Elle

by Philippe Djian

  I pick up Marty and watch them go.

  I stay alone through the weekend.

  I’m weary. I haven’t gotten over this thing; it has affected me more deeply than I allowed and, any way I look at it, leaves me torn and wounded. Following that tragic event, I dedicated every ounce of energy I had to Vincent. I remember that the first thing I did, wearing nothing but a blouse torn to shreds and panty hose rolled up in a ball at my ankle, was to unceremoniously shove him into the kitchen to shield him from the terrifying spectacle of the body in convulsion, the skull smashed, blood oozing through the ski mask like cream through a sieve. I hardly took any time for myself, and getting my head back together was not an easy task. I must have a magnesium deficiency—and a lot of other deficiencies, truth be told.

  I don’t want to talk about it. I have been missing Irène. Bad time for this falling-out with Anna, but Robert had become too insistent so I had no choice but to tell her what had been going on behind her back. Well, whatever else you say, I no longer have my friend, I no longer have a number I can dial when things go wrong, or when they go right, for that matter, so that when I reach for my phone I wind up grabbing my lemonade, while Marty painstakingly jumps onto my lap—it looks to me like his paw hurts—and turns around on my belly before settling down, getting a half smile out of me because he doesn’t usually take these liberties. But hey, I’m open to change.

  Richard apparently got into a fight with Robert in a bar a few days after my confession. I didn’t want the details. And, though there is no correlation, things are better now between Richard and me—he’s single again, so that probably has something to do with it—but I can’t find a good reason to call him right now, so I don’t. I remain alone, listening to the wind in the trees, the birds, feeling the daylight fade behind the thin veil of my closed eyelids. I know he, too, is having a hard time getting over the fact that Robert and I slept together for years and I know he’s hoping to get something out of it, to get me to give up on some of the things I blame him for, especially his slapping me, but I’m afraid that may not be possible.

  Just yesterday, we once again had a squabble about that. According to him, I am frightfully stubborn and hard, not to say cruel, and it’s downright scary. The exchange got fairly testy when he made a remark about my refusal to grant my father one final visit—a perfect example of my outrageous inflexibility—but I couldn’t listen to him judge my behavior regarding an old man who was rotting in prison, so I put earbuds in and started listening to Peter Broderick’s “Everything I Know” while watching his muted lips move and I waited for him to talk himself out and, being ill-tempered by nature, refused his invitation to have dinner in town. Even now, he just doesn’t understand that you can’t always make a separate peace, that there is a line that must never be crossed, that there is such a thing as damnation.

  The ordeal I went through over the winter gives him cause to go easy on me, as much as possible, not to upset me too much, but if he knew what was really going on, if he knew what a horrendous act I had actually been playing at, if he knew just how different things were from what they appeared, then I wager that he—and everyone else, for that matter, not to speak of Vincent—would change their view of things.

  The very thought of it makes my throat close up a little and so makes it hard to breathe.

  My share of the blame is enormous. I thank heaven that Patrick really did rape me, at least once, or else the guilt would have driven me mad, and I have held on to that thin thread up until now, that one thought, that he had paid for a sin that he nevertheless did commit. Well, I couldn’t say if this was enough, but it was all I had and it was a real nightmare, a curse. Marty purrs softly on my belly. The weather is fair as evening settles. I can hear barking in the distance. I’ll go in soon.

  Looking back, I don’t quite understand how I could ever have played such a horrendous game—unless the sex explains everything, but I’m not really sure. When you get right down to it, I never thought of myself as such a strange person, so complicated, at once so strong and so weak. It’s astonishing. The experience of solitude and passing time is astonishing. The experience of oneself. Bolder women than I have wavered—though I did more than waver, to be sure. At times I see our encounters again, watch them for some reason, as if floating a few feet above those two wild beasts waging battle on the floor below, and I am blown away by my performance, by my fury, my screams of sheer terror—which apparently prevented us from hearing Vincent come in and which convinced him that at the very least I was going to get my throat slit—and nearly moved to tears as I buckle under the sustained assault, trembling like a waif from having come too much or too hard. So strong and so weak.

