A Bar in Paris

The bar is in Paris, just off Saint-Gérrmain; it’s late, well past the time André usually goes to bed. Yet he is here, drinking hard, to drown a pain he no longer feels, whose source he doesn’t remember, the way he doesn’t remember how long he’s been here or where he was or did before coming here. He’s sure, though, that he began to drink because of a great pain and that he could remember everything if he thought hard. But thinking hard is something he doesn’t want to do right now: his head is heavy, and the bar keeps whirling around him this or that way. And, if that wasn’t enough, there’s the old voice coming from across the table.

Burp, and I beg your pardon. It’s strange, but the man across the table from André keeps swinging – left to right to left to right - and André can’t make out hsi features. The man’s voice, though, is definitely old and definitely one André does not know. Try as hard as he could, André can’t remember when or where he first heard this man. Was it in this bar? Was it today? Maybe he’s following me. He must be following me. He’s following me. But why? Why would anybody follow him? André can’t think of any reason but he’s sure that there is one and he intends to find it. He passes his hand through his clammy hair, a gesture which has helped him think more clearly in the past, which helps him do so now: I’ll ask him. He ought to know, right?

“Why… why… you…” Funny how sometimes words refuse to come out in a bar. André takes a deep breath, then pushes them out again: “...you follow… fol… low…me?”

The man laughs: perhaps because these are the first words André said to him, yet he’s been talking to him for quite a while.

André does not laugh: he mistrusts laughing strangers. After a while, the old man stops laughing and resumes his talking. He might be answering André’s question, but André doesn’t know if he is or not: he can’t make out half the words the man is saying. He’s become sure, though, that the old man is silly; his voice, in any case, is silly. Perhaps Silly Voice would be a good name for him, just as André is for me. Then, because he likes his name, he has a short moment of elation, during which he realizes that he can think quite fluently, especially compared to the way he speaks at this late hour in this dark bar, so he has another moment of elation. When he is happy, André loves his fellow human beings, so he pushes his glass across the table: “Wine… good…drink.”

The man drinks, nods yes, the wine is good, then pushes his glass towards André: “Kir… Royal… best…”

André drinks, agrees the Kir is of the best kind and laughs: suddenly Silly Voice seems to be a man after his heart. Silly Voice laughs, too, which causes André to change his mind and distrust him again. By now Silly Voice has stopped laughing and is talking again. André, overflowing again with goodwill towards mankind and, specifically, towards this man who likes the same wines he does, tries to follow Silly Voice’s disquisition but fails. “Bah,” he says, leaning back in his chair, a pout on his face. A light and ever so pleasant unknown force pulls his head back into the wooden back of the chair by the roots of his hair. André lets himself float with the sensation for a while, till Silly Voice’s bursting out laughing draws his attention. Leaning forward, André notices his legs and wonders which pants he’s wearing. He drops his chin into his chest and peers through the darkness. Then, he touches his legs. His hand discovers a crease, whose existence there, on his thigh, he finds so interesting he has to tell Silly Voice about it. Silly Voice, however, does not stop talking, does not listen. His rudeness first angers André, then saddens him. He feels lonely, is on the verge of crying. Especially because of Alice. She doesn’t love him anymore. She’s left him. He tells Silly Voice about Alice. They met at a party four months ago… No, that was not Alice. He’s confused. Alice was… No, he’s confusing her with Andrea. What a woman Andrea. She used to be his girlfriend in high school, his second girlfriend ever and the first woman to let him touch her breasts. No, no, wait a minute. It was Joanne. Dom… What was her last name now? Dom… It doesn’t matter. She, Joanne, let him touch her breast. In ninth grade. She, too, left him. So did Andrea. Everybody’s left him. Tears are running down André's cheeks. He wipes them off with the back of his hand, then takes another sip of wine and cries some more: Joanne doesn’t want to listen to him, doesn’t want to… Just like nine years ago. Or was it fourteen? And it hurts just as much as it hurt back then. It was sixteen! “It was sixteen years ago,” he tells Silly Voice with even more difficulty than the last time he spoke to him. He laughs, happy that he’s remembered, a laughter that becomes a tremendous cough, which nearly chokes the life out of André. Then, the truth hits him full in his aping, cough-laughing mouth: the number sixteen came to him because Joanne was sixteen when he touched her breast. He knows because she broke up with him two days after her sixteenth birthday. He must have been… Hmmm… How old was he? He had to be… He backs up a bit, goes at it from a different angle: he’s dated her nine or fourteen years ago and he’s… thirty-four now. Which means… Thinking of his age reminds him that he should have had two divorces by now. A Gypsy woman had seen that written in his left palm when he was in college. “I’m still single,” he tells Silly Voice. He laughs. The joke’s on that silly Gypsy. His laughter doesn’t last long, though. The same Gypsy woman told him he would not be happy with his job. And he’s not. He’s not happy with anything. No, that’s not true. He’s happy with his job. It’s just that, at his age, he should be further ahead in life. Yeah! It’s like he started everything six or seven years late. Except he hasn’t. He finished college at twenty-two. Had his MA at twenty-five. That’s not so bad, is it? But, still, he’s behind, earns less money than… Somebody must have tripped him, and he didn’t even notice till a couple of years ago or so. Must have been Alice. Or somebody. He tells Silly Voice his thoughts. Silly Voice laughs. André finds that to be a very odd reaction. He wants to ask Silly voice why he laughed, then, noticing again that he can’t make out a word Silly Voice says, gives up. He leans back in his chair, disengages his emotions. This time there’s no strange-yet-pleasant force pulling his head into the wooden back of the chair, and the fog in his head seems to have gone away. He thinks Silly Voice’s fog must have done the same and that soon he’ll finally understand Silly Voice. He is right yet wrong. Soon he begins to make out words: “... dead… golden hands… gold…” Silly Voice must be talking about the Gypsy woman who saw two divorces in André’s pal. She, too, talked about people with golden hands. She called them painters. He can’t remember why. He sighs. Silly Voice goes on talking: “... golden… death… great life…” But what do Silly Voice’s words mean? Nothing. Not to André, anyway, who, however, thinks that another drink might help him make sense of them. “Er… er… bar… tender…’nother,” he says in the direction of the bar, flailing his left arm about. While waiting for his drink, he looks around, hoping to find someone who could help him understand Silly Voice. He sees only darkness but becomes aware that something in the bar stinks. He raises his arms and smells his armpits. No, it’s not him. Must be Silly Voice. Then he places the smell: stale beer, cheap, dirty joint smell. “Sorry,” he says in the direction of Silly Voice, whose face he still can’t make out clearly.

