He doesn’t open the bottle of beer. He gets to his feet, leaves the light on in the hall, just in case Jocelyne were to track him down tonight, just in case leniency were to knock at the door, and he goes upstairs. It is a large staircase; images of falling surface in his mind. Vertigo. Gone With the Wind. Battleship Potemkin. Blood flowing out of your ears. Bones breaking.
His fingers clutch the banister; the idea of forgiveness comes only after you have picked yourself up.
He leaves for London. Two hours in the train; his hands are moist for those two hours. As if he were going on a first date. Forty metres under the sea, he is afraid. He is going to see Nadine. She refused at first. He persisted, he almost begged her. A matter of life and death. She thought that expression extremely melodramatic, but it made her smile, and he took advantage of that smile.
They are going to meet in the Caffè Florian, on the third floor of Harrods, the famous department store. He is early. He wants to be able to choose a good table, a good chair. He wants to see her arrive. Have time to recognise her. He knows that sorrow rearranges faces, changes eye colour. A waitress comes over. With a gesture, he lets her know that he doesn’t want anything. He is ashamed of himself for not even being able to say, in English: I’m waiting for my daughter, I don’t feel very well, mademoiselle, I’m frightened, I’ve done something very stupid.
There she is. She is beautiful and slender, and he sees Jocelyne’s grace and touching pallor in Madame Pillard’s haberdashery shop, back when he could never have imagined becoming a thief, a murderer. He gets up. She smiles. She’s a woman now; how quickly time passes. His hands are shaking. He doesn’t know what to do. But she holds her face up to his. Kisses him. Hello, Papa. Papa; that was a thousand years ago. He has to sit down, he’s not feeling very well, he needs air. She asks if he is all right. He says, Yes, yes, it’s just the emotion, I’m so happy to see you. You’re so beautiful.
He has dared to say that to his daughter. She doesn’t blush, indeed, she is rather pale. She says, It’s the first time in my life you’ve said anything like that to me, Papa, something so personal. She might cry, but she is strong. He is the one who cries, an old man. He is the one who appeals to her. Listen to him. You’re so beautiful, my little girl, like your mother. Like your mother.
The waitress comes over again, gliding silently like a swan. Gently, Nadine says Just a few minutes, please, and Jocelyn realises from the music of his daughter’s voice that he has only one chance to talk to her, and that chance is now. So he plunges in desperately. I stole from your mother. I betrayed her. I ran away. I’m ashamed, and I know that my shame comes too late. I . . . I . . . He is searching for words. I. The words won’t come. This is difficult. Tell me how I can get her to forgive me. Help me.
Nadine raises her hand. It’s over already. The waitress is back. Two large coffees, two pieces of fruit cake. Yes, madam. The thief doesn’t understand a word of it, but he likes the sound of his daughter’s voice. They look at each other. Sorrow has changed the colour of Nadine’s eyes. They used to be blue in Arras. They are grey now, a rainy grey; a street drying off. She looks at her father. She is searching for what her mother loved in that sad, flabby face. She is trying to discover the features of the Italian actor with his clear laughter and white teeth. She remembers the attractive face that used to kiss her goodnight when she went to bed in the evening; her father’s kisses that tasted of ice cream – vanilla, cookies, praline, banana or caramel ice cream. Does what you experienced as beautiful turn ugly because the person who made your life better has let you down? I don’t know how you can get her to forgive you, Papa, says Nadine. All I know is that Maman is unhappy; her whole world has crumbled.
And when she adds, five seconds later, so has mine, he knows that it’s all over.
He puts out his hand to his daughter’s face; he would like to touch it, caress it one last time, warm himself on it, but his hand is frozen. It is a strange, sad farewell. Finally Nadine lowers her eyes. He understands that she is letting him go without watching him, without the insult of watching a coward take to his heels. It is her present to him, in return for being told that she is beautiful.
