Adèle

by Leïla Slimani

  One evening Richard was drinking a beer in a bar opposite the clinic when he saw her, sitting with two other women of the same age. She waved at him. She smiled at him. He wasn’t sure if she was inviting him to join them or if she just felt obliged to say hello because he was her father’s friend. Richard waved back.

  He thought no more about it, his brain slowed by alcohol and the heat. He had completely forgotten about her when she walked over to his table and said: “It’s Richard, isn’t it?”

  Drops of sweat trickled down his spine.

  “Yes, Richard Robinson.” He stood up awkwardly and shook her hand.

  She sat down without asking; apparently she was less shy than he had imagined when he saw her blush behind the pharmacy counter. She started talking about university, about Rouen where she was living, about the medical degree she would like to take but for which she did not feel brave enough. She spoke very fast, in a high-pitched, singsong voice. Richard nodded limply, his face slick with sweat. He made an effort to keep his large eyes fixed on her, to smile at the right moments, at times even to rekindle the conversation.

  They walked aimlessly through the streets. He asked her for a cigarette, which he struggled to smoke. He felt like asking: “So, what are we doing exactly?” but in the end he said nothing. They walked to the clinic. Outside the building they neither hesitated nor hurried. Richard took the keys from his pocket and they went through the garage.

  In his office Richard closed the shutters.

  “Sorry, I don’t have anything to drink. Some water, if you like?”

  “Can I smoke?”

  * * *

  *

  Her skin. Her milky skin was insipid. He put his lips to it. He opened his mouth slightly, licked the hollow of her neck, kissed behind her ear. Her flesh was utterly devoid of any flavor or contour. Even her sweat was odorless. Only her fingers smelled slightly of cigarettes.

  She unbuttoned the thin white blouse she was wearing and Richard, aghast, contemplated her round belly, the folds formed by her skirt, the little bulges between the elastic edges of her bra. Adèle’s skeleton came back to haunt him.

  Matilda looked a little ridiculous, a plump twenty-five-year-old leaning against the desk trying to act like a femme fatale. The room was completely silent. Even the desk didn’t squeak. She was hardly breathing. She tried a few things but she seemed disappointed that a forbidden liaison with an older—and married—man did not create more in the way of sparks. It was even less fun than with the boys at the university. Richard was not fun.

  She threw her head to one side and then the other. She shut her eyes. Her voluptuous thighs closed around Richard. But even though he gripped her buttocks, undid her bra and stared at her white breasts, he did not manage to come. He withdrew slowly and, once they were out in the street, she rejected his offer to walk her home.

  “I live really close anyway.”

  He took his car. His mind was clear now. On the way home he kept putting his hands to his nose, sniffing and even licking them, but they smelled of nothing more than antiseptic soap.

  Matilda had left no trace.

  Richard takes her to the train station. In the car Adèle looks through the window. It is just past dawn. Misty sunlight caresses the hilltops. Neither of them gives voice to the strangeness of the situation. She doesn’t dare reassure him, act tenderly, promise him that she has no plans to escape. Richard is relieved that the moment has come to let her go, to remove the leash, even for just a few hours, and let her taste freedom.

  She will come back.

  Outside the station, he looks at her. Beautiful and sad, she smokes her cigarette. He takes out his wallet and hands her a wad of cash.

  “Two hundred euros. Will that be enough?”

  “Yes, don’t worry.”

  “If you need more, tell me.”

  “No, thank you. That’s fine.”

  “Put it away now, so you don’t lose it.”

  Adèle opens her handbag and puts the money into one of its pockets.

  “See you tomorrow, then.”

  “Yes. See you tomorrow.”

