…
when suddenly
in front of her, Eugene appears.
Thirty times bigger than he was before,
a backlit ghost surging up from a crack in the floor.
Tatiana cannot speak.
Eugene seems to hesitate, just for a moment, and
then,
he tells her …
*
but perhaps it is not yet time
for us to know
what he tells her.
After all, Eugene, ten years later,
can hardly recall what he said,
and it wouldn’t be right to remind him here and now.
That would be too easy, all in all.
And anyway, all of this is connected
to another tragic incident,
which also weighs in the balance,
and which I will tell you about at a more strategic moment.
So, on that cliffhanger,
let’s fast-forward in time
to ten years later.
We’d left Tatiana in the library, Eugene on his way
to his grandfather’s grave, each of them
slightly disorientated, a little tense,
still in suspense
after seeing each other again;
but, for now, of those two tensions,
it’s Eugene’s that requires our attention.
3
The first thing Eugene did when he arrived at the cemetery
was to look for his mother,
his father, his sisters, his grandmother,
so he could avoid them at all costs.
At that moment, his one overriding desire,
before going to pay his tributes to the deceased,
was to search for Tatiana –
or google her, at least.
Why had he never thought to do this before?
All those wasted years!
He could have googled her a million times or more
from the comfort of his own home.
He could have set daily alerts!
Then he’d have been prepared,
instead of standing here, fingers shaking,
brain ready to burst,
begging the sky for urgent information
and cursing the crapness of the 4G reception
in the cemetery.
He’d already spotted his family, all in black –
umbrella uncles, cockroach cousins,
and the old man in the coffin –
but the page was taking an eternity to load; all he saw
was one line at the top: ‘219,000 results’.
He seriously doubted
that he could read through 219,000 results
before his absence at the funeral was spotted.
Hiding out one aisle over from the hole
that awaited his dead kin,
behind a tawdry gypsum gravestone
engraved with Tremblay
(a name that matched the state that he was in),
Eugene shook his phone, an electronic superstition,
a little like his grandfather,
in the early days of television,
would wiggle the aerial to catch the waves better.
Different devices. Same anger
that they just don’t seem to understand our desires
instinctively.
Still the page didn’t load. Stupid bloody technology.
He tried to find a network manually.
‘Is Eugene still not here?’ asked his sister Evelyne.
‘I’ll call him,’ replied his sister Marguerite.
Vibrations.
A little green cartoon phone –
the idiotic icon of a telephone invented by those
condescending cretins at Apple –
appeared on his screen,
blocking Tatiana’s 219,000 public secrets.
Duty-bound, he answered:
‘Hello?’ ‘Hello, Eugene?
Where are you?’ ‘Just arrived.’
And he emerged from behind the Tremblay tomb,
to the surprise of his relatives,
who had not come
to play hide-and-seek among the graves.
He dispensed dry hellos and curt cold kisses,
cursing inwardly, furious at the idea
that his screen was now slowly percolating
tidbits about Tatiana that only his pocket could see.
The ceremony began.
The priest, as if drawn by a child
(black triangle, white square),
recited a litany of mild
praise, and then
it was Eugene’s turn.
His speech was saved on his phone, of course.
He took it out – quick squint –
and there it was, a glimpse
of the first page of results: the name of the website,
keywords in bold – ‘Tatiana’, ‘Reinal’ – and each
description,
three lines long
cut suddenly
short.
sorbonne.fr With a bachelor’s degree
and a Master in History of Art, Tatiana Reinal
has since 2012 been composing her PhD thesis
under the supervision of Professor Leprince. Her
analysis is centred on … <Click to open>
caillebotteonline.fr … must hope that
the upsurge of interest in Gustave Caillebotte
over the past thirty years is indicative of an
enduring revival.’ Text by Tatiana Reinal. Share
<Click to open>
inlovewithlabelleepoque.fr … contact
Tatiana Reinal (vice-president) for details
concerning themed walks in Paris … <Click to
open>
international-society-for-art-
history.com … cannot sever the economics of
impressionism from its aesthetics, as Tatiana
Reinal underlines … <Click to open>
marmiton.fr tatiana_reinal Thank you
for this recipe. I replaced cognac with grand
marnier and it worked very well. Even better
warmed up … <Click to open>
‘He’s speechless with emotion,’
whispered his sister Evelyne,
and Eugene had the alarming realisation
that everyone was waiting for him to speak,
while all he wanted to know
was what recipe Tatiana had liked.
