Adèle

by Leïla Slimani

  * * *

  • • •

  He doesn’t want to do anything. Not even chat with her as she sits on the uncomfortable blue stool to the right of the bed and desperately tries to make conversation. She leafs through magazines, commenting on the latest gossip, but Richard barely responds. In the end she falls silent. She looks out the window at this hospital the size of a town, the elevated railway and the Gare d’Austerlitz.

  Richard has not shaved for a week and his ragged black beard makes him look harsher. He has lost a lot of weight. His leg in a cast, he stares straight ahead at the wall, overwhelmed by the thought of all the long weeks ahead.

  Each time, she convinces herself that she will spend the afternoon with him, keep him amused, wait for the doctor to do his rounds so she can ask questions. But no one comes. Time passes even more slowly because she has the feeling that they’ve been forgotten, as if no one is looking after them, as if this room does not exist and the afternoon stretches out endlessly before them. After half an hour she always ends up getting bored and leaving. She can’t help feeling relieved as she exits his room.

  She hates this hospital. These corridors where patients—in casts, bandaged, on crutches, with braces on their necks or backs—practice walking. These waiting rooms where people wait for the words that will change their lives. At night, in her sleep, she hears the cries of Richard’s neighbor, a senile octogenarian with a broken thighbone who screams: “Leave me alone, I’m begging you, please just go away!”

  One afternoon she is about to leave when a plump, chatty nurse enters the room. “Ah, that’s good, your wife came to see you. She can help wash you. It’ll be easier with two of us.” Richard and Adèle look at each other, horribly embarrassed by the situation. Adèle rolls up the sleeves of her sweater and takes the washcloth that the nurse holds out to her.

  “I’m going to lift him up and you can rub his back. Yes, that’s it.” Adèle moves the washcloth slowly over Richard’s back, under his hairy armpits, across his shoulders. She goes down to his buttocks. She is as diligent and gentle as she can be. Richard lowers his head and she knows he is crying. “I can finish up on my own if that’s okay with you,” she says to the nurse, who is about to reply when she notices that Richard is sobbing softly. Adèle sits on the bed. She takes Richard’s arm and rubs his skin, lingering over his long fingers. She doesn’t know what to say. She has never had to look after her husband before and this role makes her sad and disconcerted. Whether broken or in good health, Richard’s body is nothing to her. It provokes no emotion in her.

  Thankfully she has Xavier.

  “I can see that you’re upset,” Richard whispers suddenly. “I’m sorry I’ve been so withdrawn, so cold with you. I know this is all really hard for you too. But . . . I saw myself die, Adèle. I was so sleepy I couldn’t even keep my eyes open and then I lost control of my scooter. It all happened very slowly. I saw everything: the car coming toward me, the lamppost to my right. I skidded a long way. It seemed to last forever. I thought it was all over, that I was going to die because I’d worked too many hours. It opened my eyes. This morning I wrote an e-mail to the department head, resigning from my job. I’m leaving the hospital. I can’t stand it here anymore. I’ve made an offer on the house and I expect to become a partner at the Lisieux clinic soon. You should hand in your notice at the newspaper. Don’t wait till the last minute, it’d be a shame to leave them on bad terms. We’re going to start a new chapter of our life, darling. Maybe, in the end, we won’t look back on this accident in a purely negative light.”

  He looks up at her with his bloodshot eyes and smiles, and Adèle sees the old man with whom she will end her life. His sober face, his yellow complexion, his dry lips: this is her future. “I’m going to call the nurse. She can finish up without me. You should concentrate on getting better. Don’t think about all this. Just get some rest. We’ll talk about it again tomorrow.” She wrings out the washcloth in a rage, drops it on the bedside table, and leaves the room with a wave of her hand.

