Adèle

by Leïla Slimani

  * * *

  *

  She takes the bus to the city center. It is a pleasant evening and the streets are full of people. Tourists take selfies. Youngsters drink beer, sitting on the cobbles. She counts her steps to prevent herself falling. She sits on a terrace, in the sun. A little boy sitting on his mother’s lap blows through his straw, making bubbles in his glass of cola. The waiter asks Adèle if she’s waiting for someone. She shakes her head. She can’t stay there. She gets up and walks to a bar.

  She has been here before. The tables on the mezzanine, the sticky countertop, the little stage at the back of the room . . . all of this seems familiar. Unless it’s just that the place is so horribly banal. The bar is full of noisy, unremarkable students, happily celebrating their exam results, the start of the summer holidays. Adèle does not belong here, and she senses that the barman is watching her suspiciously, that he has noted her shaking hands, her vacant gaze.

  She drinks her beer. She is hungry. A boy sits next to her. A thin young man with a gentle face. The sides of his head are shaved and the hair on top is long and slicked back. He talks a lot but she can barely hear him. She gathers that he is a musician. That he works as a caretaker in a small hotel. He talks about his child too. A baby, just a few months old, who lives with its mother in a town whose name Adèle immediately forgets. She smiles but she is thinking: strip me naked and put me on the bar. Hold my arms, stop me from moving, press my face against the countertop. She imagines the men taking turns, shoving their dicks inside her, flipping her over and fucking her again until they have driven out the sorrow, until they have silenced the fear that lurks deep inside her. She wishes she didn’t have to say anything, that she could offer herself like those girls she has seen in Paris, their camel-like eyes staring out from the windows of hostess bars. She wishes the whole bar would drink body shots from her skin, that they would spit on her, that they would reach into her guts and rip them out, until she is nothing but a shred of dead flesh.

  They leave the bar by the back door. The boy rolls a joint and hands it to her. She is euphoric and despairing. She begins sentences that she doesn’t finish. She keeps repeating: “I’ve forgotten what I was going to say.” He asks her if she has any children. She thinks about her jacket, which she left on the chair in her mother’s living room. She is cold. She should go back to the apartment, but it’s so late and the apartment seems so far away. She would never dare walk all the way there on her own. She should gird her loins, weigh up the pros and cons, act like a grown-up.

  * * *

  *

  When Richard found out the truth, she imagined that she would end up coming back here, to this town, to her parents’ apartment. Humiliated, penniless, with no other options. She shuddered at the idea of going back there and sleeping at the end of the hallway, of hearing her mother’s rasping voice attacking and interrogating her, hour after hour. She saw herself hanging from the false ceiling of her bedroom, her high heels dangling from the ends of her toes, her eyes full of that blue-and-white wallpaper that even now gives her nightmares. Her lips violet, her body as light as a feather, she would sway over the little bed, her shame finally extinguished.

  * * *

  *

  “What?”

  Why is this boy so desperate to make conversation? She moves closer to him, kisses him, rubs her breasts against his torso, but she finds it hard to stay upright. He catches her as she’s falling and laughs. She closes her eyes. The joint has made her nauseated and the floor has started to pitch and roll.

  “I’ll be back.”

  She walks across the room, taking deep breaths. In the toilets a group of adolescent girls squeezed into miniskirts are doing their makeup. They giggle. Adèle lies down and raises her legs. She wishes she had the strength to go to the station, to catch a train or throw herself under one. More than anything in the world she wants to return to the hills, to the half-timbered house, to the vast solitude, to Lucien and Richard. She weeps, her cheek sticking to the tile floor with its stink of urine. She weeps because she can’t go home.

  She stands up. Splashes cold water over her face. In the mirror she looks like a drowned woman. The livid complexion, the bulging eyes, the bloodless lips. She goes back into the bar, where no one notices her. She feels as if she is floating through thick fog. A group of drunk teenage boys jumps up and down, arms around one another’s shoulders, yelling out the words of a song.

