The List of My Desires

by Gregoire Delacourt

  I went to see my father.

  After asking who I was, he wanted news of Maman. I told him she was shopping, she’d look in a little later. I hope she’ll bring me my newspaper, he said, and some shaving foam, I’ve run out.

  I talked to him about the shop, and he asked me for the hundredth time if I owned it. He couldn’t get over it, he was so proud of me. Jo’s Haberdashery, formerly Maison Pillard. Jo’s Haberdashery, your name on a shop sign, Jo, fancy that! I’m so pleased for you. Then he raised his head and looked at me. Who are you?

  Who are you? Our six minutes were up.

  Jo was better. The Tamiflu, rest, the tagliatelle with spinach and fromage frais had got the better of his nasty flu. He stayed at home for several days doing a bit of DIY, and when he opened a Tourtel low-alcohol beer and switched the TV on one evening, I knew he was back to normal again. Life went on as usual, calm and quiet.

  In the following days, however, the haberdashery shop was never empty, and tengoldfingers now had over five thousand hits a day. For the first time in twenty years I ran out of casein, corozo and bakelite buttons, cutwork and bobbin lace, cross-stitch and sampler patterns as well as pompons. Or rather the pompon, the only one in stock, because I hadn’t sold any pompons for a year. I felt as if I were in the middle of a soppy Frank Capra film, and I can tell you that a bit of slush sometimes feels really good.

  When all that died down, Danièle, Françoise and I did up parcels of the blankets, sweaters and embroidered pillowcases that kind people had sent for Jo, and Danièle said she would take them to a charity shop run by the diocese of Arras.

  But the most important event in that period of our lives, the one that sent the twins into a two-day fit of hysterics, was the fact that the winning EuroMillions ticket had been sold in Arras. In Arras, good heavens, the arse-end of nowhere, it could have been us! they cried. Eighteen million euros, so OK, not a huge win like the seventy-five million won on a ticket bought in Franconville, but all the same, eighteen million! In the arse-end of nowhere!

  What sent them into even more of a flat spin, indeed left them practically apoplectic, was the fact that the holder of the winning ticket still hadn’t turned up.

  And now there were only four days left before the win was lost and the money went back into the jackpot.

  I don’t know how I knew, but I did.

  I knew, even without looking at the numbers, that it was me.

  One chance in seventy-six million, and it happened to me. I read the framed box showing the numbers in the Voix du Nord. They were all there.

  The 6, the 7, the 24, the 30, the 32. And lucky stars 4 and 5.

  A ticket bought in Arras in the Place des Héros. For a stake of two euros. Picked at random.

  18,547,301 euros and 28 centimes.

  I felt faint.

  Jo found me on the kitchen floor – just as I’d found Maman on the pavement thirty years ago.

  We were setting out to go shopping together when I realised that I’d left our shopping list on the kitchen table. I went back for it while Maman waited for me outside.

  When I went out again, at the very moment when I was stepping out into the street, I saw her looking at me with her mouth wide open, but no sound came out; her face was twisted, grimacing like the face of the horrible person in Munch’s picture The Scream, and she folded in on herself like an accordion. I lost my mother within four seconds. I ran to her, but it was too late.

  When someone’s dying, you always run to that person too late. As if by chance.

  There were people shouting, the sound of a car braking. Words seemed to be flowing out of my mouth like tears, stifling me.

  Then the damp patch appeared on her dress between her legs. It grew visibly, like a shameful tumour. I immediately felt the cold of a wing-beat in my throat, the heat of a scratching claw, and then, like the mouth of the person in the painting, like my mother’s mouth, mine opened, and a bird flew out from between my grotesque lips. In the open air it let out a terrifying cry; its chilling song.

  A song of death.

  Jo panicked. He thought I had that dreadful flu. He wanted to call Dr Caron, but I came back to my senses and reassured him. It’s nothing, I said, I didn’t have time for any lunch. Help me to get up, I’ll sit down for five minutes and then I’ll be all right, I’ll be fine. You’re so hot, he said, feeling my forehead. I’ll be fine, I tell you, and anyway I’m having my period, that’s why I’m hot.

  Period. The magic word. It puts most men off.

