by Anne H
“I forbid you to follow me around like my shadow. If anyone sees us together I’ll be ruined. You’re in my way. I can’t stand you. I’ll see you in Paris, as usual.”
“I have to be where you are. To shame you. So you can see me as I am, in a terrible state. So you can learn me by heart and never forget me.”
Could anyone but her do that better than she does, and plead her case? Could anyone proclaim louder than her the wrong that was done to her when she was numb with horror after her grandmother’s death, and death has been hard on her heels long enough that the cold breath on her neck has stopped, and the cold wind at her back, and the funereal scent of late-summer flowers, usually unscented, that had begun to smell strong like graveyard flowers, and he was inside the heat of the world, he took her inside his own heat, which was the radiant, penetrating heat of the world. The road was deserted, like a bare hand separated from its arm and shoulder, all alone in the naked air. He arrived in the bareness of the road where she’d been running since morning, her elbows close to her body, the wind on her neck like an icy knife. His clattering car, his fishing tackle in the black suitcases on the back seat. He had her get in the car beside him, choking, nearly dead from having run so far. He gave her a big white handkerchief. Told her to wipe her eyes and blow her nose. She does everything he tells her to do. He takes charge of her. He consoles her. He repeats, “Such a terrible affliction,” and he cries too. She says she has nobody now. She clings to him like a lost cat. It is autumn everywhere along the flat road where he picked her up, suffocating. They drive over the mountain, where the maple trees blaze here and there against the blackish green of the spruce and the gold of the birches. A glimmer, like light seen through stained glass, enters the clamorous little car when he offers her candy. For the first time she sees his doe eyes with their long black lashes against his pale cheek. She starts to cry again, repeats that she’s alone in the world. He squeezes her fingers hard enough to make her cry. A little more and he’ll claim that he’s all alone too. Which would be true in a way, though he has recently married. It doesn’t make sense to say he’s all alone, even if he secretly feels he is. With his wife or without her, moreover. An irreparable solitude, no doubt. This man has never in his life consoled someone else, always being the most unhappy. He is elated and comforted to be able to do so with Delphine. To deliver her from tears and from the suffocation of tears. He desires this for the first time — the power of the stronger in the face of the weaker. He melts with gratitude. Feels infinite pity. He drapes his jacket over Delphine’s shoulders. Now that she has stopped crying, she’s freezing from head to toe as if it were winter.
They pull into town around six p.m., in the little dark green car that bounces and rattles.
All that happened in Delphine’s country, well before Patrick’s return to France, where that woman was waiting for him — she who remained, in his most deeply hidden thoughts, his wife and sovereign for all eternity.
✦✦✦
Stéphane insisted on going with Delphine to the Gare Montparnasse. She departed for Nantes without seeing Stéphane, as she was busy having her ticket punched and trying to locate her railway car on the platform.
He comes to my place as soon as he can get away from the record store where he works. He’s waiting for Delphine. Though he appears to be as drained of all passion as a little dead fish on a plate. His blank eyes gaze at me, unseeing.
Delphine has come back sooner than expected. She assures me that she’ll never see Patrick Chemin again as long as she lives, that she’d rather die.
She pats her belly and seems close to giving birth. She creases her eyes in her little freckled face, makes an effort to see the shadows breathing in my paper-littered studio. She even declares that she can discern very clearly, directly ahead of her, the troubled face of Patrick Chemin. This man hasn’t been doing at all well since Delphine cursed him in Nantes.
“He’s very pale and he’s sweating bullets. His wife wipes his forehead with a Kleenex. She fixes him a soothing drink. Her movements are those of a giant who is doing her best to care for a normal-sized human being. Though his legs are too long. The tiny torso of a sick child. Narrow shoulders. No one sees him more clearly than I do, with his flaws and his good points. His incomparable eyes. He has the brown velvet eyes of a doe. His long, long lashes cast a shadow on his cheek. I’ve never looked at anyone the way I look at him. I carved his name on my heart with a sharp little knife, all the letters of his name in capitals. All the features of his face in large characters. His legs like scissor blades. The stupid look on his face when I told him he’d have to choose between his wife and me. The fat old lady or me — young and full to bursting with life. I have double everything: kidneys, liver, heart, arms, legs, sex. I’m a double-yolked egg. Carefully hidden behind my navel there’s a living beast that swells and grows from hour to hour, that eats me and drinks me, that presses on my bladder with all its weight, sucking its thumb and making itself comfortable as if it were at home.”
