Adèle

by Leïla Slimani

  In the end she surrendered and told him everything, lying in the dark, her back turned to him. She was calm and precise, relating the events in a matter-of-fact voice. Sometimes she would start going into sexual details, but he would stop her. “But that’s all there was,” she said. She tried to explain to him the insatiable desire, the uncontrollable urge, the distress she felt at not being able to put an end to it. But what obsessed him was how she could abandon Lucien for an entire afternoon to meet a lover. How she could invent a professional emergency in order to cancel their family holidays so she could spend two days fucking in a seedy suburban hotel. What simultaneously revolted and fascinated him was the ease with which she had lied to him and led her double life. He felt duped. She had manipulated him like a puppet. Perhaps she even laughed sometimes as she returned to the apartment, leaking semen into her underwear, her skin saturated with another man’s sweat. Perhaps she mocked him, imitated him in front of her lovers. He imagined her saying: “My husband? Oh, don’t worry about him, he doesn’t have a clue.”

  He stirred up his memories until he felt nauseated. He tried to remember how she had acted when she came home late, when she disappeared. What about how she had smelled? And her breath, when she spoke to him . . . Had it been scented with the breath of other men? He searched for a sign, a clue, perhaps, that he hadn’t wanted to see at the time. But no memorable events—nothing at all—came to mind. His wife had been a perfect impostor.

  * * *

  *

  When he’d introduced Adèle to his parents, Odile had had her reservations about her son’s choice of partner. She hadn’t said anything to him, but Clémence had told him that she’d used the word “calculating.” “Adèle is not her idea of a girl. She finds her pretentious.” Odile had always been suspicious of that secretive woman. She was worried by her coldness, her lack of maternal instinct.

  But he—this student from the provinces, shy and awkward—was dying to hold her in his arms. It wasn’t only her beauty that captivated Richard, but her attitude too. He had to take deep breaths whenever he looked at her. Her presence filled him to the point of pain. He loved to watch her live; he knew by heart every little gesture she made. She didn’t speak much. Unlike the young women in his medicine classes, she didn’t indulge in gossip or trivial conversation. He took her to the best restaurants. He organized trips to cities that she’d always dreamed of visiting. Soon after they met he introduced her to his parents. He asked her to move in with him, and he took care of finding them an apartment. She often said: “This is the first time this has happened to me.” And he was proud of that. He promised her that she wouldn’t have to worry about anything, that he would take care of her, in a way that no one else ever had. She was his neurosis, his madness, his dream, his ideal. His other life.

  “All right. Let’s start again.”

  To start with, she would shut her eyes. That made things impossible. She was so rigid, so cold that it drove him crazy. He wanted to slap her, to stop in the middle of it and leave her there, alone. They do this on Saturday afternoons, sometimes on Sundays. He takes deep breaths when she asks him the same question over and over again in her whiny little-girl voice. She folds her arms, hunches her shoulders, stares straight ahead. She doesn’t understand anything.

  “Look, just relax,” he says, trying not to let his annoyance show. “Don’t lean back like that—sit up a little bit. It should be a pleasure, not a kind of torture.”

  He takes Adèle’s hands and places them on the steering wheel. He adjusts the rearview mirror.

  One afternoon in July they drive on country roads. Lucien is sitting in the backseat. Adèle is wearing a knee-length dress and her bare feet are on the pedals. It’s a hot day and the roads are empty.

  “See? There’s no one here, so you’ve got nothing to worry about. You can speed up a little bit, you know.”

  Adèle turns to look at Lucien, who has fallen asleep. She hesitates, then abruptly steps on the accelerator. The car jumps forward. Adèle is terrified.

  “Shift into fourth, for God’s sake! You’ll wreck the car. Can’t you hear that noise? What the hell are you doing now?”

  Adèle slams on the brakes and looks sheepishly at Richard.

  “It’s incredible. It’s like you’re incapable of using your hands and your feet at the same time. You’re really shit at this, you know?”

  She shrugs and bursts out laughing. Richard stares at her, speechless. He had completely forgotten the sound of her laughter. That sound like rushing water, like a torrent. That throaty sound she makes when she throws her head back and exposes her long neck. He had forgotten the strange habit she has of putting her hands in front of her mouth and closing her eyes, her face forming a grimace that makes her laughter seem mocking, almost malicious. He has a sudden desire to hold her tight, to feed on this unexpected joy, this cheerfulness that is so absent from their lives.

  “I’m going to drive back. And you know what? I think you’d better take some real driving lessons. With a professional, I mean. I think that’ll work better.”

  * * *

  *

  Adèle makes slow progress, but Richard promises that he will buy her a car if she passes the test. He probably won’t be able to stop himself checking the odometer and he’ll limit her budget for gas, but at least she’ll be able to make small trips on her own. When they moved into the house he would watch her all the time. He couldn’t help it. He even followed her around, as if she were a criminal. He would call her several times a day on the house’s landline. Sometimes he would leave the clinic on a sudden impulse and drive to the house, between consultations, to find her sitting in her blue chair, staring at the garden.

