She started her car and began composing her piece in her mind. There was no question of giving up so soon.
Week in, week out, she deposits Laura at the school and plows back and forth across the countryside. On the first few occasions she braces herself fully for the moment when she must call up all her energy, as one calls up the sum total of a lifetime’s experience to fashion a shield from it, the moment when looks will be focused on her. Every time there is the same surprise, the same questioning, whatever the location—a village square, an athletic field, a forest road, a cultural and sports center, a school playground. She would like to be able to spare them this but apparently on the telephone she has no accent, her name does not suggest anything foreign, and when the conversation has gone well and ends with the words “See you tomorrow; we’ll be waiting for you!” she would love to be able to warn them—the way you warn people that your child is allergic to nuts or your elderly father is a bit deaf—but the truth is, this is not the same. Being allergic to nuts does not show on your face.
When she gets out of the car and closes the door she cannot refrain from glancing at her reflection in the window and remembering who she is, so as not to forget the image she presents to other people. To act as if everything were normal, not be offended, not be angry, never to jump to conclusions.
Week in, week out, she throws back her shoulders, smiles, steps out confidently but without vanity. She dresses in a neutral style, leaving her colored bracelets, her skirts with mirrors, her brightly colored dresses, and her wooden necklaces at home. Gradually, it seems to her that the looks of surprise are less frequent. Occasionally someone will ask her a question and get into conversation with her. Occasionally someone will ask her opinion, someone will let drop that they liked her last piece, someone will take her arm, someone will invite her to taste something, someone will insist on her drinking a cup of coffee, someone will ask if she is married, if she has children.
Then on the journey home the beauty of the countryside seeps into her, the poppies, the colza, the forsythia beside the roads, the colors floating above the meadows like a motley kite, the vibrant heat at the edges of the fields of corn, the cool emanating from the pine forests.
Now she is not weary, not vulnerable, she believes in the possibility of being an equal, a fellow human being, a sister, even. Now that deep inner thrill returns to her, the slow reawakening of that blazing hope of her youth, that of becoming a writer. Now in the evening she takes up a notebook again, she begins to write, to hope, but each time, as in a soufflé, the words collapse. But this is not a problem, for she is convinced that soon she will find a story to tell, a fantastic idea that will stand up, that will stay the course. A story she can keep an eye on from afar, even when tired, even when weary, even when disappointed, and it will be like a constant light. Yes, a story, a good story to tell.
Month after month, without fail, she delivers her pieces on time, without mistakes, headline and copy in place. Still nothing to report, says Claire. She comes to Christian Voubert’s attention because in an account of the annual reunion of veteran soldiers in a mountain village there is a word that he had never come across in French in his life before and that he had looked up in the dictionary: “Like a griot, Sylvain H. rose to his feet. Strumming on his guitar, he softly sang the old Resistance song: Le Chant des Partisans.”
Griot: traveling poet and musician in black Africa, repository of the oral culture, said to be in communication with spirits.
The editor had been moved by this sentence, as if he, too, had been there at this village, where, as Anita had written, the women wear “blouses decorated with flowers that never fade,” as if he, too, had heard the song. And for the first time in many years he had thought about his own father.
And he told himself that Anita was not a woman like the rest … By degrees, with the passage of these trial months, all the faults he had imputed to her were disappearing. The very same causes resulted in different effects, different clichés, different empty phrases.
Foreigner: a fresh eye on the region, relish for the French language.
Young mother: a welcome sensitivity.
Married to an architect whose office is just around the corner from the town hall: a woman attentive to the aesthetics of the region.
Having lived in Paris: experience.
Native of a remote island: sensitive to the region’s own strong identity.
A year or more had passed. Christian Voubert had decided that she had proved herself.
That Tuesday, when Anita walks into his office at 11:17, Christian Voubert tells himself that something about her has changed, but he cannot put his finger on it. She looks him straight in the eye.
“So, how’s it going out in the territory, Anita?”
“It’s going well. Everything’s going well.”
“Yes, I think everything’s going very well indeed. Yours is not obviously the work of a stringer. I’ve had several phone calls from people pleased with your work. I like getting phone calls like that.”
Anita remains silent, her hands resting on her knees. She is thinking back to her argument with Adam the night before. Now that Christian Voubert has congratulated her on her work he will tell her he has nothing to offer her, for the moment.
“Good. Now, Anita, this Friday there’s a cultural evening with music from the island of Réunion and a concert by a singer of, hang on … ma … something.”
“Maloya?”
“Yes, that’s it. I’ve never heard of it. They want to add this music into the UNESCO cultural heritage program and I thought that, as you come from that neck of the woods … It’s quite close by, isn’t it, Mauritius?”
“Yes, it’s very close.”
