The Enchanted Clock Read online

  “Yes. Violet rays. I was dissolving from having laughed so much … Much too much, for no reason … Nivi Delisle.”

  He had wrapped me in a white peignoir and a plaid blanket. My bathing suit had come off.

  “At first I thought that laughing seagulls were fluttering around a dolphin. Yes, there are dolphins that lose their way around here. Those mauve reflections … The tidal wind, the shadow that appeared and disappeared in the foam, struggling … But the cry was not that of a bird, that cry … could only have been the echo of a woman.”

  The wind had calmed, and the boat had stopped moving. I looked at his gray hair, his tanned complexion. How old might he be, this sidereal adolescent? Fifty? A little more? He shouldn’t imagine, above all, that he has saved me from a melancholy suicide. That’s all I need—that he should disembark like a hero at the Phare des Baleines!

  “Very sorry to have scared you … I was having a wild time … I like to laugh in the water … Does that surprise you?”

  He doesn’t wait for silence to set in. Once again, Astro comes to my aid.

  “Of course not. This encounter was inevitable.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “I waited for you to wake up … I heard you dreaming.”

  Am I supposed to say “sorry” or “thank you”? I am silent.

  “I have read your books … certain ones. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia.”2

  Am I supposed to say “thank you” or “sorry”? I am still silent.

  “Don’t worry. My job is to look at the sky. And to remain silent, me too … I don’t talk a lot. Never about the essential things … I can chat, manage, communicate … Not a bit neurotic … I will not be your patient.”

  So much the better! I notice he has let go of my hand; I need him to keep it. His voice continues: “Besides, we both explore deep spaces, at the two edges of the universe … So distant one from the other that we have no chance of meeting each other … Had no chance … The probability was close to zero. But thanks to the violet ray, it was certain … You can keep my sweatsuit. You are here, madam.”

  He had dressed me.

  I remember only vague sequences of the soundtrack of this film, and the beams of the lighthouse sweeping across the night in the Fier.3 Theo must have quietly deposited me at my home. I found myself in an armchair on the veranda facing the ocean, dressed in his charcoal gray tracksuit and a plaid blanket. I didn’t even have the strength to make myself some tea. I collapsed on the big bed and slept. Alone. Without Stan, without the telephone, without anyone.

  1. The Phare des Baleines is a lighthouse at the western limit of the Ile de Ré, the island where Kristeva and Sollers have a home. All notes are by the translator.

  2. Le soleil noir de la mélancolie is a book by Kristeva.

  3. Fier is the interior lagoon at Ars en Ré, on the island.

  2

  “THEO.” WHAT A STORY!

  I’m remembering: my linguistics professor is on the brink of death and asks me to visit him in the hospital. With a trembling index finger, he traces these letters on the mauve silk of my shirt. A cerebral attack. The old man I adore is aphasic. Three beds in a room at the Kremlin-Bicêtre hospital, rancid odor, noisy families. Does he hear them? His eyes tear, his white hair sticks to his prophet’s forehead. No words. Only these letters imprinted on my chest, between my breasts: THEO. They are still there. At the time, I have trouble believing that this extremely well-known scholar, an Enlightenment enthusiast, has this word in mind. I hand him the notebook I keep at the bottom of my bag, with the red morocco cover, the one on which I have always sketched my constellations, the words and phrases that illuminate my days, my nights. And a black felt-tipped pen. Once more, with the same trembling gesture, the old linguist clearly traces “THEO.” The prophet who explored Indo-European languages expired the next day.

  I keep this precious notebook and my professor’s last lesson with me. They accompanied me while I watched over Stan during his first illness, then during his coma, and even more at his awakening.

  “Can we go see the clock, Mama, can we?”

  Scarcely reanimated, was my son wondering what time it was? I must have looked flabbergasted.

  “Don’t worry, I feel fine. I’m okay now. How about you? Do you remember that clock and the pushing and shoving, at Versailles?”

  At life’s frontiers Stan is thinking about what time it is, what time it was, and what time it will be. He lives in time, Stan, and brings me back into it.

  I have it.

