Where Would I Be Without You?

Transcription

1 Where Would I Be Without You? Guillaume Musso Translated by Anna Brown and Anna Aitken Gallic Books London

2 Where Would I Be Without You? Guillaume Musso Translated by Anna Brown and Anna Aitken Gallic Books London

3 1 THAT SUMMER Our first love is always our last Tahar Ben Jelloun San Francisco, summer 1995 Gabrielle, a twenty-year-old American student That summer she was in her third year at Berkeley and often wore faded jeans, a white shirt and a leather jacket. With her long straight hair and her green eyes flecked with gold she looked like Françoise Hardy in the photos taken by Jean-Marie Périer in the sixties. That summer she divided her time between the campus library and the fire station on California Street where she volunteered as a firefighter. That summer she had her first serious love affair. Martin, a twenty-one-year-old Frenchman That summer he had just completed his law degree at the Sorbonne, he was in the States to improve his English and explore the continent. As he didn t have a penny tohis name he took odd jobs, working more than seventyhours a week as a waiter, ice-cream seller and gardener. That summer, with his shoulder-length dark hair, he looked like the young Al Pacino. That summer, he had his last serious love affair. The next day, San Francisco International Airport 9 a.m. It was raining. Still half asleep, Martin stifled a yawn and gripped the bus s handrail as it lurched round a bend on its wornout suspension. He d flung a moleskin coat over his shoulders, and wore ripped jeans, battered trainers and a T-shirt with the image of a rock band on the front. That summer, all the kids were crazy about Kurt Cobain. His head was full of memories of his two months in the US. He d seen so much and felt so much. California had taken him so far away from Évry and the Parisian suburbs. At the start of the summer, he d envisaged doing the exams to become a police officer, but the trip to the USA, a rite-ofpassage journey, had changed all that. The kid from the estates had gained in self-confidence, in the country where life was just as tough as anywhere else, but where people still had the hope and ambition to fulfil their dreams.

4 And his own dream was to write stories stories that would reach out to people, stories about ordinary people to whom extraordinary things happened. Reality wasn t enough for him, and fiction had always been a part of his life. Since he was a child, his favourite heroes had so often drawn him out of his misery, comforted him in his disappointments and his sorrows. They d fed his imagination, honed his emotions so that he could see life through a prism that made it tolerable. The shuttle from Powell Street dropped its passengers off in front of the international terminal. In the scramble, Martin got his guitar caught in the baggage rack. Weighed down like a mule, he was the last to get off the bus. He rummaged through his pocket for his ticket, and distractedly tried to work out which way to go through the urban maze. He didn t see her straight away. She had double-parked her car. The engine was still running. Gabrielle. She was drenched from the rain. She was cold. She was shivering a little. They spotted each other at the same moment. They ran towards each other. They hugged, their hearts hammering. The way you do the first time, when you still believe in it. Then she smiled and teased him. So, Martin Beaumont, do you really think that the kisses you never get are the most intense? They kissed. Their mouths sought each other, their breathing merged, their wet hair became entangled. He had his hand on the nape of her neck, she had her hand on his cheek. In the urgency of it all, they exchanged clumsy words of love. She said, Stay a bit longer! Stay a bit longer! He didn t realise it, but that was to be the most precious moment of his life. There would be nothing purer, more radiant or more intense than Gabrielle s green eyes shining in the rain on that summer s morning. And her voice imploring him: Stay a bit longer! One month later. September 9 th Parisian Suburbs Martin left the tiny bedroom that he had in his grandparents council flat. Lift wasn t working. Nine floors on foot. Letterboxes torn out, arguments in the stairways. Nothing had changed. For half an hour, he looked for a telephone box that hadn t been vandalised. He slid his fifty-unit card into the slot, and dialled a transatlantic number. Some seven thousand miles away, it was twelve thirty in the afternoon in San Francisco. The telephone in the Berkeley campus cafeteria started to ring

5 49, 48, 47 His stomach in knots, he closed his eyes and simply said, It s me, Gabrielle. I m phoning as arranged. Initially, she laughed because she was so surprised and because she was happy, then she burst into tears because it was too tough not to be together any more. 38, 37, 36 He told her that he was missing her so much, that he adored her, that he didn t know how to live without her She told him how much she wished she were there with him, to be near him, to sleep with him, to kiss him, to caress him, to bite him, to kill him with love. 25, 24, 23 He listened to her voice and everything came back to him: the texture of her skin, the smell of the sand, the wind in her hair, her lots of love his lots of love, his hand clasped round the back of her neck, his eyes searching for hers, the violence and the tenderness of their embraces. 20, 19, 18 He stared in terror at the liquid crystal display on the phone box. It was torture to see the units on his card tick away so fast. 11, 10, 9 Then they had nothing more to say, because their voices became choked. They just listened to the thudding of their hearts, beating in concert, and the softness of their breathing which merged, despite the damned phone. 3, 2, 1, 0 Back then, nobody yet really knew about the Internet, , Skype or instant messaging. Back then, love letters sent from France took ten days to reach California. Back then, when you wrote I love you, you had to wait three weeks for the reply. And having to wait three weeks for an I love you back is unbearable when you re twenty. There it is this is just an everyday story. It s the story of a man and a woman who run towards each other. Everything began with a first kiss, one summer s morning, under the San Francisco sky. Everything nearly ended one Christmas night, in a New York bar and a Californian clinic. Then the years went by