The Cracks in Our Armor

by Anna Gavalda

  My forehead against the cold glass windowpane, I chewed on an imaginary piece of gum to keep my throat from choking me.

  I really felt like crying. I clung to stupid things. Fatigue, cold, the night . . . I kept thinking: It’s because you didn’t get enough sleep, but later on, after a good shower, you’ll see, you’ll feel better. And I turned the volume up as high as it would go to drown everything out again.

  Adele in my earbuds. I loved her voice. It was my voice. Always on the verge of breaking. So of course I didn’t even make it to the end of the song.

  Anyway at least like that my eye makeup was already removed.

  Screw, lay, get laid, stuff, shag, bang, get it on, hump, do the business, not to mention the ubiquitous f-word . . . All these substitutes we use for make love when we know damn well there’s no love and there never will be. But I—and I’ve never told anyone, especially not Samia—when I . . . I always feel it. My body is . . . My body is who I am. It is me, too. It’s me who’s there living inside it and . . .

  And that is why, every time, I get fleeced.

  Or maybe tarred and feathered, I should say.

  Every time.

  I have never betrayed anyone.

  Ever.

  I’ve always shared.

  Oh, look. There they are again, the high-rises, the tags, the police stations, the hoodies, and the spit.

  And here we are, home again, jiggety-jig.

  When I left the IVON (that guy, the poet, I never even found out his name), I took a deep breath and headed straight for my comforter.

  I blew on my fingers, smiled to myself, gave myself a pep talk. Come on, I said, come on . . . This time, it was different, you got blasoned.

  After all.

  How classy is that?

  RESISTANCE FIGHTER

  1

  I’d moved with the kids into a tiny apartment behind the Panthéon.

  Fifth floor no elevator, run-down, funky, everything lopsided, I was subletting from my former thesis advisor’s sister, a woman I’d never met in person, and I’d been unable to tell her over the phone just how long I intended to stay. Temporary solution, temporary situation, temporary arrangement, those were her words and I was careful not to contradict her. Of course. Of course. Everything was temporary. I got it.

  Through the dormer in my study I could see the emergency exit from the Great Men’s sanctuary and I liked that little door. I liked the thought of working, sleeping, cooking, clenching my teeth, raising my children, and starting all over again in the shadow of the ghosts of Alexandre Dumas, Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Pierre and Marie Curie. It’s ridiculous, I know, but I swear that’s how I felt. I really believed in the thought that those people were helping me. I’d had to cram most of our former life into storage, and we weren’t allowed to put our name on the letterbox. A detail, but the devil’s in the details and in my case he could be really pleased with himself because even though I did have my mail addressed to an uncle, living here without a letterbox, so high up, in such shabby accommodation, and with for sole support the bones that were more alive than we were, we weren’t really here anymore. Neither here nor anywhere and, since we weren’t really here anymore we—Raphaël, five, Alice, three and a half, and me, thirty-four at the time—insidiously cut ourselves off from the rest of the world.

  Their father had died in a car crash the previous year. A depressive, elegant, conscientious man who left me not knowing what to think as to the accidental nature of his collision with a shrine, by the side of a deserted road in the Finistère, but perfectly enlightened regarding our material situation since, in addition to two orphans and one very damaged Jaguar, he had left me the “death benefit” of a life insurance policy that would keep us going for a few more years. How many, I had no idea.

  He was much older than me, he knew he was sick, he couldn’t stand the thought of imposing his decline on us, and he was constantly telling me I ought to find a younger, healthier lover, that I had to do it for my own sake and for the children’s, to put his soul to rest. Above all to put my soul to rest, my love . . . You know how selfish I am . . . I kept a muzzle on him for as long as I could, by dint of kisses, protests, denials, acts of bravado, laughter, and tears, but in the end, he outwitted me all the same.

