Unforgivable

by Philippe Djian

  There was a squall during the night. A few low clouds, stacked up gloomily on the horizon, should have alerted us, as should the falling barometer pressure, but neither she nor I had paid attention. I leaped out of my reverie when a shutter slammed violently behind me. I was right in the middle of a sentence. I got up, however, and grabbed hold of it in order to attach it to its catch. All of a sudden, the wind began to howl. The vagaries of the weather in this part of the country were not worth mentioning. My clock was showing one o’clock in the morning.

  I went downstairs. There was a draft blowing through the living room between the chimney and a French window that had been badly closed. Outside, the umbrella shade was about to fly away. I went out and was almost blown away with it. I had to lie flat on the ground with the umbrella and tie it up while sharp gusts of wind roared about over my head, tousling my hair. The chairs had rolled into the hydrangea bush, the table was teetering on its legs, I could see my irises blown flat, and there was lightning in the distance, toward the mountains, which were lit up for a brief instant. Yet no rumble of thunder could be heard. It was not raining. The drops of rain came from the sea; the foam was flying.

  I got up to rescue the chairs. Judith came with me. I signaled to her to attend to the table, for the wind was growing ever stronger. It was no mean achievement to remain standing.

  Over ten years, the wind had carried away one table and three umbrellas. A few dozen chairs.

  After we had secured the garden furniture, the wind began to drop. There was a time when we would have enjoyed the piquancy of the situation, when our sense of humor would have easily outweighed everything else, but our eyes were downcast and we sighed silently. Then we went indoors.

  “You’re working late, these days,” she said to me.

  I was still feeling a bit dazed and light-headed. “Am I? Do you think so?”

  “Mind you, it’s not a criticism. It’s a sign that everything’s going fine, isn’t it?”

  “You can’t say that. You can never say that. As you know. But OK, let’s suppose it is. All I can tell you is this: I’m progressing. Page after page, plodding along. I push on. Day after day. What more can one hope for? Isn’t that a miracle in itself?”

  She looked amazed. I admired the casual way she had settled into an adulterous relationship, that impassive expression with which she met any outside attempt to discover what she was up to.

  “I’m glad for you. I get the feeling that it’s a good story.”

  I nodded vaguely. Then it rained heavily for five minutes.

  “Does forgiveness exist in your religion?” she asked as she watched the sheets of steaming rain cascading down on the garden, beating against the bay windows.

  “That depends on what it is. Living together means sharing certain values. Agreeing on the bounds beyond which you can’t go. In that context, forgiveness exists.”

  With these words, I went outside, for the storm had stopped. A soft breeze began to blow, with the force of a hair dryer.

  “You’ve often left, by the time I get up in the morning,” I said.

  “But I go to sleep before you do.”

  “That’s true. But I can’t work in the morning, as you know. Mornings are fine for young fathers.”

  The moon shone down now and the sky glittered as if nothing had happened.

  “I can understand people being allergic to this climate,” I said, examining my mud-covered moccasins. The air was filled with the smell of tamarisk, the scent of honeysuckle.

  “Why should you be taking an interest in me once more?” she said in the half light.

  “What do you mean?” I sniggered.

  “I thought that we knew where we stood on this matter. I thought we had identified the problem a long time ago.”

  I cleared my throat. I had behaved so foolishly toward this woman that I didn’t always find the words that would have allowed me to turn the conversation around. “Writing this book gets me worked up,” I eventually admitted to her. “I’d forgotten what it was like. Don’t pay any attention. You know, there are two possibilities: either it’s worn me out, or it’s the other way round. It doesn’t surprise me you find me a bit strange. Sometimes, you know, without a couple of tetrazepam, I can’t sleep a wink I’m so stressed. But I’m not complaining. I know that some people get ophthalmic migraines or eczema into the bargain.”

  “Francis, I’m being extremely serious.”

  “Oh Lord God!” I muttered, my head down, my fists clenched, my soul in shreds.

