Waiting for Tomorrow

by Nathacha Appanah

  Anita is silent because she feels certain Adam would not understand what she might manage to say. This man standing before her, her husband, has lived here on this terrain since his birth, he knows the trees, he knows the highways and byways. His local knowledge matches his own memories. He is not trying to be a different person, he is not trying to make people forget the color of his skin, his accent. When he gets up in the morning and looks at the pine forest, no images of the tangled masses of banyan trees come to his mind. Adam would not understand the efforts she makes each day to finally belong here, so that, in the end, words (in articles, in short stories, in a novel) may take her place and speak for her. That evening Anita feels very remote from her husband. That evening she is a stranger in her own house.

  Encouraged by Anita’s silence, Adam continues. He warms to the topic, feels proud, hears himself as he speaks. This evening he is finally going to convince her. He takes another step forward.

  “Those people are exploiting you. They send you out scouring the countryside. You take all the pictures yourself. You write your stories. You hand them in neatly and tidily. They’ve no grounds for complaint about you, that’s for sure. They pay you peanuts and you’re happy with that, you sign up for more. You’re due to meet the editor tomorrow, aren’t you? What are the odds that he’ll say there’s nothing for you at the moment, but he’s well pleased with your work? He’ll hold that carrot out to you forever, Anita. You’re worth so much more than that.”

  Adam is very close to his wife now. All it takes is for him to lean toward her a little and with an almost imperceptible rustling, a fluttering of wings, she falls into his arms and he gathers her up. He would like to tell her how much he truly misses her. Her bracelets, her hair that becomes curly in summer, her soft brown skin, her long skirts that finish up with dirty hems by the end of the day, her wooden bead necklaces that reach down to her navel, the untidy bunches of wildflowers she used to scatter throughout the house, her passionate outbursts of high praise for some piece of prose or verse, the way she quickly grew heated about some conflict, some idea, some topic, the idiosyncratic way she had of carrying Laura on one hip, with a hand tucked under her buttocks, as if this were all perfectly normal, this conjoined being growing out of her hip, the stillness of her body when she is making notes in her gray binder, her vanilla scent.

  “Okay, Adam. If the editor doesn’t offer me anything tomorrow, I’ll quit.”

  Adam hugs her tighter still, the way she likes to be hugged, and lifts her into the air.

  Later Adam wakes up, with the hairs all over his body standing on end. He cocks an ear but all that reaches him is Anita breathing deeply beside him. He turns his head toward her and the contours of her body beneath the cover seem to him quite angular, as if gathered up in a little heap, and that makes him think of the carcasses of famished dogs. The vision only lasts for a moment but it makes him feel quite uneasy. He does not like thinking about his wife’s body as a little heap, he does not want his wife’s pinched body to remind him of dead dogs. He squeezes close to her. She stirs, murmurs something. Her warm breath, amazingly sweet, as if she fed only on milk, lingers over Adam’s face and he feels better. He strokes her brow, following her hairline. He closes his eyes.

  Ideas and images dance gently behind his eyelids: the meeting at 10:00 a.m. at the town hall to present the plans for the new gymnasium, Laura’s red boots in the trunk of the car, Anita’s black bra hanging from the bathroom door handle …

  Then he sees Anita standing upright in her study, lost in thought, reflecting as if within herself. When had he seen her like this? Yesterday, last week, three months ago? The more the image imposes itself on him the more Anita seems to be disappearing amid the yellow light spilling into the room, crossing it, engulfing it, swallowing it. This light becomes dense, a yellow shot through with orange that dazzles everything, a rippling sunlight blotting out all traces, all shadows, all presences.

  How to capture this color, this density, this impression of movement that is both slow and elastic?

  Adam gets up, fully alert. He walks along the passage, glances in at Laura, goes downstairs, opens the door, crosses the garden. The wet grass attaches little drops to the bottom of his pajama pants. He goes into the wooden hut at the edge of the forest.

  Within a few years this space, which is as big as their tiny apartment in Paris, has become what artists like to call a studio. Adam does not yet dare to use this term, there are a good many words like this that he keeps at arm’s length and is wary of when they come trippingly to the tongue: artist, inspiration, happiness, unhappiness. When he was a little boy his father used to say of him Adam likes painting and this phrase, one that evokes charming things, equipment kept in a jar, a well-ordered work table, would suit him very well these days. Even if his material (pots of paint, pigment oils, turpentine, brushes, hammers, pincers, thumbtacks, oiled canvases, rags) now occupies one whole wall of his studio, even if his worktable is here, there, and everywhere (the walls, odd corners, the floor), even if charming would not be the adjective that would spring to mind in someone seeing these pictures, Adam still likes to think of himself as “a man who paints.”

  In his studio Adam remains seated on a stool for a while, staring into the center of the room. He is concentrating on the image that made him leave the warmth of his bed. For some time now he has felt the urge to paint in a different way—forget faces, landscapes, detail, he would like to work with simpler, more authentic subject matter but he does not know how to do it, where to begin. He lacks something, but what?

