I raise my eyes. All around me, young people are devouring Big Macs dripping lettuce and pickles, giving only a vague glance at the guy absorbed in his papers as his fries grow cold. I need to clear my head of all the memories crowding in in response, which are scattering my thoughts, mixing up ages and places … I have to put them back in order, so that I can answer point for point. I return to the first page and, pen squeezed between my thumb and the bandage, I begin writing down the course of my life, my truth about the minor details and key events.
Half an hour later, I’ve filled the backs of the report’s three pages. And, while I’m still sure of myself as to the content, I’ve begun to have doubts about the form. The disproportion is glaring. I am extremely precise about unimportant points, and suddenly there are three years that I don’t know how to fill. And that’s not all. To show that he’s earned his fee, the detective has noted as an addendum the date corresponding to the national debt that I see in my dream. It’s October second of last year. The date Liz mentioned this morning when I brought up her scar. And I can’t find a single thing that I did on October second. It’s a complete blank.
Perhaps it’s still the effects of the coma, the excess of glutamate that has hypertrophied certain memories at the expense of others. Or just a lack of attention, moral wear, the routine in which everyone ends up shutting himself, even those who think they’re sheltered behind a passion. My passion for plants has protected only my capacity for work; emotionally, my life is a disaster under an orderly facade, a banal failure, a sum total of misery that I’d be better off forgetting.
I push away the papers, heartsick. I no longer have the strength or the will to go surf the internet to support my arguments, prove my good faith, denounce the lies … Why not simply let go, draw a line through this waste, start my life over somewhere else – or throw myself without remorse into the Seine, where I should have stayed? Everyone is lying to me, no one needs me, I’m a nuisance to everyone, and I no longer have the heart to fight.
In the midst of these customers who walk around with their trays, waiting for me to give up my spot, one face takes shape, one voice holds me back. The only person who believed in me, who held out her hand to me without second thoughts, who was kind to me for nothing. I go downstairs to the toilets, pick up the wall phone under the cries of a baby being changed. Muriel answers on the second ring.
‘Martin, at last! I’ve been waiting two hours for you to call! I’ve got some great news!’
I’m about to share her joy, but she continues:
‘I got hold of your assistant, he finally answered …’
‘Rodney Cole?’
‘And to top it off, he speaks French. I couldn’t believe it! He was floored to hear what’s happened to you. He’s like you, he can’t understand what your wife is up to, but it seems she’s been in a state of depression for months. He’s a really nice guy. He said, “I’m putting together all the proof that Martin is who he says he is and I’m taking the next plane.” He’ll be here in the morning.’
‘Wait, wait a minute, Muriel … You described what I look like?’
‘Of course! And the other shithead as well. Listen, you’re not going to start having second thoughts just when we’re finally getting proof, are you?’
Her ‘we’ echoes in the noise of traffic on the other end of the line. I shut my eyes to block the tears.
‘I get off at four. I’ll pick up Sébastien at school and we’ll meet up at my house, okay? You still have the address?’
‘Yes. And what about Rodney?’
‘Tomorrow morning, nine o’clock, at the Sofitel near Porte Maillot. Is that all right?’
I murmur my thanks, hang up, and lean my head against the wall. I’ve spent so many hours vainly struggling against this absurdity that, now that reality is finally siding with me, I have a hard time believing it. Why should that upstart Rodney, with his prudent vigilance, his calculated slowness, suddenly go through so much trouble for me, when he didn’t even recognize my picture? That said, I don’t recall his name being mentioned, other than in my list of people to contact.
I run back upstairs, feverishly search through the papers I left on the table. At no point does the investigator specify just who at Yale was shown my photo. No names, just ‘his colleagues in the botany department’, ‘the dean of his department’ – every time, the moron went to the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies on Prospect Street, which is vying with us for research credits. They obviously mistook him for a reporter, and no one at Forestry was about to talk me up. They even fed him the line that the Environmental Science Center was only a year old, to deter him from going there to pursue his research. The dean must have wowed him with his prestigious seniority, the dusty credit of his archives, the success levels of his privileged students, his corny lecture program, and the idiot was completely dazzled.
