by Anne H
Stéphane no longer listens to music — or if he does try to listen to some kind of music he used to like before he knew Delphine, his pale face looks drawn, as if he were hearing discordant notes ringing in his ears.
After the hospital discharged her, we checked out the classified ads in Le Figaro.
“‘Villa Anthelme. 17th arrondissement. Métro Wagram. Room and board.’”
Stéphane and I went there, accompanying a sleepwalker who mustn’t be wakened for fear she might throw herself under the first car that came along.
The narrow sofa was covered with a rough fabric in a dark blue that was nearly black. The double window open to the stifling summer didn’t stop the musty smell from tickling our noses.
Delphine has been leaning out the window into the sticky heat, looking at the long inner courtyard with its paving stones pried partially loose, and she declares that this is fine, that no one will dare cross the bumpy courtyard to come and disturb her for fear of spraining an ankle.
She turns down the blue blanket. Sees that the sheets are clean. Gets into bed fully dressed. Turning to face the wall, she asks us to let her sleep. While Stéphane and I are still there looking at her, Delphine sinks into sleep, tired from the move by taxi and from life in general.
Stéphane says that he loves Delphine more than his mother, that it’s terrible, and that Delphine doesn’t love him at all.
The telegram arrived almost immediately after Stéphane’s declaration: “Mother sick. Asks son to come. A neighbour.”
Stéphane took the train for Meudon the next morning. He wouldn’t come back to Paris till after Delphine’s death.
✦✦✦
I believe I can picture Stéphane comfortably ensconced in a seat on the train, heading for Meudon, travelling full speed through the countryside, not so much as moving his little finger, inert and taken in charge by one of the powers of this world. I know, however, that his musician’s soul distinctly hears Delphine’s little voice, lilting and insidious, amid the deafening clatter of the wheels along the rails.
As for Stéphane’s mother, whether she’s sick or not, I have no precise idea of her, having barely seen her, a dark widow, one night in her house at Meudon. With Stéphane on his way to her, it’s a little as if he were sinking gradually into the opacity of the earth.
The air is like oil. A heat wave in all its splendour. My solitude restored. Quick errands between two paragraphs. Stairways rushed down, then right up again, on the double. Baguette. Coffee. Ham sandwich with butter. Cheap red wine. Cheese. Summer berries. I barely exist and I write paragraphs. I abandon Stéphane’s loves and plunge into maxi-furnishings for mini-salaries. All’s well that ends well.
The world is in order. I work. Delphine sleeps at the Villa Anthelme. Stéphane is sinking into the maternal shadows before our eyes. Fear the mystery of the other like my own forbidden memory.
I’m at home, revelling in the stuffy air, when Delphine comes bursting in, shining from head to foot as if she’s just out of the water. Her maternity dress, brightly coloured and unwrinkled, hangs loosely over her tiny body. Her high cheekbones seem freshly polished.
“See how nicely I’m dressed, Édouard dear? Everything’s new. The dress, the shoes, all of it, all of it. I just had to choose from the trousseau you and Stéphane bought me! Down the toilet with my pink dress and the lump that was inside it. I’ll never see Patrick Chemin again. Take a good look at me — alone, thin, and flawless! A genuine marvel!”
She spins around. Her oversized dress is like a swollen lampshade around her. Her crepe-soled shoes squeak on the carpet. Her long hair flies over her face and down her back.
“I came to tell you about the Villa Anthelme. Would you like to hear what goes on there?”
She is here, at my place, in a room littered with papers and catalogues, all vibrant with laughter and with the secrets of the Villa Anthelme.
“At first I thought no one was there. Except the maid, who seemed to be the real mistress of the house. It suited me that there was no one in the house except for the maid and me. Silence everywhere, as dense as water. She brings my food on a tray. I don’t eat. I pretend to be always asleep. The silence from me is added to the silence of the house. Outside, it’s summer. I rage and I cry in my bed against the wall. The maid calls me Little Misery. There’s a tiny washbasin with an S-shaped pipe. I wash my hair in it. I plug in my hair dryer. Immediately, there’s a rustle of slippers everywhere, coming awake in the house. Going up and down the stairs. Brushing against my door. Feet scuffling everywhere. Buzzing like a swarm of flies in the dark.
