Odile, the next-door neighbor, arrives every Sunday at the same time. I know (because she told me herself once in the elevator) that she’s coming back from Compiègne, where she visits her boyfriend who’s been trying to earn a transfer to Paris for years. We both hear her huffing, getting out her keys, turning locks. Viviane turns on the light over the sink, lets the water run, and rinses her eyelids with delicate little pools that collect in her palms. She stays standing there, her back to me. She starts to speak. She doesn’t look at me but she starts speaking to me.
“What shoes do you have on?”
It takes me a second or two to catch on. I feel awkward as I look down at my feet, realizing I don’t remember having chosen what to wear this morning. Viviane repeats the question:
“Tell me. What shoes did you put on this morning?”
“The red ones. Why do you ask?”
“You bought those shoes on a Sunday. Your book had just come out, I think it was that same week, and the publisher hadn’t even paid you the advance. But that morning, while we had breakfast, we made plans to go bowling on Rue Mouffetard. And then you said: I like bowling, but I like bowling shoes even more. I said you should buy some. I told you I’d seen secondhand shoes in Porte de la Chapelle market, and that some of them were colored, like bowling shoes. What did you say to me?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You said that was all very well, but you didn’t have money to spend on colored shoes. What did I say? Do you remember?”
“You said . . .”
“I said you should give yourself an advance on your advance. That you’d earned it for working so hard on your book. That I loved you, and I was proud of you.”
She says all this without looking at me, with her voice echoing off the tiled wall. Then she turns around.
“I saw an interview with you. Before Christmas, I think. Do you know the one?”
I know exactly which one. It’s the kind of interview I detest: the journalist peppers me with a list of prepared questions, and I have to answer each with one sentence, as if it were a test of mental agility. But Viviane doesn’t wait for me to reply.
“They asked you what your happiest memory was. You talked about the day we went up to Lake Yamdrok, said the sky was the same color as the water and that made you feel free. Right?”
She was right.
“Well, that’s a lie. Your happiest memory is from when you were a child. You were about ten, maybe. It was New Year’s Eve, and one of the neighborhood drunks went out to fire shots in the air just for the hell of it. Your father went out, took the pistol, and knocked him to the ground with one punch. You didn’t see him do it, but your friends told you the next day. They seemed to respect you more. But that wasn’t the important thing, it was the fact of feeling invulnerable if you were at home and your father was with you. That night you asked him to let you sleep with him. It was the only time he said yes.”
Viviane takes a deep breath. She suddenly looks tired. It’s not immediate, but an accumulated weariness, as if she hadn’t slept for a week. I take a step toward her. I touch her hair.
“I know you inside out,” she says. “It’s as if I’d lived inside you. I know why you do everything you do. But when you left I felt lost, I didn’t know what was happening, I had no one to explain it to me.”
My fingers get tangled up in her hair. I close my eyes, recognizing the rootedness of my hands in this movement.
“At first I hated you, you know? I thought you were cruel. I kept telling myself you didn’t deserve someone like me. Then I thought I was worthless. If I was unable to keep someone like you, I must be worthless. I was in love with you, that’s what it was. I still love you, of course, but before I loved you more than my own life. I don’t care if what I say sounds corny to you, I’m not a writer. That’s what I felt, that was—”
I kiss her. I don’t know if I kiss her so I won’t have to hear any more of her words, because each one of them hurts me and harms me. But I kiss her. It’s a quick kiss, barely a meeting of lips: Viviane puts her hand on my chest, gently, as if picking up a little bird off the floor, and pushes me away.
“I’d like to stay tonight,” I say quietly.
“You are not made to be with me. In fact, you’re not made to be with anybody.”
I think of my father’s eyes. The black iris, the shining cornea. I no longer hear Odile, the neighbor. She must be asleep, happy because she’s just spent the weekend with her boyfriend, impatient because she won’t see him for another five days.
“You better go,” says Viviane. “Tomorrow you’ll have to go to a pharmacy, I imagine, begin your treatment. We made a good couple. But you better go.”