She looks us in the eye, Stéphane and me. Her laughter tumbles from her like a shower of hail.
“Would you like to know, my little papas, exactly what Patrick Chemin said to make me curse him in Nantes? ‘I’ll never marry you. I’m tied to another woman in spite of myself, by a powerful force that comes from her alone, that binds us to each other until death . . .’ I told him that real life was on my side, and that, if he didn’t marry me, he’d soon be dead and buried, rotten from remorse and sin.”
From laughter Delphine moves on to tears. Then laughs again. She is shaken by laughter interrupted by sobs.
“The worst part was when he asked me to forgive him and he wanted to put his ear against my belly and listen to my child’s heart, like a doctor. I couldn’t bear having him so close to the frantic beating of my life, so I scratched him on the cheek. Then I jumped to my feet in the hotel room. I buttoned my long coat up to the neck and I left, all alone, in the middle of the night. The wait till morning in the empty railway station at Nantes was the longest of all the times I’ve waited in stations and on platforms. But I’ll never again go anywhere to see him and touch him, to be seen and touched by him. Lovers who see each other and touch each other in the madness of being in love. I think I’m going to give birth right away, at your place, Édouard dear. I’ve been looking so long for a quiet, comfortable nest . . .”
Threat and counter-threat. At once I talked to Delphine about a doctor, a hospital. In one leap she was at the door. Raced down the stairs. We could hear her shouting from one floor to the next:
“I’ll give birth the way I want, when I want, where I want. It’s nobody’s business but mine.”
Leaning on the windowsill, I see her hurry across the courtyard and disappear under the porch, with Stéphane following and shouting at her.
He caught up with her at the corner of Rue de Rennes, as she was turning onto Rue Cassette, just as school was letting out. They talked together, surrounded by the crowd of children, breathless from running.
“Do you want to marry me?”
He was panting so hard that the words broke off in his throat. She kissed his cheek to thank him. For a moment his hurried breath and hers were mingled.
“No, Stéphane, no, I can’t.”
He was wrong to insist, because Delphine’s anger came rushing back. She ran away again, shouting insults at Patrick and at Stéphane, who fed her anger because he was within her reach just then. She cried:
“No, Stéphane, no, Patrick Chemin is the one I want. And anyway your hands are damp, poor Stéphane, I don’t want you to touch me!”
Stéphane let her dash away, bumping into the tables and chairs lined up on the sidewalk outside the corner café. Very quickly he lost sight of her.
We heard nothing more about Delphine for several days. Her baggage stayed on the floor of her hotel room, and her bed wasn’t slept in
.
Stéphane told me all about it, and I pointed out to him that the girl was crazy.
✦✦✦
What can be done for Delphine who has disappeared? Her pregnancy. Her madness. Her threadbare cotton dress. The inheritance from her grandmother, which is dwindling visibly. The man who made her pregnant. His refusal to marry her. Stéphane and I have decided to adopt Delphine and her child. We’ve bought a layette, baby clothes, and maternity clothes in a shop that caters to pregnant woman. We’ve started looking for her in the city.
No doubt it’s pointless to shake the city in every direction, like a rug, in the hope of finding Delphine. Streets, squares, alleys, cafés, railway stations — ah yes, especially the stations. She cannot be found.
Stéphane says her name to anyone who will listen.
“Her name is Delphine. Have you seen her? She’s a pregnant girl who . . .”
