by Anne H
She picks up her hat, her purse, and her gloves, puts the high-heeled shoes on again. She stands facing him, expecting no improbable mercy from the Lieutenant. Perhaps she has already long been aware, in the darkness of her veins, of separation, of the brevity of love, its slight passage upon the world, like the swift shadow of a cloud across the fields.
Heels together, his tall body folded in two, he bows over Clara, kisses her hand, ceremonious and preoccupied. He says sotto voce, as if afraid of waking someone who is sleeping in the room:
“Farewell, my love.”
✦✦✦
Aurélien is outside studying his garden that has been devastated by the storms. He is utterly unable to comprehend what is happening to him. He resembles a drunken man after a brawl, uncertain of what has gone on but struggling now to remain erect and ringing from head to foot from the blows he has received.
Perhaps he should not have tempted the devil and called out to his daughter after waiting for her such a long time, at the supper hour.
“You’re home late!”
It was then that he saw appear suddenly on the mute face of his daughter, by way of response, something at once blazing and consumed that has been intolerable to her.
She nevertheless prepares everything as usual, despite her tardiness, cooking the potatoes and heating up the salt pork, before taking her place at the table. But suddenly, there across from Aurélien, is a strange woman who is his opposite, in place of the little girl he is accustomed to having in the house.
Late into the falling evening, Aurélien’s gaze wanders here and there over everything that is broken, smashed, crushed, rotted all around him, from the fields to the garden, from the garden to the fields, without managing to settle down anywhere, as if he were searching vainly for the soul of the disaster that has gone astray in the countryside. But now Aurélien’s gaze is suddenly fixed on a row of collapsed suns along the length of the henhouse. Amid the withered stems, flowers, and leaves, at the very heart of each great sunflower, the little burned face of his daughter endlessly appears and shows itself, for the damnation of Aurélien.
✦✦✦
This man is preparing to go away. He looks without seeing at the river fringed with foam that carries along broken branches, bits of wood, all kinds of nameless debris from its flooded banks.
The Lieutenant has packed his bags. It is the slack hour of the night. Long before dawn arrives and long after the day has ended. The dreary moment when nothing more will arrive. Save tedium. The middle of the darkness. The moment in sleep nearest to death. He must follow his own deepest law and flee before it is too late. So many hasty departures already in his life. So many little girls adored and then abandoned, amid the blood of the first embrace, while the fear of standing trial grows, before judges in wigs of white string.
The Lieutenant sets out, his pack on his back, carrying his suitcase. His heavy military shoes make a sucking sound on the waterlogged earth. Like a thief, he enters the opacity of night. At daybreak he will be thirty years old. His solitude on this deserted road fills him once more to the brim. Father, mother, masters, and governesses seem to be sleeping in the deepest part of his memory, carefully hiding their irritated faces in dark rooms cluttered with Victorian furniture. John Christopher Simmons might think he has had no childhood, no original curse, while a sentence from Rilke obsesses him and comes to him incessantly, assuring him that while he was still a child they struck his face and called him cowardly.
He would be content to mark his birthday by hitchhiking. But no car appears on the road. Too early or too late. He cannot see two steps ahead of him. Just enough ground to set his feet down, cautiously, between puddles. It is as foggy here as at the bottom of the sea. Who knows though what city, what unknown village might loom up at any moment at a turn in this endless road? The tall wet grass at the edge of the ditches, when his steps leave the path, grazes him as he passes, and the mingled perfumes stir all around him. The rain has started falling again, in slow, fine drops.
Very far away, in a landscape the Lieutenant has left behind on the bank of a wild river, in the heart of a frame house shut for the night, an adolescent is turning over as she slumbers. She finally fell asleep at dawn, exhausted as a child who has run all day into the wind and for whom tears are secretly lying in wait. Clara sleeps while the light spattering of rain on leaves and roof penetrates her night and gently lulls her, even slips into the strangest of her dreams.
The English Lieutenant strides away into the streaming countryside. Ahead of him, on the horizon, a vague glimmer beneath a mass of grey clouds. It resembles the day.
AM I DISTURBING YOU?
I
Delphine died in my bed last night, shortly before dawn. And I, Édouard Morel — a man without grace, and rather unsociable, too — have been forced to keep watch over her for a good while now, as if she’d been a woman dear to my heart. Now that the doctor has been advised, I just have to wait for them to carry her away.
She is here, stretched out on my unmade bed, the sheet pulled up to her chin, as I arranged it after I closed her eyes. I’d never noticed before how blue her eyes could be.
And now she is playing dead, conscientiously, unreservedly, as if she were at home, alone in the world, and with a kind of supreme wilfulness absorbing her entirely. I’m looking at her as I’ve never looked at her before. I exhaust myself looking at her. You’d think I was waiting for a sign from her, an explanation, the confession of a secret, whereas I know perfectly well that, right here before my eyes, she embarked upon an endless task, a ferocious and sacred one, and that no one will be able to distract her from it until she has turned to dust.
I swear, I’d stake my life on it, that this girl is nothing to me and she had no more reason to end her days here in my bed than anywhere else. She did it deliberately. I’m sure she did it deliberately. Considering how long she’s been following me everywhere, clinging to my skin, gnawing at my bones.
