That night, she doesn’t tell Myriam about her daughter running away, nor about the bite. Mila, too, remains silent, without the nanny warning or threatening her. Now Louise and Mila each have a grievance against the other. This secret unites them as never before.
Jacques
Jacques loved telling her to shut up. He couldn’t stand her voice, which grated on his nerves. ‘Shut it, will you?’ In the car, she couldn’t help chatting. She was frightened of the road and talking calmed her. She launched into insipid monologues, barely taking a breath between sentences. She jabbered away blandly, listing names of streets, rolling out old memories.
She felt good when her husband yelled at her. She knew that it was to shut her up that he turned up the volume on the radio. That it was to humiliate her that he opened the window and began to smoke, while humming. Her spouse’s anger scared her, but she had to admit that, sometimes, it excited her too. She enjoyed making him writhe, working him up into such a state of rage that he was capable of parking on the roadside, grabbing her by the throat and quietly threatening that he would shut her up for good.
Jacques was heavy, noisy. As he got older, he became bitter and vain. In the evenings, coming home from work, he would rant on for at least an hour about his grievances with this or that person. According to him, everyone was trying to steal from him, manipulate him, take advantage of his condition. After his first redundancy, he took his employer to an industrial tribunal. The trial cost him time and a huge amount of money, but his final victory gave him a feeling of such power that he got a taste for disputes and courtrooms. Later he thought he could make his fortune by suing his insurance company after a car accident. Next he went after the first-floor neighbours, the town hall, the building’s management company. Whole days were spent writing illegible, threatening letters. He would go through legal-aid websites in search of any article of law that might play in his favour. Jacques was irascible and utterly hypocritical. He envied the success of others, denying them any merit. Sometimes he would even spend all afternoon at the commercial court, just to binge on others’ sufferings. He enjoyed seeing people ruined, the blows of fate.
‘I’m not like you,’ he told Louise proudly. ‘I’m not a doormat, a slave content to clean up the shit and puke of little brats. Only black women do work like that now.’ He thought his wife excessively docile. And while that excited him at night, in their conjugal bed, it exasperated him the rest of the time. He was forever giving Louise advice, which she pretended to listen to. ‘You should tell them to reimburse you, and that’s it’; ‘You shouldn’t agree to work one minute more without being paid’; ‘Just call in sick – what do you think they can do about it?’
Jacques was too busy to look for a job. His legal battles took up all his time. He hardly set foot outside the apartment, spreading his case files over the coffee table and leaving the television on. During that period, the presence of children became unbearable to him and he ordered Louise to work in her employers’ apartment. He was irritated by the sound of their coughs and wails, even their laughter. Louise, most of all, revolted him. Her pathetic preoccupations, which always centred on kids, put him in a veritable rage. ‘You and your bloody women’s things,’ he would repeat. He believed that such matters should not be talked about. Just let them get on with it, somewhere out of sight; we don’t need to know anything about all this stuff with babies or old people. They were bad times, those ages of servitude, of repeating the same actions. Those ages when the body – monstrous, shameless, a cold and foul-smelling machine – took over everything. Bodies that craved love and liquid. ‘It’s enough to make you disgusted at being a man.’
During that period, he bought – on credit – a computer, a new television and an electrically powered chair that gave massages and that could be inclined when he wanted to take a nap. He would spend hours in front of the computer’s blue screen, his asthmatic wheezes filling the room. Sitting on his new chair, facing his brand-new television, he would frantically press the buttons on his remote control, like an overexcited kid.
