by Anne H
“Too fat. Really thick. Too big. Wouldn’t get through the door. Arms like boas. Legs like tree trunks. Above all, too old. Oh my, old, old, old enough to die. She ought to make room for the young.”
She leans on the table, puts her head on her arms and cries. I wish I weren’t there, across from Delphine, when she’s crying. Stéphane offers her some cake.
She eats and she cries.
With her mouth full, she tells us that the Fat Lady must be somewhere in the city and that she absolutely has to be found, without her knowing it, and stopped from doing any harm. As for Patrick, he won’t be here till tomorrow.
I ask who Patrick is.
She stands up and points to her big belly.
“Patrick, Patrick Chemin, sales rep, fishing tackle, he did this to me.”
She slowly strokes her belly.
She sits again and gulps down the rest of her tea.
Then Stéphane steps in:
“And the Fat Lady, who’s she?”
“Patrick’s wife.”
Exhausted by these confidences, reproaching herself for divulging them, she is absorbed for a moment in her desolation; then in a flash she fixes both of us, from across the table, with a look that seems not to belong to her, a look as sharp and cutting as a blade.
“What’s most disgusting in this whole business is Patrick.”
She falls silent at once, having reached the limit of what you can say and show in a glance without dying of shame.
She turns towards the fountain again, as if some reassurance could come to her from the streaming water. All around us, the murmur of the city has grown so loud that we can no longer hear the murmuring water.
And now a little voice, high-pitched, soft, sounding almost worldly, emerges from the scraping of chairs being pulled or pushed, the clink of glasses, the orders shouted or whispered, from the mingled conversations, the clatter of cars and buses.
She says:
“I’m Delphine.”
She points to each of us in turn. Touches Stéphane and me on the chest, the shoulder.
“And you? And you?”
Our first names, which we offer immediately, seem to surprise her, to put her into a strangely joyous state more worrisome than her tears.
She repeats after us:
“Édouard. Stéphane. That’s great. That’s funny. Fantastic.”
During her brief time among us, the list of names that sounded so joyously in Delphine’s ear would hardly be longer than that, going from Patrick to the Fat Lady — if that Lady had a first name.
✦✦✦
Aside from the fireplace and the logs piled next to it, the table littered with papers, the two straw-bottomed chairs, and, in the place of honour, the double bed — usually only half occupied — there’s nothing here.
I read and I work, I sleep and I eat, I drink, I wash and shave. Twenty metres square. Whitewashed. Lime wash with a tinge of blue, like a country dairy. There’s no one here but me and my passing shadows reflected on the bare walls as the days go by. I myself cast a shadow on the white all around, as if I were a thick tree, a kind of dense spruce, from root to head. Myself to infinity. Just me repeated on the walls, the ceiling, on the creaking hardwood floor. My own memories flutter like moths in the room. Always the same, devoid of interest. My everyday movements here, near Place Saint-Sulpice, fourth floor, overlooking the courtyard. A studio apartment twenty metres square. Enough room to live and die without making a sound. No strict, pure angel, his crumpled wings grey, rust, and brown like those of a partridge, stands behind my chair and blames me. I am free, if I want, to be nothing and no one.
Above all, let her not come here to mix her traces with my own. Let there be no memory of her within these walls.
She was there next to the fountain, like a little heap fallen from the pink trees, half girl, half plant, like a swollen bunch of grapes. Her round belly. Her wrinkled dress. And I’ll probably never know whether this creature is opposed to me or not.
Her image is too fresh. Without past or patina. Only from yesterday. Thin. Without depth. Leaving no trace on me, like distemper drowned in water on a smooth wall. Not deserving to live inside me, like the signs of my own passage. Pathetic Delphine, swallowed up at once by me, sole master of my dark memory.
Too many glimmers, too many spots of sunlight still persist in my eyes. No doubt they come from spending too long, yesterday, looking at the chestnut trees in the square.
