Hunting and Gathering

by Anna Gavalda

  “Shall we tell him that we’re a threesome in an apartment of four thousand square feet?” murmured Camille, touching his arm.

  “Darling, please,” Franck replied, annoyed, “let me hear what the man has to say, all right?”

  She insisted he hook it up before Philibert got back, “otherwise he’ll be too stressed out,” and she spent an entire afternoon cleaning a small room next to the kitchen which must have been called the “laundry room” once upon a time . . .

  She discovered piles and piles of sheets, embroidered dishcloths, tablecloths, aprons and napkins in honeycomb weave. Old pieces of hardened soap and products that were all dried out and shriveled inside lovely boxes: salt crystals, linseed oil, whiting, alcohol for pipe cleaning, Saint-Wandrille wax, Rémy starch, all soft to the touch like puzzle pieces made of velvet . . . An impressive collection of brushes of every size and bristle, a feather duster as lovely as a parasol, a box-wood grip for shaping gloves, and a sort of braided wicker racket for beating carpets.

  Painstakingly she lined up all the treasures and committed them to a large sketchbook.

  She’d decided to draw everything, so as to have something to offer Philibert the day he had to move out.

  Every time she started tidying up somewhere, she inevitably ended up sitting cross-legged, immersed in huge hatboxes filled with letters and photos, and she spent hours on end with handsome mustachioed men in uniform, great ladies who had just stepped out of a painting by Renoir, and little boys dressed like little girls, right hand on a rocking horse at the age of five, on a hoop at the age of seven, and on a Bible at the age of twelve, shoulders turned slightly to show off the fine armband from their first communion, now that they were touched by grace.

  Yes, she loved that place, and it was not unusual for her to glance at her watch and start suddenly: already time to gallop along the corridors of the métro, arrive at work and be told off by Super Josy pointing smugly at her watch. Bah.

  “Where are you off to?”

  “Work, I’m already way late.”

  “Put on your coat, it’s freezing.”

  “Yes, Father. By the way—”

  “What?”

  “Philou’s due back tomorrow.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m taking the evening off. Will you be here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Right.”

  “Put a scarf on at—”

  The door had already slammed.

  Make up your mind, he frowned. When I try to hit on her, it’s all wrong; when I tell her to dress warmly, she makes fun of me. She’s killing me, that girl . . .

  New year, same chores. Same incredibly heavy waxing machines, same vacuum cleaners forever jammed, same numbered buckets (“no more drama, girls!”), same bitterly hard-won products, same blocked sinks, same adorable Mamadou, same tired co-workers, same hyper Jojo. Nothing had changed.

  Although she was in better shape, Camille had less enthusiasm. She’d left her stones at the door, had begun to work again, with a watchful eye on the daylight hours, and she no longer saw any reason to live life backwards. Morning was the time she was most productive, and how could she work in the morning when she never got to bed before two or three, exhausted by a job that was as physical as it was debilitating?

  Her hands tingled, her brain was spilling over: Philibert was coming back, Franck was bearable, and the appeal of the apartment remained undeniable. She had an idea brewing in her head. A sort of fresco—no, not a fresco, the word was too pompous. An evocation, yes, that’s it, an evocation. A chronicle, an imaginary biography of the place where she lived. There was so much material, there were so many memories. Not just objects. Not just photos but a mood. An atmosphere. Murmurings, a few lingering heartbeats. These volumes, oil canvases, arrogant moldings, porcelain light switches, exposed wires, metallic bedpans, little poultice jars, custom-made shoe trees, and all these faded, yellowed labels.

  The end of a world . . .

  Philibert had warned them: one day, perhaps even the very next day, they would have to leave, would have to snatch up their clothes, their books, their discs and souvenirs and the two yellow Tupperware containers, and leave everything else behind.

  And after that? Who knew what would happen? At best things would be shared out; at worst, secondhand shops, the Salvation Army, or the junk heap on the sidewalk . . . To be sure, the wall clock and the top hats would find a home, but the pipe-cleaning solvent and the drape of a curtain and the horse’s tail with its little holy inscription—In memoriam Venus, 1887-1912, proud bay with a speckled nose—and the rest of the quinine in its blue bottle on the bathroom shelf—who would care about those things?

  Convalescence? Drowsiness? Mild dementia? Camille didn’t know, either, why or how the idea had come to her, but there it was. She’d fashioned this little pint-sized conviction—and it might even be the old Marquis who’d whispered it to her—that all of this, and this dying world and all its elegance, this little museum of bourgeois art and tradition, had been waiting for her alone, for her gaze and her gentleness and her wonder-struck pen, to find the necessary resolve to disappear, at last.

  Her crazy idea came and went, vanished during the day, often banished by a host of mocking faces: You poor child, what on earth are you on about? And who are you? And who could possibly be interested in any of this, pray tell?

