The Penalty Area

by Alain Gillot

  The referee faced me. It was he who’d grabbed my arm, he who was now weighing up how dangerous I was, expressive vocabulary. He didn’t hesitate for long. He stepped back, took a red card from his pocket, and pointed to the locker rooms, while his assistants tried to hold me back. I turned to Léonard. He was still in the same place, as if frozen. He’d clearly taken to heart my advice before the match to never lose control. I was thrown off the field and led back to the locker rooms. Sitting on a bench, I could hear the noise of the stadium, the protests, the whistles, which lasted several more minutes before the match apparently resumed. I kicked the door and hurt myself. I cried out, alone in those cold locker rooms. I walked up and down like a caged animal, then finally sat down again on the bench. Catherine came in. That was all I needed.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “The match has started again.”

  “And Léonard?”

  “He’s in his place. It was just the arch of the eyebrow. It looks worse than it is.”

  “Did you see that assault! It’s unacceptable. And that stupid referee sending me off. What about the other guy, the center forward, did he send him off, too?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a scandal!”

  “Vincent, there’s no point losing your temper.”

  “How can I not lose my temper over something so unfair! He was almost decapitated by that killer!”

  “You love that kid.”

  “What?”

  “You love him.”

  “It’s not about that! You don’t understand anything! He was in the penalty area!”

  “And?”

  “You can’t do that in the penalty area! It’s taboo!”

  “Taboo, eh? Interesting.”

  “Are you making fun of me?”

  “I’d never dare.”

  “Oh, yes, I see what you’re up to, Madam Psychiatrist, but I’m not playing with words, I’m talking about the rules of soccer, the ethics of the referee’s profession! Everything falls to pieces if you flout those principles! And they were being flouted, don’t you see?”

  “You have a scratch.”

  “What?

  At that moment Catherine came up to me. I recoiled slightly.

  “I’m not going to hurt you. Show me that.”

  “It’s nothing, it was when they dragged me off the field, I struggled and—”

  “They scored a second goal, you know. The one called Cosmin.”

  “What? A second goal? Couldn’t you have told me that earlier?”

  “Yes, if you’d given me time. We’ll have to disinfect it anyway. Are you up to date with your vaccinations? I’m sure you aren’t.”

  “It’s nothing, I tell you!

  She was very close to me. Her cap was pushed back a little. She took me by surprise and kissed me.

  “What did you just do?”

  “I kissed you.”

  “You don’t have any right to do that.”

  “Are there rules for that too?”

  “Of course! There are rules for everything.”

  40

  Léonard has appointed himself supervisor of the garden. Since early afternoon, he’s been carefully raking the dead leaves, taking care to preserve the most beautiful ones in a large book. I suspect him of wanting to feel what neurotypical children feel, the ones who are called normal, by indulging in this kind of simple activity. He’s been fascinated for a while with particles, particularly the Higgs boson. He asked me to buy him everything serious I could find about on the birth of the universe, and I saw that he was devoting a brand-new exercise book to this question. It seems to me that his way of playing is influenced by this growing interest in the cosmos. He’s increasingly comfortable with high-flying balls and unpredictable trajectories.

  My sister is plastering the walls of her son’s room. From a distance, I can hear her trowel scraping the porous surface with great precision and regularity. It’s incredible how quickly she works once she’s decided on an area that needs attention. Yesterday, she removed that horrible wallpaper. Last week, she rewired the house.

  Tomorrow, she plans to tackle her own room by knocking down the wall facing the garden and putting in a picture window. Of course this outburst of DIY isn’t without its disadvantages. It’s quite difficult, at times, to find anything in the place where it was the day before. At first that bothered me enormously, but I’m gradually adapting. It’s Catherine Vandrecken’s pet theory about boxes that’s gaining ground in my narrow sportsman’s brain. Having few boxes, always knowing where they are, allows man to adapt rapidly to his environment, but, being terribly reductive, this simplicity also limits him. To agree to increase the number of boxes, to question their relevance, to invent new ones when the need arises: that takes more time, for sure, but gives you a multitude of extra possibilities. And maybe quite simply helps you to feel freer.

