The Cracks in Our Armor

by Anna Gavalda

  This was the first time I’d ever met someone who was that interested, fascinated even, in my humdrum everyday routine.

  The stockroom all the way at the far end of the store, the miles I have to walk, my fatigue, the constant concern about hygiene, the hassle dealing with mange, ringworm, feline influenza, and all the rest. Moreover, I think he was sincere. He really was interested. Otherwise we would have realized earlier on that we were freezing out there while I jabbered away, leaning on our elbows as we looked out at a wintry Paris.

  I won’t say he wasn’t checking me out a little, snooping, but it was, uh, just the way he was: mellow. And this too was completely foreign to me. My boobs and me, we weren’t used to all these fine manners.

  When I began to get goose bumps he said we better go inside so we went back into the music and the smoke.

  He hadn’t finished closing the French doors when this super thin chick zeroed in on him asking him all frantic in a whiny voice where had he been, what was he doing, why was the music so rotten . . . and then she broke off because she had just added me to the equation.

  That sobered her up real quick, the bitch.

  “Oh, sorry,” she simpered, “I didn’t know you were in such, uh, fine company . . . ”

  (Oh yes. I didn’t dream it. She went real heavy on the word “fine,” little slut.)

  And he answered, with a catlike smile:

  “No. You didn’t know.”

  She looked at me, pulling as hard as she could on the corners of her big mouth to send me a nice smile that said, more or less, “The hormones have already been squirted and the territory marked, fatso, so get the hell out like right now otherwise I’ll scratch your eyes out,” and then she hooked her arm through his to drag him over to the others.

  So I went looking for Sami, with no luck.

  She was probably already en route to Italy, by way of the Bermuda Triangle . . .

  Nothing left to eat, the music was crap, sort of loud but not so loud you disturb the neighbors, and all the guests had clumped into little groups, not letting anyone else in.

  I took a sweater out of my bag and put it on so that my Mushu wouldn’t get cold on the tip of his nose, and before I went to find my parka I scanned the apartment one last time just so I could say goodbye to the one person who’d spoken to me all evening.

  Couldn’t find him. This guy who’d been so passionate not two minutes ago had completely flaked on me the minute that tramp got her claws into him.

  Bah . . . It happens. Well, to me, anyway. Often, even. The minute a guy shows an interest in something besides my merchandise that interest doesn’t last very long, as a rule.

  A quick score or out the door. My des-tin-y.

  I know I’ve just been listing all the hassles I have at work but the thing is, not a single one of my animals would ever treat me that way. Never.

  When I spend time on them, and treat them the way I should, and pay attention to their well-being, they don’t forget it.

  And no matter the time of day, whenever I go by their cages, they each have their own way of demonstrating their friendship.

  They stop eating, and look up, some of them chirp, others squeak, others peep, or hop from one foot to the other, or whistle or sing, even, and as soon as I’m gone, hup, they start munching again.

  And then, whenever there’s one that leaves, I’m sad. Even if it’s just a little white mouse or a dumb-ass parakeet, and even when the customers seem nice.

  I feel all weird inside and I go all quiet, for hours.

  Samia says it’s because my parents are far away and I’m withholding, for want of love. I don’t know. I think I’m just really stupid, is all.

  Whoa. Fucking cold. Inside. Outside. In my head and in the street. My fingers felt like popsicles and my morale was no better.

  Exactly the sort of time when it’s a really bad idea to start soul-searching and exactly the sort of time when you just can’t help it.

  I was single. I lived in a crap studio. Even smaller than the lounge kennel at work. Every Sunday I went to see my sister and played with her kids so she could help her husband finish their house, and during vacations I never went anywhere because I’d be pet-sitting for my favorite customers and a few tenants in the building. And Shirley, too, the concierge’s little Yorkie. It gave me a pretext not to go see my aunt and uncle and besides, it paid a whole month’s rent.

  And the rest of the time, I was at work.

  Sometimes I went out with girlfriends and got myself involved in these plots, each one more hopeless than the next. Well, when I say “plots,” that’s not really the right word, but you get the picture.

  I have a colleague who’s been pestering me to look for love on the internet, but that is just not my thing.

  Every time I’ve ordered something because I trusted the photo I’ve been disappointed in the result. People are mental with their computers. They really believe in what they see when all it is, is stuff for sale in a bright shopwindow.

  No one ever imagines I’m like this. That I’m the sort who sits there all alone taking stock in my head, that I know how to tell good words from bad and I even have opinions about the internet.

  Anyway, what does anybody know, so . . .

  Like me, for example, a few hours ago I didn’t even know there were two islands smack in the middle of Paris. I only just realized, standing there chatting on that balcony. At the age of twenty-three, that’s pathetic.

  I was running like crazy toward Châtelet—I was afraid of missing my RER and I really didn’t have the means to take a taxi just then—when I heard:

  “Princess! Princess! Not so fast! You’re going to lose your slipper!”

