Low Heights

by Pascal Garnier

  Monsieur Lavenant propped himself up on one elbow and felt for his cigarettes. In the glow from the lighter flame he saw the mass of Thérèse’s red hair spread out on the pillow, a sepia pool, an armful of floppy seaweed.

  ‘As soon as we ’re finished with all this, we ’ll go away.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘I don’t know. Wherever you want; go away just for the sake of it. Here isn’t there, and you’re bound to get there one day or another. Do you want to go back to Alsace?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve no family there, no ties. It was so long ago …’

  ‘I said that off the top of my head, just to start us thinking; I could just as well have said Mont-Saint-Michel. What about abroad, does that appeal to you?’

  ‘Isn’t it a bit far?’

  ‘That depends. Switzerland’s next door. It’s peaceful, Switzerland, and yet it’s abroad.’

  ‘Do you think I’d get used to it?’

  ‘Of course, it’s like here.’

  ‘Then why go there?’

  ‘Why? Why? Because it’s like here only more expensive, that’s why!’

  ‘That’s a stupid answer!’

  ‘A stupid question deserves a stupid answer! You don’t ask why people go to Switzerland, they just go, full stop, end of story.’

  ‘No need to get angry! If that’s what you want, we’ll go to Switzerland.’

  ‘My, oh, my … It takes you an age to make a decision. You’ll like it, you’ll see; it’s very clean, the climate ’s good for you and although the clocks are always right, time passes more slowly there than anywhere else in the world. All old people like Switzerland.’

  ‘Do you consider me old?’

  ‘No, but that’ll come soon enough. You’ll be grateful to me when you’re old in Switzerland. Now we have to sleep.’

  The dark was no longer as dark. With the decision, a door had opened a crack, and behind it a vague glimmer could be seen, the germ of a future.

  ‘Thérèse, I love falling asleep in your arms …’

  The dawn had a muddy complexion. The sky was wondering about going off sick. It was a ‘roll on bedtime’ sort of a day. The two policemen from the previous afternoon seemed in a similar mood when they appeared at Monsieur Lavenant’s door. As their van was too big to get along the narrow street, all four of them had to make their way back to it on foot, under the prurient eye of the neighbour spying on them from behind his curtains.

  ‘Hey, Miriam, what did I say? Pretends to be a real gent, that one, and ends up flanked by policemen.’

  Thérèse was white with shame as she got into the vehicle. Monsieur Lavenant just looked extremely weary. Two or three people on their way to empty their dustbins stared at them and whispered. Everyday people who today weren’t everyday people any more. Édouard shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘It’s ridiculous, all this fuss and bother. We could have walked to the gendarmerie.’

  ‘It’s the rules, Monsieur.’

  ‘Rules, bah!’

  The garage adjacent to the police station, the place tyres were stored, was where Jean-Baptiste ’s body had been laid out, on a wooden board supported by two trestles. An ambulance was parked beside it. Two men in white coats stopped playing football with an old tennis ball when they arrived.

  ‘We ’ll need to be quick as the ambulance has to get off to the morgue. It’s not very savoury; the vultures didn’t leave much. I don’t know which of you …’

  ‘Stay here, Thérèse, I’ll go.’

  The first thing Édouard noticed, even before the sheet was lifted, was that the loafer was missing from Jean-Baptiste ’s left foot.

  The sock had been reduced to shreds of elastic thread at the ankle, and the foot to some bones held together by purplish tendons.

  ‘Will you be all right?’

  Édouard nodded his head. Of course he’d be all right. He had been born in Lyon, the home of the puppet Guignol – what was there to fear in a marionette without strings?

