Lullaby

by Leïla Slimani

  They make love clumsily, him on top of her, their chins sometimes banging together. Lying on her, he grunts, but she doesn’t know if it’s a grunt of pleasure or because his joints are hurting and she’s not helping him. Hervé is so short that she can feel his ankles against hers – his thick ankles, his hairy feet – and, to her, this contact seems more incongruous, more intrusive than the man’s sex organ inside her. Jacques was so tall and he made love like he was punishing her, angrily. After this embrace, Hervé emerges relieved, as if a heavy weight has been lifted from him, and he acts more familiarly towards her.

  *

  It was here, in Hervé’s bed, in his council house in the Porte de Saint-Ouen, with the man asleep beside her, that she thought about a baby. A tiny baby, just born, a baby completely enveloped in that warm smell of life just beginning. A baby abandoned to love, which she would dress in pastel-coloured romper suits and which would be passed from her arms to Myriam’s and then to Paul’s. A newborn that would bind them more closely to one another, bringing them together in the same surge of tenderness. That would erase all the misunderstandings, the dissensions, that would give meaning to their daily habits. She would rock this baby on her knees for hours in a little room, illuminated only by a nightlight that would project boats and islands on to the wall. She would caress its bald head and gently insert her little finger into its mouth. The child would stop crying then, sucking her varnished fingernail with its swollen gums.

  *

  The next day she makes Paul and Myriam’s bed more carefully than usual. She moves her hand over the sheets. She searches for a trace of their lovemaking, a trace of the child she is now sure is going to arrive. She asks Mila if she would like a little brother or a little sister. ‘A baby we could look after together – what do you think?’ Louise hopes that Mila will talk about this to her mother, that she will whisper this idea into her ear and from there it will enter her mind and grow stronger. And one day the little girl asks Myriam, under Louise’s delighted gaze, if she has a baby in her belly. ‘Oh, God, no, I’d rather die!’ Myriam laughs.

  Louise thinks that is bad. She doesn’t understand Myriam’s laughter, the light-hearted way she answers this question. Myriam is saying that, she thinks, to ward off bad luck. She feigns indifference, but she thinks about it all the same. In September, Adam too will start school; the house will be empty, and Louise will have nothing to do. Another child has to arrive to fill the long winter days.

  Louise listens to conversations. It’s a small apartment – she isn’t doing it deliberately – but she ends up knowing everything. Except that, recently, Myriam has been speaking more quietly. She closes the door behind her when she talks on the phone. She whispers, her lips just above Paul’s shoulder. They look as if they are keeping secrets.

  Louise talks to Wafa about this child that will soon be born. About the joy it will bring, and the extra work. ‘With three children, they won’t be able to do without me.’ Louise has moments of euphoria. She has the vague, fleeting sense of a life that will grow bigger, of wider open spaces, a purer love, voracious appetites. She thinks about the summer, which is so close, and their family holidays. She imagines the smell of ploughed soil and olive pits rotting by a roadside. The vault of fruit trees under a moonbeam and nothing to carry, nothing to cover up, nothing to hide.

  She starts cooking properly again; in the past few weeks her meals have become almost inedible. For Myriam, she makes cinnamon rice pudding, spicy soups and all sorts of dishes reputed to increase fertility. She observes the young woman’s body as attentively as a jealous husband. She examines the fairness of her complexion, the weight of her breasts, the shine of her hair: all, she believes, signs of pregnancy.

  She takes care of the laundry with the concentration of a witch, a voodoo priestess. As always, she empties the washing machine. She stretches Paul’s boxer shorts. She washes Myriam’s lingerie by hand; in the kitchen sink, she runs cold water over the lace and silk of her bras and knickers. She recites prayers.

  But Louise is always disappointed. She doesn’t need to rip open the bin bags. Nothing escapes her. She saw the stain on the pyjama bottoms left by Myriam’s side of the bed. On the bathroom floor this morning, she noticed the tiny drop of blood. A drop so small that Myriam didn’t clean it, and which was left to dry on the green-and-white tiles.

  The blood returns ceaselessly; she knows its odour, this blood that Myriam cannot hide from her and that, each month, announces the death of a child.