  Adèle takes her seat: next to the window, facing backward. The train moves away. A polite silence fills the compartment. Every sound and gesture is muted; people put a hand over their mouth as they talk on the phone. Children sleep. Ears are covered by headphones. Adèle is sleepy and, outside, the landscape becomes a blur of color spilling out of the frame, a half-melted drawing, a flow of gray, an ooze of green and black. She is wearing a black dress and a slightly old-fashioned jacket. Opposite her, a man sits down and says hello. The kind of man she might have hit on in the past. She feels nervous, disoriented. It is not men she’s afraid of, but solitude. No longer being watched by anyone, being a stranger, anonymous, a nobody lost in the crowd. Being in movement and thinking that it would be possible to flee. Not that she is considering it, but simply that it is possible.

  At the far end of the compartment a girl stands behind the glass door. She can’t be more than seventeen. Long, thin adolescent legs and a slight slouch. The boy kissing her has not taken off his backpack, and as he leans over her he looks as though he’s going to crush her. Eyes closed, mouths open, their tongues twist around each other relentlessly.

  * * *

  *

  Simone asked her if she would like to say a few words in tribute to her father. Adèle replied that she would rather not. In reality she doesn’t know what she could even say about this man whom she barely knew.

  His mysteriousness was at the root of her adoration. She thought him decadent, quirky, inimitable. She thought him handsome. He would speak fervently about freedom and revolution. When she was a child he would show her Hollywood films from the 1960s and tell her repeatedly that everyone should live like that. He would dance with her, and Adèle almost cried once, with joy and surprise, when she saw him lift one foot in the air and pirouette on the point of the other foot to Nat King Cole’s “Ballerina.” He spoke Italian, or so she believed, at least. He told her that he had once eaten caviar from a spoon with dancers from the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, where the Algerian state had sent him to study.

  Sometimes, in melancholy moments, he would sing a song in Arabic, the meaning of which he never revealed. He would fly into a rage with Simone, blame her for tearing him away from his roots. He would get angry, make unfair accusations, yell that he had no need for any of this, that he could leave it all behind and go off to live on his own, in a shack somewhere, surviving on bread and black olives. He said he would like to learn to plow fields, sow seeds, return to the earth. That he could have been happy with a simple, peaceful life, like the peasants of his childhood. And that sometimes he even envied them, the way a bird, exhausted after a long flight, might envy an ant. Simone would laugh. A cruel, bluff-calling laugh. And he never left.

  * * *

  *

  Adèle is rocked into a half-sleep by the jolting of the train. She opens her parents’ bedroom door and sees the big bed. Her father’s body, lying there like a mummy. Feet pointing upward, stiff in the shroud. She approaches and looks at the last visible fragments of his skin. His hands, neck, face. The large smooth forehead, the deep lines at the corners of his lips. She rediscovers those familiar features, the path taken by his smile, the full map of paternal emotions.

  She lies on the bed, barely an inch from the body. He is everything to her. For once he cannot disappear or refuse to talk with her. One arm behind her head, her legs crossed, she lights a cigarette. She undresses. Naked, lying next to the corpse, she caresses his skin, presses her body against it. She kisses his eyelids and his gaunt cheeks. She thinks about her father’s prudishness, his absolute horror of nudity: his own, and others’. Lying there, dead, at her mercy, he can no longer offer any resistance to her obscene curiosity. She leans over him and slowly unties the shroud.

  Gare Saint-Laza
re. She gets off the train and walks quickly up Rue d’Amsterdam.

  They cut all ties with their life before. A clean, total cut. They left behind dozens of cardboard boxes filled with Adèle’s clothes, souvenirs of their travels, even photograph albums. They sold their furniture and gave away their paintings. The day of their departure they looked around the apartment without nostalgia. They handed the keys to the landlord and they set off in the driving rain.

  Adèle never returned to the newspaper. She felt too cowardly to offer her resignation and in the end she received a letter that Richard waved in front of her face: “Dismissal for gross misconduct. Dereliction of duty.” They do not keep in touch with their Parisian friends, former colleagues, old acquaintances. They find excuses not to have visitors. A lot of people are surprised by their sudden departure, but no one tries to find out what has become of them. As if Paris itself has forgotten them.

  Adèle is nervous. She smokes, standing, staring at the other customers, as she waits for a table on the terrace. A tourist couple get up and Adèle sidles over to take their place. She sees Lauren wave at her from the other side of the street and she looks down at the table, as if she does not feel she has permission to smile or show her happiness.