  The teeth were immaculate and one of them, a gold molar, reflected the daylight’s milky gleam. Jean-Baptiste was smiling because that’s all a human being is left with once the skin and flesh are stripped away. All that remained of the eyes and nose – the tastiest morsels no doubt – were unfathomable cavities allowing you to imagine the vacuity of the skull, jaggedly split like a coconut shell and already orbited by a big fat fly. Lower down, the ribs protruded under the torn shirt and the entire entrails and internal organs had disappeared. A burst drum. The hands like small rusty tools were clutching nothingness. Two fingers were missing from the right hand and the thumb from the left. The rest was just shreds, leftovers from a banquet too soon interrupted by the rescuers’ arrival. In spite of the products with which he had been sprayed, Jean-Baptiste was giving off a stench of flatulence.

  ‘Do you recognise the victim?’

  ‘The very image of his father.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sorry, yes, it’s definitely him.’

  The two men in white coats stowed Jean-Baptiste in the ambulance and Monsieur Lavenant, accompanied by the officer, rejoined Thérèse in the fetid offices of the gendarmerie. Once again it was necessary to go over the distressing banality of the previous day’s events. They had to sign a statement and were asked to remain available to the authorities until the post-mortem. All these formalities were lengthy and boring; it was like being back at school. Monsieur Lavenant refused to let the police take them home.

  ‘Thank you, you’ve done enough.’

  They met no one on their way home, or else they didn’t notice, each of them was so lost in their own thoughts. Édouard’s naturally took him towards Switzerland. The page had been turned; soon he would no longer remember it. The next chapter opened with the Swiss flag, which had always made him think of an Elastoplast cross stuck over a red mouth. This symbol of mutism suited him perfectly. He had already left.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘Dead like a dead man, out of his body. Only the shell of him was there.’

  ‘You’re speaking about him as if he were a thing!’

  ‘Well, yes, a still life. There’s no reason to be offended by it. Oh, it’s raining … You didn’t bring an umbrella, obviously. What were you thinking of, Thérèse?’

  Despite hurrying they arrived home soaking wet. Édouard lit a fire and Thérèse made tea. It was barely eleven o’clock but you would have thought it was the evening. Édouard was delighted. If only every day could be this short. Twenty-four hours, that’s far too many! Half would be enough, eight for sleeping, four for getting bored stiff. Twelve hours gone to waste when they could be useful to someone else, a poor man for example. What a gift that would be!

  The log that Édouard was poking at in the fire had taken on the appearance of a bison’s head, blowing jets of spitting flames out of every orifice: flaring nostrils, hollow eye sockets, misshapen ears. Paradoxically the more the piece of wood was consumed, the more alive it became. It was fascinating.

  ‘Stop poking at that log, Édouard. You’ll end up setting light to the house.’

  ‘Bah, what does it matter, we ’re never coming back.’

  ‘We can’t leave nothing but ashes behind us.’

  The button Thérèse was sewing on slipped out of her hands, rolled over the stone slabs, and settled again, spinning like a top between her feet, almost back where it had started. They had both followed its spiral course and were now staring at it, a mother-of-pearl button with four holes in it. It looked like the world’s navel.

  After several days the authorities had to acknowledge that Jean-Baptiste ’s death was simply the result of an accidental fall, even if the victim’s dubious past and his uncertain relations with Monsieur Lavenant allowed some doubt to remain. At any rate the latter was now free to go wherever he wanted.

  They left one morn
ing, early. The previous day Thérèse had cleaned the house from top to bottom. No trace of their presence remained, and Thérèse was disturbed by this as she glanced round for the last time before closing the door. Who could have imagined that people had prepared snails and lit a fire in the grate here, that they had laughed, cried, loved and suffered … The smell of the cleaning products had left a whiff of amnesia. Thérèse felt tears come to her eyes.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘It’s as if nothing had ever been …’

  ‘Well, yes, it’s as if … that’s how it is. You wipe everything away and start again; life is a palimpsest. Oh, look where you’re going, Thérèse, or you’ll miss the step.’

  ‘What shall I do with the keys?’

  ‘I don’t know … Hang them on the nail under the beam. Whoever finds them can have them, the rust first and foremost.’

  It had been agreed that they would spend a day or two in Lyon, just while Monsieur Lavenant sorted out some business. Thérèse’s old car struggled and coughed its way along under the weight of luggage.

