by Anna Gavalda
Valiant, experienced, and inspired.
Maybe the booksellers . . . the booksellers are just a pretext for strolling along the Seine. She will let out a sigh. “Again? Those old books, again?” No, she won’t sigh. She likes to please me, too. And besides, she will give me her hand, I know she will. She has always given me her hand.
She folds her napkin before wiping her mouth. As she gets up, she smoothes her skirt and tugs on the sleeves of her cardigan. She picks up her bag and her glance indicates where I have to leave our trays.
I hold the door for her. The cold air is a shock. She ties her scarf again then with a confident gesture frees her hair from under her coat collar. She turns to thank me:
“That was delicious.”
It was delicious.
We head down the rue Dauphine, the wind is blowing, I put my arm around her shoulder and hold her close.
How I love this girl. My little girl, my daughter. Her name is Adèle and she’s not even six years old.
HIT POINTS
This morning, just before ten, I felt my phone vibrate in my shirt pocket. It went on buzzing but I didn’t pay any attention because I was crouching down by a wall, examining the progression of a crack.
With my knee on my hard hat, I was trying to understand why a brand-new residential apartment complex was doomed never to be inhabited.
I had been appointed as an assessor by the insurance company representing the architects who had designed it, and I was waiting for my assistant to finish reading the numbers on the gauges we had installed all along that same crack four months earlier.
I won’t go into the details now because it would be far too technical, but the situation was tense. Our agency had been working on this case for over two years, and a huge amount of money was at stake. A massive amount of money, the reputation of three architects, two surveyors, one property developer, one earthwork contractor, one building contractor, one foreman, two consulting engineers, and one deputy mayor.
We had to determine the “tendency of the disorder,” as we say, modestly, in our jargon, and depending on which one of these three words was used in my future report—“displacement,” “slippage,” or “inclination” (and all their corollaries)—a decision would be made regarding not the amount—a subtle factor that was not my responsibility—but the names of the issuer and recipient of the future invoice.
So it’s no wonder that I was not alone that morning at the bedside of a building that had scarcely risen from the ground but was already dying, and that my telephone could go on ringing in the void.
Which it did, and then it started again, as a matter of fact. Two minutes later. Annoyed, I put my hand inside my jacket. No sooner had I gagged the thing than my assistant François’s phone took over. It went on ringing for a long while, six or seven times maybe, and twice over, but François was otherwise engaged, hanging in a basket thirty feet above the ground, so the stubborn ass trying to reach him eventually gave up.
I was thinking, sighing, running my hand over that damned crack, the third to appear on that facade since the beginning of our investigation, and I was touching it lightly with my fingertips the way I would have touched a human wound. With a similar sensation of impotence and in a similar vaguely Christ-like delirium.
Wall, close thy gap.
I hated this moment in my life. I could tell the job was too much for me, for us, my partner and me, too heavy with consequence, too difficult and, above all, too risky. Regardless of the tenor of my report, and even if the fallout of this case, in the long run, would depend on grandstanding among lawyers, where the most alarming cracks, structures, and foundations always come to an amicable financial agreement, I knew that the mere fact of voicing my opinion, our opinion, would earn us the opprobrium of an entire sector of our branch of the profession.
If the architects were cleared, we would lose the clientele of the incriminated developer and contractor, and if the architects were held responsible, we wouldn’t be paid for months (even years) and we would lose something even more precious than any pecuniary comfort: trust.
Trust in them, trust in us, and, by extension, trust in our profession. Because if they turned out to be guilty, it would be the proof that they’d been lying to us all along.
We hesitated a long time before we accepted this mission, and if we took it on it was because we had respect for these people. These people and their work. We went ahead with it, with everything it implied in the way of risk (we had to invest in extremely expensive equipment) because we always believed in their good faith.
Any proof we’d been mistaken would also, in and of itself, for my associate and me at any rate, be a terrible disorder.
It just so happened that that morning, and for the first time since we had begun this assessment work, I was beginning to have my doubts. Pointless to explain why, just then—that would be, I’ll say it again, far too technical, but I was abnormally nervous. There were two or three details that were bugging me, and an insidious little thought was beginning to gnaw away at me. Just like those termites or capricorn beetles we went after from one assessment to the next: a xylophagous little thought.
For the first time since the start of our investigation and in all the hundreds of hours I’d spent on the case, I could sense something really nasty beginning to get at me from inside: had the architects really told us the whole truth?
(This is a long preamble, but it seems important, in light of the ensuing events to be related here. Everything is in the foundations. My profession has taught me that.)
I had reached this point in my ruminations when one of those same architects came up to me with his telephone.
“Your wife.”
Before I even heard her voice I understood that she was the one who had been trying to reach me earlier, and before I even heard what she had to say I was imagining the worst.