Frustrated and panicking, he hid the window
showing the results, and looked for his notes.
Finding them, he stammered out
a speech that lacked
his usual eloquence,
which everyone interpreted as evidence
of his deep sincerity.
As soon as the speech was over,
between the tearful thank yous of family friends
and two kisses from his mother in a cloud of perfume,
he restarted Chrome,
and his phone
went black.
The battery was dead.
For a moment, he thought about
throwing himself headlong into the hole
intended for his grandfather,
and then his mind filled with other thoughts
and he saw
the cemetery speeding around him,
quicker and quicker:
and what if she was googling him too?
searching for him on Facebook and Twitter?
Eugene’s results were not great, he knew:
• His professional page on the website of the
consultancy firm where he was Chief Business
Adviser for France / Eastern Europe / Russia.
• His LinkedIn page listing a Modern Languages degree
+ a masters from a mediocre college in America.
• A page of client recommendations: The Slavs can
be
crafty: if you have any business dealings or
negotiations with them, Eugene will help you.
And somewhere in the depths of cyberspace,
an Excel document listing the results for a go-kart race
in La Rochelle, in which he finished seventh.
The Google results of a Nowhere Man,
someone whose very soul was grey,
someone so deeply nothing that between
seventeen and twenty-seven,
all that was listed
was the simple fact that he had carried on breathing,
kept on existing,
that he’d aged a bit,
that he’d let the current of life carry him towards the sea
of further education, a job, a small apartment:
middle-class Parisian mediocrity.
The Eugene who’d hatched from the Eugene of before,
brutally exposed by the Internet,
would not impress Tatiana one bit,
only make her
yawn endlessly, perhaps even rejoice
at the choice
that he himself – oh God! –
had made to reject her.
A bullet dodged is what she’d say
to herself, thanking her lucky stars that he
dismissed her so unceremoniously.
She’d say to herself: you might have wasted
ten years of your life with a man who did nothing better
than become a Chief Business Adviser.
Yes. But then
again,
maybe, if he …
I mean, if things hadn’t gone that way,
he might be a very different man today.
He might have lived a truly exciting life
with her, crossing oceans and continents,
reading Kerouac and Kundera in tacky motels,
eating chicken feet in China, dancing all night,
trekking through the Amazonian rainforest …
Jesus Christ! How boring his life was in reality!
She was bound to see how dull he was, this Eugene, the
very worst
of him starkly revealed by Google.
And the worst of it was: it was all completely factual.
‘He looks devastated,’ observed his sister Agnes.
‘Just completely devastated by Grandad’s death.’
Eugene, however, was wrong to fret;
Tatiana had googled him half a dozen times
over the past ten years, I’ll bet;
in idle moments, increasingly rare,
while distracted by daydreams,
or just feeling bored,
she’d let her fingertips stroll across the keyboard
and pick out the letters of his name, each little square
making her feel
like a pianist playing an almost forgotten song,
a sort of wonder at finding it again,
that name that she had so often sighed,
dissected and reassembled in her head,
that name that, like any teenage girl,
she had scrawled all over the pages of her journal,
engraved into her plastic protractor.
And even at eighteen, even after,
into her twenties, each time Tatiana typed out the letters
E – U – G – E – N – E,
her mind was filled
with the same music as previously,
and her fingertips tripped
over each thrilling letter:
three tender, trilling Es,
pushing apart
the three detonations at the heart
of Eugene’s name:
the G, the U, the N.
And as for the results she found
when she googled him,
she didn’t mind; it was the melody of you-jean
that made her heart pound.
That evening, when Eugene was at last alone,
he went through the list of results – not all
219,000, of course, only the first page or two,
the others being red herrings
(including a large number of specialists in porn,
who chose Tatiana as their nom d’amour
and wore very dangly earrings).
And he sorted through the pieces
of the Tatiana puzzle, which included:
• A scholarly core, filled with dazzling successes.