I fold the sheets with a vengeful smile, imagining Muriel’s reactions to this report, this monument to deception and ineptitude that ultimately pays me homage by trying to wipe me out. I’m eager to see her, to find myself in her eyes as she sees me. Too bad she isn’t a bit sexier; the desire left in me by the shop girl at Tendance D rises in my throat, with all these high-school girls with their Big Macs chattering around me. So many years of frustration, scruples, repressed desire under the elms of the Old Campus, when the curvy silhouettes of the co-eds and their well-bred smiles stood out against the Gothic facades … All those temptations overcome to remain true to my image as a respectable professor. Whatever the outcome of my present situation, I no longer want any part of that life.
10
‘You know when I knew for sure you were the real one? When you told us about the hydrangeas identifying the killer. And then when the other guy talked about his childhood. He was just reciting his memories, but you were re-living them in your eyes: your father trimming shrubs into Mickey Mouse, the hot-dogs, the Figure 8 … I’m so happy, Martin! You want some jam?’
It’s beautiful to see a woman being reborn. She has been transformed by my story, by the role she’s played in it, by the trust she was right to place in me against all odds. I don’t object. The investigator’s report has stayed in my pocket. I see her become almost pretty, because for the first time in her life she hasn’t been jerked around, and the wrinkles around her lips have disappeared under her smile, her enthusiasm, and the hunks of baguette she’s sharing with me.
Her son watches us, perplexed. We have invited ourselves into his after-school snack, on the kitchen table. I’ve discovered a ravenous hunger in myself and we’ve already gobbled down an entire loaf of bread, alternating butter, marmalade, pâté, and Nutella. All the doubts and anxieties I’ve introduced into this manless apartment on the third floor of a miserable high-rise – what do they matter? This evening, I’ve decided to be the man that Muriel imagines.
‘Tell Seb about your job.’
I like the informality of her tone, which comes spontaneously now that she’s sure about me. I tell Sébastien how I grew tomatoes in the desert without a drop of water, just by playing music for them. I had transposed into sound frequencies the quantum signal emitted by their proteins, and I blasted them with it from amplifiers, in the form of a vegetal rap that acted like a growth hormone. His eyes widen above his bowl as his hot chocolate grows cold. He’s a boy caught between childhood and acne, with a black fuzz connecting his eyebrows and his kid’s voice still intact.
‘I’ve been recording him,’ Muriel confides with a sad smile, as soon as he’s left the kitchen to go play on his computer. ‘I tape his voice all the time, without telling him. I want to hold onto it. His friends’ voices are already breaking – it’s horrible.’
‘He seems like a sweet kid.’
‘He’s incredibly gifted, but lousy in school. He finds it boring. But he always comes in first in the IQ tests. And because of that, he gets beaten up by everybody and falls even more behind. I don’t know how he’s going to turn out. I don’t ha
ve enough money to put him in a private school.’
I nod gravely. I like this life around me, this concrete life, thick, enclosed, this mix of insignificant little dramas and daily wear and tear, without horizons or false promises. A life of trimesters and months’ ends, encircled solitude, miles driven in isolation and time spent waiting at airports, passengers taken on and empty return trips. A life of hours stolen from work to devote them to the kids, a sacrifice without issue, a cause lost in advance.
Her daughter arrives. Seventeen, tall and pretty, detached, with a distant air but a frank gaze. Indifferent and polite. Her name is Morgane, and she smells of ammonia, permanents, and synthetic lilac. An apprentice hairdresser. She downs an apple juice with her back against the fridge, lets us finish our snack with a ‘ciao’, and heads into her room to listen to techno.
Muriel watches me eat, cheek in her hand.
‘So, this is my life,’ she comments soberly. ‘I adore them, but you did a rotten thing to me. Since yesterday, I can’t stop thinking about how I’d react if I came home one evening to find another woman in my place.’