It is impossible to exaggerate the incredible speed with which the cogs in one’s brain turn, click, engage, and become alarmed. Before I’d even said those two little syllables, hel-lo, a succession of mental images, each one more morbid than the one before, had time to unreel before my eyes, and as I was still reaching for the phone I was convinced that something dreadful had happened.
Horrible thousandths of a second. Horrible seismic tremors. Crack, flaw, breach, fissure, however you want to put it, in that moment your heart weakens once and for all.
“The school,” she said, breathlessly, “Valentin’s school. They called me. There’s a problem. You have to go there.”
“What sort of problem?”
“I don’t know. They wouldn’t say over the phone. They want us to go there.”
“But has something happened to him?”
“No, he did something.”
“Something serious?”
And as I was asking her, I felt my heart start beating again. If nothing had happened to the boy, then the rest had to be insignificant. The rest no longer existed and I went back to inspecting my wall.
(And it is only tonight, as I write, “I went back to inspecting my wall,” that I realize how this assessment job has driven me half-insane.)
“It must be, otherwise they wouldn’t have summoned us like this. Pierre, you have to go.”
“Now? No. I can’t. I’m at the Pasteur site and I can’t just leave, now. We’re waiting for the results—”
“Look,” she interrupted, “for two years you’ve been making our lives hell with that site, I know it’s tough and I’ve never reproached you about anything, but now I need you. I have appointments up to my ears, I can’t just cancel them all, and besides, you’re closer. You have to go.”
Okay. I won’t spell out all the details because, once again, it would be too technical, but I know my wife well enough to know that when she speaks to me in that tone of voice, I have to respond.
“Okay. I�
�ll go.”
“Keep me posted, okay?”
She seemed really worried.
She seemed so worried that it spread to me like a contagion, and I simply called out to everyone that my little boy had a problem and I’d be back as soon as I could. I felt the cruel wind of incomprehension blow through the assembly. But no one dared say a thing. A child, even for sharks like them, was still a bit more precious than a sack of cement.
From up in his basket François gave me a reassuring sign. A sign that said, more or less: Don’t worry. I’ve got my eye on them. A magnificent sign, given the circumstances. Magnificent.
* * *
The principal herself came out to the gate of the Victor Hugo Elementary School, which our three boys attended. She didn’t greet me, didn’t smile, didn’t hold out her hand. She said nothing other than, “Come with me.”
I knew her. We always exchanged a few words during school festivities, parent-teacher conferences, or class outings, and I had even done some work for her for free a few years ago when the town hall was expanding the cafeteria. (The “school restaurant,” as they refer to it now.) Everything had gone well, and I was under the impression that our relations were in good standing.
As we were walking past the new building, I asked her whether everything was fine, where it was concerned, and she didn’t answer. Or didn’t hear. Her gait was rapid, her fists were clenched, and her face was unfriendly.
Sensing such hostility on her part took me back forty years. I suddenly felt like the sheepish little boy walking silently behind the principal, wondering what his punishment would be, whether his parents would be notified. A very unpleasant sensation, believe me.
Very unpleasant and very odd.
Very unpleasant as far as I was concerned, because it was more than a sensation, it was a memory—I’d been a troublesome pupil, the little boy who was held by the ear and marched across the schoolyard as if to the gallows; but it was odd, too, in the case of my son Valentin, because he was as gentle and kind as they come.
What on earth had he done?
For the second time that morning I was confronted with a mystery that was beyond me. What design flaw in the mind of my six-year-old son had caused his little world, or that of his school in any case, to show forewarnings of displacement, slippage, or inclination?
Nothing would have surprised me, coming from his brothers, but him? He had always been deeply respectful of his teachers, he kept his notebooks perfectly tidy, shared his toys, and when he was at my in-laws’ on vacation, he would rather run the length of their swimming pool from morning to night to fish out any drowning insects than actually swim in it himself: this boy, punished?
My gift child, as I often call him, because that’s what he is, literally. Our two eldest were already getting big, Thomas was eight and Gabriel was six, and one year when their mother Juliette asked me what I would like for Christmas I said, a baby. We just missed Christmas but, since he was born in mid-February, we called him Valentin.
He was Valentin, and he was a marvel.
How could my gift child, barely six years old, have put the principal of his school in such a state? It was a complete enigma.
Her office was on the second floor of the main building. She went in first and motioned to me to follow, never looking at me.
I followed.
“Close the door behind you,” she ordered.
If I’d had a voltage tester in my hand, I think the thing would have electrocuted me. This wasn’t a meeting, this was an electromagnetic field.