  The boy taps her on the shoulder and startles her.

  “Hey, where were you? Are you all right? You’re white as a sheet.” He gently places his hand on her frozen cheek.

  Adèle smiles. A sweet, moved smile. She likes this song. “You give your hand to me . . .” She falls into his arms, abandoning herself to the rhythm of the music. He squeezes her ribs, presses her tight against him, and rubs his hands over her bare arms to warm her up. She puts her cheek on his shoulder. Her eyes are closed. Their feet move slowly as they sway from side to side. He takes her hand and she opens her eyes when he gently spins her around and pulls her back toward him. She smiles and she hums, her lips touching his neck.

  “Well, you don’t know me . . .”

  The song ends. The crowd yells when a faster track starts up. They invade the dance floor. Adèle and the boy are separated. Hands behind her neck, eyes closed, she dances. Her hands move down her body, caress her breasts, converge on her groin. She lifts her arms, swept along by the accelerating beat of the music. She swings her hips, shakes her shoulders, moves her head from side to side. A wave of calm surges through her. She has the feeling that she is cut off from the world, that she is experiencing a moment of grace. She rediscovers the pleasure she used to feel as a teenager, when she would dance for hours, sometimes alone on the dance floor. Innocent and beautiful. She never felt any embarrassment then. Never worried about the danger. She gave herself over completely to what she was doing, on the cusp of a future that she imagined glorious, higher, greater, more exhilarating. Richard and Lucien are no more than vague memories now, impossible memories that she sees slowly dissolve then disappear.

  She spins around, indifferent to the dizziness. Eyes half-closed, she spots little bursts of light in the dark room that help her maintain her balance. She wishes she could dive into the heart of this solitude but they tear her away from it, they drag her toward them, they won’t let her. Someone grabs her from behind and she rubs her buttocks against his erection. She does not hear the raucous laughter. She does not see the looks on the faces of the men who pass her between them like a parcel, who press her body against theirs, who laugh at her. She laughs too.

  When she opens her eyes, the gentle boy has vanished.

  He was waiting on the platform. She wasn’t on the 3:25 train. Nor on the 5:12. He called her mobile. She didn’t answer. He drank three coffees, bought a newspaper. He smiled at two patients, here to catch a train, who asked him who he was waiting for. At seven o’clock Richard leaves the station. He is in a panic, barely breathing. All he can think about is why Adèle has not come back.

  He returns to the clinic but the waiting room is empty. No emergencies to keep his mind occupied. He goes through a few files but he is too nervous to work. He can’t imagine spending the night without her. He can’t believe that she won’t come back. He calls his neighbor and lies: he says there’s been an emergency, could she please stay a bit later to look after Lucien?

  He walks to the restaurant where some friends are waiting for him. Robert, the dentist. Bertrand, the business manager. And Denis, whose exact occupation no one seems to know. Until now Richard has always avoided groups of friends. He has never been gregarious. Even as a medical student he kept himself to himself. He never took part in the salacious humor of locker rooms. He didn’t enjoy hearing his colleagues boast about how they’d slept with a nurse. He was repulsed by that facile, vain male complicity that always seems to revolve around the conquest of women.

 
; * * *

  *

  It is a hot evening and his friends are waiting for him on the terrace. They’ve already had a few bottles of rosé and Richard orders a whiskey to catch up. He is nervous, impatient, on a short fuse. He feels like picking a fight with someone, letting his rage explode. But his friends are too boring and placid to get into an argument. Robert talks about the expenses of running a business and asks Richard to back him up. “It’s true, isn’t it? They’re strangling us!” Bertrand, in a calm and condescending voice, gives a long-winded speech about the necessity for solidarity, without which the French social model would fall apart. And Denis—kind, gentle Denis—repeats: “But in fact you’re saying the same thing. You’re both right.”

