I'm Gone Read online

  2

  Six months later, also at around ten, the same Felix Ferrer climbed out of a taxi in front of Terminal B at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport, under a naive June sun in a partly overcast sky. As Ferrer was quite early, check-in hadn’t yet opened for his flight: for three-quarters of an hour he had to pace the corridors, pushing a cart laden with a carry-on bag, a suitcase, and his overcoat, which had become rather heavy for the season. He had another coffee, bought a packet of Kleenex and a box of effervescent aspirin tablets, then looked for a quiet spot where he could wait in peace.

  If he had a hard time finding one, it’s because an airport does not really exist in and of itself. It’s only a place of passage, an airlock, a fragile facade in the middle of an open field, a belvedere circled by runways where rabbits with kerosene breath leap and bound, a turntable infested by winds that carry a host of corpuscles of myriad origins: grains of sand from every desert, flecks of gold and mica from every river, volcanic or radioactive dust, pollens and viruses, rice powder and cigar ash. Finding a quiet corner amid all that is not the easiest thing in the world, but Ferrer finally discovered an ecumenical chapel in the basement of the terminal, in whose armchairs one could reflect calmly on nothing much at all. He killed a little time there before checking his bags and wandering around the duty-free area, where he purchased neither alcohol nor tobacco nor perfume, nor anything else. He was not going on vacation. No point in weighing himself down.

  At shortly before one in the afternoon he boarded a DC-10 in which celestial music, turned as low as possible to pacify the clientele, accompanied him as he took his seat. Ferrer folded his coat, shoved it with his carry-on into the overhead compartment, then, installed in the minuscule square yard allotted him next to a window, he began settling in: seatbelt fastened, newspapers and magazines arranged before him, glasses and sleeping pill within reach. As the seat next to him was fortunately unoccupied, he adopted it as an annex.

  Then it’s always the same story: you wait; your inattentive ear listens to the prerecorded announcements, your eye absently follows the safety demonstrations. The vehicle finally sets in motion, imperceptibly at first then faster and faster until you take off, heading northwest toward clouds you then pass through. Below these clouds, later on, leaning against his window, Ferrer makes out an expanse of ocean, decorated with an island he can’t identify; then an expanse of land with a lake in the middle, whose name he doesn’t know. He dozes off; he casually watches several opening credits of movies that he has trouble following to the end, distracted by the comings and goings of the stewardesses who aren’t what they used to be. He is totally alone.

  Amid two hundred people pressed into a cabin, you are in fact more isolated than ever. This passive solitude, you think, might provide a good opportunity to take stock of your life, to reflect on the meaning of the things that go into it. You try for a moment, you even force yourself a bit, but you don’t struggle for long against the disjointed internal monologue that surfaces, and so you let it drop. You curl up and get drowsy; you’d really like to sleep. You ask the stewardess for a drink, which will help you sleep better; then you ask for another to help you swallow the sleeping pill: you sleep.

  In Montreal, as he got off the DC-10, the airport workers seemed unusually dispersed under a sky that was wider than other skies, then the Greyhound bus was longer than other buses, but the highway was of normal size. Arriving in Quebec, Ferrer took a Subaru taxi toward the port, Coast Guard division, Pier 11. The taxi dropped him in front of a slate bearing the notice in chalk, Destination: Arctic, and two hours later the ice breaker NCGC Des Groseilliers was heading toward the Great North.

  3

  For five years, until the January evening when he’d left the house in Issy, all of Felix Ferrer’s days except Sundays had been spent in exactly the same way. Up at seven-thirty; ten minutes in the toilet with some kind of printed matter, from a treatise on aesthetics to a humble flyer; then preparing a breakfast for Suzanne and himself that was scientifically balanced in vitamins and mineral salts. Next, twenty minutes of gymnastics while he listened to the news on the radio. After that, he woke Suzanne and aired out the house.

  After which, in the bathroom, Ferrer brushed his teeth to the point of hemorrhage without ever looking at himself in the mirror, letting two and a half gallons of cold city water run for no reason. He always washed in the same order, inalterably from left to right and top to bottom. He always shaved in the same order, inalterably right cheek then left cheek, chin, lower then upper lip, neck. And since Ferrer, subject to these immutable orders, asked himself every morning how to break out of this ritual, the question itself became incorporated into the ritual. Without ever managing to resolve it, at nine o’clock he left for his studio.

