Enough About Love

by Hervé Le Tellier

  “With you,” she once told Yves, “I’m always going somewhere, moving forward, but I’m not balanced, I’m never stable.”

  He accepted the image and replied, “There’s nothing weird about that. When you’re in motion, each instantaneous position is unstable. If you want to be in a stable position, just don’t move.”

  She also told him, “With my husband, I’m on a cruise ship, in first class. Everyone always tells me that.”

  Yves had no trouble picturing her lounging in a deck chair, surrounded by her family, gazing at the blur of fog along the coast, without ever worrying about pulling up to shore. He wondered whether life actually could be like the teak deck of a steamer. Then she compared him to a sailboat, indulgently granting him the prestige of two masts. The image struck him as rather cruel, but not unfair.

  “I don’t know,” she added, “if it’s such a good idea giving up a steamboat for a ketch.”

  Stan watches Anna moving around the room. He wants to take his wife in his arms, but she would return the hug, and he is afraid he would hold the duplicity against her.

  “I’m going to have a shower, my love,” Anna says. “I can smell the sweat on me from the day, and I can’t stand it.”

  Stan does not look up.

  “Well, I thought you smelled really good.”

  Anna does not answer. She goes to take her shower, which will help to account for the overpowering smell of soap.

  STAN

  • • •

  STAN IS OLD. The thought cuts through him. When he looked at his face in the mirror this morning, he no longer knew himself. Or was it when Anna left, when the door closed behind her. He thought for the first time that she could easily not come back one day. He watched at the window as his wife walked away, then took his coat and went out, he walked all the way to the Jardin des Plantes. He went into the magnificent Grande Serre greenhouse, and here he is now, sitting on a stone bench, not far from the door. He has laid his hand gently against the bark of a large ficus, as if against an old friend’s lined palm, but all the bark does is stay cold, rough, and damp, and reiterate in its treelike way: “You’re old.”

  Anna lied to him. She thought she could get away with it, that is all. But there was a gleam in her eye that he did not recognize, like a moment of truancy betraying her, and to think she was someone who never wanted to lie. Something in her eyes had to confess, had to speak for her, and Stan had to spot it so that she could leave without feeling ashamed. As she left, she kissed him that sexless kiss that she so frequently gratifies him with, she turned around and gave him a brief wave. Stan did not hold her back, made no move toward her, he listened to her footsteps dying away in the stairwell. Because of this new shadow, everything was now different and Stan thought that next time he would not bat an eyelid, that Anna could lie and it really would be a lie, because he would not know it.

  Stan watches the water drip-dripping along the philodendrons’ large cutout leaves. In the early days, before Karl and Lea were born, Anna used to come and meet him when he got off night duty at the Pitié hospital. On the way, she would buy an apple danish and some croissants, she had a thermos full of coffee, and they had their breakfast on this bench in the Grande Serre. There was a building being renovated outside, the work had gone on for two years, and the sound of drills and saws was forever associated with this bench, with the smell of apple from the pastry and the almond taste of Anna’s kisses.

  At the moment, there is a construction site on the rue Buffon, and the wind carries the creak of cranes all the way here. Stan likes these steel stick insects that prove life goes on, that the city is never finished and keeps moving, that the world changes. The outside air comes in through a window, breezing through his hair, chill as the beginning of winter. Anna must be at the hospital already, the gravel must be crunching under her feet, maybe she is walking quickly, Stan so loves the way she runs, like a big waterbird. Stan listens to the waterfall, the cheeping of finches, he watches the Chinese carp in the pond, the motionless turtles. I love you, Anna, Stan thinks, I’m going to tell you today, this evening, you will listen to me and close your eyes. I want you to close your eyes.

  YVES AND THOMAS

  • • •

  ANNA AND YVES

  • • •

  OUTSIDE THE CHURCH, Yves brandishes the announcements page of Le Monde at his older sister. Lise is ostentatiously in mourning, veiled hat, black suit, black coat. Her eyes are red and she keeps blowing her nose, noisily. Yves speaks quietly, between his teeth.

