The Loyalties

by Delphine de Vigan

  Every Friday it’s the same drill: he gets everything together, his clothes, shoes, all his books, folders and notebooks, his ping-pong paddle, his ruler, tracing paper, felt pens, drawing pad. He must not forget anything. Every Friday, loaded up like a mule, he migrates from one place to another.

  In the subway car, people look at him. They’re probably afraid that he’ll fall or faint, his small body staggering under the weight of all those bags. He bends, but he doesn’t weaken. He refuses to sit down.

  In the elevator, before he lands on the opposite shore, he puts down his load, gives himself time to catch his breath.

  This is what he has to do every Friday at more or less the same time: this shift from one world to the other, with no gangway or guide. Two complete worlds, without any common ground.

  Eight metro stops away: another culture, other customs, another language. He only has a few minutes to acclimatize.

  It’s half past six when he opens the door, and his mother is already home.

  She’s sitting in the kitchen, chopping intriguingly shaped vegetables. He’d like to ask what they’re called but now’s not the right time.

  She looks at him, scrutinizes him, scans him silently, her eye a radar. She can’t help it. She’s suspicious. She hasn’t seen him for a week, but there’s no hug. It’s the imprint of the other that she’s looking for, even though she fears it: the trace of the enemy.

  She can’t bear it that he’s come from over there. Théo grasped that very quickly from the air of distrust she displays when he comes back from his father’s and the impulse to reject him, which she has trouble hiding.

  And anyway, even before she says hello, she generally says “go and take a shower. ”

  They won’t talk about the days he’s spent with his father. It’s a black hole in time and space whose very existence will be denied. She won’t ask him anything, he knows. She won’t ask if he had a good week or if he’s OK. She won’t ask if he’s eaten well, slept well, what he’s seen or done. She’ll pick up where they left off a week ago, exactly as though nothing has happened, as though nothing could have happened. A week of his life struck off the calendar. But for his diary—every day he carefully tears off the perforated corner of the page—he might doubt he’d experienced it.

  He’ll put the clothes he’s wearing in the laundry basket, all of them without exception, separately, sealed in a plastic bag because she refuses to let them come into contact with his other ones. The hot water in the shower will wash away the smell she cannot abide.

  In the hours after his return she’ll observe him with a hostility she’s not even conscious of but he’s all too familiar with, that air of interrogation. Because, in her son who is not yet thirteen, she’s in relentless pursuit of the gestures, inflections, posture of the man whose name she will no longer utter. Any real or imagined resemblance enrages her and becomes the subject of an immediate response, a sickness that has to be eradicated at once. “Look how you’re standing. Don’t do that with your hands. Sit back in your seat. Don’t slouch. Sit up. You’re just like him.

  “Go to your room.”

  When she mentions his father, when circumstances force her to refer to the man who was her husband and at whose home he has just spent an entire week, when there’s no way around it, she never uses his first name.

  She says “him,” “that bastard,” “that loser. ”

  When she’s talking to her friends on the phone he’s “that shit” or “that dirty bastard. ”

  Théo absorbs this, his puny body spattered with words, but she doesn’t see it. The words are hurting him; they’re an unbearable ultrasound, a feedback loop that only he seems to hear, an inaudible frequency that shreds his brain.

  During the night after his return, a high-pitched, faraway sound wakes him. A piercing note, a static whistle that comes from inside him. If he clamps his hands over his ears, the sound at first grows louder and then fades. It’s called tinnitus. He read about it on a health website. The noise swells up more and more often in the middle of the night. At first he thought it was coming from outside. He’d get up. He’d go into the kitchen, listen to the appliances, the pipes in the bathroom, he’d open the front door. And then he realized.

  The noise is in his head. When the noise eventually stops, he can’t get back to sleep.

  He has just one memory of his parents together.

