by Anne H
“You dumped me at the Gare de Lyon, you and Stéphane, like a package to be delivered. The huge station, the crowds going every which way, people, people everywhere, breathing in my face, bumping my belly as they pass me, my child cries, I hear him crying inside me, I’m afraid for my crying child, afraid for myself lost in a station, Patrick arrives with his suitcases full of flies and fish hooks, just one change of clothes, his razor and aftershave in a toilet-case, right away she wraps him in her great big arms, hides him from me with her broad shoulders, any more and she’ll have him on her lap, her fat thighs, her enormous knees, and there will be nothing for me to do but die with my child, who is crying and crying.”
Delphine comes so close to me that I can see a little green vein on her temple. She speaks into my ear again:
“All the money is hers, the Fat Lady’s — the Paris apartment, the house on Ile de Ré. Everything. Everything. All he has is suitcases filled with sparkling flies and deadly fish hooks, his brown velvet eyes, and his soft, hesitant voice, that knocks me off my feet.”
I pick up the sheets of paper scattered over my table. I make piles of them and clip them together. Make a pretence of being very busy. Soon nothing is perceptible in the room but Delphine’s voice, uniform, unwavering, too clear. She goes on talking, like someone recalling how she’s spent the day before she falls asleep.
“The apartment all sparkling white like a bathtub, the matte white marble fireplace, the fire in the fireplace like the red tip of a lit cigarette against all the white everywhere else in the apartment, the white rug curly as a sheep, a kind of white city all around the living room, with corridors like streets and doors shut like the doors of houses. So magnificent you could die. Patrick inside it like a prince, resting after making his rounds all over the world with his flies and fish hooks. He’s earned his apartment on the Trocadéro. And she’s there talking to him and calling him ‘darling.’ If she only knew why I’m so big . . . And she’s invited me for dinner, with lighted candles on the blue tablecloth, a beautiful deep blue against all the white. So gorgeous you could die. The gleaming silverware heavy, very heavy, and glasses that sing under your fingertip, three for each person, a big one and two smaller ones, for drinking different wines, and even water if you want. She’s the one who invited me. She had no choice but to be there with him to welcome me. Very polite. Asked me about the baby in my belly. Pretended to know about the backaches, the nausea and all that. Finally asked with seeming kindness: ‘When are you due?’ All the old questions that old women ask young ones who are swollen like balloons and filled with future. You could see she was polite and well brought up. He must have had to teach her. She’d certainly seen me at the station, waiting for Patrick. She was waiting for him too. The two of us waiting for Patrick. And he pulled in on the train like a prince who travels with suitcases filled with fish hooks and flies. When I turned up for dinner they kissed me, both of them, the way you kiss a well-behaved child. When we were all alone in the living room, with her in the kitchen making coffee, he came up to me, looking like a bereaved man who does what he must to look bereaved, but who deep down is waiting for this difficult moment of sorrow and boredom to be over. He spoke very softly. His brow was knit behind the round lenses of his glasses. He said: ‘Be nice, be patient, it will all work out. Give me time . . .’ Then he added very quickly, as she was coming in with the coffee: ‘I’ll call you as soon as I can . . .’”
Delphine sits across from me. Rests her elbows on the table. In a voice that is suddenly close and familiar, she repeats her same little litany, which she’s no doubt been repeating time and again throughout her pregnancy:
“It can’t go on. Patrick and the Fat Lady married to each other. Patrick’s real wife is me. They’ll have to face up to it.”
Very quickly she goes back to her daydreams, right under my nose, as if I weren’t there.
“The apartment — all white and vast, like a white city, a private apartment so luxurious you could die . . .”
Delphine is startled again. Her sharp clear voice. She is looking at me. Two pale sparks come into her eyes, cross the table, and flash in my face.
“And now, Édouard dear, I’m staying in a small hotel, a very old one on a very old little street, Rue Gît-le-Coeur it’s called. A tiny little heart that lies there. At night I can hear that old little heart as it beats within the walls. It keeps me awake.”
