The Postman's Fiancée

by Denis Theriault; Translated by John Cullen

  As she was being fascinated by the Guadeloupian’s eyes, sparkling like crystal-clear water, Tania finally had to admit that her much-envied rival bore no resemblance whatsoever to an enemy. And what a striking duo they made, the pale Smurfette and the dark, slender island woman. They were, somehow, the two faces of Bilodo’s love, brought together against all odds in exceptional circumstances. Meanwhile, Ségolène was still examining the photograph, and she pointed out that they looked happy. Tania contemplated her screen image, arm-in-arm with Bilodo, smiling: yes, they had been happy. For such a brief moment. And she hid her face, for tears threatened to spill from her eyes.

  ‘You love him, don’t you?’ asked Ségolène, moved by the sight.

  ‘Yes, but the one he loves is you.’

  ‘That’s not possible. He doesn’t know me.’

  ‘He knows you through your poems.’

  ‘I didn’t even know Bilodo existed,’ the Guadeloupian protested. ‘I thought I was writing to Gaston.’

  ‘You were in love with Gaston Grandpré?’

  ‘I thought I was. But I was mistaken,’ Ségolène confessed.

  ‘What do you mean? All those beautiful things you wrote to him, the feelings you claimed to have for him...’

  ‘They were just words. Just poetry.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Tania, protesting in her turn. ‘If you didn’t love Grandpré, why did you offer to come to Montreal? What would have been the point of such a long trip?’

  Ségolène took a sip of sangria, made a decision, and spoke in a confidential tone: ‘I met Gaston on an Internet site dedicated to Japanese poetry, where I’d published a few haiku,’ she recounted. ‘He contacted me. He said he liked my poems a lot and started to send me some of his, which I thought were very beautiful. That was how I got a Canadian correspondent and our exchange began. In the beginning, it was nothing but a pleasant literary diversion, like a hobby he and I both enjoyed. And for a long time it stayed that way, a simple exchange of poems between friends, right up until the day when a crisis broke out, last year—’

  ‘A crisis?’ said Tania.

  ‘I found out my husband had been cheating on me with one of my friends. He had put an end to their relationship before I learned about it, but I still couldn’t accept it; I was hurt, I was outraged. I couldn’t bear his presence any more. I kicked him out of the house, and there I remained, alone with my children, and really quite depressed, I have to say. That was when Gaston’s haiku changed. It was as though he had guessed I was unhappy and wanted to console me. As though he was trying to get closer to me. In any case, the tone of his poems was different.’

  ‘I’m sure that happened when Bilodo took Grandpré’s place and started writing to you. It never occurred to you that a different person was composing the haiku?’

  ‘Never. I was a little surprised, but I got caught up in the game, and it wasn’t long before our renku became more intimate. Those poems comforted me, they inspired me. They were so passionate...I let myself get carried away. I wanted to believe in that new love, that second chance. I saw it as an opportunity to start my life over in Canada. That was why I planned to travel to Montreal. I was eager to see for myself if it would really be possible between us, and I wanted to let Gaston know that I was the mother of two young children. I wrote to him to announce my intention, but...’

  ‘He didn’t reply,’ said Tania, completing her sentence.

  ‘I didn’t know it was Bilodo I was dealing with, and of course I knew nothing about his accident. I thought I was writing to Gaston. His silence troubled me – I interpreted it as a rejection. I figured he didn’t want to make a commitment to me. I told myself I’d gone too far and frightened him. I truly regretted sending him that tanka! But I didn’t want to impose on him. I respected his desire to break off our connection; I resigned myself to losing him.’

  ‘That couldn’t have been easy,’ Tania said sympathetically, well remembering her own distress of the previous spring.

  ‘There were some hard moments,’ Ségolène acknowledged. ‘But it all turned out positive in the end. I was forced to put my feet back on the ground and see that I was neglecting the essential thing: my family. My children needed me. Their father was begging me to take him back. I found the strength to forgive him, and I let him come back to the house, just before Christmas. Aurélien’s a good father. It will never again be the way it was between us, but we’ve made up. My children suffered from our separation, and I don’t want that to happen again. We’ve gone back to the pleasure of living together, all four of us.’

