“Three nine, nine three,” she said.
“What about it?”
“It begins with my age and ends with my age.”
Oliveira kept his face as straight as a gambler’s. He could smell the woman’s breath, sour from wine and lipstick.
“But backward, no?”
“Yes, backward,” said Agatha. “It would be a palindrome of my age if the numbers in between weren’t so disorderly.”
Agatha crossed her arms over her waist and took off her blouse without even unbuttoning it, as carefree as someone trying on old clothes in a theater dressing room. Her breasts had white parallel stretch marks like trails of milk. Between the cups of her cotton bra hung a silver cross that Oliveira hadn’t seen when they pulled out of the gas station. The Christ, as if made of pearl, seemed stained by lotions, perfumes, and sweat.
“Did I tell you what your surname would be in Iceland?”
Oliveira shook his head, his back to her. He was looking for a hanger in the closet to keep his shirt from getting wrinkled. He couldn’t help smiling: a bachelor’s habits.
“Franciscosson,” said Agatha. “That’s what your surname would be. Horrible, don’t you think?”
II
He had found her (it was exactly the right verb) at an exhibition of circus horses six kilometers north of Beauvais, on the property the equestrian Francisco Oliveira’s heirs, one of whom he had no desire to be, had turned into a fairground. The place was no more than five minutes off the A16, but the willows and the whistling of the wind and the horses kicking in their stalls, or perhaps a combination of it all, warded off the din of traffic like erasing the static on a tape recording. At dusk, when the public had left, Oliveira wanted to take one last look at his father’s property, not out of any kind of nostalgia, but in order, later in his life, to be able to describe what he’d given up. There were people in the livery stable. Oliveira circled around the back wall, trying to identify the voices coming from inside without being seen. He peered through the cracks in the wood: there was Antonio, the Portuguese man who’d looked after the stables for the last seven years, accompanied by a woman. Between them, a Lusitanian stallion lowered and raised his head. It could be Elmo, might be Urano. Oliveira never called the horses by their names; he refused to put himself on the same level as them in his father’s regard. Urano, Elmo, Oliveira junior: three different forms of the old rider’s satisfactions. Was that what Oliveira had been, one more lodger at the stables? As a boy, that question had frequently crossed his mind. Now, about to leave it all behind, he was almost ashamed of remembering those regrets.
He walked around the side of the livery stable and undid the wooden bar latch. The bar fell beside him with a crash that startled the woman. The horse didn’t bat an eyelid. Oliveira realized he was sedated.
“Don’t stand there gawking,” she said. “Come and help us.”
“I don’t know anything about horses,” said Oliveira.
The woman wore a cooking apron that said MON ROYAUME POUR UN CHEVAL. Her hair was the color of a crow’s feather, and her angular, sad facial features looked as though they’d been carved with a knife on a bar of soap. She obviously didn’t know she was speaking to the son of Francisco Oliveira.
“You know how to hold a bag up in the air,” she said.
Oliveira approached. Minutes earlier he’d been walking beside the stream that flows out of the Thérain, and now the sawdust stuck to his shoes and the hems of his jeans. The woman handed him a clear plastic bag half full of a transparent liquid. It wasn’t sunny, but the slanted winter light still managed to play with the prism of water in the bag. On Oliveira’s wrist and arm it drew red, yellow, and purple figures. From the bag a tube descended and disappeared into the animal’s side; they had shaved the area where the needle went in. Oliveira felt the absurd sensation of localized cold, as if only in that space where the flesh was visible the skin bristled. He looked through the bag. He saw the oblong sign on which Francisco Oliveira had summarized his idea of horsemanship: CADENCE, LÉGÈRETÉ, GÉOMÉTRIE. He saw two deformed heads—a soapstone bust that had once been beautiful, black, lively hair—and the huge eyes of a horse beginning to nod off.
“Hold the bag up high,” said the woman. “Above your shoulder, at least.”