In the train going back, he remembers what his own mother had said when she was told that her husband had just died of a heart attack at the office. He’s abandoned me, your father has deserted us! The bastard, what a bastard! And later, after the funeral, when she was told that his heart had given out while he was having leisurely sex with the woman in charge of office equipment, a divorcée with a taste for good living, she had killed herself. That was it. She had taken the words back into herself, sealed her lips and Jocelyn, still a child, had seen the cancer of the evil that men implant in women’s hearts.
Back in Brussels, he goes to the Tropismes bookshop in the Galeries des Princes shopping arcade. He remembers the book from which she sometimes looked up to smile at him. She was beautiful when she was reading. She seemed happy. He asks for Belle du Seigneur, chooses the large-format edition, the one she used to read. He also buys a dictionary. Then he spends his days reading. He looks up the definitions of words he doesn’t understand. He wants to find out what made her dream, what made her beautiful, what made her look up at him sometimes. Perhaps she saw him as Adrien Deume, and perhaps that was why she loved him. Men think they are lovable as lordly seigneurs like Solal, when they may just be frightening. He hears the sighs of Ariane, the belle; the private thoughts of the woman whose religion is love. The length of the monologues is sometimes tedious. He wonders why there isn’t more punctuation for several pages; then he reads the text aloud, and in the echo of the large sitting room his breathing changes, speeds up; he suddenly feels dizzy, as one might in the midst of rapture; there is something feminine, gracious about it, and he understands Jocelyne’s happiness.
But the final part of the book is cruel. In Marseille, Solal strikes Ariane and makes her sleep with her former lover; the belle behaves like a graceless prostitute. And then comes the ending in Geneva. As he closes it, Jocelyn wonders whether the book comforted his wife by making her think that she had gone beyond ‘the boredom and lassitude’ that consumed the romantic lovers, and that in her own way she had discovered a love of a perfection not to be found in expensive clothes, hats and hairstyles, but in trust and peace.
Perhaps Belle du Seigneur was a book about loss, but Jocelyne read it to assess what she had saved.
He wants to go back now. He has plenty of words for her, words he has never spoken before. He knows what symbiosis means.
He is afraid to telephone. He is afraid to hear her voice. He is afraid that she will not pick up the phone. He is afraid of silence and sobbing. He wonders if he shouldn’t just go back, arrive this evening at the peaceful dinner hour, put the key in the lock, open the door. Believe in miracles. Believe in Reggiani’s song, with words by Dabadie. Is there anybody there? / Anyone I can see? / I can hear the dog from here. / So if you are not dead / Open the door to me. / I know that I’m late home. But suppose she has changed the locks? Suppose she isn’t there? He decides to write a letter.
Later, weeks later, when he has finished the letter, he takes it to the post office in the Place Poelaert near the Palais de Justice. He is worried. He wonders, several times, if he has put enough postage on it. It is an important letter. He watches the hand throwing his letter full of hopes and new beginnings into the basket; other letters soon fall in with it, covering his, suffocating it, hiding it. He feels lost. He is lost.
He goes back to the big, empty house. There is nothing left in it but the white sofa. He has sold or given away everything else. The car, the TV set, The Bourne Trilogy, the Omega watch, he couldn’t find the Patek, but he doesn’t care.
He waits on the white sofa. He waits for a reply to slide under his door. He waits a long, long time, but no reply comes. He trembles, and over the following days, when nothing happens, his cold body goes numb. He no longer eats or moves. He drinks a few mouthfuls of water every day, and when all
the bottles are empty he stops drinking anything. Sometimes he sheds tears. Sometimes he talks to himself. He says both their names. That was the symbiosis, only he didn’t see it.
When his death throes begin, he is happy.
The sea is grey in Nice.
There’s a heavy swell far out. Lacy crests of foam. A few sails moving in the wind, like hands calling for help, but no one can catch hold of them.
It is winter.
