Listening to her I think, This woman has lost everything—but once she had everything, at least everything that matters. Love, the desire that it last, the will to make it last, and the confidence that it would. Although I have many other riches, I envy her that treasure. I have never managed, up to now, to see myself living like that with a woman. When I’m with a woman, I never truly believe I’ll grow old by her side, that she’ll close my eyes or I hers. I tell myself that the next one will be the right one but at the same time I suspect that, given my track record, the next one won’t be any better and in the end I’ll wind up alone. Before the tidal wave, Hélène and I had been close to separating. Once again, love was falling apart; I hadn’t known how to take care of it. And while Ruth evokes, in a low, toneless voice, the honeymoon photos that she and Tom were so certain they would cherish in their old age, I disconnect, go off on a tangent, searching my memory for what would be our equivalent of those photographs.
A few months earlier, I’d made a film of my novel The Mustache. During preproduction and the film shoot, Hélène and I often spent the night on the main set, the apartment of the couple played by Vincent Lindon and Emmanuelle Devos. We took a secret pleasure in sleeping in the protagonists’ bed, in using their bathtub, hastily putting things back in their places before the film crew arrived in the morning. The script called for an erotic scene I had envisioned as really raw. The two actors were a little worried and kept asking me how I was planning to stage the scene, and although I always replied confidently that I had something in mind, I actually hadn’t the slightest idea. I’d scheduled an entire night for scene 39 and as that night drew closer, I began to worry, too. After I shared my anxiety with Hélène, she suggested one evening on the set that we rehearse the scene, to help me visualize it more clearly. So for two nights running, before a video camera on a tripod, we rehearsed, varying and enriching the scene, putting lots of heart into our work. When the time came to film the scene for the movie, the results weren’t bad, but in the end they wound up on the cutting-room floor, and it became a ritual joke to announce to the cast that we would include it on the extended edition of the DVD. In reality, a much better bonus would have been the two cassettes of homemade porn stashed in my desk drawer with the innocuous label Outtakes, rue René-Boulanger. And what I’m thinking this afternoon, in the bar of the Hotel Eva Lanka, where Delphine and I are listening to Ruth talk about Tom and their love, is that those two cassettes could—if we stay together, if we go through life together—become our keepsake. I imagine us watching our youthful bodies on the screen, firm, vigorous, supple, while Hélène reaches with an age-spotted hand for my old dick that has served her faithfully for thirty years, and suddenly that image moves me tremendously. I tell myself that this long life together must happen: if I need to succeed at one thing before I die, it’s this.
Hélène and Jérôme have the intensely bright eyes of those who have been baptized by fire. Jérôme tells Delphine only that Juliette has been moved from Matara to Colombo and that he’ll arrange for them all to go home as soon as possible. I’d like to hustle Hélène off to our bungalow so she can rest and fill me in, but she puts me off until later. She wants to stay with Ruth, whom she hugged when she came in as if she’d known her for ages. Hélène is exhausted, positively glowing with fatigue. We’re all gathered around Ruth, united in the idea that there may still be some way to help her, save her, to tear her from the void into which she stares, motionless. Again, it’s Hélène who steps up, asking if she has phoned her family in Scotland. Ruth shakes her head: What’s the use? Hélène insists that she call: the same torment she feels about Tom’s uncertain fate must be torturing her parents, whom she has no right to leave in the dark. Ruth doesn’t want to report that Tom is dead and tries to wriggle out of calling, but Hélène assures her that she need only say that she herself is alive. You don’t even have to talk, I’ll do it if you want, just give me their phone number. After a moment’s hesitation, without looking at Hélène, Ruth slowly recites the number. As Hélène taps it into her cell, I think about the time difference and imagine how the ringing will echo through a brick cottage in a Glasgow suburb in the middle of the night without startling anyone awake, because Ruth’s parents probably haven’t slept for three days. Hélène hands the phone to Ruth. They must have picked up, far away; Ruth says, It’s me … I’m okay … Then nothing. They’re talking, she’s listening. We watch her. She begins to cry. Tears stream down her cheeks, tears that become wrenching sobs, twisting her shoulders, and her upper body, petrified until now, begins to shake as she laughs and cries and tells us, Tom’s alive! We feel as if we’ve just witnessed a resurrection. She says a few more words to whoever’s on the line, then hands the phone to Hélène. She shakes her head gently, repeating softly for us, for herself, for the earth and sky, He’s alive … Then she turns to Delphine, who’s sitting next to her, weeping. Ruth looks at her, lays her head on her shoulder, and Delphine takes her in her arms.