The horse began to wobble. His front legs trembled for an instant, and then his body fell sideways like the façade of a building, raising a cloud of sawdust with the dull thud of his flesh. But he refused to put his head on the floor, and the woman had to kneel on his neck and all her weight was barely able to overcome the patient’s resistance. The horse blinked; he panted; his lips hung open like resin revealing the pink gums, the white teeth hard as plaster. Antonio tied a strap around the left hoof and fastened it to the railing of the stands. As he pulled the strap, the horse’s legs separated and revealed the genitals, black as oil against the brown of the groin. The woman brushed the dust off the testicles with her bare hands, washed the area with a bile-colored liquid and then with hot water, and an apparition of steam rose in the cold air. She moved her hands in the pail of water—Oliveira noticed the edges dirty with dog food—dried them with a mauve towel that she spread out on top of the sawdust, and on the towel the instruments for the operation. The woman took out of an aluminum case a small scalpel, the size of her little finger, and drew a precise line on the horse’s scrotum. It wasn’t as if she were cutting: the scalpel was a felt-tip pen and the animal’s skin fine paper. But the blade had cut. The scrotum opened like fruit rind, separated as if it had a life of its own, and the smooth white testicles were exposed to the air, luminous against the black skin.
Then the woman made another cut. The first trickle of blood appeared; immediately the white fruit of the testicles was covered in red. The woman squeezed both hands at the base of the scrotum and the testicles popped out. She raised the scalpel and cut something else, but at that moment Oliveira had to kneel down in the sawdust because he felt his head emptying of blood and the world before his eyes turning black.
“What’s the matter?” said the woman.
“He’s going to faint,” said Antonio.
“Stand up, for God’s sake. I need that serum flowing.”
Oliveira heard them, but had no voice.
“Well, you hold the bag, Antonio. I’ve almost finished.”
Oliveira didn’t see her finish. He stayed on his knees, his back to the animal. When he turned around, a sort of masculine shame kept him from looking between the horse’s legs: his gaze came to rest on the horseshoes that reflected the darkened sky. In this cleansing space the woman appeared, and Oliveira thought the fatigue in her expression was not the result of the operation, but had been with her for a long time.
“Are you all right?”
“I’ll get over it,” said Oliveira.
“Do you want to come in? A cup of tea, or something hot, would do you good.”
Oliveira shook his head.
“I have to get going.”
“But you’re not going to drive like that, it’s dangerous,” the woman said.
Oliveira saw she wasn’t smiling: her voice was more pleading than polite.
“Half an hour more, half an hour less,” she added. “Wherever it is you’re going, it’s not going to make any difference.”
—
WHEN OLIVEIRA TOLD HER that all of that, the stables and every mare and every stallion, the livery and the right to use it, the two hectares of arable land surrounding the large house, could have belonged to him and he had renounced it all, Agatha’s hands flew to her head and she called him crazy, foolish, deranged. Then Oliveira heard himself explaining his father’s life with indifference that wasn’t exactly genuine and without too many details—but touching on the subject, even if only in monosyllables and short phrases, was already a rarity—speaking about the man who was the master of equestrian artistry and trave
led all over Europe and even as far as Brazil teaching admiring students the art of sitting in a saddle. Agatha had also admired him at some point, and Oliveira couldn’t find a way to make her understand his contempt for the world of Lusitanian horses: she would have found it absurd to abandon a place like Beauvais with the arguments that sounded too much like those of an only son jealous of his father’s profession, the tantrum of a spoiled little boy. Had it been a simple slight, Oliveira thought, his motives would be easily explicable. But the memory of his father was tainted with resentments, pinned not on a lifetime’s assessment but on precise and painful images. Oliveira did not belong anywhere and that was his father’s fault. He had only two or three memories of his mother, as if he’d concentrated all his energy on that paternal anthology of reproaches. They’d arrived in France when he was still a boy. Their route had been the opposite of that of most other immigrants: they began on the outskirts of Paris and, as they became more secure, as the rider’s prestige was recognized in Brussels and Stuttgart, they moved away from the capital and out to the provinces. Oliveira grew up with the notion of living in a foreign country, but knowing that none belonged to him. He earnestly pretended whenever faced with a flag. He envied other children who used French without feeling clumsy. Gradually he noticed, little by little, he was forgetting his own language.
