by Anne H
Her blind face comes very close to me above the table. She speaks with her mouth shut. I guess at, rather than hear, what she is saying.
“They stole my child at the Hôtel-Dieu. They told me he was dead. They said I was stark raving mad. How do you expect me to work like everybody else?”
And all at once she brightens up, grave and in full possession of what she sees before her.
“My grandmother spends all Sunday afternoon rocking on the front verandah. On Sunday the rockers of her big, shiny, red straw-bottomed chair go back and forth on the floor of the verandah for hours. I like their smooth sound, it joins the murmur from the fields all around. I can hear that gentle rubbing of wood against wood in my head day and night, in Paris, Nantes, Aix, on Rue Gît-le-Coeur, at the Saint-Sulpice fountain, at the Villa Anthelme. When she died, my grandmother fell out of her rocking chair on the verandah. Not one moan. Not one sigh. Not a single cry for help. She fell like someone who has finished rocking and lets herself drop to the ground. A sound both muffled and light. The wind was blowing so hard that day, the empty chair kept rocking by itself in the wind while my grandmother was lying there dead on the ground. The doctor. The priest. The notary. I did what had to be done. At the house. At the church. At the graveyard. In the notary’s office. I went to all the places you have to go to in cases of death, burial, and inheritance. The wind was still blowing. The rocking chair kept moving back and forth by itself in the wind. I couldn’t stand that relentless creaking and I set out down the main highway, leaving the house I’d inherited to squatters, and the chair rocking on the verandah. Safe in a small leather pouch that I fastened to my belt was the other part of my inheritance, in coins and bills. Just enough to survive on until someone took care of me again. I walked along the road for hours, over the horizon, I think, and I thought I would die.”
Both her face and her body change before my eyes. Here she is in front of me, filled with terror and tears, running away from her grandmother’s death on the road. Too much, it’s too much. I’m disgusted and I turn my head away. All this girl wants is my tears in return for hers. I will not grant her that complicity. Dry as an old tree against a stone wall, I inform Delphine that she’ll have to find another shelter for the coming night. I give her the address of a small hotel in Montparnasse that someone told me about.
✦✦✦
Édouard dear, do you want to know what’s going on in the Rue J. C.? It’s a street full of girls swaying on their high heels. Redheads, blondes — they lost their original colour long ago — they blaze in the sun or the rain, among the gaudy neon signs. Starting at four in the afternoon. The tallest one has the red mane of a mad mare hanging all the way down her back. Her gleaming black boots come up to her thighs and they are inlaid with bits of mirrors. We meet on the sidewalk. She’s constantly parading back and forth. I’m looking for my hotel. She despises me, she hates me from the first hard, furtive glance. Édouard dear, why did you drop me there in the middle of all those hookers? The hotels are named for flowers: Les Hortensias, Les Glycines, Le Volubilis. Only the Saint-Gildas displays its name, the name of a Breton saint, in phosphorescent letters. That’s where you sent me to sleep. I was wide awake all night. The big clock on the wall in my room sounds the quarter-hour and the half-hour with a muffled thud. Beneath my window the red mare paces the sidewalk and hates me along the way, through the closed shutters. I’d rather sleep at your place, Édouard dear. It’s more peaceful. Just sleep. I’m so tired. Ever since I’ve had my grandmother’s death chasing me, and Patrick Chemin, who is rotten. So long, big brother. Till tonight.
Delphine
I found this letter when I came back from a long stroll along the quays. The Seine was flowing slow and grey in the mist, and the edge of the water disappeared into the hazy sky. A wan light rose from the river, as it does when there’s snow on the ground and the earth is brighter than the air. It was the beginning of September. The thought of Delphine followed my every step, like a stray cat that twines itself around your legs, that you refuse to look at for fear you’ll have to take it in.
I barely have time to read her letter, which she’s slipped under the door, when there she is, with her bundle on her back. She says she’s tired. She stretches out on my bed and stays there, fully dressed, listening to her weariness. She spies on her motionless body, searching for the deep-seated reasons for her distress.