  Lauren sits down with her and talks about Adèle’s father, his funeral. She says: “If you’d told me earlier I could have gone with you.” She asks about Richard, Lucien, the little village, the house. “So what is there to actually do in that godforsaken hole?” she laughs hysterically.

  They bring up old memories, but it’s all rather half-hearted. Adèle racks her brain, but she can think of nothing to say. Her mind is a blank. She looks at her watch. She can tell her that she’d better leave, that she doesn’t want to miss her train. Lauren rolls her eyes.

  “What?” Adèle asks.

  “You’re making the biggest mistake of your life. Why have you buried yourself in that place? Does it really make you happy, being a provincial housewife?”

  Adèle is exasperated by Lauren’s insistence, by the way she keeps repeating that her marriage with Richard is a mistake. She suspects the advice is motivated not by friendship but by other feelings. “You’re not happy—admit it! Not a woman like you! It’s not as if you married him for love.”

  Adèle smokes and nods silently as Lauren talks. She orders another glass of wine and slowly drinks it. When her friend has exhausted all her arguments, Adèle attacks, cold and precise. She surprises herself by imitating Richard’s intonations, repeating the exact words that he uses. She develops her ideas clearly, expresses her feelings in a way that her friend cannot refute. She speaks about the happiness of owning a property, the importance for Lucien of being in contact with nature. She sings the praises of modest pleasures, simple daily joys. She even utters the stupid and unjust words: “People who don’t have children just can’t understand. I hope one day you’ll learn that for yourself.” The cruelty of those who know they are loved.

  Adèle is late, but she walks slowly from the train station in Boulogne-sur-Mer to her parents’ apartment. She walks through the gray, ugly, deserted streets. She has missed the ceremony at the crematorium. It took her a long time to reach the Gare du Nord and she missed her train.

  When she rings the doorbell, no one answers. She waits on the front steps of the apartment building. A car stops and Simone gets out, escorted by two men. She is wearing a tight black dress, and a little hat pinned to her bun, with a veil. She has even put on a pair of hideous satin gloves that make creases in her wrinkled wrists. She is not afraid of ridicule in that get-up. She is playing the role of the tearful widow.

  They go into the apartment. A waiter puts canapés on a table and the guests quickly surround and devour them. Simone places her hand on the hands that are placed on her. She bursts out in uncontrollable sobs, wails Kader’s name. She moans in the arms of old men turned lecherous by grief and alcohol.

  She has closed the shutters and the heat is stifling. Adèle drops her jacket on the old black armchair and notices that the shelves have been emptied. Her father’s records have disappeared and she can still smell the sickly-sweet odor of Simone’s furniture polish. The entire apartment appears cleaner than usual. As if her mother had spent all morning scrubbing the floors, dusting the edges of the photograph frames.

  Adèle does not talk to anyone. A few guests try to catch her eye. They speak very loud in the hope that she will join their conversation. They look bored to death, as if they’ve already said all they have to say and they imagine that she will be able to entertain them. She is repulsed by their wrinkled faces, the sounds made by their weary jaws. She wants to stick her fingers in her ears and shut her eyes, like a sulking child.

  The eighth-floor neighbor stares at her. His eyes are gluey; it looks as though a tear is hanging from his eyelid. He is the neighbor so obese that Adèle had trouble locating his penis amid the folds of his belly. His penis was layered with sweat under all that fat, rubbed sore by those enormous thighs. She would go up to his apartment in the afternoons after school. He had a living room and two bedrooms. A large balcony with a table and chairs. And a breathtaking view. He would sit down at the kitchen table, trousers around his ankles, and she would stare out at the sea. “See the English coastline? It’s like you could almost touch it.” The horizon was clear and flat.

  * * *

  *

  “Didn’t Richard come with you?” Simone asks as she leads her daughter into the kitchen. She is drunk.

  “He couldn’t leave Lucien on his own or abandon the clinic in the middle of the week. He told you that on the phone.”