“Am I disturbing you?”
The silence of death isn’t altogether impenetrable then, for Delphine’s voice persists in the muggy atmosphere of the closed room, tirelessly repeating her eternal, pointless question.
I’ve called the doctor, who is taking his time, and I’ve pulled the sheet over Delphine’s face.
I’ve thrown open the shutters and I’m leaning out the window as far as I can. I seem to be looking for some kind of help in the grey dawn rising over the one tree in my building’s tiny paved courtyard.
“Am I disturbing you?”
Scarcely a few hours ago. Her doleful, stubborn voice close to my ear. No doubt she’d kept a copy of my key, and she came in without making a sound. Her flat little Chinese shoes brushing the rough sisal of my rug. Suddenly she is there in the room where I’m asleep. She bends over me in the darkness as if she wants to force her way into my sleep, to interfere with my most secret dreams. Her long hair tickling my cheek, her breath racing on my neck.
She climbed the four flights of stairs without breaking the silence of the sleeping house. No witness to her light passage. Behind their closed doors all the tenants are asleep, ignoring one another in the dark as they do in the daylight. Right away she starts to undress, her movements strangely slow, as if each article of clothing were wrenching away her soul.
Though I tell myself there’s nothing all that unusual about some unimportant woman undressing at my place uninvited, just to annoy me, my attention is extreme, almost overcharged.
The faded jeans, the worn T-shirt, the frayed briefs fell around her untidily, onto the rug. When she was fully naked, standing in the middle of the room with everything that adorns, dresses, and covers tossed away from her, I knew that Delphine’s pure nakedness, her devastating poverty, were intolerable to me.
She steps over her scattered garments with their sweetish smell, curls up under my blankets, sig
hs contentedly, and says it’s as warm as if she were under the belly of a warm beast. She closes her eyes and seems to sleep right away. She talks as if in a dream:
“Sore feet. Sore legs. No money. Totally exhausted. Grandma’s inheritance all gone. Too much walking. Days of it. Nights. Afraid to stop. Afraid of being killed where I stand. Taken by force. I’m insulted on the sidewalks as I walk along without stopping. Evil men stare at me as I pass, touch me with their dirty hands. Sore back. Sick to my stomach. As if I were pregnant again. Nothing to be done now. Nothing to say. Nothing to explain. Nothing to laugh at. Nothing to cry over. Nothing to eat, either. Only myself, all alone. Myself, less than nothing. Myself, and I’ve been walking for days. For nights. Thirst. For a good ten minutes I follow close behind a man who is eating grapes and spitting their skins onto the sidewalk. I eat the skins of the grapes spat out by the man who’s walking down the street ahead of me. My stomach aches. Everything aches. The poor little thing who aches all over, as my grandmother used to say.”
Delphine’s usual chatter, inexhaustible. Herself, always herself, reflected in a mirror that is itself reflected in another mirror, and so on from mirror to mirror till her head spins, while Delphine’s voice dwindles away. Pointless to prick up my ears. The bits of phrases that I hear suffice and I can’t stand them.
An odd little laugh at the very back of her throat quavers like a sleigh-bell.
“I ripped off some shampoo at the supermarket.”
I approach the bed, wanting to make Delphine feel ashamed about the grapes on the sidewalk and the stolen shampoo.
She moves her head and her hair falls onto her cheeks and her nose, long black threads. She talks and gets winded, lifts locks of hair with every breath, every word she utters. Doesn’t even try to toss it off her face. Says she’s just washed it, in the fountain in Place Saint-Sulpice.
“My hair’s the only thing I love.”
She tries to laugh again. Shows her teeth. Props herself up on the pillows. Raises her arms above her head. Her small breasts are flattened, disappear altogether. Her ribs become visible. I can’t help thinking of the skeleton of a little ship in distress, washed up on my bed.
Delphine is stubborn; she resumes her monologue, seems to be trying to thumb her nose at some invisible person who’s hidden in the bedroom, who would force her to get it all out very quickly — everything she’s never said or even imagined saying to anyone.
I talk to her about her country, which she should never have left.
She replies:
“I have no country. My country is any city that has sidewalks where I can walk. Railway stations. Trains. Hotels. Airports. When I can follow someone everywhere. Shadow him. Wait till he turns around. To see me and be seen by me. In the hope that he’ll take me home and adopt me. The way my grandmother came to my parents’ house to get me the first time I nearly died. The last time, it was on account of Patrick Chemin and my child who is dead and gone now.”
She goes on talking, chewing away at her words, while I’m no longer sure I can hear anything she says. In any case, I refuse Delphine, body and soul, and I haven’t finished protesting her presence in my bed.
Now she is pronouncing my name slowly, distinctly, as if she were taking pains to decipher something strange that was written on the wall in front of her.
“Édouard, dear Édouard, let me sleep here. Only sleep. One more time. Only once.”
She says again, echoing her own voice:
“Sleep. Sleep.”
I lean over the untidy bed. I move her hair off her face, which is changing. Delphine’s last sigh runs over my fingers, between the long locks of her black hair.