  ‘First thing tomorrow we’ll buy a new one. We can’t go to Switzerland in an old jalopy like this, people would take us for gypsies.’

  ‘She ’s still game! She’s overloaded, that’s all. I couldn’t bear to see her go to the scrapyard.’

  ‘We ’ll put her in my garage then. She’s earned her retirement, don’t you think? What are you looking at in the mirror?’

  ‘I thought I saw two women waving us off at the corner of the street.’

  ‘One tall and one small?’

  ‘Yes. Do you know them?’

  ‘Vaguely. I’ve seen them go by.’

  The sky was as white and opaque as a cinema screen. It seemed as if at any minute Charlie Chaplin would appear, twirling his cane, on the horizon of the motorway. Thérèse kept to the slow lane, huddled over the steering wheel, stoically putting up with the exhaust fumes from the lorries she couldn’t bring herself to overtake. Every time she went under a bridge she would shut her eyes, her lips stammering out unintelligible prayers.

  ‘Open your eyes, for God’s sake! You’ll have us off the road.’

  ‘I can’t help it, I hate the motorway, especially the bridges. There’s always people on them looking at us.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I’m scared they’ll throw things at us.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous! What do you think they’d throw at us?’

  ‘I don’t know … A bicycle, a log, stones … It has happened.’

  ‘I love travelling with you. It feels so safe. You can stop at the next service station; I urgently need to go.’

  Hemmed in by two articulated lorries, Thérèse missed the first one. Édouard’s bladder was at bursting point when they came to the second. He rushed into the toilets, the ones for disabled people which he found more spacious, and stayed there for some time, prostate oblige. It was like the North Pole, a vast expanse of pristine tiling, from which seals, penguins and bears might be expected to appear.

  Thérèse was waiting for him in front of the coffee machines. They each had a tomato consommé. In the nine hours since they had left, they had covered only about a hundred kilometres. Tousled kids, bright red in the face, were clamouring loudly for everything the service station had to offer them: cuddly monkeys, cakes, fizzy drinks, key rings, music cassettes, sandwiches, regional specialities, knives … To relax after long hours at the wheel, fathers were practising virtual steering on video screens. It was a strange, murky world, slightly resembling that of a Jacques Cousteau documentary. They left their cups still half full on some plastic mushrooms and took refuge in their car, certain of having narrowly escaped some sort of danger.

  They took over four hours to reach the capital of the Gauls. Terrified by the traffic, Thérèse got lost a thousand times before – nerves in shreds and totally distraught – drawing up in front of Monsieur Lavenant’s residence in Boulevard des Belges, a stone ’s throw from the sparkling gates of Parc de la Tête d’Or.

  The apartment was immense, seven rooms, maybe more, stretching over almost five hundred square metres and with very high ceilings. Édouard showed Thérèse round at top speed before abandoning her in the drawing room while he shut himself in his study to make some urgent phone calls.

  Perched gingerly on the edge of a sofa made of the thickest leather, Thérèse looked over the decor surrounding her. It was expensive, to be sure; each piece of furniture, every carpet and ornament had to be worth a small fortune, but this ostentatious luxury dripping with gold and satin was out of keeping with Monsieur Lavenant’s character. It was hard to picture him moving around in this monstrous bonbonnière in which the sugared almond-coloured lampshade frills vied for first prize in the bad-taste stakes with the chantilly cream tie-backs for the fuchsia curtains. The plethora of objects in the display cases, on the occasional tables and on the shelves was enough to give you indigestion. In a vain attempt to find a moment’s escape from the riot of bronze, porcelain and other biscuit ware, Thérèse’s eyes lit on one of the countless terrible paintings staining the walls. Like the others it depicted a bunch of flowers, but the artist had larded it with so much red and blue that it had the same effect as an open abdomen spewing its steaming entrails. Thérèse found refuge only in contemplating a triangle of sky which gave the window a matt-white tint.