  The truth is it does not matter very much. Adam is thirty-five. Unaware of the cruel way time chips away at things, he is not affected by reality. He is here and now. He draws. He paints. He makes things. He imagines. He designs. He sands and polishes. He works at his art, at what he is creating, without asking himself questions, without a mountain to climb, without a jungle to cross, without any obstacles. Moments before he had been that disgruntled husband, falling out with his wife, breaking a plate, arguing with her. Moments before, too, he had been that man seeking the warmth of a desired body, the comfort of being loved and desired in return. Now all he is is this man preparing a canvas, mixing pigments with linseed oil. He is nothing more than his painting and his painting is his alone. He is without fear, without guilt, without a path to follow, no meals to prepare, no laundry to hang, no shopping to do, no child to amuse. There is nobody whom he has to convince of his right to be where he is, with no sound in his ears, no sunlight coming in to interrupt his train of thought. He is creation itself.

  “The song of the fourth floor”

  ANITA ARRIVES IN THE CITY AT 11:00 IN THE MORNING. It is the day after her quarrel with Adam. She parks her car behind the church, walks briskly across the paved square with its abundant flowers, passes through the shopping mall that she uses as a shortcut, emerges into another square where the surface resembles the ones used in children’s playgrounds, and goes into the building on the left. It is an ordinary four-story building where the second, third, and fourth floors each have balconies that come to a point and remind her of a kind of vertebral column (she must remember to ask Adam if there are such styles in architecture as “pointed,” “round,” “semicircular,” “pierced”). On the first floor of the building there are fascinating machines that produce offset plates, as well as scanners, harsh lights, dark corners, and men with mustaches and fierce eyes, raising their voices above the boom, boom, boom of the rotary presses. The second floor houses the newspaper’s reception office, the secretarial and administrative staff, the archives, the cafeteria. On the third floor are the proofreaders, the editorial secretaries, the layout artists, the graphics team, and the pasteup artists.

  On the fourth floor, where she stops, is the reporters’ room. Facing the door to this is the glass cage of the editor, Christian Voubert, a very tall, very slender man who, when he rises from his chair, unwinds like a liana. She is due to meet him this morning.

&nbs
p; On either side of the cage the L-shaped work spaces are arranged in pairs. They might seem identical: beige computer, black keyboard, pencil holder, stacks of gray wire filing trays, telephone. But personal impulses have turned each space into a little home away from home: a photograph, a pebble, a bunch of dried flowers, a chipped cup, a piece of origami, an indescribable clutter, a quotation.

  Anita breathes in and opens the door and would love to be able to capture a snatch of this soundtrack and edit it into her own personal, intimate, and subjective compilation of the best sounds in the world.

  This fragment she would call “the song of the fourth floor”: the clatter of a keyboard, an animated conversation about how many words a report on the previous day’s rugby match might be worth, the noise of the fax machine, a telephone ringing, pages being turned, the coffee machine spluttering, the muffled sound of a television, laughter, greetings. And this fragment would have smells to go with it: those of coffee, paper, the sea air blowing in at the windows, that of ink.

  Anita has no desk here, far from it, because a year ago Christian Voubert told her that the only thing he could offer her for the moment was work as a “stringer” (the moment in question not being one as in the dictionary definition a brief period of time, but on the contrary, one synonymous with for the foreseeable future). Anita had then learned that stringer is a term used on regional newspapers for the freelance journalists who fill up the pages of local news, that is to say, half the paper. Brief stories with photographs and the feel-good atmosphere of weekends with the family. It was not what she had hoped for but there was this business of for the moment, and there was also the business of proving herself.

  Over a year ago on the same floor, in the same glass office, Christian Voubert sees Anita for the first time after she has submitted a spontaneous job application.

  “This is a difficult time, and, well, you know, looking at you, now, I don’t know if you can write.”

  “I’ve already published articles in Claire magazine. I sent them with my résumé.”

  “Yes, yes, agreed. But, how can I put it? This is a daily newspaper, not a women’s magazine. And you don’t come from around here, do you?”

  “No.”

  “You see, that’s what I’m saying. Now, to be a stringer is to know the region. To go out and meet people. To take the pulse of the countryside, eat pork for breakfast and drink wine at ten in the morning. To be like doctors in the old days, you know …”

  Christian Voubert had sighed deeply as he gave her the bad news. (We don’t need anyone else at the moment, but I will not hesitate to contact you should the occasion arise.)

  Anita was watching him closely and was reminded of her father’s deep inhalations and exhalations when he was embarking on his daily yoga session. A big veranda, bougainvilleas, a lean dog with half-closed eyes, the dawn, a man doing his vipassana meditation, birds calling to one another in the trees, strange how memories creep in where nothing calls them forth.

  Did she give him a faint smile, there in that glass office? Did she relax a little? Did a hint of something touching and sincere appear in her face that caused a sudden shift in Christian Voubert’s resolve?

  “Anita, it’s your lucky day. We’re going to give you a few months’ trial. Agreed? You’ll be a stringer. That’s all I can offer you for the moment. Later on, we’ll see. You’ll have to prove yourself.”

