III
ALL THE SAME. HE WASN’T THE KIND OF MAN YOU COULD PUSH around. Mathias was obstinate and proud. As proud as Marc? Possibly worse. He was the kind of hunter-gatherer who would chase his bisons until he was exhausted and then stay away from the tribe rather than return home empty-handed. No. That sounded too much like an idiot, and Mathias was more subtle than that. On the other hand, he was capable of going two days without speaking, if one of his ideas came up against reality. The ideas were probably too complex, or the desires too inflexible. Marc (who could talk for France, to the weariness of his audience) had more than once had to stop short when he came across this blond giant in the corridor of the university, sitting silently on a bench, pressing together his huge hands as if he was squeezing into pulp the contrariness of fate, a great blue-eyed hunter-gatherer, away in pursuit of his bisons. Was he from Normandy perhaps, a descendant of the Vikings? Marc realised that in the four years they had sat side by side, he had never asked Mathias where he came from. But what the hell did it matter? That could wait.
There was nothing to do in the cafe, and Marc sat waiting. With his finger, he was doodling on the tabletop the outline of a statue. His hands were long and skinny. He liked their precise engineering and the veins standing out on them. As for everything else about his physique, he had serious doubts. Why think of that? Because he was going to see the great blond hunter again? Well, so what? Of course, Marc, being only of middling height, and very thin, with a bony face and body, would not have made an ideal bisons-hunter. He would have been sent up a tree, more likely, to shake down the fruit. A gatherer, in other words. Full of nervous dexterity. Well, what of it? Dexterity is useful. No money, though. He did still have his rings, four big silver rings, two with gold strips, conspicuous and complicated, part-African, part-Carolingian, on the fingers of his left hand. And yes, it was true that his wife had left him for a more broad-shouldered type. A dumbo, for sure. She would work it out one day. Marc was counting on that. But it would be too late.
He rubbed his drawing out with one swift stroke. His statue had gone awry. A fit of pique. He got them all the time, these fits of irritation, these impotent rages. It was easy to caricature Mathias. But what about himself? What else was he, apart from being one of those decadent medievalists, neat, dark, delicate but tough little creatures, the prototype of the researcher after useless information, a luxury product with dashed hopes, hitching his futile dreams to a few silver rings, to visions of the millennium, to ploughmen who had been dead for centuries, to a long-lost Romance language that nobody cared about any more, and to a woman who had abandoned him? He looked up. Across the street was a large garage. Marc did not like garages. They depressed him. Striding past it with long swinging steps, came the hunter-gatherer. Marc smiled. Still blond, his hair too thick to be properly combed, wearing his eternal sandals which Marc so much disliked, Mathias was keeping the rendezvous. He was still wearing no underclothes. Nobody knew how, but you could always tell. Sweater and trousers straight on to the body, Sandals and no socks.
Well, rustic or refined, tall or thin, there they were at a table in this dingy cafe. So no matter.
‘You shaved off your beard,’ said Marc. Aren’t you doing pre-history any more?’
‘Yeah, I am,’ said Mathias.
‘Where?’
‘In my head.’
Marc nodded. The information had been accurate. Mathias was indeed down on his luck.
‘What’s up with your hands?’
Mathias looked down at his black nails.
‘I’ve been working in an engineering shop. They kicked me out. They said I didn’t have any feeling for machines. I managed to fuck up three in one week. Machines are complicated. Especially when they break down.’
‘And now?’
‘I’m selling tatty posters in the Chatelet Metro station.’
‘Any money in that?’
‘No. And you?’
‘Nothing to say. I used to be a ghostwriter for a publisher.’
‘Medieval stuff?’
‘Eighty-page love stories. You have this guy, untrustworthy but good in bed, and this girl, radiant but innocent. In the end they fall madly in love and it’s incredibly boring. The story doesn’t say when they split up.’
‘Of course not,’ said Mathias. ‘Did you walk out?’
‘No, got sacked. I used to change whole sentences in the page proofs. Because I’m bitter and twisted, and because I was so fed up. They noticed. Are you married? Partner? Children?’
‘No, nothing like that,’ said Mathias.
The two men drew breath and looked at each other.
‘How old are we now?’ asked Mathias.
‘Thirty-five-ish. We’re meant to be grown-up by now.’
‘Yeah, so I’ve heard. Are you still poking about in that medieval midden?’
Marc nodded.
‘What a pain,’ said Mathias. ‘You were always a bit unreasonable about that.’
‘Don’t start, Mathias, it’s not the moment. Where do you live?’
‘In a room I’ve got to get out of in ten days. The posters don’t pay enough to rent a bedsit. Let’s say I’m going downhill.’ Mathias squeezed his two powerful hands together.
‘I can show you this house,’ said Marc. ‘If you’ll come in with me on it, we might be able to forget the thirty thousand years between us.’
‘And the midden too?’
‘Who knows? What about it?’
Mathias, although he was uninterested in, indeed was hostile to anything that had occurred since 10,000 BC or so, had always-incomprehensibly-made an exception for his lanky medievalist friend, who always wore black with a silver belt. To tell the truth, he had always considered this weakness for his friend a lapse of taste on his part. But his affection for Marc, his appreciation of the other’s versatile and sharp mind, had made him close his eyes to the distressing choice his friend had made to study that particularly degenerate phase of human history. Despite this appalling weakness of Marc’s, Mathias tended to trust him, and had allowed himself to be dragged now and then into one of his quixotic enterprises. Even today, when it was clear that Don Quixote had been unhorsed and was reduced to trudging along like a pilgrim, in short, now that he was clearly down on his luck, just as Mathias was himself (and in fact that was rather pleasing), Marc had not lost his persuasive air of royal grace. There was a world-weary expression perhaps in the lines at the corner of the eyes, and some accretion of unhappiness, there had been shocks and traumas he would rather have done without, yes, there was all that. But he still retained his charm and the fragments of the dreams that Mathias had lost sight of in the underground corridors of the Chatelet Metro station.
True, Marc did not seem to have given up on the Middle Ages. But Mathias was ready to go along with him to this ‘disgrace’ that he was describing as they walked along. His hand, adorned with rings, waved arabesques as he explained the deal. What it seemed to be was a tumbledown house, with four floors if you counted the attic, and a bit of garden. Mathias wasn’t put off. They would have to try to find enough money for the rent. Make a fire in the hearth. Find room for Marc’s aged godfather. Why? He couldn’t be abandoned, because it was either that or a retirement home. OK. No problem. Mathias was not bothered. He could see Chatelet Metro station receding into the distance. He followed Marc’s lead, satisfied that his friend was in the same boat as himself, satisfied that he was in the pathetic situation of an unemployed medievalist, satisfied with the showy ornaments his friend dressed up in, and entirely satisfied with the wretch of a house, in which they were certain to freeze to death because it was still only March. So by the time they arrived at the rusty gate, through which you could see the house across a patch of long grass, in one of those secret streets that exist in Paris, he was incapable of viewing the dilapidation of the site with any objectivity. He found the whole thing perfect. Turning to Marc, he shook hands. It was a deal. But even with what he earned selling posters, it still wasn’t going to be enough. Marc, leaning on the gate, agreed. Both men became serious. A long silence followed. They were trying to think of names. Someone else as down and out as themselves. Then Mathias suggested a name: Lucien Devernois. Marc reacted strongly.
‘You’re not serious? Devernois? Have you forgotten what he does?’
