That Time of Year

by Marie Ndiaye

  Herman sipped gingerly at the slightly musty sweet wine. He nodded in agreement, enchanted by Métilde’s rapturous, almost transparent face. It occurred to him that he might say, “I’m a teacher, maybe in Paris there’s something I can do…” but he hesitated and missed his chance.

  “I’m just fine the way I am,” mumbled Charlotte.

  “No, you’re not,” Métilde answered softly, sighing, “you’re absolutely not.”

  She stroked Charlotte’s head and said:

  “Monsieur Herman, how can we get her to understand that she needs to make something of herself?”

  Leafing through a manual on computer languages, he smiled awkwardly and shrugged with his elbows. Now and then the spattering rain on the windows half drowned out their voices. Encouraged by Métilde’s full, smooth face, thinking he could trust her, he asked if she thought he was obliged to say yes to the tennis match with Gilbert against the district councilor.

  PART TWO

  1 – Herman would pass by the inevitably wide-open door to Alfred’s room, shared by Charlotte, and see the bed strewn with the cassettes she listened to whenever she had a free moment, and magazines devoted to cooking or scandals involving people whose names meant nothing to Herman but were well known to Charlotte, which she read with a passion that—Herman grumpily told himself—she never threw into anything else. Charlotte would get up very early to bring the president his breakfast, and often he would criticize what she brought him; he was always out of sorts in the morning. Then he would leave for work at the town hall and Charlotte would set about cleaning the rooms, giving Herman no chance to approach her like he wished he could: she worked with great diligence, fearing her mother, and although she never said it to his face she didn’t like him even simply asking a question that would force her to turn off the vacuum to hear, or pause as she scrubbed out a sink or swatted a bedspread. Any other time of day, the mother would have urged Charlotte to talk with Herman for as long as he liked. But during housekeeping hours she’d come creeping up, stand behind Herman, smiling, affable, and assign Charlotte some task or other—keeping her eyes on her—in a voice that Herman found nothing short of exquisite in spite of himself. And, since he hadn’t yet talked to her about the exorbitant price of his board and didn’t feel at ease in her presence, he’d soon wander off, slowly, regretfully. He went back to his room, glancing toward the window. The rain poured down, erasing the hills in the distance. Sometimes, with the skies so gray and the clouds so low, he couldn’t even see the face of the old woman across the way, but he no longer minded being watched. Because was there ever anything strange or private in his behavior? The whole village could have had their eyes glued to him twenty-four hours a day, watching his every move, and they would have nodded their heads with unwavering approval.

  Then, having nothing else to do, he would take a little nap. He would also sometimes walk past Gilbert’s room, but quickly, staring straight ahead. And if he sensed that Gilbert was there, lying on his bed, smoking, then he would race to the toilets at the end of the hall and lock himself in until Gilbert was gone.

  Sometimes the father would happen upon Herman and, to make conversation, tell him with a sigh:

  “Our Gilbert’s out of work, it’s been more than two years, what hope do we have of finding something for him in the village?”

  And the mother would chime in:

  “It’s sad, seeing him hang around here all the time with nothing to do. At least he has his weekend connections in L., something’s going to come of that, I’m sure of it.”

  But the parents, proud of their son’s handsome face, didn’t want him to be offered a position as some sort of subordinate. They wanted to see him in business school, and they were indignant that it required a baccalauréat, which Gilbert didn’t have. And so they’d staked their pride on seeing to it that he got in without one, through the intercession of his friend Lemaître, an important figure in L. They also seemed to have gotten the idea that Herman was somehow going to help Gilbert get on his feet, although they hadn’t heard about the tennis match. They lavished him with kindness and attention, particularly the mother, but Herman was still resolved to pay only half of what they were asking when the end of the month came. Which was why he avoided her, despite the captivating courtesies she was capable of dispensing.

  All day long he would wander around the hotel, heading aimlessly upstairs, then down, trying to bump into Charlotte, hiding from Gilbert and the mother. He ceremoniously greeted any other guests he met, and they him. They were mostly traveling salesmen. The rain and the cold discouraged any thought of going out. And with Charlotte he had the emptiest conversations over and over, never unhappy about it, adapting to the simple way her thoughts progressed, affectionately squeezing a bit of her flesh here or there. Charlotte’s tranquil existence was filled with housekeeping, magazines, and serving the ever capricious and demanding president, Alfred. How could she need anything more? Indifferent to her appearance, she always dressed in the same unbecoming clothes.

