Unforgivable

by Philippe Djian

  “I couldn’t give a damn,” he answered.

  At the time of her last visit, Alice had left behind a T-shirt on which was printed, in English, the inscription abuse of power comes as no surprise, but it was too small for me.

  It was washed and ironed, naturally, and it had a clean aroma of detergent. No trace of any smell of her, of course.

  How could I have foreseen it all? Almost two months, now. Appalling.

  I wasn’t able to get my head through. It would reach down to my navel. Since I couldn’t wear it, I had to make do with holding it in my hands.

  The newspapers continued to mention her disappearance. Some of them were convinced she was still hiding in a private clinic, for a detox or God knows what, but I had telephoned every one of these establishments in turn, right at the very beginning, without the slightest success.

  In this regard, at least, she was gradually becoming more reasonable. The twins had helped bring her down to earth more or less. Roger, too, had grown more mature. His wife’s excesses amused him far less these days, he himself having vowed—after that dreadful evening when two of Anne-Lucie’s fingers had rolled onto the carpet—that he would never touch anything again.

  I longed for someone to get in touch and ask me to pay a ransom. I would willingly cross the town on foot and disappear into the forest with a suitcase full of banknotes; that was all I wanted, to be useful, but no one called me.

  Judith was sleeping upstairs; she had begun yawning before supper was over. Her comings and goings exhausted her, as they did me. Her handbag, which I did not inspect in frantic detail, told me nothing about the sort of things she was up to, or anything of a possibly adulterous nature.

  I wondered whether I was still capable of feeling anything, whether my brain’s obsession with the disappearance of my daughter—the only one I had left—had not cut out everything else; I hoped that my search might arouse a hint of jealousy in me, but I felt nothing. I was barely conscious of what I was doing.

  When she wasn’t there, I was cross with her for leaving me alone, but when she returned home, her presence made me feel ill at ease. I was ashamed of the mindless state I was in, and I quickly averted my eyes. I mumbled sentences in which I did not understand a single word of what I was saying.

  She was considering taking a room in San Sebastián if the buoyancy of the market continued.

  “Good God,” I said, “things are beginning to take a pretty turn.”

  “I don’t know, Francis. I really don’t know. Taking a room by the month would cost me less than a hotel. There’s nothing more to it than that.”

  “And that’s more than enough, I can assure you. If you could wait until I felt a little better, you would be doing me a kindness. You really would.”

  When she was around, I had to find a means of keeping myself busy, for I could immediately sense her gaze hanging over me. Especially in the evening, when she took advantage of the dim light to stare at me; I began to imagine that there were words inscribed on my forehead and that she was able to read them, and that was the last thing I wanted.

  I was glad I had begun to smoke again. To make up for this, I walked a good deal. There was not a single book that took priority any longer, either to read or to write. I had time on my hands. Eventually, I would come across Jérémie at some time or other during the day. With that dog he appeared to have adopted and which was getting visibly fatter. It was very clever at running after bits of wood or pinecones.

  “I can understand your position,” I said to him. “But I’m doing what your mother asked me. It’s up to you to accept or refuse. All I’m doing is passing on information to you.”

  “What the hell would I do in a casino?”

  “I don’t know. Croupier? How should I know?”

  He whirled a stick in the air and the creature shot off at full speed, yapping as it went. “I’d rather die,” he said. Impervious, the full moon lapped the sea, bathed the pine trees, bounced along the road, and then invited itself into the gardens.

  Although she showed herself incapable of taking certain steps with regard to her son, A.-M. despaired at the lack of enthusiasm he showed about doing anything. She had probably hoped that I would back her, which was indeed the case, but the boy would not listen. I did not know the solution to this problem.

  Eventually she sighed and admitted she couldn’t cope. I had not particularly shone as a father. Not sufficiently to boast of any authority in the matter, and Jérémie’s situation was well beyond my competence.