  When I had decided to introduce Alice and Roger to Judith, I had organized one of those meals for which I hold the secret, in which everything goes wrong.

  We were still at the planning stage. She had sold me this house, we had slept together six or seven times, and I was her favorite writer, which made her a relatively serious candidate to succeed Johanna—before I became totally crazy—but it was important that my daughter and her lunatic of a boyfriend did not cause her to flee on the spot.

  I had decided to cook a mutton-and-vegetable stew but I couldn’t find the casserole. I had asked for someone to give me a hand with the mountain of packing cases—Johanna’s and Olga’s belongings had accompanied us, adding pain to the confusion because everything had been jumbled together indiscriminately and their things suddenly began to appear at the top—but no one answered.

  There was nothing unusual about that, in itself, since they were so often stoned that they slept most of the time, but without this casserole I couldn’t achieve anything ambitious, whereas I ought to have been outdoing myself.

  By the time evening came, I was distraught.

  I had drunk half a bottle of white wine and I was thinking about the possibility of pouring myself some more as the risky aspect and the enormity of the undertaking loomed larger, as the sky grew dimmer, as the horizon shimmered weakly above the sea darkened by the twilight. The clock chimed eight o’clock. Not only was I asking myself how I could have organized such an encounter, given the challenge it represented, but I was equally astounded by the fact that I was thereby making our relationship official—something that had curiously and maddeningly escaped me up till then and that I now regarded as a further betrayal of Johanna. I had tears in my eyes.

  I hoped that everything would cave in on me and bury me. Almost two years had passed, but I could not get out of my mind the fact that the last image she had taken away of me, and which I could no longer do anything about, was that of a man who had betrayed her. And here I was replacing her with another woman.

  With any luck, Roger would bring out a needle in the middle of the meal or swallow a whole handful of drugs as Judith looked on in bewilderment. Neither was I entirely satisfied with my stew; not because I had not eventually laid my hands on the precious cast-iron pot, but for some strange reason that I couldn’t be bothered to fathom, neither my turnips nor my carrots had caramelized as I wanted.

  I had bought this unfamiliar house, and I wondered whether it was going to suit us. I didn’t know a damn thing. I had laid the table and lit a few candles. A perfectly dismal atmosphere.

  When the doorbell rang, I would have liked to put a bullet into my head or to have disappeared forevermore. I gave myself a final glance in the mirror before opening the door. I frightened myself.

  “Hello,” I said. She responded with a passionate embrace, which I barely saw coming, among the coat stands. I should have expected it. In retrospective fear, I imagined Alice’s reaction at finding me in close contact with a woman other than Johanna and I led her stumbling along among the warren of packing cases that the movers had piled up in narrow canyons, in unsteady columns, in meandering stacks.

  I sat her down on the sofa that I had inherited from my aunt, a real Basque woman and a lover of art and literature—a sofa that I was actually longing to have taken up to my study—then I bustled about filling our glasses. I smiled, but deep down winced bitterly, knowing what a huge mess we were heading straight toward.

 
I found her cruelly attractive that evening. Yet I could imagine only too well how distressed, flabbergasted, and astonished she would be by the end of this family meal I had so skillfully concocted; the awful food, the awful company.

  “Do you and this house get along well together?”

  “Perfectly well,” I replied.

  “Francis, I’m glad.”

  “Judith, I am, too.”

  “Where are they? I’m getting restless.”

  I winked to reassure her, already fairly drunk; best not to be completely sober when you are to be involved in your own ruination. I signaled to her to wait for me and I made my way to the stairs, which I immediately proceeded to climb, clinging to the banister.

  Were they asleep? Were they going to tell me that they had forgotten our party, or would they simply refuse to take part just because there was nothing that compelled them to make the acquaintance of the “woman from the agency,” as they would not fail to christen her?