✦✦✦
Doctor Jacquet moves slowly, like someone who has been snatched from sleep. There’s no end to his examination of Delphine’s body stretched out on my bed. He grumbles as if this examination annoys him more than anything else in the world. Seems not to believe what he sees. He turns to me.
“Are you a relative?”
“No, just a friend.”
My face, turned blue by my overnight beard, seems to hold his attention as much as Delphine’s overly white arms, where he’s straining to look for needle marks. Is he trying to catch someone out, someone dead or alive, over this incongruous death?
“Did she shoot up?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“Was she suicidal?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“In short, you don’t know very much about this person.”
“That’s right, not very much.”
I think, I do know a couple of things about her, but I’m not really sure what I mean by that and I remain silent.
Dr. Jacquet’s broad, clean-shaven face betrays deadly boredom. Sitting at my work table, he pushes away my papers, then writes his report. He mentions permission to postpone burial and says a post-mortem is essential.
“I warn you. If you’re interrogated, you’ll have to be more precise about this person.”
“Her name is Delphine and I’ve known her for a few months.”
I repeat “a few months.” I meditate on the word month, the word day, the word year, and on time in general. I try to find the secret relationship that may well exist between measurable time and the scandal of Delphine’s death.
All at once, abruptly, I remember that Delphine has just turned twenty-three. I’ve been thirty for two months now.
✦✦✦
Two men in white smocks came to get Delphine. They took her to the place where dead girls are opened and emptied, and their hearts are weighed in rubber-gloved hands.
Nothing else to report. Leaning on the windowsill, I wait for the day to arrive altogether before I turn around to face the untidy room at my back.
The deserted courtyard is gradually waking. Cheeping of birds. Clatter of shutters thrown open. Broad shafts of soft September light. Through bursts of ringing bells I hear the streaming of the fountain at the church of Saint-Sulpice.
The sun is high now. It penetrates everywhere in the room, sheds violent light on last night’s disorder, which is frozen in its tumult like the hands on a watch that has stopped.
Gather up Delphine’s things, scattered all over the room. Make a tidy package of them. Change my soiled sheets. Pull the plaid blanket tight, without a crease. Sweep. Dust. Erase all fingerprints but my own. Chase away the shadow of Delphine’s fingers on any object they have touched. Let in lots of air between kitchen and bedroom. Alone once more. Pick up the thread of some copy I started last night. Line up words underneath realistic colour photos. Push mass-produced furniture for a mail-order catalogue. I’m used to it, though my aversion is intact.
“Mini-price. Maxi-quality. Guaranteed value. Super-sturdy. Multi-purpose. Melamine-surfaced particle board.”
The term melamine-surfaced delights me, as if at one stroke I’ve achieved the most grotesque perfection of my soul.
Glued to my table. Move on from the convertible banquette to the stylized Louis XIV living room suite. Wait for the day to end. Act as if Delphine’s bird-claws had never settled on me.
II
Who was the first, Stéphane or me, to notice Delphine beside the fountain, in the glow of the pink chestnut trees that line the square? Afterwards, that would prove to be a lively topic of conversation between Stéphane and me.
There was a girl who hadn’t moved for quite a while, who was sitting on the rim of the fountain with the water streaming at her back. There was something surprising about her stillness. From her entire little person there emanated a kind of obstinacy at being there in the mist from the fountain, an unwillingness to exist anywhere else — elbows on her knees, folded in on herself, slightly shocked at finding herself in the world.
She sees two young men coming towards her, one stocky and dar
k, the other lanky and fair, and she acts as if she sees no one. Is it Stéphane? Is it me? One of us asks:
“Can we do anything for you?”
She doesn’t reply right away, as if it were difficult for the question to make its way into her stony stillness. Her eyes looking up at us, open too wide, as blank as a statue’s.
I repeat — this time I’m sure it’s me:
“Can we do anything for you?”
We hear her voice, reluctant and remote, murmuring as if from the bottom of a well:
“If you want.”
Stéphane and I take hold of her under the arms and pull her up. She doesn’t resist and says:
“Thanks. But you really didn’t have to.”
And she worries about her baggage.
Once she was on her feet, her dress pink, as if the colour of the chestnut trees were rubbing off on her, we saw that she was pregnant.
She smooths her rumpled dress and her big belly with hands like a child’s, slender and white. She speaks with excessive, nearly unbearable softness.
“The Fat Lady mustn’t know I’m in Paris.”
Just then the bells of Saint-Sulpice unfurl onto the square like an equinoctial tide, loud and joyous.
She smiles and tells us it’s the angelus.
✦✦✦
After she’s settled on a café terrace in the square, she goes on looking at the fountain she’s just left.
I point out that her coffee’s getting cold, that she should drink it.
She takes a few sips, makes a face, pushes the cup away, says it’s too strong and makes her feel sick to her stomach.
Stéphane offers her some tea, and she drinks it with a lot of milk.
She acts as if she’s not with us and gazes attentively at the women who walk by. She stares at them. Knits her brow. Disparages them to her heart’s content. None of them finds favour in her eyes. There’s not one woman parading in the square who isn’t caught in the act of resembling the Fat Lady.