  Sometimes he could be cruel. He would use his power over her to belittle her. One morning she asked him to drop her off in town on his way to the clinic. She felt like walking around town, visiting a few shops. She even suggested they have lunch together, in a restaurant that he had mentioned. “Can you wait for me? I’ll just be ten minutes.” She went upstairs to get ready. She locked the bathroom door and he left. She must have heard the engine start as she was getting dressed. She probably looked through the window and saw the car disappear. That evening he didn’t even mention the incident. He asked her how her day had been. “Very nice,” she replied with a smile.

  In public he acts in a way that he regrets afterward. He grips her arm, pinches her skin, watches her so closely that the people around them are embarrassed. He examines every movement she makes. He reads her lips. They rarely go out but he is glad that he invited the Verdons. Perhaps they will host a party in September. Something simple, with his colleagues and the parents of Lucien’s friends.

  He is tired of these constant suspicions. He is sick of thinking that she is only here because of her lack of independence. He promises to leave a bit more money in the house. He encourages her to take Lucien on the train to see his grandparents in Caen or Boulogne-sur-Mer. He has even told her that it’s time she started thinking about what kind of job she might like to do.

  * * *

  *

  Sometimes he gives way to an irrational enthusiasm, to an optimism that all doctors are warned to beware. He becomes convinced that he can cure her, that she clung to him because she sensed that he was her savior. Yesterday she woke up in a good mood. It was a beautiful morning. Richard took her into town with Lucien because she had to buy him some things for school. In the car she talked about a dress she’d seen in a shop window, a dress she liked. She began to stammer vaguely about the money she had left and how she was going to save up to buy herself that dress. Richard interrupted her. “Do what you want with the money. You don’t have to justify yourself to me.” She looked at once grateful and a little disoriented, as if she had become used to the weird game they’d been playing.

  “Make her happy.” How easy that had sounded when Henri said it about Odile, when he repeated that it
was the whole point of life. Start a family and make her happy. How simple that had seemed in the square outside the town hall where they got married, in the maternity ward where Adèle gave birth, at their apartment-warming party, when everyone seemed so sure that Richard possessed all the ingredients for a successful life.

  Odile keeps saying that they should have a second child. A house like this, she says, needs a big family. Each time she comes to see them she glances questioningly at Adèle’s belly and Adèle shakes her head. Richard is so embarrassed that he pretends not to understand this silent communication.

  He imagined a new life for her, one where she would be protected from herself, from her urges. A life composed of habits and constraints. Every morning he wakes her. He does not want her to lie around in bed, brooding. Too much sleep is bad for her. He doesn’t leave the house until he has watched her put on her sneakers and start running along the driveway. Out near the hedge she turns to wave at him and then he starts the engine.

  Simone has always had a horror of the countryside, probably because she grew up in it. She spoke of it to her daughter as a place of desolation, and in Adèle’s eyes nature is a wild beast that we think we have tamed but that can savage us without warning. She doesn’t dare say this to Richard, but she is afraid of running on country roads, of penetrating the dark forest. In Paris she liked to run through crowds. The city gave her its rhythm, its tempo. Here she runs more quickly, as if pursued by assailants. Richard would like her to enjoy the scenery, to be awed by the calm of the valleys and the harmony of the landscape. But she never stops running. She runs until her lungs burn and when she gets home she is exhausted, her temples throbbing, amazed and relieved that she didn’t get lost. She barely has time to take off her shoes before the telephone rings. She catches her breath before answering Richard’s call.

  “I have to wear myself out.” That’s what she thinks, to encourage herself. In the mornings, after a good night’s sleep, she can sometimes even believe it. She is capable of optimism, of making plans. But the hours pass, nibbling away at what remains of her determination. Her psychiatrist has advised her to scream. Adèle laughed when he told her that. “No, I’m completely serious. You have to yell, at the top of your voice.” He told her it would bring her relief. But even alone, even in the middle of nowhere, she has not managed to express her rage. She has not managed to scream.

  * * *

  *

  In the afternoon she is the one who goes to pick up Lucien. She walks down to the village. She doesn’t speak to anyone. She greets passersby with a nod of her chin. The familiarity of the villagers chills her. She avoids waiting outside the school gates for fear that the other mothers will try to talk to her. She explains to her son that he just has to walk a little farther to reach her. “You know, where the statue of the cow is. That’s where I’ll wait for you.”

  She always gets there early. She sits on the bench, opposite the covered market. When the bench is occupied she stands next to it, her face impassive, until the person sitting there feels so uneasy that they get up and leave. Richard told her the village was accidentally bombed by the Americans in 1944. In less than twenty minutes the whole place was wiped off the map. The architects attempted to reconstruct the buildings identically, to reproduce the half-timbered Norman style, but the effect is artificial. Adèle asked him if the American planes had spared the church for religious reasons. “No,” he answered, “it was just more solid than the other buildings.”

