Black Forest

by Valérie Mréjen

  He paints ectoplasmic bodies, gauzy, granular ghosts floating in tangled masses against black backgrounds. One day in his room, he sits up in bed, leans his head against the wall, and looks out the window facing a small courtyard. His son, worried when he doesn’t respond to a text message suggesting they go out for a picnic, stops by to visit, and finds him in this position.

  HE BROUGHT HIS THREE CHILDREN to a faraway coast for their summer vacation, leaving his new partner, who isn’t a full-fledged member of the family yet, in Paris. His loved ones don’t seem to have been too upset by his change in sexual orientation, and he’s maintained a good rapport with his ex-wife. Since he met the man of his life, both are radiant, joyful, fulfilled. Their friends are convinced they were destined to find each another.

  It’s the end of summer, that last week in August when pictures of crowded beaches begin dissolving into images of leaves falling onto squares and avenues. It’s still a bit early to call: people might not be home yet, some take only a few days off, and those who stay in the city prefer to keep a low profile and make the most of the calm before their first engagements. Still, the news makes its way around their small circle of friends within just a few hours: there, in that country, driving with his children in a rented car through a place he knew a little, but not well enough to navigate the roads with ease, he found himself in the middle of a neighborhood like so many others, with nearly identical high-rise buildings and narrow alleyways, at the hottest hour of the afternoon—there, he must have taken a wrong turn on a one-way street and crashed into a car coming from the opposite direction. His life was extinguished in that fraction of a second, at the moment when a red and white road sign failed to catch his eye.

  Those of us close to his new partner ask ourselves how we can be of help, what words of consolation to offer, what pitiful twig we can add to the dam we’d like to build—in vain, we know—against a tidal wave of grief whose force necessarily escapes us. Probably the best we can do is to send the occasional sign that we’re there for him, and hope that in time his pain will begin to recede, that he will, eventually, find some respite from it.

  THEY’VE JUST MOVED INTO A rental apartment on the corner of a boulevard, right above a bakery, and since it’s on the second floor, part of their living room can be glimpsed through the windows as night falls. Neither one has really let go of their old love, which complicates their already stormy relationship, laden with a certain tension; their evenings are occasionally ruined by fierce arguments, though in the morning everything is always better again. With his slightly rugged appearance and faux bad-boy air, with the deep crease between his eyebrows and his fingers gnarled by manual work, you’d never think he could make such delicate jewelry. You’d never guess that a man like him—in a black leather jacket, on a roaring motorcycle—would have silver ingots and curved pincers in his tail box, or that he’d use them to make chain-linked rings with polished stones in clusters that fall nonchalantly to this side or that, depending on the movement of the hand wearing them. When they’d first met, some months ago, she was still living with her long-time boyfriend, the childhood companion with whom she shared so many memories, their photographs tucked away in shoeboxes that had moved with them several times already. Then, after this childhood friend had sanctioned their breakup by pursuing a new lover of his own, the biker-jeweler had sprinkled a few handfuls of gold powder along the sidewalk in front of their building, as if rolling out a path to her little room, drawing a shining trail in the light of the streetlamps so that she had only to follow, leaving her precious footprints behind in the pulverized metal.

  She’d finally moved in with him, but the loss was fresh and she kept a few of the shoeboxes filled with photos of her former life, photos in which the couple’s still childlike faces could be seen surrounded by friends: there was a black-and-white series of her in the early morning, sitting before an old coffee service and a vase of hyacinths; a windowed ceiling framed against the light; colored photo booth snapshots where he had close-cropped hair and wore a plaid shirt; and yellowed polaroids from their somewhat hippie period, the young lovers in tunics and embroidered slippers picnicking near a fountain in a large Indian city to which they had returned several times; or else in the courtyard of their first building, repairing a bicycle or sanding shelves.

  In this new apartment above the bakery, dinners are held under the pretense that nothing has changed, and by all appearances the couple is on good terms with the ex-partner, who brings with him his new fiancée and their friends from the travel photos.