4
It took us a long time to get to Matara, Hélène tells me that night. It’s not far, but the road was often washed out, the van kept stopping for hitchhikers, and it had to wait at every bridge because bodies were being fished out of all the rivers. At one point the van drove past the club where we’d planned to go out diving the day of the wave; there was nothing left of the building or the vacation resort it served, and when Hélène asked a policeman what had happened to the hundreds of guests there, he’d sighed and told her, All dead. The hospital in Matara was much bigger than the one in Tangalla; they were dealing with many more corpses, and the smell of death was even stronger there. Hélène and Jérôme were taken to the cold room: twenty drawers containing whites—the VIP section, cracked Jérôme grimly. The drawers were opened for them, one by one. Hélène didn’t know what she feared more, finding Juliette in a drawer or not finding her. She wasn’t there. They searched the hospital from top to bottom. Jérôme kept waving the Tangalla “receipt” with the scribbled description of Juliette at people, who gestured sadly and helplessly at the swollen gray bodies lying everywhere on the floors: There they are, take your pick … After an hour of looking everywhere, they felt completely at a loss. Someone directed them to an office where a man sat at a computer running a slide show. The monitor flashed photos of the dead who’d been brought to the hospital and sent on elsewhere. A half dozen Sri Lankans crowding around the screen made room for Hélène and Jérôme, whom they probably took for a bereaved couple, a handsome couple: a tall man with curly hair in a white shirt, unshaven; a stunning woman in white pants and a T-shirt—both of them worn out by grief and worry. Everyone there was grief-stricken, but Hélène and Jérôme inspired particular sympathy, and the others seemed eager to help them. Jérôme described his daughter to the hospital employee, who listened intently but didn’t understand too well and continued streaming the photos. Men and women, young and old, Sri Lankans and Westerners, photographed full face, their features battered, swollen, eyes open or closed. Dozens, each image stopping for a few seconds before the next one automatically replaced it. Finally, Juliette appeared. Hélène was at Jérôme’s side. She watched him see the photo of his dead little girl. She watched him stare at it. When Juliette’s photo vanished and another took its place, Jérôme panicked, grabbed the computer, and shouted for someone to make the slide show go backward. The employee clicked the mouse, then checked the information listed with the photo: Juliette was no longer there, she’d been sent to Colombo the previous evening. Her photo vanished again, and again Jérôme went wild, pleading to go back once more—he couldn’t turn away from the screen, couldn’t accept Juliette’s disappearance. As the employee clicked repeatedly to reverse the slide show, Jérôme gazed greedily at his daughter’s face, at her blond hair, the straps of her red sundress on her round, tanned shoulders. Each time the next photo appeared, he begged, Again! Again, again!—and writing this, I think of Jeanne, our own little girl, who has recently learned to say Encore! non-stop to pro
long a game of “This is the way the ladies ride.” Was it Hélène who did what needed to be done? Taking his hand to tear him away from that abyss, saying, Come on, let’s go, we have to go … How did they get back here? There were gaps in her story, and she spoke with some reticence. True, she was exhausted, at the end of her tether, but I also understood that if she didn’t tell me everything, it was so as not to betray the awful and wrenching intimacy she had just shared with Jérôme, an intimacy that wounded me.
Another day passed before we could leave for Colombo. An empty day: there was nothing left to do but wait, and we waited. We kept to ourselves, so I hardly remember who else was around. On the periphery, almost invisible because they ate somewhere apart from everyone else, were the Swiss German Ayurvedics and Leni Riefenstahl, who still swam her laps every morning. We saw an Israeli couple fussing over their daughter; she was about Juliette’s age, and they were obviously only too aware that she could have met the same fate as Juliette. There was also an unpleasant French family carrying on about their lost credit cards and what the wrong people might do if they got their hands on them. As for their cash, they’d already given up on that, they announced, admiring their ability to roll with the punches. They probably resented Delphine and Jérôme, whose tragedy put a damper on their recital of woe; they avoided them, in any case, and only in their absence would they swoop down on Hélène or me to borrow a cell phone and yell at their insurance company to send a helicopter for them immediately.
Jérôme persuaded the hotel management to arrange transportation the next day to Colombo. The minibus could accommodate a dozen passengers, tightly packed, and part of the evening was spent trying to decide who’d get the seats. There would be another departure in a day or two, perhaps, but it wasn’t definite, and since most of the available vehicles had been requisitioned for rescue work and fuel was scarce, we seized the opportunity. Jérôme, Delphine, and Philippe had priority, of course, and we had been so close to them from the very first day that we were naturally on the list as well. Jean-Baptiste and Rodrigue had been going crazy doing the bungalow–restaurant–swimming pool circuit, so they were relieved to be going. Ruth had learned from her family that Tom was hospitalized in a town about fifty kilometers inland, in the mountains. No one could figure out how he had wound up there, but since great chunks of the coastal road were cut off and we’d have to reach Colombo by going up-island, it was agreed that we’d make a detour to take her to him. That left four seats the management felt obliged to offer to the disagreeable French family, but either the prospect of their grieving compatriots’ company distressed them or they were convinced a helicopter was on the way from their insurance company, because luckily they declined.
