Unforgivable

by Philippe Djian

  He did not appear to. One part of his mind was concentrated deep within himself, whereas the other was focused almost entirely on his dog, from dawn till dusk, so that he paid virtually no attention to other matters, as if nothing else existed between these two poles.

  “It doesn’t matter. Don’t trouble yourself,” she told me. “Let him do what he wants with his money. It’s all the same to me.”

  Her complexion was a yellowish gray. The slightest attempt to follow anyone exhausted her. She dabbed her clammy forehead. So much so that Judith, who had been in a quandary for a long time and reluctant to help, eventually took pity on her and sometimes invited her to share our meal.

  Judith took Jérémie to task one morning; on the previous day in the evening, his mother had suddenly had a dizzy spell in our kitchen and, after attending to her and listening to her rapid breathing, we found her to be in a very weak condition. She told him that she preferred not having had a child if it meant being rewarded in that way and encountering such ingratitude, etc.

  Jérémie stood rooted to the spot. He lowered his gaze. For some reason or other, his heart was always in his boots in Judith’s presence. She damned well frightened him. One day when I showed surprise at this, he turned scarlet and began to mumble.

  Judith certainly had a strong personality. I could testify to that. He felt paralyzed and her slightest remark made him feel as if he had reverted to childhood; I could vouch for this, it was taking place before my very eyes.

  I knew that the lack of eagerness he had displayed about following her over the course of the past months had been to do with the hold she exerted over him. I knew this very well.

  He was basically still an adolescent. The majority of boys of his age were little more than pathetic imbeciles, vapid and helpless, incapable of looking a woman in the eyes for more than two or three seconds, and I could see him cringe at the reproaches that she was leveling at him concerning his indifference, literally shrinking, retracting and shriveling as she bombarded him.

  A few days later, returning from a dinner party with friends, we discovered a cardboard box in front of the door. Inside it was a cake. Carefully prepared, as the card inside stated, by Jérémie and his mother, who, on this occasion, had joined forces. I suggested we taste it. The night was clear, soft, and without a breath of wind, without any mosquitoes, without any insects, without any moths: their total disappearance had been one of the subjects discussed during the evening, as had the programmed death of the West and the invention of the water engine.

  One week after Johanna and Olga were buried, I had sold our apartment, put our possessions in storage, and we had set off on our travels for several months.

  On the day before our departure, at dusk—a time of day when I used to feel particularly exhausted, particularly empty, and unwell—Alice walked into my bedroom and found me sitting on the bed.

  I knew that Johanna kept a diary. I knew where she kept it. But two full weeks had gone by and I had not picked it up. It required a certain degree of courage to shove my hand into her chest of drawers, to rummage among her things, among her underclothes, and I had not yet found this courage, this strength.

  Alice hurled her mother’s diary at my face. I soon understood the reason why. The cover of the diary cut my lip slightly before continuing its flight across the bedroom.

  “You make me sick,” she said to me.

  “Very well,” I replied.

  This drive around Grisons was costing me dear. I withdrew to the bathroom and locked the door so that I could clean up the blood that had trickled down my chin without being disturbed. She immediately banged on the door, ordering me to open it. I turned on the cold-water tap and I was dabbing my lip while she started aiming solid kicks at the door and letting out long howls. “Baaaastard!” she yelled, hammering violently on this wretched door while my blood dripped, drop by drop, into the basin. “Open up, you baaaastard!”

  The following day, when we set off for Sydney, she was wearing large dark glasses and had not uttered a word since she woke up. The shrink had advised us to travel together, to take a few months to rediscover ourselves and, my goodness, the whole thing was off to a very bad start. I was—even though she hadn’t said so, she had certainly made me feel it—the last person in the world she wanted to be with.

  I had a fairly good idea as to what she had been able to read about me, for I knew how her mother had taken the affair. Very badly. Very very badly. And Johanna was not a woman to mince her words.

  I no longer had any chance of discovering from Olga how she would have viewed my conduct, but I doubted whether the scales would have tilted in my direction. The three women were against me. The three of them blamed me. The only one who was still alive wouldn’t even speak to me.

  As we were about to land at Singapore and I was looking forward to being able to smoke a cigarette or two, we entered some strong turbulence. The plane began to leap about amid the dark clouds. The in-flight meal trays were flying about before the air hostesses were able to collect them. People were yelling. Oxygen masks dropped down from the ceiling. In normal circumstances my teeth would have started to chatter, I would have taken up the crash position after being shown what to do, my face would have been contorted, etc., but not this time, this time I remained impassive, I couldn’t have cared less about dying, I couldn’t have given a damn about dying . . . instead I held out my arm resolutely across the row of empty seats—she had asked not to be seated right next to me and a cow at the Air France counter, a sexy blonde, had stared at me for a few seconds before granting her request.

  As the plane plunged several thousand feet, the man sitting in front of me was screaming that we would all perish, but I kept my hand stretched out toward Alice, steadily held out, palm open, without flinching. As it fell, the Airbus roared and whistled like a kettle while my daughter cowered and wondered whether she should let go of the armrests and reach out to that lousy hand now—now that we were on the verge of death. I did not know whether she had understood that the fate of this plane was in her hands. That she only had to make a simple movement for this nightmare to be over.

