The Cracks in Our Armor

by Anna Gavalda

  Above all they showed him a path away from the path of guilt. Another path, a detour, a shortcut. An amnesty. Okay, he hadn’t done the job properly and some of his failings could never be repaired, but for now he was the one who’d gotten the miracle glove at the Harvest Sprite Casino.

  No, you and I didn’t see much of each other anymore, until one evening, you got things going again. You saw us on the landing and you invited us to come to the cinema at your place.

  O tempora, o mores, truffles had been replaced by sushi and Julia certainly was not dressed by Givenchy, but you loved Pretty Woman and the girls loved it with you.

  A new cine-club was born: every other Saturday evening, if Louis was around, we would go to his place. You introduced them to Paul Grimault and they gave you Hayao Miyazaki in exchange. You gave them Buster Keaton, and they lent you Buzz Lightyear. You gave them all of Jacques Demy and they arrived with the entire Studio Ghibli in return. They loved coming to your place. They loved your mess, your canes, your Daumier prints, your paper cutters and your glass paperweights. They said, “Why do you keep all those old newspapers all over the floor?” and you lowered your voice and said, “Because there are little mice that live underneath, you see . . . ” and then it was ever so hard to concentrate on the movie . . . So, so hard . . . With one eye they wept for E.T. and with the other they were watching out for the least little rippling under the surface of those old forgotten issues of Le Monde.

  But it all remained very tenuous, very sober. Both of us were unsociable, we had both received the same good upbringing, give or take, that teaches paralysis as surely as it does politeness, and we were always afraid we might be disturbing one another.

  Particularly me. I kept my distance. You were a man of dossiers, I knew you worked at home a lot, and I was very scrupulous about such things. (Work! The God Work!) And then there were your absences. Your nights of carousing, you called them. Your nights of great murkiness. You led a complicated life, Louis, didn’t you? Well, complicated, perhaps not, but full of contrasts, let’s say, full of contrasts.

  Because of all this—your dossiers, your solitude, your ellipses—I might have left things there, with the truce we’d established back then, and would already have considered myself lucky, but our shoes, once again, trampled all our good manners underfoot.

  I can’t remember when, or how, or whose idea it was, but it became, in addition to our mouse and sushi sessions with the girls, our new confirmed old bachelors’ ritual. On Sunday evenings, when I was alone and you were “fasting” (that was the word you used) we would polish our shoes together.

  Like those car trips that give you the illusion that the only thing that lies ahead is the road, or those steep hikes that require you to keep a close watch on your feet through the difficult stretches, or like snapping the ends off green beans when, between two abrupt little gestures, you have to look out for the string—like any manual activity you are performing together with someone at the same time, in fact, polishing shoes is a wonderful way to get to know the other person, without letting anything on.

  We removed the laces, cleaned, applied the polish, spread it, impregnated the leather, nourished, polished, rubbed, brushed, shined, sheened, and put the laces back in and, incidentally, fortuitously, during these various operations which provided us with a cover, since they monopolized all our attention, incidentally, as I was saying, we chewed the fat.

  In the beginning we would always talk about the merchandise (our shoes, past, present, and future), then we talked shop (our work weeks, past, present, and future), and finally, we discussed productivity (God, Life, Solitude, Death; past, present, and future).

  We spoke about our leathers at least as much as we took care of them, and our final strokes of polish often took us far away from our hidebound reality.

  Shoe upon shoe, pair after pair, we learned to understand the other person’s mechanisms and his modus operandi, but as we were also very discreet, we neglected to . . . no, not neglected, not eluded, either, we respected, observed, rather, yes, that’s the word, observed, the way one observes a rule, a rite, a minute of silence, or a fast, precisely, we also, alas, observed their commandments and we never got our hands dirty.

  We were familiar with each other’s mechanisms, but we knew nothing about the combustion, fuel, or wear and tear, and I regret that bitterly, now.

  I regret it bitterly because the news of your death came as a terrible shock.