“‘Where does it hurt, sweetheart?’ my grandmother would ask.”
She repeats that she’s tired. I tell her she’ll have to get a job like everyone else. She laughs. Gets up abruptly. Swears she doesn’t hurt anywhere. I notice how small and white her teeth are.
Delphine is telling her story again, as if she can’t stop, regardless of what it may cost her.
“Excused from dishes, housework, cooking, from mending, from hens and rabbits, by my grandmother, who does everything in my place, I rest. At night I no longer hear the cries of hungry infants piercing my skull. I sleep to my heart’s content, day and night. Between naps, I read. A huge fatigue turns up between books, between naps. A black hole to swallow me up. The poets keep me company, and I’m damned along with them, in the books and in my room in the country where I read. I read and I dream about hell and about the scarlet sky at the end of hell, like a bright border of flames. Always, my grandmother comforts me and says sweet things to me, things so comforting and sweet after my huge storms of incomprehensible pain. I hear her empty chair rocking on the empty verandah. I escape from that intolerable rocking by hurrying down the deserted road. My footsteps resound on the asphalt. Tap, tap, tap. A real runaway horse. But smaller. Not so strong. A little clicking of hoofs on the asphalt. A very small runaway horse. Driven onto the road. A very small, panicky clicking along the asphalt. And I’m nearly out of breath, close to dying. The first car stops. The first person appears. His head out the window. His head bent towards me. His gaze, like no other. Let him look at me just once more and I’ll be his entirely. Let him recognize me straightaway as his inexpressible soul, let him take me with him right away, to a life that is comforting and sweet. Out of this world. Let him settle me in a safe place filled with incomparable love. An impenetrable place where I’ll be safe from terror. There are black suitcases piled on the back seat of his car. He gazes at me with his doe eyes. His long lashes. He is Patrick Chemin. He comes from another land, across the ocean. He sells flies and fish hooks. I have to be picked up right away or I’ll drop dead on the hill. Too many kilometres in my body. Haven’t eaten. Or drunk. Too much walking down the road. My grandmother’s chair keeps swaying in the wind behind me. I go limp and I fold, like cloth. My breathing pounds outside of me. Let me get my breath back. The wet grass where I fall full-length chills me and swallows me up at the same time. I’ve passed out in the wet grass. He carries me to his car, which smells of beer and smoke. Puts a compress on my forehead. Takes me to town.”
She is alone before me, as I am alone before her. She extracts her life from between her ribs, a little at a time. I respond with the brutality of the deaf, who hear nothing and who measure neither voice nor speech.
“You always talk about your grandmother. What about your parents? Didn’t you ever have parents?”
“A father, a mother, brothers, sisters, masses of them, masses. Everything you need to make a family. To populate the entire world. The only visible problem is the lack of room for sleeping. Three to a bed. Dresser drawers set on the floor. To sleep in. An air mattress in the tub. Diapers drying everywhere. On radiators. On lines strung up in the kitchen. Shot through with cries. I am shot through with cries. I didn’t have a childhood. The first-born. Made to pick them up one by one as they come into the world. When my grandmother arrived, I’d been lying on a bed for three days as if I were dead. With my parents’ approval she decided to adopt me. As soon as I was at my grandmother’s, at her house in the country, along the very edge of the paved road, I settled into
a peace like no other. At home, I was replaced right away. Scarcely two days after my departure, my fourteenth little sister was born, chubby and round. I’ve never heard her cries rip through the air above the rooftops. My grandmother was my nest. I’d never known anything like it. And I kept cheeping to go back to my nest and rest. I didn’t return to the house in town, and no one in the family came to the country to see me at my grandmother’s. Not my father, not my mother, not Malvina, who’s going on six. Not Petit Louis or anything or anyone. All alone with my grandmother. For all eternity.”
Her voice monotonous, inexhaustible, lower and lower, muffled. Her story with no beginning or end. I’m becoming exasperated. And my own story down deep inside me is asking to be heard in turn. What a fine dialogue of the deaf Delphine and I would have. I cut short the preposterous idea of such a conversation. I take refuge in the kitchen till she falls silent and my soul does too.
