Not a single book on the shelves aroused a desire to read it.
He picked up the remote and turned on the TV. Hopped from one channel to another. No one was there to protest, and he took advantage of it. Five minutes. That was long enough to realize that nothing caught his interest.
However, he left the TV on and went to get something to drink in the kitchen. First he filled a glass with Coke, added three big ice cubes; he was thirsty after running. As he drank, he poked around in the refrigerator. There were quite a few leftovers: carrots, tomatoes, cucumbers, but nothing tempted him. Instead, he added a dash of whisky to the remains of his Coke.
He could have called a friend. Just like that. To talk. Catch up.
He didn’t have any friends.
Time and distance had caused his old friendships to lose their intimacy. He hadn’t been able to replace them. No pals with whom he could drink beer, ogle girls, and talk soccer or rugby. Because he didn’t like beer, and liked sports events still less. Or any of the things men did when they went on a binge together. He’d never liked the company of men. Too much showing off and hidden rivalries. Too much vulgarity.
He had to put up with more than enough of that at work.
He did have a few relationships: the parents of Claire’s students and her colleagues. People with whom he could have discussions but not talk. Whose fault was that? His own, probably. That’s how he was, discreet and even secretive. It was also his occupation’s fault. People liked to know somebody who was a cop. Like doctors and plumbers, they can come in handy sometimes. But you don’t confide in a cop. Not without a summons.
He liked family outings, games of cards or Scrabble on the big table in the living room. Apart from his job and running, he had no life outside his family.
He poured himself another big glass of Coke. And put a larger dose of whisky in it.
The children were growing up, moving away. Nothing was more normal than that. They had their own lives to live. Without him. “Little by little, the bird leaves the nest.” Léo and Séverine no longer needed their father. They’d been weaned. He hadn’t.
It was painful. Like a divorce.
Claire had her work, her friends, her activities. Gymnastics, the chorale. She didn’t seem to suffer from the situation. On the contrary. She was bursting with joy and health. Maturity suited her well.
Why wasn’t she there?
He’d often imagined this moment when there would just be the two of them again. They’d sometimes even been impatient for it to arrive. They’d met at university and had Léo very soon.
Too soon?
They hadn’t been kids, however. Gilles was 25, Claire 24. But they hadn’t yet taken time to live. They finished their studies; Gilles had dragged things out a bit. They were just beginning to earn a living. They wanted to travel, to go around the world. They’d tried another adventure. An adventure that was now coming to an end.
They thought they could catch up later on.
Later . . .
Later should have begun tonight.
In a few days, Claire would be leaving on a cruise. Her first boat trip. With her friends. When she’d told him that she’d bought her ticket, he’d felt a twinge in his heart. He hadn’t said anything. She had to keep busy. She had two months of vacation, while he had only one. She had already declined her girlfriends’ proposals several times, and had limited herself to a few short trips in July with her family. But this year the children were going off by themselves, and she’d given in.
They were missing their rendezvous. As a couple, were they really so different from Sylvie and José Lopez? Were they still living together or just side by side? They saw each other in the morning and the evening; from time to time they said “I love you.” More or less the way one says “hello.” Out of politeness. Out of habit.
When you know each other by heart, you can read your partner’s body language, smiles and grimaces. You start by no longer needing to look at each other and end up not seeing each other at all. You no longer even bother to look up.
All that was drearily banal. He knew it. But you always think: “We’ll be different.” From time to time you wake up, you want to react. You bring home a bouquet of flowers, make love on the living room carpet, suddenly decide to go to a movie.
And then one day you realize that you’re alone. Still a father, still married, but a bachelor again.
That had been the part hardest to bear. And whether or not Claire had a lover was merely a detail.
He’d poured himself more whisky. Without the Coke. He was already finishing it. A last swig. He closed his eyes. Notes of smoke. Pepper, iodine. The perfume of the Scottish islands. He’d changed since his first bachelorhood. Earlier, he hadn’t been able to afford to get drunk on ten-year-old Talisker.
He had a wild desire to call Claire. Her melodious voice and her joyful laugh hummed in his memory. He wanted to hear their echo in reality. He went to get his phone from the pocket of his jacket, which was hanging on the rack in the entry hall. He dialed her cell phone number and hit the call button. He waited until her name appeared on the screen, then hung up.
Where are you, Claire?
She’d told him she was going out with Pascale and Véronique. They were supposed to go to a restaurant and then to a movie. Or the other way around. He no longer knew exactly. Above all, he remembered that she’d told him not to wait up for her. That she’d probably get home late.
Grabbing the remote, he silenced the TV.
He turned on the stereo and looked for a CD. Something calm. Tender. And melancholic. He chose a disk by Cesaria Evora. Sodade. The languorous voice of the singer from Cape Verde rose in the deserted house.
His head was already spinning. He knew he should eat something, but he wasn’t hungry. It was too hot.
He thought again about the class evaluation meetings. There had been too many of them that year, and they’d run too late. And about Claire’s frequent outings with Véronique, her friend who’d been depressed since she’d been going through divorce proceedings. He kept thinking about this gym class she claimed to have attended.