It occurs to me that this might be the last time I see her. I feel sick for an instant, and my hand, as if by instinct, covers my lymph node. It’s a new movement: a sick man is an animal who learns new tricks. Sometimes, this gesture is a response to shame; other times, however, it’s a simple nervous tic. Like straightening my glasses on the bridge of my nose. Like touching Viviane’s hair. But now it’s time for me to go, although part of me doesn’t want to.
“Can I call you?” I say.
“Of course not. What for? Your moment of uncertainty is over, isn’t it? You’re not scared anymore.”
I leave. The stairs are dark; before closing the apartment door, I hear her say:
“Now you can go back to being independent.”
—
I PRESS THE SWITCH so a low-watt bulb lights the hallway for twenty seconds. I decide to take the stairs, as I did the last time I was in this building, and press the switches at each floor, and each bulb gives me a brief light, the twenty seconds necessary to get to the next floor and repeat the maneuver. That’s how I descend, from one floor to the next, from darkness to darkness, until I feel, as I make it to the sidewalk, the gray and cold of the night like fog in my eyes. I think Paris is small, and that, with a bit of luck, I’ll run into Viviane once in a while, at the market or the cinema. They’ll be those coincidences that tend to happen in a city like this, falsely grand and rather provincial, a city where people don’t often leave their own neighborhoods. I’ll see her face, we’ll exchange a couple of affectionate phrases. And that’s how, bit by bit, I’ll go on surviving.
The Solitude of the Magician
I
What happened inside his pocket struck Léopold as one of the most extraordinary things he’d ever seen—the interaction of a wedding band, a key ring, and a hand’s magical gesture—and he could not think it was a mistake, as everyone insisted at the time, to have publicly questioned a magician’s skills, even just an amateur magician, a mere weekend apprentice. The magician’s face (Léopold remembered the moment when he’d heard his name, Chopin, and hadn’t been able to ask whether it was a vulgar nickname or a coincidence) emerged from a thick turtleneck, and the smooth skin under his chin wrinkled when the man nodded or worried, and also wrinkled when Léopold approached the tallest lamp with the evidence of magic in his hand and his right heel searched out the switch on the parquet floor; the light came on and Léopold’s eyes stared at that miracle, a wedding band linked onto a key ring. Selma, his wife, saw him walk toward her, take her left hand, and slip the band, a single diamond set in the gleaming surface, back onto her finger, as if marrying her again, and she couldn’t help wondering, given that her marriage still seemed new to her the way shoes you don’t wear very often still seem new for quite a while, if this would continue to happen in the future: if small acts or banal circumstances would seem to belong belatedly to the same, now long-ago liturgy.
They had been married in a Catholic ceremony in which her cream-colored, rather than white, bridal gown had caught on the armrests of the seats, because she, willful girl that she was, had insisted the service be held outdoors beside the little stone chapel on the hill that faced Hamoir, in spite of the strong
kite-flying wind at that time of year, and all just because it terrified her in the middle of July to be stuck inside the humid and sinister darkness of the Cathedral of Saint Paul, in Liège, with stained-glass windows, grimy with urban grime, that allowed no light through, and a door that on weekends appeared clogged with chocolate and cream gaufre stalls and diners’ cars and the diners themselves, families of clumsy children with clumsy hands who Selma could already envisage sullying her dress’s shimmering train with sweet sticky caramel, apple, or wild blackberry sauces. So Father Malaurie, of Xhoris, used a safety pin to tame his soutane, and blessed the couple without keeping the rice-paper pages of his Bible from fluttering like a caged bird, without ever finding out that the bride was pregnant, and without knowing, of course, to what extent the pregnancy was one of the most pertinent reasons for her being there that day, holding her veil with her hand so Léopold could kiss her and turning to face the wind so her hair wouldn’t tickle the groom’s face and make him sneeze at such a solemn moment or get in her eyes. Léopold’s kiss tasted of champagne cocktail; the shoulder of his formal suit gave off a whiff of mothballs that Selma reluctantly inhaled. That night she cried a little: she would have liked her father to still be alive to give her away in matrimony. Charles, her father, dead of throat cancer before she learned to speak; her daughter—Selma was magically sure it would be a girl—was fortunate because she’d have a living father, because she wouldn’t grow up as lonely as Selma had.