  Spring makes the sky iridescent. Versailles always dazzles me, that day more than any other. Nothing is annulled when we are transported into splendor and voluptuousness. On the contrary, the rest of the world, its challenges and sufferings, appear absolutely simple, elementary. Between Stan and me a new proximity is born, infantile and humble, the magic of this disorientation. My son blossoms in this magical world. Running in the alleys of Bacchus and Saturn, the groves and the Orangery; laughter in his eyes tickled by the waters of the Neptune basin and the Apollo baths; reveries along the Water alley, the North parterre …

  Today we are not following the flood of Japanese tourists stifling in the Hall of Mirrors. Stan has always loved history and museums. Where other parents drag along their bored kids, he finds enchantment. Not really a gifted kid but an eternal child hovering in the body of an atypical preadolescent, who protects himself, gets around difficulties, avoids thinking about a father who no longer contacts him … He escapes from me too, so I follow him to protect him, share in the discoveries that absorb him. I love his face illuminated by astonishment. Stan has recently discovered a taste for science: Buffon, Jussieu, Cassini, La Condamine. How much of that can one find in this king who they say loved celestial mechanics much more than he loved Madame de Pompadour? Stan wants to check it out, find out for himself.

  The curator—head of an owl, peroxide chignon, eyes converging at the bridge of her nose—explains to our very private group (the extreme rarity of three or four enthusiasts on a guided tour of Louis XV’s chambers) that a fabulous astronomical clock, the masterwork in this salon of magisterial rocaille décor, is programmed with the hours, minutes, seconds, and even sixtieths of seconds up to the year 9999. I’m barely listening to her … I’m thinking about Stan, who has lagged behind at a barometer made for Louis XV and who invents another world for himself: exceptional, solid, impregnable.

  Outside the window a strange smoke rises. With my dog’s sense of smell I’ve already noticed it, my eyes are getting irritated … The Owl is engrossed in her anecdotes about the Château. I don’t have time to smile politely; the smoke is getting to my throat. Suddenly an alarm rips through the confined air: “Fire! Immediate evacuation!”

  Where has Stan gone off to? I wasn’t paying attention. The frightened Japanese invade the little apartments, mad scramble, I look to the right, then to the left. Where could my Stan be? No sign of him, unreachable on his smartphone. The human wave grows and carries me off. I catch hold of the Owl, her ear glued to her cell phone—“Have you seen my son by any chance?”—she doesn’t understand, she’s waiting for instructions from security, let’s not panic, I am paralyzed, a guard has caught sight of someone, he grabs me, we attempt to push our way through the rush against the flow … At last we find him: in the famous Clock Cabinet, deserted now. Stan is in the middle of the room, in admiration of a Louis XV piece.

  “Mama, look, look!”

  “There’s a fire alarm, my darling, let’s hurry, we’ll see it later!”

  “Look at the time … 9,999 years closed up in a clock …”

  “Really? … Hurry, it smells of smoke … We’re leaving!”

  There’s an explosion, followed by shots. The guard rushes us toward the exit, we meet up with the Owl, she tries to take us down a little staircase, the Japanese, more and more numerous, converge on the same emergency exits, the Owl slips and falls, gets up without her glasses, her lip torn, blood all over her chic sui
t. “Run! Run! Don’t stay in the Château. Quick!” She takes my hand, Stan clears a path for us. And we find ourselves outside, at the Café de la Place.

  I hate these events that plunge you into a state of torpor. Only the media love them. Was the fire caused by a simple electrical short circuit? Or was it a terrorist act? The solitary wolves of al-Qaeda haunt the planet and threaten the Hexagon,1 it’s well known. Was the fire just a smoke screen? The gas explosion a homemade bomb that missed its target? What target? France, of course. Fortunately the police are on the lookout, and they are effective, sometimes. The proof: the damage was minimal, the inquiry takes its course, the smoke was just a provocation to distract attention, but from whom, from what?

  The incident quickly forgotten, other news takes its place. No point in waiting for it to pass, it never passes, that’s how it is.

  Since then I’ve encountered the Owl several times, at the National Library, at the Café Marly, at the Carrousel du Louvre. Didn’t recognize me, in spite of her glasses. She didn’t have any reason to, me neither.

