Without thinking, he followed her. When he got down there within the cool brick walls, the rotting mushroom smell reminded him of the muggy atmosphere of a sauna and excited him. He sped after the waitress between the rows of bottles.
There, he grabbed her and forced a kiss on her. She struggled but he used his strength. When she managed to move back a little, she realized it was the master of the house and panicked even more.
“Don’t scream, my dear, just give me pleasure.”
Maintaining his grip, he took her hand and placed it on his crotch. Blinking, the girl understood.
“You’re willing to give me pleasure, aren’t you?”
He was holding her so tight that she thought it best to give in if she didn’t want to be strangled.
Lowering herself, she opened Zachary’s zipper and obeyed.
Seven minutes later, relieved, Zachary thanked the waitress. He put his clothes back on and went back up the stairs to the reception rooms.
Exhausted and disgusted, the girl was still huddled there, wanting to sob.
A shadowy figure emerged from a corner of the cellar and approached her. Somebody had witnessed the scene. A tall, elegant woman with a face like a Madonna leaned over the girl.
“I got lost looking for the toilets and saw everything. We’re going to report him.”
“No, madame, I’ll lose my job.”
“Ignoring this is out of the question.”
“Please, madame, I don’t want any hassle. If you say anything, I’ll deny it.”
The woman slowly nodded, then gave her a handkerchief. “Here, wipe yourself.”
At around midnight, the party was still in full swing, the string orchestra was playing more modern, more rhythmical pieces, and some of the guests had started dancing.
Zachary Bidermann was talking with everyone. He was in a cheerful mood, and more brilliant than ever. The press photographers flashed their cameras as soon as he stood next to a famous person.
Suddenly, Zachary demanded that Rose be included. They struck a cheerful, amorous pose, which was applauded by the guests.
In the midst of the ovation, three police officers burst in. “Excuse us, ladies and gentlemen, we’ve received a call about an assault.”
Petra von Tannenbaum appeared from behind a screen. “I made the call.”
Everyone looked with surprise at this magnificent creature nobody had noticed: in marked contrast to her extreme sophistication, the straps of her dress were torn and her hair was inexplicably disheveled.
Trembling, she pointed a finger at Zachary. “He’s the one who raped me.”
A shudder went through the assembled guests.
She took a handkerchief from her reticule and added, with a sob, “I have proof.”
PART FOUR
DIES IRAE
PRELUDE
That night, a night when a tense heat weighed over the city and would disappear only with a thunderstorm, the parrots spoke their mother tongue, the one that is still a mystery to men. Their lively chatter built footbridges of sound between branches, threw creepers from tree to tree, recreating a jungle on the square, from the majestic nest occupied by the macaw to the huge boat of twigs where several families of small green parakeets resided. The hullabaloo added to the fog inside the brains of the humans.
We may train parrots to say whatever we want, but parrots actually say what they want. What is a speaking parrot trying to explain? What is a silent parrot trying to express?
When civilization shuts parrots in cages, we can view them as acoustic monkeys—unless, that is, we view monkeys as acrobatic parrots.
Let us stop seeing them with human eyes.
They babble, cackle, prattle, then, all of a sudden, they observe a minute’s silence. The hubbub resumes and, here and there, there are fragments of French, Portuguese, Italian. Are they reproducing echoes of our sentences without understanding them, or are they revealing their exceptional skills? Perfect linguists with sharp ears, they might be double agents, able to handle the language of men as well as that of birds. What makes us so sure that we are superior to them, we featherless bipeds with no lexical duplicity?
When they speak our language, are they addressing only us or are they conducting a conversation among themselves? Perhaps they are spying on the acts of humans, reporting on them, criticizing them, circulating malicious gossip about them . . .
The more time you spent on Place d’Arezzo, the more convinced you were that you were entering a zone of mystery. Even the name of the square bordered on the surreal, paying homage as it did to the Benedictine monk Guido of Arezzo, who invented the system of musical notation to dispel the fog of oral transmission. “He who performs without understanding is nothing but an animal,” he said. In music, Guido of Arezzo was a killer of parrots. Repetition wasn’t enough. He wanted to put an end to imitation and allow us to analyze, note down, write. So, around the year 1000, he named the notes do, re, mi, fa, sol, la . . .
By what irony of fate did parrots and parakeets decide to move into this particular square?
That night, there were as many humans as birds. The atmosphere felt explosive. There was a feeling that something was about to happen.
“But what?” an African gray parrot kept crying. “But what?”
1
As soon as she heard the screams, Diane knew it was no game. Around her, beyond the trees and the lawns, the city rustled with an ever-changing cacophony that the residents took for silence. And yet the cry for help cut through the night.
In spite of the darkness, in spite of her high-heeled thigh boots, which made it hard for her to run, in spite of the uneven ground—stumps, clods, roots—that the clearing set up as an obstacle, she rushed to the spot from where the screams had come.
