The List of My Desires

by Gregoire Delacourt

  My two live children and our little angel were my joy and my sorrow; I still tremble for Romain, but I know that on the day he is hurt and there’s no one else to tend his wounds, he’ll come back here. To my arms.

  I loved my life. I loved the life that Jo and I had made. I loved the way that ordinary things became beautiful in our eyes. I loved our simple, comfortable, friendly house. I loved our garden, our modest little vegetable plot, the pathetic tomatoes on the vine it gave us. I loved hoeing the frozen ground with my husband. I loved our dreams of next spring. I was waiting with all the enthusiasm of a young mother to be a grandmother some day; I tried my hand at lavish cakes, gourmet pancakes, rich chocolate desserts. I wanted to have the scents of my own childhood in our house, with different photographs on the wall.

  One day I was planning to convert a ground-floor room for Papa, I would have looked after him, and every six minutes I’d have invented a new life for him.

  I loved my thousands of Isoldes who read tengoldfingers. I loved their kindness, calm and powerful like a river flowing along, a regenerating force like a mother’s love. I loved that community of women, our vulnerabilities, our strengths.

  I loved my life deeply, but the moment that I won the lottery I knew that the money would wreck it all, and for what?

  For a bigger vegetable plot? Larger, redder tomatoes? A new variety of tangerine? A larger, more luxurious house; a whirlpool bath? A Porsche Cayenne? A round-the-world cruise? A gold watch, diamonds? Enhanced breasts? A nose job? No, no and no again. I already had what money can’t buy but can only destroy.

  Happiness.

  My happiness, anyway. Mine. With all its flaws, its banalities, its petty drawbacks. But mine.

  A huge, flaming, unique happiness.

  So I had made my decision a few days after coming back from Paris with the cheque: I had decided to burn the money.

  But the man that I loved stole it.

  I didn’t say anything to anyone.

  When the twins asked me about Jo, I said that he had stayed on in Switzerland for a few more days, at Nestlé’s request.

  Nadine was still sending me her news. She had a boyfriend, a tall redhead, a 3D film animator who was working on the next Wallace and Gromit. She was gently falling in love, my little girl; she didn’t want to hurry things, she wrote in her latest email, because if you love someone and then you lose him you have nothing left. At last she was finding words. Tears came to my eyes. I wrote back saying that everything here was fine, I was going to sell the haberdashery shop (true) and devote myself to the website (false). I didn’t say anything about her father. Or the harm he was doing us all. I promised to come and see her soon.

  Romain, as usual, wasn’t sending any news. I knew that he had left the Uriage crêperie and the girlfriend, and was now working in a video club in Sassenage. Probably with another girl-friend. He’s a boy, said Mado. Boys are savages. And tears came to her own eyes, because she was reminded of her grown-up daughter who had died.

  A week after the disappearance of Jo and my cheque for eighteen million euros, I gave a little party at the shop. There were so many people that they spilled out on to the pavement. I announced that I was leaving the haberdashery shop, and introduced the lady who was taking over from me: Thérèse Ducrocq, the mother of the journalist on L’Observateur de l’Arrageois. Thérèse was applauded when she explained that she wasn’t actually replacing me, just looking after the shop until I came back. Jo and I, I told my worried customers, had decided to take a year off. Our children were grown-up now. There were trips we’d promised ourselves ever since we first met, countries to be visited, cities to be explored, and we’d decided that now was the time. People came up to me, said they were sorry Jo wasn’t here. They asked which cities we were going to visit, what countries we planned to travel to, what the climate was like there, and went on to offer to make us a sweater, a pair of gloves, a poncho. You’ve spoilt us so much all this time, Jo, it’s our turn now.

  Next day I shut up the house. Left the keys with Mado. And the twins drove me to Orly.

  Are you sure about what you’re doing, Jo?

  Oh, yes. Yes a hundred times, a thousand times over. Yes, I’m sure I want to leave Arras, where Jo left me. Leave our house, our bed. I know I won’t be able to stand either his absence or the lingering odours of his presence. Of his shaving foam, his aftershave, the faint smell of his sweat in the clothes he’s put in the washing, and the stronger smell of it in the garage, where he liked making small pieces of furniture; his acrid smell in the sawdust, in the air.

