Low Heights

by Pascal Garnier

  ‘It’s … It’s truly amazing but …’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘The scar …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You’ve got the wrong cheek.’

  Mirrors are always playing tricks, but Édouard was unperturbed. Left, right, who would worry? For the moment other things were more pressing. They had to go to Geneva to retrieve their things from the hotel.

  ‘Will you be able to drive this car?’

  ‘It’s an automatic; I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s very simple: forward gear, reverse gear. Actually I should be able to manage it myself. Let me take the wheel.’

  Thérèse wasn’t entirely reassured but after a few kilometres she agreed that Édouard was acquitting himself very well. The gracefully negotiated bends followed one upon the other like the figures of an accomplished skater. The sun spread a gilded pollen in the air. There was a cassette in the car radio. Édouard pushed it in with the tip of his index finger. Berlioz’s Requiem accompanied them in grand style right up to the Bristol.

  Once the bill was paid and the luggage stowed in the boot, Édouard and Thérèse found themselves burdened with a completely new freedom. It was half past ten and the weather was glorious.

  ‘What do you say to a drive along the lake? We could have lunch in Thonon or Évian.’

  ‘If you like.’

  There was little traffic, camper vans in the main, driven by retired couples in no hurry to arrive anywhere. On the left a sign post announced ‘EXCENEVEX, MEDIEVAL TOWN OF FLOWERS’.

  ‘Tempted, Thérèse?’

  ‘Why not?’

  All the car parks charged a fee, which made Édouard lose his temper. So they parked some distance from the centre in a place where it was free, near a campsite where elderly people plastered in sun lotion were getting some fresh air outside their caravans. They found more of the same, only more suitably dressed, in the twisting narrow streets of the town. The women went into raptures over the window displays in the souvenir shops, while the men videoed the half-timbered balconies spewing torrents of geraniums. Every house was a business; everything was on sale: hand-knitted pullovers, sausages, cowbells, carved walking sticks, musical boxes shaped like chalets, handmade leather sandals, brightly coloured caps and T-shirts. The most unassuming little door claimed to be a ‘crêperie’, a ‘sandwicherie’, a ‘friterie’ or an ‘atelier d’art’. The wrought-iron shop signs swung lazily in an asthmatic wind. As was proper, the visit to the town ended at the foot of a castle whose towers rose straight out of the lake. Happily there was no one at that spot. Thérèse and Édouard sat down on the flat polished stones which sloped down into the clear water. Ducks fluffed up their feathers, quacking. A woman dived off a yacht anchored a few metres out: ‘Come on, Tony, it’s lovely.’ A silent aeroplane split the sky in two. In a room in the castle, someone was picking out notes on a piano, a clumsy approximation of a Chopin étude. Every sound ricocheted off the lake; the echo went on for ever. Thérèse seemed happy. Her gaze drifted over the smooth surface, far away, beyond the mountains in their turbans of wispy cloud.

  ‘How peaceful it is …’

  ‘Let’s go and look for a restaurant, but not in this madhouse.’

  ‘Édouard?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What about having a picnic?’

  They went to the shops in Thonon. The streets were heaving with a multicoloured and very noisy crowd, halfway between a village festival and a riot. Édouard had left the choice of menu to Thérèse. He was waiting for her in front of the delicatessen with a baguette under his arm, in the company of an ageless poodle with watery eyes. Pennants of various colours were strung across the street, flapping in the wind, and loudspeakers crackled unintelligible announcements between salsa tracks. Certain places are non-places and Thonon-les-Bains was one of them. Édouard was convinced that if he were to go round behind the façades of the houses he would find only wooden stays, like the ones used to support scenery on a film set. Ditto with the people who, from the front, couldn’t be more than one centimetre deep. In October they must fold all that up, leaving Thonon no more than a name on the map. That said, Geneva and Lyon had made the same impression on him. Doubtless because he was no longer in the cast list for this bad film and was glad of it. He had only one desire, to get the hell out of there. In a gap in the crowd, his attention was caught by the shopfront of an outdated clothes shop: ‘A. CARON, founded 1887’. Diagonally across the window was a banner with ‘EVERYTHING MUST GO’ written in red on a white background. Behind the sign, two headless mannequins, one tall and slim, the other small and stout, sported identical beige and blue-sprigged dresses. The back of the shop was immersed in total darkness. Édouard couldn’t help smiling when he recognised the two familiar figures, and touched his hat in greeting. Eventually Thérèse reappeared, hair all over the place, as if emerging from a gladiatorial combat.