  I was angry with him. For a long time it seemed to me that far from sparing us his decline, he had imposed it on us forever. I didn’t invite his children to the funeral, or even his parents, I went alone with him to the crematorium at Père-Lachaise and when I took the métro back the other way I was hiding a still-warm urn under my sweater. That same evening I got completely wasted with Lorenz W., his associate, and I begged him to fuck me. I was feeling very sentimental at the time, but young widows are often very sentimental. I lived with my head stuck in a shrine for a few months and then I decided to move, and this little apartment came to the rescue.

  No furniture, no memories, no neighbors, no butcher, no baker, no newspaper vendor, no café waiter, no wine merchant, no dry cleaners’ employee who’d known him and grown very fond of him because he was a delightfully endearing man, no little classmates who were as hurtful as they were ingenuous, no sympathetic schoolteachers far too sweet to be sincere, no points of reference, no routine, no letterbox, no doorbell, no elevator, no safety net, no nothing: at last we were able to ease up on the sorrow.

  Our life now fit in a space hardly bigger than a pocket handkerchief, its four corners unfolding as follows: the minimarket downstairs, the nursery school on the rue Cujas, the paths through the Luxembourg Gardens, and, last but not least, the Bombardier pub which huddled just across from the Saint-Étienne-du-Mont church. Every afternoon, we stopped in that square after school and Raphaël and Alice drank their lemon sodas while tallying their bruises, their marbles, their Pokémon cards, the stars in their notebooks, and who knows what else, while their maman slowly but surely got hammered.

  Once the children were in bed, I often went back down onto the pavement outside the Bombardier just to mingle silently, pint in hand, with the clusters of students from the Latin Quarter.

  Yes, that’s what I did. Yes, I locked my little ones in at night and left them to their fate. Did they have nightmares? Were they afraid? Did they ever wake up? Did they ever call out for me?

  I don’t think so.

  Children are so wise . . .

  The moment my love first imagined his shrine, he started drinking, and I often went with him. I was along for the ride, after all, and when he was no longer there I just kept on going without him. I had a drinking problem, I won’t deny it. Oh but yes, look, I am still denying it. I didn’t have an alcohol problem, I was an alcoholic. (It’s awful, rereading this and cringing at that last word, stumbling over it, more like, wondering if I wasn’t exaggerating a little and was I still the sentimental young widow I mentioned above, so I went to check the definition of the word alcoholic in a dictionary: A person who drinks too much alcohol.) Right. I drank too much alcohol. I didn’t want to elaborate on the subject, those who know, know, and don’t need anyone to tell them how ingeniously the brain will help you bend your elbow, and those who don’t know cannot understand. There comes a time when you realize that alcohol (and all the thoughts that go with it—struggle, resist, haggle, give in, deny, gain ground, fight, negotiate, exult, surrender, blame, advance, retreat, stumble, fall, lose) has become the most important activity of the day. Excuse me. The only activity of the day. Those who have ever tried to stop smoking —be it once or several times, but always in vain—will have a sense of how psychologically wretched this inane relationship with oneself has turned out to be. The only difference—and what a difference—is that other people do not view smoking as shameful. That’s it. Let’s change the subject.

  I would rouse the children from their beds, get them dressed, butter their toast, pour their hot chocolate, take them to school, drink a coffee on the rue Soufflot while lea
fing through the newspaper, do some shopping, tidy our little home, get their lunch ready, go back to get them on the rue Cujas, feed them, take Raphaël back to class, come straight home with Alice fast as I could so she wouldn’t fall asleep in her stroller, put her down for her nap, read detective stories that I had bought for fifty centimes or a euro from the boxes outside Gibert Jeune, Boulinier, or the bouquinistes on the banks of the Seine, wake her up, bring her along when I picked up her brother at school (little girl rested and babbling, big brother free at last and grinning, best time of day), take them to the Luxembourg gardens, watch them play, then home for their shower, and dinner, and I would read them stories, tuck them in, and kiss them goodnight.

  And all that time, the vise of alcohol never loosened.