  I should take care not to embroil myself too much, according to Judith. She had looked up the records on the Internet and the account of the holdup in which Jérémie had been involved elicited no sympathy for him as far as she was concerned. It mattered little who had fired. The checkout operator was dead. Because an idiot had decided to carry out a holdup at a service station. Didn’t I think that was appalling?

  Jérémie felt that he had not won Judith over, but he claimed that he could see things from her point of view and could understand her reservations about him.

  He hardly dared come into the garden when she was at home and she scarcely encouraged him, but I did not want to interfere. I would go outside and stay to smoke a cigarette with him. We didn’t talk much. We watched the dog running after the seagulls, which cried as they disappeared into the darkness. Judith asked me what was so important that I should desert her in this way and I didn’t really know how to reply to her.

  I had no reason to seek this boy’s company apart from the fact that he was available at a time when I was going through one of the worst ordeals in my life.

  He, too, had his problems, he wasn’t in good shape, and this similarity—this inauspicious point in common—seemed to have the power to lighten certain burdens, to make them less painful to endure, both on one side and on the other. It’s reassuring, is it not, to see that there are others as damaged as oneself, as mistreated, as lost, as broken as oneself?

  A.-M. put me a little more in the picture, one morning, when she informed me that Jérémie’s father had died in the boy’s arms, a few days after the lad had celebrated his sixteenth birthday. The beginning of the problems that he had accumulated, up to his being thrown into a prison cell, stemmed from that moment.

  I didn’t imagine that Judith would consider that an excuse, I said to her in reply. We had risen at dawn to go and buy anchovies. A light veil of morning mist still covered the nearby mountaintops, which were piercing through the darkness. A.-M. gave a slight shrug of her shoulders; she was a mother first and foremost.

  One of the mistakes I had made was my categorical refusal to have a child with Judith. She had taken it badly. She had taken it badly and I was now paying the consequences. I had hardened her heart. I was sometimes astonished by a certain coldness that she displayed—her attitude toward Jérémie was a perfect example—forgetting at the time (wretched, shameless amnesiac that I was) that I was the one responsible for it in the first place.

  A.-M. had a family recipe for preserving anchovies that consisted in covering them with table salt—not coarse salt, as it happens—with fin sel, in layer after layer, so that their flesh remained firm and red and, quite simply, succulent. There was an absolutely true story that went the rounds, according to which Hemingway, who had been awarded the Nobel Prize in the meantime, used to order them from A.-M.’s mother, right up to the time of his death, and she, in an average year, would send him fifty or so jars in boxes, the most recent of them to Ketchum, in Idaho, and that our Ernest—Ernesto as we called him here—had never settled with her for this last batch.

  Confronted with five kilos of anchovies that had to be filleted, cleaned, washed, put in jars, etc., A.-M. left us to dash into town, for what purpose we weren’t sure—she did not talk much about her work. I felt a certain fear when I noticed that Jérémie was still half asleep on his feet. On the way back, he had slept in the car. Coping with five kilos on my own did not exactly thrill me.

  The dawn
was rising. I made some coffee. Had I been like this when I was twenty-five? So feeble? “All right, let’s roll up our sleeves,” I said as I opened the shutters. Jérémie winced in the buttercup-yellow daylight. “Two months without news, Jérémie. It’s almost two months, do you realize?”

  I took hold of a fish, slit it open, gutted it, rinsed it quickly under the tap, and then lay it on its bed of salt. I suggested to Jérémie that he do the same.

  “It occurred one morning, twelve years ago. The same thing happened to a truck driver as happened to your father. A heart attack. I had got out of the car with Alice and we were walking over to the snack bar. We were setting off on vacation. They reckon the man had already lost consciousness when his tanker truck careered across the parking area like a cannonball, smashed into our car, and they were burned alive, Jérémie, they were burned in front of our very eyes. Both of them. Her mother and her sister. One mustn’t forget that, before judging her. I tell you this so that you should understand. Look at Courtney Love. Who would blame her for going a bit too far from time to time? In any case, you know the story now. It’s hard enough to cope in those circles in normal times. I can tell you that she fought. I can tell you she needed guts. It’s not because I’m her father. Roger will tell you that she still wakes up with a start and in a sweat. In that world where everybody’s on the lookout for the slightest weakness, for the slightest gaffe from the person opposite you . . .”