  His mother is sitting on a hard sofa upholstered in a foamy mustard fabric (in fact, he’s not sure if he really remembers this sofa. It’s possible he’s copied the detail of this image from a photo. Ms. Destrée taught them that at the beginning of the year; there are things we retain in the memory, others that we transform or manufacture, still others that we appropriate). His mother is sitting stiff and tense, not leaning on the backrest. His father is pacing up and down in front of her like a caged animal. Théo is sitting on the floor or maybe beside his mother, who is not touching him. He has to raise his head to see them. He’s a child of four and a bit, the watchful observer of a smoldering war that’s about to explode.

  Then there are the words his mother says, words that strike him immediately, make him gasp, words that are saved on his hard drive, adult words charged with a meaning he can’t grasp but whose power he registers. His mother is looking down, but she’s talking to his father when she says, “You disgust me.”

  They’ve forgotten he’s there or else they think he’s too young to understand, to remember, but it’s precisely because these words contain something he can’t grasp, something solid and maybe a little sticky, that he will remember them.

  At this moment, neither he nor she can imagine that their son of four years and a few months will have just one memory of them together and this will be it.

  Théo comes out of the bathroom wearing clean clothes. He thinks about Ms. Destrée wanting to know which of his parents he was spending the week with. She’d looked at him in a funny way. When he caught up with Mathis at the school gate, he said, “That woman’s crazy.” But now, thinking back, his forehead flushes with a feeling of shame that spreads to his throat. He’s sorry he said that.

  His mother is still in the kitchen, half-listening to something on the radio as she finishes making dinner. He asks if he can go on YouTube.

  “No.”

  He should do his homework. He must have work to catch up on.

  For the next few hours, maybe even until tomorrow, she’s going to make him pay for having set foot on enemy territory, for having been outside her law, her control, for having had fun.

  Because she’s sure he will have taken full advantage, he’ll have done nothing all week but stare at screens, stuffing himself with chips and Coke and staying up till all hours.

  That’s what she imagines.

  It doesn’t matter what she imagines.

  Anyway, he’s not going to contradict her.

  HÉLÈNE

  The nurse asked to see Théo this week.

  The day after his appointment she suggested we have coffee to talk it over. She came to the staffroom at lunchtime. She related in detail the conversation she’d had with him. She talked to me as though I were unwell, as though someone had warned her I needed to be handled carefully, talked to gently.

  She’d begun by telling Théo that several of his teachers were worried about how tired he was. They’d told her he’d fallen asleep in class a couple of times. That he had trouble concentrating.

  She wanted to know what was going on, how he was feeling.

  He asked if it was me who had told on him.

  She said that no one had told on him and repeated that several teachers were worried about how tired he seemed and wanted to make sure everything was OK. That was all.

  He relaxed a bit.

  He admitted he found it very hard to get to sleep, or rather that he was waking up during the night. He said several times that he was not playing on a tablet or gaming console—or very little. She tried questioning him about his family but got nothing
out of him. His mother had a management job in a pharmaceutical company and his father was in IT. The joint custody arrangement dated back to their separation several years ago. She asked him how things were with his parents and he replied without enthusiasm but also without hesitation, “They’re fine.”

  She admitted she found him anxious and a little defensive. But not more so than the situation might have caused, given that he was the only student in his class she’d asked to see. She asked him if she could listen to his chest on the grounds that lack of sleep sometimes causes growth and development problems, and he didn’t object.

  There were no marks on his body. Smooth skin, pure, intact. Not so much as a scratch or a scar. His height and weight were slightly below average for his age, but nothing alarming.

  She wrote a letter for his mother, which she gave to Théo.

  In it she mentioned his drowsiness in class and the need to see a doctor to tackle the insomnia problem.

  She told Théo that he could come and see her whenever he liked and suggested he try to rest a bit during breaks if he felt tired.