  I knocked at their bedroom door without the slightest hope, with a kind of morbid pleasure, but they came out immediately and walked out in front of me; I was in no state to run after them. Given the measure of the attraction I felt for this woman, I had considered myself justified in arranging such a meeting and I was now going to discover the cost of my error. Brazenness had a price. Arrogance had a price. Naïveté had a price. I jumped the last step unintentionally and almost landed flat on my face.

  Having drunk a large glass of wine, I caught up with them in the kitchen, for everything was probably going to take place in the kitchen: the actual meeting, the unpleasant things, the cutting remarks, the hurtful things, etc.

  All three of them were bent over my lamb stew as if it were a cradle—apart from the fact that it was steaming. It seemed an odd scene to me. Alice still had the wooden spoon in her hand. Roger was holding the lid. Judith turned toward me; I thought she was going to clap. “Wow!” she said.

  I then noticed that Roger was wearing a clean shirt and that he had the look of someone else. That Alice had done up her hair in an elegant way. I stroked my chin. I took a step backward. “Papa, you’re the best,” Alice said to me. Roger agreed, giving me the thumbs-up sign.

  Apart from me, everyone was hungry.

  I sniggered aloud during the meal, but I wasn’t able to break up the mood.

  “I think we’ll be getting married soon,” I heard over the dessert course. I glanced up at Alice. “But what’s all this about?” I mumbled with difficulty. “I wasn’t informed. You’re going to what? Get married?”

  Without waiting for an answer, I got up from the table, taking my glass with me, and went and sat down a short distance away. I pondered.

  “Well, perhaps you won’t be the only ones,” I said. “All right then. Perhaps you won’t be the only ones, after all. Perhaps it’s best that way.”

  Judith burst out laughing. She pretended that I was very funny. I was in any case, to her mind, one of the funniest writers in the world.

  The following day, she paid me a visit, I asked her to sit down, and she told me that she had spent a very pleasant evening.

  I had been suffering from a violent migraine ever since I had woken up, but I greeted the news with a vague smile. Then came the moment where she gingerly brought up the subject of that announcement I had made the previous evening, concerning us, and whether it was serious or not. And if it was, whether that would necessarily pose a problem for Alice.

  These days, A.-M. was taking morphine and rarely ever left home.

  Most of the time, when he wasn’t working, Jérémie stayed outside, under the porch, together with his dog and his CD player, and only came in at night. I knew that he never addressed a word, so to speak, to his mother, and simply made sure that she had what she needed, fetching her a glass of water, switching off the lights, then heading straight upstairs with his dog at his heels without even removing his headphones for a second.

  When I looked at him, I could still see so much anger seething inside this young man that I wondered whether the treatment he was being given served any purpose. “Strictly none,” A.-M. confirmed. “Thank goodness he’s got that dog with him. Thank goodness that dog’s there, you know.”

  These days, she stayed in her slippers and hobbled around the ground floor accompanied by different carers and home helps who took over from one another at different times of the day and made her walk—except that she had nowhere else to go, she was fond of pointing out, and was consequently told off politely for her gloomy remarks.

  “He wears gloves, you know.”

  “He wears gloves?”

  “To touch me. He wears gloves to touch me.”

  She made comments like this, terrible ones, in a matter-of-fact tone of voice as she gazed into space. If Jérémie was there, she would position herself in the shade, by the window, and look at him furtively while she questioned herself, in an astonishingly calm voice, about the total ingratitude of this son whom she had brought into the world and who wore gloves in order to touch her.

  Spring was already well advanced and the Spanish property market, buzzing briskly, was taking up a great deal of Judith’s time; the messages informing me that important business was retaining her on the other side of the Pyrenees increased. It was beginning to get hot and I saw her take only light outfits away with her. I watched her depart in the morning without being sure of seeing her in the evening; she waved from the gate and I raised my hand before going back to my novel.

  How many writers had gone back to their novels rather than dash off in pursuit of their wives? The best ones, without any doubt. The clairvoyants. The great masters.