  I didn’t know you were sick, Louis. I didn’t know that you’d been fighting your illness for years. There I was, living next door, I owed you so much, I would have done anything for you and I did not know a thing.

  You were my friend of solitude, my late-come friend, my evening friend, my camp friend, my bivouac friend, maybe an imaginary friend, but my friend all the same. The friend I did not have time to get to know.

  (I wrote love and then thought better of it, yet again.) (What a jerk.)

  The friend I didn’t have time to love and appreciate. (What a jerk, as I said.)

  Of course two years is not a long time and we didn’t see each other that often. All told, not counting the films, the girls, the movement of the brushes, and the merely polite pleasantries, our hours in each other’s presence did not add up to that many, in the end, and . . .

  And the news of your death was a terrible blow.

  You often vanished. Sometimes for a long time. You were out in the country, or so you told the girls. You went to take your mice for a walk. And then one day you didn’t come back.

  One day you didn’t come back, at all, and another day, Lucie, my youngest daughter, through Laure, her sister, through Ariane, their mother, through Mako, their nanny, and through Fernanda, our concierge, told me that there was no point waiting for you to watch Grave of the Fireflies, that you, too, were in heaven, that you would never come back again, that . . . but what would become of the little mice?

  I learned of your death through a rosary of ladies.

  I was your friend and I heard about your death from the concierge.

  There’s a slap in your face, Paul, poor little rich boy.

  A slap for the dominant male, distributor of Christmas envelopes, lord of the gratuities.

  A whopping great slap, right in the face.

  You see, you went on perfecting my education right to the end.

  Then came the rumors that you had committed . . . that you had ended your own life. I wasn’t interested. I paid no attention to those rumors. I am grateful to you for this and respect you all the more for it. Suicide, too, is my imaginary friend. I merely lost my half-inch again, from bending to the weight of my remorse.

  The thought that perhaps you reached the end of your suffering by inflicting yet greater suffering on yourself: it made me wretched. I could have, should have, helped you, would have liked to. In any way I could. In every way.

  I could have obtained the details regarding your passing, but I didn’t want to know. You wanted to leave so you left, that was all that mattered. To me. That consoled me.

  * * *

  Louis,

  One day you left for the country with your mice, another day a little girl in tears told me you were dead, and yet another day, much later, people came to empty your apartment, and that very evening a big boy smelling of sweat rang at my door and handed me a cardboard box. I recognized your handwriting on it: for the neighbor across the landing and, in the box, there was a wooden wine crate.

  A Château-Haut-Brion crate, in memory of your first mission.

  Since we’d drunk them together, there were no more bottles in the crate, but there were 2 horsehair brushes (one for light polish, the other for dark), 2 boar bristle brushes for shining, 2 little toothbrushy things in boar bristle for the welts and the sneakier spots, 4 jars of polish, 4 boxes of shoe wax to go with the polish, a nourishing milk, a suede brush, a suede block, some terre
de Sommières stain remover, and a soft rag cut from an old shirt that I recognized. I’d seen you wear it. Maybe it hadn’t been even that old. But it was soft, that much was certain. It was soft and it acted as the farewell note that you hadn’t been able, or willing, to write.

  It was so soft I blew my nose in it.

  I took your departure very badly, Louis, secretly and badly. There, too, I don’t know which had it worse, my pride, or my flesh (my heart, moron, my heart), but for a long time I remained in the state I described to you at the beginning of this letter. What was it I said? A wedge. That’s right, a wedge. A wedge someone had rammed into my skull, all the way at the top, in the middle, where the fontanelle closes over.