  The twins go with me as far as they’re allowed. Their eyes are flooded with tears. I try to smile.

  It’s Françoise who guesses. Puts the unimaginable into words.

  Jo’s left you, is that it? He’s gone off with a younger, prettier woman now that he’s going to be head of a unit and drive around in a Cayenne?

  My own tears start flowing. I don’t know, Françoise. He’s gone. I have to lie about it. I avoid the trap, I resist temptation. The breach in the breakwater of my love. Maybe something’s happened to him? suggests Danièle in a soothing voice. Don’t people ever get kidnapped in Switzerland? I read somewhere that what with the private banking and laundered money, it’s a bit like Africa there these days. No, Danièle, he hasn’t been kidnapped, he’s kidnapped himself from me, he’s extracted, amputated, removed himself from me. And you didn’t see it coming, Jo? Not at all. Nothing whatsoever. Like in a bad film. Your man goes away for a week, you reread Belle du Seigneur while you wait for him to come back, give yourself a face-mask, a body scrub, you wax your legs, you massage yourself with essential oils so as you’ll be beautiful and soft when he comes back, and all of a sudden you know he won’t be back at all. But how do you know, Jo? Did he leave you a letter, or something? I have to go. No, that’s the worst of it, not even a letter, just nothing, a bleak void, like being in space.

  Françoise takes me in her arms. I whisper in her ear for a moment, entrusting her with my final wishes. Call us when you arrive, she whispers back when I’ve finished. Have a good rest, adds Danièle. And if you need us to come, we’ll be there.

  I go through security. I turn round.

  They’re still there, their hands waving like birds.

  And then I go.

  I haven’t gone very far.

  It’s fine in Nice. It isn’t the holiday season yet, just the in-between season. A season for convalescence. I go down to the beach every day at the time when the sun will shine on my back.

  I have the figure that was mine before Nadine, the figure I had before I put on all the flesh that stifled Nadège. I’m pretty, I look the way I did when I was twenty.

  Every day, even when the sun isn’t strong, I put suncream on my back, and my arms are still too short; and every day, at that precise moment, my heart races and my senses sharpen. I’ve learnt to hold myself upright, to move with assurance. To get rid of that look of solitude. I gently massage my shoulders, my neck, my shoulder blades – my fingers move over my skin, there’s nothing tentative about them; I remember his voice. The words he said seven years ago, when I came here to escape the horrible things Jo had said.

  Let me help you.

  But the words behind my back today come from people chatting into their mobile phones, from kids who come here to smoke and laugh after school. The tired words of young mothers, already so lonely, their babies left in the shade in buggies, their husbands who have gone away, who don’t touch them any more; their words are salty, like tears.

  So, in the afternoon, when I’ve counted forty planes taking off, I pick up my things and go back to the studio flat that I’ve rented for a few weeks, time enough for me to learn how to be an assassin, in the Rue Auguste-Renoir, behind the Musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret.

  It’s a nondescript flat in a 1950s apartment block, designed when the architects of the Côte d’Azur were dreaming of Miami, motels and buildings full of curves; the time when they dreamed of taki
ng flight. It’s furnished. The furniture is tasteless but it’s solid, that’s all you can say for it. The bed creaks, but as I sleep alone the creaking doesn’t bother anyone but me. I can’t see the sea from the only window, where I dry my underwear. In the evening the place smells of the wind, of salt and diesel. In the evening I dine alone, I watch TV alone and I am alone with my insomnia.

  I still cry in the evenings.

  As soon as I get back from the beach I shower, as Papa did when he came home. But I do it not to get rid of any residue of glutaraldehyde, only to wash away my shame, my pain. My lost illusions.

  I’m preparing myself.

  During those first weeks after Jo made off, I went back to the Centre Sainte-Geneviève. The Dominican nuns had gone away too, but the nurses who had replaced them were just as considerate.

  When he left me, Jo took away my laughter, my joy, my love of life.

  He tore up the list of my needs, my desires, the list of my crazy ideas.

  He’d deprived me of the little things that keep us going. The potato peeler you plan to buy at Lidl tomorrow. The Calor iron you’re going to buy at Auchan the week after that. A little rug for Nadine’s room in a month’s time, when the payslip comes in.