  It was as if we were in some crazy henhouse. What a din! What a commotion! Everything whirled and hurtled about. Sitting in their corner, the air hostesses gritted their teeth.

  Yes, I had slept with my editor, Marlène Antenaga. Yes, I had done so. But I was far from home, in Grisons, I was drunk, and this woman ran one of the most prestigious publishing houses in the world—some would have killed their father and their mother to appear in its catalogue. This woman, Marlène Antenaga, could put a stop to a writer’s career with a simple snap of her fingers. Should I therefore have taken my own life? Should I have said good-bye to the full-page ads and the long interviews she obtained for me when each of my novels was published? We had laughed so much as we walked back up to the chalet—I had downed a bottle of gin with Martin Suter and Robert McLiam Wilson. My wrist was aching from signing so many autographs. What a marvelous evening. The fragrance of the night air in Grisons. The sweet and distant whiff of the cowshed in the chill air. The narrow staircase that led to our bedrooms, beneath the eaves. The wonderful feather-filled eiderdowns. The mist flooding the valley. The bells around the necks of the cattle. The neutrality. The stone upon which Nietzsche came to sit and meditate.

  I had been a widower for just over a year when I pushed open the door of an estate agent in the center of town in search of a house, having decided that Alice and I could no longer live in the same place together—if I wanted to keep her alive, at least.

  I looked up and it seemed as if I was gazing at a woman for the first time in ages.

  During the days that followed, she arranged appointments for me and took me around in her car while Alice continued to get frequently and systematically stoned, accompanied by this banking kid with whom she had been going around for months now—the guy had been sick in the bathroom, burned the carpets, broken plates, alarmed the neighbors, walked arou
nd the apartment for nights on end; the guy was a real pain, I loathed him, but I didn’t want Alice to run away, something she had threatened me with when one morning, just as I was having my breakfast, I saw this idiot appear from the end of the corridor, barely able to hold himself upright, as if he still had his needle stuck in his arm, and suddenly collapse on the table, sending my bowl of coffee flying, my fromage frais, my cereal, and what failed to hit me full in the face shattered on the tile floor and spilled over my feet, so I then became furious, I stood up, knocking my chair over, I wiped my face, threw down my napkin, then I grabbed the screwball by the neck and dragged him over to the landing, from where I was about to throw him down to the foot of the stairs, when she appeared, white as a ghost, she appeared and urged me on: “Do it,” she said to me. “Go on, do it, and you’ll never see me again, you bastard.”

  The insult had stuck, in spite of the months spent together here and there—and on account of the extreme cowardice I had displayed in order that things should not become worse than they were. Alice did not use the term every moment of the day—as she had during our visit to Sydney, by the end of which I’d come to think that “you bastard” had become my name—but she still used it on certain occasions. I looked at her before releasing the object of her concern, who had not been aware of anything and had collapsed into a bad-tempered coma. When you have only one daughter and do not want to lose her, the outcome of every battle is known beforehand.

  This week spent crisscrossing the area in the company of this woman who took me to visit houses brought me abruptly back to life. After five hundred days of grieving that had sapped my energy, I woke up once more, blinking. She drove a Lexus—secondhand, she eventually admitted to me on the morning of the third day, by which time we were already on first-name terms, Judith, Francis, etc. “Business wasn’t as good when I was driving my Honda Civic,” she added with a laugh.

  I was bowled over. I didn’t understand what was happening to me straightaway. I was glad to be back in the Basque Country; to see the rays of sunlight glistening through the rain, to breathe the sea air, to drive through the forests, to rediscover the taste of chilies and goat cheese. But that wasn’t all.

  I played hard to please as far as choosing houses was concerned, pretending that I needed to see as many as possible before reaching a decision. I settled comfortably in the Lexus and let myself be driven all over the countryside, from the hinterland to the coast. Spring was coming, preceded by vast, crystal-clear skies. The craziest notions bombarded me.

  She had read my books. All my books. I had the sense that I was living in a dream. “But above all, I love the way you write,” she had added.

  “A stroke of luck,” I had thought, for this Judith was a very attractive woman, younger than me by about ten years and financially independent.

  “You make me blush,” I had said.

  The following day, she suggested we visit a house beside the sea. Then she changed her mind. The house was ideal, but it was beyond the price range I had set. “A villa in the Andalusian style,” she sighed. “I adore it. Frank Sinatra stayed there after the filming of The Man with the Golden Arm, which had literally exhausted him.”

  “Compared to Hemingway, why, Nelson Algren is not worth two pennies,” I explained. “But let’s go and take a look, in any case. Who knows?”

  “Not on your life, Francis. I don’t want to appear to have pushed you into anything. Don’t go on about it . . .”

  As soon as she drew up in front of the house in question, I knew it was the right one.