  But at night . . . oh, at night! When she came back from her horrible office towers, where she’d spent most of her time squatting down next to a bucket and wiping the drip from her nose with her nylon sleeve, bending over ten times, a hundred times, to throw away plastic cups and papers of no interest and following miles of pale, sinister underground passageways where insipid graffiti could not cover up thoughts like: What about him? What does he feel when he’s inside you?; when she put her keys down on the chest by the front door and walked through this huge apartment on tiptoe, she could not help but hear them call out: “Camille, Camille,” squeaked the floor; “Don’t let us go,” begged the antiques; “Zounds! Why the Tupperware and not us?” protested the old general from his deathbed photograph. “Yes, exactly,” echoed a choir of copper buttons and the moth-eaten grosgrain, “why?”

  So she sat in the dark and slowly rolled herself a cigarette to give them a chance to calm down. First of all, I don’t give a damn about the Tupperware, and second I’m here—just wake me up before noon.

  And she thought about Prince Salina, going home alone on foot after the ball. The prince who had just witnessed, helpless, the decline of his world and who, when he saw vegetable peels and the bloodied carcass of an ox by the roadside, prayed to the heavens not to delay . . .

  The guy on the sixth floor had left a box of Mon Chéri chocolates for her. He’s crazy, laughed Camille, who offered them to her favorite boss, then let Yosemite Sam thank him for her: Thank you, but tell me, you don’t have any filled with liqueur by any chance, do you?

  I’m so funny, she sighed, putting down her sketch, so very funny.

  And it was in that state of mind—dreamy, mocking, one foot in The Leopard and the other in filth—that she pushed open the door of the storage room behind the elevators where they left their bottles of bleach and all their stuff.

  Camille was the last to leave and was beginning to get undressed in the semidarkness when she realized she was not alone.

  Her heart stopped beating and she felt something hot run down her thighs: she had pissed herself.

  “Is someone there?” she said, groping along the wall to find the light switch.

  He was sitting on the floor, panicked, a crazed expression, his eyes hollowed by drugs or deprivation: she knew such faces well. He didn’t move, he had stopped breathing and was holding the muzzle of a large dog between his hands.

  They stayed like that for a few seconds, staring at each other in silence, long enough to understand that neither one of them was likely to die at the hands of the other, and when he moved his right hand to place a finger on
his lips, Camille plunged him once again in darkness.

  Her heart was beating again. All over the place. She grabbed her coat and stepped out, backwards.

  “The code?” he moaned.

  “P-pardon?”

  “The entry code for the building?”

  She couldn’t remember it, mumbled something and, groping along the wall, found her way to the exit, then was out in the street, shaking and covered in sweat.

  The security guard called out: “Cold out tonight, isn’t it?”

  Camille didn’t reply.

  “You okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “Tired.”

  She was frozen, pulled her coat tight over her soaking overalls, and headed off in the wrong direction. When she finally realized where she was, she walked along the curb to hail a taxi.

  It was a luxurious station wagon with a thermometer indicating indoor and outdoor temperatures (+70°, -25°). She spread her thighs, leaned her forehead against the window and spent the rest of the trip looking out at the little piles of humanity curled up over the air vents and in the alcoves of the entryways.

  They were the stubborn, pigheaded ones who refused aluminium blankets because they didn’t want to be seen in headlights, and they preferred warm asphalt to the cold tiles of the homeless shelter in Nanterre.

  Camille made a face.

  Bad memories welling up in her throat.

  And that wild ghost? He looked so young . . . And the dog? That was just stupid. He couldn’t go anywhere with that dog. She should have talked to him, warned him against the guard’s big dog, Matrix, and asked him if he was hungry. No, it was his dope he wanted. And the mutt? When had he last had something to eat? She sighed. What an idiot she was. Worrying about some mongrel when half of the people on the planet were dreaming about a spot on top of an air vent. Go on, get to bed, you old cow, I’m ashamed of you. What is the point of it all, any of it? You switch off the light because you don’t want to see him anymore and then you pine away in the back of a luxury limo chewing on your lace handkerchief . . .

  Go on, go to bed . . .

  The apartment was empty. Camille went looking for some alcohol, anything would do, drank enough of it to find her way to her pillow, then got back up in the night to throw up.

  52

  HANDS in her pockets and nose in the air, Camille was hopping up and down beneath the arrivals-and-departures sign when a familiar voice gave her the information she was looking for:

  “Arrival of the train from Nantes on platform nine at 20:35. This train is delayed by fifteen minutes . . . So what’s new.”

  “Hey! What are you doing here?”

  “Well,” said Franck, “I came to be the third wheel. Hey, you’re all dolled up. What’s this about? Am I dreaming or is that lipstick?”

  She hid her smile behind the holes in her scarf.

  “You’re an ass.”

  “No, I’m jealous. You never put on lipstick for me.”

  “It’s not lipstick, it’s something for chapped lips.”

  “Liar. Show me—”

  “No. Are you still on vacation?”

  “I start again tomorrow evening.”

  “Oh? . . . Is your grandma doing okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you give her my present?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “And she said that if you drew such a nice picture of me, it meant you must be madly in love with me.”

  “What on earth—”

  “Shall we go get a drink?”

  “No. I’ve been indoors all day. I’m going to sit here and look at people.”

  “Can I join you?”

