Unforgivable

by Philippe Djian

  As for me, I could no more bring myself to put two bits of wood together—or anything else—as long as there was a chance that Alice was still alive.

  Judith had returned in the middle of the night. For the time being, she was asleep.

  What was the point of waking her up either? On reflection, talking to the twins was what probably suited me best on this dazzlingly bright day. A light breeze was coming from the sea, mingled with the scent of tamarisks. I found the girls and examined the cross they had made with bits of wood from a crate and bent nails. “Good work,” I said to them in a friendly way as I operated the garage door. “I know someone who’s going to be pleased.”

  I wasn’t talking about Jérémie. However, it was he whom I spotted in my rearview mirror when I switched on the engine. I gave a frosty glance at the girls. Then I reversed and stopped alongside him.

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” I said after contemplating him for a moment. “Go back home. Let us deal with this.”

  It was as if he were clenching his teeth with all his might. In the end, I asked him to get in. “I was saying that for your own good,” I said as I drove off. From a canvas bag he carried on his shoulder, he took out a cross that had been astonishingly and elaborately carved and polished, and that gleamed like a fine, old wooden floor that had been newly polished.

  The girls cried out in delight. He shrugged his shoulders. He explained that he had developed this pastime in prison. That this carefully decorated cross was the least he owed his friend, his companion.

  It was so childish. On a level with the twins, who would soon be asking for holy water; yet the girls were still at an age to bury dead beetles . . . and he at an age to hold up a service station.

  He must have spent the entire night there. It was so childish. I didn’t need to see the state his hands were in to imagine the ordeal he was going through, but I found it somewhat hard to sympathize, considering what I was going through myself.

  In any case, his presence had a negative effect on all of us. I suspected that he was taking advantage of his mother’s absence in order not to eat anything. Before she left, A.-M. had filled the freezer with individual portions that could be put straight into the microwave, but this seemed to require an effort he could not manage. He was growing extremely pale.

  He didn’t utter a word throughout the journey. I didn’t know whether I was right or wrong to go through this foolish procedure with them. And yet it was from me, I supposed, being the eldest in the group, that one might have expected a little good sense. To have put a stop right away to this jaunt, which did not show any of us in a good light. However, I had not done this. I had not clapped my hands to bring the three of them down to earth. I had not put my foot down. I had opened the car door and asked Jérémie to get in.

  I would have found it very difficult to say what it was I was giving in to, but the result was here, on this road that meandered through the brush and climbed up toward the hill, in an atmosphere that was as sultry as one could imagine.

  The cross that Jérémie had carved and the skill and passion that he had obviously devoted to its construction made the process even more solemn, even more unbearable. Just what one needed to avoid. But it was too late to turn back now.

  A little while later, Jérémie was looking at my CD player and scrolling through my lists. “Can I put on Current 93?” he asked as we were nearing our objective; a shower of golden petals that had fallen from the trees rustled on the road, still shimmering after the strong intermittent downpours during the night. I gave in. What did it matter? I could see the twins in the rearview mirror. I could see their hands joined, I could see their lips moving, and I wondered whether they were reciting some sort of prayer.

  We had buried the dog in the teeming rain but we were now dealing with the funeral ceremony on one of those infinitely graceful autumn days for which we were the envy of the entire world. The bay that stretched out behind us, from the Spanish coast to the horizon, was like a casket of jewels that sparkled with amethysts, sapphires, turquoises, etc. Ernesto often used to walk here. I mean to say that Ernest Hemingway often used to walk here. He always said that there was no better place in the world for a writer. He was hardly exaggerating. He used to come to these parts regularly, accompanied by one of my aunts, to pick cèpes and take a siesta beneath the ancient oak and chestnut trees. That stout fellow.