  That evening, standing on a chair in front of Adam, with a rug draped around her like a toga, Anita had declaimed:

  Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears

  To be a stringer is to know the region

  To be a stringer is to take the pulse of the countryside

  Monsieur Voubert, my friends, tells us to eat pork for breakfast and drink wine in the morning

  And Monsieur Voubert is an honorable man …

  Adam had laughed until the tears came to his eyes.

  Anita was making a joke of it but she was too naive, too happy to read between the lines, to guess at Christian Voubert’s private thoughts as he wondered how long a woman like that would stick at it with that job.

  A woman like that was the sum total of prejudices, clichés, and impressions he had formed in his mind as a result of his meeting with Anita.

  A foreigner: she doesn’t know her way around and makes mistakes in French.

  A young mother: not always available and gets depressed.

  Married to an architect whose office is three streets away from the newspaper: a housewife looking for an occupation so as not to get even more depressed.

  Has lived in Paris: arrogant.

  Native of an island: lazy.

  But as Christian Voubert will discover, Anita is not a woman like that. She calls at the editorial office every Monday. The schedule for the day is posted at 10:00 a.m. and she comes in through the door at 10:07. The top lines on the schedule are devoted to the news stories that will occupy the front and back pages in the paper. Politics, social news, financial news, news in brief, environmental topics, culture. She reads through the topics, the names of the reporters, occasionally there is a note of the style of coverage or the angle the article will take.

  Lower down on the schedule there is a list of locales, with a note of the commune, the topic, the name of the stringer. There is never any note of the angle or the style. Anita looks through the topics to which no stringer has been assigned and every week she writes down a minimum of two and a maximum of five. She naturally has her own criteria—she only covers events that take place between 9:30 a.m. and 3:00 p.m., so she can drop Laura off at school and pick her up; she never works on Wednesdays because Laura is at home then; she notes down all the events happening on the weekend because that is when Adam takes over for her at home. Next she makes her way to Claire, the news editor. She is a good-natured, plump woman who talks fast and gives good advice. She is forever tossing her head backward to rearrange her pretty curls, which seem to be mounted on springs. A coquettish gesture on the verge of becoming a nervous tic, thinks Anita. Claire confirms the topics or not, decides which days the stories will appear, and Anita can begin the week.

  She accepts whatever falls to her equally calmly and seriously: the final interclub match between pétanque teams, a veterans’ reunion, the annual bazaar at a primary school, a miniconcert given by a Johnny Hallyday lookalike at an old people’s home, a performance of Antigone by a high school dramatic society, a day of regional cuisine, the deliberations of the jury for a “Houses in Bloom” competition.

  On her first time out, in a village where they were celebrating the birthday of a pair of ninety-year-old twins, she had failed to understand the looks she attracted, both surprised and questioning. People responded to her politely but warily. She had great difficulty in getting them to tell her stories about the two spinster ladies who had been born in this very village. The best she got was the grocer’s son telling her how they used to wash one another’s feet each morning. Twice the mayor asked her if she was indeed the person he had spoken to on the telephone the previous day and for how long she would be standing in for Georges (the regular stringer who was down with flu). She did not manage to take good group photographs, people kept drifting away as fast as they gathered. All she managed to take was a picture of the ninety-year-old ladies in profile, after they had blown out their candles, their faces swathed in a faint mist. Nobody offered her a piece of cake.

  There Anita was, all too visible, and yet appallingly invisible. She had reread her notes and reckoned that she would have enough to write two hundred and fifty words. She walked around the village, several small boys were playing a game of tag. Stone houses, lace curtains, spick and span alleyways, what are the lives of people here? What are they thinking about, those young men leaning against the wall of the town hall, their mopeds within easy reach, watching the celebration without taking part, with a mixture of scorn and derision in their eyes? She took several extra photographs, picked up a black pebble streaked with mauve, gathered
a few daisies from the roadside for Laura.

  When she got back to her car she caught her reflection in the window and suddenly she understood. She was not at all the person they had been expecting. The game she sometimes played with Laura came to mind: spot the odd one out. A vegetable among fruits, a pair of spectacles among pairs of shoes, a red flower in a yellow field. She was the stranger with dark skin (what to call it? black? brown?) among the whites.

  Anita got into her car but did not drive off right away. She had certainly found it difficult doing her work that day but she could not set aside the feeling of pure joy that had overcome her as she noted a few lines on her pad and the words had come to her naturally, authentically. She had felt capable of being in the moment while at the same time observing it. That instant in this village forgotten by the tourist routes was one of absolute truth. These winding lanes, which had followed the same course for hundreds of years, these stones, gleaming from being trodden underfoot, what do they tell and what effect do they have on people? Was this not just what she had wanted to do for so many years? To chronicle the ins and outs of the world? She could not give up so soon.

  To be sure, this was not the way she had imagined the profession. She remembered the editorial offices in Paris where she had done an internship and the somewhat unreal aspects of it that she had not particularly enjoyed at the time, but that, in the end, she occasionally missed a little, those extremely elegant and well shod young women who chose to call themselves “girls,” the assignations kept amid the hubbub of the city, the apartments smelling of coffee and beeswax, evenings spent quietly writing her article, in her studio apartment, in a café, anywhere at all, it did not matter, provided one was in Paris.