Stéphane has arrived, all out of breath. He claims that Delphine’s ears are too sensitive for her to sleep all alone in a residence so old, so given over to the strange sounds of an ancient time and of the pitch-black night.
After not finding Delphine in her hotel, after running over to my place so he’s out of breath, Stéphane seems relieved, as if he was afraid he would never see Delphine again anywhere in the world.
✦✦✦
Delphine had very clear ideas about what had to be seen in the city. The fountains, the bridges, and the banks of the Seine attracted her particularly. Whether it was the traffic circle on the Champs-Élysées, the Pont d’Arcole, or the fountain in Place Saint-Michel, we had to wait for Delphine to emerge from her fascination and come back to us.
The great lake and fountains of the Place du Trocadéro. The night, humid and mild. In-line skates. Skateboards. Boys, girls, perched on passing flashes of light. A rumbling hum. The city two steps away. The gushing water. The long liquid flames, white and shuddering. The spray that touches Delphine’s hands as she draws near. Again, her stonelike stillness. Her perfect solitude once more.
Nine p.m. at the Place du Trocadéro. A girl and two boys at a table on the terrace of a café they can’t afford.
Here she is accepting the cake Stéphane offers her. Didn’t see Stéphane order the cake. Didn’t see the waiter take the order. Sudden laughter on Delphine’s face, where warmth and vivacity have returned. She’s laughing because she likes cake, and because she feels she has to laugh to say so. She speaks with her mouth full.
“You can see Patrick’s embarrassed to go out with me because of my condition. He bought me a big loose coat that goes down to my heels. He wrapped me up in it. Asked me to wear it all the time when we’re together, even when the weather is warm. I don’t wear it if he’s not there. But when he takes me out, like yesterday when we went to the movies, I keep it on all the time. Even at the restaurant after the movie. I’m suffocating from the heat. But I do what he wants. While I wait for us to get married. He’s always asking me to be patient.”
Stéphane says:
“The bastard! The bastard!”
Delphine doesn’t hear a word Stéphane says. She goes on with her story.
“Once, at the hotel after the restaurant, he didn’t want to make love. For fear of squashing the baby. Wouldn’t even kiss me. But we could talk with no one else around. I made a scene. He started quivering like a little puppy. To calm me down, he promised he’d tell his wife everything. And he will. He’ll tell her and he’ll marry me. He has to, after all. I’m pregnant.”
She rests her elbows on the table, lets her tea get cold. Loses sight of us, of Stéphane and me, like small figures becoming smaller and smaller as you move off in a boat and little by little the shoreline disappears.
Again her ventriloquist’s voice, remote and subdued:
“I think he’s very bored in his wife’s lovely apartment. A kept man, that’s what Patrick Chemin is. His white leather easy chair. I’m sure he’s sitting in his white leather easy chair. Looking preoccupied, he sips the coffee the Fat Lady serves him. He’ll have plenty of time tomorrow to complain about the coffee keeping him awake.”
Stéphane says again:
“The bastard! The bastard!”
I too intervene. I take Delphine’s wrist, I squeeze it in my fingers very hard, I shake her arm all the way to the shoulder to make her face me, alive, to make her look at me and talk to me. Her tra
nsparent skin. Her green veins visible on her too-white skin, all down the length of her arm.
“Get out, for Christ’s sake! Get out girl, before it’s too late. You can’t stay in limbo like this. Forget about Patrick Chemin and go home.”
She looks at me, alarmed. Rubs her wrist as if we’d handcuffed her.
