The Mystery Guest: An Account by Bouillier Grégoire

Author:Bouillier, Grégoire [Bouillier, Grégoire]
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2010-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

IV

That might have been that. Ordinarily, it would have been. But one night I went to a party with the Lyonnaise, as I referred to a very young woman whose company had brightened certain hours of my life, and was told that somebody wanted to talk to me, was in fact eager to meet me and congratulate me on my book, and it was a woman, she was waiting for me at the bar—and it was Sophie Calle. At first I didn’t quite put this information together; but as I crossed the room my excitement grew, I even felt a kind of thrill at the prospect of laying eyes on the woman in whose home, a dozen years before, my existence had been turned upside down, the woman whose intervention had set everything else in motion, yes, the story of the mystery guest came rushing back to me along with a feeling, perfectly preserved, which I realized had been drowned out by a thousand other memories, a feeling I’d forgotten over the years, and while I threaded my way toward the bar through the clusters of guests, I felt oddly as though I was reconnecting with the best part of my past and reliving what had already taken place, and I almost expected everything to start all over again. That’s how uncanny it was, how full of portent, to be seeing her at another party, as if all the years and lives that had passed into and out of existence in the meantime had never been. As if, now that she’d straightened out the oysters in the kitchen, we were about to take up our conversation where we’d let it drop. At the same time I had no specific memory of what she looked like, and I wouldn’t have recognized her on the street, and it wasn’t until I was standing right in front of her that I was struck all over again by the openness of her smile, despite the heavy, serious black glasses that I didn’t remember her wearing before, and the lock of hair was still falling over her forehead, and she was wearing a short dress, which showed off her breasts to great advantage, and I was so happy to see her, I was delighted, and I clasped her hand, and she said she was delighted to see me, too, and right away she started to talk in the most heartfelt terms about what I had written, and as she went on I began to realize that she had no idea who I was. My face didn’t ring any bells, as they say, she obviously had no clue that I was one of her mystery guests, and things wavered and quivered around me, and slowly the room began to seem less and less real, and for a few seconds I had to clutch the stool beneath me with both hands, digging in with my nails, just to convince myself that everything wasn’t going to blow away

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