  By the end of the meal Richard’s jaw is trembling. The alcohol has made him sad and sensual. He wants to cry, to cut short all conversations. His cell phone lies on the table in front of him and he jumps whenever the screen lights up. She doesn’t call. He leaves the table before the digestifs arrive and Robert makes a remark about Adèle’s beauty, about Richard’s impatience to get home. Richard smiles and winks at him, then leaves the restaurant. He could just as easily have slammed his fist into that boor’s thick-lipped face. As if there were some kind of glory in going home to mount his wife.

  * * *

  *

  The road is slippery and he drives fast. It’s a warm, stormy night and the thunder makes horses whinny in the distance. He parks the car in the driveway and sits there, looking at the house. The worm-eaten window frames. The wooden bench and the breakfast table. The hills, at whose center the house nests. He chose this house for her. Adèle has not had to worry about a thing. The shutter that used to bang during the night, he had it fixed. He planted the lime trees on the little terrace.

  He starts making wagers with himself, the way he used to do as a child. He promises. He swears that, if she comes back, everything will be different. He won’t leave her alone anymore. He will break the silence that pervades this house. He will pull her toward him, he will tell her everything, and then he will listen to her. He will abandon all his bitterness and regrets. He will act as if nothing happened. He will smile and say, “Did you miss your train?,” then he will talk about something else and it will all be forgotten.

  He is wary of illusions these days, but of one thing he is sure: Adèle has never been as beautiful as she is now. Ever since they left Paris she has had this astonished expression on her face, a humble, softer look in her eyes. No more dark rings. And her eyes have grown larger. Her eyelids are as big as dance floors. At night she sleeps peacefully. A sleep without secrets or intrigues. She says she dreams of a cornfield, a suburban neighborhood, a children’s park. He doesn’t dare ask her: “Do you still dream of the sea?”

  He never touches her but he knows every inch of her body. Every day he examines her. Her knees, her elbows, her ankles. Adèle does not have bruises anymore. He inspects her skin but it’s smooth, as pale as the walls of the village. She has nothing to say. Adèle no longer bangs into headboards. Her back no longer gets carpet burns. She no longer wears her hair over her forehead to hide the bumps there. Adèle has put on weight. Beneath her summer dresses he can tell that her bottom is rounder, her belly heavier, her skin less taut, easier to grasp.

  * * *

  *

  Richard wants her. All the time. A violent, selfish desire. Often he wishes he could reach out to her with his hand but instead he just stands there, stupid and immobile. He puts his hand over her vulva, the way you might place your palm over the mouth of a child who is about to scream.

  And yet he wishes he could sob into her breasts. Cling to her skin. Put his head in her lap and let her console him for his great, betrayed love. He desires her, but he hears. The comings and goings of the men who have walked over her. This revolts him, obsesses him. That coming and going, that back and forth that does not want to end, that leads nowhere, those skins colliding, those flabby thighs, those revolted looks. That back and forth, regular as blows, like an impossible quest, like the desire to wrest a cry from her, a sob that sleeps deep inside her and that will make the landscape tremble. That back and forth that can never be entirely reduced to itself, that is always the promise of another life, the promise of beauty, of possible tenderness.

  He gets out of his car and walks to the house. Drunk and slightly nauseated, he sits on the bench. He searches his pockets for a pack of cigarettes. He doesn’t have any. He always smokes hers. She can’t leave. She can’t abandon them. You can’t betray the one who’s forgiven you. He sniffs as he thinks that he is going to enter this house alone, that he will have to answer Lucien when he asks: “Where’s Mommy? When is she coming home?”

  He will go and find her, wherever she is hiding. He will bring her back. He will never let her out of his sight again. They will have another child, a little girl, with her mother’s eyes and her father’s solid heart. A little girl who will keep her occupied, whom she will love more than anything in the world. Maybe one day she will even be content with the banal preoccupations of an ordinary life and he will be happy, so happy he could die, when she wants to redecorate the living room, when she spends hours choosing new wallpaper for the baby’s room. When she talks too much, when she has a tantrum.