✦✦✦
Pale, thin, and long — like me, a specialist in little dead-end jobs — Stéphane experienced incredible ecstasies while listening to Bach and Mozart. His face then resembled those of the saints captured in mystical mid-prayer by painters of bygone days.
Very quickly his face came to bear the same expression when he looked at Delphine, who didn’t look away; she was not at all uneasy under Stéphane’s gaze, being fully taken up with herself, untangling the inextricable.
Around noon the next day, she turned up at his place on Rue des Anglais. Hadn’t he given her his address and phone number?
He thinks:
Good God, I haven’t made the bed, there are crumbs everywhere, my records on the floor . . .
She says:
“Patrick’s plane has been rerouted to Marseilles because of the fog.”
He thinks:
My God, what a mess, she turns up at my place out of the blue, on Sunday of all days, and I’ve slept in as I always do on Sunday, dirty shirt on the chair, socks on the floor, on the glazed tiles, my room a disaster, what will she think of me?
She says:
“I came to ask what I have to do to get to Marseilles.”
He rubs his eyes. Explains that Marseilles is far away and that once the passengers are off the plane they will most likely be put on a train to Paris.
She wants to know what train, what station, and she’s afraid the Fat Lady knows much more about it than she does, that she’ll be the only one able to greet Patrick Chemin when he arrives in Paris.
He thinks:
Not here, I don’t want her here, not today, I’m not ready for that, it’s too small here, too dark, my room under the rooftop, the neighbours’ dormer window right across from mine, my neighbours and I look at each other every chance we get, gimlet-eyed, like fighting cocks, and here she is in the middle of my room, so visible with her pink dress and her big belly, in a little while they’ll see her too, those malevolent neighbours, they’ll think she’s an ordinary person paying an ordinary visit, but she’s a marvel, my extraordinary guest.
She says again that Patrick Chemin’s plane is lost in the fog. She’s on the verge of tears.
Craning her neck, she looks out the window, the sky barely visible high above the narrow courtyard, a well of black light rather than a courtyard. She thinks she can hear the murmur of the sky above the rooftops.
“His plane. That’s his plane. I’m sure it’s his plane. I can hear it roaring and circling in the sky. I can hear it using up its fuel by going around so much, like a bumblebee, in that thick milkiness in the sky. This morning everybody was looking up at that sound. Even the Fat Lady was afraid it would burn up all its fuel, and fall and crash at our feet. The Fat Lady was frozen there like a statue. Like everyone else, for once. You could see that her big fingers were no longer moving on the yellow book she was reading. In the end, we were told the plane would land in Marseilles. So I came to find out what I have to do to get there.”
He phones. But all the lines that have anything to do with Patrick Chemin’s plane have been busy since morning.
She says again, “Marseilles.” Swallows. Gathers momentum, and disjointed words tumble off her tongue — “Patrick Chemin,” “airplane,” “fog,” “Fat Lady.” The rest is as muddled as the tears on her cheeks, which she
wipes away with her sleeve.
But now Stéphane must lend an ear to what is new in Delphine’s confused remarks.
She talks about her grandmother, who died and left her an inheritance. She says she’ll spend that inheritance, penny by penny, to travel, to follow Patrick Chemin to the ends of the earth if she has to.
She pronounces “grandmother” slowly, cautiously, as if it were a precious, fragile word, and her face lights up. Again she emphasizes the syllables in “grandmother,” and she is absolutely happy.
“Do you want to see my inheritance, Stéphane dear?”
She pulls up her dress. He can see her Petit Bateau underpants. She undoes the little brown leather pouch that she’s fastened around her waist with a belt against her bare skin. Shows him the coins and bills. Scatters them around her in the room. Then she runs to pick them up, like a hen picking at grain scattered in a barnyard.
✦✦✦
Not knowing what to do with Delphine, who had started crying again, Stéphane brought her to my place, holding her hand all the way along the boulevard.