  * * *

  *

  When spring arrived her doctor insisted that she spend her days outside. He advised her to take up gardening, to plant flowers that she could then watch grow. Emile helped her dig a vegetable garden at the end of the lawn. She spends a lot of time there with Lucien. Her son likes wallowing in the mud, watering the broad beans, chewing the earth-stained leaves. Even at the start of July she can’t help noticing that the days are getting shorter. She watches the sky, which darkens ever earlier, and she feels anxious at the thought of the coming winter. The endless days of rain. The lime trees that will have to be trimmed and that will exhibit their black stumps, like giant corpses. When she left Paris she gave up everything. Now she has no job, no friends, no money. Nothing but this house, where summer is an illusion and winter holds her captive. Sometimes she is like a frightened bird, banging its beak against the bay windows, breaking its wings on the door handles. She finds it ever harder to conceal her impatience, to suppress her irascibility. And yet she does try. She bites the insides of her cheeks, she does breathing exercises to control her anxiety. Richard has forbidden her to let Lucien watch television all day, so she has to invent amusing activities for him. One evening Richard found his wife sitting on the living-room carpet, eyes swollen and red. She had spent all afternoon trying to clean a paint stain that Lucien had left on her blue chair. “He wouldn’t listen to me. He doesn’t know how to play,” she repeated, her mouth twisted with anger, her knuckles white.

  “The last time you came to see me you said you thought you were cured. What did you mean by that?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, with a shrug.

  The doctor lets the silence stretch out. He looks at her with his kindly eyes. The first time she saw him in his office he told her he didn’t have the resources to treat her. That the usual recommendation was for behavioral therapy: treatment through sport and support groups. In a cold, firm voice she replied: “I’m not doing that. It disgusts me. There’s something cowardly about putting your shame on display like that.”

  She had insisted on continuing to see him instead of finding another psychiatrist. She trusted him, she said. Reluctantly he agreed, moved as he was by the sight of that pale, thin woman in her too-large blue shirt.

  “Let’s just say that I feel calm.”

  “That’s being cured, for you? Feeling calm?”

  “Yes. I suppose. But there’s something terrible about being cured too. It means losing something. You understand?”

  “Of course.”

  “At the end, I was scared all the time. I had the feeling that I’d lost control. I was tired. I had to stop. But I never would have believed that he could forgive me.”

  Adèle’s fingernails scratch the cloth armrest of the chair. Outside, black clouds flaunt their pointed nipples. The storm will soon break. From where she sits she can see the side path and the car where Richard waits.

  “The night he found out the truth, I slept very well. A deep, soothing sleep. When I woke, even though the house was a wreck, even though Richard hated me, I felt a strange kind of joy, even a sort of excitement.”

  “Relief.”

  Adèle says nothing. Rain pours hard on to the cobblestones. The sky is so dark it looks like night has fallen in the middle of the afternoon.

  “My father died.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that, Adèle. Was your father ill?”

  “No. He had a stroke last night, in his sleep.”

  “Does that make you sad?”

  “I don’t know. He never really liked being here.”

  She rests her face on her right hand and sinks back into the armchair.

  “I’m going to his funeral. On my own. Richard can’t leave the clinic and he thinks that Lucien is too young to deal with death. In fact, he hasn’t even offered to go with me. I’m going there alone.”

  “Are you upset with Richard for abandoning you in these circumstances?”

  “Oh no,” she replies softly. “I’m delighted.”

  Richard never felt sex was important. Even when he was young it never gave him any great pleasure. He always got a bit bored while he was doing it. It seemed to last a long time. He felt incapable of playing the role of a passionate lover, and—stupidly—he had thought that Adèle would be relieved by the feebleness of his desire. Like any intelligent, sophisticated woman would be. He thought that, compared to all he had to offer her, sex was neg
ligible. In public he would sometimes pretend a little bit, partly for appearances’ sake and partly to reassure himself. He would make a vulgar remark about a girl’s bottom. He would imply to his friends that he’d had a one-night stand. He wasn’t proud of this. The truth was he never thought about sex.

  He had always dreamed of being a father, of having a family who would depend on him and to whom he could give everything he had received from his own parents. He had desired Lucien more than anything and he had been anxious at the thought of his conception. But Adèle had become pregnant very quickly—at the first attempt, in fact. He had pretended to be proud of this, to see it as proof of his virility. In reality he was relieved that he didn’t have to wear out the body of the woman he loved by “trying” over and over again.

  * * *

  *

  Not once did Richard think of revenge. He didn’t even consider attempting to balance things out, in a battle that he knew was lost in advance. He did once have an opportunity with a girl and he took it without really thinking. With no idea of what he was hoping to get out of it.

  Three months after he started working at the clinic, he was introduced to Matilda, who was doing an internship at her father’s pharmacy. She was a plump young woman with olive eyes, her acne hidden behind her long red hair. She was almost pretty.