  ‘I’m happy for you,’ Tania said sincerely.

  ‘Do you believe Bilodo could be dangerous?’ Ségolène asked, looking worried. ‘He wouldn’t try to destroy my family, would he?’

  Tania assured her that Bilodo was harmless. But to tell the truth, who could guess what was currently stewing in that overheated head? Tania turned on her smartphone and checked Bilodo’s credit-card account. She saw that he had neither got back on a plane nor reserved a hotel. Unless Bilodo had swum away from Guadeloupe, he must still be slinking about somewhere, no doubt disoriented. She tried in vain to call him. Ségolène scared up a phone directory and they systematically went through the list of hotels in Pointe-à-Pitre, dialling each one in turn on Tania’s phone. But the fugitive’s name didn’t appear on any register. ‘What shall we do?’ Tania wondered. Inform the police that there was a Montrealer in distress wandering around their city and possibly considering some nefarious plan? Call the hospitals? Inquire at the morgue?

  ‘I have to find him,’ she decided.

  Ségolène offered to go with her.

  They started by exploring the neighbourhood around the port. This was a hot spot on that evening, the final opportunity for festivities before the beginning of Lent. The streets were packed with night prowlers, to whom Ségolène spoke in Antillean Creole while Tania showed them the Place d’Armes selfie on her smartphone screen, pointing at Bilodo. Having covered the harbour basin from one end to the other, the two women headed for Place de la Victoire, where the Carnival activities were now concentrating and the commotion reaching its climax. Frenzied dancers escorted a great effigy of the villainous Vaval to the stake. In the crush of people around the procession, Tania thought she caught a glimpse of Bilodo and charged, but it was only a French tourist who looked a little like him. Continuing their progress through the jubilant crowd like persistent ants, the two women turned down several invitations to zouker – to dance the zouk – and showed the photograph to anyone willing to look. But no one recognized Bilodo.

  Shortly before midnight, with the horrible Vaval already ablaze, Tania and Ségolène, somewhat discouraged, ended up on the steps of the statue of Félix Éboué. Ségolène’s telephone rang. It was Aurélien, her husband, worried about her being out on a night dedicated to wild public behaviour.

  ‘I’m going to have to go home,’ she said to Tania. ‘I have my class tomorrow morning.’

  Tania, who had been awake for thirty-six hours, felt suddenly exhausted. The probability of finding Bilodo this way – wandering about at random – appeared infinitesimal, and she decided to suspend her search for the time being. Ségolène expressed regret at not having been able to help Tania any further and accompanied her back to her hotel. Tania apologized for having dragged Ségolène into that senseless adventure.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Ségolène replied. ‘You just worry about Bilodo, and keep me up to date on what happens, won’t you?’

  The Guadeloupian woman kissed Tania like a sister and then got into a taxi. Touched, Tania watched the taxi drive away. She went into the hotel and entered her room.

  ‘Just one word, nothing more, I’m begging you,’ Tania texted Bilodo, without real conviction and moreover without result. She got into bed. Unable to shut her eyes, she listened to the noises of Carnival that slipped into the room through the partly open window.

  The hands of the clock guillotined the min
utes implacably, and Tania turned round in her sheets, haunted by the fear that Bilodo might have committed some self-destructive act. An image obsessed her, the noose swaying from the ceiling of Grandpré’s apartment...

  ‘Grandpré?’ she suddenly thought.

  Tania got out of bed. She went down to the reception desk, borrowed a telephone book and once again picked though the list of hotels in Pointe-à-Pitre, calling each one and asking, this time, to speak to a guest named Gaston Grandpré.

  Fortune smiled on her with the seventeenth call.

  20

  It was still night when Tania presented herself at the Midas Hotel, an establishment unworthy of the starry firmament. A comatose employee gave her the number of the room occupied by Gaston Grandpré.