  Jérémie had brought along a hammer and some nails the size of a finger to put up the two crosses. The tree trunk beneath which his dog was buried seemed as hard as stone. He had asked me to leave the doors open so that we could hear some of those dismal songs that David Tibet specialized in; meanwhile the grim hammer blows echoed through the forest and the twins squelched about in the mud searching for leaves and flowers as decorations. I stood back a little, chewing on nicotine gum, pretending not to notice the flight of the crows directly above the clearing where the scene was taking place. I was longing to wander about in the brush, for I could detect a very distinct smell of fresh mushrooms. Alice adored cèpes. Tears began to streak down my cheeks, just thinking about this. As I drove off along the wrong road, I could sense Jérémie’s silent approval.

  I spent a good part of the afternoon in the garden, cleaning the basket I had used to collect the cèpes in the forest and wondering about Jérémie, about what would become of him.

  Roger had taken his daughters to the cinema after criticizing me for being a second-rate grandfather; he was referring to the state in which I had brought them back, red-eyed and covered in mud from head to foot, etc. I had not reacted. I needed a little calm after the business of the burial.

  When we got back, Judith had already gone out. I called her, then found her bedroom empty, her bed unmade. I rang Jérémie’s number to ask him to start his tailing job straightaway, but there was no answer. Shit! What was he doing with his telephone? At this time of day, she may have been in a hotel bedroom, with her lover. We had to make sure. But Jérémie was not answering.

  Roger and the girls had left for the 4:30 showing. The sky was beginning to turn pink. Judith’s hours were becoming more and more unreasonable. I was confident. I knew that, sooner or later, she would make a mistake and would be caught. So long as Jérémie kept his eyes open and didn’t just sit sprawled in an armchair waiting for the world to end.

  Before reaching his voice mail, one had to endure forty-five seconds listening to a particularly agitated English group who nearly burst one’s eardrums. “OK, Jérémie. Call me back. Urgently. As soon as you get this message. Call me extremely urgently, will you?” But evening came and he did not ring back.

  Judith could take all the time she wanted with an amateur like this on her tracks. I carried my mushrooms into the kitchen, rinsed them, and then went back outside. I called Jérémie again. “Listen to me. I need to know if you’ve got any eggs. Whether you can let me have some or whether I have to go down to the town. So, please, pick up your phone. The girls will be back and they’ll be starving. There’ll be a scene. Will you please get back to me? Thank you.”

  I had probably asked for it—I’d been unable, at least, to prevent myself wanting a double, a duplicate of Johanna and nothing else—I had probably deserved what was happening to me as far as that was concerned. There was no going back on that. God knows, I hadn’t wanted any of this. All I wanted at the moment was to be able to take my punishment and get away without it causing too much damage. I knew all the facts. In her place, I would certainly have done the same as Judith. Or worse, who knows?

  Be that as it may, I rang Jérémie again. We had agreed that I could contact him at any time in view of the task that I had entrusted him with. I reminded him of this curtly, via his answering machine, not forgetting to thank him for the eggs.

  The more time went by, the more convinced I became that Judith was giving herself to another man in a nearby bedroom. The region swarmed with those small, luxurious inns, offering half board, that were perfectly discreet and real havens; if one w
anted to abduct a woman and win her over, well, this area was hard to beat.

  Such a scenario set my teeth on edge. I felt unable to keep still. I stood up to cut the cèpes into strips and slices, and felt short of breath. I felt deeply ashamed as I noted my pathetic reaction, my futile restlessness, and I could feel my cheeks flushing. Yet a good part of me persisted in feeling this way.

  Such visions, such horrors came into my mind that I almost suffocated. I could almost hear her moans, the words she whispered into the man’s ear as she perspired on top of him. Impossible to escape from them. Clutching a dish towel, I sat down.

  Night was beginning to fall, bringing with it cooler air that was extremely welcome for my temples were burning. I stood up. I opened the butane gas canister and lit the grill.

  I browned the cèpes. I chopped the garlic and the parsley. As I got older, I thought I had grown out of these things. I thought I had understood that they were not worth the trouble one used to take over them, I thought I had realized that one had attained a higher level, that one no longer had to play these foolish games, that one could be rid of them, and yet here I was shivering in the twilight like a schoolboy, totally ill equipped, shattered.