  “She charms the worst part of me,” mused Herman, “the laziest part, the most shiftless. The hours go by without thought or vitality, and everything’s the same, from minor villainies to virtuous good deeds. How restful, yes, what a restful life this is! What a restful place is this village!”

  At six thirty, he would rouse himself and go wait for Métilde in the lobby of the town hall. They drank a glass of fortified wine at her apartment, all the while discussing Métilde’s chances of success, as well as the possibility of saving Charlotte, which interested Herman less, because he didn’t believe anyone could or should extract her from her torpor. Dynamic tension kept Métilde’s shoulders straight and square. And although he was very fond of her, a growing weariness made Herman less talkative around Métilde every day.

  “The Bodin Marble Works, the Vocational Training Certificate, all that fuss and work day after day, what’s the point?” he vaguely asked himself. “Who cares?”

  He wasn’t far from thinking that a rudimentary, inert existence in the hibernating village was the only life worth living. But he still forced himself to believe that—with her pure, honest, industrious will—Métilde brought out all his finest instincts, that her presence was good for him, as the unconsciously toxic Charlotte’s was not. He paged through Métilde’s books, did his best to provide useful advice. He would have been happier sprawled on the comforter; he would gladly have lain there silent and mindless for hours on end.

  Then Gilbert, Métilde’s long-time lover, would show up, pouring himself generous glasses of port and holding forth, perpetually upbeat and confident. Gilbert and Métilde would talk about leaving the village for the bustling subprefecture city of L., Gilbert smugly depicting his life as a student admitted to the First School of Business with no baccalauréat, while in a few hopeful words Métilde modestly evoked an executive secretary position at the Bodin Marble Works, then gave up even on that, not wanting to even think of leaving before she’d saved Charlotte from her pointlessness.

  “Yes, life in this village is a good life to live,” thought Herman, “once summer’s over there’s nothing to do with yourself, and boredom without awareness or resentment slows the mind, and the subprefecture city of L. seems unreachable in the storms: you have to accept it, and even deep in an ugly little room with flowered wallpaper, find your way to restfulness, to a sort of dulled, larval inertia. Such a good life!”

  All the same, he took care not to interrupt Gilbert and Métilde as, more and more heated, their voices sharp and seething, they went on and on about the village, suddenly scorned amid their evocations of L.’s superiority. In the village, Gilbert couldn’t enjoy or exploit his prerogatives as a universally charming young man. In the village, Métilde couldn’t rise professionally, she could learn only the theory of a life enriched and liberated by a very modern career, which in her eyes was perfectly represented by the vision of herself entering the Bodin company’s receipts and expenses into a computer. In the vi
llage, Métilde had no prospects but ribbons for her blouse and everything that came with them. She wanted no such life, she said, for her dear Charlotte either.

  “Oh, why not?” thought Herman, submerged in his deep lethargy.

  Tired of this talk, he abruptly changed the subject to his missing family, and asked what might become of them and of himself. To his own surprise, he was racked by a dry sob. But could he even quite remember what Rose and the boy looked like? He could not—little more than their first names. He could very precisely picture the vague, indifferent expression that sometimes dulled Métilde’s eyes, he knew everything down to the exact tone of the dismissive little “oh” that would escape Gilbert’s suddenly slack lips.

  “What has to happen will happen,” one or the other of them would invariably say.

  They showed no sign of discomfort, at most mild surprise that Herman was revisiting a closed subject, with what might have struck them as a sort of impropriety.

  “Alfred wouldn’t be happy with me,” Herman would tell himself.

  Nonetheless, just once, Métilde let slip a word that Herman turned over and over in his mind without quite managing to connect it to his problem, though his problem was precisely what she was talking about. She said something about the many avatars in this damp region. Gilbert yawned, so Métilde dutifully perked up and announced that the local want ads were always asking for people with the Vocational Training Certificate, and once you had that in your hand, no, you’d have no problem finding a job in L. that paid eight thousand francs after taxes.