  What he called his studio wasn’t really a studio. It was kind of one when Ferrer had called himself an artist and considered himself a sculptor; these days it was nothing more than the back room of his gallery, which could also serve as a one-room apartment now that he had gone into dealing other people’s art. It was on the ground floor of a small building in the 9th arrondissement, on a street that seemed unlikely to contain a gallery: a lively merchant artery, rather working-class for the neighborhood. Just opposite the gallery a large scaffolding was going up, which was only in the beginning stages; for the moment they were digging deep foundations. Ferrer arrived and brewed some coffee, downed two Efferalgan, opened his mail, most of which he threw out, toyed with the paperwork lying around, and waited for ten o’clock, struggling valiantly against the notion of a first cigarette. Then he opened the gallery and made several phone calls. At around twelve-ten, still by phone, he cast about for someone to have lunch with: he always found someone.

  Beginning at three o’clock and for the rest of the afternoon, Ferrer manned the gallery; then at seven-thirty he called Suzanne, invariably in the same vein: don’t wait for me for dinner. She always waited and, at ten-thirty, Ferrer was in bed with her, domestic squabble every other evening, then lights out at eleven. And for five years, yes, things had gone this way before changing abruptly last January 3. Still, not everything had changed: not without some dismay, Ferrer was forced to admit, for example, that in Laurence’s narrow bathroom he continued to wash from left to right and top to bottom. But he wouldn’t stay at her place for long; one of these days he would return to live in his studio.

  Always several vacuumings behind, this studio looked a lot like a bachelor pad, or the lair of a hunted criminal, or an untouched inheritance while the heirs were fighting it out in court. Five sticks of furniture supplied minimum comfort, alongside a small safe whose combination Ferrer had long ago forgotten, and the three-by-nine kitchen contained a stove dotted with stains, a refrigerator empty save for two wilted vegetables, shelves supporting preserves well past expiration. As the refrigerator was rarely used, a natural iceberg invaded the freezer; every year, when the iceberg neared floe proportions, Ferrer defrosted it with a hair dryer and a bread knife. Tartar, saltpeter, and purulent plaster had colonized the chiaroscuro of the bathroom, but a closet concealed six dark-colored suits, a procession of white shirts, and a battery of neckties. This was because Ferrer, when he looked after his gallery, made a point of being impeccably dressed: the strict, almost austere outfit of a politician or bank manager.

  In what passed for his living room, there was nothing to recall the gallery owner’s past artistic ambitions, aside from two exhibition posters from Heidelberg and Montpellier—and aside from two blocks of marble, chiseled and left in disgrace, now serving as a low table or television stand; keeping for themselves, in their heart of hearts, the forms that had once been intended to surge from their loins. These might have been a skull, a fountain, a nude, but Ferrer had given up first.

  4

  Now it was an ice breaker one hundred yards long and twenty wide: eight coupled engines with a combined 13,600 horsepower, maximum speed 16.20 knots, 24-foot draft. They had settled Ferrer in his cabin: furniture bolted
to the decks, sink with pedal-controlled faucet, TV screwed into an extension of the single bunk, and Bible in the nightstand drawer. Plus a small fan, paradoxical given that the heat was at the highest setting, maintaining a canicular 85°F, as in all polar outfittings, whether for ships, tractor cabs, or buildings. Ferrer arranged his belongings in the wardrobe, setting within reach, near his bunk, a book on Inuit sculpture.

  The crew of the Des Groseilliers was composed of fifty men, as well as three women whom Ferrer noticed immediately: a ruddy, compact young thing in charge of the mooring lines, a nail-biter who looked after the accounts, and a nurse with an ideal nurse’s physique, discreetly made-up, delicately tanned, barely dressed beneath her blouse, who also ran the book and video libraries and was named Brigitte. As Ferrer would soon acquire the habit of borrowing books and videos from her, it took him only a few days to understand that Brigitte, when night fell, went to join a radio operator with square chin, spindle-shaped nose, and handlebar mustache. Not much hope in that regard, but we’d see, we’d see, it wasn’t over yet.