In the room there was a man with a somber expression who responded to my greeting with a tiny nod, a woman so full of outrage that she didn’t have the breath to respond, a little boy in a wheelchair, their son no doubt, who did not look up at me, absorbed as he was in scratching an imaginary spot on the knee of his trouser leg, and, all alone, facing them, standing by the window, my son Valentin.
He was backlit and staring at his feet.
“Valentin will explain to you why I sent for you so urgently this morning, along with Maxime’s parents,” announced the principal, turning to my son.
No answer.
“Valentin,” she repeated, “at least find the courage to tell your father what you did.”
Maxime’s dad was looking sternly at my son, Maxime’s mom was shaking her head indignantly and fiddling with her car keys, Maxime was looking out the window, and Valentin was still staring at his feet.
“Valentin,” I said softly, “tell me what you did.”
No answer.
“Valentin, look at me.”
The boy obeyed, and I found myself looking at a child I’d never seen. If you could even call him a child; this was a wall. His face was a wall and the wall was far more solid than the ones I’d been so focused on not half an hour earlier. A great stone wall, with two big, fair eyes for arrow slits. A fortress.
Of course, I couldn’t let anything show, but inside I was smiling. He was so cute, with his little air of a young soldier about to be court-martialed. No, he wasn’t cute, he was handsome.
So handsome, calm, and pale . . . A statue. Of white marble.
“Valentin,” said the principal again, “don’t make me have to tell them myself, please.”
Maxime’s mom let out a little hiccup and her hiccup annoyed me. What was going on, anyway? Their son was alive, by the look of it, and surely it wasn’t my son who had put him in his wheelchair! I was about to interrupt, to give voice to my irritation, when my little boy resolved to confess—and I can never thank him enough for that—and thereby saved me from ridicule before this gathering full of sorrow and fury.
“I punctured the tire on Maxime’s wheelchair . . . ” he murmured.
“Precisely!” retorted the principal, in a smug tone. “You punctured the tire on your little classmate’s wheelchair, using the tip of your compass. That is precisely what you did. Are you proud of yourself?”
No answer.
No answer on the part of a six-year-old boy hitherto known for his kindness was tantamount to acquiescing, and if he was taking responsibility for his deed in this way, the least anyone could do was conduct a little investigation.
Mind you, I’m not saying I was already prepared to cover for him or forgive the sins of my offspring, but it was my profession to conduct investigations in order to determine the responsibility of the parties involved in a dispute, and I would insist on a preliminary assessment before determining the causes of a claim.
I wasn’t protecting my son, I was enforcing the law. And that morning I was all the more scrupulous about it, given that I was having such a fussy time with the truth.
For months I’d been stressed, mistreated, shoved this way and that by people who were playing cat and mouse with reality, and when it came down to it I was really in need of the utmost clarity.
“Are you proud of yourself?” she asked him again.
No answer.
The principal turned to Maxime’s parents, raising her arms in a sign of exasperation.
Relieved that Valentin had confessed, and reassured by the unfailing support of Authority, Maxime’s dad sat up straighter and his mom put away her keys.
The tension fell a few thousand volts and you could tell that now it was time to move on to more serious things, namely: the punishment. What would be a fitting sentence for such a cowardly act? For you must agree, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that there is nothing worse on earth than attacking a poor, defenseless, disabled child, now is there?
Yes, I could feel the tension abating and I did not like the nature of this easing. I didn’t like it because it was covering the cracks a bit too quickly. I knew my son, I knew what he was made of, his foundations, and it was not like him to commit such an act without good reason.
“Why did you do it?” I asked, flashing him an invisible smile, hi
dden in my eyebrows above my big-mean-but-only-pretend-mean eyes.
No answer.
I was disconcerted. I knew my boy must have seen my real-pretend-angry-dad grimace, so why didn’t he stop his own scowl? Why didn’t he trust me?
“You don’t want to tell me?”
He shook his head.
“Why don’t you want to tell me?”
No answer.
“He doesn’t want to tell you because he’s ashamed!” asserted Maxime’s mom.
“Are you ashamed?” I repeated gently, still holding his gaze.
No answer.
“Okay, look . . . ” sighed the principal, “I don’t want to keep you any longer over such a regrettable incident. We have the facts, and the facts are unforgiveable. If Valentin won’t speak, too bad. He will be punished, and that will give him time to think about his behavior.”
Sighs of relief in the courtroom.
I did not take my eyes off my son. I wanted to understand.
“Go back to class,” she ordered.
As he was heading to the door, I called out, “Valentin, is it that you don’t want to tell me or that you can’t tell me?”
He froze. No answer.
“You can’t tell me?”
No answer.
“You can’t tell me because it’s a secret?”
And then, because he nodded his head for the first time, the gentle shaking of his neck allowed two huge teardrops lodged in his eyelashes to escape at last and slide down his cheeks.