The New Life

A story in the third person

Photo by Matthieu Oger on Unsplash, rendered black & white by me

When he told her about what was happening to him -- about the latest wave of brutal and mysterious murders that he, as head of forensic police, was forced to analyze, explain, and rationalize as though they were mathematical theorems -- she listened silently and didn’t speak for some time afterward. Then, as they lay naked in the fading light of the bedroom, each immersed in their own inner realm, she said with a half-voice, in the tone of someone making a confession, that she had sometimes thought about leaving everything behind and starting a new life. It was more than a thought, she specified -- it was a dream. As if there existed a pecking order, an imaginary ranking where dreams were higher up than thoughts. She said that dreams can take the shape that one wants, whereas thoughts are constrained. By what? he asked. By their mere status as thoughts, she replied, without adding anything else, as if those words explained it all in a primitive, self-contained way.

She dreamed of selling everything, her house, her car, her jewelry, and a nice wristwatch her parents had given her when she graduated from college, that she had kept in a security box at the bank ever since, as she never liked to wear wristwatches and, even if she did, that one was too good a watch to wear around because of crime and unpleasant surprises, and so she dreamed of selling all that until she had collected a substantial amount of cash to fly to Paris, where she would rent a small studio apartment somewhere between Quai de Conti and Boulevard Saint-Germain, or maybe even farther down near the Jardin du Luxembourg, in the Sixth Arrondissement anyway, and then she would go see a capable plastic surgeon and ask to alter her facial features so that she would look like someone else, a different woman, a new woman, rejuvenated, ten years younger at least, unrecognizable to anyone from her prior life, not that she would go back to her prior life just to check whether they would recognize her, not at all, but hypothetically speaking, no one, not even her parents, would be able to recognize her, although for a while she would have to go around wrapped in bandages, like a mummy, which she would enjoy, after all, first because she would be noticed and watched surreptitiously, and second because it would give her an aura of mystery, with people imagining what this silent stranger had to go through and giving up their seats for her in the metro or on the bus, for example. And then, one rainy morning, she would finally proceed to remove her bandages, carefully following the instructions that the plastic surgeon had given her, slowly, like an archaeologist who has just made an incredible discovery, or a girl who unwraps, bit by bit, a present and wants to make that moment last forever, until finally the last bandage falls, and she goes to the mirror and stares at herself, nods at herself, approves of herself, and signs off.

And she dreamed of stepping out into the streets of Paris with her new appearance and going to museums and art galleries and bookstores and literary cafes and jazz clubs, all while studying French for at least two hours a day in the beginning, then maybe two hours every other day, then maybe two hours a week, until she would finally master the language naturally, in all its idiomatic nuances, effortlessly thinking and dreaming in it, and learning to play the piano, with dedication and grace, under the supervision of a Viennese teacher named Frau Greta Hartmann, a serious middle-aged woman for whom the piano was all that counted and who, due to that, never got married but secretly conducted a life of lust at night, when no one was watching, when no one knew her whereabouts. She dreamed of doing everything with joy and excitement and lightness in this new life, a life that she would design right off the bat as one where emotions and sensibility would take priority over anything else, a life where she would cultivate creativity and the arts, where she would read all the books that she had always wanted to read without feeling guilty for taking time that could have been given to something else, without even caring about the passage of time, she would read all her favorite French authors in their native language, Camus and Modiano and de Beauvoir and Duras and Sartre and Céline, she would read and reread them, in the morning and at night, and she would take long walks along the Seine, from Quai de la Tournelle to Quai Voltaire, stopping at the bouquinistes to buy old, used books and stamps and postcards.

Then, one day, a little book on one of those bouquinistes’ green boxes would catch her attention and she would buy it on a whim, without even opening it or leafing through its pages, or asking what it was about, a book, written centuries earlier, by an unknown Persian philosopher, that she would read on rainy nights, not because, without rain and darkness, she wouldn’t feel like reading it, but because it wouldn’t open, its cover so heavy that even the strongest man in the world couldn’t lift it, and she would resign herself to this fact without much questioning -- it is what it is, she would say to herself -- but at night, with the sound of rain outside the window, the book would open always to a different, seemingly random page and reveal unbelievable things, meaning that they were so absurd that not only would no one believe them, but she would be deemed delusional if she even mentioned them.

Until one windy afternoon in mid-March, while wandering around lost in thought, she would find herself in front of the Café de la Jeunesse Perdue, at the corner of Rue Cassette and Rue de Vaugirard, and she would notice a man seated at a table outside, holding the same book in his hands, opened to a page about three-quarters of the way through. She would first be amazed that another copy of her obscure book existed, and then by the fact that the book was open in daylight, with not a drop of rain in sight, and an irresistible urge to approach that man would begin to rise within her, an urge to ask him about the book, but also about himself. And she would go and ask him I’m sorry to bother you but I happen to own a copy of the book you’re holding, but mine I can only read on rainy nights, it won’t even open on a day like this, and he would look up from the book and say you’re not bothering me at all, and would go on saying that his copy, on the contrary, wouldn’t even open on rainy nights, and she would feel a magnetic attraction to this man, almost a cosmic attraction, or a sort of yin and yang type of thing, and the man would continue by asking whether her copy ever opened on page four thirty-six, and she’d respond no, why? because there lies the truth, he’d say, what gives sense to our existence, I know this for a fact because I have dreamed it and my dream had all the beautiful colors of ancient Persia.

Then she dreamed of starting a relationship with this man, a mysterious man of surprisingly good manners and innate elegance, who would be the head of Paris’ forensic police and whose life would be tormented by a wave of inexplicable murders taking place in the city, for which no one could seem to find a common thread, and one night, while laying in bed naked in the fading light of the bedroom, he would tell her about what was happening to him and she would listen silently, not speaking for a while afterward, then she would say with a half-voice, in the tone of someone making a confession, that she had sometimes dreamed of leaving everything behind and starting a new life, that she dreamed of selling all of her possessions and raise a decent amount of cash to fly to Berlin, where she would rent a small studio apartment, have her facial features retouched by a competent plastic surgeon, and start all over again.

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