Paul Auster - Invisible

For the first twenty or thirty minutes, we mostly talked about Adam. Cécile wanted to know everything I could tell her about what had happened in his life from the moment she lost touch with him. I explained that I had lost touch with him as well, and since we hadn’t resumed contact until just before his death, my only source of information was the letter he had written to me last spring. One by one, I took her through the salient points Walker had mentioned-falling down the stairs and breaking his leg on the night of his graduation from college, the luck of drawing a high number in the draft lottery, his move to London and the years of writing and translating, the publication of his first and only book, the decision to abandon poetry and study law, his work as a community activist in northern California, his marriage to Sandra Williams, the difficulties of being an interracial couple in America, his stepdaughter, Rebecca, and her two children-and then I added that if she wanted to learn more, she should probably arrange to meet with his sister, who would no doubt be glad to fill her in on the smallest details. As promised, Cécile broke down and cried. It touched me that she understood herself well enough to have been able to predict those tears, but even though she knew they were coming, there was nothing forced or willed about them. They were genuine, spontaneous tears, and although I had been expecting them myself, I genuinely felt sorry for her.

She said: He lived around here, you know. Just thirty seconds away, on the rue Mazarine. I walked past the building on my way to see you just now-the first time I’ve been on that street in years. Odd, isn’t it? Odd that the hotel should be gone, that terrible, broken-down place where Adam lived. It’s so alive in my memory, how can it possibly be gone? I was there only once, one time for an hour or two, but I can’t forget it, it’s still burning inside me. I went there because I was angry at him. One day early in the morning. I cut school and walked over to the hotel. I climbed the rickety stairs, I knocked on his door. I wanted to strangle him because I was so angry, because I loved him so much. I was an idiot girl, you understand, an impossible, unlikable girl, a gawky imbecile girl with glasses on my nose and a sick, quivering heart, and I had the temerity to fall in love with a boy like Adam, perfect Adam, why in God’s name did he even talk to me? He let me in. He calmed me down. He was kind to me, so kind to me, my life was in his hands, and he was kind to me. I should have known then what a good person he was. I never should have doubted a word he said. Adam. I dreamed of kissing him. That was all I ever wanted-to be kissed by Adam, to give myself to Adam-but time ran out on me, and we never kissed, we never touched, and before I knew it he was gone.

That was when Cécile broke down and started to cry. It took two or three minutes before she was able to talk again, and when the conversation continued, the first thing she said opened the door onto the next phase of our encounter. I’m sorry, she mumbled. I’m blathering on like a madwoman. You have no idea what I’m talking about.

But I do, I said. I know exactly what you’re talking about.

You can’t possibly know.

Believe me, I do. You were angry at Adam because he hadn’t called you for several days. The night before you went back to school, he had dinner with you and your mother at your apartment on the rue de Verneuil. After dessert, you played the piano for him-a two-part invention by Bach-and then, because you left the room for a while, your mother had a chance to speak to Adam one-on-one, and what she said to him, in your words, scared him off .

Did he tell you this?

No, he didn’t tell me. But he wrote about it, and I’ve read the pages he wrote.

He sent you a letter?

It was a short book, actually. Or an attempt to write a book. He spent the last months of his life working on a memoir about nineteen sixty-seven. It was an important year for him.

Yes, a very important year. I think I’m beginning to understand.

If not for Adam’s manuscript, I never would have heard of you.

And now you want to find out what happened, is that it?

I can see why Adam thought you were so intelligent. You catch on fast, don’t you?

Cécile smiled and lit another cigarette. I seem to be at a disadvantage, she said.

In what way?

You know a lot more about me than I know about you.

Only the eighteen-year-old you. Everything else is a blank. I looked for Born, I looked for Margot Jouffroy, I looked for your mother, but you were the only one I could find.

That’s because all the others are dead.

Oh. How awful. I’m so sorry… especially about your mother.