Later he would tell me all about Delphine’s intrusion into his place, about the route they’d taken through the city.
He’d assure me that she’d neither seen nor heard anything around her. The new leaves at the tops of the trees, the scaly trunks of the plane trees, the song of the invisible bird, the round grilles at the foot of the trees, the captive roots beneath them, the light mist everywhere, the great murmur of midday, the busy passersby — life, all of life, had rained onto her and she hadn’t been aware of it; she had shed it as a duck’s back sheds water.
Once they reached Rue Bonaparte, outside my building, she cast away any trace of absence or daydream. All at once she dropped Stéphane’s hand, surprised she’d held it for so long. Suddenly clear and precise, with no hesitation, she declared:
“Poor Stéphane, your hands are wet.”
Very quickly she was standing in my doorway, saying, “Bonjour.” And then Delphine walked into my place for the first time.
✦✦✦
She’s out of breath and she looks bigger to me than she did yesterday. She sits on my bed. Piles the pillows behind her back. All her attention is devoted to recovering her breath and settling in comfortably. Delphine is at my place but it’s as if she weren’t here, she’s facing me as if I didn’t exist.
Then, abruptly, she springs to her feet and comes to stand next to me.
“I have to know. What station? What train? What time? Hurry, Édouard dear, please. Or I’ll die right here, right now, on the ground at your feet.”
Immediately I abandon my scattered papers, my catalogues and dictionaries. I pick up the phone. After listening to bursts of soft music for a long time, I finally get the information Delphine is waiting for.
She repeats after me, ten times at least, as if she were singing:
“Four p.m., Gare de Lyon, four p.m., Gare de Lyon, Gare de Lyon, four p.m., four p.m. . . .”
Stéphane and I decided to show Delphine around the city while we were waiting for the train from Marseilles. The three of us walking. The mocking expression of some passersby. Which of the two of us is the father of that child who is practically visible through its mother’s pink dress?
She already likes the bateaux-mouches and the banks of the Seine. She shuns monuments and museums like a child who’s afraid of grown-ups. Despite the hazy day, like a December morning, we take her to the banks of the river. Her round belly thrust forcefully ahead of her seems not to belong to her, she is still so slender and frail, separated from her burden by steadfast childhood.
She’s careful not to stumble on the paving stones. Then she sits on the ground, her back against the stone wall, despite our protests. The dampness doesn’t bother her, or the cold stones.
Delphine looks at the Seine stretching out before her.
A white mist rises from the water. We can see the boats through the mist. At times half visible in the white mist. The lights of the bateaux-mouches slice through the fog in long luminous beams, and we hear them glide along the water. As if it were night.
She says:
“At my grandmother’s house there’s a river running nearby. Sometimes it runs through white mist, other times it’s very bright because of the sun shining on it. I like it when my grandmother is rocking on the verandah. When she died, the rocking chair kept going back and forth in the wind all by itself, and I couldn’t stand that rocking without my grandmother’s slight weight. That rocking on the verandah drove me crazy and I ran down the road, carrying my inheritance against my belly, till I was out of breath, and then I met Patrick Chemin, who drove me to the nearest town.”
Stéphane stands, I stand facing her, both of us shot through with mist, looking at her and listening to her, shivering as if it were winter though it’s April already, while she sits on the ground, her back against the stone wall, her eyes vague, as if she’s seeing her grandmother through the mist.
She says, suddenly very close, very alive, like someone stirring after a waking dream:
“Patrick and the Fat Lady haven’t been married to each other for very long. It can’t last. I’m pregnant. Patrick’s real wife is me. He’ll have to realize that.”
On the bank in front of us is a man getting ready to fish. We watch him get ready. He sits on the paving stones, arranges his glittering metal line, rummages in a green plastic bucket.
Delphine assures us that the angler is poorly equipped as regards line and hook, and that he’ll never catch anything.
“And besides, the Seine is rotten, everybody knows that.”