  ‘What a queue there was!’

  ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  On their way out of the town, just past the Château Ripaille, they turned into a road at random. It led to the Gavot Plateau. The higher they climbed, the fewer houses there were and the easier it was to breathe. Just like locals, they went straight off along a little track lined with hazels which came out into an idyllic meadow argued over by sun and shadow. A wooden fence separated them from a field of piebald ponies, which ceased grazing to watch, wide-eyed, as the visitors sat down. After the bustle of the town, the infinitely peaceful sight of the animals charmed them. Édouard broke off a lump of bread and went over to the enclosure. A mare followed by her foal plodded over to meet him. Édouard stretched out his palm and stroked her nose. It felt hot and damp. A delicious smell of hay and leather was coming from her. The foal, like a bolster on top of two wobbly trestles, kept at a cautious distance. One by one the others came forward, as shy as they were intrigued. For a moment there was peace on earth, men, things and animals gathered together in the most perfect harmony. Édouard then made the mistake of throwing the piece of bread. Immediately the horses began fighting, biting one another and of course the strongest came out on top.

  ‘Load of idiots …’

  ‘Édouard, it’s ready!’

  Thérèse was radiant, like a celluloid doll appearing out of a fake cabbage. She looked as if she had fallen out of the sky, her blue dress spread out like a parachute on the green grass. The shadow of the leaves gave her a little veil.

  ‘You look magnificent, just like a Watteau. So, what’s on the menu?’

  The ponies had gone back to their grazing, as indifferent to them as they were to the rest of creation. Thérèse was brushing some crumbs off her lap. Édouard was lying on his back, picking his teeth with a blade of grass.

  ‘Édouard?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What are you thinking about?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m looking for the ogre.’

  ‘Ogre?’

  ‘The one in children’s puzzles. “The ogre is hiding in the tree. Can you find him?”’

  ‘Have you found him?’

  ‘There are so many.’

  ‘Doesn’t this remind you of something?’

  ‘What, the ogres?’

  ‘No, here, now …’

  ‘I give up.’

  ‘The picnic at Nyons.’

  ‘Oh yes, indeed.’

  ‘How far away that seems, another life. I don’t really know where I am any more. I have the feeling of going from dream to nightmare with nothing in between.’

  ‘The best way to avoid getting lost is not to know where you’re going. I read that somewhere – it’s true.’

  ‘But … Don’t you feel any remorse?’

  ‘No more than I feel regret. I’m alive and I’m sleepy.’

  For some unknown reason the horses began to prance in the meadow, neighing. Édouard was already asleep, one arm covering his eyes. Thérèse stretched out next to him. A ladybird ventured onto her hand. ‘Ladybird, will it be fine
on Sunday?’ The insect spread its glossy wings and flew away. It was Saturday.

  It was quite beyond belief – how could strapping great lads like that flaunt themselves in that sort of outfit, striking poses that were downright … Thérèse tried to find the appropriate adjective, then, having failed, shut the body-building magazine and put it back in the pile she ’d taken it from. She knew that type of publication existed but she ’d never had a look at one before. They didn’t seem like Jean’s sort of thing. Of course his slightly too fastidious manners, along with the place they had met him, left little doubt as to his tendencies, and she wasn’t shocked. But ‘that’ was vulgar, just one step better than an advertisement for Boucherie Bernard. How can you tell with people? One side of the wall is always in the shade. She wondered what hers might be like, where her place in the shadow was and what vice might be lurking there. There were ten thousand or none at all. It was like when she was a little girl going to confession. She had been obliged to invent sins for herself, out of fear that if she had nothing to ask pardon for, people would suspect her of concealing horrors. Hatred and jealousy were foreign to her; she had never envied anybody anything, nor harmed anyone. She didn’t consider herself a saint but it had to be admitted that the sum of her sins would not weigh very heavily in the scales at the Last Judgement. She wasn’t proud of this, merely astonished. In this respect she wasn’t exactly like everyone else, and had sometimes suffered for it, as if it were a sort of character flaw. That said, she was still complicit in a murder. Two days before, she ’d been digging a grave in the dead of night and burying the body of a man she ’d known for only a few hours. She was aware of this, without managing entirely to believe it. Life had resumed its course, as peaceful and serene as at Rémuzat before Jean-Baptiste ’s arrival. Only the scenery had changed; eagles had replaced vultures. It was nice on the balcony; it smelled of wood and hot pine resin.