  They huddled on a bench between a newspaper stand and a ticket-stamping machine, and watched the merry-go-round of frantic travelers.

  “Go on, run, man! Run! There you go—no, too late.”

  “One euro? No, a cigarette if you want.”

  “Can you explain to me why it’s always the girls with the worst figures who wear those low-rise pants? I just don’t get it.”

  “A euro? Hey, you already asked us earlier, old man!”

  “Look at that little old lady with her Breton headdress, you got your sketchbook with you? No? That’s too bad . . . And what about that guy, look how happy he is to see his wife.”

  “That’s suspicious,” said Camille. “She must be his mistress.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “A man who comes rushing into town with his overnight kit and throws himself on a woman in a fur coat, kissing her on the neck . . . Believe me, that’s suspicious.”

  “Pfff . . . It could be his wife.”

  “No way! His wife is in Quimper and she’s putting the kids to bed as we speak! Hey, there’s a real couple,” she laughed, pointing to a visibly middle-class man and woman who were quarreling in front of a TGV barrier.

  He shook his head: “You’re depressing.”

  “You’re too sentimental.”

  A little old couple then walked by them at a snail’s pace, bent, tender, cautious, holding each other by the arm. Franck elbowed her: “Ah!”

  “There, I concede . . .”

  “I love train stations.”

  “So do I,” said Camille.

  “If you want to get to know a country, you don’t need to ride around in some tourist bus, all you have to do is visit the train stations and the markets, and you get the whole picture.”

  “I totally agree with you. Where have you been anyway?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “You’ve never been outside of France?”

  “I spent two months in Sweden. As a cook at the embassy. But it was winter and I didn’t see a thing. You can’t get a drink there. No bars, nothing.”

  “And the train stations? And the markets?”

  “I never saw daylight.”

  “Was it nice? Why’re you laughing?”

  “No reason.”

  “Tell me.”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  “Uh-oh, some business with a woman, right?”

  “No.”

  “Liar, I can tell by your . . . your nose, it’s getting longer.”

  “Okay, shall we get going?” he asked, pointing to the platforms.

  “Tell me first.”

  “But it’s nothing. Fucking stupid.”

  “You slept with the ambassador’s wife, is that it?”

  “No.”

  “With his daughter?”

  “Yes! There! Bull’s-eye! You happy now?”

  “Very happy,” she conceded, simpering. “Was she cute?”

  “A real dog.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. Even a Swede who’d tanked up in Denmark on a Saturday night and got drunk as a skunk wouldn’t have touched her with a ten-foot pole.”

  “Why you, then? Charity? For the good of your health?”

  “Cruelty.”

  “Tell me.”

  “No. Unless you tell me that you were wrong and that the blonde there earlier was actually his wife.”

  “I was wrong. The whore in her beaver-skin coat really was his wife. They’ve been married sixteen years, they have four kids, they adore each other and at this very moment she is hurling herself at his fly in the elevator of the parking lot with one eye on her watch because she put a blanquette in the oven to reheat before she left and she’d like to make him come before the leeks get burned.”

  “Yuck. You don’t put leeks in a blanquette.”

  “No, really?”

  “You’re confusing it with a pot-au-feu.”

  “So what about your Swedish girl?”

  “She wasn’t Swedish, she was French. In fact it was her sister who was hitting on me. A spoiled little princess. A little airhead done up like a Spice Girl, she was hot. I’ll bet she was bored too. So to pass the time, she’d stop by and sit her little ass down on our ovens. She flirted with everyone, she
’d dip her finger in my saucepan and gaze up at me while she licked it clean. Hey, you know me, I’m not a complicated guy, so one day I grabbed hold of her on the mezzanine and what does she do but start squealing, the little bitch. Threatening to go and tell her father, and all that. Well, I’m not complicated but one thing I hate is a cocktease. So I did her big sister, just to teach her a lesson about life.”

  “But that’s really mean, for the ugly one.”

  “Everything is mean for the ugly ones, don’t you know that?”

  “And then?”

  “After that, I left.”

  “Why?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Diplomatic incident?”

  “Yeah, you might call it that. C’mon, let’s get going now.”

  “I like it too, when you tell stories.”

  “Yeah, what a story.”

  “You have a lot like that?”

  “No. As a rule I’m happier hitting on the cute ones.”

  “We should go a little further down,” she fretted. “If Philibert takes the stairs over there and goes up to the taxis, we’ll miss him.”

  “Don’t worry, I know my Philou. He always walks dead straight ahead until he bumps into a pole, then he says sorry and lifts his head to look around and find the exit.”

  “You sure?”

  “Of course. Hey, this is far enough. You in love, or what?”

  “No, but you know how it is. You climb out of the train with all your shit, you’re a little groggy, a little discouraged. You’re not expecting anyone to be there, then boom! Someone’s there after all, at the end of the platform, waiting for you. Haven’t you ever dreamt that would happen to you?”

  “I don’t dream.”

  “I don’t dream,” she repeated in a macho tone. “I don’t dream and I don’t like a cocktease. May that be a warning, babe.”