The dream of having a daughter had changed Selma’s way of moving, her way of touching Léopold (with whom she’d gone to bed barely a dozen times before a bout of morning sickness had hit her in the middle of Place Saint-Lambert), and later, when they were living together in the house on Rue de Lognoul, near Ferrières, she used to get up in the middle of the night, close the bathroom door so the white light wouldn’t wake up her husband, undress in front of the mirror, and lose herself in the contemplation of her body and the changes to her body, because attending to the details of her belly in profile, through the third, fourth, fifth, sixth months, was like watching the phases of a fleshy moon, a fantastic moon with protruding navel against the sky of aquamarine tiles. Her breasts grew until it was possible, by crouching a little in certain positions, to feel her skin resting on her skin, and that sensation, extravagant and at once monstrous, excited her; and her small aureoles darkened and the skin of her nipples hardened and turned porous, two sawdust beauty spots on the pale, round fullness. It was during that time that Léopold offered to host the first hunt of the season, in part for the small honor involved in his group of hunters—men associated with the industrial cleaning company that had maintained his family since 1959—in part for the delicate pride of socially introducing his wife and unborn daughter, one inside the other, a Russian doll. The features of Selma’s face were still those that had obsessed Léopold, but the puffy cheeks, the circles under the eyes revealing a certain exhaustion, and her forced smile confounded him, and at the moment of gathering the hunters in a circle for the maître de chasse to deliver instructions and lay down the rules, the moment Léopold had planned to bring Selma into the center of the circle and say some calculatedly amusing phrase such as No shooting any juvenile boars or aiming inside the encirclement, and this, gentlemen, is my wife, at that moment, dressed in green and gray and with his rifle slung over his shoulder, Léopold only managed to point to her with his gloved hand (it was cold), and in the hush that fell over the cobblestone yard all that could be heard was the hunters’ bewildered breaths, the dogs’ claws clicking against the cobbles, and the echoes of a piano sonata that someone had left on in the living room filtering through the glass. Then the hunters left, the doors of their four-by-fours banged shut and the dogs barked, and Selma was left alone in the yard. She whistled a few bars of the Pathétique: she remembered it because she’d practiced it as a young girl and failed at it. She never managed to understand what her teacher meant when she spoke of the exposition as something that should swirl, or of the transition between the grave and the allegro as the conversion of a caterpillar into a butterfly. She never liked butterflies; they didn’t disgust her, but frightened her absurdly: everyone around her knew this, except Léopold.
When she went into the living room to warm up a little, thinking the cold must not be good for the little girl in her belly, she was surprised to find a stranger sitting in the yellow easy chair, not wearing rubber boots, or hunting gear, or a beater’s orange fluorescent jacket, but a wool sweater the collar of which seemed to be folded four times and gave the man the look of a storybook sailor, but a strange sailor, a sailor without a sailor’s beard, fond of Alfred Brendel’s piano playing and owner of an expression of cynicism or indifferent aversion that had to have been cultivated on dry land. He looked up when he saw her, the woman of the house, come in, and in a display of rudeness that seemed improbable limited his greeting to a nod of the head, not as a sign of welcome, but as if congratulating himself for doing so well what he was doing with his busy hands. And what was that, what were his hands busy with? Selma took a little while to realize that the trail of white linen the man was manipulating was in fact a deck of cards, moving with such speed and such skill, passed from one hand to the other with such dexterity, that from afar and in the gloom of the living room (it was early and no fire had been lit yet) what Selma’s eyes managed to see was just a colorless rainbow, and then, when she asked the man to do it more slowly, a succession of pink or gray squares, a blend of white background, and the alternating tones of the figures. It was eight-thirty in the morning; when Léopold came back, just after twelve, he found that his wife had arranged one of the kitchen chairs in front of the corner table from the trophy room and moved Léopold’s cast-iron ashtray, Léopold’s bifocals, and the Genevoix book that Léopold was reading so that this Chopin, whom he’d invited simply out of courtesy—since word of the Saturday get-together had gotten out around the office—could not just refuse to go hunting and in passing suggest contempt for the tradition, but also devote himself during the absence of the rest to impressing the hostess with the cheap tricks of an alcoholic gambler or a fairground clown.