  I’ll warm up something for you, he suggested, opening the fridge. Unless you’d rather order a pizza. I smiled. My Jo. My dear Jo. Or we could eat out for once, I murmured. He smiled and got himself a Tourtel. I’ll put on a jacket, my beauty, and then I’m your man.

  We ate at the Vietnamese restaurant two streets away. There was hardly anyone there, and I wondered how the place kept going. I ordered a light soup with rice noodles (bun than), Jo ordered fried fish (cha ca), and I took his hand in mine the way I used to when we were engaged twenty years ago. Your eyes are shining, he whispered with a nostalgic smile.

  And if you could hear my heart beating, I thought, you’d be afraid it was going to explode.

  Our orders arrived quite quickly. I hardly touched my soup, and Jo looked anxious. Are you sure you’re all right? I cast down my eyes.

  There’s something I have to tell you, Jo.

  He must have sensed that it was important. He put his chopsticks down and wiped his lips with the cotton napkin – he always made an effort in a restaurant – and took my hand. His dry lips were shaking. Tell me it’s nothing serious? You’re not ill, are you, Jo? Because . . . because if anything happened to you it would be the end of the world . . . Tears came to my eyes, and at the same time I began laughing, a restrained laugh that sounded like happiness. I’d die without you, Jo. No, Jo, it’s nothing serious. Don’t worry, I whispered. I just wanted to tell you I love you.

  And I swore to myself that no sum of money would be worth losing all this for.

  We made love very gently that night.

  Was it because of my pallor, my new fragility? Was it because of the unreasonable fear he’d had of losing me a few hours earlier in the restaurant? Was it because we hadn’t made love for quite a while, and he needed time to relearn the geography of desire, tame his masculine forcefulness? Was it because he loved me enough to rate my pleasure above his own?

  That night I didn’t know. I do know now. But oh God, it was a beautiful night.

  It brought to mind the first nights lovers spend together, nights when you’d be happy to die at dawn, nights that care only for themselves, far from the world, its noise, its nastiness. And then, as time goes on, the noise and nastiness come your way and it is difficult to wake up, the disillusionment is cruel. Desire is always followed by boredom. And only love can defeat boredom. Love with a capital L; we all dream of it.

  I remember crying at the end of Albert Cohen’s novel Belle du Seigneur. I even felt angry when the lovers threw themselves out of the window of the Ritz in Geneva. I threw my own copy of the book in the rubbish bin, and in its brief fall it took the capital L away with it.

  But that night it seemed to have come back.

  At dawn Jo went out. For the last month he’d been on a course from seven-thirty to nine every morning, in order to become a foreman and get closer to his dreams.

  But now, my love, I thought, I can make your dreams come true; they don’t cost as much as all that. A flat-screen Sony 52-inch TV set: 1,400 euros. A Seiko watch: 400 euros. A new fireplace in the sitting room: 500 euros plus 1,500 euros for fitting it. A Porsche Cayenne: 89,000 euros. And your complete set of James Bond films, all 22 of them: 170 euros.

  This is dreadful. I’m thinking I hardly know what.

  Whatever’s happening to me, it scares me silly.

  I have an appointment at the French Gaming headquarters in Boulogne-Billancourt, up in Paris.

  I caught an early train this morning. I t
old Jo I had to see my suppliers Synextile, Eurotessile and Filagil Sabarent. I’ll be home late, I told him, don’t wait up for me, there’s a chicken breast in the fridge and some ratatouille that you can warm up.

  He went to the station with me and then hurried to the factory, to get there in time for his training course.

  In the train I think of the twins’ dreams, their disappointment every Friday evening when the balls fall and the numbers on them are not the numbers that Françoise and Danièle have chosen so carefully, thinking hard about them, assessing them, weighing them up.

  I think of the readers of tengoldfingers, those five thousand Princess Auroras who dream of pricking their finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel, going to sleep and being woken by a kiss.

  I think of Papa’s six-minute loops of time. Of the vanity of everything. Of what money can never make up for.

