The Cracks in Our Armor

by Anna Gavalda

  I reached for a towel, dabbed my face, and when I finally turned around, she said,

  “You know why I’m leaving you, Paul? I’ve leaving you because you didn’t even nick yourself. I’m leaving you because you’re the kind of man who can be told all this and come out of it without a single scratch.”

  I was speechless.

  “You’re a monster, Paul Cailley-Ponthieu. A kind monster, but a monster all the same.”

  I didn’t respond. It was an old blade and I was already late.

  I managed to stay on the phone all the way to the gate, but when I found out the flight was at least fifty minutes late (poor visibility), I hung up, switched the phone off, and collapsed in a seat, my legs like jelly.

  A stranger roused me from my torpor.

  “Monsieur? Are you all right?”

  I apologized, pulled myself together, and left for Hamburg.

  My driver dropped me off outside the house that same evening at around eight o’clock.

  The front hall of the apartment was littered with cardboard boxes: Shoes Me, Girls Summer Clothes, Lucie Stuffed Animals, Ariane Underwear. Right.

  I pulled off my scarf, my coat, my jacket, my tie, my watch, my cuff links, my shoes, and my socks, inspected the mail, poured a drink, and was running a bath when the interphone rang. It was Julio. The cleaner.

  Of course I helped him. Not that I really wanted to, but I could not decently watch the poor guy carting off all my family’s dirty laundry without giving him a hand. And besides, as my wife would confirm: I’m a monster, but I’m kind, all the same. Kind.

  Because Julio and I were monopolizing the elevator, you eventually decided to use the stairs and walk up six flights, at your own pace.

  You were out of breath when you finally arrived. You were not young anymore and you had a lot to carry: two thick files under your left arm, and a wicker basket filled with food in your right hand. A basket bursting with branches of celery and leek. I recall this because it was so unexpected. I would never have imagined you doing anything remotely domestic. I don’t know why. I simply couldn’t imagine a man who wore derby buckle shoes making dinner. It’s idiotic, but the leeks completely threw me, I have to admit.

  (In my defense, let it be said that I was down to basics in those days. The strict minimum.)

  So there we were, face-to-face in the middle of my dejection. I was barefoot, you were wearing Aubercy, and we greeted one another in our usual distracted manner. You didn’t look at the elevator or my apartment even once, you just wove your way between two boxes and closed the door to your apartment behind you.

  The efficient Julio had soon cleared the place out and the worst of it was that I couldn’t stop myself from giving him a tip. I didn’t even think about it, it’s second nature with me. I always say thank you, and I always thank people with money. I can hear the sentiment sycophants tut-tutting in protest all the way from here. I’ve been hearing them my entire life. The thing was, with Julio, it seemed to me that a fifty euro note slipped inside a little thank you would please him as much as a big verbal thank you slipped inside nothing at all. And his morality has nothing to do with it.

  Nor does mine, for that matter.

  All my life, I’ve been made to feel guilty for making money. And for using it as a shortcut with things and with people. For wanting to buy everything, above all proof of affection. I have never known how to cope. Honestly, I don’t know what to say. I know how to make money the way others know how to spend it, and I give it easily because I know how useful it can be, it’s as simple as that. Because of the price of our shoes, we’ve often touched on the subject (we never got into anything, but we touched on almost everything) and you always maintained that those right-thinking people were far more obsessed with cash than I was. “You are above all suspicion, my dear Paul. For you, money has no value,” you insisted, “since you were born with it. Those people are obtuse. Forget it. Forget those flunkeys. Drop it,” and when it was no longer enough to console me for being so misunderstood, you would always end up banishing the clouds by quoting Alphonse Allais:

  “No need to take ourselves seriously; there will be no survivors.”

  (Forgive me, my dear Louis, but I am making the most of this last night with you to pour out my feelings a bit more than usual.) (It must be the altitude.)

  Julio cleaned the place out, as I said, and I closed the door behind him the way you had closed your own door a few minutes earlier.

  This next bit is hard to tell. To give a fair rendering of things, I would have to use words I don’t know how to handle. I was never taught them. Or never wanted to learn them. Cowardly words, too corruptible and unreliable. Too easily handled, to be precise. And it was because I was this . . . inmate, this emotionally incarcerated inner self, this total jerk, that I had reached this precise moment in my life.

  I was fifty-four years old, I was running a company my great-grandfather founded. I was the only son. My father had killed himself at the controls of his plane when I was ten years old; my mother, the regent, had finally abdicated and was wallowing in Alzheimer’s disease with delight, my first wife had taken our eldest son and gone to the United States, the second one had just left me, with our two daughters, for a “considerate” man (and the distance seemed even more terrifying), and the water in my bath was getting cold. There. That’s it.

  That is all I had to say.

  I don’t know how long I’d been standing dazed by the . . . I don’t know, I was in the dark when a knock came at the door.