  Herman choked down the rest of his wine and said his goodbyes. Through his weariness, he was grateful to Métilde for enlivening the past hour with her cheerful chatter and the pretty sight of her cheeks pinkening with every mention of the Vocational Training Certificate, etc.

  Later, beneath his umbrella, his thoughts turned to the avatars, but focused, sustained reflection was growing hard for him, as he had so few occasions to practice it. He caught himself daydreaming or vacantly gazing at the dark shop windows, imagining the merchant women at home, wondering if among family they permitted themselves to liberate their customarily compressed and flattened breasts just a little. After eight, the streets were deserted. Low, narrow windows between the timbers, dim lights, not a sound filtering out, not even a television. Herman hurried to the Relais, almost embarrassed at the thought of being seen outside at that hour.

  “Ah, I was waiting for you,” Alfred always said, sitting on Herman’s bed, ten minutes after dinner was done.

  “I stopped by Métilde’s,” Herman would answer.

  But Alfred knew every move he made, like everyone in the village, Herman supposed. And so—though as time went by he found it less and less disagreeable, more and more inoffensive—he had to endure the assault of Alfred’s impetuous friendship, his eagerness to hear Herman tell him he was happy and felt himself becoming a genuine villager who didn’t miss Paris at all in spite of the constant rain, and the little there was to do, and the solid gray sky masking the hills on all sides. And once Herman obediently acknowledged his contentment and the relative tranquility of his mind, Alfred would triumphantly promise he’d be reunited with Rose and the child, possibly soon—although he himself couldn’t say—but when he did, the meeting might not bring him any more joy than he would feel next summer, when, in the streets of the village they had only come to for shopping (for lavish, impulsive grocery purchases), he would once again see all the Parisian vacationers. The wife and the child would remind him of life in the capital, and Alfred was convinced that Herman would in fact look away, out of boredom and disgust with that existence.

  “Well, why not?” thought Herman, trying to make out the face of the old woman across the way, the mother of the present charcutière.

  The president’s prediction no longer offended him, scarcely interested him. Now he knew Alfred dyed or bleached his hair to match the intense blondness around him, since his eyebrows were still black and thick, like the hairs that darkened his wrists and upper hands. Out of pure affection for Herman, Alfred regularly offered to have Charlotte serve him breakfast, as she did his, at no added expense.

  “No, no, never,” Herman would answer, feeling the burden of Alfred’s solicitude, Alfred’s eagerness to see him make full use of Charlotte like he did, and for the sake of Herman’s comfort and pleasure, Alfred would be perfectly prepared to secretly pay off the mother for Charlotte’s added labor.

  “And why would he do that?” Herman limply asked himself.

  Because he was trying to keep him there in the village, to keep him rhapsodizing several times a day over the excellent life to be had here, but Herman didn’t need Alfred, didn’t need Alfred’s devoted attention to the perfect repose of his soul, to feel a gratitude toward the off-season village for what it was giving him—a progressive indifference to action and mental labor—and so Herman, idle and drowsing, his half-closed eyes vaguely registering the pretentious little flowers interlaced on the ceiling, came to think that vitality is in no way a necessity, nor is a certain sort of happiness made up of varied activities, heart-felt affections, and a comfortable, discreet wealth, like he’d known until recently with Rose in the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris. But neither did he want that Parisian life to be taken away from him, he felt no contempt for it. It was just that, for the moment, he was powerfully drawn to the possibility of an indolent but not ignoble, serenely oblivious degeneration. Charlotte didn’t think she had to be saved, but was she right? Nothing was less certain, but he felt his friendship for her growing.

