The Loyalties

by Delphine de Vigan

  After dinner he retired to his study as usual.

  I knocked on the door. I was tempted to go in without waiting for his response; it was an unexpected opportunity to surprise him in the act. It was several seconds before he permitted me to enter. The computer screen was blank. He’d taken off his jacket and had some papers spread out in front of him. I sat down in the armchair and began talking about Mathis and the negative influence I felt his friend was having. I explained why I had the feeling that this relationship was disturbing our son and gave a few random examples. William seemed to be listening carefully, without impatience. As I reached the end of my little speech, this phrase came into my mind: here you are, confronting the devil in his lair. It was ridiculous and completely over the top. If William had heard me he would probably once again have mocked my affected figures of speech. But from that moment I have not been able to shake off that phrase and its powerful reverberation. William wanted hard facts. Signs of regression, a graph showing decline, quantifiable evidence. What evidence could I put on record? Mathis’s grades were very respectable. William didn’t see what the problem was. I was imagining things. The fact is, he always thinks I’m imagining things. About everything. It has become an effective way to gently bring any conversation to an end. “You’re imagining things.”

  The truth is, most of what I tell my husband holds very little interest for him. It’s one of the reasons I tell him almost nothing. It hasn’t always been like this. When we first met, we spent entire nights talking. I learned almost everything from William. Words, gestures, the way I stand, laugh, behave. He held the codes and the keys.

  I don’t know when we stopped talking. A long time ago, for sure. But the most worrying part is that I didn’t realize it.

  This morning, Mathis got up before me. When I went into the kitchen he was making his breakfast.

  I sat down and watched him for a few minutes: the nonchalance with just a hint of cockiness in the way he picks things up, lets the cupboards close automatically, the embarrassment on his face whenever I speak to him or ask a question. I understood then that he was on the threshold, right on the threshold. It’s already stirring and incubating in him like a virus, at work in every cell of his body even if nothing is perceptible to the naked eye. Mathis isn’t an adolescent yet, at least not visibly so. But it’s just a matter of weeks, perhaps days.

  My little boy is going to be transformed before our eyes just as his sister was, and nothing will be able to stop it.

  MATHIS

  On his first day of middle school he chose the middle row. And then his seat: in the middle of the middle row. Not too far from the board and not too near it. Neither the front nor the back. Where he expected to attract the least attention. From the list pinned up in the schoolyard he’d realized that he wouldn’t know any of the other students. Everyone from his elementary school had been split up between other classes.

  By the time the door closed, no one had sat down beside him. He didn’t dare look at the others, sitting in pairs, elbow to elbow, busy whispering. All around the class the murmuring had begun, a low, drifting hum that the teacher, for now, was managing to control. He was excluded from their secrets. He had never felt so alone. So vulnerable. The girls in front had already turned around twice to size him up.

  Ten minutes later someone knocked on the door. The guidance counselor came in with a student Mathis had never seen before. Théo Lubin had gotten lost in the corridors and been unable to find his class. A derisive whistling ran through the rows. The teacher pointed to the empty seat beside Mathis. Théo sat down. Mathis pushed aside his own things, though they weren’t in the way, as a way of greeting the latecomer, of signaling to him that he was welcome. He tried to catch his eye to smile at him, but Théo kept his head down. He took out his pencil case and notebook and without looking up muttered, “Thanks.”

  In the next class they sat together again.

  On the days that followed they looked for the gym together, the guidance counselor’s office, the cafeteria and the classrooms, whose numbers defied all logic. They mastered this new space, which then seemed endless and which they now know like the backs of their hands.

  They didn’t need to talk to know they’d get along. They only had to look at each other to see something silently shared—social, affective, emotional—abstract, fleeting signs of mutual recognition which they wouldn’t have been able to name. They’ve been together ever since.

  Mathis knows how much Théo’s silence impresses others. Girls as well as boys. Théo doesn’t say much, but he’s not the sort to be pushed around. He’s feared. Respected. He’s never had to fight, or even threaten to. But there’s something menacing within him that dissuades attack and comments. When he’s beside him, Mathis is protected, not at risk.

  On the first day of school this year, when Mathis saw on the bulletin board that they were in the same class again, he felt an intense sense of relief. If asked, he wouldn’t have been able to say whether he felt relief for himself or for Théo. Today, a few months later, it seems to him as though his friend has grown even more somber. He often has the feeling that Théo is playing a role, that he’s pretending. He’s there beside him, going from class to class, waiting patiently in the cafeteria line, organizing his things, his locker, putting away his tray, but in reality he’s standing outside it all. And sometimes when they say goodbye at Monoprix, when he lets Théo go off toward the metro, a confused fear spreads in his chest that makes it hard to breathe.