“‘Somebody’s blown the fuses!’
“The answer echoes back:
“‘Who blew the fuses?’
“I huddle in my bed. The shattered silence of the house is intolerable. The silence ought to be glued back together so I can hide deep inside it again. I don’t want anyone to see me. I pull the sheet over my face. There’s a knock at my door. I put my hands over my ears. The maid bursts into my room. She unplugs the hair dryer. Says it’s forbidden. She’s very angry. My eyes are wide open at the maid’s anger. I see her thick lips quivering with anger. Now there are old people all over the landing, craning their necks to look through the open door into my room. The old people have emerged from their holes like rats. I hide in my bed as best I can. I’m so afraid that all at once I get my voice back. I scream:
“‘Shut the door!’
“Once the door has been shut and the maid has gone, I cry my eyes out, I can’t stop, till evening. It’s a change from the silence that’s been stifling me for days. Around eight o’clock the maid comes to see me with bread and ham on a plate. She says:
“‘You’re carrying on too much, Little Misery. Now stop it. Your pillow’s soaking wet.’
“She wipes my face with the hem of her white-flowered red dress.
“Her name is Farida. She’s the real mistress of the Villa Anthelme. The old people just have to behave themselves. She scolds them one by one, each in turn, and she runs everything like a real queen.”
Delphine is talking faster and faster. She can’t get the words out quickly enough. The tempo of her speech has been restored to her a hundredfold. After a very long silence she really gets going.
“If you only knew, Édouard dear, the things that go on at the Villa Anthelme.”
She delights at the rest of her account in advance, as if it were an avalanche of words preparing to tumble down.
The heat seeps in through the closed shutters. Delphine looks out between the slats at the courtyard baking in the sun. She comes back to me.
“I wanted to take a bath before I came to see you. Soap myself from head to toe. I washed my hair yesterday, but already it’s like spun glass. So much accumulated sweat, grime, and tears. I want to erase every sign of my past life. Forget Patrick Chemin. Get a new skin. Into the sea at noon. Start from square one. Never be fat again, or sad. Here I am before you for the first time. Take a good look at me. See how clean and new I am. My imaginary child is in the garbage. As for the bath, Farida told me I could. She assured me that the youngest of the old people bathes on the days his girlfriend comes to visit. The bathroom is big and high like a chapel, and the tub sits on a platform like an altar. Four doors flatten the four corners. No key. The tub as deep as an abyss. The still, hot water Farida has run. The verdigris copper taps. I’m in water up to my chin. My hair in a chignon on top of my head. The delight of all that water. I breathe under water. I blow bubbles. In a little while, a strange rustling comes into the gentle foaming of the bubbles, from the other side of the doors. The old people are spying on me through the keyholes. I hear them breathing and stamping at the four compass points. I get out of the water as fast as the wind, and wrap myself in the huge towel Farida has laid out. The one and only big, white, soft terrycloth towel in the Villa Anthelme. The
other towels are the size of a gauze pad, they’re scratchy and they don’t dry you properly. Farida brings me something to eat and drink. She tucks me in even when I pout against the wall. She scolds me and wipes away my tears. Her big breasts. Her swollen mouth. If she looks away for just a minute, I go back to the street and follow the first person who comes along, dogging his footsteps till he turns to me and takes charge of me.”
I point out to Delphine that it would be best if she stayed at the Villa Anthelme as long as she can before she goes back to her country.
“I don’t have a country. Get that into your head, Édouard dear. No country at all. Where I come from was my grandmother, only my grandmother, and she’s dead.”