She says:
“You’re nasty, Édouard dear. Patrick is a good man. He’s the first one I saw on the road, in his old Ford that was falling to pieces, jolting and clattering over the bumps. He picked me up right away, when I’d been racing down the road since morning, the swaying of my grandmother’s rocking chair in my ears, my grandmother dead beside her chair, a sudden death, fallen from a rocking chair that went on rocking as if nothing had happened, an evil chair that did it on purpose, the wind that joins in and carries the swaying and breathing of death down the road and far away, that breathing and swaying on the back of my neck as I run, the scent of fields for as far as the eye can see on either side of the road, mixed with the breathing of the wind and of death, the scent of daisies, buttercups, vetch, yarrow that you start to smell in the fields on either side of the road, and even the grass along the ditches, salted with dust, is perfumed by the wind and the breathing of death, and me, I’ve been running down the road since morning, scented by the fields and by death on the back of my neck, and Patrick drives up in his old car, his suitcases full of flies and fish hooks, and he takes me in, it’s the first car I’ve come across since morning, since the breathing of death on the back of my neck, and I run away, I run till I’m out of breath, the swaying of the rocking chair in my ears, death on the back of my neck, and he is the first one — Patrick Chemin, fishing tackle sales rep — he’s the one I have to marry, he’s the first, it’s an obligation I have.”
Stéphane leans towards her as she strays from the point, no doubt hoping to bring her back to us by means of cakes and tea. He calls out:
“Waiter!”
I think, and my chest swells at the thought: she followed the first person who came along, like a baby goose. A phenomenon of her pregnancy, most likely. With Patrick now, and it’s for life. Pointless to insist. It could just as well have been me or Stéphane. But it was Patrick. The first person who came along. To replace the grandmother. A question of time and place. Of country. Chance in all its necessity.
Can it be that I’m no longer a man? I just have to do what a man does with a woman. Take her as a man takes a woman. Remove her from her repetitive childhood without delay. Right here, maybe, though it’s a busy place, with cars, and blind, deaf people jostling one another while they wait for the 63 bus. Ophelia, Iphigenia, Antigone, and some other diaphanous creatures, doomed to an early death. I’d open her belly, in keeping with male custom, that humped belly of hers, and I’d draw out the little occupant cowering in there. I’d save her from the affliction of being an unwed mother — and crazy on top of it. But I’m not up to that, I don’t even deserve to lick her ear in my dreams. And what’s the good of losing myself in my savage ruminations? I’m bored to death here between Delphine and Stéphane. I wish I were somewhere else, someplace I’d be alone again.
Still, I miss nothing of what Stéphane and Delphine say or do as they huddle with me around a little table covered with cake crumbs and dirty cups.
Stéphane has just laid his big pale hand with its knotted knuckles over Delphine’s little hand, which has wandered onto the table.
“Don’t touch me, Stéphane. Your hands are damp, and that gives me goose pimples.”
This remark slipped out, but she neither moves nor takes her hand away. No sign on her face of either speech or anger. Delphine sits there motionless, exposed to all and sundry, without modesty or hope.
Stéphane hides his big offended hand in his pocket. He hastens to offer a chocolate eclair to Delphine, who is smiling vaguely.
I go home alone, walking along the quays. The Seine gleams in the night, brighter than it is by daylight. The echo of my footsteps follows me like a noisy shadow, rapid and rhythmical.
✦✦✦
For three weeks we didn’t see Delphine or hear of her. As if she were no longer in Paris. She didn’t show up at my place or at Stéphane’s. She didn’t slip in between the tables with her big belly to join us at a café or restaurant. No one spotted her sitting on the stone with the Saint-Sulpice fountain at her back.
Stéphane even wondered if Delphine might be giving birth all by herself in some private clinic, like a cat who goes into hiding to have her kittens.
And then one fine day she rang the bell and walked right into my place, not waiting for me to open the door. She plunked herself down on the rug, in the middle of the room. She lifted her faded pink dress and undid the leather belt she wore against the skin of her waist. She opened her pouch and flung a shower of coins and bills around her. Then her nimble little bird-claws picked everything up, as if thieves were pursuing them. She made piles of coins and bills on the rug. She gazed at what was left of the inheritance from her grandmother, she counted it, and she was desolate.