  It wakes her suddenly. She hardly has time to grasp the fact that she’s naked and cold, that she fell asleep with her face in an overflowing ashtray. It makes her chest shudder, it twists her guts. She tries to close her eyes. She turns over and begs sleep to swallow her up, to rescue her from this ugly situation. With her eyelids shut she buries herself in the swaying bed. Her tongue spasms so hard she wants to scream with pain. Green flashes shoot through her head. Her pulse accelerates. The nausea flays her stomach. Her throat trembles and her stomach seems to empty, as if preparing for expulsion. She tries to lift her legs to get the blood back to her brain, but she’s too weak. She just has time to crawl to the bathroom. She puts her head in the toilet bowl and starts throwing up a gray, acidic liquid. Violent retches wring out her entire body. She vomits from her mouth and her nose and she feels like she’s dying. She thinks it has stopped and then it starts again. As she vomits for a second time, her body twists into a coil and then collapses, exhausted.

  She doesn’t move. Lying on the tile floor, she slowly catches her breath. The back of her neck is soaked with sweat. She starts to feel cold: a relief. She presses her knees against her chest and weeps softly. The tears deform her yellow face, cracking the dry veneer of makeup on her skin. She swings back and forth, disgusted and betrayed by her body. She rubs the tip of her tongue over her teeth and feels a bit of food stuck to her palate.

  * * *

  *

  She doesn’t know how much time has passed. She doesn’t know whether she fell back asleep. She crawls over the tiles to the shower cubicle. Very carefully, step by step, she climbs to her feet. She is afraid she will faint, smash her skull on the bathtub, vomit yet again. Squatting, kneeling, on her feet. She can barely stand. She wants to sink her nails into the walls. She takes a deep breath and tries to walk in a straight line. Her nose is blocked, full of scabs. It hurts. Once she’s in the shower she notices the blood trickling down her thighs. She doesn’t dare look at her crotch but she knows it is raw, torn and swollen like the face of someone who’s been beaten up.

  * * *

  *

  She doesn’t remember much. Her body is her only clue. She didn’t want to spend the evening alone, she remembers that. It was agonizing, the thought of all those empty hours, not knowing how she would fill them, alone in her apartment. Within an hour Mehdi replied to the message she left on his website. He arrived at nine—with a friend and five grams of cocaine, as agreed. Adèle had made herself beautiful: just because you’re paying for it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make an effort. They sat in the living room. She liked Mehdi straightaway. His shaved head, his young thug’s face, his brown gums and sharp teeth. He was wearing a chain on his wrist. His nails were bitten to the quick. He was admirably vulgar. The friend was blond and quiet. A young, skinny boy named Antoine, who took an hour to remove his jacket.

  They looked a bit surprised by the apartment, with its modern, sophisticated decor. Sitting on the sofa, they were like two little boys embarrassed to be having tea with a grown-up. Adèle opened a bottle of champagne and Mehdi asked her what she did for a living.

  “I’m a journalist.”

  “A journalist? Fuck me, that’s wicked!”

  He took the sachet from his pocket and waved it in front of Adèle’s face. “Oh yeah, hang on!” She turned around and took a DVD cover from the bookshelf: one of Lucien’s cartoon shows. Mehdi laughed and poured out six lines on the smooth plastic. “After you. This is good stuff, you know,” he kept repeating. And he was right.

  Adèle could hardly feel her teeth anymore. Her nostrils stung and she felt a joyful, compulsive desire for alcohol. She grabbed the champagne bottle and threw her head back. When the liquid started dripping down her cheeks, into the hollows of her neck, soaking her clothes, she figured it was time. Antoine crouched behind her. He started unbuttoning Adèle’s blouse. They knew exactly what they were doing; it
was like a perfectly choreographed ballet. Mehdi licked her breasts and put his hand between her thighs while Antoine grabbed her by the hair.

  * * *

  *

  Adèle lets herself slide down the wall. She crouches under the jet of hot water. She needs to pee but her groin is hard, as if the muscle has hardened to bone during the night. She curls her toes, clenches her jaw, and when, at last, the rank urine starts trickling down her thigh, she groans with pain. Her vagina is just a shard of broken glass now, a maze of ridges and fissures. A thin layer of ice with frozen corpses floating beneath it. Her mons pubis, which she shaves every day, is purple.