  Mathis is stealing money from his mother. She doesn’t suspect. She leaves her bag lying around, doesn’t check her change. He goes for coins, never bills. And he takes them carefully: one or two at a time, never more. That’s enough for small bottles: €5 for La Martiniquaise rum, €6 for Poliakov vodka. They go to the little grocer’s at the end of the street. He’s more expensive than other places, but he never asks questions. For big bottles, the best bet is to go through Hugo’s brother Baptiste, who’s a junior at the high school nearby. He’s still underage but looks older than he is. He can go to the supermarket and not get asked for his ID. He asks them for “a small percentage.” On good days, he’ll do a discount.

  Mathis hides the coins in an ebony box his sister gave him. He thought it looked like a girl’s thing because the inside was lined with floral fabric, but the box has the advantage of locking and now it hides his treasure.

  Tomorrow after lunch they have a study period. If there’s no one in the corridor, they’ll slip into their hiding place to drink the rum they bought yesterday. Théo said that it makes your head explode, even more than vodka. He pointed an imaginary pistol at his temple, two fingers together, and pretended to fire.

  THÉO

  He’s left the big sweater he got for Christmas at his father’s, the one his mother asked him not to take there. She didn’t realize at first, but today, now that it’s gotten colder, she’s surprised he isn’t wearing it. She’s horribly angry, that’s obvious. She’s struggling to mask the signs of irritation that Théo knows well. She says several times: “We’re not likely to see that again.” The sweater is in danger, absorbed into the depths of the void. She’s alluding to the enemy territory that she will not name. A place governed by unknown laws, where clothes can take weeks to be washed and where objects get lost and never reappear.

  Théo promises he’ll bring it next time. No, he won’t forget.

  She’s finding it hard to let it go, he can see.

  When he was younger, up until the end of elementary school, she packed his bag for him before he went to his father’s. She chose his least nice, most worn clothes on the grounds that they took ages to come back and sometimes never came back at all. On Friday evening she took him there on the metro and left him outside the building. In the beginning, when Théo was too young to take the elevator on his own, his father would come down and be watching from the other side of the glass doors. Like a hostage exchanged for some unknown commodity, Théo would go down the hall and cros
s the neutral zone, hardly daring to press the light switch. A week later, at the same time on Friday, on a different street, his father would switch off his engine and wait in the car for Théo to go into the building and start the whole thing again. In another stairwell, his mother would hug him tight. Between kisses, she’d stroke his face and hair, looking him over with relief, as though he had returned miraculously alive from some unfathomable disaster.

  He remembers one day a long time ago—he must have been seven or eight—when his mother was checking the contents of his bag after he came back from his father’s, and she didn’t find the pants she’d bought him a few weeks earlier. She began taking all the clothes out one by one, as though it were a matter of life and death, tossing them angrily in the air. And then, having confirmed that the garment was missing, she began to cry. Théo watched her, stunned. His mother was kneeling in front of a duffel bag, her body wracked with sobs. He could see her pain, it struck him in jolts, but there was something that escaped him: why was it so serious?

  His mother had begun complaining that his father couldn’t give a shit about getting his things together (every time she said something bad about his father, this wrenching feeling of discomfort agitated his stomach and the sharp sound made his ears buzz) and he had to admit that he’d packed his bag himself. He’d done his best to collect up his clothes, but he hadn’t found his pants, which were probably in the wash. And then suddenly his mother had shouted, “Doesn’t that slut know how to turn on a washing machine?”

  When his parents divorced, his father moved in to a new apartment, where he still lives. He put up an extra partition at the back of the living room so that Théo could have a room of his own. In the months after the separation, his father was seeing another woman whom his mother called “the bitch” or “the slut.” The bitch came to his father’s some evenings but never slept over. She worked in the same company as him. They must have gotten to know each other in the elevator or the cafeteria; that was how Théo imagined them meeting, a scene he tried to reconstruct several times, despite his difficulty picturing the setting. He found it impossible to imagine what “the office,” the place his father went each day on the other side of the beltway, looked like.

  He remembers a spring day at the amusement park in the botanical gardens with his father and this woman. He must have been six or seven. He’d been on the trampoline and the go-carts, had a go at the tin can alley game. Later in the afternoon, all three of them got lost in the maze of mirrors, then they climbed into a boat and, for what seemed like a deliciously long time to him, they allowed themselves to be carried along by the current of the enchanted river. Later they had cotton candy. The bitch was nice. It was thanks to her that they’d discovered this marvelous world, protected by gates and fences, a world where children were kings. The woman must have had some connection to this place, she knew every corner. She was the one who had guided them along its paths and handed out the tickets, and his father looked at her with such devotion that Théo came to the conclusion that the whole amusement park must belong to her.

  But the next day when he went back to his mother, he had a stomachache. He felt sad. Guilty. He’d had fun with this woman, accepted her gifts.

  Something sweet and sticky still clung to his hands.

  In the beginning, when he got back from his father’s, his mother would ask him questions. While pretending not to get involved, as though he couldn’t spot her ploy, she would fish for information by means of digressions and circumlocutions that he saw through immediately.

  To say as little as possible, Théo pretended not to understand the questions, or else he replied evasively.