Amid the chestnut trees, she made out three large shadowy figures crouching over a girl lying on the ground. The victim was struggling with all her might, but being hit seemed to excite the men even more as they indulged their pleasure. One was holding the head of their prey, trying to gag her with his arm, which she was wildly fending off. It was a battle. A smell of blood and sex hung in the air. Diane immediately saw the gravity of the situation. A fight has to have an outcome, and this one could well be a fight to the death.
Without hesitation, she charged at the rapists. Only the one holding the girl’s head saw her, but he barely had time to cry out before Diane brutally kicked the others on the backs of their necks. Caught by surprise, they rolled onto their sides in pain, and Diane now aimed for their genitals. They screamed and crawled away into the grass, moaning.
Then the one who was left was bitten by the girl, bellowed, and pulled his hand away, which gave Diane a chance to deliver a hook to his nose.
The three men lying on the ground, astounded that they were being attacked by a woman on her own, got ready to attack out of male pride.
But then the sound of a siren came from the boulevard below, and without thinking they stood up and scurried off.
They were absorbed by the night.
The siren stopped.
Diane’s heart wouldn’t slow down. All she wanted was to keep fighting.
Her fierce excitement was interrupted by the victim’s moans.
Diane bent over her and recognized Albane. Her legs bruised, her lips bleeding, her body shaking, the girl was crying, shielding her private parts with one hand and hiding her face with the other.
Diane had the good sense not to return her straight to her mother.
In spite of all the guests flooding Place d’Arezzo to attend the Bidermanns’ party, she managed to park her car on Rue Molière and sneak Albane up to her own apartment, concealed under a tartan rug. Jean-Noël wouldn’t disturb them: he was on a business trip to Stuttgart.
Once indoors, she helped the girl to pull herself together.
Albane sto
od in the hot shower, unable to move, at once distraught and convalescent, as if the water might cleanse her of what had happened, wipe the memory of her attackers from her skin, restore her lost purity. In that humid atmosphere, she was also able to cry.
On the other side of the door, Diane was worried. The girl had locked herself in—which was only natural—and Diane was afraid she might do something fatal. Although she had hastily removed anything sharp—razor, scissors—she knew that the resourcefulness of a desperate person should never be underestimated.
What reassured her was hearing Albane’s regular sobs: they proved she was still alive.
An hour later, the shower stopped.
“Are you all right?” Diane asked. “Do you want a hot drink?”
She heard a weak “yes.”
Albane appeared, wrapped in a robe, a towel tied around her head like a turban, which reassured Diane: if the girl was concerned with her hair, that meant she wasn’t planning to leave this world.
They sat in the kitchen, where Diane prepared a hot toddy with a liberal amount of rum.
Albane told her about her ordeal. It wasn’t easy for her. She had to break off her story several times out of anger and amazement. At other times, she was choked with hiccups.
Diane listened, then asked for details. She thought it vital that Albane put her attack into words, if not to overcome it, then at least to tame it, to remove it from that terrifying violence and put it into the order of language.
By her second glass of toddy, Albane had finished.
She felt a dumb kind of relief, verging on lethargy: she had put everything into words, but hadn’t rid herself of the horror. Images and sensations kept coming back to her, tearing at her flesh.
“Do you want a doctor?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’ll talk about it with your mother.”
At the mention of her mother, Albane lost heart and collapsed.
“What’s the matter?” Diane exclaimed.
“Mommy . . . She’ll be so upset when she finds out . . . Oh . . . ”
Diane propped the girl up and tried to reason with her. “Albane, be clear about this. She won’t be any more upset than you are.”
“Yes, she will.”
Diane realized the girl meant what she said. To her great surprise, this realization took her back decades, to when she herself was a little girl trying to shield her mother from life’s hardships. A loving child faces her own pain, but refuses to torment her parents. She put this recollection away into the drawer where she kept long-dead feelings and took Albane into her dressing room. Since the girl couldn’t wear her torn outfit again, she had to be clothed before she returned home.
Albane stopped being a martyr and spent a few moments marveling at what she saw. Since the capricious, versatile Diane liked playing different scenes, there was everything and its opposite in her wardrobe: leather and tweed, angora and latex, a business suit alongside a sexy nurse’s uniform, a hippie tunic next to a lamé shift. The wardrobe was like the costume department of a theater, the storeroom of a quick-change artist rather than the closet of a respectable Brussels resident.
Diane chose a pair of jeans and a loose-fitting sweater, then, holding Albane’s hand, took her to her mother’s.
Half an hour later, leaving Patricia’s apartment, she felt a sadness akin to helplessness, which had been triggered by Albane’s question: “What were you doing there?” Naturally, Diane couldn’t tell the truth, so had improvised on the theme of “I was driving around, stopped to smoke a cigarette, and rolled down the window.” Mother and daughter had swallowed the lie, exclaiming, “Thank goodness!”
But Diane hadn’t gone out to smoke. She had been hanging around the park in Forest, an area with a dangerous reputation, because, her husband being away tonight, she was hoping for an encounter. The truth was, she had been there to experience the very act that had befallen Albane—but of her own free will! Could she ever admit that? Could she even hear herself say it? She could barely understand it herself . . .