  She’s done her job, I can’t deny it. She followed the rules. She promised that she’d stay alert. And she went back to her antiseptic domain, sparkling floor, her sheltered, protected space. I stayed in the staffroom. I couldn’t get up. I was sitting with my back to the door with a pile of notebooks in front of me and the almost empty plastic cup with coffee I couldn’t drink getting cold in the bottom. I told myself: Get up and go home. I’d finished for the day and I could feel the wave swelling, a backwash from the sewer, brackish, stinking waters. The black tide of memory was starting to rise to the surface. First the sounds: the broken fridge, asthmatic snoring, television jingles in the background, laughter, encouragements, applause. And then the images: curtains stained yellow by nicotine, rickety chairs, chipped ornaments.

  Nothing seems completely intact in that room, but on the television the Wheel spins and people are having fun. “First puzzle. I’ll buy an A; I’ll try an N.” The Wheel turns again, unpredictable fortune: good luck!

  We have our own game too, my father and I, at the same time as the TV. It starts without warning, for no reason, while I’m drawing or doing my homework. The first question rents the air and announces the torture: “Since you know everything, Hélène, when was the guillotine invented?”

  I’m eight. Eleven. Thirteen. I’m always in the same place, sitting at the kitchen table, hands flat on the oilcloth. My father’s home early, he’s thinking up a quiz for his daughter. She works hard in class—big deal. She reads books, claims she wants to become a schoolteacher and it’s as if she’s spitting in the face of her father, who was expelled from school. Since she acts so clever, he’s going to ask her some questions to see what she knows.

  One wrong answer: a tap on the top of the head. Two wrong answers: a slap.

  Three wrong answers and he pushes me off my stool and I fall on the floor.

  Four wrong answers and I stay on the ground and he gives me a kick.

  “When was Joan of Arc canonized?”

  “In which year did Charles Martel win the Battle of Poitiers?”

  Sometimes the questions are the same as on the TV game show, sometimes not. The rules keep changing.

  I try to concentrate. It’s not easy with the noise of Wheel of Fortune. The music’s so loud. “You get to play again, Roselyne. Well done. Now you need to guess an expression. OK, listen carefully, Roselyne.” I’m lying on the floor, as always. I’m not allowed to get up. I’m no longer searching for answers—I’m waiting for the next blow. “The correct answer was ‘pie in the sky,’ Roselyne, too bad.” I never cry.

  The questions no longer make sense and he keeps on kicking me. I try to protect my head. I curl up on the floor and try to avoid the kicks to the stomach that wind me; his boots have hard, round toecaps. My father wears protective footwear, even though he no longer works on the shop floor. “And you’ve chosen this sapphire and diamond ring, Roselyne. You’ll get that along with its international gemological certificate for a total of nine thousand nine hundred francs. You’re taking home some very nice prizes all the same.”

  I’m fourteen. I’m lying on the floor when my mother gets back. I may have been unconscious for a few seconds or minutes. When I stand up, there’s blood trickling from between my legs, a scarlet snake sliding down my calf seeking refuge in my socks. My mother asks if I have my period and I say no.

  A few weeks later I’m in math class and the pain is clawing at the pit of my stomach. I’m having trouble breathing, it’s hard not to groan. The teacher notices I’m not listening. He asks me about what he just said but I can’t answer. The walls are spinning faster than the Wheel of Fortune, the floor is pulling me in. I don’t even know what the lesson is about. The teacher gets angry and tells me to leave. In the corridor I faint.

  In the hospital they diagnose an infected uterus. Not a pretty sight.

  I tell them I fell off a bike rack onto a concrete curb. I don’t know yet that I won’t be able to have children.

  I’m seventeen. I’ve passed my exams and I’m leaving. My father has just died of cancer. His decline lasted two years, two years of truce with no games and no kicks, just the occasional swipe when I passed within range.

  Now it was my father’s turn to be on the floor. My mother looked after him right to the end.

  I’m seventeen. I’m going to study. I’m going to become a teacher. I’m not going to forget any of it.