  I think of all that Maman didn’t have, the things she dreamed of that I could now give her: a trip up the Nile, a Saint Laurent jacket, a cleaning lady, a Kelly bag, a ceramic crown for her tooth instead of the horrible gold one that spoilt her wonderful smile, an apartment in the Rue des Teinturiers, an evening in Paris at the Moulin Rouge and the Brasserie Mollard with its delicious oysters, grandchildren. She used to say, grandmothers make the best mothers, a mother has too much to do to be a woman. I miss my mother as much as I did on the day she collapsed. I feel sad whenever I think of her. I always cry. Who must I give the money to so that she can come back, all eighteen million five hundred and forty-seven thousand, three hundred and one euros and twenty-eight centimes of it?

  I think of myself, of all that will now be possible for me, and I don’t want any of it. I don’t want what all the money in the world can buy. But does everyone feel like that?

  When I arrive, the receptionist is charming.

  Ah, so you’re the one who bought the ticket in Arras. And she asks me to wait in a small sitting room, offers me magazines to read, a tea or a coffee. I say: No thank you, I’ve already drunk three coffees this morning, and at once I feel stupid and provincial, a real idiot. A little later she comes back and takes me to the office of a man called Hervé Meunier, who welcomes me with open arms.

  Well, you certainly had us worried, he says, laughing, but here you are at last, that’s the main thing. Sit down, please. Make yourself comfortable, we want you to feel at home. My new home is a big office with a thick carpet; I unobtrusively slip off one of my flat-heeled shoes to let my foot stroke the pile, sink a little way into it. Gentle air conditioning keeps the temperature comfortable, and outside the windows there are other big office blocks. They look like huge pictures, Hoppers in black and white.

  This is the point of departure for new lives. Here, face to face with Hervé Meunier, people receive the talisman that will change everything for them.

  The Holy Grail.

  A cheque made out in their name. A cheque made out to Jocelyne Guerbette, for the sum of 18,547,301 euros 28 centimes.

  He asks me for the lottery ticket and my ID. He checks them. He makes a short phone call. The cheque will be ready in a few minutes’ time – would you like a coffee? We have the entire Nespresso range. This time I don’t say anything. Just as you please. Personally I’m hooked on the Livanto blend because of its smooth, rounded, velvety aroma. Well, while we’re waiting, he goes on, I’d like you to meet a colleague of mine. In fact, you must meet my colleague.

  The colleague is a psychologist. I didn’t know that having eighteen million euros was an illness. But I make no comment.

  The psychologist turns out to be a woman. She looks like Emmanuelle Béart; like her, she has Daisy Duck lips, lips so swollen, says my Jo, that they’d explode if she bit them. She is wearing a black suit that emphasises her plastic look (as in plastic surgery), she offers me a bony hand and says this won’t take long. In fact it takes her forty minutes to explain that what’s happened to me is both a stroke of good luck and a great misfortune. I’m rich. I’ll be able to buy anything I want. But I must tread carefully. I mustn’t be too trusting. Because when you have money, she explains, all of a sudden people love you. Total strangers love you. They’ll ask you to marry them. They’ll send you poems. Love letters. Hate letters. They’ll ask you for money to nurse a little girl whose name is Jocelyne, like yours, and who has leukaemia. They’ll send you pictures of an ill-treated dog and ask you to be its godmother, its saviour; they’ll promise you a kennel in your name, dog biscuits, dog food, a dog show. The mother of a child with a muscle-wasting disease will send you an upsetting video of her little boy falling in a stairwell and hitting his head on the wall, and ask you for money to install a lift in their apartment block. Another woman will send you photos of her own mother dribbling and incontinent, and ask you with grief-stricken tears to help pay for her to have a nurse at home. She’ll even send you a form so that you can deduct tax from your donation. A woman called Guerbette living in Pointe-à-Pitre in Guadeloupe will discover that she’s your cousin, and ask you for the money for an air fare so that she can come and see you, and then money for a studio flat, and then more money so that she can bring over a friend who’s a healer and will help you to lose those extra kilos. And I haven’t even mentioned the bankers. Sugary-sweet, all of a sudden. Madame Guerbette here, bowing and scraping there. I have tax-exempt investments for you, they’ll say, invest overseas, invest in the tax-deductible restoration of old buildings as specified in the Malraux Law, invest in fine wines. In gold, in property, in precious stones. They won’t mention the wealth taxes. Fiscal controls. Or their own fees.