  When I stand up, Marty falls to the ground. He’s an old cat with slowing reflexes and I wasn’t looking out for him. I tell him I’m sorry and lead him to the kitchen where I cut him a piece of melon. I see him stagger into the room, obviously still half asleep. He had run off after the tragedy and I didn’t see him again for about ten days. Every evening I would go to the window and call him for minutes and minutes. He’s the only one who knows the truth, the only witness to everything, and that’s why he is so dear to me, so precious. I didn’t tell the detectives anything interesting, and I told Richard that I couldn’t know if Patrick and the man who raped me the first time were one and the same because I never saw the latter’s face, but I didn’t think so because Patrick was taller and more athletic. The detectives left and I requested that this subject never again be broached with me or with my son, that the whole episode be considered closed, once and for all. Marty looks at me. I don’t know what he wants. I bend down to pet him. He perks up. He is my proud and silent accomplice.

  I wake up in the middle of the night for no good reason. I don’t turn on the lights but I wait a few minutes in total silence. Then I go back to sleep.

  In the morning, his heart is no longer beating, he’s dead, he has given up the ghost on the rug beside my bed. Curtains are not enough—the sun is majestic. I get up and close the shutters to maintain a favorable half-light, then I go back to bed. I don’t look at him, don’t touch him. I just leave him where he is and cry over his departure and all the rest, noiselessly and continuous into midafternoon, my T-shirt and my sheets soaked as if a summer shower had surprised us in the middle of a bad dream.

  I no longer have a single tear left when I see to him, scooping him into a hatbox I fished out of the attic, left over from when Irène was twenty. I add a few personal items—a little silver bell, a brush, a rabbit-fur mouse. I bury him at the foot of a tree in the garden.

  The phone rings but I don’t answer it.

  I have taken care of Vincent, supported him, protected him, relieved him of his guilt. I have not forgotten him for a second since it happened. I slept with my bedroom door open for days, so that if something was wrong I would hear it. I also took care of Richard when Hélène dumped him in the spring for a young screenwriter, going out to bars with him for a few drinks when he felt alone and needed to talk. But the remedies I employ for others have no effect on me. My speeches are of no help at all. So strong and so weak.

  The next day, I go to the QuickBurger to see my son in his new uniform and I tell him Marty died and he asks me if he went peacefully. But he doesn’t look too terribly unhappy in his new position and starts threading through the tables once again, smiling left and right, and yet later on Anna will tell me that he called her after I left to say that I wasn’t doing well, that I looked, to use his exact words, “like death warmed over.”

  Since I’m not too far away, I go visit Irène. My father is lying next to her but I pay no attention. I flower only one half of the grave site and I never speak to him. I pretend he doesn’t exist.

  “Marty is dead,” I say. The sky is so blue you might expect to see palm trees sprouting up all over the place. The cemetery is empty. I last a few minutes. Then my lips begin to tremble, I mumble, and I promptly get out of there. And I can hear her calling after me,
“What a chickenshit you turn out to be, darling!”

  Anna parks outside my house at dusk. I watch her get out of the car and walk up the path toward me while I rock the glider ever so slightly and it makes a long creaking sound.

  It’s still very hot and her arms are bare.

  “Marty is dead,” I say as she walks up.

  “Yes, I know,” she answers, sitting down next to me. She puts her hand on mine. It’s been at least three months since we last touched one another, during which we have had a strictly business relationship. “I was thinking maybe I should rent a room out to a student,” I say.

  The moon is bright. On the other side of the road, a few hundred feet away, Patrick’s house is like a shining toy placed on a silvery lawn. They have mowed it, trimmed the hedges, cleaned the windows, replaced the water heater, but the woman from the agency could turn the place into sugar and gingerbread and I suppose she still couldn’t sell it.

  “Why don’t you rent me the room?” she suggests, never taking her eyes from the view.

  “Oh,” I say, with the slightest of nods.

  PHILIPPE DJIAN is the award-winning author of more than twenty novels, including the best seller 37°2 le matin, published in English as Betty Blue. Elle is the fifth of his novels to be adapted for the screen. Published in French under its original title “Oh…,” this best-selling novel received the 2012 Prix Interallié.

  MICHAEL KATIMS is a Brooklyn-born screenwriter and translator. He worked with Roman Polanski to bring Yasmina Reza’s play to the big screen in Carnage, and with Jacques Perrin on the U.S. version of Oceans. His subtitling credits include Dany Boon’s Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis (Welcome to the Sticks) and Raymond Depardon’s Les Habitants.