  On the first day, on the bridge, Ferrer met the officers. The captain looked like an actor and his executive officer like a master of ceremonies, but that’s as far as it went: the other officers, senior or junior, didn’t remind him of anyone in particular. After introductions were made they found little to say to each other; Ferrer went off to explore the vast warm body of the ice breaker, progressively tempted by its smells. At first it was clean and didn’t smell like anything, but if you sniffed a little harder you made out, in order of appearance, olfactory ghosts of diesel fuel, burnt fat, tobacco, vomit, and compacted garbage; then with a little more effort, a vague, floating undertone of dirty or moldy dampness, briny evacuation, last gasp of the sewage pipe.

  Loudspeakers buzzed orders, guys joked around behind half-open doors. Along the passageways, Ferrer came across, without speaking to them, various crewmen, stewards and mechanics unused to the presence of nonprofessionals and in any case too busy to care: apart from their duties in the navigational operations, most worked all day in huge mechanical or electrical workshops located on the ship’s lower decks, stuffed with enormous machine tools and tiny delicate instruments. Ferrer managed to chat a bit with a shy, vulnerable, muscle-bound young sailor who drew his attention to several passing birds. The ptarmigan, for example, the eider that eiderdown comes from, the fulmar, the petrel, and I think that’s about it.

  That was about it. The fatty meals were served at set times and they were allowed only a brief half hour at the bar, every evening, to buy themselves a beer or two. After that first day of discovery, the weather turned foggy and began to deteriorate. Through the porthole of his cabin, Ferrer saw Newfoundland parade by on his right before they began to skirt the coast of Labrador up to Davis Inlet, then to the Hudson Strait, without once hearing an engine rumble.

  Bathing tall cliffs in a violet brown-ochre, the still air was icy, and therefore heavy, crushing its full weight onto an equally still sea of sandy yellow-gray: no gust of wind, no boats, soon not even any birds to animate it with the slightest movement, no sound. Deserted, spotted with mosses and lichens like badly shaven cheeks, the coasts fell sharply straight into the water. Through the uniform fog they divined, more than they saw, the flanks of glaciers detach and fall at imperceptible speed. The silence remained perfect until they met the ice floe.

  As it was relatively thin at first, the ice breaker began to slice a path through its front. Soon it became too thick to keep on. At that point the breaker rode on top of it, tried to crush it with all its weight; then the ice exploded, cracking in every direction as far as the eye could see. Down in the ship’s bow, separated from the impact by two and a half inches of steel, Ferrer listened from up close to the sound it made: sound track for a haunted castle full of scraping noises, whistles, and growls, bass notes and creaking of all kinds. But back up on the bridge, he saw no more than a slight permanent crackling, like a fabric tearing easily above nuclear submarines sitting calm, silent, and still on the ocean floor, in which men cheat at cards while waiting in vain for their counterorders.

  They continued on; the days passed. They came across no one, except, once, another ice breaker of the same model. They stopped alongside each other for an hour, started up again after the captains had exchanged notes and plottings, but that was all. These are territories where no one ever goes, even though a fair number of countries have more or less laid claim to them: Scandinavia, since it provided the region’s first explorers; Russia, because it isn’t very far; Canada, because it’s nearby; and the United States, because it’s the United States. Two or three times they spotted abandoned villages on the shores of Labrador, originally built by the central government for the native populations and equipped with everything from power plants to churches. But as these villages were ill adapted to the needs of the locals, the latter had destroyed them before going off somewhere else to commit suicide. Here and there near the disemboweled shacks one could still find desiccated seal carcasses hung from gibbets, the remains of food reserves protected from polar bears.

  It was fascinating, it was empty and spectacular, but after a few days it also got a bit boring. It was then that Ferrer became a regular at the library, checking out classics of polar exploration—Greely, Nansen, Barents, Nordenskiöld—and videos of all types: Rio Bravo and Kiss Me Deadly, of course, but also Kinky Cashiers and The Nurse Is Ready. These latter works he borrowed only after making sure of the relations between Brigitte and the radioman; at that point, nurturing few hopes about his chances with the nurse, he had nothing to lose by degrading himself in her eyes. Vain scruples: it was with an equable smile, full of maternal indulgence, that Brigitte indifferently recorded in her register the loan of Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse or Stuff Us Good. A smile so pacifying and permissive that Ferrer soon stopped inventing daily excuses (headaches, back pains) to go ask for care (compresses, massages). As a first step, it seemed to be working.