  I know the illness the psychologist is talking about. It’s the illness that afflicts people who don’t win, they’re trying to inoculate me with their own fears like a vaccine against evil. I protest. Some people have survived, after all. And I’ve only won eighteen million. What about people who have won a hundred, fifty, even thirty million? Exactly, replies the psychologist, looking mysterious, exactly.

  Now, and only now, do I accept a coffee. I think the blend is Livato, or Livatino maybe, a well-rounded flavour, in any case. With one sugar, thank you. There have been many suicides, she tells me. Many, many cases of depression, many divorces, much hatred and tragedy. We’ve heard of knife wounds. Injuries from shower-heads. Burns inflicted with butane gas cylinders. Families torn apart, destroyed. Deceitful daughters-in-law, alcoholic sons-in-law. Contract killers, just like in bad films. I knew of one stepfather who promised one thousand five hundred euros to anyone who would eliminate his wife, she said. She’d won a little less than seventy thousand euros. A son-in-law who cut off two fingers to get a credit-card code. Forged signatures, forged documents. Money drives people mad, Madame Guerbette, it’s behind four out of five crimes. One out of two cases of depression. I have no advice to give you, she concludes, only this information. We have a psychological support service if you would like to make use of it. She puts down her coffee cup; she hasn’t so much as moistened her Daisy Duck lips with the drink. Have you told your close family? No, I say. Excellent, she says. We can help you to break the news to them, find words to minimise the shock, because believe me, it will be a shock. Do you have children? I nod. Well, they won’t just see you as a mother now, they’ll see you as a rich mother and they’ll want their share. And then there’s your husband; let’s suppose he has an ordinary kind of job. He’ll want to give it up and devote himself to managing your fortune, I say yours because from now on it will be his as well since he loves you, oh yes, he’ll tell you how much he loves you in the days and months to come, he’ll give you flowers – here I interrupt her to say I’m allergic to flowers – he’ll give you . . . give you chocolates, give you I don’t know what, she goes on, but anyway he’ll spoil you, he’ll lull you into a false sense of security, he’ll poison you. Because this is a script written in advance, Madame Guerbette, written long ago, greed burns everything in its path. Think of the Borgias, the Agnellis, or more recently the Bettencourt family.

  Then she makes me assur
e her that I’ve taken in everything she’s said. She gives me a small business card with four emergency numbers on it. Don’t hesitate to call us, Madame Guerbette, and don’t forget, from now on you’re not going to be loved for yourself alone. Then she takes me back to Hervé Meunier’s office.

  He is smiling broadly, flashing his teeth.

  Those teeth remind me of the teeth of the salesman who sold Jo and me our first used car, a blue 1983 Ford Escort, one Sunday in March in the Leclerc shopping-centre car park. It was raining.

  Your cheque, says Hervé Meunier. Eighteen million five hundred and forty-seven thousand, three hundred and one euros and twenty-eight centimes, he announces slowly, as if reading out a sentence in court. Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer a bank transfer?

  ‘I’m sure.’

  The fact is, I’m not sure of anything now.

  My train for Arras leaves in seven hours’ time.

  I could always ask Hervé Meunier, since he has suggested it, to get my ticket changed and have a seat reserved on an earlier train, but it’s a fine day. I’d like to walk for a while. I need some fresh air. Daisy Duck has delivered me a knockout blow. I can’t believe that there’s a murderer, or even a liar, still less a thief inside my Jo. Or that my children will look at me with eyes like Uncle Scrooge McDuck’s in the comics I read as a child – big, greedy eyes with dollar signs leaping out of them whenever he saw something he wanted.

  Greed burns everything in its path, she said.

  Hervé Meunier goes out to the street with me. He wishes me luck. You look like a good person, Madame Guerbette. A good person, my foot. A person in possession of eighteen million euros, yes. A fortune that all his ingratiating ways will never bring him. It’s odd how servants often give the impression of owning their masters’ wealth. Sometimes with such brilliant skill that you let yourself become their servant. Servant of the servant. Don’t make too much of it, Monsieur Meunier, I say, withdrawing my hand, which he is holding with damp persistence in his own. He lowers his eyes and goes back into the building, opens the revolving door with a swipe card. He’s returning to his office where none of the fixtures and fittings belong to him, not even the thick carpet or the vista of office blocks like pictures on the wall. He’s like those bank clerks who count thousands of notes that only burn their fingers.