Sleep overcame her as she lay in my bed with her long hair tangled and her clothes a mess.
I lie down beside her. Switch off the light. Listen to her slightly husky breathing in the dark.
The warmth of her sleeping body next to mine. It’s so dark in the room that I can’t see her face. I feel the desire to do with her what a man does with a woman in his bed. I kiss her lightly on the cheek. I touch her breasts under the T-shirt. She jumps up. Speaks very softly and with difficulty, as if each word were being wrenched from her.
“I’m living through a disaster, Édouard dear. Leave me alone. I followed Patrick Chemin like a dog. For days. Sometimes without seeing his face. Just an attraction, an odour that told me where he’d been. The first time, it was in a town of all levels and castes, the one where I was born. His eye, the eye of a sacred cow, had already ravaged me on the road, before he brought me with him to the hotel in town. I liked his little poor man’s suitcases too. I bled a lot onto the hotel’s sheets. Patrick Chemin washed them in the washbasin in the room. The water was all red. He kept saying: “Good God! What have I done?” I gave birth to a dead child and my love died at the same time as my child. Patrick Chemin is a pig. And you too, Édouard dear. Men are all alike. No more of that, ever. Now let me go.”
The sound of a key turning in the lock. Middle of the night. Delphine has flung my door wide open on the landing. Goes slowly down the stairs. Her fatigue on her back like a stone.
✦✦✦
What get in my way most are her suitcases; she left them on my rug and I have to walk around them to go from the bed to the table. As for the rest, I’ll have to get used to those recurring images of her that make me shrink like an oyster reacting to drops of lemon juice.
Delphine anorexic amid the cheeping mob of her sisters and brothers, who are hungry for her. Delphine at the house of her grandmother, who is showing her how to tear a chicken leg to pieces with her teeth. The grandmother an ogress, Delphine an ogress in turn. The overwhelming love of the one and of the other. For the one and for the other. Grandmother and granddaughter.
Having not yet attained the point of absolute disappearance, the little ogress I found by the side of a fountain continues to eat into my time, to gnaw at my solitude. I can’t bear not knowing where she is in the city. It’s ten days now that she’s been gone. But what can she be doing, with no money, no baggage, in a city crowded by all those people returning from their August vacations?
I look everywhere for her, with no hope, as if for a needle in a stack of hay.
Is it possible I’ll find her mingling with the crowd on the grands boulevards, trailing behind the first man who comes along in the hope that he will turn around and assist her? I can’t help thinking that even if her destitution became extreme, she wouldn’t hold out her hand. She would never ask for charity. But she’d be so alone and lost that people would give her alms without her asking. No doubt she’d just have to be there on the sidewalk, waiting for the world to end, her eyes blank, her face pale and insulted, facing a stranger who would turn away, hounded by her for hours now, and she’d attract the most perverse compassion.
I’ve been walking since morning.
The city is spilled out abundantly around me. A smashed anthill. But shining in the lacklustre crowd, like lighted rallying points here and there, are anonymous joys, furtive rages.
No trace of Delphine.
All I can do is go home. Back to my stairs, my four walls, my catalogues.
Stéphane’s mother is recovering slowly. Stéphane won’t be back in Paris before next week. Marianne and Patrick are on Ile de Ré till September 15.
I damn myself all alone.
And now she has chosen this propitious time of my own damnation to perfect it in a way, to turn up at my place once again, and end her days in my bed.
A burst aneurysm, the autopsy report will declare.
III
Everything seems to be in order around me. The body removed. The bed made. The room aired out. All I have to do is resume my idiotic work, with complete peace of mind. It would take someone clever to get me out of here now. But here is her little voice, half worn away by the ravages of death, drawing me out of the opacity in which I’ve enclosed myself:
“Let me sleep here. Only sleep.”
She, always she, Delphine. Not sleeping. Acting in secret. Consuming her life and her death amid hidden violence.
