The Great and the Good by Michel Déon

Author:Michel Déon [Michel Déon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910477403
Publisher: Gallic Books
Published: 2016-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

What do we retain of that impalpable, possibly non-existent thing we call the past? Hardly more than a few words that we’re no longer sure were really said or whether we simply invented them in the naive desire to justify ourselves, to believe we really existed on that day, at that crucial time, whose memory haunts us. There are only images – sometimes linked together like a film in which a censor has cut the best or worst scenes, stripping the sequence of all logic – images that surface and allow us to reconstruct an episode from the past that we are convinced was a fatal crossroads. That was where everything changed. A step to the left instead of a step to the right, a minute later, and an entire life tumbles into the unknown.

Why does Arthur recall, of that July Saturday morning in New York, firstly his long walk through the city from Rector Street to 72nd Street, along the furnace of Broadway and then Fifth Avenue, the burning pavements, the traffic lights that break his rhythm, the lost couple who ask for directions in a language he thinks might be Lithuanian, the scraggy yellow dog that follows him from the Stock Exchange and leaves him at Times Square, a girl on roller skates in blue shorts and singlet spinning like a top around Rockefeller Plaza, pretty, bursting with health, her skin like burnt bread, her dyed hair tied back in a ponytail? After this there is a gap, as if magically Arthur is transported by what the Italians call “ministero angelico” from the roller skater on Rockefeller Plaza to the glass door of the Brasilia, which a doorman holds open so that he can receive the full force of Augusta’s anxious look, sitting at a table facing the door, opposite two men whose backs are to him. One has a circle of thinning hair, like a monk’s tonsure: Getulio on the way to being bald. The other, in contrast, has hair that curls over his collar and, crow-black, is plastered to his temples by a lavish application of brilliantine: the Brazilian wheeler-dealer who is the reason for this meeting. These two disparate hairstyles are accessories in the film which has already started and whose beginning will be revealed little by little. The soundtrack is missing. On the screen there is now only Augusta’s blue eyes in a succession of close-ups that enlarge to the point of eliminating both the restaurant’s splashy decor and the waitress in a costume of Bahia who, with a sweetness devoid of irony, takes Arthur’s hand to guide him through the maze of occupied tables to that of Getulio, who gets to his feet and, after Augusta has offered her cheek to the Frenchman, introduces Luis de Souza and Arthur Morgan to each other. The latter still has no idea of what is going to be asked of him, he only knows that he is running a risk because of Augusta and her bare

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