  He’d taken away my desire to be beautiful, sexy, a good lover.

  He had crossed out my memories of us, cancelled them. He’d done irreparable damage to the simple poetry of our life. A stroll, hand in hand, on the beach at Le Touquet. Our hysterical delight when Romain took his first steps. When Nadine first said pipi, wee-wee, when she meant Papa because she was pointing at him. A fit of laughter when we’d made love at the Sourire campsite. Our hearts racing at the same moment when Denny Duquette appears to Izzie Stevens again in season five of Grey’s Anatomy.

  When he left me because he’d robbed me, Jo wrecked everything he’d left behind him. Soiled it all. I had loved him, and now I had nothing left.

  The nurses gently taught me to regain my taste for certain things. The way you teach famine-stricken children to eat again. The way you learn to live again at the age of seventeen when your dead mother wets herself on the pavement in full view of everyone. The way you learn to think yourself pretty again, to tell yourself lies and forgive yourself. They erased my black thoughts, brought light into my nightmares. They taught me to breathe from lower down in the body, from the stomach, well away from the heart. I wanted to die, I wanted to run away. I no longer wanted any of what my life had been. I had inspected the weapons available to me, and retained two of them.

  Throwing myself under a train. Cutting my wrists.

  Throwing myself off a railway bridge as a train was passing. You couldn’t miss. Your body would explode, be torn to pieces, scattered over several kilometres. There wouldn’t be any pain. Only the sound of your body falling through the air, and the terrifying screech of the train, then the whoomph of the former hitting the latter.

  Cutting the veins in my wrists. Because there was something romantic about that. The bath, the candles, the wine. A kind of amorous ceremonial. Like the baths taken by Ariane Deume, preparing herself for her Seigneur. Because the pain of the blade on my wrist would be tiny, and aesthetically pleasing. Because the warm blood would spurt out, a comforting sight, drawing red flowers that would blossom in the water, tracing perfumed trails. Because it wouldn’t really be like dying, more like going to sleep. My body would slip down, my face would sink and I would drown in dense, comfortable liquid red velvet; like a womb.

  The nurses at the Centre taught me to kill only what had killed me.

  So here we have our runaway.

  He’s shrunk, he’s shrivelled up. His forehead is pressed to the window of the moving train, its speed creating virtuoso Impressionist pictures of the fields. He turns his back to the other passengers, like a child sulking, although his problem is not a fit of the sulks but treachery, a stab wound inflicted with a knife.

  He had found the cheque. He had waited for her to tell him about it. He had taken her to Le Touquet for that; for nothing. Then, given her craving for calm, her love of things that last, he had guessed what Jocelyne had in mind. He had taken the money because she was going to burn it. Or give it away. To drooling sufferers from muscular dystrophy, bright little kids with cancer. It was more money than he could earn with Häagen-Dazs in six hundred years. Now he utters a sob as he feels his disgust at himself rising to terrifying fruition. The woman next to him asks in a whisper, ‘Are you all right, monsieur?’ He reassures her with a weary gesture. The train window is cold against his forehead. He remembers Jocelyne’s cool, gentle hand when he was almost carried off by that bad attack of flu. Pretty images always come to the surface when you’d like to drown them.

  When the train reaches Brussels Midi he waits for all the other passengers to get out before leaving the carriage himself. His eyes are red, like the eyes of men not properly awake, half closed to keep warm in the draughty bars of railway stations, men who dunk Belgian speculoos biscuits or rolls in their strong coffee. It is the first coffee of his new life, and it is not a good one.

  He has chosen Belgium because they speak French there, and it is the only language he knows. Although he didn’t know all the words in it, as he had told Jocelyne when he was courting her. She had laughed and tried the word symbiosis on him, and when he shook his head she had said it was what she expected of love, and their hearts had raced together.