  “What the hell is this, Lise, this stupid Vigny quote? ‘We shall speak again in the darkest hour.’ ”

  “It’s a line from Destinées,” Lise replies curtly. “What did you want, something right-on and witty from Desproges, a bit of Pierre Dac?”4

  Yves shrugs. He waves the newspaper again.

  “And what about ‘this very special couple,’ where do you get this stuff? Is that our parents you’re talking about?”

  “Absolutely, it’s our parents I’m talking about,” Lise retorts.

  Her voice is a whistle, her mouth spluttering behind her veil.

  “Do you know what I think about this, Lise? Do you know what I think?”

  “Oh yes. Very well. I know very, very well.”

  She would like her brother to stop talking, but can tell he wants to work right through his anger, so she moves away from the coffin, which is being carried into the church by four men dressed in black, as if afraid her dead father can hear Yves. He turns and follows her.

  “So what is it you’re telling us with this ‘very special couple’? Are you doing a Disneyland number, is that it? She didn’t love him, she thought he was a dick, she told him so, in front of us, she gave him a hard time his whole fucking life, and then when she died, he was left there crying over her …”

  “She’s our mother, you have no right to—”

  “I have every right. Horrible people have children too.”

  “Say what you like. I don’t give a damn. God, if you knew how little I care what you say.”

  “Yup, I’ll say what I like.”

  “Stop talking so loud in front of … the kids …”

  Lise says nothing more. Her gaze does not extend to the pretty brunette standing, silently, beside her brother.

  Anna understands. She moves away, blends into the small crowd of people, none of whom she knows and none of whom want to know her. No distant cousin comes to say hello, nobody is curious about her. The family keeps its distance from the son’s partner, a bad son who ran away from home so young and never came back.

  Anna was wrong. She wanted to use this painful occasion to claim her place by Yves’s side, she wanted to be beautiful, to honor Yves. The idea was not inappropriate, but here, in this hostile indifference, she feels too elegant, over-made-up, she wishes she could be invisible. Focusing on his argument, Yves has abandoned her. This anger in him reminds her that even though he no longer wants to be part of a family, he does still have one, and she does not feature in it.

  It starts to rain. To the east, over Azelay’s slate roofs, a rainbow brightens the sky. If David were here, David, her brother who has “found religion,” he would look away from the prism up in the azure, and recite the Zocher haBrith blessing to remember the promise the Almighty made not to flood the world again. He would remind her that it was Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai himself, blessing be on him, who forbade contemplating the apparition of a keshet, a rainbow, the symbol of God’s renewed alliance with man, and that he put a handwritten note about it in the margin of the Zohar. But Anna no longer believes in God, she really could not care if the Torah has something to say at any point about waterskiing or whether the glue on postage stamps is kosher. A Jew who loses his or her faith is said to embrace questions because the world is then reduced to endless questioning. Anna looks at the rainbow, without actively defying heaven or its angels.

  She steps inside the Gothic church, looks at the statues of emphatically C
atholic saints, the brightly colored windows telling the story of Christ’s passion, the bust of the Virgin Mary carrying the baby Jesus with maternal bliss, and, looking down the nave, she sees the huge stucco figure of Christ nailed to the cross, Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum. The coffin is before the altar, draped in black velvet with bouquets of lilies and wreaths of roses laid on top of it, and white candelabras lit around it. Yves no longer believes in God either, but it really is not the same God. Anna inhales the bitter smell of incense and the sickly fragrance of flowers, her head spins, she sits on a pew at the back of the church, shivering, she suddenly feels cold, terribly cold.

  She feels like a foreigner. She should not have come. She is not from here. No one will recite the kaddish, Yitgadal v’yit-kadash sh’meh rabba, b’alma di-v’ra chir’uteh, for the father; no one will tear their clothes before the grave is filled in; no one will lay a stone on the tomb; no one will light a candle in the father’s room. No, Anna is not from here, she does not want to be, would never know how to be. She cannot go back to Yves, cannot find refuge in his arms. Everything suddenly seems difficult, almost impossible. They are so different, he is a gentile, she a Jew.