  Never, and with varying degrees of assertiveness, depending on whether the moon was in my belly, sapping my energy, or whether my love had come to whisper in my ear without warning. When he was just passing by to make sure everything was all right, then I was fine, but when he too would weigh upon my belly, coming back at night and demanding his share of the bed, his share of life, his share of us, I would get back out of bed, in tears, and go downstairs and get bombed.

  Our life, as I said, would fit in a handkerchief.

  And then, one morning, I noticed you.

  2

  I noticed you because you were beautiful.

  I was standing with my elbows on the counter, nursing my too-short nights as I read the day’s news or eavesdropped on my neighbors’ conversations by the sugar bowl, and I spotted you in the mirror above the bar. You always sat there, all the way at the back, in the same place.

  I admired your style, your poise, your refinement, your hands. I liked your cheerfulness, your smiles, that way you had of being here and completely elsewhere, as if you had just left the embrace of a lover or were about to go and meet them. You were sexy, and you looked as if you must be smart, too, you were perfect, and yet there was always something inexplicably untidy about you, too, a strand of hair, a collar askew, a crease, a watchband too loose, a worn-out handbag, a belt fastened wrong, a crease at your lips, shadows under your eyes, and this made you . . . I was going to write “irresistible,” but that’s too predictable. Irrevocable.

  Yes, irrevocable. Ever since there has been a Paris, people have talked, written, fantasized about Parisian women, and when I looked at you I said to myself: there, that’s it, she’s it. She’s the Parisian woman, and that’s all there is to it.

  I was all the more aware of your beauty in that the mirror also reflected my own dreary counterpart, and the moment I saw it, I returned to stirring my coffee. I looked like nothing, skinny, out of sorts, I’d been wearing the same two pairs of jeans for months, and my dead husband’s shirts, my dead husband’s cashmere sweaters, my dead husband’s scarves and his jackets, too. I’d gotten my hair cut very short so I wouldn’t have to bother with it, I’d stopped wearing makeup and perfume, I’d stopped jogging but I never wore anything but my running shoes, I had a cavity, maybe even two, and couldn’t care less, I drank too much, I was dehydrated, my hands were rough, my skin was dry, my body was dry, and everything inside me had bad breath.

  You have since confessed that you had been watching me, too, and that you envied my casual, classy look. What a joke.

  You had noticed the elegant cotton patches on the pockets of my worn-out jeans, the soft quality of my overlong cardigans, the way the cuffs doubled as mittens and how I shrouded myself in fine tweed and other fabrics.

  You thought it was chic, you said, so chic . . .

  You always ordered a small café au lait and a tartine, and you scraped the excess butter off with your little spoon, and you spent most of the time on your phone texting. You leaned over the screen and smiled. It wasn’t hard to figure out that you were in love, and you began your days chatting with a man (or a woman?) who made you happy. Sometimes your smiles were moist and your dimples more alluring. What do you call it when a person is smiling and sending sexy messages? That they have started their day by sexting? Yes, every morning you would bite into a chunk of fresh baguette dipped in café au lait while you brought someone you loved up to date on your life, that much was obvious.

  And there were times when your phone stayed in your bag next to your cup, silent. You were every bit as pretty but you looked a little lost, disoriented. On those days you would look around, and I think that’s when we would exchange a little smile of complicity. Nothing friendly, really, just courtesy between two regulars at the same watering hole. People often say that Parisians are hard, but they never mention these moments of complicity they share among themselves. So we were familiar faces, but we might never have said a word to each other had Raphaël’s teacher not gotten sick, which meant one morning I came back to the Café de la Sorbonne with my two kids in tow.

  We sat down at the table next to you, deliberately, I must admit, and we weren’t even settled before you started gazing hungrily at my little daughter. Life had not yet taught Alice that she wasn’t really a princess, and she responded to your eager gaze by turning on the charm, and I saw how you melted when she showed you her security blanket, and her brother’s, her decal tattoo, and her brother’s, her marbles, and her brother’s, crossing and uncrossing her pudgy little legs all the while and constantly readjusting the tiny sequined barrette which was her crown.