  ‘Say what you like, people are not like us.’

  So this was how other people lived. Well, so long as they liked it …

  She got no further in her reflections. Édouard had joined her, a leather briefcase under his arm, bouncing with energy.

  ‘Right, a car’s coming for me. I’ve two or three matters to sort out. Make yourself at home. I’ll be back around eight. I’ll book a table at Orsi’s, very nearby; that’ll be simpler for this evening … Sorry?’

  ‘I didn’t say anything.’

  ‘Oh, I thought … Right, well …’

  Édouard seemed like a different person in these surroundings, smaller somehow. He was like one of those portraits of adolescents you find when leafing through a family album, awkward-looking, ill at ease.

  ‘Cécile had terrible taste. See you this evening.’

  When he returned shortly before eight o’clock, Thérèse was still in the same place. Only the now open window showed that she had moved. The sun was sinking behind Fourvière hill.

  Édouard talked and talked, of things Thérèse understood absolutely nothing about: his business, his lawyer, figures. She wasn’t listening to him in any case; all her attention was focused on the excellent blanquette d’écrevisses au vin jaune which she was savouring in tiny mouthfuls.

  ‘It’s atrocious, Thérèse, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sorry, what’s atrocious?’

  ‘My place, it’s atrocious, don’t you think?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. It’s … big.’

  ‘I’m going to throw all that out. Every day she would bring home some thing or other, some whatnot, so hideous that I always used to wonder where on earth would sell it.’

  ‘You know, tastes and colours …’

  ‘No! It wasn’t that she had bad taste, she had none at all. She didn’t respond to colours or flavours or … Take your blanquette, for example. You’ve savoured it. Well, she ’d have swallowed it like a mess of tapioca. Imagine a bell with absolutely no resonance. She was extraordinary, unfathomably vacuous. It was no doubt to fill that void that she bought all that, to please me, maybe … Or to annoy me; I’ve never known which. On the other hand she could do impeccable imitations of farm animals.’

  ‘Farm animals?’

  ‘Yes, cows, cockerels, goats, sheep … You couldn’t tell them from the real thing. She could have had a career in music hall. Animals would answer her, you know. She could hold a conversation with a duck for nearly forty minutes!’

  ‘She loved animals.’

  ‘I don’t think so. It always ended in a row. They’d try to bite her and she ’d hit them
with a stick. She knew their languages, that was all. A pointless gift, like her beauty. She never made use of it. I got to wishing that she would cheat on me. She had many admirers. It never happened.’

  Thérèse noticed something like a little wave in Édouard’s look, with a mast in the distance, sinking beneath the foam.

  ‘Is something wrong? You haven’t touched your plate.’

  ‘I’m fine. It’s strange, I can’t remember her face at all, only her voice …’

  On leaving Orsi’s, Édouard went in the opposite direction to the one from which they had arrived. Thérèse was surprised but, not knowing the city, followed him. After a good quarter of an hour (whereas they’d taken only five or six minutes to walk to the restaurant from Édouard’s apartment) she asked him where they were going.

  ‘I’ve no idea, I’m following you.’

  ‘But we’re going to your apartment!’

  ‘Oh …’

  ‘Your place, Boulevard des Belges.’

  ‘Boulevard des Belges …’

  ‘Don’t you remember where you live?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The big apartment that’s … ugly.’

  They had taken so many turnings down so many empty, identical streets that Thérèse now had no idea at all where they were. Luckily a passer-by pointed them in the right direction. They had gone a long way off course but Édouard seemed unconcerned. He let himself be guided by Thérèse with the serene confidence a blind man has in his dog. Finally she recognised the façade and the carriage entrance opposite the park gates. Access was by a numerical code.

  ‘Seven, eight, nine, three.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Of course!’

  Thérèse pressed the buttons without really believing him, yet the gate opened straight away.

  ‘Are you making fun of me?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You don’t know where you live but you can remember the code?’

  ‘Get in quickly instead of asking stupid questions. It’s starting to rain.’