  But what on earth was this idiot Jérémie doing then? I was beginning to have had enough. I was overwhelmed by what I was visualizing, overwhelmed by the way she had surrendered herself into the arms of the chimpanzee who had her in all sorts of positions. I chewed another piece of nicotine gum; sometimes I had nightmares in which I had run short of it and was planning to go and break into a drugstore with a hammer.

  I finished the cooking and then slid the mushrooms onto a plate that I then covered. As an omelet, it was one of the best dishes in the world. In fact, I was never surprised when I heard tell that this or that person had succumbed to the charm of this region; some extremely well-known writers used to travel down from Paris to investigate our way of life and to take notes, and these guys had intuition.

  I got into my car. In less than three minutes, after champing at the bit among the pine trees and the heather, I parked purposefully opposite the house in which he lived with his mother and got ready to teach him his job—which consisted in not falling asleep while the client’s wife was committing adultery.

  I persuaded myself that I would explain to him that he ought to take his work much more seriously if he intended to make a name for himself in the profession; that he couldn’t allow his own moods to distract him from his task. In any way. Not in these grim times when holding your head above water required all your efforts, when keeping yourself and your family alive did not come easily. Was there anyone who still doubted that market forces would have no mercy on those who did not heed them? Could anyone still claim that the Western world was making positive progress?

  The moon was shining. I remained at the wheel for a second, hoping that a rush of pride might make me turn back, but nothing of the kind occurred.

  Judith was choosing the worst moment to do this to me. I was therefore doubly angry with her and I had no difficulty getting out of my car, walking through the Lémos’ little garden that consisted largely of tufts of grass and sand, adorned with a few pinecones that had rolled there, as well as some cream-colored pine needles, and knocking at the door. There was a light shining on the first floor. I rang the bell. “Jérémie, it’s me!” I shouted, hopping from one foot to the other.

  I waited a short while, then I tried the door handle. It was open. I could hear the muffled sounds of Joy Division, which he was still playing. The kitchen light was on. “Would you have some eggs you could lend me?” I called out, making my way toward the fridge. “I rang, but you didn’t answer.” Radio silence.

  I came across a slice of green ham, a bit of black Basque pâté, some yellow spaghetti, very yellow, very stiff, almost translucent. Two solitary eggs, laid in the last century, were squabbling in a corner, alongside a chunk of half-decayed goat cheese. A.-M. wondered whether her son ate properly when she was away. I would not be able to reassure her for the time being.

  You could not count the anxieties that Jérémie caused on the fingers of one hand. All the more reason, I told myself, to look after him and to pack him off right away on the track of my wife, who was probably dining by candlelight at this very moment, in a sweet, modest country bedroom, dressed simply in a minuscule nightdress no thicker than a micron, with her hair awry, etc., her cheeks flushed.

  The living room smelled of cold ashes. There was a photograph of his father on the mantelpiece, posing with his racing bike and his Oakleys on his forehead. Grinning foolishly, in my view. I wondered whether a man could prove capable of transforming a woman into a lesbian, something he would certainly have had to have done for a woman to renounce the male species forever. I found him a fascinating character. Each time I had set foot in this living room, I had walked over and gazed at this specimen in an effort to solve such a mystery: How could a man have demeaned himself so? He looked like the sort of guy who drank milk all day long. “Do you think you’re capable of coming down so that we can talk?” I called out over my shoulder as I examined the picture of the strange individual. “I need to have a word with you, believe it or not.”

  Gossips claimed that the heart attack his father had suffered about ten years previously was due not to natural causes, but to taking drugs while climbing the Col du Galibier.

  I was a rumormonger. There was absolutely no proof that A.-M.’s veering out of control could, for some reason, be put down to this man’s behavior. I had promised myself I would question her on the subject, but I had not yet done so. I was unsure whether we would have reached a sufficient level of intimacy to address the matter.