  Euphoria gives way to days of dejection. The world seems to shrink, to retract, to weigh down on her body, to crush it. Paul and Myriam close doors on her and she wants to smash them down. She has only one desire: to create a world with them, to find her place and live there, to dig herself a niche, a burrow, a warm hiding place. Sometimes she feels ready to claim her portion of earth and then the urge wanes, she is overcome by sorrow, and she feels ashamed even to have believed in something.

  One Thursday evening, around 8 p.m., Louise goes back to her studio flat. The landlord is waiting in the dark corridor. He stands beneath the bulb that no longer works. ‘Ah, there you are.’ Bertrand Alizard practically pounces on her. He aims the light from his phone screen at Louise’s face and she covers her eyes with her hands. ‘I was waiting for you. I’ve come here several times, in the evenings and afternoons. I never found you.’ He speaks smoothly, his upper body leaning towards Louise, as if he is about to touch her, take her arm, whisper in her ear. He stares at her with his gummed-up eyes, his lashless eyes that he rubs after taking off his glasses, which are attached to a string around his neck.

  She opens the door to her flat and lets him in. Bertrand Alizard is wearing a pair of beige trousers that are too big for him. Observing him from behind, Louise notices that the belt has missed two loops and that his trousers hang loose at his waist and beneath his backside. He looks like an old man, stooped and frail, who has stolen a giant’s clothing. Everything about him seems harmless: his balding head, his wrinkled cheeks covered in freckles, his trembling shoulders … everything except his huge, dry hands, with their thick nails like fossils; his butcher’s hands, which he rubs together to warm up.

  He enters the apartment in silence, slowly and carefully, as if he were discovering the place for the first time. He inspects the walls, runs his finger over the spotless skirting boards. He touches everything with his calloused hands, caresses the sofa’s slipcover, strokes the surface of the Formica table. To him, the apartment appears empty, uninhabited. He would have liked to make a few remarks to his tenant, to tell her that in addition to paying her rent late, she is failing to take care of the flat. But the room is exactly as it was when he left it to her, the day she visited the studio for the first time.

  He stands with one hand on the back of a chair and looks at Louise. He waits, staring at her with his yellow eyes that don’t see much any more but that he is not ready to lower. He waits for her to speak, or to rummage in her handbag for the rent money she owes. He waits for her to make the first move, to apologise for not having replied to his letters or the messages he left on her phone. But Louise doesn’t say a word. She remains standing against the door, like one of those little dogs that bite you when you try to calm them down.

  ‘You’ve started packing up, by the looks of it. That’s good.’ Alizard points, with his thick finger, at a few boxes in the entrance hall. ‘The next tenant will be here in a month.’

  He takes a few steps and tentatively pushes open the door of the shower cubicle. The porcelain bowl has sunk into the ground, and the rotten planks beneath it have given way.

  ‘What happened here?’

  The landlord squats down. He mutters to himself, takes off his jacket and drops it on the floor, then puts on his glasses. Louise stands behind him.

  Mr Alizard turns around and says in a louder voice: ‘I asked you what happened!’

  Louise jumps. ‘I don’t know. It happened a few days ago. The shower’s old, I think.’


  ‘No, it’s not! I built this shower cubicle myself. You should think yourself lucky. Before, people used to wash in the bathroom on the landing. It was me, on my own, who put the shower in this studio.’

  ‘It collapsed.’

  ‘You didn’t look after it, obviously. Surely you don’t think I’m going to pay for this to be repaired when you’re the one who let it rot?’

  Louise stares at him and Mr Alizard cannot guess what that closed, silent look means.

  ‘Why didn’t you call me? How long have you been living like this?’ Mr Alizard squats down again, his forehead covered in sweat.

  Louise does not tell him that this studio is merely a lair, a parenthesis where she comes to hide her exhaustion. That she lives somewhere else. Every day she takes a shower in Myriam and Paul’s apartment. She undresses in their bedroom and delicately places her clothes on the couple’s bed. Then, naked, she crosses the living room to reach the bathroom. Adam sits on the floor and she walks past him. She looks at the babbling child and she knows he will not betray her secret. He will not say anything about Louise’s body, its marble whiteness, her mother-of-pearl breasts, which have seen so little sunlight.