✦✦✦
The beautiful summer is stagnating in the courtyard and above the city, is ripening gently, secretly preparing its decline and its end. I’m reading Murder on the Orient Express. I lose my way in the obscure plot. I think I hear a steam engine whistling in the night, while in full daylight, at home on Rue Bonaparte, the muffled sound from the porte-cochère rings out and slowly fades.
It’s her. It can’t be anyone else. I listen for her footsteps on the stairs. I drop my book. I hear a child’s voice calling to me through the door:
“Are you there, Édouard dear? I need to talk to you right now!”
Her hair, plaited into two long braids that pull at her temples, makes her look more offended than usual.
“I’m not hanging around the Villa Anthelme any longer. I’d rather go back to the street.”
She stretches out on my bed, slaps her braids against her shoulders like whips. Straightens up and says in a strained voice, urged by I know not what wild wind that presses on her and leaves her breathless:
“I have to tell you. Since yesterday, Farida has refused to bring my meals to my room. She flung me into the dining room with the old people. I have to face the old people at the table in the dining room of the Villa Anthelme. My arrival creates a sensation. They all look up. Their gazes all focus on me. They stop chewing when I sit down. They drop their forks and knives to look at me. The silence they cast over me is like black ice. A field of black ice to catch me in, to put me into the same state as them, like poor frozen beasts.”
Nervously Delphine undoes her braids. Her hair, set free, corkscrews around her. She brings her hands together, groans in a barely perceptible voice:
“Farida doesn’t look after me. She leaves me all by myself. I’d got used to her warmth, the warmth of a living creature. The others give me goose pimples. Their cold hands. The way they roll their eyes — the eyes of a malevolent dead fish. And Farida, who goes from table to table dishing out the meat, rice, or vegetables, the cheese or stewed fruit. She refuses to change Madame Lebeau’s plate between the meat and the fruit. With her hands on her hips she declares, so all the people in the dining room, who are listening in silence, can hear:
“‘You old owl. Are you the one that washes the dishes?’
“I saw that Farida was as fierce with the poor creatures as an animal tamer swinging his stick inside a cage.”
She talks. I listen. The long hours of midsummer, drop by drop. Suddenly she falls silent. Gathers her impressions. Doesn’t know how to approach them. Steeps herself in silence again. Silently regains the power of speech. Broods on the insult to Madame Lebeau. Swallows at length. Briskly flips her hair over her shoulders. Decides to say something but doesn’t know quite how to go about it. Thinks very hard about Madame Lebeau and how she was insulted by the maid.
“She left the table without picking up her napkin, which had fallen to the floor. She walked right across the dining room, head high, feet awkward in her house slippers. Everyone watching. Everyone listening. It’s so rare that anything happens at the Villa Anthelme. We hear Madame Lebeau shuffling up the stairs, step by step, breathless and plaintive. Her door on the second floor slams in the vast silence. We go back to eating, but more slowly, moving food from one cheek to the other, like a child who doesn’t want to swallow. For three days, not a sign of Madame Lebeau. Nowhere. Not in the dining room. Not on the stairs. Not in the hallway that leads to the bathroom. By the third day I wondered if she was dead in her room. I knocked on her door. Several times. With a pause between knocks. Eventually she came to the door. Brusque, like some crank. I asked how she was. I observed that she was very much alone. She jumped out of her room. A little grey viper about to bite. She came into my room. My door stayed wide open. Her amazing speed. Her quick little movements that could stagger you, body and soul. She repeated ‘alone,’ ‘alone,’ as if she were tearing the word between her teeth, spitting it on the ground, then picking it up to bite it again.
“‘Everyone’s alone. I’m alone. You’re alone. Or maybe you’re hiding someone? Under your bed? In your closet?’
“She looks under the bed. She looks in the closet. Shaking like a leaf.
“‘You can see there’s nobody anywhere.’
“She whispers, like an echo, ‘nobody,’ and ‘anywhere,’ breathing very fast, looking deathly tired.
“Then she totters out and double-locks herself inside her own room.”
Delphine ends her speech with a great sigh, brings Madame Lebeau’s solitude back to herself, is engulfed in it for a moment.