  ‘Well, Thérèse, getting a tan? Here’s the mail – I ran into the postman.’

  ‘The postman?’

  ‘At the end of the track. It was “Bonjour, M’sieur Marissal. Lovely weather!” We talked about this and that. He’s a very pleasant young man.’

  ‘He didn’t …’

  ‘Not for one second. Let’s see … Bank statement … advert … advert … and a body-building magazine. Nothing very interesting.’

  ‘It’s not right to open his mail.’

  ‘Why not? He’s got nothing to hide any more, neither the state of his bank account – which, by the way, seems satisfactory – nor his little foibles. And stop talking about him; you’ll give me a split personality. I’m Jean Marissal and I’m even going to start painting again.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Of course. At the end of his life Monet was painting with two stumps, and I’ve still got one good arm. The studio’s never been used – there ’s not a spot of paint, nor the slightest whiff of turpentine. That poor Jean’s latest canvases are painful to look at. Nothing but portraits of children – star pupils, not a hair out of place, absolutely perfect in their execution but quite devoid of emotion. An orphans’ gallery! I can see why he stopped doing it altogether. Have you seen them?’

  ‘No, I’ve not been downstairs.’

  ‘Good God, Thérèse, own the place, fill the space. Get out of your kitchen and your laundry room, broaden your horizons!’

  ‘I will, I’ll go. What do you want for lunch?’

  Édouard wondered which annoyed him more, the strands of air-dried beef stuck between two of his teeth or Thérèse’s extraordinarily apathetic reaction to their new situation. What would it take before the umbilical cord keeping her on a leash from the larder to the balcony, from the balcony to the laundry, broke? Enough had happened since he’d taken her on: a son gobbled up by vultures, a significant inheritance, a brand-new wardrobe, a Swiss chalet rid of its owner … Damn it! What was wrong with the fat cow? But no, even on tiptoe a dwarf is still a dwarf.

  The tiny bit of meat exploded onto the balcony rail, as if shot out through a pea-shooter. Thérèse was sleeping peacefully, mouth half open, snoring gently, her chubby hands with their palms like cats’ pads turned up to the sky on the lounger’s armrests, her legs stretched out, feet turned inwards … ‘Fat cow,’ he repeated through clenched teeth, but with all the candour of a child encountering a fat cow for the first time.

  As he got up from the wicker chair he could not have said which of them creaked more. The sky was paved with clouds; there was no one up there any more. The great puppetmaster had let go of the strings. Even the trees were sagging.

  The big empty room frightened him. The silence especially, nibbled by the mandibles of unidentifiable insects. In Switzerland time seems slow but it’s just an illusion. An implacable stopwatch has it on a leash and every last second is counted, stored, recorded. There nothing is left to chance because chance has been bought as well. No risks are taken. Lake Geneva will never flood.