Most of the shutters in the apartment buildings on the Promenade des Anglais are down. They are like medical dressings on the well-worn façades. The old people are shut up at home, watching the news and the bad weather forecast on TV. They chew for a long time before swallowing. They are suddenly making things last. Then they go to sleep on the sofa with a little woolly rug over their knees and the TV still on. They must hold out until spring or they’ll be found dead; with the rising temperature of the first fine days, disgusting smells will seep out from under doors, up chimneys, nightmarish. Their children are far away. They won’t come back until the first warm days, when they can take advantage of the sea, the sun, Grandpa’s apartment. They’ll come back when they can take measurements, draw up plans: enlarge the sitting room, give the bedrooms and the bathroom a makeover, fit a new fireplace, put an olive tree in a pot on the balcony so that they can eat their own olives some day.
It’s almost a year and a half ago that I was sitting here on my own, in the same place, at the same time of year. I was cold, and I was waiting.
I had just left the nurses at the Centre, alive, appeased. In those few weeks I had killed something in me.
A terrible thing called kindness.
I had drained myself of it like pus, like a dead baby; a present someone has given you only to take it back immediately.
An atrocity.
It’s nearly eighteen months since I let myself die and be born again as someone else. Colder, more angular. Grief always refashions you in a strange form.
And then Jo’s letter had arrived, a small highlight in the mourning of the woman I was then. An envelope sent from Belgium; on the back, a Brussels address in the Place du Grand Sablon. Inside, four pages of his untidy handwriting. Surprising phrases, new words that might have been taken straight from a book. Jo, I know now that love can stand up to death better than to betrayal.* His writing was full of fear. The gist of it was that he wanted to come back. Just like that. Back home. Back to our house. The factory. The garage. The small items of furniture that he made. Back to our laughter. And the Radiola TV set, the low-alcohol beer, his friends on a Saturday, my only real friends, he called them. And you. He wanted to come back and find me as I was. I want to be loved by you again, he wrote, I have realised that to love is to understand.* He promised. I’ll persuade you to forgive me. I was afraid, I ran away. He swore. He made declarations. I love you, he wrote. I miss you. He was suffocating. I know that he wasn’t lying, but it was too late for these careful, pretty words.
My merciful curves had melted away. The ice was taking shape, and it had a cutting edge to it.
He had enclosed a cheque with his letter.
Fifteen million one hundred and eighty-six thousand and four euros, seventy-two centimes.
Made out to Jocelyne Guerbette.
Look, I’m asking you to forgive me, said the figures. Forgive my betrayal, my cowardice; forgive my crime, my lack of love.
Three million three hundred and sixty-one thousand, two hundred and ninety-six euros, fifty-six centimes had vanquished his dream and his self-disgust.
I expect he bought his Porsche, his flat-screen TV, all the James Bond films, a Seiko watch, a Patek Philippe, maybe a Breitling, shiny and flashy, several women younger and more beautiful than me, depilated, Botoxed, perfect; he must have had some bad experiences, as people do when they have a treasure trove – remember the cat and the fox who steal the five gold pieces given to Pinocchio by Mangiafuoco? He must have lived like a prince for a while, as you always want to do when fortune suddenly comes your way, to get your revenge for not having it sooner, for not having had it at all. Five-star hotels, Taittinger Comtes de Champagne, caviar; and then whims and fancies, yes, I can easily imagine my thief developing them: I don’t like this room, the shower drips, the meat is overdone, the sheets are scratchy; I want another girl; I want friends.
I want what I’ve lost.
I never replied to my murderer’s letter. I let it slip out of my hands – the sheets fluttered for a moment, and when they finally came down they were reduced to ashes, and I began to laugh.
* Adapted from André Maurois (1815–1967), ‘Love can stand up to absence or death better than to doubt or betrayal.’
* After Françoise Sagan (1935–2004), ‘To love is not just to love well but above all to understand.’ (In Qui je suis.)
My last list.
Go to the hairdresser, have a manicure and depilation (for the first time in my life get someone other than me to remove the hair from my legs / armpits / bikini line – well, not the full Brazilian, all the same).
Spend two weeks in London with Nadine and her red-headed lover.
Give her the money to make her next little film (she’s sent me the screenplay, from a short story by Saki, it’s brilliant!!!)
Open a savings account for my rascal of a son.
Choose a new wardrobe (I’m a size 10 now!!!! Men smile at me in the street!!!!).