  Stan isn’t giving up on his idea:

  “Mama, I’m talking to you, can we go see the clock? Can we, mama? … Do you remember?”

  “Vaguely. What clock?”

  “You know, the Owl was leading us to a clock programmed to the year 9999 … Yes, that one, Passemant’s clock, I’ve told you about it before.”

  My son’s memory is as absolute as his ear. In my notebook covered in red morocco, I note: “An astronomical clock keeps Stan alive until he awakens after two weeks in a coma.”

  I don’t tell Theo what happens to me when I think about him (I leave a few hints of it in my notebook). I just write to him: “Well before meeting you, Stan made me understand that an astronomical clock can restore life to someone.”

  The immediate answer: “Where you were, where Stan was, where you are, I am. An encounter of this intensity reprograms everything, from before as well as after. ILY.”

  Pure Astro. Understand it if you can.

  As for me, I understand that at this very instant, billions of Internauts send one another words and energies. In the past, Theo claimed that these signals were lost in the atmosphere and loaded it dangerously with CO2. Now he asserts these signals are not really lost. They accumulate and magnetize one another, encircle us in their networks, transport us outside ourselves, create zones of accretion where time and space are blended. As for lovers.

  Often, ILY disappears from my screens for days, for entire weeks. Theo is working on a new ultrarapid camera capable of shooting 1,500 images per second in almost total darkness. He doesn’t answer. In the end I get impatient, I send him a text: “How are you?” Finally he reacts: “They’ve just detected an exoplanet, baptized Kepler-186f, comparable in size to the Earth, turning in an orbit around a dwarf star redder, smaller, and less hot than the Sun, on which water can therefore exist in a liquid state. And now another team of researchers is on the verge of determining the speed of rotation of an exoplanet, Beta Pictoris b! Are you following me, Nivi?”

  And how! I am following him …

  A few days later (or maybe several weeks? When? I’ve lost my sense of time in these sequences that fix me in a single present), I write the following e-mail to Theo Passemant:

  “The pleasure you have given me, our pleasure, comes to mind as soon as I think about you. In front of my computer, or swimming with the seagulls in the Atlantic, when I read your texts sent from I don’t know what observatory in the Andes, whether we have a simple lunch at the Balzar or I imagine you in the sky, that pleasure returns. Ever since you entered my life, the pleasure that is called physical begins for me with a first name: yours. I see your face. Your hands slide along my skin, your voice pierces me, I feel it in my mouth, it opens my throat, warms my heart and my blood, makes my fibers tremble with the rhythm of your words. Belly, vagina, clitoris, uterus, anus: everything is inside and outside, fire and water, Nivi supple and on fire. You carry my entrails toward the heavens, as my Teresa of Avila would say. I take your penis in my mouth, it hardens, I caress it, it swells yet more, it penetrates me more and more until a single movement burns us to the same point, and our bodies dilute into one flesh, efflorescence and discharge. Animal embraces, baby embraces, embraces of chaste and monstrous angels, forever sated and always unsatisfied, endlessly to start over, all genders combined, all given names exhausted, your name, my name, no name, ILY.”

  I will not send you this e-mail. Our encounter, my rescue in the ocean, all those galaxies you inhabit, the universe I see in your eyes, your wanderings and your presence deep inside me and thousands of light years away; Stan’s tenderness, who needs me and from now on you, because you love him through me, the way I love him, the way you love me: I write to tell you all this. I live again in our separation, which you confirm with a glance, a smile, or an exclamation point preceded by our cabalistic ILY. You feel the same pleasures at the same moments. The same ones as me, in your solitary male fashion, fazed by nothing, you say, converted to science so as to enter the order of the stars.

  I will see you … when? In a few hours, two weeks, three months, Christmas Eve? That is not the time you are in, me neither. You are refractory to Time in your own way, which is not mine, yet it comes to the same thing. Could that be what makes us climax together, both here and there, in the Fier d’Ars and in the Astrophysics Lab, at Harvard or in New Mexico? I with Stan, who wants to return to Versailles to see the meridian in the King’s Cabinets. You with your Advanced Camera Surveys, which reconstruct the history of the creation of the stars. ACS, which sounds like the abbreviation of an elite unit in a crime series.