  Wondering what could have impelled Bilodo once again to borrow the identity of the man with the red carnation, Tania went up to his room and listened at the door. She heard nothing. She dared to give the door a few light raps. Still nothing. The door wasn’t locked. Warily venturing into the semidarkness of a shabby room that stank of alcohol and vomit, Tania inadvertently kicked an empty bottle and sent it rolling across the floor. She discovered Bilodo on the bed. He was lying in his own ejecta, alive but unconscious. Tania opened the balcony door to ventilate the decadent scene a little and then bent over Bilodo, who really didn’t look very good. He refused to wake up. Seeing that he was feverish, Tania went to get him some water.

  Later, having cooled Bilodo down somewhat, Tania texted Ségolène to tell her that she had found the runaway. Ségolène replied a little while later, asking Tania to keep her informed. But there was nothing very agreeable to report; Bilodo opened his eyes from time to time, but he never truly regained consciousness – he would stammer some incoherent words, vomit and then pass out again.

  All through the morning, and then all day long, Tania looked after Bilodo, bathing his temples with cool water, wiping his burning forehead, stoically bearing the stifling heat that prevailed in the non-air-conditioned hotel. In the evening, Bilodo’s fever suddenly got worse. He was delirious, babbling disjointedly about orchids and hummingbirds. Perhaps taking Tania for Ségolène, Bilodo seized her wrist and mumbled something that sounded like a haiku. Then some violent cramps bent him double. He went rigid, convulsed like one of the strung-out heroin addicts Tania had seen in a television documentary. Bilodo’s condition grew so alarming that she considered calling the emergency services, but after a few moments he began to relax, and little by little he grew calm. His fever fell and he dozed off and was soon resting peacefully. Reassured, Tania allowed herself a quick shower. Then she lay down next to Bilodo, resolved to watch over him as long as her strength held out.

  Grandpré was sitting at his favourite table in the Madelinot, wearing his red kimono. With studied movements, he poured himself some tea and said:

  Swirling like water

  against rugged rocks,

  time goes around and around

  Why was he reciting that haiku, which Bilodo knew only too well? Grandpré savoured his tea, displaying a wise smile, and...Bilodo opened his eyes. Hanging from the ceiling, a lazy fan laboured to stir the air. Bilodo found himself lying on a damp bed, in a suffocating room. He didn’t know how he’d ended up in such a place. By dint of a mental effort, he remembered that he had run, that he had wept, that he had run for a long time while weeping. Then he’d walked about at random, stumbling amid the smoking wreckage of his foolish romantic ambitions.

  Fare thee well my lucky star

  my too lovely love

  fare thee well my life

  Bilodo had meandered through the festive streets of Pointe-à-Pitre, feeling only desolation. As for the tropical setting, which had so charmed him when he dreamily pictured Ségolène in it, he had found it to be, in reality, horrifying. Losing his way in the twists and turns of the Carnival, he had taken a drink from every bottle that was handed to him, he’d sung, shouted and drunk some more, to the point of heavy intoxication. He remembered attending Vaval’s blazing combustion. He had even danced around the stake, wiggling to the rhythm of the drums and the cries of ‘Vaval kité nou!’ chanted by the ecstatic crowd. Bilodo, aware that the incineration symbolized the purification of the soul, had envied the ignoble Vaval, who in spite of his uncountable sins was nonetheless granted a spontaneous redemption. Bilodo remembered finding this unfair, and wishing that the flames of expiation would consume him rather than Vaval, he had tried to throw himself into the conflagration, but someone – a reveller less wasted than the others? A guardian angel? – had stopped him. After that, everything became foggy: the images were blurred, distorted. Fleeing like Dr Caligari into an expressionistic night, Bilodo had lost his balance and toppled over into a world where nothing was solid...

  Someone had asked him for his name and his passport. The principal at the Fernande-Bonchamps school? No, this was much later, at the hotel reception desk. His passport, no longer in his pocket, had been lost or stolen. As for his name...he was obliged to acknowledge that he couldn’t remember it. ‘Who am I?’ he’d guffawed, finding his inability to respond to such an elementary question vastly amusing. Then, in a mirror fastened to the wall in the reception area, he had spotted the reflection of a face he recognized at once – nothing more normal, because it was his own – the familiar, bearded face of a ghost who was none other than himself. ‘My name is Gaston Grandpré,’ he’d declared, placing on the counter a fistful of dollars.