  I’ve always suffered from terrible migraines—and you knew this, because one evening you saw me completely out of it; you saw me lie down on your floor with my head in my hands, you saw me collapse on your bed of newspapers like a huge bundle of pain, you heard me beg you to switch everything off, to be quiet, to make everything quiet, shut everything up, turn off all the lights, make it completely dark, stop all motion, don’t move a thing, dip a napkin in ice water and put it on my face like a compress. Later, once the crisis was over, you heard me explain to you that it was like an enucleation, an evil spirit with a tiny but deep spoon with nice sharp edges was there behind my eye sockets using all his weight as a lever to turn the handle of his instrument of torture, first one way then the other, ever so slowly and conscientiously, to dig the eye out of its socket; and that these crises were so sudden, implacable, and violent that I could have blown my brains out a dozen, a hundred times, already—yes, I’ve always had terrible migraines and now, as if that weren’t enough, I’ve got your death rammed into my brainpan.

  I’m going to take a shower. I’ll be back.

  scorching water

  for a long, long, long time

  melted

  drained

  dissolved

  scraped

  liquefied

  liquidated

  Liquidated, the old man. Liquidated.

  That’s better.

  Daybreak. I have to hurry.

  If I brought up these episodes of descent into hell just now, it wasn’t to make you feel sorry for me, Louis, it was to get myself back on my feet.

  I don’t have time to go hunting for words anymore. I have to leave in less than two hours and I’m still in my bath towel.

  I don’t have time for anything anymore, just to get myself back on my feet before I toss some ash on the embers and strike camp.

  My feet, you remember, that’s—cut and paste—“a woman full of wit to whom I had just related our early-morning to-ings and fro-ings (I will tell you later the circumstances thereof), emphasizing the strange comfort they gave me.”

  Yes. The same. The woman who would call out to Proust in the street and ask him if he was on the way home from the Duchesse de Guermantes’s place, or from a urinal.

  It was because of her that we have spent this night together, you and I.

  Because of or thanks to, I’m not sure which, but what is certain is that were it not for her—her irony and clear-sightedness and talent—were it not for Proust and his admirer Morand, I wouldn’t have done it.

  I wouldn’t have gone rapping at the door of the dead. I would have gone no further than Untitled 1, and “you piss me off,” and I would never have said another word to you. Or as few as possible.

  I’m not sure you would have gained much in exchange, but this time I won’t sign off with a coarse remark.

  You don’t piss me off, Louis. You don’t piss me off at all.

  So, the circumstances.

  Let’s talk about the circumstances.

  I was at an airport. Indeed. Fate. I was in a gigantic terminal at London Heathrow and I had a meltdown.

  Noise, sounds, crowds, bright light everywhere, neon lights, voices calling, music, people, smells, engines, machines, metal detectors, beeps, colors, movement, waves, sirens, espresso machines, heating, air conditioning, the stink of airplane fuel, ringing, telephones, cries, laughter, children, I thought I would die from the pain.

  I was standing behind a pillar, with my forehead on it, ready to step back and smash it open at last. Like an egg, a keg, a rotten pumpkin, a coconut: smash the thing, once and for all.

  I was stifling, sweating, dripping, shivering, I peeled off layers of clothes, my teeth were chattering.

  I came round in a hospital room.

  I’ll spare you the details, but it was a long assault course, which I navigated ingloriously, and at the end of it the insurance companies and the banks ordered me to seek therapy. To strip down. Let myself be strip-searched. Soul-searched. See what science would have to say. Audit myself, in a way.

  And at each consultation, I found myself sitting opposite a woman.

  That woman.

  I had nothing to say to her.

  I didn’t say a thing for two whole sessions.

  At the beginning of the third one—which, we had both agreed, would be the last one, given my patent unwillingness to cooperate—she said:

  “You know, if you don’t like the term shrink, or therapist, because it feels incriminating to you, all you have to do is view me the way those patients of mine who are most resistant to any form of dishonest compromise view me, those patients we refer to as mad, crazy, nutcases, weirdos, all those Napoleons and so on. You know what they call me?”

  She was being such an imperial pain in the ass that I felt like saying Josephine, but didn’t dare.