  I’ve sat down on the bench under the cherry tree. I come here regularly now, to talk with my mother. With my father, too, even though I didn’t know him so well. I’m more and more convinced that on the day of his accident, he deliberately swerved into the ditch. Rather the way Catherine’s mother threw herself in the Seine. Except that we weren’t in the car. I don’t resent André and Gabrielle anymore. Who would ever have thought that possible? Life is long, we probably don’t realize how long. My parents didn’t have many boxes. They adapted too quickly. They were so afraid of being rejected that they must have pretended to know before they started to learn. It’s thanks to Léonard that I’ve understood some of these complex things. That particle that crossed my sky.

  Madeleine has come out of the house. She walks toward me. She’s wearing the sweater she’s dedicated to her art. It’s streaked with different colored paint stains, and has burns from the soldering iron and cuts from the saw. Her face is spattered with bits of plaster, her hands reddened from holding the tools, several fingers covered with bandages. She smiles, she’s half dead with exhaustion, but she’s happy.

  “Aren’t you answering your phone?”

  “I don’t know where it is. Don’t ask me why.”

  “Don’t go blaming the work. Catherine called me in the end, because she couldn’t reach you. She’ll be here, but not until seven-thirty. An emergency at the hospital.”

  “What do you mean she’ll be here? We see each other on Tuesdays.”

  “You know, I wonder if you haven’t gone straight from wisdom to senility. Today is Tuesday.”

  I rush into the bathroom. I still have half an hour, I can thank the hospital for that. Madeleine drops everything to iron a shirt for me, and Léonard starts searching for the leather moccasins I’ve just paid a fortune for, to replace my everlasting sneakers. In the end he has to admit defeat. They might be in a box my sister took down to the basement when she emptied my room to build a bookcase, but since the basement door is obstructed by a mountain of wood being stored there temporarily, he prefers to throw in the towel.

  Catherine rings the doorbell. She’s come straight from her office. Her hair is loose and she has rings under her eyes, which is how I like her best, the ultimate expression of her sensuality.

  “Sorry I’m late.”

  “I’ll forgive you this time.”

  She kisses me, then holds me close and looks me in the eyes. “What’s that ironic look?” she asks.

  “It isn’t for you, it’s for me.”

  “We’ll be just in time for the movie.”

  “We can eat beforehand and go to the last show. Or else not go at all.”

  “Do you mind?”

  “Not a bit.”

  “There’s a weird smell here.”

  “Madeleine’s started on the plaster in Léonard’s room.”

  “Oh.”

  We leave without disturbing them. They’re both in their own worlds. From
the sidewalk, we can see life inside the house. Madeleine on her stool, Léonard engrossed in a book.

  “The house looks bigger, doesn’t it?”

  “That’s because it’s lived in.”

  We leave the car and walk. Catherine sees that I’ve kept my awful sneakers and calls me a sportsman, to which I respond by calling her an intellectual. Sometimes, we like to play with the old boxes. In the meantime, I’m holding her arm.

  It’s already too late for the movies, and walking as slowly as we are, and being some distance from the center of town, there isn’t much chance we’ll find a restaurant still serving dinner in Sedan on a Tuesday evening. It doesn’t really matter. We can just as easily have a drink sitting on a banquette in the station brasserie. All we want is to sit side by side and talk, smoke, drink, start talking again, then kiss like idiots. And when we’re really hungry, we can always go back to the house and cook ham and eggs. And see my sister wander into the kitchen with her tub of plaster, and hear Léonard, having just emerged from his reading, explain the birth of the universe, his hands conducting an invisible orchestra: this family that has somehow formed, the one I spent so long looking for.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Alain Gillot is an admired journalist, a screenwriter, and a comic book author. The Penalty Area is his debut novel.