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her own, with nowhere in particular to go,
and Carla will shut herself in her room as soon as she hears the sound of Marc
Devade’s key sliding into the lock. But for now nothing tragic will happen. Marc
Devade will read an essay by a Bulgarian linguist; Guyotat will go to see a film
by Jacques Rivette; Julia Kristeva will stay up late reading; Philippe Sollers
will stay up late writing, and he and his wife will barely exchange a few words,
shut away in their respective studies; Jacques Henric will sit down at his
typewriter but nothing will occur to him, so after twenty minutes he’ll put on
his leather jacket and his boots and go down to the underground parking garage
and look for his Honda in the dark; for some reason the lights in the parking
lot don’t seem to be working, but Henric can remember where he left his bike, so
he walks in the dark, in the belly of that whale-like parking lot, without fear
or apprehension of any kind, until about halfway there he hears an unusual noise
(not a knocking in the pipes or the noise of a car door opening or closing) and
he stops, without really understanding why, and listens, but the noise is not
repeated, and now the silence is absolute.
    And then the night ends (or a small part of the night, at least,
a manageable part) and light wraps the photo like a bandage on fire, and there
he is again, Pierre Guyotat, almost a familiar presence now, with his powerful,
shiny bald head and his leather jacket, the jacket of an anarchist or a
commissar from the Spanish Civil War, and his sidelong gaze, veering off to the
right, as if into the space behind the photographer, as if directed at someone
near or at the bar, perhaps, standing or sitting on a stool, someone whose back
is turned to Guyotat and whose face would be invisible to him unless, and this
is not unlikely, there is a mirror behind the bar. It may be a woman. A young
woman, maybe. Guyotat looks at her reflection in the mirror and looks at the
back of her neck. Guyotat’s gaze, however, is far less intense than the gaze of
this woman, which is plumbing an abyss. Here we can reasonably conclude that,
while Guyotat is looking at a stranger, Marie-Thérèse and Carla are looking at a
man they know, although, as is usually (or, in fact, inevitably) the case, their
perceptions of him are entirely different.
    Let’s call these two beyond the frame X and Z. X is the woman at the
bar. Z is the man who is known to Marie-Thérèse and Carla. They don’t know him
very well, of course. From Carla’s gaze (which is not only gentle but
protective) it could be inferred that he is young, although from Marie-Thérèse’s
gaze it could also be inferred that he is a potentially dangerous individual.
Who else knows Z? No one, or at least there is nothing to suggest that his
presence is of any concern to the others. Maybe he’s a young writer who at some
stage has tried to get his work published in
Tel Quel
; maybe he’s a
young journalist from South America — no, from Central America — who at some
point tried to write an article about the group. He may well be an ambitious
young man. If he’s a Central American in Paris, as well as ambitious, he may
well be bitter. Of the people sitting around the table, he knows only
Marie-Thérèse, Carla, Sollers and Marc Devade. Let’s say he once visited the
Tel Quel
office and was introduced to those four (he also once
shook hands with Marcelin Pleynet, but Pleynet’s not in the photo). He has never
seen the others in his life, or only (in the cases of Guyotat and Jacques
Henric) in author photos. So we can imagine the young Central American, hungry
and bitter, in the
Tel Quel
office, and we can imagine Philippe Sollers
and Marc Devade, wavering between puzzlement and indifference as they listen to
him, and we can even imagine that Carla Devade is there by pure chance; she has
come to meet her husband, she has brought some papers that Marc left behind on
his desk, she’s there because she