Where Would I Be

Without You?
Guillaume Musso

Translated by Anna Brown

and Anna Aitken

Gallic Books
London
Where Would I Be
Without You?
Guillaume Musso

Translated by Anna Brown

and Anna Aitken

Gallic Books
London
 1

THAT SUMMER

Our first love is always our last

Tahar Ben Jelloun

San Francisco, summer 1995

Gabrielle, a twenty-year-old American student

That summer she was in her third year at Berkeley and often wore faded
jeans, a white shirt and a leather jacket. With her long straight hair and
her green eyes flecked with gold she looked like Françoise Hardy in the
photos taken by Jean-Marie Périer in the sixties.
That summer she divided her time between the campus
library and the fire station on California Street where she
volunteered as a firefighter.
That summer she had her first serious love affair.

Martin, a twenty-one-year-old Frenchman

That summer he had just completed his law degree at the Sorbonne, he
was in the States to improve his English and explore the continent. As he
didn’t have a penny tohis name he took odd jobs, working more than
seventyhours a week as a waiter, ice-cream seller and gardener.
That summer, with his shoulder-length dark hair, he looked like the
young Al Pacino.
That summer, he had his last serious love affair.

The next day, San Francisco International Airport

9 a.m.
It was raining.
Still half asleep, Martin stifled a yawn and gripped the bus’s handrail as
it lurched round a bend on its wornout suspension. He’d flung a moleskin
coat over his shoulders, and wore ripped jeans, battered trainers and a
T-shirt with the image of a rock band on the front.
That summer, all the kids were crazy about Kurt Cobain. His head was
full of memories of his two months in the US. He’d seen so much and felt
so much. California had taken him so far away from Évry and the
Parisian suburbs. At the start of the summer, he’d envisaged doing the
exams to become a police officer, but the trip to the USA, a rite-of-
passage journey, had changed all that. The kid from the estates had
gained in self-confidence, in the country where life was just as tough as
anywhere else, but where people still had the hope and ambition to fulfil
their dreams.
 And his own dream was to write stories – stories that would reach out
to people, stories about ordinary people to whom extraordinary things
happened. Reality wasn’t enough for him, and fiction had always been a
part of his life. Since he was a child, his favourite heroes had so often
drawn him out of his misery, comforted him in his disappointments and
his sorrows. They’d fed his imagination, honed his emotions so that he
could see life through a prism that made it tolerable.
The shuttle from Powell Street dropped its passengers off in front of
the international terminal. In the scramble, Martin got his guitar caught in
the baggage rack. Weighed down like a mule, he was the last to get off
the bus. He rummaged through his pocket for his ticket, and distractedly
tried to work out which way to go through the urban maze.
He didn’t see her straight away.
She had double-parked her car. The engine was still
running.
Gabrielle.
She was drenched from the rain. She was cold. She was shivering a
little.
They spotted each other at the same moment. They ran towards each
other.
They hugged, their hearts hammering. The way you do the first time,
when you still believe in it.
Then she smiled and teased him. ‘So, Martin Beaumont, do you really
think that the kisses you never get are the most intense?’
They kissed.
Their mouths sought each other, their breathing merged, their wet hair
became entangled. He had his hand on the nape of her neck, she had
her hand on his cheek. In the urgency of it all, they exchanged clumsy
words of love.
She said, ‘Stay a bit longer!’
Stay a bit longer!
He didn’t realise it, but that was to be the most precious moment of his
life. There would be nothing purer, more radiant or more intense than
Gabrielle’s green eyes shining in the rain on that summer’s morning.
And her voice imploring him: Stay a bit longer!

One month later.

September 9th
Parisian Suburbs
Martin left the tiny bedroom that he had in his grandparents’ council flat.
Lift wasn’t working. Nine floors on foot. Letterboxes torn out,
arguments in the stairways. Nothing had changed.
For half an hour, he looked for a telephone box that hadn’t been
vandalised. He slid his fifty-unit card into the slot, and dialled a
transatlantic number.

Some seven thousand miles away, it was twelve thirty in the afternoon in
San Francisco. The telephone in the Berkeley campus cafeteria started
to ring …

*
49, 48, 47 …
His stomach in knots, he closed his eyes and simply said, ‘It’s me,
Gabrielle. I’m phoning as arranged.’
Initially, she laughed because she was so surprised and because she
was happy, then she burst into tears because it was too tough not to be
together any more.
… 38, 37, 36 …
He told her that he was missing her so much, that he adored her, that
he didn’t know how to live without her …
… She told him how much she wished she were there with him, to be
near him, to sleep with him, to kiss him, to caress him, to bite him, to kill
him with love.
… 25, 24, 23 …
He listened to her voice and everything came back to him: the texture
of her skin, the smell of the sand, the wind in her hair, her ‘lots of love’ …
… his ‘lots of love’, his hand clasped round the back of her neck, his
eyes searching for hers, the violence and the tenderness of their
embraces.
… 20, 19, 18 …
He stared in terror at the liquid crystal display on the phone box. It was
torture to see the units on his card tick away so fast.
… 11, 10, 9 …
Then they had nothing more to say, because their voices became
choked.
They just listened to the thudding of their hearts, beating in concert,
and the softness of their breathing which merged, despite the damned
phone.
… 3, 2, 1, 0 …

Back then, nobody yet really knew about the Internet, email, Skype or
instant messaging.
Back then, love letters sent from France took ten days to reach
California.
Back then, when you wrote ‘I love you’, you had to wait three weeks for
the reply.
And having to wait three weeks for an ‘I love you’ back is unbearable
when you’re twenty.

There it is – this is just an everyday story.

It’s the story of a man and a woman who run towards each other.
Everything began with a first kiss, one summer’s morning, under the
San Francisco sky.
Everything nearly ended one Christmas night, in a New York bar and a
Californian clinic.

Then the years went by …