She suddenly felt worn. Compared with Albane, she realized she had experienced everything, tried everything, exhausted everything. Her search for something new, extreme, and dangerous had led her to a critical point of humanity—or inhumanity—in which she practiced universal irony. In her cynicism, she found entertainment in what scared other people. Could she still feel anything? Hadn’t she dulled her emotions? Even violence no longer seemed like aggression, but more like a game, since she would immediately turn it into a staged scene. Every event became a ritual, and she an extra in the ritual.
I am my own surveillance camera. I become the night watchman who enjoys watching me on the screen in strange situations. In a way, I no longer live but watch myself live.
Who was she, this woman who spent more time outside than inside herself?
As she crossed Place d’Arezzo, Diane noticed a different kind of agitation. Whereas earlier she had sensed a cheerful impatience in the guests rushing to the party, there was now a tension: the music flooding out of the windows had stopped, and on the square everything had come to a standstill.
She saw the large door of the town house open and police officers emerge with Zachary Bidermann.
Diane thought she was hallucinating: the proud, haughty Zachary Bidermann, escorted by four police officers, looked like a suspect being taken into custody. He was rolling his eyes in outrage and keeping pace with those leading him. They finally pushed his head down and bundled him into a white car with blinding blue revolving lights. Anyone would have thought he was a criminal!
Rose appeared at the top of the steps, her face haggard, holding a handkerchief, supported by a few close people, among them Léo Adolf, Chairman of the European Commission.
Diane might have been stunned by the sight of Zachary, but that of Rose overcame her completely. Looking away, almost hiding, she ran off past the trees until she got home.
The following day, at dawn, she heard through the media about the scandal that had occurred on Place d’Arezzo.
At around noon, returning from Stuttgart, Jean-Noël found her glued to the TV screen. She pointed to a platter of cold meat she had prepared for him and carried on watching. He barely managed to exchange a few words with her, and they were only about the events unfolding.
“Poor woman,” Diane exclaimed.
“Let’s not exaggerate,” Jean-Noël grunted. “Sure, she was forced to give him a blow job, but she’ll get over it.”
“I meant Rose.”
“Rose?”
“Rose Bidermann, that bastard’s wife. She’s the one who’s suffering the most right now.”
“Oh?”
“Now that she knows he’s been cheating on her, what she’s refused to admit for years is going to come crashing down on her head. People have been talking since this morning, and all sorts of details are coming in about his sexual obsessions. The press are going to town on it and digging up lots of witnesses.”
“Honestly, Diane, are you shocked?”
“What?”
“A compulsive sex drive like that—”
“You wouldn’t understand,” she muttered, turning up the volume.
That morning, Diane woke, heard the whistling and chirping of the parakeets on the square, and decided it was time to act. Today, she would do what she had never attempted in the past few years.
She got ready, doing her hair and applying her makeup as if going to a prestigious evening, then dialed the number she had obtained years earlier.
A curt voice answered. “Zachary Bidermann’s office, Madame Singer speaking.”
“I’d like to make an appointment with Rose Bidermann.”
There was an irritable silence, then the voice said, “Who’s speaking and what is it concerning?”
“This is Diane Fanon.”
> “Does Madame know you?”
“No.”
“What is this in connection with?”
“I have something to reveal to her.”
A weary groan preceded Singer’s reply. “Look, madame, we’re receiving revelations from women by the truckload. Mistresses, lovers, exes, the ones still to come, the ones who were forced, the ones who hesitate, and the ones who would quite like to—believe me, that’s all I’m getting on the phone. Can we have some common decency, please? Madame Bidermann isn’t remotely interested in your revelations, and I don’t understand how you can have the gall to try. Learn to respect other people’s grief, madame.”
“But I do respect it! I love Rose.”
“What do you mean? You just said she didn’t know you.”
“Look, I don’t want to tell her anything about Zachary Bidermann, it’s something else I want to talk to her about.”
“What?”
Diane hesitated. Would she utter the words she had been avoiding for years? She resorted to a subterfuge. “Tell her I want to talk to her about . . . Zouzou.”
“Zouzou?”
“Zouzou. Tell her—”
“I don’t understand.”
“She’ll understand.”
Diane dictated her phone number and hung up.
Her heart was pounding fit to burst. She felt as if she had just committed the riskiest, most indecent act of her existence. Unwilling to leave, she lingered by the phone, waiting for the return call.
Luckily for her nerves, it came soon. A few minutes later, Madame Singer suggested an appointment at five that afternoon.
Diane presented herself solemnly at the front door, ignoring the reporters and photographers camped out on the sidewalk. She kept her head down, ignoring their questions, focusing on her objective.
She gave her name and the butler invited her to slip inside, careful to prevent an indiscreet snapshot, and led her up to the main floor. Here Rose Bidermann was waiting for her, standing in the middle of a room blooming with peonies. Her hair neatly done, prettily made up, dressed in light colors, with a resonant voice and a smile on her lips, she behaved magnificently, her grace and ease contradicting the tragedy that had befallen her.
The Carousel of Desire Page 41