  She leaves the bathroom door open so she can hear him. She turns on the water and for a long time – as long as possible – she remains motionless under the burning jet. She doesn’t get dressed again straight away. She sinks her fingers into the pots of cream that Myriam hoards and she massages her calves, her thighs, her arms. She walks barefoot through the apartment, her body wrapped in a white towel. Her own towel, which she hides every day under a pile in a cupboard.

  *

  ‘You noticed the problem and you didn’t try to fix it? You’d rather live like a gypsy?’

  Crouching in front of the shower, Alizard hams it up. This studio in the suburbs, he only kept it out of sentimentality. He exhales loudly and puts his hands to his forehead. He touches the black foam with his fingertips and shakes his head, as if only he could possibly understand the gravity of the situation. Out loud, he calculates the cost of the repair work. ‘That’s going to cost about eight hundred euros. At least.’ He dazzles her with the science of DIY, using technical words, claiming that it will take him more than two weeks to repair this disaster. He tries to impress the little blonde woman, who still says nothing.

  She can pay for it out of her deposit, he thinks. When she moved in, he insisted that she pay him two months’ rent in advance, as a form of security. It’s sad, but the truth is you can’t trust people. As far as the landlord can remember, he has never had to pay back that sum to any of his tenants. Nobody is careful enough: there is always something to be found, a defect to be highlighted, a stain somewhere, a scratch.

  Alizard has a head for business. For thirty years he drove a lorry between France and Poland. He slept in his cab, barely ate, lied about his rest time, resisted every temptation. He consoled himself for all of this by calculating the money he’d saved. He felt pleased with himself, proud of his ability to make such sacrifices in preparation for his future fortune.

  Year after year he bought studio flats in the Paris suburbs and renovated them. He rents them out, at an exorbitant price, to people who have no alternative. At the end of each month he goes round to all of his properties to pick up his rent. He pokes his head through doorways; sometimes he goes inside, to ‘have a look round’, to ‘make sure everything’s in order’. He asks indiscreet questions, to which the tenants reply grudgingly, desperate for him to leave, to get out of their kitchen, to take his nose out of their cupboard. But he stays there and in the end they offer him something to drink, which he accepts and slowly sips. He tells them about his backache (‘Thirty years driving a lorry, it messes you up’). He makes conversation.

  He likes to rent to women, because they’re more conscientious and less likely to cause trouble. He particularly favours students, single mothers, divorcees – but not old women, who can move in and stop paying and still have the law on their side. And then Louise arrived, with her sad smile, her blonde hair, her lost-waif expression. She was recommended by one of Alizard’s former tenants, a nurse at the Henri-Mondor hospital who had always paid her rent on time.

  Bloody sentimentality. This Louise had nobody. No children and a dead husband. She stood there in front of him, a wad of euros in her hand, and he thought she was pretty, elegant in her blouse with its Peter Pan collar. She looked at him, docile and grateful. She whispered: ‘I was very ill’, and in that moment he was eager to ask her questions, to ask her what she’d done after her husband’s death, where she had come from and what pain she had suffered. But she didn’t give him time. She said: ‘I’ve just found a job, in Paris, with a very good family.’ And the conversation ended there.

  *

  Now Bertrand Alizard wants to get rid of this mute, negligent tenant. He’s no longer fooled. He won’t put up with any more of her excuses, her shifty behaviour, her late payments. He doesn’t know why, but the sight of Louise makes him shiver. Something in her disgusts him: that enigmatic smile, that excessive make-up; that way she has of looking down on him, her mouth tight-lipped. Not once has she ever responded to one of his smiles. Not once has she made the effort to notice that he’s wearing a new jacket and that he’s brushed his sad few strands of red hair to the side.

  Alizard heads over to the sink. He washes his hands and says: ‘I’ll come back in a week with the parts and a plumber to do the work. You should finish packing.’