  She was the one who asked for it. She can’t blame them. She asked Mehdi to do it, after an hour of screwing, an hour of him inside her, of Antoine inside her, of games and swaps. She couldn’t hold back any longer. She told him: “It’s not enough.” She wanted to feel it. She thought she could take it. Five times, maybe ten, he lifted up his leg and his sharp, bony knee smashed into her vulva. To start with, he was careful. He exchanged a surprised, slightly mocking look with Antoine. He shrugged and lifted his leg. He didn’t understand. But then, seeing her writhe, hearing her cries that were no longer human, he got a taste for it.

  Afterward . . . afterward, nothing else was possible. Afterward, she may have fainted. Perhaps they talked a bit longer. In any case, she woke up here, naked in an empty apartment. She hobbles slowly out of the shower, clinging tight to the wall, to the countertop. She grabs a towel and wraps it around her, then sits carefully, very carefully, on the edge of the bed. She looks at herself in the full-length mirror. She is old and deathly pale. The slightest movement sickens her. Even thinking is enough to make the walls spin.

  She should eat something. Drink something cold and sweet. She knows that the first mouthful will be delicious, it will quench her thirst, but once the liquid hits her empty stomach she will feel intensely nauseated, she will have a terrible migraine. She’ll have to resist. Lie down again. Drink a little bit, sleep a lot.

  * * *

  *

  The fridge is empty anyway. Adèle has not been shopping since Richard was hospitalized. The apartment is filthy. In the bedroom, clothes are strewn all over the place, pairs of panties litter the floor. A dress lies sleeping on the arm of the living-room sofa. Unopened letters are piled up in the kitchen. In the end, she will lose them all or throw them away. She’ll tell Richard that there wasn’t any mail. Adèle has not been to work all week. She promised Cyril an article that she is incapable of writing. She has been ignoring his texts and calls. Finally, in the middle of the night, she sends him a pathetic message explaining that she is spending her days at the hospital looking after her husband. That she’ll be back on Monday.

  She sleeps fully dressed, she eats in her bed. She is cold all the time. Her bedside table is covered with half-eaten containers of yogurt, spoons, and bits of dried bread. She sees Xavier whenever he has time, in the apartment on Rue du Cardinal Lemoine. When he calls, she gets out of bed, takes a long hot shower, throws her clothes on the floor, and empties her cupboard. Her bank account is overdrawn but she takes a taxi anyway. Every day she needs a little more makeup to camouflage the bags under her eyes, to brighten up her dull complexion.

  * * *

  *

  Her telephone rings. She pats the duvet, slowly lifts up the pillows. She can hear it but she can’t find it. Then she lifts her foot and sees it. She looks at the screen. Six missed calls. All from Richard, minutes apart. Six frenzied calls. Six furious calls.

  Today is January 15.

  The day Richard gets out. He is waiting for her. It’s January 15 and she’d forgotten. She gets dressed: a pair of old jeans and a man’s cashmere sweater.

  She sits down.

  She does her hair and makeup.

  Sits down.

  She tidies the living room, rolls her clothes up in a ball, then leans back against the kitchen cupboards, her forehead glazed with sweat. She looks for her handbag. It’s on the floor, completely empty.

  She has to go and pick up Richard.

  In the summer, Adèle’s parents would rent a small apartment near Le Touquet. Kader would spend all day at the bar with a gang of holiday friends. Simone would play bridge and sunbathe on the terrace, a reflective disk around her neck.

  Adèle enjoyed being left alone in the apartment. She would smoke mint cigarettes on the balcony. She would dance in the middle of the living room and rummage through the drawers. One afternoon she found a copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being that must have belonged to the apartment’s owners. Her parents didn’t read that kind of book. Her parents didn’t read any kinds of book, in fact. She flicked through the pages randomly and came upon a scene that moved her to tears. The words seemed to resonate deep within her. Each sentence shot an electric current through her body. She clenched her jaw, tensed the muscles of her vagina. For the first time in her life, she felt the desire to touch herself. She pulled her panties up so tight that the fabric burned her flesh.

  “She was nearly immobile while he undressed her. When he kissed her, her lips failed to react. But suddenly she felt her groin becoming moist, and she was afraid.”