How could he still have any doubts?
Claire sometimes seemed so far away. He recalled the other day. Her graceful movements, her distant smile. And especially the pink in her cheeks, the same as when they had just made love.
The clues were piling up, his suspicions becoming more precise. The cop wanted to know but did the husband? You’re not a cuckold so long as you don’t know it.
“Cuckold . . . ” The word was enormously ugly.
Why did he have to set that damned trap for Claire?
He imagined his wife in another man’s arms. He invented situations, provided them with details. Pure masochism. The pain was atrocious and he kept coming back to it. Like a tongue returning again and again to the tooth with a cavity in it.
In the end, he wasn’t surprised. It was all so natural. How could a woman limit herself to being looked at by a single man for twenty years? How could she be satisfied with the same hands on her body, the same skin under her fingertips. The same cock . . . The worst part was thinking that when she prettied herself up this morning it was for another man. For another man that she hesitated between her form-fitting dress and her frilly skirt. For another man that she undid the top button of her blouse and that she allowed the lace on her bra to be seen. For another man that she emphasized her green eyes with discreet eyeliner. That was the real betrayal. The sex was merely accessory.
He didn’t wait until he’d finished his glass to pour himself more whisky. He sensed that the evening was going to end badly.
But how could he stop his imagination from functioning? Would the mixture of alcohol and solitude give him a gloomy outlook on life or a flash of lucidity?
With a rolling gait, he went out onto the terrace. Night was falling but it was
still hot. However, a little breeze was making things more pleasant. It was rustling the bamboos at the back of the yard.
He collapsed on a chaise longue.
Whistles repeatedly disturbed his ruminations. The neighbor was calling her cat. She’d lost two of them recently; they’d been run over by cars. She’d gotten another, but she was constantly worried. As soon as the cat escaped, she walked all over the neighborhood whistling the same two sad notes, over and over. Occasionally the tom showed up. But most of the time the old woman went on whistling in vain for hours. She got out of breath and began to cough. A hoarse cough. A smoker’s cough. She was exhausting the whole neighborhood. This evening, he felt overwhelmed by a strange sympathy for the woman the children called “the crazy old lady.”
Was he doomed to end up like her? Abandoned by his family and friends, and with a cat that ran away as his only companion?
No.
“Definitely not.”
The words had slipped out of him. He’d shouted. He finished his glass in a single swig. Inside, he was full of new energy. He was going to resist; he was going to fight.
And if he lost anyway, he’d get a goldfish instead.
CHAPTER 14
Anneke had spent a delightful evening with her French friends at the Deux Margots bar. But she’d preferred to return alone to her furnished room. She walked rather uncertainly down the dirty, slippery sidewalks of Perpignan’s old quarter. She could have been leaning on Florent’s strong arm had she responded to his advances. The guy was cute, and his lively blue eyes sparkled with desire. Maybe some other time. She hadn’t liked his excessive self-confidence and especially his insistence. As if Dutch girls were supposed to lie down as soon as someone smiled at them.
Nightfall hadn’t cooled down the air. It was still hot. But less than in the bar. Anneke was a little ashamed of the stains on her dress below the armpits. She’d had to watch her movements all evening, and especially not lift her arms. She was afraid she might smell a little strong despite the deodorant—above a certain temperature, chemistry is powerless.
Anneke was in a hurry to take a shower and go to bed. She was tired. The evening had been a long one, and so had the school year. She was finishing the first part of her university degree in molecular biology. She was deeply interested in that field. She’d chosen to take her degree in France; these days, with European Union programs, it was easy to do that. She’d had a hard time with French. She’d been a good student in high school, but taking classes in a foreign language was really very different. Especially in French, a language that was so subtle and so complex, with all its rules and exceptions to the rule. A language that resembled the country.
She walked through the narrow, winding streets of the North African quarter, passed in front of the window, still lit, of a shop that offered cheap telephone calls all over the world. The historic center of the city had retained its popular soul. Squalid buildings still housed a mixed population of immigrants and gypsies. In Holland, the city centers now consisted only of offices and residences for young, single managers. In France as well, she’d been told. But not in Perpignan. Not yet.
She heard footsteps behind her. Very close. She now realized that these footsteps had been following her for some time. Following her . . . “Hey, girl, you’re getting paranoid,” she tried to reassure herself. She’d said that to herself in French. She caught herself more and more often thinking in that language. Some nights she even dreamed in French. She wouldn’t have thought that possible. The week before, on the telephone with her parents, she‘d had trouble finding her words in her native language. Several times her mother had had to reproach her for filling her remarks with French expressions.
The streets she was walking through were deserted. She’d met only two persons since leaving the bar. However, the footsteps behind her were coming closer. They weren’t a figment of her imagination. In a shop window, she tried to get a glimpse of her pursuer, but it was too dark. She was now quite close to her room. She clutched her purse to her and walked faster.
She left the Saint Mathieu neighborhood and approached the Avenue Poincaré. She had only to follow that avenue, a gentle uphill walk. She passed a service station that had closed for the night. A few hundred yards more and she’d be there. The footsteps had stopped. Soon she’d be in her bed.