Organise an exhibition of Maman’s drawings.
Buy a house with a big garden and a terrace with a view of the sea, maybe at Cap Ferrat, where Papa will be comfortable. Above all, don’t ask the price, just write the cheque, casually .
Get Maman’s grave moved to near me and Papa. (In the garden of the house mentioned above?)
Give a million to someone at random. (Who? How?)
Live with him. (Well, beside him, really.) And wait .
And that’s all.
I did everything on my last list with the exception of a couple of details
In the end I did have a full Brazilian wax – it’s odd, very little girl-like – and I haven’t decided who to give the million to yet.
I’m waiting for an unexpected smile, a small ad in the newspaper, a sad but kindly look; I’m waiting for a sign.
I spent two wonderful weeks in London with my daughter. I found my way back to the old times, when Jo’s cruelty made me take refuge in her room, and she stroked my hair until I was as calm as the surface of a lake again. She thought I looked pretty, I thought she looked happy. Her lover Fergus is the only Irishman in England who doesn’t drink beer, and that made me a happy mother. One morning he took us to Bristol and showed me round the studio where he was working; he lent my face to a florist whom Gromit was passing as a tiny dog pursued him. It was a lovely day, like going back to childhood.
When we said goodbye at St Pancras, we didn’t shed any tears. Nadine told me that her father had been to see her some time ago; he looked lost, she said, but I wasn’t listening. Then she whispered maternal words in my ear: You deserve a good life, Maman. Try to be happy with him.
Him. My Vittorio Gassman; I’ve been living at his side for over a year and a half now. He’s as good-looking as he was on the day when we kissed in the Hôtel Negresco, his lips still taste of orange pekoe tea, but when they kiss mine now my heart doesn’t race, my skin doesn’t shiver.
He was the only island in my sorrow.
I had called him just after Jo’s foreman confirmed that he was taking a week’s holiday. On the day when I knew I had been deceived. I had phoned, not for a moment believing that he would remember me; perhaps he was only a predator who duped faithful wives with a cup of tea at the bar of the Hôtel Negresco, with its delicious temptation of dozens of empty rooms. He knew who I was at once. I was hoping to hear from you, he said. His voice was grave and calm. He listened to me. He understood my anger and the mutilation I had suffered. And he said those four respectful words: Let me help you.
They were an open sesame. They lanced t
he boil. Made me the ethereal Belle, Ariane Deume on the edge of the void in Geneva, one Friday afternoon in September 1937.
I let him help me. I gave myself up to him.
We go down to the beach every day, and every day we sit on the uncomfortable pebbles. I didn’t want little canvas chairs or cushions. I want everything to be the way it was on our first day, the day when I dreamed of perhaps becoming his lover; the day when I decided that neither Jo’s harsh words nor my loneliness was a good enough reason for that. I don’t regret any of it. I gave myself to Jo. I loved him without reservation or afterthought. I have ended up treasuring the memory of his moist hand on mine during our first date at the newsagent’s in the Arcades; I could still weep for joy when I close my eyes and hear those first words of his: You’re the miracle. I’d accustomed myself to his acrid, animal body odour. I had forgiven him a great deal, because love calls for a great deal of forgiveness. I had been prepared to grow old with him although he never said pretty things to me, no flowery phrases – oh, you know, those silly things that win girls’ hearts and make them remain faithful for ever.
I tried to lose weight, not so that he would think me more beautiful but so that he could be proud of me.
You’re beautiful, says the man who is now reaping the benefit of it, although I wanted to be beautiful for someone else. But I would like to see you smile sometimes, Jo. He’s a good man; he has never known betrayal. His love is patient.
I sometimes do smile in the evenings, when we go home to the huge, beautiful villa in Villefranche-sur-Mer that I bought, signing the sales agreement casually and the cheque without a moment’s thought; when I see Papa sitting on the terrace with his nurse beside him, while Papa looks at the sea and, with his child’s eyes, searches the clouds for images: bears, maps of a Promised Land, Maman’s drawings.
The List of My Desires Page 8