A baccalauréat at seventeen; finished first in her Literature
class; won a prize in Philosophy; several articles published;
made speeches at international conferences …
• A few eclectic pastimes around the edges.
Gave themed walks in Paris for tourists who loved books.
A part-time painter too, with some pretty works: not
especially original, but nicely done. She had her own blog –
not many visitors, and not often updated, but fun – where
she chronicled the films she’d seen, the exhibitions she’d
visited, the books she’d read.
Her latest favourite was HHhH by Laurent Binet.
She described it as ‘daring, inspired and funny’.
(Eugene decided that he hated Laurent Binet.)
• Between the centre and the edges, nothing:
a gaping hole.
Social life? Nothing.
Love life? Nada.
Sex life? Zilch!
Eugene tried to think rationally:
it was pretty normal
not to find online any specific details
of her intimate relations. What was he hoping for?
‘I HAVE NOTHING AGAINST SODOMY, declares
Tatiana Reinal. <Click to open>’?
That was not a realistic expectation.
But all the same, she might have had a Facebook page,
offering a little bit of information.
Eugene hated Facebook,
and obviously wasn’t on it himself.
But he found it pretty outrageous
that Tatiana wasn’t either. How dare she.
The loves of her life, if she’d had any,
if she had any now,
had left no trace.
Eugene paused on a result: the announcement of a
(the real one, not a porn star),
open to the general public,
the following week (Saturday),
as part of a festival at the Musée d’Orsay,
with the title:
‘The young man at the window: what is he looking at?’
Eugene did not really care about
the object of the young man’s gaze,
but this would be his chance
to see Tatiana again,
without having to call her. He could pretend
to be visiting the museum, just to get some
culture, and then …
Tatiana, hey!
What an amazing coincidence, seeing you today
for the second time in a week,
after ten years of nothing at all!
Play it cool:
since we’re both here, why not go for a bite?
Of food, I mean. I don’t mind if we stay out late,
I’ve got nothing planned tonight.
Which is uncharacteristic, I should point out,
cause normally on Saturday,
I go out with friends.
I have friends, lots of them, but they’re away,
so anyway – what do you think? Fancy a drink?
But
Eugene had to admit
that there was a possibility
she wouldn’t believe his tale of chance,
the idea that he was there by sheer coincidence.
So why not just confess he wanted to see her?
And why ‘confess’, in fact?
Just tell her, with honesty,
intelligence
, tact,
the way she told him once how she felt …
What exactly was it that she had said?
He only had the vaguest recollection,
It was pretty mind-boggling, thinking about it now:
how could Eugene, the undisputed king
of remembering a thousand
useless facts and names and dates,
enabling him to crush his opponents at Trivial Pursuit,
prompting all his friends to say he should be on TV
because he’d be bound to win Mastermind or Jeopardy! …
how could someone with such a brilliant mind
suddenly find
such a hole in his memory?
How was he able to recall
the capital of Nepal, every island in the Pacific Rim,
but not that crucial thing:
the words of a young girl who loved him?
He remembered that the letter had been
beautiful;
that went without saying,
since the girl who wrote it had grown up to be
the Tatiana of today.
Of course her words had been deep and true
If only he’d known what to do
with them. If only he’d kept a copy of that letter …
he could use it for inspiration now
or, even better,
make subtle reference to the things she had felt for him,
as a way of expressing what he felt for her.
Frantically he searched through his inbox:
did he still have it, the email that she’d sent? No.
He’d changed his account to gmail after that.
Tatiana’s words were not the only things he’d forgotten.
That summer didn’t linger.
The place where the garden ought to be
was a desert
in his memory.
Almost nothing remained,
not the good things, nor the bad,
not her love, nor their pain.
He couldn’t even find a single message from Lensky,
not one confirmation that they’d ever been friends.
Even the few photos of the two of them he used to keep
were lost when his hard drive died.
This was before Dropbox.
2006: a lost world,
trapped on the other side
of a technological divide.
He knew there was no point googling Lensky,
of course.
The results would not have changed in the past decade:
a small piece in Le Figaro,
with a few biographical details
and a photograph of Lensky smiling,
the caption reading:
his name, open brackets, date of birth
then a dash
and another date, seventeen and a half