  Édouard sat down behind the desk, drummed his fingers on the green morocco-leather blotter and began opening the drawers. The first held nothing but boring paperwork – receipts, insurance policies, chequebooks – all of it in a total mess. Clearly Jean was no longer keeping on top of things, just letting them pile up. Most of the envelopes hadn’t even been opened. The second contained a small nickel-plated 6.35-calibre revolver with a mother-of-pearl handle, and a dozen unremarkable photos, taken in Morocco no doubt – palm groves, ochre mud buildings, red sand dunes. Jean figured only in the last one, along with a tanned young blonde girl who was smiling broadly into the lens. She had her arm round Jean’s waist and was resting her head on his shoulder. His arms were folded across his chest, and he stood stiff as a post, screwing up his eyes, grimacing. They seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, white ground and uniformly blue sky. The desert perhaps? The print had been torn and stuck together again with sticky tape. It must go back a number of years. Jean didn’t yet have the look of a dead man. The third drawer was locked. Édouard forced it, using a paperknife in the shape of a salamander with the blade as its tail. Strangely all he found there was a bent paper clip. Evidently Jean had had a clear-out and wiped the slate clean where his past was concerned. Apart from Édouard’s visit, he could no longer have been expecting much from life and had left the place in the state in which he had found it on moving in. Édouard was grateful for his consideration, which allowed him to assume Jean’s identity without burdening himself with his memory. He then spent a good hour imitating his signature for no particular reason, the way you kill time in the dentist’s waiting room by doing a crossword.

  Thérèse woke up lying sideways, with sunburn on her left cheek. She had never in her life been drunk but this siesta gave her a vague idea of what a hangover might be like. It was because of that stupid dream in which she and Édouard were flushing eagles out of burrows, a dark labyrinth which smelled of soil and hen droppings. They were moving around on all fours, their mouths and nostrils full of feathers, their hands and knees crushing eggs which groaned. Édouard was going ahead of her like a furious mole: ‘And another one!’ Dreams were stupid, so stupid that you ended up believing them.

  With furred-up mouth, unsteady on her feet, she took refuge in the kitchen and swallowed two big glasses of water one after the other. The clock said five. It was still too early to start cooking but she needed to occupy her hands in order to rid herself of her head. Not much was left in the fridge or cupboards – a few potatoes, some shallots, a pack of smoked herring. She plunged the potatoes into a pan of salted water, staring at it until it came to the boil. Then she chopped the shallots as finely as possible to make it take longer. As long as her hands were doing something, nothing could happen to her. What little good sense she still had lived in her ten reddened fingers with their broken nails. She didn’t want to think about anything any more, anything at all. If Édouard had arrived unexpectedly she could have stuck the vegetable peeler into his throat without batting an eyelid. Frightened by this sudden upsurge of
violence, she let go of the knife and collapsed onto a chair, arms hanging by her sides. ‘I’m going mad as well now …’

  During his school days Édouard had many a time used his talents as a forger to get his schoolmates out of a jam – school reports, absence notes – always in return for a reward of course. Jean himself had called on his services. By now Édouard could imitate his signature with his eyes closed – a merely stylistic exercise, because in no way was he thinking of emptying the dead man’s bank account. What would he have done with it? He was richer than him. It was a way of putting himself in the character’s skin, unless it was the other way round … Let’s just say that they were currently proceeding hand in hand. He crumpled up the scribbled pages and threw them into the wastepaper basket. It was as he was straightening up again that his eye fell on the little silver box Jean had sniffed the powder from on their first evening. He opened it, licked the tip of his finger and tasted it. It was bitter, like all medicines. Closing it again, he automatically pocketed it before going downstairs to the studio.

  As the house was built on the side of a hill, the studio, like the ground floor, benefited from a large picture window through which light poured in. An armchair, a sofa, a large Godin stove and an enormous studio easel that was like some medieval instrument of torture made up the furniture. Édouard pulled out one of the dozen canvases stacked with their faces to the wall, and placed it on the easel. It depicted someone near life-size, a young woman or a young man, you couldn’t really tell, seen from behind, head turned, appearing to look over their shoulder. Édouard uncorked a bottle of turpentine and soaked a rag in it. At school he had always volunteered to clean the blackboard. Verb tables, divisions, multiplications, date and moral for the day would disappear as he wiped, and soon there remained on the black surface only a tangle of large figures of eight, dripping with milky water which dried in patches. Yesterday turned into tomorrow, a single day always starting afresh, eternity in the everyday. His arm had instinctively rediscovered this windscreen-wiper movement and little by little the adolescent face disappeared, making way for a strange landscape in which the colours ran together according to the fickle rules of chance. Édouard was triumphant, intoxicated by the solvent fumes and the certainty of having opened the door which had been shut in Jean’s face.