  He walks through the drizzling rain that stings his skin. See, he is making faces, he looks ugly. He was handsome when Jocelyne looked at him. He looked like Venantino Venantini. On some days he was the most handsome man in the world. He crosses the Boulevard du Midi, goes along the Boulevard de Waterloo, up the Avenue Louise and the Rue de la Régence to the Place du Grand Sablon and the house he has rented there. He wonders why he chose such a big one. Perhaps he believes he’ll be forgiven. Perhaps he thinks that Jocelyne will come and join him there one day, that one day the things that can’t be explained will be understood. That one day they will all be reunited, even angels and dead little girls. He thinks he ought to have looked up the definition of symbiosis in the dictionary at the time. But for the moment, excitement carries him away. He is a rich man. The world is his to command.

  He buys a very powerful, very expensive red car, an Audi A6 RS. He buys a Patek Philippe watch that displays the date as well as the time, and an Omega Speedmaster Moonwatch. A Loewe flat-screen television set and the collector’s edition of the Jason Bourne trilogy. He is catching up with his dreams. He buys a dozen Lacoste shirts. A pair of Berluti ankle boots. A pair of Weston shoes, a pair of Bikkembergs. He has a suit made to measure by Dormeuil. Another by Dior, but he doesn’t like it. He throws it out. He gets a cleaning lady for the big house. He lunches in the cafés around the Grand-Place. El Greco, Le Paon. In the evening he sends out for a pizza or some sushi. He goes back to drinking real beer, the kind drunk by lost men with blurred vision. He likes Bornem Triple, loves the giddiness you get from Kasteelbier with its 11º alcohol content. His features are thickening. He is slowly putting on weight. He spends his afternoons on café terraces trying to make friends. Conversations are few and far between. People are alone with their mobiles, sending thousands of words out into the void of their lives. At the tourism office in the Rue Royale, they recommend a cruise for bachelors along the canals of Brussels, two women on it among twenty-one starving men; it’s like a bad film. At the weekend he goes to the seaside. In Knokke-le-Zoute he stays at the Manoir du Dragon or the Rose de Chopin. He lends money and never sees it again. Sometimes he goes out in the evenings. He goes to nightclubs, exchanges a few dismal kisses, tries to seduce a few girls. They laugh at him. Things are not going very well. He pays for a lot of champagne and is sometimes allowed to touch a breast, a dry, purplish cunt. His nights are gloomy and cold and disenchanted. He goes home alone. He drinks alone. He laughs alone. He watches films alone. Sometimes he thinks of Arras, and then he opens another beer to drive the thought away, to blur everything again
.

  And sometimes he picks a girl on the Internet, as you might choose a dessert from a restaurant trolley. The girl comes to give herself to him in the darkness of his big house, she swallows up his banknotes and hardly even has to suck him off because he can’t get a hard-on. Look at him when she slams the door behind her: he slips to the cold, tiled floor, a pathetically sad figure, hunched up like an old dog; he sobs, he slobbers out his fears with the snot from his nose, and no kindly woman holds out her arms to him in the shadows of his night.

  It is six months after Jocelyn Guerbette left Arras that the cold takes possession of him.

  He has a hot shower, but the cold is still there. His skin gives off steam, but he is still shivering. The flesh of his fingers is blue and wrinkled, and seems about to peel away. He wants to go home. He is falling to pieces. Money doesn’t buy you love. He misses Jocelyne. He thinks of her laugh, the smell of her skin. He loves their partnership, their two living children. He loves the fear he sometimes felt that she might become too beautiful, too intelligent for him. (And he loved the idea that he might lose her; it made him a better husband.) He loves it when she raises her eyes from a book to smile at him. He loves her steady hands, her forgotten dreams of being a dress designer. He loves her love and her warmth, and suddenly understands his present icy chill. Being loved warms the blood, heats desire. He emerges from the shower still trembling. He doesn’t hit the wall as he was still doing not so long ago. He has succeeded in taming his sorrow for Nadège, he doesn’t talk about it any more; he won’t hurt Jocelyne like that again.

  He doesn’t open his bottle of beer. His lips are shaking. His mouth is dry. He looks at the big sitting room around him, the emptiness. He doesn’t like that white sofa. That low, gilded table. The magazines that no one reads, arranged on it to look pretty. This evening he doesn’t like the red Audi, the Patek watch, the girls you can buy who don’t take you in their arms; his thickened body, his swollen fingers, and this icy chill.