  “They call me the head-doctor,” she replied with a smile. “Remind me why you’re here, already?” (Eyeglasses, distracted look at my file.) “Ah, yes, your left knee . . . ”

  Ha ha ha. Very funny. Madame psychoanalyzing a clown.

  I didn’t respond.

  She gave a sigh, closed my file, took off her pretty eyeglasses, and looked straight at me as if firing daggers.

  “Listen to me, Paul Cailley-Ponthieu, listen carefully. You are wasting my time. So we are going to stop this session right now. Don’t worry, I will sign the papers and discharge forms you need to go back into battle. Yes, I will do that for you: I am sending you back to the front because it’s what you want, but since my professional conscience is just as rigorous as your own, I want you to take this.”

  She put her glasses back on, typed on her keyboard, leaned over, picked up the prescription that emerged from the printer, and handed it to me.

  “There. Fit for duty. You will find a pharmacy on your left on the way out. Check in with reception regarding payment. Goodbye.”

  She stood up while I read her prescription:

  Silistab Genu Patella Knee Brace x 1

  She was on her feet. Looking at me.

  I was seated. I was looking at my knees.

  I was beginning to have a headache.

  I felt like crying.

  I was thirsty.

  I was hot.

  I began talking to her simply so I wouldn’t weep.

  I would still rather open this floodgate than that one.

  I would still rather die with my mouth open than shed even one tear in front of this stranger.

  So I opened my mouth and said your name.

  And then I . . . And then nothing.

  She didn’t say anything either. Out of respect, I think. She saw me hopping from one foot to the other at the end of the diving board and refrained from giving me a shove from behind. That was kind.

  After two or three long minutes had gone by, she gave me a little nudge all the same:

  “Do you suffer from tinnitus? Do you have hearing problems?”

  For a moment I was nonplussed. Then realized: your name, in French, is a homonym for hearing. Louis, l’ouïe.

  “No,” I laughed, drowning in my tears. “No
. Louis. My friend Louis.”

  It was gushing out.

  “Don’t move,” she said.

  She left the room, then came back holding out a roll of kitchen towels.

  “I’m sorry, that’s all I have.”

  “Thank you.”

  She sat down in the armchair next to me while I mopped my face.

  Silence.

  Then she spoke to me the way she had to speak to me. She didn’t say, “Yes . . . Of course . . . So, Louis . . . Louis . . . Your friend, you were saying . . . How interesting . . . But still . . . But how . . . But blah blah blah and how did you feel.”

  No.

  She looked me straight in the eyes and said, calmly:

  “My next appointment is in forty-five minutes. What do we do?”

  She spoke about procedure, schedule, efficacy. She put me back in familiar territory.

  I don’t know exactly what I said, but I must have spoken about that way you had of being both intense and volatile at the same time, being absolutely present and yet always slightly elsewhere, both generous and stingy. About everything you had done for me, and the brutal way you’d died on me. The words of farewell I’d been deprived of. Your lack of trust. In me, in yourself, in our friendship. The nasty impression I kept getting, constantly chewing it over, that I had completely passed you by. Missed you altogether. Betrayed you. Betrayed myself. That I was a complete and utter failure.

  Am a complete and utter failure.

  Also, that I was an only child. That I had probably projected the image of an ideal brother onto you. I had dreamt you, invented you, made you up. It was not you I was weeping over, but my lovely hologram. I was weeping over a lot of deaths, in fact. Your death, the death of our friendship, of my father, of the adoring uncle you’d become to my daughters, the death of my fatherhood, of my filiation, of my childhood, my youth, and my own life, which had finally been taken from me and . . . And then I talked about your secrets, your absences, your silences, and what that morning vision of you inspired in me, when you were returning, as far as I could tell, from a world of liberty/tine/tinage, whereas I was on my way to wall myself up in a car that was as long and black as a hearse and which would take me to start my shift in a free-market liberticide world which I defended as best I could, while in fact in the space of a few years that same world had been destroying the combined efforts of four generations of men and women of good will, which included some bosses.