The Umbrella

He already knew Robby, a man of about his own age, having met him before in this same bar in St Germain des Prés.

   They were talking of their lives and of this and that, about what was on their minds and in their hearts, when he became aware of a young woman by his side.

    “She has very beautiful eyes,” he mimed to Robby so that she could not hear him.

    He had the impression that she was listening to them, however, and this impression was soon confirmed when she picked up one of his phrases (“a paradise island”), repeating it in a tone of quizzical irony.

    He turned towards her, and from there on the conversation widened to include the young woman.

    She had been drinking a little, and one could guess that she was not very happy. She confided in a half-whisper that she had just been through “a lousy love affair”.

   The three of them discussed literature. She was a great admirer of Arthur Koestler -- to the extent that she did not like anyone to judge him solely on the basis of his “Darkness at Noon” when, she said, his work was so rich and varied.

   So much did she admire the author that he had a hard time trying to convince her that it was possible to have a positive opinion on Koestler while having read just that one book.

   But he understood her attitude, with which he sympathised. It was based on a fear of deformation of Koestler’s thought by epigones, he said to himself. He had found the word in the writings of Trotsky.

   He defended the young woman’s position before Robby, who objected precisely that “Darkness at Noon” was the most accessible of Koestler’s works.

   But he also agreed with Robby that the young woman was nevertheless being presumptuous. One still had the right to admire the writer on the basis of just one work..

                                                          

   There were a lot of people Chez Georges. It was a Saturday night and already quite late. The three of them were drinking tequila and beer, and with the general noise and various interruptions the last words on Koestler lost themselves in the ambient alcoholic confusion.

   He found the presence of the young woman agreeable, but she seemed to be irritating Robby. Was that because he himself was not in love but would have liked to be, while Robby was in love but wished not to be? In any event, she constituted a sweet distraction for two rather blasé young men.

   The bar filled up some more, it was now heaving with people, and several of them greeted  Marion: that was how the two men learned her name.  Some character with a big belly even tried in some way to warn them against her. “Marion is tired, she is weak,” the man said.

    Could this be her “lousy love affair”? he wondered and hoped not for her sake. The man seemed a disagreeable type all right, hateful even, but on receiving no response to his remarks, he slid out of sight.

   “Do you think I look smart?” she threw out next, drawing attention to her appearance. “Yes,” he replied honestly. No doubt she had made an effort that night, and it was true that she looked good.

    She then announced that she was annoyed by her umbrella, which she found absurd. She normally never carried one, she explained.

    She went on to impress him by her rejection of one of his favourite notions of that time, which he also attributed to Trotsky, to the effect that “above all nowadays, all art must be revolutionary”.

        “No, I don’t think so,” she said simply and disarmingly. He thereupon realised that he didn’t think so either, or no longer did now. He had been in the habit of repeating this idea because it pleased him. Now however she had consolidated a doubt on the matter which had already awakened in him that very evening, from the moment he had entered the bar, in fact. He had even talked about it earlier to Robby!

   But he adored the enthusiasm of the young woman who, moreover, confessed to an intellectual confusion which he imagined matched his own. He attributed this confusion to their education, he said, again borrowing a secondhand idea. She showed them the notes that she had made of an esoteric lecture which she had just attended. The subject was of a mind-boggling complexity and he understood nothing. He marvelled at her.

    Georges was closing up and it was two o’clock in the morning. She lived in the suburbs and Robby, who had a car, agreed to take her home. She and Robby thus left together, ahead of him.

    Suddenly he noticed that Marion had left behind the umbrella, the same one which she had found so absurd and annoying. His heart leapt strangely. Almost voraciously, he grabbed the object, which was of a black and scarlet material. Then he too left the bar, serene and self-possessed as a lord, to hail a taxi.

    The driver dropped him in front of the church of St. Ambroise, in the 11th arrondissement. As he walked the few paces across the square towards his apartment in a state of exaltation, he heard a nightingale sing. In a rush of joy, he brushed the umbrella with a kiss. Embarrassed then, he asked himself what he was doing. He underwent a moment of shame as he realised that he had not even thought of handing the umbrella over to Georges so that its owner could recover it.

    The umbrella stayed a week in the hall of his apartment while he was out of town and a serious political crisis shook the French government, in whose fortunes he had, as a keen would-be revolutionary, been taking an active interest. This was the first government under Mitterrand, which had enjoyed a large majority of Socialist and Communist Party deputies in the National Assembly. 

    In the crisis, the traditional workers’ parties had, according to the analysis of his political mentors, just confirmed once again their craven spinelessness, turning their backs on the aspirations that had carried them to power. It seemed evident indeed that only the revolutionary trotskyists offered any alternative…

    During the course of the same week, the vague rendezvous that the young woman had given him for the next weekend, Chez Georges, came back to him. He returned to Paris early on the Saturday. But a wedding reception he felt obliged to attend that same afternoon left him in a state of gloom and lassitude. After fulfilling that duty, he abandoned any plan to go Chez Georges that night. She had said “weekend”, had she not? That still left Sunday, he told himself.

    The next day, he set out for the bar. Before going, he carefully wrote some words for Marion should she not be there, which seemed to him quite likely. He would put them inside the umbrella which he would leave with Georges. He noted with amusement that he was, by coincidence, dressed in black and red, the same colours as the umbrella which he was carrying.

    He was to experience an unforeseen disappointment: Georges was closed on Sundays. But he nevertheless intended to treat himself to some red wine that evening, and so set about finding some elsewhere. St Germain and the Latin Quarter were bleak and deserted. It was cold and a persistent drizzle was setting in. At least the umbrella served some practical purpose...

    The first bar he entered became unbearable after one glass. He was already returning home along the Rue St André des Arts when, on a whim, he retraced his steps. He entered a café which had attracted him without his knowing why. He went up to the bar, took a drink, and again wanted to leave immediately.  However a man at his side insisted on buying him another one. Feeling himself weaken, he yielded. He then felt obliged to buy the man a drink in return.

    His head elsewhere, he did not speak to this customer who, moreover, had something shifty about him. He thought only about this umbrella business... Sporadically, he saw in a mirror the reflection of a woman in the rear of the yellowing café. She stood out from the three other people seated at her table, which he could hardly see, like a cold gleam amid the general obscurity. He was not watching the umbrella, which he had hung from the edge of the bar.

    The four people at the back of the café stood up. And as if she had sprung out of some blackened old oil painting in order to attack him, the woman from the mirror bore straight down upon him. She forced him to move to allow her to pass between him and the bar in order to reach the exit. Meanwhile he finished his drink, paid and turned towards the door, before remembering the umbrella. Which was no longer there!

    At the bar they had seen nothing, they said, straight-faced. The other customers had seen nothing either. He was staggered, dumbstruck that one could steal the umbrella from him, just like that. It was like a mockery of him and his sweet, formless romantic fancies, that even their symbol, this foolish fetish, should be taken from him and prove so cruelly ephemeral.