  5

  What wasn’t working so well, six months earlier, was business at the gallery. In the period I’m describing, the art market was nothing to write home about, and while we’re on the subject, Ferrer’s last electrocardiogram was nothing to write home about either. He had already had several warnings, a slight infarction whose only consequence was to make him give up tobacco, a point on which the specialist Feldman had proven intractable. If life punctuated by Marlboros had seemed like climbing a knotted rope, from that point on life without cigarettes was like climbing endlessly up an unvaryingly slippery rope.

  Over the past several years, Ferrer had built himself a small stable of artists whom he regularly visited, occasionally advised, and quite clearly annoyed. There were no sculptors, given his background, but naturally some painters, like Beucler, Spontini, Gourdel, and especially Martinov—who was rather visible these days and worked only in yellow—as well as a few plastic artists. Eliseo Schwartz, for example, who, specializing in extreme temperatures, had invented closed-circuit air blowers (“Why not add valves?” Ferrer suggested. “A valve or two here and there?”); or Charles Estrellas, who haphazardly installed little hillocks of glazed sugar and talcum powder (“It could use a bit of color,” hazarded Ferrer, “couldn’t it?”); Marie-Nicole Guimard, who dealt in blow-ups of insect bites (“You wouldn’t be interested in the same kind of thing with caterpillars?” Ferrer imagined. “Or snakes?”); and Rajputek Fracnatz, who worked exclusively on sleep (“Still, easy with the barbiturates,” worried Ferrer). But in the first place, no one really wanted these works anymore these days, on top of which the artists, especially Rajputek, startled once too often out of his slumber, ended up making Ferrer understand how inopportune his visits were.

  In any case, none of it sold that well anymore. Gone were the days when the telephones rang themselves hoarse, when the fax machines spewed continuous requests, when galleries the world over asked for news of his artists, statements from his artists, biographies and photos of his artists, catalog
ues and exhibit proposals for his artists. There had been several feverish, rather enjoyable years, when it wasn’t a problem to take care of all those artists, find them grants in Berlin, foundations in Florida, or classes to teach in Strasbourg or Nancy. But the vogue for all that seemed past and the lode exhausted.

  Unable to convince enough collectors to buy these works, while also noting that ethnic art was gaining ground, Ferrer had ended up revising his plan of action some time before. Gradually abandoning the plastic artists, he naturally continued to deal with the painters, especially Gourdel and Martinov—the latter in full expansion, the former clearly in decline—but he was now envisioning diverting the bulk of his efforts to more traditional channels: Bambara art, Bantu art, art of the Plains Indians—that sort of thing. To advise him in his investments, he had secured the services of a competent informant named Delahaye, who also, three afternoons per week, manned the gallery.

  Despite Delahaye’s professional qualities, his appearance did not work to his advantage. Delahaye was a man made entirely of curves. Hunched spine, gutless face, and an asymmetrical, uncultivated mustache that spottily masked his entire upper lip and curled into his mouth; certain hairs even slipped backward up his nostrils. It was too long, it looked fake; you’d think it was glued on. Delahaye’s gestures were undulating, rounded; his thinking was as sinuous as his gait; even the lenses of his eyeglasses did not reside on the same level, as the stems of his eyeglasses were twisted—in short, nothing about him was rectilinear. “Stand up straighter, Delahaye,” an annoyed Ferrer sometimes told him. The other did nothing of the kind. Oh well.

  In the first months following his departure from the house in Issy, Ferrer had indeed benefited from the new order in his life. Having at his disposal a towel, a bowl, and half a closet at Laurence’s, at first he spent every night with her on Rue de l’Arcade. And then, little by little, things fell apart: it became no more than every other night, then every third, soon every fourth. Ferrer spent the others at the gallery, first alone, then less alone, until the day Laurence: “You’re going, now,” she told him. “Out. Grab your things and beat it.”