“Once in my life I was more alone than Madame Lebeau, the very worst of all the times in the world, and that was after my grandmother died. And now that Farida has kicked me out, it’s starting again.”
She is talking in her stranger’s voice again, very low, her soul and her heart so far away that I feel I’m hearing her in a dream.
Caught in the act of listening and heeding, I refuse to follow this little girl along the uncertain roads of loss and desolation. For want of anything better to do, I offer her food and drink. I set the table and heat up a pizza.
She eats and drinks warily. Barely sips her wine. Spits the anchovies onto the edge of her plate, the olive pits into the ashtray. She gazes fixedly at me across the table and prepares what she is going to say. Lays down her knife and fork.
“Please, Édouard dear, let me sleep here, only sleep. I’ve left the Villa Anthelme.”
She wants me to be kind and compassionate, while I rage and refuse.
✦✦✦
I make her lie down in the bed right against the wall. I, the true master of the bed, stretch out at the other edge. I leave the light on. I look at her. She’s pale and thin. She looks at me. I am heavy and dark, with curly hair. When I pull off my shirt, she turns away. I switch off the light. Undress in the dark. Stretch out again. A lock of her hair brushes my shoulder. I lift it off at once. I establish a clear boundary in the very middle of the bed, a kind of no man’s land where it’s best not to venture. It’s not that this girl excites me, but I’m afraid of I know not what sombre power emanating from her small person as she is given over in the darkness to the old demons that torment her.
She is lying there perfectly flat under the sheet, moving neither her head nor her body. Her profile indistinct in the dark. Barely audible words break away from her, move across my cheek like warm mist.
“At the Villa Anthelme there’s someone who’s hidden, someone more highly placed than Farida, who gives orders to the whole house in secret. Someone authoritarian and sacred stands behind a closed double door with dark mouldings, on the ground floor just next to the front door. She’s the one who is really in charge of the Villa Anthelme. When I was walking down the hall this morning, I heard her voice, an old woman’s voice, bellow and break. No doubt angry at having played dead for so many days and nights now, she was crying out to make up for the time she’d lost. Farida received her anger, flung by the bucketful. I saw Farida go in like a little girl waiting to be punished. I saw her come out again, all limp in her floral-patterned dress, like a big red and white flower withering and drooping on its stem. Farida saw me —
saw that I knew everything, that I’d been standing there in the lobby for several minutes. She couldn’t bear no longer being the queen in my eyes. She turned on me. Her eyes were bulging out of her head like shiny marbles, black and white. She cried out in turn:
“‘Get out of here, Little Misery! I don’t want to see your face any more! Get the hell out!’
“She helped me pack my bags. Her hands were trembling. She threw me out on the street. And she hailed a taxi, waving both arms over her head as if she were calling for help.”
What do I do with this girl lying beside me in my bed, like an old wife telling me about her day? I think I’ll dream all alone at her side, like a very old husband. She says good night, and she drapes her hair across her face, to hide.
✦✦✦
She pretends to be drinking her café au lait, face buried in her bowl up to the eyes. Confesses that she’s not crazy about coffee.
I make her some tea.
Between us, no conversation is possible. She’s too sleepy, it seems, to launch into one of her customary long monologues. And I’m too much on my guard again to want to listen to her. I’m annoyed at her for having slept in my bed. I retreat into silence in front of her and wait for her to go away.
A sleepwalker who butters slices of bread and dips them in her tea. Her slow movements nearly coming to a standstill above the plate and bowl. A little more and her knife and her little spoon will fall to the tablecloth, and sleep will make her head droop to her chest. She murmurs that she’s very tired.
I tell her that if she wants to stay in Paris, she’ll have to look for work. She admits, her lips barely moving, that she’s never worked and doesn’t know how to do anything.
She closes her eyes, turns very pale, speaks softly — listening to a voice, it seems, that repeats as an echo in the absolute void of the room.
“My grandmother used to say that I was a poor little thing who hurt all over, and that I needed to rest.”