She laughs, showing all her little white teeth. She points at us, at Stéphane and me.
“Little Frenchies, little Frenchies, your Seine is rotten!”
Stéphane clears his throat.
“And what about your river? What’s your river like?”
“Wide and deep, with rapids. The Thibaud boy drowned in it, between the island and the mainland. The water was as black as hell.”
The fisherman is standing in oversized trousers that hang loosely on his scrawny legs. He casts his shiny line onto water that recedes gently into the mist.
It’s not possible that this girl has a grandmother like everyone else. A father, perhaps a mother? In vain I search her peculiar face for some sign of belonging, some slight trace of a resemblance. I look at her stretched out on the ground, propped up by the wall. Her pure stranger’s mask positioned over the fine bones of her face. She has a touch of an accent. Pronounces her a’s like o’s and her o’s like a’s. Perhaps she’s never lived in a real country, just in some hinterland known only to her, beyond sea and land, at the slender line between life and death.
“Let’s get out of here. There’s too much fog. We’re getting all tangled in this cotton batting.”
Delphine gets up and shakes out her dress, which is short in front, long in the back. Stéphane holds out his hand to her. He asks:
“Where do you come from?”
She points to the white sky above our heads, to a passing gull. Says, “Up there.” Laughs.
“I took a plane to come here. My grandmother’s inheritance was eaten up in one shot when I bought the plane ticket. One way. I’ll be there when he arrives. The first one to greet him. Before the Fat Lady. Didn’t see the Atlantic Ocean. Too many clouds. White. Thick. Just like meringue. Very white. Verging on blue. Dazzling. Flew too high. Didn’t see the ocean. Cotton batting everywhere. There’s no ocean. My mouth is full of cotton batting. I suffocate. Too high in the sky. The birds are dead. Too high to build nests. I’m coming, dear Patrick. Four p.m., Gare de Lyon. I’ll be there. Before the Fat Lady.”
The fisherman’s line goes taut. A little fish is wriggling at the end of the line. The fisherman quivers with joy from head to toe.
&
nbsp; Delphine declares that it’s high time we went to the Gare de Lyon. She takes us by the arm, Stéphane and me. She is between us, clinging to us for all eternity, or so it seems.
Which of the two of us will draw the child from between her thighs and give it to her, as childlike and virginal as she is herself?
✦✦✦
I write: “Checkerboard table. Solid exotic wood from South America, top stained and finished with nitrocellulose varnish.”
Glance out the open window. And that’s it for my peace of mind. Just long enough to gaze at a tree in the courtyard. I envy that tree, envy its fullness as a tree, utterly wrapped up in its branches and its leaves, shivering in the light wind. Whereas I am reduced to the most infinitesimal part of myself, typing nonsense for a mail-order catalogue.
A hundred times in a row I write “nitrocellulose.” To calm myself. The clicking of my typewriter bears me up and carries me away. Is this any way to live?
Again I glance out the window above my typewriter. The tree in the courtyard is standing there, tranquil. I take a breath. The tree and myself, both perfectly calm.
Suddenly I spy her coming along the paving stones, between flower-beds that aren’t yet in bloom. Have heard nothing from her for several days now.
She sits on my bed, winded.
“Too many stairs, Édouard dear. It’s too much. Too much.”
The same pink dress, more and more shabby. She apologizes, her voice barely audible, assures me none of her clothes fit now except for this pink dress her grandmother gave her a long time ago.
She comes very close to me, says into my ear:
“Stéphane promised me he’d put this dress in the washing machine when he goes to his mother’s, and iron it himself.”
She appears very pleased with herself and with Stéphane, whereas I become furious with her and Stéphane both.
Delphine pursues her thinking:
“Patrick and the Fat Lady: their marriage won’t last long, I don’t think. He promised to phone me.”
She settles in among the cushions. Begins to recount, speaking to no one in particular, her eyes focused on the open window as if, through the grey day, she sees images that stand out powerfully before her.