  2 – With Métilde’s intercession, he’d gotten his name on the list for an audience with the mayor, having accepted that he had to wait his turn. And now a meeting had been scheduled, and the day had come. He wearily made his way to the town hall, no longer convinced that his problem deserved a place among the cases requiring urgent attention. Hadn’t they already made it very clear that his situation was of no particular interest? He gave his name at the front desk, then climbed the stairs alone to the mayor’s office, which occupied the whole second floor. There he had to identify himself to another secretary, who would verify the rationale behind his request for an interview and usher him in when the time came. Herman recognized her immediately: she was his one-time neighbor on the plateau, the farmwoman, the first person he’d gone to see to ask about Rose. She gave him a wide, detached smile and in a precise voice told him she knew why he’d come to see the mayor and in all honesty didn’t think it was sufficient grounds to disturb him, but she would let Herman in all the same, taking into account the friendships he’d made in this very building, among the employees.

  “So you don’t work at the farm anymore?” asked Herman, for whom this reunion was not a pleasant one.

  He remembered losing his composure in front of her, and he was ashamed.

  “When the cold weather comes I switch to the town hall,” she explained laconically.

  Then she stood up to open the mayor’s door, announced, “Monsieur Herman,” and with a graceful one-handed wave showed him in.

  It was an enormous room of ultramodern décor, exactly like downstairs. The mayor was sitting at a large desk made of a single plate of glass, no papers or pencils before him. But his serious air and stern posture made an impression on Herman, who forced himself to shake off his apathy.

  “I know everything I have to know about your case,” the mayor said with a smile. “What I don’t know is what you’re hoping for from me.”

  Herman simply wanted to introduce himself to the leading figure in the village; to make sure his case was known; in short, to take the steps required by the most basic rules of civic life: he told him that. At the same time, if the mayor had any thoughts on his problem, he would be glad to hear them. And he sat down facing him on a metal chair, his thighs, like the mayor’s, slightly magnified and deformed through the desk’s glass. The mayor sighed, as if steeling himself to say something unpleasant. And what follows he threw out all at
one go, not looking at Herman, but still maintaining the slightly precious, affable, congenial air he would never have dreamed of abandoning, even if he could. It was obvious, he declared, obvious indeed to everyone here—Alfred included, no matter what he might have told Herman—that Herman would never again see his wife and his child as he knew them, in their customary, untransfigured form, speaking as they spoke in their ordinary lives. No, Herman had to renounce all hope of ever again seeing his wife and his child that way. This had happened before, and it was the same every time. Nothing set Herman’s case apart from the others. No one here felt any surprise at what had befallen him, much less troubled themselves over it for long, and when they saw the missing pair on the village streets or, who knows, on the roads in the hills, they would simply say hello to them, without fear or surprise or any particular joy. They might not even bother to tell Herman. Because there was nothing at all interesting about it, in any real sense.

  “But, I mean, will they be alive?” asked Herman, his voice shaking a little.

  “In a way,” answered the mayor.

  He looked at his watch. Herman understood that the time set aside for this meeting was strictly limited. He realized that he shouldn’t try to eat into the time allotted to the next hopeful, that he should be satisfied with whatever he was told and stay patient and polite.

  “In a way,” the mayor repeated.

  As if doing Herman a great favor, he explained: They would be alive, but only in the manner of the woman who peers into the Relais, whom Alfred must have told Herman was “the mother of the present charcutière.” What Alfred didn’t say, and what the mayor now allowed himself to divulge on the theory that Herman wouldn’t have gone much longer not knowing it, is that in all likelihood the face belonged to Alfred’s wife, who’d come with him for a vacation in the village fourteen years before and had never been seen again, except in her current role and her current setting, smiling and peering at the rear façade of the Relais day and night from a tiny window that was indeed located over the charcuterie, in what must be an uninhabited room, a sort of storage area, in the charcutiers’ apartment. But no one could see any point in asking questions about that room. Pleasant, never intrusive, that face, that being had chosen to settle in with them. She always behaved herself and knew the ways of the village, which is all that mattered. Some of the villagers recognized her as Alfred’s wife—he’d reported her disappearance way back when—and then she appeared at the window three weeks afterward, fresh and discreet. Who would ever have thought of even mentioning it to Alfred? He’d rather not have it spread around that it was his wife, his wife’s face. He had every right. Everyone understood his reticence. But they knew the truth. But they didn’t bother themselves with that truth in any way. Now and then—rarely—someone spotted Alfred’s vanished wife in the village, on the main square. They said hello to her, kept walking, nothing more.