  CÉCILE

  I talk to myself. At home when I’m alone and in the street when I’m sure no one can see me. Yes, I talk to myself, but it would be more accurate to say that one part of me talks to the other. I say, “You’ll get there,” “You did it!” or “You can’t go on like this.” Those are examples. I tried to explain this to Dr. Felsenberg when I met him a few weeks ago, this thing about there being two parts of me. The very first time. He thought it was worth clarifying. OK. So: one part of me, which is dynamic and which I would call positive, talks to the other part. My weak part. To keep it simple, let’s call it the problem part.

  Neither my husband nor the children know I’m seeing Dr. Felsenberg and it’s much better that way. At the time of our weekly session, I’m officially attending a yoga class, which only exists on the kitchen calendar.

  So I talk to myself to reassure, console and encourage myself. I speak familiarly, since the two parts of me have known each other for a long time. I’m well aware that this may seem ridiculous. Or worrying. But the fact is that the part of me that talks to the other always appears confident and reassuring. She sees the best in everything, always looks on the bright side and mostly gets the last word. She’s not the sort to panic.

  And in the evening when I go to bed it’s not unusual for her to congratulate me.

  The two parts of me have always existed. The concerned parties, so to speak, but until recently they didn’t communicate with each other, at least not through the medium of my voice. That’s much more recent.

  Dr. Felsenberg also asked me if an event or an episode had created or triggered this voice. As I was thinking in silence, he rephrased the question.

  He wanted to know if I’d ever talked to myself when I was a girl or a student, for example. Or when I was first married. Or when I stopped working. I was certain I hadn’t.

  “It’s not a problem in itself, you know. Lots of people talk to themselves,” Dr. Felsenberg said. “But it is a problem for you, because you’ve brought it up.” He wanted me to think about it. He decided we would reflect together on the function of these exchanges between me and myself.

  It took a few sessions for me to realize (and acknowledge) that the voice appeared shortly before the discovery I made on my husband’s computer. And a few more sessions to talk explicitly about this discovery in Dr. Felsenberg’s office.

  What I saw that day, and what I saw on the days that followed, when I started to look, I can only express indirectly, through circumlocution
s. I’m unable to set it down in black and white.

  Because the words are vile and stained with dread.

  Yesterday when I got home I found Mathis and his friend there. Normally at that time they should have been in school. My son claimed the music teacher was absent and I could tell at once that he was lying.

  They looked odd. Both of them. Mathis doesn’t like me going into his room, so I stayed at the door, waiting, trying to work out what was wrong. They were sitting on the floor. It was tidy. They hadn’t gotten any games or books out. I wondered what they were up to. Théo was looking down. He was staring at a point on the carpet as though observing a colony of microscopic insects that only he could see.

  I have a problem with that boy. To be honest, I don’t like him. I know it’s horrible to think that. He’s just a twelve-year-old boy, pretty well brought up on the whole, but there’s just something about him that bothers me. I’ve been careful not to share this with Mathis, who idolizes him as though he has supernatural powers, but I don’t get along with him. I really don’t understand what Mathis sees in him. When he was in elementary school, Mathis had a friend I really liked. They got along brilliantly and never fought. But that kid moved away at the end of fifth grade.

  Last year when Mathis started middle school, he met Théo and from then on nothing else mattered. He became attached to him immediately and exclusively and defends him tooth and nail if I ever express the tiniest reservation or ask anything about him.

  I asked them if they’d had a snack and my son said they weren’t hungry. I let them be.

  Nonetheless I can’t help feeling that Théo is dragging Mathis down a slippery slope, that he’s having a bad influence on him. He’s tougher than our son, less emotional. That’s probably why Mathis thinks so much of him. The other day after dinner I tried to talk to my husband about it. Since I discovered how William really spends his evenings, apart from the largely prosaic exchanges that allow us to maintain a life together, I have not been tempted to communicate with him. To tell the truth, I’d just spent weeks observing his little tricks and lies from a distance.