It was probably a Saturday, since they ate lunch together. Jacques was ranting, as always, but with less vigour than usual. Under the table, Louise had put a bowl of ice water in which Jacques was soaking his feet. In her nightmares, Louise can still see Jacques’s purple legs, his swollen diabetic’s ankles, which he would constantly ask her to massage. For the past few days, Louise had noticed, his complexion had been waxy, his eyes dull. He’d been having difficulty finishing a sentence without pausing for breath. She cooked an osso buco. After his third mouthful, as he was about to speak, Jacques threw it up all over his plate. It was projectile vomit, like a baby’s, and Louise knew it must be serious. That he wouldn’t get better. She stood up and, seeing Jacques’s bewildered expression, she said: ‘Don’t worry, it’s nothing.’ She talked constantly, accusing herself of having put too much wine in the sauce, which had made it acidic, spouting idiotic theories about heartburn. She talked and talked, gave advice, blamed herself and asked for forgiveness. Her quavering, incoherent logorrhoea only succeeded in intensifying the panic that had taken hold of Jacques, a fear akin to missing the top step of a staircase and seeing himself tumbling down, headfirst, his spine crushed, his flesh bloody. If she’d shut up, perhaps he could have wept, maybe he’d have asked for help or even a bit of tenderness. But as she cleared the table, as she cleaned the floor, she talked, ceaselessly.
Jacques died three months later. He dried up like a piece of fruit forgotten in the sun. It was snowing on the day of his funeral and the light was almost blue. Louise found herself alone.
She nodded as the notary explained, in an apologetic voice, that Jacques had left her only debts. She stared at the goitre crushed under his shirt collar and pretended to accept the situation. All she had inherited from Jacques were failed lawsuits, pending trials, unpaid bills. The bank gave her a month to leave the little house in Bobigny, which would be repossessed. Louise boxed everything up herself. She carefully collected the few things that Stéphanie had left behind. She didn’t know what to do with the piles of documents that Jacques had accumulated. She thought about setting fire to them in the little garden, imagining that, with a bit of luck, the blaze might spread to the house, the street, even the whole neighbourhood. In that way, this entire part of her life would go up in smoke. She would feel no sorrow if it did. She would stay there, motionless, discreet, to watch the flames devour her memories, her long walks in the dark empty streets, her bored Sundays with Jacques and Stéphanie.
But Louise picked up her suitcase, she double-locked the door and she left, abandoning in the entrance hall of the little house those boxes of memories, her daughter’s clothes and her husband’s schemes.
That night she slept in a hotel room, where she paid for a week’s stay in advance. She made sandwiches and ate them in front of the television. She sucked fig biscuits, letting them melt on her tongue. Solitude was like a vast hole into which Louise watched herself sink. Solitude, which stuck to her flesh, to her clothes, began to model her features, making her move like a little old lady. Solitude leapt at her face at dusk, when night fell and the sounds of family lives rose from the surrounding houses. The light dimmed and the murmur grew louder: laughter, panting, even sighs of boredom.
In that room, on a street in the Chinese quarter, she lost all notion of time. She felt lost, crazed. The whole world had forgotten her. She would sleep for hours and wake up swollen-eyed, her head aching, despite the cold that seethed through the room. She only went out when she absolutely had to, when her hunger became too painful to ignore. She walked in the street as if it were a cinema set and she were not there, an invisible spectator to the movements of mankind. Everyone seemed to have somewhere to go.
*
Solitude was like a drug that she wasn’t sure she wanted to do without. Louise wandered through the streets in a daze, eyes so wide open that they hurt. In her solitude, she started to see other people. To really see them.
The existence of others became palpable, vibrant, more real than ever. She observed, in minute detail, the gestures of couples sitting on terraces. The sideways glances of torpid old people. The self-conscious expressions of students who sat on benches and pretended to revise. In squares, outside metro stations, she would recognise the strange parade of the impatient. Like them, she waited for someone. Every day, she would encounter companions in madness: tramps, lunatics, talking to themselves.
The city, back then, was full of madmen.
Winter comes, and the days blur into each other. November is rainy and cold. Outside, the pavements are covered with black ice. Impossible to go out. Louise tries to entertain the children. She invents games, she sings songs. They build a house out of cardboard. But the day seems to last for ever. Adam has a fever and he won’t stop whining. Louise holds him in her arms; she rocks him for nearly an hour, until he falls asleep. Mila, pacing around the living room, grows fractious too.
