In Search of Eternity

His street occupied a position of rare absurdity on the map of City N.: it neither led to the sea nor toward the train station. By setting foot on it, one found oneself even farther from one’s destination. Moreover, it was far less well lit than neighboring Verdi Street.

Yet I always walked it from one end to the other: from the underground Louvre parking garage to the Casino grocery store. Even he did not make such an effort and would turn off a little earlier—at the intersection with Louise Ackermann Street—while he still remembered the way to my place.

It was in this labyrinth that we found ourselves when he suddenly decided, for no apparent reason, that he wanted to spend the rest of the evening without me. Gathering the last crumbs of his gallantry, he nevertheless deigned to walk me to the nearest public transport stop. As we waited for the tramway, and as I still could not believe that he truly wanted to stay without me, that he had quite literally just shown me the door, a strange man, resembling a homeless person, approached us. This did not surprise me at all: in my presence, odd types always seemed to latch onto him. The drifter tried to sell him cigarettes, but he had already smoked one earlier and had a good reason to refuse. Still eager to provide us with something, the tramp eventually handed him some strange candies, without even asking for money.

“A magic potion,” I sneered.

There were seventeen minutes left before the tram arrived. I suggested that we walk to the next stop, hoping that in the end he would change his mind and abandon his cruel decision to leave me. We walked along the tracks, and he dropped those lollipops on the ground, saying that this way I would be able to find my way back.

Will I ever manage to find that reverse path?

I went to every tobacco shop in the neighborhood where he might buy his cigarettes, to every pharmacy where he might buy condoms (although no, he preferred to avoid those; rather the ones where he bought antidepressants). I made appointments with doctors located near his place, secretly nurturing the hope that one day I would hit the jackpot and end up with a specialist whose office was in his building. I even went to a few sessions with a psychoanalyst, dreaming of running into him in the waiting room. I quickly abandoned that idea when I discovered that my psychoanalyst had no waiting room. And how many times did I eat breakfast (and lunch, and dinner…) in a brasserie near his place, and buy croissants from the bakery across the street? In fact, I had liked that brasserie long before I knew it was located just beneath his windows.

I scrutinized every black car that passed, hoping to catch sight of him behind the wheel, and I turned around every time someone honked. I desperately searched for signs, the slightest clue that might show me the way to him, but I always ended up at a dead end. Around me there were only blind walls. No way out, only a road leading to the sea. Leading to the lighthouse, where we had once watched the moon gorge itself on blood, as if it were turning into Mars.

I knew he ran along the same route as I did. I began running more often and for longer distances, morning and evening, avidly scanning the face of every man running toward me, in the hope of recognizing those features I had so often seen in my dreams.

At times, it seemed to me that I was going permanently mad from the crushing solitude that had swallowed me in this city. Then friends would arrive and bring me back to reality. I tried going on dates with other men, to erase his voice and his gestures from my memory. But every time, it ended in total failure.

“I’m simply wasting precious time in my life,” I would think before leaving the money for my glass of rosé, firmly refusing to be walked home. And once again I would resume my immutable detour, which passed through his street.

I lived like this for four cold months, desperately hoping that this routine would not last forever, that my secret name did not contain the sounds “s,” “i,” “z,” “f,” that my deceased father was not the master of the winds, and that the gods had not cursed me for having tried to deceive death.