  Someone ought to write about it someday: the grace and elegance of very little girls.

  The children monopolized your attention and we hardly spoke that day. I found out that your name was Mathilde because Raphaël asked you, but I didn’t say anything. I kept quiet because I’d hardly slept, I kept quiet because I was going to have to go grocery shopping with the children under my feet and that annoyed me (you see, that’s alcoholism: thanks to the luminous presence of two children you finally meet the woman who’s had you dreaming for weeks, and these children, in addition to being exquisite, have the good taste of being your children, and all four of you are sharing an exorbitantly-priced breakfast in a café in a city that sets the whole world dreaming, and yet you can only think about one thing, worse yet, you are obsessed with one thought alone: under which item, size-wise, volume-wise, a cereal box for example, are you going to hide your bottle of Johnnie Walker, in the crap plastic basket at the pathetic little grocery store on the ground floor of your building?). I kept quiet because I had nothing to say, I kept quiet because it was deafening, the noise in my brain, I kept quiet because I wasn’t used to speaking anymore, I kept quiet because I had lost.

  On the days that followed you didn’t come to the Café de la Sorbonne. Then there were the school holidays, I think it was the February break, and one morning, when I’d already gotten out of the habit of looking out for you, you came to lean up against the bar next to me. You said hello, you ordered an Americano, and we didn’t speak. As I turned to one side to fish for some coins in my pocket, you put your hand on my forearm and said, “Leave it, my treat,” and it was only then, at that moment, when I turned to face you to thank you, that I saw your face crumple. I put my hand on yours and you burst into tears. “Sorry,” you said, laughing, apologizing, “sorry, sorry.” I left my hand where it was and I stopped looking at you.

  I don’t know how long we stood there not moving, you entrusting me with your sorrow and me enfolding it with my own. At one point you murmured: “Your children . . . they’re so sweet,” and I broke down.

  The proprietor came over, gently scolding us. “What’s going on, ladies? What is it? Don’t you like it here? You’re going to scare all the customers away! What can I offer you to make you feel better—a shot of calvados?”

  Man, did that make me happy.

  We downed it in one gulp. You choked, I could breathe again, and under the liberating effect of a few ounces of helium in my veins, I invited you to come over for dinner that very evening.

  You smiled, I asked you if you had someth
ing to write with, and on a coaster I copied out the address of my little abode. As well as, because of the downstairs buzzer, the name of those people who were not us.

  3

  You showed up with your arms full: flowers, a cake, champagne, presents for the children . . . They were delighted.

  Just delighted. Not because of the presents, but because you were there. This was the first time the outside world had ever invited itself into our home, the first time that someone had made the climb to come and see us; life returning.

  You didn’t know that at the time, and you thought it was the Corolle doll, the bow and arrow, the stickers, the magical baby bottle, and the colored crayons that got them so excited, but you may recall that once all these treasures had been unwrapped all they wanted to do was take you by the hand to show you their room, their toys, their world, the ladder to their bunk bed, which was still a novelty to them, their class photos, the picture of their daddy, and of Toby, their former nanny’s dog, and all their charming clutter. What you had brought them in the way of happiness was not material, and you played the game so well.

  And it was then, on seeing how moved you were, how curious and attentive, listening and learning by heart the names of all their stuffed animals, baby dolls, classmates, and Wigglytuffs and Jigglypuffs and Slowpokes and Psyducks and other Pokémon, each one more improbable than the next, that I understood you were dying for children the way I was dying of thirst.

  We watched them eat their dinner, and then Alice insisted you help her into her nightie and undo her braids and brush her hair, at length, which you did, constantly remarking on how silky it was, how curly and blond, how nice it smelled . . . And you also read them a story, and then another, and then a third, until finally I stepped in to free you from the children and your distress.