Artist

His conversation started belligerent and ended meek. He was uncomfortable at first to have seen me but after a while he settled again in his chair and eventually drew the conversation back to himself until it seemed at moments that I wasn't there.

"I think he's dead, but its not obvious."

'He' is the old man who lived below him and has since left. No-one told him, he insisted, as if this were his right.

"He was very fat."

He holds up the sleeve of a shirt that is a little too large for him.

"It's nice, no?"

When I'd met him before, he hadn't looked so old, or at least these malignancies in him had remained latent. Since, however, they have been teased up by his failures, forced out of him as beneath some great weight, like worms smoked out of wood, so that he isn't even aware of them as malignancies anymore. The old arrogance is gone. Instead, in the places where it should have been, there, now, his eyes dart away, as if apologizing for its absence.

I hadn't seen him for five years and then I'd met him only a few times with friends who have since left. At our first meeting, he had sat in the café with his arms stretched across the back of the chairs, his head cocked, his nose raised with the sort of haughty vanity of a groomed poodle. He dresses now as he did then. A Dandy, in a corduroy jacket, dress-shirt, wide slacks and rounded leather shoes, loosely fitted.

It was a contrived eccentricity, of course, but he has since molded himself to it so that one feels, in tearing a sleeve, for example, one might draw blood. He doesn't smoke. He drinks only certain wines. He still haunts, incredibly, the same cafés in Montparnasse. It was among these that we last met and it was then, too, that he'd taken me to his apartment to see his work. I'd immediately regretted going.

He'd raised his nose to me again the whole time and scoffed, as he pulled out drawing after drawing, as if to say "I do not need your approval".

Yet even then I could feel the solicitous upswing of his eyes, seeking the approval he evinced to care nothing about while I, as conscious of his regard as my own, I tried to not show my disbelief at how bad I found his work to be.

"You of course might find it strange - "

Anger seizes him and is quickly gulped down again. It shakes him , and he pauses.

"But if you think," tapping two fingers on his forehead, trying to smile, "there is nothing strange about it. What does one mean by "strange', really?"

In the past, he would have waited for a reply. In the past, too, I might have answered.

Montparnasse is emptied of Parisians in August and tourists take their places among the cafés on the Boulevard. And I suppose if one came here and saw him sitting, as he does, by himself, upright before his drink, encased and removed as if within some glass cage; regal, even, still handsome, an apparently ragged pride to him ­ then one would think him an artist of some sort.

Whether he still believes that himself, I don't know; he doesn't talk about it. Nor, for different reasons, does he talk about the girlfriend who'd followed him here and whose affairs I had seen so lovingly mixed with his own. It is only by chance that I find she's left him. He's stoical about it but this, no doubt, has contributed to the somewhat lordly isolation he has penetrated. He drinks his wine slowly, in neat measured sips. He keeps his chin up. Beneath the August heat, he doesn't take his jacket off and seems even not to sweat. Above all, he has become, by a gross irony of which he perhaps is no longer aware, a diminutive of what he had sought before to caricature: the irony in his Dandyism has disappeared, whittled away by the years and his constant defeats; that very irony has retreated into rather meek, distracted airs and left him like a soldier bearing the uniform of war everyone else has forgotten about.

"It is strange, is it not?"

That his neighbour should leave the jackets there and not that he should steal in about the darkened room and try them on. Upon a mildewed floor, in an airless dark, trying on jackets much too large for him, even, or so it is imagined, laying on the stripped mattress and drifting sleepwards in the clothes of a man now dead.

He lives so deeply within in himself, has painted the world with such large strokes of his inner reality that the boundaries between the two have become skewed and the telling of the story, more than the actual story itself, is the surest sign of this.

"Yes, it is strange."

Yet, despite all, there is something noble to him that had not been there before. It's as if he has somehow achieved with his life what he could not do on canvas. The world bends to his inner logic, and he makes fewer and fewer concessions. Had I not hailed him, he would have let me pass by. Then he would have sat motionless before the passing tourists, almost regal to their eyes. He would not have had to answer, he would not have had to talk, he would not have been, as it were, startled up from himself.

Later, he would have got up and left the exact coinage, with a few centimes he wanted to get rid of. He would have brushed his jacket, looked around, would have, without disturbance, taken in the dust-blown trees, the heat-quivering air and walked home down the empty boulevard, unbothered and unspent. My appearance would not have disturbed him, and at one point, finally, oblivious even to the track upon which his feet led him, he would have disappeared from view, unharried, poised and erect, and hardly aware anymore of that sky which stood waiting, at the boulevard's end, to swallow him whole.