‘Come here,’ Louise tells her. Mila approaches and the nanny takes from her handbag the little white vanity case that the child has so often daydreamed about. Mila thinks Louise is the most beautiful woman she knows. She looks like the flight attendant – blonde, with lots of make-up – who gave her sweets on a trip to Nice. Even though Louise is constantly on the move, doing the washing-up and running from the school to the house, she always looks perfect. Her hair is meticulously tied back. Her black mascara, of which she applies at least three thick coats, makes her look like a surprised doll. And then there are her hands, which are soft and smell of flowers. And her nail varnish that never flakes or peels.
Sometimes Louise paints her nails in front of Mila and the little girl, eyes closed, breathes in the smell of the remover and the cheap varnish that the nanny spreads with quick, lively gestures, never getting any on her skin. Fascinated, the child watches Louise wave her hands in the air and blow on the fingers.
When Mila allows Louise to kiss her, it is so she can smell the talcum powder on her cheeks, so she can get a closer look at the glitter that sparkles on her eyelids. She likes to watch her put lipstick on. With one hand, Louise holds a mirror – always perfectly clean – in front of her, while she pulls her face into a strange grimace that Mila tries to reproduce afterwards in the bathroom.
Louise rummages around in her vanity case. She holds the little girl’s hands and coats them with rose-scented cream, which she takes from a tiny pot. ‘Smells nice, doesn’t it?’ Under the child’s astonished eyes, Louise puts varnish on her little nails. A vulgar pink varnish that smells very strongly of acetone. For Mila, this is the smell of femininity.
‘Take off your socks, would you?’ And she paints the toenails of her chubby little feet with nail varnish. Louise empties out the contents of the vanity case on the table. The air fills with orange dust and the smell of talc. Mila laughs suddenly, jubilantly. Louise is putting lipstick on her now, then blue eyeshadow, then a sort of orange paste on her cheeks. She asks her to lower her head and she backcombs her hair – too straight and too fine – until it looks like a mane.
They laugh so hard that they don’t hear Paul as he closes the front door behind him and enters the living room. Mila smiles, mouth open, arms spread wide.
‘Look, Papa. Look what Louise did!’
Paul stares at her. He had been so pleased to get home early, so happy to see his children, but now he feels sick. He has the feeling that he has walked in on something sordid or abnormal. His daughter, his little girl, looks like a transvestite, like a ruined old drag queen. He can’t believe it. He is furious, out of control. He hates Louise for having done this. Mila, his angel, his little blue dragonfly, is as ugly as a circus freak, as ridiculous as a dog dressed up for a walk by its hysterical old-lady owner.
‘What the hell is this? What did you do to her?’ Paul yells. He grabs Mila by the arms and stands her on a stool in the bathroom. He tries to wipe the make-up off her face. The little girl cries out: ‘You’re hurting me.’ She sobs and the rouge just smears, ever thicker, ever stickier, over the child’s diaphanous skin. He has the impression that he is disfiguring her even more, soiling her, and his rage grows.
‘Louise, I’m warning you: I never want to see this again. This kind of thing disgusts me. I have no intention of teaching such vulgar behaviour to my daughter. She’s far too young to dress up like a … You know what I mean.’
Louise stands in the bathroom doorway, holding Adam in her arms. Despite his father’s anger, despite the agitation, the baby doesn’t cry. He glares at Paul coldly, suspiciously, as if to make it clear that he is on Louise’s side. The nanny listens to Paul. She does not lower her eyes or apologise.
Stéphanie could be dead. Louise thinks about this sometimes. She could have prevented her from ever living. No one would have known. No one would have blamed her. If Louise had eliminated her, society would perhaps even have been grateful to her today. She would have proved herself clear-headed, a good citizen.
Louise was twenty-five years old and she woke up one morning with heavy, painful breasts. A new sadness had come between her and the world. She felt certain that there was something wrong. Back then, she was working for Mr Franck, an artist who lived with his mother in a mansion in the fourteenth arrondissement. Louise did not really understand Mr Franck’s paintings. In the living room, on the walls of the corridor and the bedrooms, she would stand in front of the immense portraits of disfigured women – bodies crippled with pain or paralysed in ecstasy – that had made the artist famous. Louise wasn’t sure they were beautiful, but she liked them.
