A reprisal of sorts. A call to action of sorts. A reminder.

It was the season’s beginning. The rainy season. And suddenly, it was humid, then no longer. Dead, crunchy leaves lined the streets and made the Earth look brownish-yellow and burnt. A year had passed, and no one had taken note.

Anne sat silently in the kitchen while Muzil and I played music in the living room. This was before the rest. Going back to before his demise and the unspeakable act. Anne was tired, but she insisted on making tea. I offered to help, but she refused. Instead, she sat silently in the kitchen while the waiting for the water to boil. I turned down the volume. I didn’t want to disturb.

Claire was elsewhere.

Christine was home writing. It was the season before she hit it big. She was on the fringe of being ‘on the scene’. I hated her then. Léonore was never around, but Christine talked about her a lot.

Hervé was gone. At some point, he left Paris to spend several months in Brittany. He came back a changed person.

This was before Dominique and I stopped speaking. She stopped by shortly after the tea had already been steeping.

It was May 1968 all over again. The schools were barricaded, vehicles were ablaze, sirens blared incessantly in the distance. Broken shards from wine bottles crammed the gutters. Services were suspended. The trains stopped running. The President of the Republic was on TV almost every evening pleading for a peaceful night.

Question: And for dialogue?

Answer: There is none. No one said anything of note.

Muzil looked up from his paper. He was wearing head to toe white, as was his custom in those days. He lit a cigarette, glanced toward the kitchen, made a hand gesture to me in Anne’s direction, and went back to reading.

It was a lethargic time. The heat made it impossible to expend energy. I was reading the classics of fatigue literature. The slow stories that lasted forever and never went anywhere. The journeys back home from exotic locations, the inabilities to speak, the inaudibility of words themselves.

I remember the phone ringing incessantly. No one picked up the receiver.

Dominique brought food. Most of the stores were closed, and she had brought us some provisions from her stock to keep us going until the grocers opened again. It was a prison.

I remember the look on his face when I confronted him. It was situated between relief and pain. Perhaps, more the former. He didn’t speak for several hours after that. Silence was communication enough. The very silence that caused it all, the end of the end. The very silence that shouted beyond the dimension of existence and solidified failure.

He wouldn’t look at me after that.

After Christine hit it big, there were parties, and dinners and lunches and cocktails. We were out nearly every night until the sun broke its slumber. After parties in the café. She threw her money around like the nouveau-riche society type she was. No one got it but me. She never talked to me about it, but I knew she understood that I saw beyond her games.

Muzil was appalled by Christine. He felt betrayed and suffered her fame at his expense. This is why Hervé left as well. He couldn’t look her in the face after what she had done.

* * *

Claire and I were walking along the St. Martin Canal. It was a Sunday afternoon during the summer. This is when it all fell apart between us. I can’t recall the words she used, but it wasn’t until much later that I saw her again. And, even then, we didn’t speak significantly for longer still.

In the end, as if resolute from the very beginning, everything falls apart. It just takes getting to that moment when all the factors align to see it all topple. One begins to wonder if our nature is one of destruction as a means to define our own attribute of created being through rebellion.

* * *

When I look back, it is hard to feel anything anymore. To think of all those who tried and failed; to long for a time that was irresolutely flawed. It was one’s own Middle East – bombs going off to the side and a trail etched in the desert ahead.

Memory itself failed.