In his studio Adam remains seated on a stool for a while, staring into the center of the room. He is concentrating on the image that made him leave the warmth of his bed. For some time now he has felt the urge to paint in a different way—forget faces, landscapes, detail, he would like to work with simpler, more authentic subject matter but he does not know how to do it, where to begin. He lacks something, but what?
The truth is it does not matter very much. Adam is thirty-five. Unaware of the cruel way time chips away at things, he is not affected by reality. He is here and now. He draws. He paints. He makes things. He imagines. He designs. He sands and polishes. He works at his art, at what he is creating, without asking himself questions, without a mountain to climb, without a jungle to cross, without any obstacles. Moments before he had been that disgruntled husband, falling out with his wife, breaking a plate, arguing with her. Moments before, too, he had been that man seeking the warmth of a desired body, the comfort of being loved and desired in return. Now all he is is this man preparing a canvas, mixing pigments with linseed oil. He is nothing more than his painting and his painting is his alone. He is without fear, without guilt, without a path to follow, no meals to prepare, no laundry to hang, no shopping to do, no child to amuse. There is nobody whom he has to convince of his right to be where he is, with no sound in his ears, no sunlight coming in to interrupt his train of thought. He is creation itself.
“The song of the fourth floor”
ANITA ARRIVES IN THE CITY AT 11:00 IN THE MORNING. It is the day after her quarrel with Adam. She parks her car behind the church, walks briskly across the paved square with its abundant flowers, passes through the shopping mall that she uses as a shortcut, emerges into another square where the surface resembles the ones used in children’s playgrounds, and goes into the building on the left. It is an ordinary four-story building where the second, third, and fourth floors each have balconies that come to a point and remind her of a kind of vertebral column (she must remember to ask Adam if there are such styles in architecture as “pointed,” “round,” “semicircular,” “pierced”). On the first floor of the building there are fascinating machines that produce offset plates, as well as scanners, harsh lights, dark corners, and men with mustaches and fierce eyes, raising their voices above the boom, boom, boom of the rotary presses. The second floor houses the newspaper’s reception office, the secretarial and administrative staff, the archives, the cafeteria. On the third floor are the proofreaders, the editorial secretaries, the layout artists, the graphics team, and the pasteup artists.
On the fourth floor, where she stops, is the reporters’ room. Facing the door to this is the glass cage of the editor, Christian Voubert, a very tall, very slender man who, when he rises from his chair, unwinds like a liana. She is due to meet him this morning.
On either side of the cage the L-shaped work spaces are arranged in pairs. They might seem identical: beige computer, black keyboard, pencil holder, stacks of gray wire filing trays, telephone. But personal impulses have turned each space into a little home away from home: a photograph, a pebble, a bunch of dried flowers, a chipped cup, a piece of origami, an indescribable clutter, a quotation.
Anita breathes in and opens the door and would love to be able to capture a snatch of this soundtrack and edit it into her own personal, intimate, and subjective compilation of the best sounds in the world.
This fragment she would call “the song of the fourth floor”: the clatter of a keyboard, an animated conversation about how many words a report on the previous day’s rugby match might be worth, the noise of the fax machine, a telephone ringing, pages being turned, the coffee machine spluttering, the muffled sound of a television, laughter, greetings. And this fragment would have smells to go with it: those of coffee, paper, the sea air blowing in at the windows, that of ink.
Anita has no desk here, far from it, because a year ago Christian Voubert told her that the only thing he could offer her for the moment was work as a “stringer” (the moment in question not being one as in the dictionary definition a brief period of time, but on the contrary, one synonymous with for the foreseeable future). Anita had then learned that stringer is a term used on regional newspapers for the freelance journalists who fill up the pages of local news, that is to say, half the paper. Brief stories with photographs and the feel-good atmosphere of weekends with the family. It was not what she had hoped for but there was this business of for the moment, and there was also the business of proving herself.
Over a year ago on the same floor, in the same glass office, Christian Voubert sees Anita for the first time after she has submitted a spontaneous job application.
“This is