  A sensation of movement yanked Bilodo out of that spectral memory. The bed creaked, the mattress shifted slightly, and he perceived that he wasn’t alone. A woman was asleep at his side, her back turned to him. A woman who wasn’t Ségolène, because her hair was blonde, because her skin was as white as mother-of-pearl. It was Tania, dressed only in knickers and a camisole. How had she come to be beside him? And what were the two of them doing in that bed?

  Stunned, Bilodo got up slowly so as not to wake Tania, stepped into the little bathroom, and locked himself in. Suddenly feeling intensely thirsty, he drank from the tap and then rinsed out his mouth for a long time, trying to get rid of a foul aftertaste. He hardly dared to look at himself in the mirror, afraid of seeing Grandpré’s face, but the dead man did not appear, probably because he was busy in some other corner of the Great Beyond. Bilodo went back into the bedroom. Tania was still sleeping. Shouldn’t he seize his chance and get out of there? Looking at the young woman, he was surprised to find he didn’t hate her. In fact, he wasn’t even cross with her. The anger Tania’s duplicity had aroused in him had inexplicably vanished. Bilodo was amazed at how magnanimous he felt. Feeling the need for some fresh air, he walked out onto the little balcony, which overlooked the port.

  A pleasant breeze was blowing in off the sea. It was early. Bilodo’s thoughts drifted towards Ségolène, marked with a serenity that ultimately disconcerted him. How could he be thinking of her with such detachment, as though their love story were ancient history? The crazy day he’d spent pursuing Ségolène from one end of Guadeloupe to the other, all the way to the final shock of their meeting – all that seemed like part of a previous life. What had become of the passion that had carried him to her over land and sea? What was it that had gone on inside him?

  Everything that had happened to Bilodo since the fragrance of the lemons revived his memory now seemed to have little more consistency than a dream. And that, he realized in a sudden flash of lucidity, was exactly the point: Ségolène’s love had been only a dream, a dream from which he had just – finally – awakened.

  Ségolène had never loved him. Nor he her, for that matter, not really. He had practised self-delusion, desiring at all costs to believe he was in love, but in reality loving only love itself. The whole thing had been no more than a mirage, a sublime fantasy, an irresistible obsession he’d felt compelled to go all the way to the end of, crossing over the border into madness, rushing ahead faster and faster until he lost control and veered off the rails. And now that he was entirely consumed,
poor little Vaval, and was being reborn, purified, from his ashes – now that he was seeing the world with new eyes – the person he found at his side was Tania.

  Bilodo stepped back into the room. Tania was still sleeping, and he thought she looked even more beautiful than she had on that recent night when he’d entered her bedroom and gazed at her for a long time while she slept. It was as if time were making one of those poetic loops so dear to Grandpré’s heart, bringing Bilodo back to that precise mental point, that moment of nocturnal adoration in Tania’s room, back when he still remembered nothing and was totally ignorant of her treachery. She had deceived him, certainly, but not more monstrously than he’d fooled himself, and basically for the same reason – for love – that was why she’d followed him, it was why she was there, in that crummy bed, despite everything that Bilodo had put her through.

  Ségolène’s love had been only a dream, but Tania’s was genuine; Bilodo could see that now, and this essential realization dynamited the last dike around his heart, releasing a torrent of emotions. As he gazed at the sleeping Tania, he admired her finely drawn lips, the harmonious curve of her hip, the delicate roundness of her small toes, and he marvelled at finding her so beautiful, so extraordinarily real.

  Tania twitched in her sleep and rolled over on her back. The movement pushed up her camisole, which tightened across her breasts and revealed her navel, surrounded by golden down. Spellbound at seeing her offered like that, Bilodo stiffened...

  Tania was having a very exciting dream. She dreamt that she and Bilodo were making love. The sensations were intense. Everything was vivid, everything was acute; incredibly realistic, this erotic dream of hers. So much so that Tania suddenly began to doubt whether it was a dream, and at the moment when her pleasure reached its culmination, she became aware that she wasn’t sleeping, that she was awake – and that it was indeed him!