The waitress brings him another glass of wine but doesn’t want to tell him what Silly Voice is talking about. As a matter of fact, she doesn’t even want to talk to him. “Bitch,” André calls her, which brings on some vague memories. Maybe (he can’t be sure, but it’s possible” his being here has got to do with Michelle, his finacée. Maybe she’s left him… Somebody’s left him… said he was immature and “I’m sick of you.” He looks at Silly Voice. “Might of bee… Might… ha… er… Mich… No!” A very resolute no: Michelle, he’s just remembered, left him five years ago, he’s had someone else since. Two someone elses, as a matter of fact. “Er… yeah… Mich… No… Sandy… Sandy?...Nnnn… Trish…” Trish sounds more familiar, more recent. It must have been Trish who said all those nasty things. That is, unless Trish is not his mother’s name. “Or something.” He doesn’t know anymore. One thing is for sure, though: he called someone a bitch not so long ago. “I did that,” he informs Silly Voice. Silly Voice just goes on talking. André decides it’s best to concentrate again on what Silly voice is saying. With much pain, he figures it out: Silly Voice is talking about living off dead people. He, Silly Voice, knows a cemetery where they bury the dead with golden fingernails. He found out about it a long, long time ago, from a friend. The business is his now. It consists of digging out the dead, ripping off their golden fingernails, then burying them back. Sometimes, he finds corpses with golden fingers. Or hands. Golden hands are rare, very rare. “Life would be so easy if there were more of them,” Silly Voice sighs. André finds this interesting yet revolting. Silly Voice moves on to the non-material advantages of living off gold-nailed, or - fingered, people. “It’s lots of fun.” It seems Silly Voice gets to see them hurt and squirm. It’s better than sex.

At first, André doesn’t get it: how could they squirm? Is Silly Voice talking about golden-finger-nailed people who haven’t quite died yet? How cruel! Suddenly, André hates Silly voice: golden-nailed people, he decides, are sacred.

Silly Voice isn’t aware that André hates him and goes on talking about his business. After a while, André, who now positively adores golden-nailed people and wants to be one of them, takes off his boot, lifts it high, high above his head, then lowers it over Silly voice’s head. Then, he does it again and again. And again. Silly Voice falls asleep with his head on the table. André puts his red-heeled boot on the chair next to his and watches Silly Voice. Sleep’s coming over him and… he falls asleep - happy: he did a good deed today. His mother has always encouraged him to do so.