Frames

by Justine Poustchi   

As Yves, a floor scraper at 68 rue de Passy, peeled the floor into fine ribbons, he listened to the postman deliver the mail along the street. His movements glided across the floor, synchronizing with the clink of mail being dropped into the bright blue boxes marked lettres. The floor scraper began on his knees. His body would unfold from the fetal position; his hands cradled a metal pick that removed the top layer of the floor. He pulled back like a cat. His muscles remembered the shape—the way his arms extended slimly beyond his head, the way his back curved softly like the side of an egg, the way his feet tucked into his chest. He fell asleep in this position each night, his body cradled by only the smooth floor of his tiny windowless apartment in northeastern Paris. Each morning as he awoke, his limbs were offered temporary relief as he walked to the house of Isabelle Benoit in the 16th arrondissement. It was here, never at home, where the floor scraper awaited the arrival of the mail.

As Yves prepared for work, he witnessed Mlle Benoit walk around her house caught in that moment between sleep and wakefulness. And though Yves was confined to the salon of the fifth floor, the central spiraling staircase offered chasmic views of below. Isabelle’s face was already caked with white powder reminiscent of a Fragonard painting, the frills of her fluorescent blue sleeping gown dancing along the floor no matter how simply she moved. The floor scraper only ever saw her feet in passing. He learned to recognize them immediately as they walked along the floors he tended to. They too had their own particular sound—klumch—as the rose pink heels flung themselves across the hardwood. When she would trip and fall, it was then that the floor scraper learned her soft round face, her blushing cheeks, and the rouge painted on top of her lips, for his eyes rarely left the space between baseboard and the floor. She was jolted awake by the arrival of the mail each morning, the clink alerting both Yves and Isabelle.

Théo Roulin, the postman, delivered the mail with a sense of urgency. His deep blue uniform pulled his body together. In the evenings, he sat in a café sipping a pastis still in his uniform, the double-breasted jacket’s gold buttons pressing into his body. He wore a quiet expression—his small beady eyes gesturing only to the bartender and his wife, his nose resting above a soft golden beard that completed the square of his face. Each morning as he received the mail, he admired the letters addressed to Mademoiselle Isabelle Benoit. The paper was thicker. The handwriting slanted to the left, as if it were about to run off the side of the envelope. The emerald green stamp was always a faded portrait of Louis XV even though the year was 1887. When the postman began his daily route, he navigated the labyrinth of pale white houses whose balconies spewed curves and lines into the open air. Théo kept one hand clasped around the letters for Mlle Benoit, and when it rained (as it often did in Paris) the water would seep through his bag, the ink would smudge and he would be left with an impression of Isabelle Benoit or the court of Louis XV on his hand. Sometimes it was both.

Yves had never seen the postman, but he knew the shade of blue that passed through the space beyond the window, which flooded the room with light. When the mail arrived, Isabelle descended the stairs swiftly. Her return was careful, calculated—a stilted attempt at grace. Her gown flowed energetically from her waist even if her movements were small. Her hands, painted with the same white powder as her face, clutched the envelopes carelessly. She only ever read the return address, tossing the unworthy over her shoulder. A fine trail was left along the long narrow corridor of the fifth floor. Occasionally, letters tumbled into the salon where Yves worked. He collected them, placing them in large empty pockets of his dirty blue pants.

The floors in the salon of the fifth floor were a deep burnt gold. Yves claimed he could make them new again using the oldest of techniques. The moment he learned to crawl, Yves had moved alongside his father as he scraped the floors. Even at the age of seven, his small boyish frame would slide across the slabs of wood. He never grew out of the boyish frame—it seemed that none of the other floor scrapers did. Like the two other men he worked with, Yves had long thin arms that his muscles desperately clung to; his torso was narrow and concave.

In the candlelight of his apartment, Yves would peel the stamps off the envelopes. His walls were windowless, bare save the stamps that coated the walls. Each night, as he fell asleep, the floor scraper stared into the eyes of the former Kings of France that gleamed red or white or blue.

In the morning, after Isabelle Benoit had eaten her breakfast, she would dress lavishly, parading slowly through her bare house. There were seventeen rooms, each one with a single monochromatic piece of furniture. The walls were a muted beige. As she moved from the first floor to the fifth, she felt as if she were painting the rooms. Her eyes, outlined in black, watched as the walls absorbed the colours of her robes. They shifted from purple to yellow to blue to beige. It was patchy. The colours ran. There was a pool of paint at her feet. She pressed her body into the walls into the bare walls —she was the only source of life, of colour. And she walked from room to room, from floor to floor, descending and ascending the staircase—the colour chased her. Passing by the salon on the top floor where the floor scrapers worked, she would surreptitiously glance over her shoulder, hoping to admire the male nude, for the men did not wear shirts. She averted her gaze quickly, never entering the room—she preferred to study and sleep alongside the Greco-Roman statues at the Musée du Louvre. Leaving disappointed, she failed to notice the way the sculptures moved across the salon of her own house, concealing their faces, avoiding her gaze.