  At the dawn of the new year, after the whole group has spent the holidays together—not without a few minor clashes caused by a persistent twinge of jealousy—the biker-jeweler rides his motorcycle down a busy boulevard in Paris, angry and probably speeding. In the hospital of the outer suburb where a few loved ones are summoned after the accident, a tall black nurse who feels sorry for these people and wishes he could tell them something different, shakes his head with a look of utter helplessness and repeats I don’t have good news, I don’t have good news. Many years later, for those friends who are still here and whose features have inexorably slackened in the group portraits—even if the digital photos always turn out nicer—the boulevard Magenta remains permanently marked, as other places are for other people, whether a particular city square or terrace, haunted forever by he who is absent because that was the last place where he was alive.

  THE SAME COULD BE SAID of the Pont Henri-IV, where a young actor of North African descent who’d grown up in Aubervilliers collided with a streetlamp: at that intersection where cars approach from the boulevard Saint-Germain while a traffic light stops those coming from the other direction, and where the sidewalk is elevated. Not far from the square where they’d shot a farewell scene in his very first film.

  WE WOULD LEAVE THIS FLOWER-FILLED café and wander the streets of the neighborhood in search of another, but none would really do. I wouldn’t want to take her to some awful spot where the television is on and the bar crowded with regulars, even less to an American chain serving vanilla-flavored lattes with caramel and too much foam and warnings not to burn yourself printed on the paper cups. Truth be told, no place would seem good enough to me; I’d find them all filthy and decrepit, or else pretentious and too new; empty and drab, or raucous and rowdy. In the traditional cafés, the clamor of saucers carelessly piled up and the thump, thump of espresso handles hitting the edge of a drawer would be almost unbearable to her ears, and, in the end, we’d settle on a bench in a public square. The beds of hydrangeas would remind her, curiously, of the tiny garden plot behind the suburban house where we’d lived only a few months, just long enough to renovate it—a garden so narrow and hedged in by concrete slabs that you wondered if its dense, stony earth was really from there, originally, or if it had been brought in bags and packed in layers just thick enough to nourish a few obliging plants. We’d observe the comings and goings: a group of teenagers in tracksuits lounging on the steps as if they were in their own living rooms; one or two mysterious people with seemingly no other afternoon plans than to sit alone for a while in this fairly animated place to put off growing depressed at home; toddlers fascinated by hobbling pigeons and their parents trailing behind, scolding them for trying to chase the birds or touch their feathers. We’d sit in our fenced-in islet and watch the action unfolding around us to the rhythm of the slamming and creaking of battered iron gates that visitors released behind them with a vigor that quickly dwindled into a loose swinging of arms, oblivious to the deafening noise they’d caused.

  THE SEVEN-AND-A-HALF-YEAR-OLD GIRL—AND she’s more than a little proud to have reached the age of reason, even if the meaning of these words remains quite obscure; it has a nice ring to it, like a victory achieved simply through the accumulation of years—the seven-and-a-half-year-old girl nurtures a kind of pure admiration. If you were to ask her do you have a role model, she’d be tempted to tell you and yet a little afraid to speak frankly, since her fa
scination might be cause for ridicule: to her it seems a bit compromising to admire one’s parents so much. The connection is too obvious, the proximity embarrassing; how simple it must seem of her to have chosen as if at random these people whom fate had, in any case, placed among her forebears. She finds her mother almost intimidating, strangely out of reach—maybe it’s because of her black hair, jet black, as she’s often heard it described, the same words that are used in Snow White: the young princess of legendary beauty has black hair, as black as jet or ebony, and these two rare materials which she knows only by name seem equally wonderful to her. Her mother is Snow White, a naïvely charming, innocent girl, banished by an evil queen who is none other than her own aging and jealous stepmother, and who worries—not without reason—that her stepdaughter’s beauty might charm her third husband. And so the queen decides to marry her off without further delay: soon the engagement is announced, then the wedding, and finally, the birth of this little girl who admires her so.

