly. The woman’s sense of humor was apparently intact, then, and successful as she was in her narrow world of academic research, she must have understood how peculiar a life she had chosen for herself: sequestered in the small rooms of libraries and underground vaults, poring over the manuscripts of the dead, a career spent in a soundless domain of dust. In a P.S. to her letter, she revealed how sardonically she looked upon her work. She recognized my name, she said, and if I was the James Freeman she thought I was, she wondered if I would be willing to participate in a survey she and her staff were conducting on the composition methods of contemporary writers. Computer or typewriter, pencil or pen, notebook or loose sheets of paper, how many drafts to finish a book. Yes, I know, she added, very dull stuff. But that’s our job at the CNRS: to make the world as dull as possible.

There was self-mockery in her letter, but there was also anguish, and I was somewhat startled by how vividly she remembered Walker. She had known him for only a couple of weeks in the distant days of her girlhood, and yet their friendship must have opened up something in her that altered her perception of herself, that thrust her for the first time into a direct confrontation with the depths of her own heart. I have never forgotten him. He was the first love of my life . I hadn’t been prepared for such a forthright confession. Walker’s notes had dealt with the problem of her growing crush on him, but her feelings turned out to have been even more intense than he had imagined. And then she spat in his face. At the time, she must have felt her anger was justified. He had slandered Born, he had upset her mother, and Cécile had felt betrayed. But then, not long after that, she had written him a letter of apology. Did that mean she had rethought her position? Had something happened to make her believe Walker’s accusations were true? It was the first question I was intending to ask her.

My wife and I booked a room at the Hôtel d’Aubusson on the rue Dauphine. We had stayed there before, had stayed in several Paris hotels over the years, but I wanted to go back to the rue Dauphine this time because it happened to be smack in the middle of the neighborhood where Walker had lived in 1967. The Hôtel du Sud might have been gone, but many of the other places he had frequented were not. Vagenende was still there. La Palette and the Café Conti were still open for business, and even the cafeteria on the rue Mazet was still dishing out inedible food to hungry students. So much had changed in the past forty years, and the once down-at-the-heels neighborhood had evolved into one of the most fashionable areas of Paris, but most of the landmarks from Walker’s story had survived. After checking into the hotel on the first morning, my wife and I went outside and wandered through the streets for a couple of hours. Every time I pointed out one of those places to her, she would squeeze my hand and emit a small, sarcastic grunt. You’re incorrigible, she finally said. Not at all, I replied. Just soaking up the atmosphere… preparing myself for tomorrow.

Cécile Juin showed up at four o’clock the following afternoon, striding into the hotel bar with a small leather briefcase tucked under her left arm. Judging from Walker’s descriptions of her in the notes for Fall , her body had expanded dramatically since 1967. The thin, narrow-shouldered girl of eighteen was now a round, plumpish woman of fifty-eight with short brown hair (dyed, some gray roots visible when she shook my hand and sat down across from me), a slightly wrinkled face, a slightly sagging chin, and the same alert and darting eyes Walker had noticed when they first met. Her manner was a bit skittish, perhaps, but she was no longer the trembling, nail-biting bundle of nerves who had caused her mother so much worry in the past. She was a woman in full possession of herself, a woman who had traveled great distances in the years since Walker had known her. A few seconds after she sat down, I was a little surprised to see her pull out a pack of cigarettes, and then, as the minutes rolled on, doubly surprised to learn that she was a heavy smoker, with a deep, rumbling cough and the rough-edged contralto voice of a tobacco veteran. When the barman arrived at our table and asked us what we wanted, she ordered a whiskey. Neat. I told him to make it two.

I had prepared myself for a prissy, schoolmarmish eccentric. Cécile might have had her eccentricities, but the woman I met that day was down-to-earth, funny, enjoyable to be with. She was simply but elegantly dressed (a sign of confidence, I felt, a sign of self-respect), and although she wasn’t someone who bothered with lipstick or nail polish, she looked thoroughly feminine in her gray woolen suit-with silver bracelets around each wrist and a bright, multicolored scarf wrapped around her neck. During the course of our long, two-hour conversation, I found out that she had spent fifteen years in psychoanalysis (from age twenty to thirty-five), had been married and divorced, had married again to a man twenty years older than she was (he died in 1999), and that she had no children. On this last point she commented: A few regrets, yes, but the truth is I probably would have been a terrible mother. No aptitude, you understand.