  Anna feels like crying. She would like to stand up and walk out of the church, but her legs will not obey her. A man’s warm hand takes hers, brings it to his lips. Anna huddles against Yves, the pain is too much for her, it overflows, she cries in his arms, shuddering as she sobs, she wants to stop, but she just can’t, she just can’t.

  4. Pierre Desproges (1939–1988) was an outspoken and eloquent French humorist. Pierre Dac (1893–1975) was a cabaret singer.

  THOMAS AND LOUISE

  • • •

  THOMAS THOUGHT he would feel no pain. The analyst believed he was prepared for his father’s death, had so clearly inscribed the idea on his mind that he could already picture him under the earth. But he has a persistent ache, a blend of remorse and resentment. He never loved this absent father, this man he only ever called by his first name, Pierre, this father who showed so little interest in fatherhood that Thomas feels he can count the times they spent together on the fingers of one hand. As a teenager, Thomas wanted to change his name, he could have called himself Durenne, his mother’s maiden name. Then his anger lost its painful edge, was less of an issue. Eventually, he even thought he no longer bore him a grudge.

  And yet when, almost twenty years ago now, “Pierre” said over the telephone, “I know you’re hurting, I know you resent me …,” Thomas sniggered to himself. He did it loudly enough for his father to hear, and the freshly qualified analyst in him knew that meant the business was far from over, and he said, “I’m sorry, Pierre. You’re probably right. I resented you and I still do.”

  As he drives to La Roche-sur-Yon, Thomas knows he is going to confront him. If Stoics are right, if there really is nothing between men, no love, tenderness, or friendship, but the body is everything, if all feeling really does germinate and take root in the individual, then this journey, however belated it may be, will not be pointless. Thomas is driving toward his own appeasement.

  Louise has canceled all her meetings, she wanted to come with him.

  “Thanks for being here, Louise.”

  Tenderly, without a word, she rests her head on his shoulder, he breathes in her perfume. She closes her eyes, puts her arms around him. She is wearing a sober black suit, looks at the map, acts as copilot.

  “We need to take exit 30,” she says quietly. “And then the first turn to La Roche-sur-Yon and Noirmoutier.”

  “In one kilometer, turn left,” says the satellite navigation system, which has maintained a discreet silence for nearly five minutes.

  “That’s what I just said,” sighs Louise. “Can’t you at least switch it to Italian or Spanish, so we can practice a language?”

  “You can actually. You can also have a man’s voice, if you like.”

  “In five hundred meters, turn left onto the D347.”

  “Someone should invent a GPS for life,” Louise smiles, and she adopts the machine’s slightly nasal, disembodied voice: “In one week, take a lover. In one day, take a lover. Take Thomas Le Gall now, on the left. In one month, leave your husband. In one week, leave your husband.”

  “Leave your husband now,” smiles Thomas.

  “Turn left now,” says the GPS.

  “There, you see?” says Louise.

  She puts the map down.

  “When was the last time you saw your father?”

  “Eight months ago, for his eightieth birthday. I hadn’t seen him for, what, fifteen years. But I wanted my daughters to meet their grandfather, the ‘real’ one, at least once. So it wouldn’t stay a family secret, a phantom link. They didn’t want to, I had to insist and explain, to keep at it. In the end I convinced them by saying that if he died tomorrow, before they got to see him, they’d regret it for the rest of their lives.”

  “In one kilometer, take the second exit at the rotary.”

  “You can shut up. So the girls agreed. It was in a big, fancy restaurant, near the Porte Maillot, the sort of place I’m glad I never set foot. It was kind of cheerful, even if I did find it hard relaxing completely. Alice and Esther thought he was very nice, and they loved their cousins.”

  “Your sister’s children?”

  “My half-sister’s. Aurèle and Just.”

  “Just?”

  “You’re right, Just is a weird name. I wanted my girls here for the funeral, but it was too complicated getting them over from Glasgow.”

  Louise points at a road sign saying LA ROCHE-SUR-YON—15 KM.

  Thomas nods.