  I hastily threw on a more or less presentable mask in the shape of a face, but in my haste I must have put it on upside down because I saw you, the way your face fell for a split second before you got your wits about you, your impassive face, in other words, and you announced:

  “Homemade soup. A 2009 Mission Haut-Brion. Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn.”

  I was utterly speechless.

  “Dinner in ten minutes. I’ll leave the door ajar. See you soon.”

  And you turned on your heels.

  Oh, thank you, Louis. Thank you.

  Thank you, because your tone was so calm and peremptory that I immediately felt like a little boy who’s been told to go and wash his hands.

  How simple everything suddenly became.

  Dinner . . .

  I was being summoned.

  So I headed to the bathroom and started by splashing my face with cold water and I . . . I am reluctant to relate these things. It takes so much out of me. And I . . . And it melted. The mask melted. Something in my hands melted. Someone . . . Anyway. Let’s move on. Water, water, everywhere, dixit the famous English poet.

  I took off my shirt, rubbed my arms, chest, neck, shoulders, and navel; I eventually stood up straight and I recognized him. I recognized the little Cailley heir who did not have the right to weep in public. Enough, Paul, enough. Remember, life has been very good to you.

  Beneath his crust, his rind, completely raw, I recognized him, in that very mirror that had witnessed his wife skinning him alive a few hours earlier.

  Yes. Thank you, Louis. Thank you for having allowed me this: to strip myself bare at last.

  * * *

  Your apartment was plunged in shadows. I walked down a corridor, guided by the light of the candles you had arranged on a low table amid the jumble of bookshelves, books, files, loose papers, and piles of old newspapers that must have been your living room.

  In front of a deep sofa, a table was set for two. Neat tablecloth, two soup bowls set on two plates, two silver soup spoons, two wine glasses, a bottle waiting to reach room temperature, a piece of cheese on a little wooden chopping board, and a basket of bread.

  I heard your voice in the distance telling me to sit down, and you came out wearing an apron and carrying a steaming tureen of soup.

  With the help of a big, antique ladle
, you gave me a hearty serving, ground a bit of pepper over my bowl, then filled my glass.

  Then you untied your apron, settled into the sofa next to me, sighed with pleasure, raised your glass to your nose, sniffed it, smiled, picked up the remote control, and asked me if I needed subtitles. I shook my head, you pressed play, Sabrina began, and you said bon appétit.

  And so we feasted with the ravishing Audrey who, how appropriately, had just returned from the best culinary school in Paris.

  Delightful. Delightful.

  Violins, romance, we finished off the Beaufort and the bottle. You walked me to the front door in silence then wished me good night and invited me to come again the next day, at the same time.

  I was so groggy I hardly thanked you.

  Against all expectation I slept well that night. Really, really well.

  (As things stand, I may as well confess to this solitary pleasure: I fell asleep thinking about your lovely slippers.) (Shipton & Heneage, Grecian slippers, you confessed, a few weeks later.)

  Thank you, Louis. Thank you.

  Thank you.

  I don’t know yet how many times I’ll go on repeating myself, I’ll count them at the end. And there will be as many thank yous as handfuls of earth as it takes.

  The next evening there was cream of pumpkin. And it was the next evening that I understood why I was there. After the same ritual as the previous day, you turned to me, remote control in hand, and asked, looking vaguely concerned:

  “I thought we’d watch The Apartment, but I don’t want to seem tactless. Perhaps it’s a bit too soon, what do you think?”

  What a beautiful smile.

  “No, it’s perfect,” I answered, full of wonder. “Perfect.”

  Louis. No one had ever taken care of me in this way. No one.

  Did I remember to say thank you?

  (Once, just once in my life I was nurtured in this way, with the same absolute toughness and tenderness, just once. It was Emilia, little Emmie, the Alsatian maid who worked for my grandmother at La Huchaude, a sinister house in the Nivernais where just after my father died I spent an entire summer left to my own devices. When I was alone in the “château,” as she put it, she let me have supper with her in the pantry and she made me French toast, dipping slices of a thick, four-pound, well-hardened bread into some curious batter of milk, sugar, and cinnamon.

  (I will never forget the taste of that French toast. Never. It was the taste of kindness, simplicity, and disinterest. The type of dish I have not often eaten since.

  (Yaya . . . Yaya would not let me speak when it was time for her serial on the radio. Yaya to whom I practiced reading, over and over, the passage in Jules Verne’s novel where Michel Strogoff is sentenced “never to see the things of the earth,” as he is about to be blinded by a white-hot saber. I practiced rolling my “r”s like the evil Ogareff so that his voice would sound crrrueller and even morrre terrrible. She loved it. A few months later I found out, completely by chance, that she had been dismissed, and when at last I dared ask my grandmother why (and to do so I had to show the same courage as the proud courier for the tsar), she simply answered that she, Yaya, “didn’t always smell very nice.”)