  “I’ll double the amount. Don’t desert me, damn it! Jérémie, Jérémie, look at me. A few hours each day. When you’ve got a spare moment, perhaps, but I’ve got to know, you understand. Uncertainty gnaws away at me. It can’t go on like this. Summer’s coming. I’m going to go crazy, you realize. I’m in the middle of writing a novel. I can’t interrupt myself every moment of the day to dwell on my personal problems. This time, my reputation’s at stake. I’m risking my all. What’s more, if this doesn’t go well, I’ll stop. I won’t write another line. I’m telling you. The return on the investment is too small. One thing’s for sure, in any case, I can’t allow myself to make a mess of my comeback, Jérémie. I must keep my head clear. Oh, I know very well what you think. That I don’t appear to be doing a job that’s too demanding. You’re not the only one, you know. But I’m not complaining. Have you ever heard me complain? I know that many men are up with the dawn, I know that many men are exploited by their bosses, I know all that. I’m aware of all that. I know that there are men who see their fields devastated, their houses go up in a puff of smoke, their schools collapse, while I apparently just sit gazing up at the sky like a simpleton. Ha! Ha! I wish that writing could be as straightforward as dressmaking, I wish that writing could be as easy as it looks. Well, it isn’t, actually. Don’t believe that. Don’t believe it’s heaven-sent. I have to devote all my attention to it. I have to concentrate beyond what is reasonable. I can’t let there be any questions that nibble away in my mind. Like an infernal bee buzzing around a flower bush. I can’t, Jérémie. I can’t put up with it, it’s out of the question. Beyond my ability. I must know. I must liberate myself, rid myself of this terrible and obsessive uncertainty, do you hear, even if it’s very unpleasant, even if it doesn’t do me any good, do you hear, Jérémie?”

  I had counted the days, now I no longer counted anything. The precise moment that Alice ceased to exist for me seemed such a long time ago nowadays, so distant, so deeply embedded in the limbo of my memory, that having taken root on the far side of a dark and bottomless ocean, it would strike me all the more clearly. “I know I shouldn’t say this, but it’s as if you were dead. I’m sorry.”

  I hung up. Mildly disconcerted. She hadn’t attempted to speak to me for a long time—ever since the day when she got fed up with me putting the phone down without a word after s
he had begged me to say something, no matter what, which was still too much for my liking.

  I walked to the seashore, feeling irritated and troubled. I didn’t know what she wanted because I hadn’t given her time to express herself, but her telephone call was so unexpected that my formerly uncontrollable reflexes had not been functioning. I had spoken to her. Probably in a somewhat curt manner, but I had nevertheless exchanged a few words with her and I had almost wanted to wash out my mouth in my handkerchief—and God knows how piqued I felt that such crude images should come so easily to mind, but Alice still triggered such harsh and primitive reactions in me.

  I walked as far as Hendaye. I caught a train on the way back. My shoes were full of sand and my trousers were wet up to the knees, but I didn’t exactly know what I had been up to. In any event, it seemed to me that I had not been thinking of very much. I flicked my tongue over my salt-covered lips. There was a strong smell of old tobacco in the compartment dating from the time that smoking was permitted.

  Alice wanted to inform me that she was pregnant. I learned about this the following day from Judith, who looked at me as if I was a monster—Judith, who always tried not to understand what motivated me.

  “Will it be a boy or a girl?” I asked, yawning.

  She gave me a piercing, chilly look. I had realized long ago that my fatal error had been not wanting a child. She had never forgiven me for it. That was how it still was today and barely a day or two passed without our having this kind of silent squabble. In every glance she shot at me, I could discern the void that the absence of a child had left in her. Unfortunately, my regrets were of no use; my nonregrets were of no use.

  “It makes no difference to me. Whether she’s pregnant or not makes absolutely no difference to me.”

  I exasperated Judith more easily than in the past. I should like to know how I went from the status of being a brilliant writer to that of a self-centered professional.