  The child wants so much to be like her mother that one day she decides to imitate her as closely as possible, to follow her everywhere and mimic her gestures in perfect synchrony. She pursues her frantically through the rooms of the apartment, runs after her into the bathroom to copy her morning routine, trails her like a shadow in the hallway, the floorboards groaning horribly despite endless precautions and betraying her presence even on tiptoe; she stays close on her heels, relentless, trying to mirror her every movement with absolute precision, clearly intent on becoming a sort of twin, on achieving as perfect a resemblance as possible. Very quickly, though, she realizes that this little lark only serves to annoy her mother, who scolds her for getting underfoot, for constantly being in the way, and in the end she’s forced to accept the disheartening fact that she’ll never attain the status of clone. All the same, she confesses, in a moment of cheerful forthrightness, that she’d devised this game in the hope of becoming her mother’s double, and yet instead of the reaction she wishes for—involving, if not the revelation of some magical formula to help her achieve this purpose, at least a show of bemused affection—her mother sighs, impatient, and all at once the little girl is disenchanted, the echo of her words left hanging in the air.

  NOW TWELVE YEARS OLD, THE girl makes up her mind one day to never again say anything at all that might elicit a look of disapproval. She mustn’t say the wrong thing or speak out of turn ever again. It’s devastating to hear Snow White correct her each time she misquotes something or misremembers the name of the hero in a novel, and so she resolves to read every single book in the library, under cover of night, so that she can finally reap the reward she’s been dreaming of: a show of confidence, in any form, but if at all possible a litany of praises spoken before a very large audience and recorded for posterity so that she can play it over and over again, basking in the words for years to come. The girl is mortified by the condescending looks that often accompany the correction of an error. It truly is discouraging to not know everything, to not grasp certain references that might have allowed her to join in her mother’s friends’ conversations about the comic strips of their youth or yé-yé music. She wonders how she might secretly research these things or, at the very least, hide her ignorance (crass ignorance is an expression she’s often heard, much like filthy as a pigsty) and it’s only years later that she thinks back and realizes that this wasn’t altogether natural, that sometimes parents teach their children a thing or two rather than always leaving them to grapple with an obsessive fear of misspeaking, of being taken for an idiot, of falling short in the eyes of the more worldly-wise.

  BUT THIS IS ALL SO far in the past now that the girl, just over twenty-three, sometimes wonders if she hadn’t blown things out of proportion, attaching too much meaning to nuances of speech that a less obsessive person might not even have picked up on. She understands now that the mind invests too much in certain memories, willfully fixating on this or that remark until its surplus value accrues enormously, while other phrases, spoken in kinder tones, depreciate and are in time forgotten.

  HE’S A DEVOTED FAN OF Six Feet Under. On this day, like any other, he sits down to watch the latest episode, but the opening credits have barely begun when he starts to feel unwell. Fade to white, shots of wilting lilies, graves marked with American names, a crow’s feet gripping the edge of a headstone: he still has a few seconds to make his way through the two-bedroom apartment and crouch over the toilet bowl to relieve himself of whatever is bloating his stomach, and so he runs into the tiny bathroom, where he feels cramped since he’s recently put on quite a bit of weight—and it hits him like an avalanche. He collapses to the floor, no doubt from a heart attack, and his opulent body blocks the doorway, trapping him inside. Meanwhile, his girlfriend, in total horror, throws herself against the closed door with all her strength, pounding away at the oppressive silence, crying out his name.