  “I booked a pretty hotel in La Rochelle, in the old town, with views of the sea. We’ll leave right after the funeral. Is that okay?”

  “Perfect. I have an overnight pass. I said I had to visit a lifer at Saint-Martin de Ré prison, for a review. It’s almost true.”

  “How should I introduce you? Louise Blum? Just Louise? My friend?”

  “Yes, Louise is fine, I think. ‘My friend’ is okay too, seeing I’m here as your friend. And I’m wearing black, which is appropriate.”

  “Your dress really suits you.”

  “It’s a suit, you moron …”

  “Take the second turn on the right, onto the D347,” intones the GPS.

  “Look,” Louise says, flipping up her skirt. Bright red lace with gray edging appears right at the top of her naked thigh. “I put on my sexiest underwear. To be honest, I even bought it for … for the occasion.”

  “Fantastic, my love. I’ll tell my father as soon as I see his coffin.”

  Thomas slides his hand onto her knees, strokes her legs and moves right up her thighs, which part to let him through. He slows down, the car shifts a gear.

  “Good thing I rented an automatic.”

  “Turn right now,” says the GPS.

  Thomas absentmindedly obeys the computer’s instructions. His hand slips beneath the silk, flits over Louise’s pubis, which proves compliant.

  “I love you,” says Louise.

  Thomas’s fingers start to wander, so does he.

  “Make a U-turn,” the GPS says flatly.

  ANNA AND YVES

  • • •

  IT IS NOVEMBER and yet summer is still lingering in southern Europe. The French Institute in Florence has invited Yves for a reading of his first book, which has been translated into Italian. Yves takes Anna with him for a long weekend. Their room is very light, with a balcony overlooking the Arno. Anna is watching the river and suddenly spins around.

  “Please can we go to Arezzo? I’d really love to see the Piero della Francesca fresco. It’s of the Virgin when she is pregnant, she’s standing like in Byzantine images of her, impassive, hieratic. She’s resting one hand on her stomach, the other on her hip. The colors are gorgeous and her features so fine. They used it in Nostalghia, the Tarkovsky film. Do you remember? The poet and the young blond interpreter are driving along in an old Volkswagen. It’s pouring rain, the s
ky’s black, it’s a winding road and the chapel’s right at the top of a hill, surrounded by cypress trees.”

  Yves thinks he has seen the film, but is not sure he remembers the scene. Anna is insistent: “When they get there, they’re celebrating a Mass for the Virgin. The girl goes in alone and the poet stays on the doorstep. The roof has collapsed and the Roman beams are open to the storm. It’s raining inside the church, on the flagstones, but the fresco’s in an alcove, sheltered from the rain, lit by hundreds of candles. Do you remember?”

  Yves wants to remember. Arezzo is in southeastern Tuscany, on the border with Umbria, they will need a car, he rents one.

  Anna buys a guide to Tuscany, tries to find the church. With no luck.

  Yves makes his inquiries. An hour later, he knows everything.

  “Anna, I have bad news.”

  “The church is closed?”

  “It’s not that. Your church with the broken roof isn’t near Arezzo.”

  “Really?”

  “Yup. It’s a Cistercian abbey somewhere near Sienna, San Galgano Abbey. It’s so romantic it’s been used in several films, like The English Patient.”

  “Is it far?”

  “Southeast of Sienna, an hour and a half by car. But you definitely won’t see the fresco from the Tarkovsky film there.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the pregnant Virgin in his film is the Madonna del Parto. If you want to see her, you have to go to the Museo de Monterchi, a church not far from Arezzo. Actually, the director chose to film a reproduction of it which is much better quality: the Nostalghia Virgin. And that particular Virgin is somewhere else again, in the crypt of a Roman church in San Pietro, in Tuscany.”

  “I see. Nothing’s true.”

  “Let’s say Tarkovsky pieced everything together to make the scene. That’s movies for you, make-believe.”

  Anna says nothing for a moment. When she does speak, her voice is sad.

  “You know, that’s me all over. The things I want don’t even exist, it’s all make-believe.”