‘There’s always a way to prove who you are, Muriel.’
‘Yeah, right – I’d wish her good luck and be out that door like a bat out of hell!’
She snorts with laughter while biting her lips, waves her hand to annul the blasphemy, and finishes her tea with a grimace.
‘I never have time in my life to just sit still. And so much the better, I guess. A little glass of Cinzano?’
Without transition, we push away our cups and move on to the aperitif. She tells me about her childhood, her marriage, her divorce. None of it is interesting, all of it can be predicted from the start, but the rage to try to climb out of it all alone, to spare her children what she has lived through, the energy spent for nothing, give this whole banal wasteland the dimensions of a Greek tragedy.
The clock hits the hour and her kid comes back in to ask when dinner is. She tells him to fend for himself; this is her night off. I offer to take them to a restaurant and they look at me as if I were from Mars. Morgane, telephone glued to her ear, comes in to announce she’s spending the night at Virginie’s. Her mother holds out her hand; she hands over the phone with a sigh, turning on her heels. Muriel verifies the alibi, hangs up, shrugs her shoulders, saying that in any case she’s been on the pill for six months, and what’s the use of going to bed early to be well rested for a job you can’t stand?
‘Pick out something from the freezer,’ she says to her son as she finishes off her third Cinzano.
I ask her what Rodney’s voice sounded like on the phone.
‘Normal. He has a lot of respect for you, in any case. He must have asked me twenty times how you were taking it, if you were holding up, what you were planning to do about your wife …’
‘You talked to him on his cell?’
‘I redialed the number in the call log. So what are you going to do about your wife? And the people who are doing this to you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Anyway …’
She leaves her sentence unfinished above her glass. The beginnings of drunkenness lessen the euphoria, pull her away from my story, push her further into a reality that she will never escape once my problem is solved. Tomorrow I’ll have proof of my existence, I’ll head off to do what I have to do, and for her there will be nothing new anymore … I can follow all these thoughts on her face, between the uneven locks sticking out of her hair clips. I’ve been a blast of wind through her life, a rush of madness, a burst of folly, and now everything is about to settle back into place, only worse.
She stretches a hand out to the bottle, knocking over her glass. I jump up too late. She says she’s sorry, tells me where the bathroom is, plunges her head into her crossed arms.
I exit the room out of tact. Morgane is putting on makeup in front of the drugstore mirror; she says to come in, I won’t bother her. I go to turn on the faucet, dab at the stains on my jacket. She looks at the bandages peeling off my right hand.
‘Does that hurt?’
‘It’s nothing, it’s healing all by itself.’
She draws a line with her eyeliner pencil, advises me to use a poultice made of bread dough and sea salt.
‘My dad’s with a woman who has horses. When I went to their place, I used to fall all the time. Sea salt is the bomb for edemas.’
I thank her.
‘You known Mom a long time?’
Perhaps Muriel didn’t tell them about our accident. I answer, ‘Yes.’ And it’s true that part of me could have known her at twenty, led a similar existence, started this kind of family … Our points of departure are very similar.
‘You seem to be good for her.’
She attacks the other eye, asks if we’re just friends. I nod while rubbing the fabric with soap. A telephone rings in the other room.
‘She’s really great, you know? My dad did a number on her. Since then we’re all she’s got. I’m sick of seeing her by herself.’
I concentrate on the spots on my jacket. She puts down her eyeliner pencil, comes closer to get a tube from the sink.
‘Don’t you like her?’
I return her gaze as she looks hard at my silence. There is a real reproach in her eyes, a genuine admiration for the mother she must have hated before coming to understand her.
‘Sure I like her, but …’
Her lips purse at my ellipsis. Then, with a sigh, she removes her T-shirt and unbuttons her jeans. With her breasts bared, she goes to choose a dress from the closet, which she puts on facing away from me.
‘Well, see you,’ she says, turning back at the door with a smile.
I remain frozen in the middle of the tile floor, dumbfounded by that gesture, her tactful abruptness, the way she used her body to arouse my desire for her mother.
