I HAVE NOTHING
Chapter Five
The City of Light
The station’s clock read ten o’clock
in the morning. Jack was glad to not have more luggage than his tiny duffle
bag, because in the middle of that chaos, it would be impossible to find any
other suitcase. Several soldier groups were across the platform, and lots of
families were waiting for the trains, fear painted on their faces, policemen
dressed as civilians watching everything, trying to find some stranger with a
suspect face...there was a war, so the ambience in Paris was anything but
normal. Jack finally passed through all those people, and finally, the morning
sun was upon his face.
A soldier that spoke English
showed him the way to Montmartre, the bohemian section that was shared by
artists, intellectuals, prostitutes, drunks, and mad people. Most resided in
coffee houses and squares, telling their miseries to anyone who might be
interested in hearing them, but, after all, Jack thought that it had something,
something magical and special. There was some kind of freedom floating in the
air that he liked...he took a deep breath and looked in his pocket for some
coins to have a cup of coffee.
He looked sometimes at the
waiter. Maybe he would be familiar to him...but it was useless. The rest of the
day, he took several walks, looking and letting himself be looked at, looking
for that light that would illuminate his life. But everything stayed black.
He was hungry and entered a dirty
restaurant, where an old man hurt everybody’s ears with something that once had
been an accordion.
"Does anybody speak my
language?"
A boy with brown hair who was sat
in a corner with his head in a book turned.
"Jack! Jack Dawson! Mon
Dieu! Jack Dawson!"
He stood up as if a bomb had just
exploded at his feet and hugged Jack so tightly that he lifted him two hand
spans from the ground.
"My dear friend! What are
you doing here? This is amazing!"
Jack didn’t know what to say.
Emotion had left him deaf, mute, and almost blind. He felt he was losing the
world’s sight, and asked the boy to let him sit in a chair.
"You know me? You...you know
who I am?"
"But...of course, Jack! What
are you saying? I’m Pierre! Crazy Pierre! Don’t tell me you don’t remember
me…"
But Jack’s lost look was the only
answer he got. Pierre couldn’t understand anything, but he asked the waiter for
two glasses of wine and sat quietly in front of his friend. Something strange
was going on, and he had all night to discover what was it. Jack drank the wine
in one single gulp and then cleared his throat.
"I don’t know where to
begin..."
Bit by bit, words started coming
out of his mouth. Pierre didn’t stop looking at him, surprised that he was
listening to Jack’s story. When he told him that he was there because of a
drawing, he laughed.
"I’m sure you sell it to
earn some money! How do you think you lived, my friend?"
Pierre told him what he knew about
him. That his name was Jack Dawson, that he was an American, and that he had
arrived in Paris with dreams of becoming famous, but things weren’t as he had
thought, and that he had decided to go back home.
"Knowing you, I’m sure you
won your Titanic passage in a card game."
They both laughed hard.
Jack stayed without any
remembrance, but he felt that Pierre really appreciated him, and that between
them there was some kind of really good connection. They spent the night
talking, first in the restaurant, and then in Pierre’s attic. His friend
offered to let him stay there like old times, and Jack accepted gladly. Anyway,
according to Pierre, he had nowhere to go.
Near dawn, the two friends fell
into their beds. But Jack couldn’t sleep. His brain was functioning like a
locomotive, repeating in his mind everything that Pierre had said. At least now
he knew where he came from, but in his heart...he still felt a weird empty
sensation.
"Pierre...Pierre, tell me—was
I in love with somebody?"
"You? Oh! Yeah! Of course,
with three or four hundred mademoiselles, but I think that if you saw them, you
wouldn’t remember their faces."
"No, seriously. I mean
really loving someone."
"Well...I don’t know of any
woman who could have stolen your coeur yet, my friend."
Jack turned around and looked at
the picture of the smoking woman. No, he hadn’t been in love with her when he
had drawn her. But he had the strange sensation that he had been deeply in love
with one of his models. Was that really true, or was that just his imagination?
Jack sighed. Surely he would never know about it.
*****
His first weeks in Paris were
madness. In spite of the war, Montmartre kept being the refuge that it had
always been, with its strange characters, its strange restaurants, and its
strange rhythm of life. There, life started when the sun set. Jack and Pierre
slept during the day, and during the night, they would stay out or work
frenetically in the attic.
Pierre wanted to be a writer, and
even though people told him that his writings were too shameless to be
published, he kept filling pages and pages with his revolutionary ideas about
love, sex, and death, his favorite subjects.
Jack discovered that he had a
natural talent for painting, especially of portraits, and for drawing people,
seeing what was inside of them—passion, loneliness, sorrow, kindness, evil...
His folder began filling with
portraits quickly, as the attic began being filled with women. Aspiring
actresses, waitresses, prostitutes, poetesses, vagabonds...one time he had a nurse!
Some of them were really beautiful, but Jack didn’t feel anything looking at
them. Watching their naked bodies was just a part of his job, nothing else. His
blue eyes drew every corner of their bodies with the precision of a surgeon. It
was like his heart and his feelings were somewhere else, far away from there,
lost in the emptiness of his head. He wasn’t able to fall in love with anyone,
and at the same time, he felt a love bigger than the ocean floating in the sea
of his memory. A cage without a lock, with nowhere to go, with no owner.