  I wondered whether Jérémie asked himself the same questions I asked myself about his father, about the kind of husband he had been for A.-M.

  What kind of father had he been? What kind of father had I myself been? I turned toward the staircase, at the foot of which a rather uninteresting green plant stood on a small table, and I tried again: “Well, Jérémie, my boy, d’you think I’ve got all night?”

  A.-M. arrived on the first flight of the morning, when the dawn had just broken and it was still cold and the sky still blue. I immediately assured her that Jérémie had pulled through, but had not yet woken up, and I drove her to the hospital as the first shafts of sunlight gleamed over the surrounding mountains—the peak of the Rhune glowed as it emerged from the shadows.

  I spared her the details. I spared her the blood. I spared her the vomiting. I did not let her know that I had found him dead drunk—and, what’s more, unable to bleed properly, having chosen a knife that was as jagged as a handsaw with which to end his days.

  In spite of everything, she was trembling. In spite of the fact that I had chosen my words carefully, she was biting her lips. She let me talk, nodding her approval as I listed the various initiatives I had taken during this tragic night, but she had not uttered more than a word or two since we had left the airport, staring dumbfounded at the road ahead. Delicate blue clouds flitted above the sea, in the direction of the Côte des Basques.

  I took her hands once we had sat down in the waiting room—opposite a young girl in a miniskirt, her eyes lined with kohl, who was breast-feeding her baby as she chewed gum relentlessly.

  I leaned over toward A.-M. “It’ll be all right,” I told her. “Don’t worry.” She had just seen her son behind a glass partition, unconscious and on a drip, having spent a sleepless night at Orly in order to catch the first flight, and so I had taken her by the arm and led her over to a chair.

  She had lived through ten years in the space of a few hours. Her skin was wrinkled, her complexion had grown pale. “He’s not the first to do that,” I said, in an effort to try and dissolve the drama. “The number of young people who are unhappy with themselves and who do that, they’re legion. When they become aware that this entire life is nothing but a farce, etc. Not everyone is able to accept it without batting an eyelid. It’s the most clearheaded w
ho pay the price, that’s the way it is, A.-M., and there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s always been like that and it will never change.”

  She wasn’t listening to me, she was just weeping silently. The girl was now walking up and down with the child, who was also crying—squealing like a piglet being strangled. “It’s my milk,” she snapped as she passed close to me. “It’s like water.”

  Talking to Judith, Roger said that, whether I meant to or not, I had saved the boy’s life, and my wife replied that she agreed.

  I gave a slight smile. My role had been limited to calling the emergency services while the blood continued to flow from his arm. I had also switched off the music. Joy Division or not.

  After the meal, I fell asleep at my desk instead of getting down to writing an introduction for a new edition of some of my short stories, illustrated by Tomi Ungerer. I had not slept a wink all night. I crashed out.

  I had promised A.-M. that I wouldn’t leave her son until she was back, and I was true to my word. I had spent the whole night pacing the corridors—the thought of Judith being unsupervised preventing me from falling asleep—and I was paying the price in the middle of the afternoon, dozing on my leather sofa, surrounded by my books, my DVDs, my music, my computers, my pens, my medicaments.

  To transport this sofa, which I had inherited from my aunt, to my study upstairs had required the combined efforts of four local moving men, who were built like wardrobes—men who spent their spare time tossing tree trunks or carrying rocks for fun. I don’t know whether it was because Hemingway had fallen asleep upon it on various occasions, during the time that he stayed at my relative’s home, but I felt perfectly happy with it. I liked its smell. I liked the way it had aged. I never hesitated to sit down on it to scribble a few pages or to read the newspaper, but the best thing one could do was to sleep there.

  On the very evening that Johanna discovered I had slept with my editor, this sofa had become my bed until matters were sorted out, and I had found it comfortable. I was convinced that everything would work out eventually because my feelings for her were unaffected, whatever she may have thought. I had hunched my shoulders, waiting impatiently for the crisis to be over, while Johanna shot me a black glance every time our paths crossed in one room or another.