  Louise takes the children for walks. They spend long afternoons in the park, where the trees have been pruned, where the lawn – green once again – attracts the local students. Around the swings, the children are happy to see one another again, even if they don’t know anyone’s names. For them, nothing else matters but this latest fancy-dress costume, this new toy, this miniature pram in which a little girl has nestled her baby.

  Louise has only one friend in the neighbourhood. Apart from Wafa, she speaks with nobody. She offers nothing more than polite smiles, discreet waves. When she first arrived, the other nannies in the park kept their distance. Louise was like a chaperone, a quartermaster, an English governess. The others disliked her haughty airs, her ludicrous grande dame pose. There was something sanctimonious about the way she didn’t have the decency to look away when another nanny, phone glued to her ear, forgot to hold a child’s hand as they crossed the road. Sometimes she would even make a point of telling off unsupervised children who stole toys from others or fell off a guardrail.

  As the months passed, the nannies – sitting on those benches for hours on end – gradually got to know one another, almost despite themselves, as if they were co-workers sharing an open-air office. Every day after school they would see one another, in the supermarket, at the doctor’s or by the merry-go-round in the little square. Louise remembers some of their names and countries of origin. She knows the apartment buildings where they work, their bosses’ occupations. Sitting under the barely flowering rose bush, she listens to the interminable conversations that these women have on their phones as they nibble chocolate biscuits.

  Around the slide and the sandpit she hears snatches of Baoulé, Dyula, Arabic and Hindi, sweet nothings whispered in Filipino or Russian. Languages from all over the world contaminate the babbling of the children, who learn odd words and repeat them to their enchanted parents. ‘He speaks Arabic, I swear! Listen to him.’ Then, with the passing years, the children forget. And as the face and the voice of the now-vanished nanny fade from memory, nobody in the house recalls how to say ‘Mama’ in Lingala or the name of the exotic dishes that the nice nanny used to make. ‘That meat stew, what did she call it again?’

  Around the children – who all look alike, often wearing the same clothes bought in the same shops, with their names written on the labels by their mothers to avoid any confusion – buzzes this swarm of women. There are young women in black veils, who have to be even gentler, cleaner and more punctual than the others. There are the ones who
change wigs every week. The Filipinos who beg the children, in English, not to jump in puddles. There are the old ones, who have worked in the neighbourhood for years, who are on familiar terms with the school headmistress; the ones who see teenagers in the streets who they used to look after when they were little and persuade themselves that the teenager recognised them, that he would have said hello if he wasn’t so shy. There are the new ones, who work for a few months and then vanish without saying goodbye, leaving trails of rumours and suspicions behind them.

  About Louise, the nannies know very little. Even Wafa, who seems pretty close to her, has been discreet about her friend’s life. They have tried asking her questions. The white nanny intrigues them. How many times have the other parents used her as a benchmark, vaunting her qualities as a cook, her total availability, mentioning the complete trust Myriam puts in her? They wonder who she is, this fragile, perfect woman. Who did she work for before she came here? In which part of Paris? Is she married? Does she have children who she picks up in the evening, after work? Are her bosses good to her?

  Louise does not respond – or hardly – and the nannies understand this silence. They all have shameful secrets. They hide awful memories of bent knees, humiliations, lies. Memories of barely audible voices on the other end of the line, of conversations cut off, of people who die and are never seen again, of money needed day after day for a sick child who no longer recognises you and who has forgotten the sound of your voice. Some of them, Louise knows, have stolen – just little things, almost nothing at all – like a tax levied on the happiness of others. Some conceal their real names. It never even crosses their minds to blame Louise for her reserve. They are wary, that’s all.

  In the park, they don’t talk much about themselves, or only by allusion. They don’t want the tears to well in their eyes. Their bosses are fodder enough for animated conversations. The nannies laugh at their obsessions, their habits, their way of life. Wafa’s bosses are stingy; Alba’s are horribly suspicious. The mother of little Jules has a drinking problem. Most of them, the nannies complain, are manipulated by their children; they see very little of them and constantly give in to their demands. Rosalia, a very dark-skinned Filipino woman, chainsmokes cigarettes. ‘The boss surprised me in the street last time. I know she’s spying on me.’