The night before we set off, Ruth joined our group for dinner, which I remember, as does Jean-Baptiste, as the strangest time of that entire week. If I try to describe it, I’m forced to evoke a kind of euphoria—tragic and frenetic, yes, but euphoric all the same. We drank a lot. Beer, but also wine, the kind you find on the wine list of a restaurant in southern Sri Lanka, something akin to a five-year-old Beaujolais Nouveau bottled by a South African Tamil wine merchant and corked to boot. This frightening rotgut, several bottles of which we nevertheless dispatched (the entire supply, in fact), provoked withering scorn from Philippe and Jérôme, devotees of the grands crus bordelais now goaded by the pathetically indecipherable label on this swill into an outburst of complete nonsense stuffed with their favorite jokes and associations—plonk, rock ’n’ roll, the hazelnut aftertaste of a Château Cheval Blanc, Keith Richards stories—all compounded by the pretensions of the Swiss German Ayurvedics, with whom Jérôme, on a roll, amused himself by insulting zestfully every time one went by: How’s it going, feeling serene? Seriously Zen? Swinging along on the path to liberation? That’s great, guys, really great, hang in there! He was in a ferociously sarcastic mood, but it was with real affection that he had us all drink to Tom’s resurrection. Ruth was clearly uncomfortable. Imprisoned in her own pain a few hours earlier, drifting far from the world of the living, she had lost all consciousness of others; no one existed except for her dead Tom—and his wife, determined to die of grief. Since the miracle of the telephone call, however, she had again become what she must have been all her life, a sweet, compassionate young woman whose instinct was to restrain her joy and share the sorrow of these people who had kindly come to her aid. But she’d never encountered anything like Jérôme’s furious vitality. He ate nothing, but he drank, smoked, laughed, teased, and talked loudly, refusing to let silence fall. We had to bear up, and he bore up. He carried everything, lifted us all, swept us along in his wake. At the same time, out of the corner of his eye, he kept watch over Delphine, and I remember thinking, there it is, real love, a man who truly loves his wife. There’s nothing more beautiful. But Delphine remained silent, absent, horribly calm. It was as if Jérôme and Philippe—because Philippe was valiantly backing up his son-in-law—were doing a sacred dance around her, as if they were constantly calling to her: Don’t go, we’re begging you, stay with us! Sitting next to Delphine, Ruth took her hand several times, timidly, as if she hadn’t the right, and tenderly because she did have the right after all, or because no one had the right, or everyone did, or there was no “right” anymore, there were no more proprieties to observe, nothing left but this elegant blond mass of pain for which there was no remedy, and the need to take her hand.
It was late, toward the end of this dinner, when Rodrigue, dead tired, slipped onto Hélène’s lap. Like the little boy he still was, he nestled his head against her shoulder, and she stroked his hair for a long time. She petted him, reassured him: I’m here. Then she took him off to bed. As they left through the garden, Delphine watched them go. What was she thinking about? Her little girl, whom she’d petted and tucked into bed only four nights ago and would never pet and tuck into bed again? Was she thinking about how she’d never again sit on her child’s bed to read her a story? Never, ever, arrange all her stuffed animals around her again? For the rest of her life, stuffed animals, cute mobiles, and the sound of music boxes would tear at her heart. How is it possible that this woman can be hugging her living child while my little girl is so cold and will never speak or move again? How could she not hate them, Hélène and her child? How could she not pray, Dear God, perform a miracle; give me back mine and take hers. Make her be the one to hurt the way I do and make me be like her, full of that comfortable, cushioned sadness that simply helps others to better enjoy their own good fortune.
Delphine looked away from the silhouettes of Hélène and Rodrigue melting into the dark path to the bungalows. When our eyes met briefly, she smiled and murmured, He’s so little …
The distance was immense, the gulf between us impossible to bridge, but there was kindness in her halting voice, and tenderness, and it was this sweetness more than my morbid thoughts that gave me the shivers. With hindsight, I feel that something extraordinary happened that evening. We were with a man and a woman who had just experienced the worst thing that can ever happen to the human soul, while we had escaped unscathed. And yet, even if certain thoughts lurked in the back of their minds—and they certainly had such thoughts—and if they could have changed places, saving themselves by plunging us into misfortune, they would have, anyone would have, we all prefer our own children to those of others, it’s only human, and yet, I think on that evening, during that dinner, they did not resent us. They did not hate us, as I had feared they would. They rejoiced like us in the miracle that had just restored to Ruth the joy that had been forever taken from them. Delphine was moved by the sight of Rodrigue cradled in his mother’s arms. We experienced these moments together. For a few days we were as intimately connected and as radically separated as it is possible to be. I know that we loved them and I believe that they loved us.
Other Lives But Mine Page 4