Selma, excited and wide-eyed, asked Chopin to repeat two or three of the tricks that had filled the morning’s boredom (for him; for her, he’d made time and the heaviness of her belly and the cold and the gray sky of the Ardennes all disappear); he put the deck faceup on the table and asked the youngest beater to think of a card and he turned the deck over and moved the cards from one hand to the other, shuffled twice, put the deck back down on the table, cut the cards, and asked the beater to say what card he’d thought of at the same time as he turned over the top card of the deck. Seven of clubs, said the young man as he picked up the seven of clubs. There was a murmur of voices. Léopold walked across the parquet floor clicking the heels of his waterproof boots and asked if the magician could do something truly bold. Chopin rolled his eyes, perhaps because the same thing had happened to him before and the situation made him uncomfortable; he cut the cards again and asked Léopold to turn over the top card: it was the king of spades, a figure posing in profile with his eye wide open, looking at Léopold with a mocking grimace on his face. Chopin asked the beater to look at his card again: the seven of clubs had turned into the queen of spades and a few people timidly applauded. Then Léopold dared him (maybe he would later wish he hadn’t); his voice tried to intimidate, required a real trick, demanded they be impressed.
The magician did not refuse. He asked Selma to take off her wedding ring, and she obeyed; he asked Léopold to show everyone his key chain, a copper stag’s head from whose right antler dangled a double metal hoop and the key to his jeep (which flashed when someone lit a match); he walked over to Léopold and, one at a time, dropped both objects into his green corduroy pocket, and then went to stand like a caryatid on the opposite side of the room. From his corner, in front of a bucolic landscape painted in oils by Selma’s late father, beneath the head of the first boar Léopo
ld had ever shot—it was in Modave, in 1973, six days before the first snowfall—Chopin pressed his palms together at waist height, said a couple of magic words that sounded atavistic and sardonic at the same time, and his right hand turned over in the air like a dead salamander on the pavement. Léopold felt for the key ring in his pocket: he moved his hand anxiously, almost in fear, among the coins and bullets that fell to the floor when he yanked the copper stag out and showed everyone the tiny frightening miracle: linked on the aluminum hoop, like one more key, was Selma’s ring. The guests began to leave. The table was not even set for lunch.
II
Only later, when the accident that was seeded that morning had already taken up its time and its space, when Selma and Chopin had passed through desire and love and shipwreck, would Selma recognize the nature of solitude in the magician’s hands. Chopin’s hands, small but capable of palming a card—an ace, a queen: yes, especially a hidden queen—lost Selma. The tip of each thumb was covered by a thin, almost invisible callus; on his right hand, another callus bent the first phalange of his middle finger, made it lean slightly out, an elegant hump. Selma would fall in love with his rough fingers, his concealing palms, his wrists so thin that the glass face of watches slipped around to the underside and forced Chopin to look at the time as ladies once did. That very night she asked a couple of questions about Chopin: where was he from—he was from Liège—what was his position in the business—a mere assistant to the underwriter, his office didn’t even have a window. This pair of details served to sate her curiosity, but most of all they were useful because she felt that Chopin’s name was a raspberry seed stuck in her teeth, something pleasant and annoying at the same time, and talking about him at night, casually from the bathroom, while rubbing stretch-mark-prevention cream into her thighs and buttocks and the moon of rosy skin, was to spit out the seed and sleep in peace. Meanwhile, Léopold reproached her for getting into bed before the cream had dried. It was incredible that she could sleep in sticky, smeared sheets that smelled of laboratory algae.
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