  I noticed that he was staring at me. My cellar door closed over me once more. The heavy stone slab of my tomb took up its place again and reduced me to silence.

  “Don’t look like that,” he said to me. “Not everything’s lost.”

  Roger brought the girls back for the All Saints’ Day holiday. I thanked the heavens that Judith had returned to this side of the frontier and was able to greet them and embrace them like any self-respecting grandmother, and that she was determined to play her part as she should . . . Especially as she performed it extremely well. The girls refused to go to sleep without a last kiss from her.

  When we collected them from the airport, Judith gave me a troubled glance. Two little turnips on legs. Did Roger give them enough to eat? Did he look after them properly? Their grandmother was probably exaggerating a bit. The air in the capital city alone was enough to sap the healthiest of creatures and gradually poison the hardiest. The girls may have had a few more bluish and obvious circles under their eyes than usual, but not many more. Roger didn’t look too bad either.

  He waited until midafternoon before talking to us about the team of journalists he had invited around for the following day. Judith and I looked at one another. Journalists.

  Roger did not allow us to regain our breath. He explained to us that the worst thing that could happen was that silence should descend once again. That we needed to keep in the foreground and show that while tears continued to flow, at the same time, hope remained. We should trust him. The previous week, he had plastered the walls and métro stations with a photograph of Alice—taken three years earlier at a film festival in Sydney—and the caption give her back to us. In the magazine Elle that week, she had shared a page with Paris Hilton—that pathetic blonde.

  “You must stop,” I told him. “Really. Don’t stir up so much fuss for nothing.”

  He stared at me with a trace of contempt. “Have you lost hope then?”

  “Not at all. But Roger, I don’t see the point of all this.”

  “Give me one good reason not to do it. Tell me in what way this could harm her and I’ll stop at once. I’m not like you, Francis. I can’t just sit with my arms crossed and do nothing.”

  “You should go easy on the white stuff,” I told him.

  That evening, the weather was still good enough to cook a few spare ribs on the barbecue. The hiss of the surging tide could be heard in the distance; a dove was cooing in the neighbor’s spruce tree, while its companion had just flown off toward the Rhune mountain, in the star-studded sky that floated calmly over the Pyrenees. He handed me some herbs.

  His brow was knitted in an almost constant frown. But the moment he stopped frowning, he no longer looked so afflicted. Judith had not gone along with me in this analysis and had even reproached me for a certain hardness. Not just a certain hardness when I demanded tangible signs of his suffering—pallor, emaciation, sobbing . . . but also a certain foolishness in embarking on a path that led nowhere. “Would you be any further forward if he became ill? Would you feel mollified?”

  In any case, his state of health did not alarm me. Could I say that? Was I allowed to say that? Could I consider that he didn’t look too bad, without being called a troublemaker?

  “Let’s go to the casino,” I suggested to him when we had finished the meal. “Let’s go and blow a bit of cash.”

  I got to my feet. I went upstairs to tell Judith and I stopped by the half-open door of the guest bedroom. Judith was reading something or other by Jane Austen to them. The twins had lumps in their throats and were snuggling up to their grandmother—who looked so young for her age that I felt choked once more. How could I have distanced myself from such a woman? I must be crazy, I would frequently tell myself. I should have been fulfilled to have married such a pretty brunette. A real one. I must be completely blind.

  Johanna was also a brunette. Her full and magnificent head of hair had caught alight in a flash—as if flames were coming out of her head. I had clasped Alice to me but a few images had had time to imprint themselves on her mind, with the result that she had armies of shrinks on her tracks throughout all these years. The worries she had given me could have filled a stone quarry.

