Consolation Read Online Free PDF Page B

not her. Not the beautiful Laurence Vernes.
    It was winter and I had met them in a posh restaurant in the 8th arrondissement. ‘For coffee,’he’d taken care to point out. Yes, indeed, for coffee . . . I was a supplier, not a client.
    A little treat, at most.
    Finally, I introduced myself.
    Out of breath, slovenly, bulky. With my helmet in one hand and the tubes of blueprints in the other. Pursued by a waiter who was as horrified as he was obsequious, pestering me to take my rags off me, fussing in my wake. He took my dreadful biker jacket and went off, inspecting his pale carpet. Searching, no doubt, for traces of dirty oil or mud or similar vile excretions.
    The scene only lasted a few seconds but it was enchanting.
    So there I was, sly and mocking, pulling off my long scarf and shivering one last time, when by chance my gaze met hers.
    She thought, or knew, or hoped that my smile was meant for her, but in fact it was for the absurdity of the situation, for the stupidity of a world, her world, which fed me in spite of myself (in those days it seemed to me that to come and give an estimate to a bloke who’d made his fortune in leather, in order to redo his new duplex ‘without touching the marble’, was proof of an utter lack of taste on my part . . . But the social security contributions, my God! This was Le Corbusier they were assassinating!). (I’ve changed since then. I’ve lost a few holes in my belt at business lunches and I’ve accumulated some useful complaints against the social security contribution collection agency. I’ve learned to live with my clear-sightedness, when all is said and done. Even with marble . . .) So, as I was saying, in spite of myself, a world that had not invited me just asked me to sit down in front of a stained tablecloth while some other fool swept up the last crumbs.
    My nastiness in exchange for a smile. We were even, then.
    The first smile.
    But a nice one . . .
    A nice one, already a bit charged, and I would realize fairly quickly, alas, that her self-confidence, and the way she was eyeing me up, all bold and flattering, owed more to the virtues of Monsieur Taittinger than to my improbable charm. But anyway . . . It was indeed her big toe I could feel, there, in the hollow behind my knee, while I was trying to concentrate on the gentleman’s desiderata.
    He was asking for details about the bedroom. ‘Something spacious and intimate at the same time,’ he said, over and over, peering at my specifications.
    ‘Don’t you think, darling? Do you agree?’
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘The bedroom!’ he whispered, with an exasperated puff on the cigar. ‘Try to keep up please.’
    She agreed. Only her lovely foot had wandered off.
    I loved her, knowing full well what she was like, and I don’t really see how I can complain now just because she wanders off with a flippant remark . . .
    She was the one overseeing the site. We began to meet more and more frequently and as the work progressed my perspective became more vague, her handshakes less energetic, the load-bearing walls less of an obsession, and the workers increasingly in the way.
    Finally one evening, on some flimsy pretext that the parquet was too dark, or too light, she hardly knew which, she demanded I meet her within the hour.
    So we were the first to inaugurate the magnificent bedroom. On a painter’s sheet, spacious and intimate, among the fag-ends and pots of white-spirit . . .
    But after she’d got dressed in silence she took a few steps, opened a door, closed it again at once, came back to me smoothing her skirt, and announced, quite simply, ‘I shall never live here.’
    There was no arrogance for once, no bitterness or aggression. She would never live there.
    We switched off the lights and went down the stairway in the semi-darkness.
    ‘I have a little girl, did you know?’ she confided between two floors, and while I was knocking on the concierge’s door to give her the keys, she added in a very low voice, for