Geneviève, Mr Franck’s mother, had fractured the neck of her femur getting down from a train. Unable to walk, she had lost her mind on the platform. She spent her life lying down – naked, most of the time – in a light-filled ground-floor bedroom. It was so difficult to dress her – she fought with such ferocity – that they just laid her on an open nappy, her breasts and genitals exposed. The sight of that abandoned body was appalling.
Mr Franck had begun by hiring qualified, very expensive nurses. But they complained about the old woman’s tantrums. They stuffed her full of tranquillisers. The son found these nurses cold and brutal. What he wanted for his mother was a friend, a nanny, a tender-hearted woman who would listen to her ravings without rolling her eyes, without sighing. Louise was young, admittedly, but she had impressed him with her physical strength. On the first day, she had come into the bedroom and, by herself, had managed to lift that body, as heavy as a concrete slab. She had cleaned the old woman, talking constantly, and for once Geneviève had not screamed.
Louise slept with Geneviève. She washed her. She listened to her rant all night. Like a baby, the old woman dreaded dusk. The fading light, the shadows, the silences made her scream with fear. She begged her own mother – who’d been dead for forty years – to come and fetch her. Louise, who slept next to the medical bed, tried to calm her down. The old woman spat insults at her, called her a whore, a bitch, a peasant. Sometimes she would try to hit her.
Louise started sleeping more deeply than ever. Geneviève’s cries didn’t disturb her any more. Soon she was no longer capable of turning the old woman over or putting her in her wheelchair. It was as if her arms had atrophied, and she had terrible backache. One afternoon, when darkness had already fallen and Geneviève was mumbling heartrending prayers, Louise went up to Mr Franck’s attic to explain the situation to him. To Louise’s surprise, the artist became enraged. He banged the door shut and walked over to her, his grey eyes boring into hers. For an instant, she thought he was going to hurt her. And he started laughing.
‘Louise, women like you – single women who hardly earn enough money to live – do not have children. To be perfectly honest with you, I think you’re completely irresponsible. You turn up here with your big round eyes and your stupid smile, to tell me that. What do you expect me to do? Open a bottle of champagne?’ He was pacing around the large room, hands behind his back, surrounded by unfinished paintings. ‘You th
ink it’s good news? Don’t you have any common sense at all? I’ll tell you one thing: you’re lucky you have an employer like me, who’s willing to try to help you improve your situation. I know plenty who would kick you out the door, quick as a flash. Listen, I entrust you with my mother, who is the most important person in the world for me, and I can tell that you’re completely brainless, incapable of making a good decision. I couldn’t care less what you do with your free evenings. Your light morals are none of my business. But life is not a party. What would you do with a baby?’
In reality, Mr Franck did care what Louise did with her Saturday evenings. He started asking her questions, increasingly insistent. He wanted to shake her, to slap her face until she confessed. He wanted her to tell him what she did when she wasn’t there, at Geneviève’s bedside, where he could keep an eye on her. He wanted to know from what caresses this child had been conceived, in which bed Louise had abandoned herself to pleasure, to lust, to laughter. He asked her over and over again who the father was, what he looked like, where she’d met him and what his intentions were. But Louise, invariably, responded to his questions by saying: ‘He’s no one.’
Mr Franck took charge of everything. He said he would drive Louise to the doctor himself and wait for her during the procedure. He even promised her that once it was over, he would have her sign a proper contract, that he would pay money into a bank account in her name, and that she would have the right to paid holidays.
The day of the operation, Louise overslept and missed the appointment. Stéphanie took over her life, digging inside her, stretching her, tearing apart her youth. She grew like a mushroom on a damp piece of wood. Louise did not go back to Mr Franck’s house. She never saw the old lady again.
Locked up in the Massés’ apartment, she sometimes feels she is going mad. For the past few days there have been red blotches on her cheeks and her wrists. Louise has to put her hands and her face under cold water to soothe the burning sensation. During the long winter days, a feeling of immense solitude grips her. In a panic, she leaves the apartment, closes the door behind her, faces up to the cold and takes the children to the park.
Lullaby Page 7