  (Louis? Is this too much? Am I imposing on your eternity with my childish whining? If so, you only have yourself to blame, my friend, I didn’t even remember that I remembered Yaya, and were it not for you I probably never would have remembered.)

  This ritual—soup, fine wines, and Hollywood classics—lasted until the early hours of the following year. Every evening you set our appointment for the next one, and every evening that followed, I would come back to our confirmed old bachelors’ tea party with an inexpressible sense of relief. (Inexpressible, adj. That which cannot be said with or translated into words due to its intense, strange, or extraordinary nature.)

  Neither one of us made the slightest reference to Christmas or New Year’s.

  Since you were so kind as to renew your invitation from one evening to the next and I was in no fit state to decline it, we went on living as if nothing had happened. Or rather, as if nothing had happened and I went on living. My son went skiing in Colorado with his mother and dashing stepfather as planned, while Ariane and the girls frolicked in their swimsuits by a coral reef (I didn’t try to find out whether the considerate man had gone with them, my apparent indifference would serve, I had decided, as an amiable gift I was giving myself) and you, without realizing it, became my only family and my only refuge.

  What you thought about it, I don’t know. I was careful not to ask you if you had nothing more entertaining to sink your teeth into, during this holiday period, than the resident cuckold. No, I didn’t dare. And now, after all that’s happened, I no longer know whether to be sorry for my lack of tact or, on the contrary, to be proud of it. Of course I did not wish to be seen to the door, but that wasn’t all, Louis, that wasn’t all. I respected your silence.

  And even tonight, you know, if I am allowing myself to speak so shamelessly, it is solely because I am writing to you from the ends of the earth and in a state that is closer to sleep-walking than mere insomnia.

  On Christmas Eve you’d put Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life on the program.

  “Not a very original choice, and I’m sure you’ve already seen it a dozen times, but you’ll see, it never gets old. And then this good little Clos-Vougeot will take care of the rest . . . ”

  I did not dare contradict you (I had never seen it) and I was very grateful to you for leaving us in the dark for a few seconds after the angel’s final words. George Bailey’s fate was like a fist in the gut, and I was not feeling very valiant when the time came to go home. So far from valiant, in fact, that I came and rang at your door a few minutes later.

  “Did you forget something?”

  “No, but I . . . You know I, I too, took over my father’s business after he died and . . . ”

  And as I didn’t know what else to say—well, I did, I knew very well but I did not know how to go about it—you put an end to my prevarication, waving it away with a burst of laughter.

  “But of course I know, for goodness’ sake! Everyone knows! You are at the helm of a flagship French industry! Off you go . . . Time for bed. All this emotion has worn us out.”

  At home again, sitting in the kitchen in my big, empty apartment, after the second glass of a superb whisky which one of my collaborators had given me that very morning, I was finally able to finish my sentence.

  No one heard it, but what I was telling you went roughly:

  “ . . . I too took over my father’s business after he died, and I too am acquainted with that solitude. That solitude, and the terrible fear of losing face. My enemy is not the despicable Potter, my enemy is the end of a world, of my world, the world I represent. My enemy is globalization, it’s Asia, where at this very moment I have wandered astray, it’s delocalization. My enemy has already beaten me. ‘Flagship French industry.’ My dear Louis . . . there has been no such thing as French industry for a long time. I am no longer expanding my company, I am simply avoiding its loss. I am saving the family jewels. Or selling them off cheap, rather. The feet of the colossus are made of clay, and . . . ”

  And a few sips later,

  “ . . . and I’m alone. Far more alone than George Bailey ever was, because I’ve never done anything good for those around me, I . . . I’ve never known, even fortuitously, how to make myself loved the way he did, because I’ve never known how to love, either. As cynical as it might seem, I’ve never had the means. I’ve often been told that I was born with a caul, but what sort of caul, for God’s sake? A spiked helmet? A leaden miter? I wasn’t born with a caul, I was born crippled. And at this time of reckoning, not only is my wife hardly raising the alarm to save me from drowning, she has gone off who knows where to toast her buns, keeping my kids from me on Christmas day. As for friends, what of them? What fri
ends? What are we talking about? I don’t even know how a friend is made. Are they designed? Modeled? Tested? Copied at lower cost? Patented?”

  Okay. I was drunk.

  And because I was drunk, I was finally able to finish my sentence:

  “ . . . no, I didn’t have time for anything. And I’m alone on earth. But this evening you are still here, my stranger of a neighbor who does not speak, who asks for nothing, who I always approach empty-handed, something that had never happened to me in my entire life, who I always approach empty-handed because I too am so empty, so empty, so disheartened and powerless that I don’t even have a nickel’s worth of politeness to offer, and . . . ”