He could have told the woman about these memories and said: “This house is my father, these horses are my father. Now do you understand why I’m leaving?” But he didn’t. He concentrated on practical questions, the total area of the property, the price of the stallions. When his father died, the estate was divided up easily and in less than three weeks, so many people were due a share of the inheritance if the son turned it down. The only condition Oliveira imposed was that Antonio should keep his job, but that didn’t keep the foreman from telling him what was in his head. “One doesn’t throw a life away just like that, kid. One would have to be sick at heart. You act as if you’ve lived alone your whole life, as if no one’s ever loved you.” But Oliveira went ahead, without thinking that selling the property, instead of renouncing it, would have at least gotten him some money, which he was going to need. The compensation he’d received, not for the place but for the purebred his father had given him for his twenty-first birthday, was all the money Oliveira had now.
“I spend my life taking care of horses, and you get rid of them,” said the woman. “Incredible that we’re sitting here together.”
“Don’t you ride?”
“Only very badly,” she said.
They were sitting on one of the long wooden benches in the kitchen, beside the gas stove, trying to warm up a little. The lamp over the sink cast a bright yellowish light around the room, and the stove projected an ostrich-shaped shadow. Oliveira realized that it had been a long time since he’d last exchanged more than a couple of polite phrases with a woman: gratitude for merits not his own but his father’s, promises to keep in touch and organize something with the Beauvais horses at the next festival. Perhaps for this reason he thought it lucky that Agatha had arrived in town by train, that someone else—a gay journalist with a German accent—had given her a lift from the station. Now he, who was heading south, could drive her home to L’Isle-Adam, which was barely out of his way. He suggested it, and the ease with which she accepted allowed Oliveira to consider her vulnerable and fantasize from that moment on about her body and the infinite possibilities that might result from a man and a woman traveling alone between the towns of the Oise, each of them alone but traveling together, with the awareness that a night of sex wouldn’t transform them but might be, as had happened to him with other women for one night, an anesthetic, numbing his solitude.
They left about nine, when the December night had fully settled in. Oliveira’s van was parked under an oak tree; the air vents and the windshield wiper blades were covered with twigs and wet leaves. Agatha saw the logo of the rental company, green and yellow letters slanted as if caught in the wind.
“Oh, but you’re really leaving entirely,” she said. “I didn’t realize things were so serious.”
He spoke to himself.
“Of course I’m leaving entirely,” he said. “I don’t imagine there’s any other way to leave.”
After packing, Oliveira had realized that five cubic meters was quite a bit more than he needed. The blonde at the agency had warned him, of course, but Oliveira couldn’t manage to persuade himself that her face—her upper lip covered in a yellow scab as if she were just getting over a nasty flu—inspired confidence. So, in the cargo compartment, the luggage Oliveira was beginning his journey with took up a little more than half the available space: two garbage bags full of clothes and several cardboard boxes left enough room for a person. Agatha read: HAUT-PLANTADE, THIERRY GROS CAILLOUX, HAUTS-CONSEILLANTS.
“They’re all wine boxes,” said Agatha.
“Yes, but only one has bottles in it. The rest are full of records and cassettes, movie magazines. Things like that.”
“Any photos?”
“Photos of what?”
“I don’t know, the maestro, some horse. Is there no part of this house you might want to remember some day?”
Oliveira thought it over or pretended to.
“No, none,” he said finally. “Do you have photos of your family?”
“Only of Alma. My daughter. But that’s because she died two years ago, and I don’t want to forget what she looked like.”
Oliveira was going to say he was sorry: I’m very sorry to hear that or My deepest condolences, but both phrases seemed awkward, ill-suited to the casualness of the revelation, and he couldn’t think of any others.
“Tell me more,” he said then. “We’ve only talked about me. Tell me what your partner does, for example.”
“He’s long gone. He left when Alma was a zygote.”