  No way.

  I could not believe it.

  There was Special Agent Mulder again . . .

  Maybe there was one last thing he wanted to ask me? The price of a canary or a ferret exercise ball?

  He was bent double trying to catch his breath:

  “Wha . . . Why did you leave . . . so . . . so soon? Do you . . . fff . . . do you want to go for . . . fff . . . a nightcap?”

  I told him I didn’t want to miss the ZEUS, which made him laugh, and then he offered to see me back to Olympus and that made me sad.

  I was in over my head and I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay in the game for long. That I’d have to sleep with him if I wanted to go on playing. Yes, I knew it, that apart from my menagerie I didn’t have a lot in stock and as for my other assets, they were way more common.

  So I didn’t say anything.

  We hurried down the stairs together and since he didn’t have a ticket I motioned to him to squeeze up close next to me to go through the turnstiles.

  Ha, ha. I too got my Garfield smile.

  The station was deserted and the atmosphere was creepy: a dealer who’d set up a quick-stop shop at the entrance to the tunnel, a few partygoers, already pretty wasted, and some cleaning workers on their way home, dead tired.

  We sat on the last free bench all the way at the end of the platform and waited.

  Old silence.

  He didn’t talk, didn’t ask any more questions, and I was too scared it would show—my wasted years at school, how I failed my diploma—so I played the gecko: I sat there motionless and blended into my surroundings.

  I read the billboards, looked at my feet and the scraps of newspaper on the ground, I tried to guess the missing words and wondered if he was really going to follow me all the way home. I was totally freaking out. I was ready to go clear out to Eurodisney by way of Orly to keep him from getting the slightest idea about my life and where I lived.

  He was looking at people and you could tell he was dying to ask them as many questions as he’d asked me.

  How much for a gram? Where’s it from? What’s your margin? And if all hell breaks loose, what do yo
u do? You run into the tunnel, is that it? What about you? What sort of party was it? Birthday? Soccer match? Where are you headed now? And tell me, is your mom going to clean up all that puke, yet again? And you, Madam? Offices or a store? Is it hard work? Do they provide you with powerful vacuum cleaners at least? Where are you from? And why did you have to leave? How much did you have to pay the smugglers? Do you miss it? Yes? No? A little? And do you have children? Who is looking after them while you are waiting for your RER and it’s past midnight, so far away from Mali?

  After a while, to act the part and reestablish contact, off I go:

  “Looks like you’re interested in people.”

  “Yes,” he murmured, “that’s true. In everybody . . . Really everybody . . . ”

  “Do you work for the police?”

  “No.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m a poet.”

  Fuck did I feel stupid. I didn’t even know it was still a profession.

  He must have realized, because he turned to face me and said:

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “Yes, yes, I do, but, uh . . . it’s not really a job, is it.”

  “Really?”

  And all of a sudden, just like that, he turned really sad. His face gray, his eyes like an abandoned cocker spaniel’s. Seriously, this wasn’t much fun anymore and I couldn’t wait for my pumpkin to show up.

  “Maybe you’re right,” he said, in a low voice, “maybe it isn’t a profession. But then what is it? An illusion, a favor, an honor? An imposture? An inevitability? Or a convenient affectation in order to chat up a pretty girl in a sinister place while waiting for the god of thunder?”

  Fuck me. Back into the fourth dimension.

  This is what happens when you punch above your weight (in the human relations department), you lose your balance with the first puff of air.

  And that lazy stupid useless RER still not showing up . . .

  After a silence that was even heavier than before, given the fact he wasn’t looking around him anymore now but inside him and what he was finding was way less “mesmerizing” or “romantic” than two druggies, three drunks, and one worn-out cleaning lady, he said, never looking up from his thoughts:

  “And yet. You, Ludmila, for example. You. You are the proof that poets have a reason to be on this earth. You are . . . ”

  I didn’t react, not a millimeter, because I was dead curious to find out what I was.

  “A dream of a blason.”

  “A what?”

  A flash of light. Now he was back among us.

  “In the sixteenth century,” he began, waffling again, all happy and sure of himself, “all the rhymers and rhymesters and versifiers and other dreamers went about it, more specifically, they composed paeans to those divine charms you occasionally favor us with. To produce a blason was to magnify, as simply and delicately as possible, the various parts of the female body and you, lovely Loulia, you, when I . . . ”

  He moved closer to touch my head, and said softly:

  “Long, lovely, locks unbound

  All the better my heart to bind . . . ”

  Then his hand lingered on my piercings and rings:

  “Oh ear impressing upon the heart

  What the lips express.

  Oh ear into which one must speak

  As it tends gracefully toward the cheek . . . ”

  which made me squint:

  “Brow that chases and taunts the clouds

  In keeping with its noble arch . . . ”

  Then, like in some kid’s nursery rhyme, his index finger went gently nudging along my face:

  “Pretty little nose, polished and well-fashioned

  Neither short nor long, most well-proportioned . . . ”

  I was smiling. Then he tapped on my teeth:

  “Oh, lovely teeth, thus joined and well united

  What pleasure brings this fetching sight!