Lost from the outset, like a puppy found in a garbage can — wandering since the dawn of this world in some vague country we can only imagine — Delphine well and truly cannot be found. The two of us, Stéphane and I, can trace her appalling little life no farther back than a grandmother and a rocking chair that moves back and forth on a wooden verandah. Delphine says her grandmother no longer has milk or periods. That reassures her. The old woman cannot release some noisy baby from her dry womb, from under her pulled-up skirts. She won’t insult her granddaughter by replacing her with another brat. An only child forever, she breathes and settles herself in her grandmother’s lap, against the big, dry, warm breasts. Even though she is ten years old. Childhood rediscovered seems eternal. But now things are falling apart and the whisper of death can be heard. That bitter whisper cannot be the wind, though the rocking chair continues to move back and forth after the grandmother has fallen dead to the ground. Such swaying back and forth in her ears, and the road before her so she can run away until she’s out of breath. And now, on this side of the Atlantic, it’s beginning again. Once again Delphine is running away, with death at her heels, or so she thinks.
✦✦✦
The Fat Lady is here before me. Now I can see her up close. The texture of her skin, the curl of her hair, the breadth of her hips, the blaze of her anger, the passage of words on her red lips, her carnivorous teeth. I can hear her breathe.
Having emerged from Delphine’s story as if by magic, the Fat Lady is at my place. She is sitting on my bed and crossing her legs. But how can this be?
She dragged a sheepish Patrick Chemin to Rue Gît-le-Coeur in the hope of finding Delphine and taking the child from her. With Delphine gone, the hotel-keeper insists that someone get rid of her baggage.
At that very point in the conversation with the hotelkeeper, about the baggage, Stéphane turned up, and the three of them met and recognized one another, making Delphine’s world virtually complete. All that remained was for me to join them and to join in their commitment to find Delphine.
All Patrick does is plead that we go to the railway stations and look for Delphine there.
Her fury paces the narrow room. Her long strides. Her endless legs. My back is to the wall. Shut away with her inside her rage and her insults. I, with my restricted life, my limited desires, I am suffocating in here with her, between the table and the bed.
She strides back and forth. She has the ceiling at her head, the walls at her fingertips, she need only reach out her arms. Now she is circling me, glaring, dancing. Her short linen jacket spins around with every step. Her odour is on me. She speaks into my face.
“Patrick has told me everything about that little girl. He was trembling from head to toe. He looked like a stuffed toy being shaken.”
Shall I take advantage of her anger, rub myself against it like a match, and blaze in turn from a strong and violent life?
But look at her now, outrageously mild and asking for something to eat and drink.
I offer her bread and cheese. I set a half-full bottle on the table.
I watch her eat and drink, standing across from her, arms hanging by my sides but somehow awkward, as if I were holding a hat in my right hand and a bouquet of flowers in my left, the better to salute her rapacity — or perhaps this fury of hers, that is soothed as she eats and drinks.
“I’m very greedy, and my greed will be the death of me. I like choucroute, bacon omelets, good ripe Camembert, and my dear little husband — oh God, how dear he is, my dear, dear, dear husband who has cheated on me . . .”
Her deafening laughter makes the windows rattle.
Not a drop left in the bottle, not a crumb left on the plate. She gets up from the table, stretches and yawns, her mouth wide open as if she wants to swallow everything around her — invisible pollen suspended in the motionless air, every living particle eddying within my walls, and me, standing there before her like an edible insect.
Something infinite in her arms and thighs. The giantess moves like a panther in a cage.
“I have to adopt that child. He’s half mine as it is, since Patrick is the father. I’m ravenous, and everything I lust after is already mine.”
She has started to smoke. She blows smoke-rings big enough for me to step through, like a circus act, wearing all my clothes and with my big boots on my feet.
This creature is beautiful and terrifying. Her name is Marianne Chemin.
✦✦✦
The waiting room, Gare Saint-Lazare, seven p.m.
Marianne is the first to recognize her, having looked for her more zealously than anyone else. The crowd walks by, going in every direction, dazing her and jostling her. Now she has neither grace nor beauty. Her dress is a rag on her skin. Her head is as empty as a black hole. You can see beads of sweat on her forehead.