Suddenly a dark form leaped out of a doorway and slammed her against a car. A hand covered her mouth to prevent her from crying out. She felt the blade of a knife on her neck. She didn’t dare swallow. The man attacking her was wearing a hood. He must be dying of the heat, she said to herself, astonished to have such thoughts at a time like this.
The man didn’t move. The moment went on. Anneke was pinned between the car and her attacker. She could feel his slow breathing, both muted and amplified by his woolen hood. He still hadn’t tried anything. Her fear gave way to puzzlement. Then to a certain impatience. The moment was going on endlessly. She didn’t understand. If he wants to kill me, let him do it, if he wants to rape me, let him get on with it, but for God’s sake let’s get this over with. Headlights appeared at the other end of the avenue. A sign of life. A hope. They were like a signal for the man.
“Get into the car,” he said in a hushed but firm voice.
His hand left her mouth and slipped behind her back to try to open the car door against which she was pressed. But the door resisted. Anneke noticed that the pressure of the knife blade had disappeared from her throat. She pushed the man away with all her strength and screamed. Holding her purse by the strap, she swung it in front of her. It seemed to her that she had hit her target. Then she began to run down the middle of the street toward the approaching headlights. The driver slammed on the brakes. A man got out.
“Help me, please, I’ve just been attacked . . . ”
A woman got out of the car as well, on the passenger side. She came up to Anneke and put her hands on her shoulders, while her companion had a look around.
The woman took out a tissue and wiped Anneke’s neck. The tissue was stained red. The knife blade had left its mark. The woman handed her another tissue so that she could wipe away her tears. Then she said to her gently:
“I’m calling the police.”
Anneke would have liked to take refuge in her bed, hide under her clean, cool sheets. She also wanted to take a shower, a long, hot one. But she knew that she would have to wait a while yet.
The driver came back toward the two women. He’d found no one. Silence fell over the city again.
CHAPTER 15
The alarm roused him out of a cottony fog. He slowly stood up. The solar lamps studded the yard with points of melancholy blue. An empty bottle lay next to the chaise longue. He bent down to pick it up and felt sick to his stomach. His head was spinning. He squinted to get his bearings.
Talisker. He’d finished it off under the stars. Right out of the bottle.
The alarm clock stopped ringing.
He looked at his watch. 3:20. Claire still hadn’t come home. It wasn’t an alarm clock ringing that had pulled him out of his coma. Not at this hour. And in any case he couldn’t have heard it from the terrace.
He went back into the house. He’d left his cell phone somewhere. On the bar. The screen indicated that he had a message. Who could be calling him at this time of night? Someone from work? Or Claire?
Something had happened.
He feverishly dialed the access code for his message service. What did he fear most? A message from the hospital telling him that Claire had had an accident or a message from Claire telling him that she wasn’t coming home, that she’d never come home again? Before he could muster the courage to answer that question, a strong voice with a vigorous accent assaulted his sensitive ears.
“Pardon me for disturbing you at this hour, sir, it’s Ripoll, André Ripoll. I’m on night duty at the station and a letter has just arrived for you; it appears
that it’s important, and that’s why I took the liberty of calling your cell phone. I didn‘t know whether I should also call you at home, I’m very sorry . . . ”
He hadn’t finished listening to the message when the land line started ringing in the study. Ripoll must have made up his mind. Sebag interrupted the message and went to pick up the receiver.
“Hello, this is Ripoll, André Ripoll, I’m sorry . . . ”
“It’s okay, get to the point,” he interrupted, “I’ve just gotten your message. What’s all this business about an urgent letter in the middle of the night?”
“I know it may seem bizarre, but first there was a telephone call, about half an hour ago, to say that a letter was waiting for you in the station’s mailbox and that it was urgent. It didn’t seem to be a joke, so I went to see. There was in fact an envelope in the mailbox and it was marked ‘urgent’.”
“Can you describe this envelope for me, what does it look like?”
“Well . . . nothing special, it’s a normal envelope, that’s all. White. With your name typed on it. No stamp, it must have been dropped directly in the box.”
Obviously, at that hour! What was he thinking, this Ripoll? Did he think the Perpignan postmen made a second delivery every night around 3:00 A.M.?
“Is that all? No sender’s name?”
“No, just a drawing on the back.”
“A drawing?”
“Yes. It looks like a bird.”
A shiver ran through Sebag’s body.
“What does this bird look like? A swallow?”
“Maybe. I don’t know anything about birds. But it might be a swallow, yes.”
He dropped two aspirins in a glass of water before going off to take a shower. He didn’t touch the hot water faucet and breathed noisily under the impact of the icy spray. After he’d toweled off, he put on decent cop’s clothes. “A police raid, hmm . . . that’s amusing.” Then he quickly swallowed the two aspirins. On the living room table, where she couldn’t miss it, he left a short note to Claire. Ultimately, he wasn’t sorry he wouldn’t be there when she came home. Maybe she’d be a little concerned, too.
Summertime All the Cats Are Bored Page 13