  “So where’s the anxiety in this fine love story of yours?”

  The metallic accents of my friend and colleague Marianne Baruch—still the same, I haven’t changed since I left the Medical-Psychological Center (MPC for the initiates)—attempt to bring me back down to earth. Marianne lowers her gaze to Theo, passing through Paris on a flying visit. I swallow my saliva and don’t answer …

  My Astro’s phlegmatic reflectiveness answers for me: “The Hubble observations are part of the Advanced Camera for Surveys Nearby Galaxy Survey Treasury program. Have you heard of it? We say ANGST, if you prefer.”

  Theo spins out this info without the shadow of a smile. And as for me I attempt to interest Marianne in the work of my A … I mention the ESA, NASA, the latest facts provided by the Planck satellite observing the diffuse cosmological background, also called fossil radiation: the first light emitted 380,000 years after the Big Bang! I also ask my friend to look up on the Internet what Theo pulls out of the active regions, those little blue spots that bear witness to the birth of stars. Or also the distorted images of ultradistant galaxies. The effect of shear that a universal gravitational field would produce allows us to distinguish the luminous mass of the amassed galaxies from mass that does not emit light. For Theo, this extremely weak twinkle, at the limits of current technology, serves to detect black matter and dark energy. Still mysterious, granted, but five times more abundant than the matter that constitutes us! These people are making maps of the invisible. When you think about it, Marianne my dear … Anxiety? What anxiety? No feeling of angst, just ANGST …

  I sense that I’m making an impression on her. I too visit and inhabit secret regions, those of my psychoanalysis patients, regions active since the birth of I don’t know what unknowns that torment them. I borrow Theo’s vocabulary to give a name to this thought matter, where names, words, incredible stories light up, attract us, and escape from us. Little blue or yellow points, enigmatic, disconnected, and pulsating gravitational shears. I insert them into the words of those who take the risk of confiding them to me, until they catch up with me and become lives that encounter mine. Then I name them, I interpret; I share them, integrate them. Every day a new world. For me, for them. That is where I am focused with my A.

  And with a few accomplices.

  1. “The Hexagon” is a familiar name for Fra
nce, in reference to its approximately hexagonal shape.

  3

  MY NAME IS CLAUDE-SIMÉON PASSEMANT

  My name is Claude-Siméon Passemant, the king’s engineer. Born in Paris in 1702, I died from a sudden so-called soporous illness at sixty-seven in 1769, twenty years before the French Revolution. I know this because time is my specialty. I calculate it, I live it, I can stop it down to the second, to the sixtieth of a second. I retain everything: numbers, words, colors, sounds, melodies, rhythms. My memory is infallible; my thoughts run at a gallop, like the horses of the king hunting at Choisy. Witticisms, vivacity, sparks, sparkling fires, my agitated soul nevertheless does not often get carried away. My thinking is quick and calm. Astronomy is my companion, my remedy, my religion. My relaxation, say my daughters, my sons-in-law, my wife, my extollers. What nonsense! I never seek relaxation. To flee sorrow by thinking about time is an infinite joy. I kill boredom by inventing machines that allow me to calculate the course of the stars, the rise of the tides, the strength of the winds. No rest, pure pleasure. In short, I speak less than I am moved to, and if my politeness seems too simple, it is never feigned.

  I shun society; silence suits me. Bitterness or sorrow, perhaps. So they say, so they will say. I’m indifferent is more like it. I find humanity’s affairs tiresome. The court as well as the academy. What importance remains, after having calculated my clock with such precision that in ten thousand years people will see no deviation from the astronomical tables?

  This is my refuge. The heavens can be calculated because time can be. I discovered this at the death of my father. This man, who had molded my heart more and better than he had ensured my subsistence, constantly encouraged what he called my “easy understanding.” I have to admit that it brought me various prizes at the Collège Mazarin, where I did my secondary studies and initiated the calculations that would perfect that famous clock with the sphere that now resides at Versailles. But the heavens took my father before my education was finished.