  “I’m just disappointed, that’s all. I thought he would realize that I was very hurt by his absence. There were lots of people I wanted to introduce to him and this was the ideal opportunity. But apparently . . .”

  “Apparently what?”

  “Well, since he got his clinic and his big house, apparently we’re not good enough for him anymore. He’s only been to visit once this year, and he looked like he was holding his breath the whole time. I should have guessed then.”

  “Stop it, Mom. He’s working a lot. That’s all.”

  Simone has placed the white-and-pink porcelain urn next to her collection of hotel matchboxes. It looks like a large biscuit jar or an old English teapot. In a single night her father has moved from the black armchair to the living-room shelf.

  “I never would have guessed that Dad wanted to be cremated.”

  Simone shrugs.

  “He may not have been religious, but still, it’s his culture . . . You shouldn’t have done that, Mom. You could have talked to me about it.” Adèle’s sentence ends in an inaudible murmur.

  “Is that why you came? To tell me off? To take your father’s side even after his death? It was always all about him. His stupid dreams, his fantasies. ‘The high life!’ That’s what he wanted to live. Our life was never high enough for him. Let me tell you something . . .” Simone swallows a mouthful of gin and clicks her tongue against her incisor. “People who are never satisfied destroy everything around them.”

  * * *

  *

  The aluminum plates are empty and the guests are saying their farewells to Adèle. “Your mother needs to get some rest.” “It was a beautiful ceremony.” As they go through the door they all cast a sideways glance at the ashes of her father.

  Simone has collapsed on the sofa. She hiccups softly, her makeup smeared over her cheeks. She has taken off her shoes and Adèle looks at her wrinkled skin, covered in brown stains. Her black dress, with a slit up the side, is fastened with a large safety pin. She weeps, grumbling incomprehensibly. She looks terrified.

  “You always understood each other. Always ganged up on me. If he hadn’t been here you’d never have come to visit, would you? The eighth wonder of the world! Adèle this, Adèle that. It suited him to think that you were still his nice little girl. He always d
efended you. Too cowardly to punish you, to face up to you. ‘Talk to your daughter, Simone!’—that’s what he always said. And he turned a blind eye. But you don’t fool me. Richard, poor bastard, he doesn’t see a thing. He’s like your father, blind and naive. Men don’t know who we are. They don’t want to know. But I’m your mother, I remember everything. The way you wiggled your hips . . . You weren’t even eight. You scared men. The grown-ups used to talk about you when you weren’t around. And they didn’t say nice things, believe me. You were the kind of kid that grown-ups don’t like. You had wickedness in you, even then. And you looked like butter wouldn’t melt! A perfect little hypocrite, you were. You can leave, you know. I don’t expect anything from you. And that poor Richard, who’s such a nice man. You don’t deserve him.”

  Adèle puts her hand on Simone’s wrist. She wishes she could tell her the truth. Could confide in her and depend on her goodwill. She would like to caress her forehead, where a few fine curls stick to the skin, like a child’s hair. She was a burden to her mother when she was a child. Now she has become an adversary, without ever having the time for tenderness, for gentleness, for explanations. She doesn’t know where to start. She is afraid that she will say the wrong thing, cracking the shell and releasing thirty years of bitterness. She does not want to witness one of those hysterical fits that punctuated her childhood: her mother, face covered in scratches, hair disheveled, screaming abuse at the entire world. Adèle swallows, says nothing.

  Simone, numbed by tranquilizers, falls asleep with her mouth open. Adèle drinks what remains of the bottle of gin. She downs a glass of white wine that her mother left near the oven. She opens the shutters and looks through the window at the empty parking lot, the little garden with its sunburned grass. In the squalid apartment where she grew up, she staggers around, bumping into walls. Her hands shake. She wishes she could sleep, tame the rage inside her, but it is still bright outside; it is still early evening as she leaves the apartment, swaying unsteadily. She left an envelope on the sideboard in the entrance hall, along with the orange box containing the brooch.