The troublemaker

Pentecost

The meeting had taken place almost seven years earlier. Charles had just spent an afternoon, declared to his boss as a meeting at a client's, but in fact spent in a hotel with a married woman. After all, it was Whit Monday, he told himself. Civil servants and many others were not working. Passers-by on the streets of Paris spoke only Cantonese, Russian, American and Japanese. Why should he be the only one to put on a suit and go to the office? What's more, global warming was beginning to make itself felt, and in early June, a late-July heat was suffocating the city. An IPCC scientist had announced on the radio this morning that the worst was yet to come and that, in a few years' time, we'd be missing the "coolness" of a day like this. If he had returned to his tower in La Défense, he would have imitated his colleagues. With their ties undone and their shoes off, they used these half-working days to file the backlog of files that would never be processed into the digital basket.

After three hours of body-to-body combat, in an air-conditioned room with closed shutters, Charles stood for a moment in a daze as he left the building, in the street flooded with heat, light and the sound of horns. He froze on the sidewalk to recover his senses. He gradually became aware of the time and the mediocrity of the afternoon he'd just lost. He didn't want to go back down to the metro or stay in this shadowless street. He looked around for a tearoom or an ice-cream shop. Rue de Clichy at this height was home to nothing but fripiers and gloomy bars. He decided to follow the downward slope of the artery. He was looking for a perpendicular alleyway to escape the sound of a jigsaw on a building site and the buses clattering past. He entered Rue de la Trinité and immediately came upon the church of the same name. He thought of how cool and quiet it must be. There was an entrance off to the side. He strode towards it and, after a short flight of steps, found the shady peace he longed for behind the two heavy doors.

With one hand in his pocket, he moved nonchalantly towards the right side aisle. He passed two large statues of winged female angels in stucco niches. One carried a branch, the other a jug. He was so thirsty that he regretted that nothing flowed from the jug. At the foot of the angel, however, a basin held water. He tapped his temples and the back of his neck, not realizing it was holy water. The succession of chapels dedicated to the saints opened with an archway covered with the names of the valiant men of 14-18. He gazed distractedly at the stained-glass windows and colorful paintings. All these martyrs swooning in theatrical postures were as indecipherable to him as Chinese ideograms. To his left, the hundreds of chairs in the nave were occupied only by a sleeping homeless man and a wrinkled African woman mumbling tensely over her rosary. He watched her as she headed for the exit. She waddled from one leg to the other like all women broken by a life of washing for others. She greeted a hunchbacked old lady, dressed in turquoise, who was watering flowers in front of the cubic Plexiglas confessional. He climbed the stairs to the semicircular ambulatory behind the heart. In this dark corridor, he was beginning to taste the calm and freshness he had come for. He paused to consult the flyers advertising a pilgrimage to Ars and the "braderie solidaire" organized by the parish. He realized that this exotic microcosm was amusing him. But he resumed his stroll before he had read everything. He stumbled into the chapel of the Virgin Mary at the end of the building. The shock of light displeased him. The opaque balls of the great chandelier and the gaudy stained-glass windows failed to soften the decor. The shaft of light blurred the life-size Marian statue, sitting majestically in the center with her four-year-old son asleep on her lap. Yet he had the impression that she was staring back at him with her marble eyes, and he strode back towards the chapels on the left side aisle to make his way to the exit.

At the bottom of the stairs, he heard something like a sniff. His eyes scanned the space to his right: "St. Joseph's chapel" was the sign. The large paintings and statue depicted the bearded father gazing down on his adopted son. The chapel seemed empty of any living thing. Nevertheless, he entered to examine the corner hidden by a pillar. He stepped back as he caught sight of a white human form. Looking to the side, as if to protect himself from danger, he reassured himself that he had identified a recumbent corpse lying there awaiting restoration. He rubbed his eyes and took another step forward to check. He froze. Two naked little girls were sitting on a prie-Dieu, crying. They raised their heads and stared at him with four large, misty black eyes.