“I’m ruined. Ruined. All those trains. All those trains. Nice, Toulouse, Poitiers, Brussels, La Rochelle. The money slips away, along with the trains and hotels. And Patrick, who pretends not to recognize me in the stations and hotels. Who goes marching across hotel lobbies. His long legs like scissors cutting, kicking through the air. Who pretends not to see me, walking fast so he’ll lose me in the crowd of travellers. Who’s always surprised by my appearance, like a wild animal chased by a sudden storm. Carrying his big suitcases, full of fish hooks and flies, at arm’s length. While I have all my belongings on my back, and my inheritance tied around my waist. I was like a lost soul in drafty train stations filled with people weighed down like movers. Despite their haste and their burdens, the air of insult written on their faces, I’m sure all those people who were leaving were judging me on the way by, condemning me as a slut because of my belly and my dress that’s too short in front and hangs down in the back.”
She is loudly indignant; she curls up and lies on the rug, protecting her belly with her hands. Says she hasn’t slept for days and her legs are very cold. I carry her to the bed and cover her with the duvet. A moment later and Delphine goes on talking, as if she’s telling herself a story before she goes to sleep.
The story is all about spending long hours in the waiting rooms of strange railway stations, about how hard it is for a pregnant woman to stand up for so long, about her fear of falling and being trampled by travellers.
Delphine suddenly throws off the duvet. She sits on the edge of the bed.
“Good thing I swiped Patrick’s diary from his coat pocket last time we were together in Paris, in a sleazy hotel hidden away on the second floor of a fancy restaurant on the quays. I learned it by heart, the way you learn your lesson before you leave for school. I just had to go wherever Patrick was going with his heavy suitcases. To surprise him. To see and be seen by him. Without really wanting to. Or deciding to. Only a diary in my head that I had to follow to the letter to fulfil my need to be with him. A sort of obligation, stronger than everything else. A tremendous stubbornness. I followed him from station to station, from train to train, from town to town, from hotel to hotel. Always, I was there waiting, and he thought he was going crazy. And I thought I was going crazy. Always, he was surrounded by people he knew. They mustn’t see us together. Pretend not to know each other in stations and hotels. Me with my loose coat down to my heels. Him with his suitcases, his doe eyes constantly on the lookout in case someone saw him with me. Around three a.m., when no one was there to catch him, an adulterer, in the hallway, he’d come to me, all excited, in his stocking feet on the hall carpet. He worried about the baby and he said that one day he’d have to marry me. All the time he was talking, he kept looking at the time on his wrist. Before he left I’d always create a little scene, and he would too, quietly, not letting himse
lf be too angry for fear someone would hear him in the silence of the night hanging heavily over the hotel.”
Alone within herself, no longer facing me as I listen, Delphine recounts her own life, never tiring of it. I let my pen fall to the floor. The blue ink makes a tiny dark stain on the blue carpet. As if it were merely the shadow of the fallen pen.
Delphine is shivering on the bed. I heat water for tea. I ask if she’s seen a doctor since she’s been in Paris. Delphine’s teeth chatter against the bowl of tea. She looks at me, outraged. Says I mustn’t mention doctors to her, ever, or she’ll throw herself in the Seine.
✦✦✦
High summer over the city. The light on all sides is white, dry, blinding. The shade gnawed away in all its nooks and crannies. The stone radiates, dry as crumbling chalk. White dust. Sweltering heat. Pollution. Sheltered from sweat and tears, Delphine resembles a little fish that’s been salted dry. Her baby curls up inside her and is silent.
She casts no shadow in the strong sunlight that devours her. Only the fleeting shadow of her big belly against a wall when she goes into town, pushing her belly before her like a steep rock. Under these conditions — extreme weight in her centre and a ravenous beast deep in her entrails — she raises frail, green-veined arms to the sky. Yells. Demands justice. Absolute justice that would depend only on her own law, Delphine’s law, an ideal law, despite the common sense and notions of justice held by married women and timorous men. With the railway timetable carefully memorized, and Patrick Chemin’s schedule at her fingertips, she tracks him down and runs into him in out-of-town hotels located near the train station, just long enough for them to exchange the resentment they both feel, to whisper it in strange bedrooms, stopping themselves from bursting out, the way people hold back their cries when making love, because of the neighbours.