  I loved Alice deeply, with all my heart, but I still felt a lingering resentment about everything she had made me put up with—a road accident, an overdose, a stay in a sobering-up cell, a drowning incident. This time, I was preparing myself to receive a fatal blow, and Judith could very well prove to be my only support during the unbearable ordeal that awaited me. I ought probably to keep the twins away in order to be close to her should everything disappear in a cloud of dust. I must not make a fool of myself.

  When she looked at me, I smiled back and indicated that I was going out.

  We walked along the beach. “I didn’t think so,” he said.

  “Think what?”

  “That you would sit around doing nothing.”

  “I have not sat around doing nothing.”

  “That’s what I’m saying. That you haven’t sat around doing nothing. I’ve said it, but I didn’t think it.”

  The boards on which we were walking disappeared beneath the sand in places, then resurfaced looking as though they were covered in ashes. Seagulls circled overhead, hovering on the breeze. It was a cloudless night.

  “What you have to understand,” he said, “what you really have to understand, is that everything I do, I do for her.”

  “I should have preferred that you talked to us about it beforehand.”

  “Yes, I know. You’ve already told me. OK. I’m happy to spend the entire night apologizing if that’s what you expect of me.”

  “It’s a great idea. Go ahead.”

  “Listen, Francis, listen, it’s not going to kill you. We mustn’t reduce the search, we must intensify it. Intensify it, do you follow? That’s the way these things work. The more they talk about her, the better it will be. What? You don’t watch the news? You don’t see what fate has in store for nonentities? You don’t see that?”

  I had a sudden longing to eat a waffle. The sea was like a vast, black, shiny screen teeming with blue filaments, over which streamed a wave of powerfully iodized air. From a beach hut where people were cooking came a good smell of vanilla-flavored pastry.

  “I’ve never heard so much said about her,” I said. “I see her everywhere. Even though she’s not there. I think that’s what I find so shocking. The contrast. To be honest with you.”

  “Fine. Very well. I can understand that it upsets you. But you must do it for her, Francis. Fucking
hell, Francis.”

  I looked at him. In the half-light, his years spent getting stoned accentuated his haggard complexion, his mien of a crooked financier. I had told Alice my opinion of this young banker—the bank belonged to a branch of his family that had settled in Monaco—who spent entire days lying on the couch in his office in a state of delirium, his collar undone, canceling his appointments one by one, stoned out of his mind, etc. I had tried to open her eyes, but to no avail.

  For my part, I married Judith. In these circumstances I could not object to marriage on formal grounds. In any case, I had not appeared firm enough, nor sufficiently convincing, and we had got married, within a month, at the church of Saint-Jean-Baptiste, when the cherry trees were in bloom, because fate had so decreed it, because we could no longer cope, because the flames had to be extinguished.

  Those two years. Those following the accident. The nightmare years.

  When I look at Roger today, and remind myself of the absolute zombie who married my daughter—and staggered up the aisle—I sometimes have to recognize that he managed very well, apart from the fact that he now dresses in Ralph Lauren from head to toe.

  “There’s a ransom demand, Francis,” he told me, flinching as if I’d just stamped on his foot. I froze. “Sorry, but I wasn’t allowed to talk about it,” he added.

  I cleared my throat. “She’s alive?” I asked.

  “What? Yeah . . . Sorry, yes . . . She’s alive. But the police are stumbling on, of course.”

  “The ransom? What ransom? You talk to me about a ransom only now?”

  I tossed half of my waffle in the garbage. My head spun for a few seconds and I decided to go and sit down on a nearby bench that abutted an old, hollowed-out tamarisk tree.

  “You knew that I was fretting, that I feared the worst, you knew the anguish I was going through, but you had no mercy. You didn’t think it right to afford me the slightest comfort, did you?”