‘Martin!’
Muriel calls to me against the sound of the apartment door slamming. I join her in the living room. She’s standing against the bookshelves, her phone at her ear.
‘Thanks, I’ll tell him. Love to Ginette, and get some rest. That was Robert,’ she says, hanging up. ‘The friend who lent me his taxi. He just got back from vacation and he called the cops. They found the truck that ran us into the river. At the bottom of a garbage dump in the Eure-et-Loir. And guess what? It was stolen!’
She’s thrilled. She hopes the fact that she refused right of way to a stolen truck will help with the insurance and license revocation. I don’t respond. I stand there, pondering the old, damaged books lined up on the shelves. Something stirs in my memory, which I try to isolate – a regret, a loss, an association of ideas … I don’t know if the connection is with Muriel’s words or with the smell of basement and damp leather permeating the room.
‘Inherited from my parents,’ she says, following my gaze. ‘The entire history of world religions since people first invented God as an excuse to beat the crap out of each other. They’re dust collectors and full of germs, but I can’t bring myself to chuck them out. My folks were so proud of them. Memory really sucks.’ She uncorks a bottle of white, then continues, ‘When you came to, I thought you’d be a total amnesiac. I said to myself, what luck.’
Sébastien brings us square fish with soggy breadcrumbs and some kind of tomato roughage, which we eat at the coffee table while watching the news. Floods, peace plans, assassinations, soccer, an oil slick, the official visit of the American president, the British queen’s woes. Muriel fumes about the traffic jams, lists the month’s nuisances: three heads of state, twelve demonstrations, the closing of the riverside lanes … You can’t even get around Paris anymore. And to top it off, the mayor is cementing the bus lanes; now the taxis can’t even pull out when a delivery truck is in the way. I listen distractedly, grunt agreement as I eat.
‘What are you thinking about, Martin? You look like something’s bothering you.’
‘Not really, I was just wondering why we took the Seine road to go to the airport. I’m startin
g to learn my way around Paris, and … well, it’s not the most direct route.’
She stares at me, looking tense. I pretend to forget about it by concentrating on the weather forecast. I wouldn’t want her to think I was accusing her of taking a roundabout way just to pad the fare.
‘What do you mean, “not the most direct”?’
‘Nothing. It’s just that taking the Seine to go to Charles-de-Gaulle from my place …’
‘From your place? You mean Rue de Duras? That’s not where I picked you up!’
‘Then where did you pick me up?’
She snatches up the remote, mutes the sound.
‘In Courbevoie.’
‘Where?’
‘Courbevoie,’ she repeats, as if it were self-evident. ‘Boulevard Saint-Denis.’
I feel like the wind has been knocked out of me.
‘But … what was I doing all the way out there?’
Her gesture indicates that I’m the one who should know. I rack my brain, but come up blank.
‘Are you sure?’
She confirms it, mollified, and asks if this is the first memory that hasn’t come back to me. I remain vague.
‘We’re watching M6,’ her son decides, picking up the remote.
He surfs through the channels, turns the volume back up. Muriel reminds him that he has school at eight o’clock. He settles between us on the yellow couch, and we watch a group of girls who are getting coached on how to sing and dishing dirt on each other for the camera, each one trying to have the others eliminated by the TV audience so she’ll become the newest pop idol. The kid gobbles up this phantasmagoria, vibrating with enthusiasm for an androgynous-looking black girl and calling the others skanks. When his sobbing candidate is wiped out in the next phone poll, he flings down the remote and leaves the room. I stay behind with Muriel, an empty cushion between us. I’ve spent the program replaying the entire scene in my head: we arrived at Rue de Duras, I was treated at the pharmacy, I joined Liz at France Télécom, we went to sit in the café with our suitcases, I discovered I’d forgotten my laptop, I ran after Muriel’s taxi, yelling for it to stop … It’s true that I can’t visualize the surroundings at that point, but how could I possibly have ended up in Courbevoie?
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