Man Who Was Late Read Online Free Page B

could bring the rest of their stuff to New York when he returned and mail it from there; he should be grateful he was on Porquerolles and did not have to pay Antibes prices.
    I knew you could not be trusted, she added, I was right to be next door. How did you dare to fix it so you would be alone there with those beautiful girls, staring at their breasts! This was not the first time that Rachel had accused Ben of deviate conduct or desires. As he reviewed her words, however, first in rage and then coldly, with great care, he came to think that some of Rachel’s inspiration must have come from the twins: it was possible that this was what they thought. In such case, he would henceforth keep his distance. He was truly alone.
    A S B EN’S EXECUTOR and devisee of all his papers (as well as of his collection of neckties, cuff links, and shirt studs), I retrieved, with the help of Ben’s distraught secretaries, file folders of papers from his offices in New York and Paris and, from warehouses, serially numbered, sealed cartons. Each bore a label with the words “Pandora’s Box” written on it in Ben’s hand. There were also documents and tapes of his dictation in the hotel in Geneva.
    Thus I came into possession of Ben’s pocket notebooks and diaries with notations (often illegible) of the events of the day that lay outside his business life—what he had eatenat each meal and in whose company—dates on which the reading of a book was commenced or finished, streets down which he had walked in foreign cities, as well as numbers, algebraic symbols, and little drawings to which I never found a key. On certain blank pages of these diaries—but also on sheets of paper clipped together or rolled and held by rubber bands—were lists of women’s names: sometimes the full name was given and sometimes only the first name and an initial in lieu of the surname. Occasionally, one or two letters appeared on a line, without a name. Were these initials? Some names were followed by dates. Having known Ben and at least the New York world he had moved in so very well, I realized that these were records of his more ephemeral “possessions,” and gradually I came to deduce that they had been made in airport departure lounges, on trains, or while Ben pretended to listen to financial presentations. He wrote them to test his memory or to break in a new fountain pen or perhaps for insertion in the curriculum vitae he would present to the arbiter of some ultimate place of repose—much as another man might have cataloged articles he had published in learned journals. The lacunae in certain of the lists and the inconsistencies, which at first I found surprising, I came to relate, in moments of frustration, to what in the past I had sometimes assumed to be Ben’s mythmaking. At other times, I adhered to another, more benign explanation: Could it not be that Ben was capable of forgetting, that his memories became confused, and that, at least once in a while, his attention flagged?
    Much later, when I was brought to reflect bitterly on whatmust have been a signal Ben had tried to give—speaking to me so insistently and mysteriously of a novel by Pierre Jean Jouve—a signal that I had not understood but that could have been a plea for help, I read, as though in contrition, much of that writer’s work and came upon the following passage, which I have translated:
    A notebook is found, containing all these names of women, with and without addresses, a chaos of names: sluts, you say, and “useful addresses.” But that entire notebook, if only because it is so jam-packed, cannot correspond to experience. A man responsible for a great task could not have entered so many women. That entire notebook contains figures which correspond to one Figure only, before which the Poet is a Supplicant. It is a vow of union to the woman who belongs to all, and to all women, and thereby the notebook dissolves into a prayer. All these names adored under the vestment