  How drear when there is naught to bite!”

  So, there, I burst out laughing.

  And as I was laughing, I knew my goose was cooked. Or anyway that it could be. All of a sudden there was the smell of something burning.

  “The train is approaching the station,” blinked the sign. I stood up.

  He followed me.

  We were the only people around and we sat down facing each other.

  And once again this weird old silence lost in the sound of the wheels on the rails. After a few minutes had gone by, he added, as if nothing had happened:

  “Of course, there are many others . . . Blasons, that is. You can imagine that between your hair and the tips of your toes there are, well, there could be, so many other sources of inspiration . . . ”

  “Oh, yeah?” I said, holding back my smile.

  “The most famous one, for example. The Blason of the Beautiful Nipple, by the great Clément Marot.”

  “I get it . . . ”

  I was forcing myself to count the lamps in the tunnel to keep a straight face.

  “Or the navel, for example. That Little Knot which, from divine hands, after all else was perfect, was the very last event,” he looked at me with a smile, “that little corner whence moved desire for tickling delight . . . ”

  “Belly button, too, huh?” I said, sounding astonished, like some little brown noser who’s way too interested in the teacher’s bullshit.

  “Indeed. As I said . . . The navel, and its neighbors a bit further down . . . ”

  What a night. What a Martian pickup act. Complete and utter BS. If someone had told me one day that I’d be on the D-line at midnight with Victor Hugo himself and that, on top of it, it would give me this warm feeling in my belly, frankly I’d look around to see who they were talking about.

  So I said, coy as could be:

  “So? Don’t you remember those ones?”

  “I do, but . . . uh . . . ”

  “Uh, what?”

  “Well, I don’t want to shock anyone. We’re in a public place, after all,” he whispered, shifting his eyes to indicate the completely deserted car.

  And then, at that point in my life, just before we pulled into the Gare du Nord, I told myself three things:

  One: I want to sleep with this sweet duck. I want to because I’ve been having fun with him and if you think about it there is nothing nicer on earth than having fun in bed with a sweet boy.

  Two: I am going to pay for it. Again. This is the sort of thing that’s doomed from the get-go. A sort of war of the worlds, culture clash, class struggle and all the rest. So I won’t give, anything. I’ll get undressed, I’ll look after that part of me that’s hungry, I’ll have a great time, then I’ll get the hell out. No swapping phone numbers, no text messages the morning after, no little kisses on the neck, no cuddles, no smiles, no nothing.

  Nothing tender. Nothing that might leave a memory. This blason thingy, okay, but I act super blasé, otherwise on Monday morning I’ll start crying again like a stupid cow the minute I reach for my baby bunnies.

  Because that swarm of tactile little poems may have been fine and dandy but it was typical of a really well-oiled pickup stunt. To know all those poems by heart he must have done this a million times already.

  Besides, I don’t even have long hair.

  So silence up there while we get this straight, before the attack. The road map is really simple:

  Good evening sir, Welcome, sir, Goodbye, sir.

  See you again sometime.

  Three: Not at my place. Not there.

  “What are you thinking about?” he said, worriedly.

  “A hotel room.”

  “Oh, Lord,” he moaned, as if he were really shocked, “these Pushkin heroines . . . I should have known.”

  A poet in a good mood is really gorgeous.
/>   I laughed.

  “Oh laughter, welcome me into your heavenly realm . . . ”

  What better way to put it.

  3

  After what came next, after the little muff secreted by vermillion stud or ruby buckle, and the round little derrière, so sweet and impregnable, embedded twixt two hills where no enemy dare approach, after all these hours of good things and banter in Old French from a bygone era, while we were recovering and he was holding me to his chest, I asked him:

  “And what about you?”

  “Sorry?”

  “All of this is stuff you’ve read in books, but could you make me one just like that, on the spot? For me and me alone?”

  “What do you mean, a baby?” he said, pretending to be horrified.

  “No, dummy. A poem.”

  He was silent for so long that I thought he’d fallen asleep, and I was about to do the same myself when he took a lock of my hair in his fingers.

  While I wriggled my Mushu’s little wings on my buttocks, he whispered in my ear:

  “Little Saint George of an evening,

  And this my only glory,

  Employing naught but jargon

  Did I then slay this dragon.”

  I smiled in the dark and then I waited until it was time.

  I didn’t want to sleep. That would have been too trusting, too much letting go.

  For sure I was already hurting in spite of myself; for sure. When people make you laugh, however much your heart may pretend otherwise, it is already fucked.

  4

  In the end, I took the 6:06 IVON.

  I was with more or less the same people as at Châtelet a few hours earlier except for the cleaning crew: they were new.

  Everyone was half-comatose.