  * * *

  *

  She put the book back in its place, in the little chest of drawers in the living room, and at night she thought about it. She tried to remember the exact words, to rediscover their music, and then she couldn’t hold out any longer. She got out of bed and opened the drawer. She looked at the yellow book jacket and felt new sensations awakening beneath her light gown. She hardly dared pick it up. She hadn’t marked the page, had left no trace of her presence in the middle of that story. But each time she ended up finding the chapter that had stirred her so deeply.

  * * *

  *

  “The excitement she felt was all the greater because she was excited against her will. In other words, her soul did condone the proceedings, albeit covertly. But she also knew that if the feeling of excitement was to continue, her soul’s approval would have to keep mute. The moment it said its yes aloud, the moment it tried to take an active part in the love scene, the excitement would subside. For what made the soul so excited was that the body was acting against its will; the body was betraying it, and the soul was looking on.

  Then he pulled off her panties and she was completely naked.”

  * * *

  *

  She repeated those phrases like a mantra. She rolled them around her tongue. Wallpapered the back of her mind with them. Very quickly, she understood that desire was unimportant. She didn’t want men she would have to approach. It wasn’t for the flesh she yearned, but for the situation. Being taken. Observing the look on a man’s face when he came. Filling herself up. Tasting another’s saliva. Miming epileptic orgasms, lascivious pleasure, animal satisfaction. Watching a man leave, traces of blood and semen under her fingernails.

  Eroticism covered everything. It masked the banality and vanity of things. It gave a new depth to her adolescent afternoons, to birthday parties and even family reunions, where there was always an old uncle to ogle her breasts. This quest abolished all rules, all codes. Friendships, ambitions, schedules . . . it made them all impossible.

  * * *

  *

  Adèle is neither proud nor ashamed of her conquests. She keeps no records, recollects no names, no situations. She forgets everything very quickly, and that is a good thing. How could she remember so many different skins and smells? How could she recall the memory of the weight of each body on hers, the width of their hips, the size of their penis? She has no clear memories of them, and yet these men are the sole landmarks of her existence. Each season, each birthday, each event in her life corresponds to a lover with a blurred face. In the depths of her amnesia there exists the reassuring sensation of having existed a thousand times through the desires of others. And when, years later, she happens to bump
into a man who tells her in a deep and slightly shaky voice: “It took me quite a while to get over you,” she draws an immense satisfaction from this. As if all of it has not been in vain. As if, in spite of her best intentions, some sort of meaning is somehow mixed up in this eternal repetition.

  Some of them remained close to her, touched her more than others. Adam, for example, whom she likes to think of as a friend. Even though she met him on a dating website, she feels close to him. Sometimes she drops by at Rue Bleue, keeps her clothes on, and smokes a joint with him, in the bed that serves him as office and living room. She puts her head on his arm and she enjoys this easy camaraderie. He has never made any comments or asked any questions about her life. He is not intelligent or profound, and she likes that.

  Some of them she grows attached to; she finds it hard to let them go. Now that she thinks about it, this attachment seems hazy; she no longer understands anything about it. At the time, though, nothing else seems to matter. That was true for Vincent and, before him, for Olivier, whom she met during a reporting trip to South Africa. She waited to hear from them with the same intensity she waits now for Xavier’s messages. She wanted them to burn for her, wanted them to love her to the point of losing everything, even though she has never lost anything.

  She could exit the stage now. Take a rest. Leave it up to fate and settle for Richard. It would probably be a good idea to stop now, before everything falls apart, before she is too old or too weak. Before becoming pitiful, before losing her magic and her dignity.

  It’s true that it’s a very nice house.

  Especially the little terrace, where she should plant a lime tree and install an old bench that they would let gently rot and become mossy. Far from Paris, in that small provincial house, she would give up the very thing that she thinks defines her, her true self. The very thing that, since no one else knows about it, represents her greatest act of defiance. If she abandoned that part of herself, she would become merely what everyone else sees. A surface without depth, without a flipside. A body without shadow. She would no longer be able to tell herself: “Let them think whatever they want. They’ll never know the truth.”