  Back then, his mother would suddenly begin crying without warning, because she couldn’t open a jam jar or find something that had disappeared or because the television had stopped working or because she was tired. Sometimes it was like an electric shock, sometimes a cut or a punch, but his body always connected with her pain and absorbed its share.

  In the beginning, every time he came back from his father’s, she asked him, “Did you have fun? You didn’t cry? Did you think about Mommy?” He couldn’t have explained why, but he instantly felt this was a trap. He never knew whether he was supposed to reassure his mother by telling her it had all gone well or claim that he’d been bored and had missed her. One day, when Théo had probably struck her as too happy after his week on the other side, his mother’s face took on a horribly sad expression. She became silent and he was afraid she’d start crying again. But after a few minutes, she said in a small voice, “All that matters is that you’re happy. If you don’t need me, I’ll go, you know. Go traveling, maybe. Have a rest.”

  Théo learned very quickly to play the role expected of him. To offer words sparingly, expressionlessly, eyes lowered. Not to expose himself. On both sides of the frontier, silence was clearly the best policy, the least dangerous.

  After a time, he couldn’t say when, the bitch disappeared. According to what he managed to glean at the time from scraps of phone conversations caught on one side or the other, the woman had children, who couldn’t have appreciated her having fun at the amusement park without them, and a husband she didn’t want to leave.

  Gradually, his mother stopped crying. She sold the furniture and bought newer, nicer furniture, then she repainted the apartment. Théo chose the colors for his room and the kitchen.

  She stopped questioning him when he came back from a week with his father. She no longer asked what he’d done or with whom. If he’d had fun. In fact, she started avoiding the subject. She didn’t want to know anything anymore.

  Today, the time he spends away from her has ceased to exist. One evening she explained to Théo that she had drawn a line under all that and no longer wanted to hear it mentioned.

  His father does not exist. She has stopped uttering his name.

  HÉLÈNE

  I wanted to bring up Théo Lubin’s case at the next student welfare meeting. Frédéric convinced me to wait a bit longer. He feels I don’t have enough evidence. Also, bringing up a case always leaves traces, which might harm Théo or his family down the line, and that’s not something that should be treated lightly.

  Did I appear to be treating it lightly? I wake up every night, my breathing constricted by anxiety, and it often takes me hours to get back to sleep. I no longer want to go out with my friends or to the movies. I refuse to have fun. Anyway, there is no “case.” I have no documents to add to the file and I’d have to go against the advice of the nurse, who didn’t think it was a good idea to call in the parents, though so far she hasn’t had any reply to the letter she sent home to the mother.

  I agreed to wait a bit. Frédéric promised he’d pay particular attention to Théo, though he only has his class for one hour a week.

  Yesterday afternoon, when I saw Théo come into class just after Mathis, my heart gave a lurch. I was sorry I’d given in. He immediately struck me as odd, unsteady. He was walking carefully, as though at every step the ground might give way beneath him. What a sight the poor kid was, leaning on the tables to get to his seat. That really got to me. He looked like a drunk. I thought he’d injured his leg or his back, he was having such difficulty moving forward. Then he collapsed into his chair, looking relieved to have made it that far. His eyes were fixed on the floor, avoiding mine.

  By the time all the students had sat down and the hubbub subsided, he still hadn’t moved. I asked him why he hadn’t taken his notebook out. Without looking up at me, in a thin voice, he replied that he’d forgotten it.

  I felt panic flood through me. Images that I couldn’t block out assailed me. I couldn’t calm my mind or get my breath back. I couldn’t stop looking at him, trying to understand what was going on.

  Then I saw the injuries on his body. I saw them as clearly as if his clothes were ripped in exactly the right places to reveal the bruises and the blood. I was gasping for air. I looked at the other students. I watched their faces for the moment when they would r
ealize. I hoped that one of them, just one of them, could see what I saw. But they were all motionless, waiting for the sentence I was going to pronounce or for the lesson to begin. I repeated these words in my head several times: I’m the only one who can see his injuries. I’m the only one who can see he’s bleeding. I closed my eyes and tried to reason with myself, to calm my breathing, to recall the words of the nurse who had examined him and her firm, reassuring tone: “There was nothing. No mark, no trace, no scar.”

  There was nothing.

  Except: I’ve been hit, so with me that won’t wash.

  Hugo in the front row asked me gently, “Miss, are you feeling ill?”

  The images were fighting back.

  I took a deep breath and asked the students to take out a piece of paper, then I read out the quiz questions without going to the trouble of writing them on the board.

  “What is the function of the foods we consume each day?”

  “List the food groups that you know.”

  “What unit of measurement is used to calculate the energy foods provide?”

  One of the girls in the front row (Rose Jacquin probably, who never misses a chance to pipe up) interrupted me: “Miss, you’re going too fast!”

  I had never given them a surprise quiz before and a ripple of dissent ran through the room. Théo still had his head down, his hands shielding his eyes like a visor so that I could no longer see them. I asked if he wanted to go to the nurse and he said no.