  THE CHILD HAS GROWN INTO a teenager, and the rift between the two of them has widened, her mother telling her over and over that her very presence is exasperating, that she sucks up all the air, she poisons everything, and these words are not taken lightly; the girl soon begins to see herself as a sort of thing or blob or shapeless monstrosity, something fleshy and sluggish that never fails to disgust people the moment they lay eyes on her unpleasant figure. Over time, she comes to terms with this version of things and even takes it a little further, elaborating on the idea that she is a blight on the community, picturing herself a social pariah and murmuring cruel words under her breath as if to better stoke this fierce little flame whose warmth she will almost come to appreciate.

  Sitting around the large Formica table with extension flaps, a table bought at the same assemble-it-yourself furniture store as many of the other new fixtures in their home—a chain that has just opened a location on the outskirts of Paris and which people describe with excessive enthusiasm, as if it were a sign of divine providence—sitting around this smooth, white, austere table, facing a giant poster of a paradisiacal landscape bordered by groves of coconut palms, they finally decide to talk things over, to set down the facts and establish a kind of official report. They play lip-service at first, then gradually come out with the truth, each admitting how, for years now, she has seen herself through the other’s eyes: a bad mother who’s done so much harm that it’s impossible to feel any sympathy for her, and a daughter disdained for her countless flaws and right to loathe herself.

  The girl had assumed the role of the burden-arrived-too-soon, of the nuisance that kept the young princess, drawn to the freedom and audacity of the student movement in the late sixties, from thriving, never mind that she’d married before she was twenty-one and had rushed to imitate women of earlier generations, heading—just like all the bourgeois women in her family—toward a destiny that looked very much like that of a housewife. And now, fifteen years later, they decide it’s time to settle their differences, to clear up the old misunderstandings; but in the end, guilt over words spoken in anger rises from one side of the table, while from the other come reassurances that all is forgiven, that there isn’t a drop of resentment left. It’s not worth ruining this moment since there might not be another chance, and anyway, the truth is everything will be different from now on. A drop of salt water glistens on the rim of the teenager’s heavily made-up lower eyelid; she tries to delay its fall for as long as possible, but the moment she blinks it spills over the dam, a spring erupts and quickly begins to flood part of the scene, most of all the things near the Formica tabletop: a placemat of fine wooden slats held together by flexible string, which can be rolled up at the end of a meal; a pair of faded, high-waist jeans worn at the seams; a size-XL jacquard sweater that comes down to her knees to hide just how ill fitting this high-waist cut is; and a bit of crumpled paper towel that ends up looking like egg whites escaped through the crack in a shell and caught like lace in boiling water.

  AS SHE STARES AT THE tropical image opposite her, the teenage girl isn’t sure what to make of it, this giant po
ster that’s nearly the same size as the ones in the metro and takes up an entire wall in their relatively small kitchen. The household is not without a sense of irony, and yet there is something oddly serious to her about this massive snapshot. It’s almost as if it were being presented as a paradise at face value, and this fine sandy beach beside a lagoon with its cloudless sky and big, round sun may, after all, be the ideal horizon that sets her mother dreaming: a clichéd destination that looks a bit like something out of a travel brochure, but one she would rush off to without a second thought if someone happened to call and announce that she was the lucky winner of a week-long stay.

  AFTER THE CONVERSATION IN THE kitchen facing the poster of a desert island that she could not quite picture as an Eden, so closely associated was this image with the distressing question of the famous list of books—a definitive selection, not one too many—that you’d bring to fend off boredom during a long, solitary spell (it was too risky to opt only for books you hadn’t read since you might not end up liking them, but the idea of bringing books you loved and reading them over and over again until you were bored sick wasn’t any more appealing); after this conversation facing the island poster, there were no more opportunities for them to grow closer. Her mother’s relapse gained the upper hand, and though little by little they cut away bits of her flesh to counter the illness, it only served to confirm—following one last excision or two—just how far it had spread. The sleeping pills she took after returning home early from her weekend in the countryside only hurried things along, for she’d apparently become so fragile that the prescribed dosage she took for sleep brought her instead eternal rest. The teenager finally saw herself projected into that image, alone on an isolated beach, surrounded by waves.