  In the attic, I discovered an enormous room that would have ultimately persuaded me had I had the least doubt about the matter. I could already see where I would place my desk, the electric coffee machine, the sofa. I could already visualize myself at my computer, involved in the battle for literary prizes: Marlène Antenaga—it was fair play—had reinstated me among the firm’s top authors on the very day of the burial, having embraced me and kissed me on both cheeks in front of members of the press who had announced that I was changing publishers a few days previously.

  From the window, I could see the sea. “It’s not Edmond Rostand’s house,” I said, “but it’s not bad. It’s not at all bad. The owner is mad, of course. He’ll never get that much. But the house is really not bad.”

  We looked at one another.

  “Marry me,” I said to her. “You’re my only hope.”

  I reeled at the notion of being in the presence of the wife I needed, in the house that I needed. At the notion of my recovery. I suddenly realized that my mouth was completely dry.

  On the day that Roger had crushed his daughter’s fingers by swinging on a solidly built rocking chair, he had sworn he would never touch drugs again. The accident occurred when he was completely stoned and was supposed to be looking after the twins. He had given up threatening to cut his hand off as he had originally planned to do, but he had taken advantage of my presence in Paris so that I could witness his entire stock being thrown down the lavatory without further ado and, to my total amazement, he appeared to have kept his word and Alice had done so, too.

  Anne-Lucie was barely one year old when she had crawled over toward her imbecile of a father, who, in a final bout of crazed rocking, had rolled forward heavily, his hands firmly gripping the armrests, and had reduced her fingers to pulp; the fact that she had only lost two fingers was little short of a miracle. As for their mother, who was spending the weekend with the producer of an indigestible comedy she was preparing to make for television, she could hardly be excused for a large part of the responsibility in this appalling business.

  Be that as it may, however, they had pulled themselves together and had managed to create a relatively normal family—something that had led me to temper my criticism and to tone down my sarcasm.

  It had been touch and go for them. Unlike Judith, who had not had the good fortune to live in the same house as them at a time when the dealers and the emergency services were beating at my door, I nonetheless remained on my guard. Not, I stress again, that I would have refused to acknowledge the progress they had made—especially since Judith and I, after three years of marriage, were hardly an example of perfect success.

  There I was, lost in thought, daydreaming, while Judith was leafing through some travel brochures at the Air France counter, when their plane came down to land beneath a bank of heavy clouds, head-on to the wind that blew from the Bay of Biscay.

  There were half a dozen photographers at Biarritz-Parme airport that morning. The sky was heavy with snow and the wind was gusting. According to the latest news, Alice was suspected of having an affair with one of these lousy actors and this had provoked a sort of buzz around her. Snowflakes the size of small nuts were fluttering over the runway. No sooner was she married—the twins were just two years old—no sooner had she got rid of her bad habits—she only took a few sleeping tablets from time to time, when the pressure was too great—than here she was trying something new, here she was discovering other experiences; sometimes I was glad I was merely her father.

  In any case, we watched her arrive that morning, looking glorious, emerging from a flurry of snow—Christmas was fast approaching. Straightaway, the flashbulbs crackled. She adopted a few poses. After which, she walked over to us.

  “You’re looking good, both of you,” she said in a husky voice as Roger and the twins—who had briefly been dispatched to collect the luggage—elbowed their way through the crowds toward us.

  “Has Roger had some hair implants?” I asked, winking in the direction of my son-in-law, who had just loaded three enormous suitcases and a few bags onto a cart.

  “Of course not. He’d never do that,” she answered in an exasperated voice.

  “Oh good. Forgive me. I could have sworn that he had.”

  She herself was carrying several bags from smart boutiques—a perfume shop, a delicatessen, a chocolate maker—which I suggested relieving her of so that she could embrace Judith without crushing ev
erything to bits.

  By shoving a local radio microphone in front of her face, a girl with a large bosom, wearing small spectacles, markedly reduced the effusiveness.

  Alice stared at her for a moment. “Thank you. But I don’t want to make any comment. I have nothing to say. Please understand me. Brad is probably the nicest boy I know, but I repeat, to have a relationship with your partner is the surest way possible to end up as a second-rate actor. I’m delighted we’ve had such a success together. Let’s leave the gossips, the fundamentalists, the envious, the scandal sheets, etc., to their dreary jobs, OK? My husband is here. My children are here. My parents are here. Do I look as if I have run away with my lover? Let’s be serious. Soon people will start alleging I’m having an affair with Jack Nicholson. And how old is he now? Eighty? Good God! Listen, I’d just like to say one thing. Angelina is my friend. Listen, I know that for some people that doesn’t mean very much. But for me, it does. Try to understand that.”

  I looked at her. She had put on some weight again, she was radiant, she exuded health, energy, beauty. She had become, I fully realized as I watched her that morning, and without any possibility of being wrong—as the gusts of wind shook the shimmering eddies of dead leaves and blue-tinted snow behind the bay windows from which, in fine weather, you could normally see the Pyrenees—one of those loathsome young actresses who were self-confident and arrogant, and totally unbearable.