Let the frozen ocean spread out between us as far as the eye can see. The pole and its ice. Never walk across the empty space. Between her and me. Between myself and me, I should say. Myself, in the flesh. Childhood abolished, the wish for non-return. Adulthood as a desiccated fruit. Very little air around me. Just enough to breathe between the pages of a mail-order catalogue. Delphine is unwelcome. All compassion unwarranted. Such frost inside me. Such cold, unimaginable for a creature from a temperate country like the one where I happened to be born. Exquisite light of the country around Tours. The banks of the Loire sandy and mild. A father, a mother, planted there, inadvertently no doubt, in the midst of rich, level soil. And the second son, born to them too late, like a bitter root doomed to freeze.
Who talks about breaking the ice? Harsh, forbidden memory (unless it is little Delphine, acid and stubborn). With what highly sharpened axe? What effort on the part of the entire being who seizes the axe with both hands? If by chance I were able to break the frozen sea within me, I would have Delphine at my fingertips, alive and shuddering, and perhaps, as well, a little boy who was killed, who was caught in the ice in the depths of my night. Above all, I must not become emotionally involved. The risk of waking the still water is too great. I prefer to let the dead bury the dead, twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea. The real terror is that the shadow of God’s pity should be well and truly lost in the depths of the accumulated gloom.
The greatest disturbance in the world — when the waters were divided from the firmament, with a crashing of foam and molten lava — would likely have had no more effect on me than Delphine, death at her back, climbing into my bed.
“Am I disturbing you?”
To silence Delphine. To exhaust with one stroke the words of the living woman, the silence of the dead woman. To prevent her from coming to me under the ice, like a little smelt. Let her be absolutely dead. Killed by me. Once and for all. Beyond any pity for her and for me.
Am I not free to rid myself of Delphine as something that’s in my way? To sort out her images one at a time before I dump them overboard? Now I am settling her one last time on the edge of the Saint-Sulpice fountain. I leave her for a moment on a country road in a strange land. I push her into Patrick Chemin’s arms. I cause Delphine’s child to live or die at will under her pink dress. I hear the cries of the imaginary child before he returns to the limbo he should never have left. Delphine’s gaze, so blue, slips through my fingers.
Nothing. Nothing more is happening under the transparent ice. Because I assure you that there is nothing aliv
e here, only the pitiful episodes in Delphine’s life and death, filing untidily towards the exit. A school of little fish good only for frying. Pointless to lean over the overflowing water. If minuscule eddies persist, their bubbles barely visible, it is only the end of imaginary abysses as they close up over strange, broken memories. Nothing. There is nothing more to see here. Only the echo of some lost words persists, pounds against my temple.
Sounds (nothing but sounds) loom up, syllables assemble and take pleasure in strange couplings. A little more and the words will come into view, sharp and clear; soon they will form complete sentences, and the meaning of the world, long since disappeared, cast back into the darkness, will become as clear as spring water dipped from the depths of the sea when its black crust is broken into pieces. A harsh memory split from top to bottom. I hear Madame Benoît testifying before the court of God:
“I swear it. That child’s eyes are filled with tears.”
Madame Benoît repeats the same thing again and again beneath the black ice. A very small fissure suffices, a mere thinning of the frozen surface, for the sound to come through. There is talk of a little boy with frozen tears as I find myself again at the age of five or ten.
This woman comes to visit my parents every Sunday, at the hour when they drink a pastis, and afterwards she drives away in her little violet Méhari, going down the roads of the country around Tours to gather up every sign of sorrow or grief for miles around.
And I, I, Édouard Morel — a forgetful man if ever there was one — am I to be placed forcibly in intimate contact with a whining child? Tender enough to die. Am I to be obliged to recognize myself in that child, the second-born of Rose and Guillaume Morel, cabinetmaker by trade? It’s no small thing to place my feet in my own footsteps and say: There it is, it’s me. Here is the house and the peaceful garden. The hydrangeas, blue on one side of the hedge and pink on the other because of the different soil my father transplanted there by the wheelbarrow load.