  * * *

  *

  Adèle will age. Her hair will turn white. She will lose her eyelashes. No one will see her anymore. He will hold her wrist. He will rub her face in everyday life. He will lead her in his wake, will never let go of her, when she is afraid of the emptiness and wants to fall. And one day he will plant a kiss upon her cracked skin, her parchment cheek. He will undress her. He will no longer hear in his wife’s vagina any other echoes but the blood that pulses there.

  And she will surrender. She will rest her tremulous head on his shoulder and he will feel the full weight of a body that has thrown down its anchor. She will scatter sprays of funeral flowers over him, and as she nears death she will become more tender. Adèle will rest tomorrow. And she will make love, her bones creaking, her spine rusted. She will make love like a poor old woman, who still believes in it and who closes her eyes and says nothing at all.

  This doesn’t end, Adèle. No, this doesn’t end. Love is only patience. A pious, fanatical, tyrannical patience. An unreasonably optimistic patience.

  We’re not finished.

  A PENGUIN READERS GUIDE TO

  ADÈLE

  Leila Slimani

  AN INTRODUCTION TO ADÈLE

  “She wishes she were just an object in the midst of a horde. She wants to be devoured, sucked, swallowed whole. . . . She wants to be a doll in an ogre’s garden.” (this page)

  Adèle Robinson is a beautiful and wealthy woman with a loving husband and son, a luxurious Parisian apartment, a loyal best friend, and an enviable career as a journalist that allows her to travel often. But Adèle isn’t sure she wants any of these things. Her career bores her; her friendship is based on convenience more than true affection; her house sometimes feels like a prison; and she has complicated feelings about her husband and son, often wondering whether they even need her at all. More than anything, Adèle is addicted to sex, preferably with strangers—an addiction that’s destroying her life.

  When we first meet Adèle, she’s about to give in after having remained faithful to her husband, Richard, for a whole week. Leaving Richard and their four-year-old son Lucien sleeping peacefully, she visits the apartment of one of her lovers before showing up to work an hour late. In order to keep her extramarital dalliances secret, she has to lie to her husband, boss, coworkers, family, and friends, inventing work meetings and childcare emergencies to account for the time she spends with men who aren’t her husband. What’s perhaps most strange of all is that her affairs are purely compulsive, devoid of any pleasure or joy.

  Richard, who for much of the novel is blissfully unaware of Adèle’s other life, wants them to have another child
and move to the country. Adèle doesn’t refuse, nor does she exactly accept; with characteristic ambivalence, she says nothing or changes the subject whenever he brings up the future. She loves her son, but parenthood is also a convenient way for her to “protect herself from other people. As a wife and mother, she is haloed with a respectability that no one can take away from her. She has built herself a refuge for her nights of anguish and a comfortable retreat for her days of debauchery” (29). The tension between her two lives, and her inability to fully choose one or the other, leads her to fight with her only friend, Lauren, a photographer who has grown tired of acting as Adèle’s alibi whenever Richard comes looking for her.

  When Adèle begins an affair with a coworker of Richard’s, Richard finally finds out that his wife has been hiding her terrible compulsion from him for years. Furious and hurt, he moves the family to the countryside and tightens his control over Adèle, sending her to a psychologist and monitoring her every move. But will his efforts be enough to keep their marriage intact, despite her betrayal? And will Adèle ever regain control of her own existence?

  A CONVERSATION WITH LEILA SLIMANI

  Early in the novel, Adèle says that she wants to be “a doll in an ogre’s garden.” What does this idea mean to her?

  Adèle wants to be an object. I think that this is the most subversive part of her personality. She doesn’t want to be a subject, she doesn’t want to decide, to have power. She just wants to be a little doll, a toy.