From very far away, Marianne has seen the pink stain of Delphine’s dress as she stands pinned against the wall. She moves towards her, picks her out, holds her. With her head thrown back and her hands on her belly, Delphine is without defences or vivacity. She is ripe like a fruit that is past its prime, one that holds within it another fruit that is practically overripe and ready to fall to the ground.
Once they’re in the taxi on their way to the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, amid countless cars driving along in the sunlight, the two women are so close to one another on the back seat that Marianne can feel Delphine’s contractions through her own sterile body, resonating in her like waves against a seawall. And if Delphine turns around, she can feel Marianne’s gaze fixed on her like the black eye of a squirrel preparing to break a nut to get at its kernel. I want that child and I’ll have it, thinks Marianne.
Delphine is moaning continuously now. She has arrived at the peak of her lie and of her little drama.
The over-abundant life she thought she possessed has been taken from her. Her imposture has been found out and she is dumbfounded.
Her cries through the walls of the Hôtel-Dieu.
Marianne, Patrick, Stéphane, and I confined to the waiting room. Cries everywhere, all around us. What goes on here is like the earth forced open so new blood will come.
Patrick never looks up from the tiles at his feet. We can see the top of his head, his thinning hair. You’d think that his misfortune was hidden down there, between two tiles, that if he bent down he’d be able to rip it out like a weed.
Briefly he raises his head, and I observe the eyes that Delphine praised so highly. Excessively gentle, with an otherworldly velvet smoothness, Patrick Chemin’s eyes express what he will never say to Delphine. Tender compassion is lost between his eyelashes. At the peak of disaster. Doesn’t know whom to ask for forgiveness. Delphine or Marianne? Wants above all to be rocked and consoled.
The midwife approaches us. Tells us that the girl was full of air, like a wineskin. She laughs reluctantly, too surprised to poke fun openly.
“False pregnancy! Did you ever hear the like, I ask you? A unique c
ase in the annals of the Hôtel-Dieu.”
More exhausted than if it had all been real, a cry caught in her throat, Delphine finally dozed off long after she was placed in a hospital bed, an injection in the crook of her arm.
As she walks past the nursery, Marianne carefully studies the newborns behind the glass, as if she were looking through the impassable waters of birth. Her long hand, with its gleaming wedding band, raps against the glass wall.
✦✦✦
She is silent on her hospital bed. Utterly mute. Still as a stone. Flat as a sole. A dead fish. Nothing is happening any more, in her belly or in her heart. She has been burst open. Stripped of her heaviness. Now she is reduced to her empty form. Narrow and thin. The imaginary fruit has been tossed into the naked air, mingled with the nudity of the air, sucked in by the naked air, reduced to dust and powder, spread, impalpable, through the great void above the rooftops, disappearing on the horizon like the ashes of the dead, vanished over the sea.
A beautiful summer. Paid holidays. Vacations planned since last year. The sea. The mountains. The countryside. Children. Parents. Grandparents. Evanescent loves appearing on the horizon. They all go away. Nearly everyone. Pretend they know nothing of Delphine’s extravagant dream that has been swallowed up by the chalky air of a summer day.
They have not seen her thinness, the sheet that her flat little bones barely lift as she lies tidily on the hospital bed. They have taken advantage of her absolute silence and her refusal to see anyone at all to leave on vacation as usual.
Marianne has taken Patrick to Ile de Ré, to the big house that has been hers since her parents’ death. Ashamed as though he himself had given birth to a chimera, Patrick has sworn that never again will he be taken in.
I brought flowers to her in the hospital. She closed her eyes so as not to see them. Pinched her nose so as not to smell them. Her hand came away with difficulty from her chest, where it had been fixed like the dead hand of a martyred woman, palm open over her heart, in old paintings. She gestured for the flowers and their odour to be taken away, and went back to sleep, the sleep of the dead.