* * *

As Théo Roulin delivered the mail, his hat, marked poste, lay precariously on the tip of his head. When he passed by the park he liked to rustle his beard against the trees. In the evenings, he sat at a long rectangular table in a hidden corner in a café. His carrier bag was nestled on his lap, and he drank his sixth glass of pastis. The postman’s wife, Marianne, sat to his right, nestled in the corner sipping her second glass of Crème de Cassis. The café was lined with mirrors, and as the waiter delivered Théo’s seventh verre de pastis, he would lean into his wife and kiss her purposefully. The mirrors reflected and sliced the look of anticipation in the lovers’ eyes. When he finished his glass, they went home and clumsily made love; his hat marked poste still resting on the tip of his head.

That same evening the floor scraper fell asleep pushed against the voluptuous moulding forced into the walls. Before he succumbed to slumber, Yves had swept the room and then uncovered the small hands of a pocket watch. Out of his deep pockets, the floor scraper, who could not read, pulled out the letters that Mlle Benoit had rejected. Using the minute hand of the pocket watch, he began to trace to words slowly: Galerie... Nationale...Jeu...de...Paume...He wondered what the words meant and what lay behind them. He traced another. L’impressionisme. Slowly, learning to read the words discarded by the bourgeois, the floor scraper fell asleep.

As Yves awoke the next morning, the flood of sunlight through the window alarmed. He began to prepare for the day’s work, and when the two extra workers arrived, they positioned themselves on opposite sides of the large band of light. Occasionally, the man to Yves’s left would cross over the ray of light diagonally as he cleared the shavings from the path of work. But mostly it was Yves who intersected the diagonal, slicing it with a sense of anticipation, the sun beating on his back. His work at the house of Isabelle Benoit was almost over. The other men eager to earn extra money wondered if she might want them to stain the floor. It was almost completely bare.

Yves walked along the corridor towards Mlle Benoit’s study. He kept his eyes directed at the floorboards for that was where he had been trained to look. He knocked on the door three times. The floor scraper heard her say Entrez. He could see her robe pooled around her ankles, her bare feet floating above them. He didn’t dare force his gaze upwards. There was a window to his right and so he stood and stared out of it, onto the courtyard at the full trees the postman would rustle his beard against. The floor scraper asked Isabelle if she would like the floors stained. In that moment, Yves caught a glimpse of marble-swirled floors, whose opulence continued up the walls, and even upon the window frame. She replied, oui. She was eating a bright coloured macaron—he knew this only from the way the bright yellow and orange crumbs fell to her pale golden feet and the smell of almonds. He exited the room.

The workers kept a bottle of red wine in a corner of the salon. As Yves returned he began to work violently, he shifted in all directions: up, down, left, right, slicing the room on a diagonal. In a strange way the contortions formed a waltz and as Mlle Benoit walked past the room fully clothed her gaze was fixed. The heel of his foot hit the bottle and emptied itself all over the bare floor. The floors were now stained in red.

Using his sharp tools, the floor scraper began to cut out words from the letters of Isabelle Benoit—the ones he knew from the page, whose sound matched their form. An hour later, he had reconstructed a letter that read: Je suis désolé. I am sorry. He said he would ask a friend to refinish the floors in his place. He pulled a yellow stamp from his wall, and placed it on the envelope. In the middle of the night, the sky burning blue, the floor scraper mailed his letter of resignation to 68 rue de Passy.

The next morning, Yves returned to work out of respect to Isabelle Benoit. He listened carefully for the clink of the mail in search of libération. It never came. Isabelle continued her morning routine, her face full of white powder, her robe dancing along the floor, until she shouted: UNE GRÈVE! A strike. Théo Roulin would not be delivering the mail this morning, or any other morning in the foreseeable future. Instead he would sit in the cafè drinking pastis. In his verre, he would be transfixed by the swirl of his beard, the dance of the walls, the flush of his face. The floor scraper scarped the floors day and night until the damage had been undone. His letter of resignation never came. He continued to work.

On the morning of November 23rd, there was tapping on the door. To the surprise of Mademoiselle Isabelle Benoit, it was the postman carrying a bag full of all the invitations she had missed, and one pastiched letter of resignation. She did not want to see any of them. She ordered Théo Roulin to carry them up to the roof and as he did so, he passed by the floor scraper, who continued to scrape the floors diligently. As the postman filled the chimney with the letters, Yves began to scrape the faded blue roof. The tin screeched and as soon as the postman was done, he returned to the first floor. Isabelle Benoit stood with a match between her fingers; she played with it as the postman descended the stairs. He stood across from her and across from the fireplace. She lit the match. There was a single flowerpot behind Théo. The match was dropped; fire choked its way to life. The first few seconds it glowed softly, contained by the fireplace. The letters burned, collapsing in on themselves. As more and more envelopes began to fall through the chimney, the flame grew higher. The fire blazed, the flames began to pour into the room where Isabelle and the postman stood. The flames leaped from one room the next. The flower burned into the wall. Then the flames, a mirror reflecting the postman’s face, flickered as Théo attempted to pastiche his face together. He could only make out an impression of himself. The fire moved closer to his body, licking the walls from the first floor to the fifth, but the postman did not move. The blaze swirled around his beard. The flames grew taller, poured out of the windows, burned with the breeze of autumn. And you never would have thought that fire was so transparent, but the postman could see Mademoiselle Isabelle Benoit swinging daintily from the chandelier.

On November 23rd, 1887, an impression of the postman was burned onto the house of Isabelle Benoit and the floor scraper moved back and forth, back and forth pulling the blue tin roof apart.