Oliveira was shaken by the force of her cynicism. He felt indiscreet: that’s what you get for trying to approach a stranger. Agatha kept talking, seeming at ease. She leaned back toward the load with a cat’s curiosity.
“Which is the box of wine?” she said. “I feel like a drink, maybe that would warm us up.”
Then they took the N1 south, a bottle of Saint-Julien held like a baby’s bottle between Agatha’s feet. By the time the van merged with the heavy traffic of the A16, the surface of the wine was below the top of the label. The rainy season was late in coming; the sky seemed clogged up, invariably gray. Soon the highway was no longer illuminated, and all Oliveira saw was the glare of the lights of northbound cars, that sort of permanent eclipse behind sheets of zinc that separated their lanes from oncoming traffic. Agatha slid down in her seat, took off her shoes with one hand, and put her feet up against the glove compartment. Then she turned on the heating. It blasted Oliveira in the face.
“Sorry. Do you want a sip?”
“Not for me, thanks.”
“Very good,” she congratulated him. “One does not drink at the helm, everyone knows that.”
After passing under a concrete bridge—a fluorescent sign ordered FAITES LA PAUSE TOUTES LES DEUX HEURES—Oliveira slowed down. He changed into the right-hand lane; Agatha asked him if they were going to stop for something as he pulled into a rest area, a concrete bay surrounded by pines. “I just need to use the rest room,” he lied. The noise of a fight came out of a bus parked a few meters away. Two teenagers were rolling around on the ground, and the sound of a fist as it thumped into a skull seemed exotic to Oliveira, something forgotten, a childhood memory. “I won’t be long,” he said as he got out. This, however, was true: he crossed the parking bay toward the services hut, found a tin vending machine built into the wall, put in ten francs, and a little pack of condoms, square and perfect as if no one had ever touched it, dropped into the palm of his hand. The dispenser also offered toothbrushes and razors. Oliveira decided he wasn’t in need of anything else and returned to the van.
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Agatha had finished the bottle. Her raincoat was hanging over the hand brake, between the two seats. When she spoke, it was clear her tongue was beginning to get tangled up.
“Do you like me, Oliveira?”
He didn’t answer.
“Are we going to make love? Because I’d rather not go to my house, that’s the only thing.”
“Well, let’s go somewhere else, then,” Oliveira heard himself say.
He waited a moment and added:
“That is unless you’re in any hurry, of course.”
“None at all,” said Agatha, lowering her head. “It’s winter and the fucking night never ends.”
III
The television was a luminous window hanging in the corner attached to the wall, and the slanted view Oliveira had from the bed was that of a man with thick glasses standing beside a map of France, indicating with a pointer the route of some electronic clouds across the western half of the hexagon. He was moving his lips but not saying anything, because underneath France, between Nice and Marseille, the word Mute ordered his silence. Then a series of squares appeared, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Oliveira saw that he’d have nothing but bad weather for the whole trip, but thought he might reach Clermont-Ferrand ahead of the rain they were forecasting. Who was that man? Why was Martine Desailly not there, the woman who’d been in charge of predicting the weather for years? The one-o’clock news was part of Oliveira’s routine, and his day incomplete without the most recent scandal from the Assemblée Nationale or the images of the dead in Algiers, more or less sophisticated forms of violence that vindicated his desire to leave, to hide away from the world. Agatha was sleeping. After sex, she had locked herself in the bathroom for fifteen minutes; Oliveira was going to ask if she was feeling all right, but then saw that she hadn’t redone her makeup, as he’d thought at first, but that the dampness of her eyes was displacing her mascara a little. He thought it would be futile to ask her why she’d been crying, when they were going to say good-bye in an hour and never see each other again in their lives. He felt cynical but also justified in refusing to accumulate other people’s sadness when it wasn’t within his power to alleviate it. “I’m going to sleep for a little while, if you don’t mind,” Agatha had said, “but don’t be embarrassed about waking me up if we have to get going.”
Lovers on All Saints' Day Page 15