She died six years ago. In October-exactly six years ago tomorrow. About a month after the attacks on New York and Washington. She’d had heart trouble for some time, and one day her heart simply gave out on her. She was seventy-six. I wanted her to live to a hundred, but as you know, what we want and what we get are rarely the same thing.

And Margot?

I barely knew her. I was told she killed herself. A long time ago now-all the way back in the seventies.

And Born?

Last year. I think. But I’m not absolutely sure. There’s a slim chance he’s still alive somewhere.

Did he and your mother stay married until her death?

Married? They were never married.

Never married? But I thought-

They talked about it for a while, but it never happened.

Was Adam responsible for stopping it?

Partly, I suppose, but not entirely. When he talked to my mother and made those wild accusations about Rudolf, she didn’t believe him. Nor did I, for that matter.

You were so incensed, you spat in his face, didn’t you?

Yes, I spat in his face. It was the single worst thing I’ve done in my life, and I still can’t forgive myself for it.

You wrote to Adam to apologize. Does that mean you changed your mind about his story?

No, not then. I wrote because I was ashamed of what I did, and I wanted him to know how bad I felt about it. I tried to talk to him in person, but when I finally found the courage to call his hotel, he wasn’t there anymore. They told me he’d gone back to America. I couldn’t understand it. Why would he leave so suddenly? The only explanation I could think of was that he was so upset by what I’d done to him that he couldn’t bear the thought of staying in Paris. How’s that for a selfish reading of events? When I asked Rudolf to talk to the head of the Columbia program and find out what had happened, he reported that Adam had left because he wasn’t satisfied with the courses he was taking. That seemed utterly feeble to me, and I didn’t buy it for a second. I was convinced he’d left because of me.

You know better now, don’t you?

Yes, I know better. But it took years before I learned the truth.

Years. Which means that Adam’s story had no effect on your mother’s decision.

I wouldn’t say that. After Adam left, Rudolf couldn’t stop talking about him. He had been accused of murder, after all, and he was outraged, quite bonkers really, and he fumed and railed against Adam for weeks. He should be put in jail for twenty years, he said. He should be strung up and hanged from the nearest lamppost. He should be carted off to Devil’s Island. It was all so excessive, so over the top, that my mother began to feel a little annoyed with him. She had known Rudolf for a long time, many years, almost as long as she’d known my father, and for the most part he had been extremely gentle with her-considerate, thoughtful, gracious. There were a few hot-headed moments, of course, especially when he started talking about politics, but that was politics, not personal business. Now he was on a rampage, and I think she was beginning to have some doubts about him. Was she honestly prepared to spend the rest of her life with a man who had such a violent temper? After a month or two, Rudolf began to calm down, and by Christmastime the fits and crazy outbursts had stopped. The winter was tranquil, I recall, but then it was spring, May sixty-eight, and the whole country exploded. For me, it was one of the greatest periods of my life. I marched, I demonstrated, I helped shut down my school, and suddenly I had turned into an activist, a bright-eyed revolutionary agitating to bring down the government. My mother was sympathetic to the students, but right-wing Rudolf had nothing but contempt for them. He and I got into some dreadful arguments that spring, fierce shouting matches about law and justice, Marx and Mao, anarchy and rebellion, and for the first time politics was no longer just politics, it was personal business. My mother was caught in the middle, and it made her more and more unhappy, more and more silent and withdrawn. The divorce from my father was supposed to become final at the beginning of June. In France, divorcing couples have to talk to a judge one last time before he can sign the papers. They’re asked to reconsider, to rethink their decision and make sure they want to go ahead with it. My father was in the hospital-I imagine you know all about that-and my mother went to see the judge on her own. When he asked her if she had any second thoughts about her decision, she said yes, she had changed her mind and didn’t want a divorce. She was protecting herself against Rudolf, you understand. She didn’t want to marry him anymore, and by staying married to my father, she couldn’t marry him anymore.