“There you are. I thought you could do an article for the arts page on Saturday. You’d do a long piece, let’s say nine hundred and fifty words in total, about this traditional music. What it is. The history of the thing, its development, and how it’s part of the French cultural heritage, all that. We need two separate sections, one on the concert itself, perhaps a picture of the singer, I can’t remember his name, and another on the business of adding this music into the cultural heritage. How does that strike you?”
“It’s an excellent idea.”
“Good, but take care, Anita. The account of the concert has to be written the same night. You’ll have an hour, an hour and a half at the very most, to do it. Do you think you can manage that? Yes? Very good. Claire will give you the details better than I can. If it goes well, you’ll have other opportunities like this. Does that suit you?”
“Yes, Monsieur Voubert. Thank you.”
“Good. You can call me Christian.”
For the first time since she walked into the office she smiles at him (something that lights up her soft face and makes her eyes shine) and Christian Voubert has to restrain himself from coming around his desk to throw his arms about her.
As she is leaving he realizes that she is no longer wearing on her wrists those colored bracelets that tinkled gently as she moved. A pity. They suited her well.
Anita does what she generally does: she selects three topics from the board, discusses them with Claire, drinks a coffee and consults the archives. Once outside she begins running toward the beach, laughing. She feels as if her joy were trailing a great glittering train behind her and that this could carry the whole town with it: that young woman in a long skirt drinking coffee on a café terrace, that man in a gray jacket walking briskly along, the old lady in sneakers pulling her shopping cart, the girl in a tight-fitting dress smoking in front of her swimsuit store, the ice cream man in his striped jersey sitting on his stool, the balloons all ready, waiting for the children, the carousel, at a standstill, surrounded by a protective net, the people strolling on the promenade, the old men on the benches, the dogs, the cats at windows, the profusion of plants with mauve flowers all along the coast road, that strip of sand, the azure blue sea, the spring sky.
Later, stretched ou
t on the sand, her eyes closed, her heart now beating regularly, she begins to dream about next Saturday, when Adam collects the newspaper after his run. He will be bathed in sweat, he will come leaping upstairs four steps at a time. Despite their quarrel, despite all he had said to her, predicted, advised, this first article will please him. Yes, he will say, you were right to persevere. They will be happy. They will be proud. They will feel filled with the courage and energy they need to live this life of theirs. It will be the renewal they were hoping for.
Today
IT IS 7:00 A.M. The morning is here, sidling into every nook and cranny in the house, proclaiming this day in all its cruel density and reality. Anita swallows a vial of royal jelly and avoids looking at her reflection in the bay windows. She must not flinch today. She is so afraid of this day, she dreads every step she will take, every word she will utter, she dreads her daughter waking up, she is afraid of taking her husband in her arms, she is afraid of what they can say to one another. These days Anita is afraid of everything. A few years ago she believed she and Adam had a destiny. This was neither vanity nor arrogance but the quiet certainty that they were, in their own way, exceptional. Where did it come from, this conviction that together they would achieve something unique?
Anita remembers with a twinge of embarrassment that on occasion she pictured an article about the two of them in a very smart magazine along the lines of Architectural Digest. She would have written a great novel that attracted notable coverage; he would have painted pictures of great beauty, designed a striking modern building; they would arrange visits to their fine timber house, the study, the studio, the extensive bookshelves, they would pose beside the lilac tree with the forest visible behind them. They would be witty, mysterious, intelligent, generous, humble, and respectful and insist that their daughter’s face be pixelated.
Anita had been convinced that someday they would step into the limelight, they would be discovered, as a perfect diamond is suddenly discovered in a mine explored a thousand times before, a remarkable manuscript in a trunk in an attic, or a painting by an old master hidden beneath a layer of dirt. One little thing would suffice, so she surmised, to catapult them into something extraordinary, into what she called a destiny.
That “little thing” was Adèle.
“Maman? Maman!”
Anita is snatched out of her reverie, hurries through the living room without looking at the mist rising off the forest, ignoring Adam’s triptych that still hangs over the fireplace. As she reaches the threshold of the bedroom she straightens her back, tenses like a bow, smiles broadly and her jaw makes a little clicking sound. She goes in.
Laura is sitting on her bed, her face set in an expression of surprise and fear. She is almost thirteen, her once curly hair is smooth now. Her eyes are slightly slanted. Sometimes, when her movements and words are measured, she has the elegant look of an Asian woman. Laura eyes her mother, then the wheelchair near the door, then her mother again. She grasps the bars that are raised on both sides of the bed.
“Maman? What’s happening? Where’s my bed?”
On some days Laura’s memory is disturbingly sharp: she remembers the hoarfrost on the ferns, her pink coat, Adèle on the jetty at the lake, she recalls waking up in the hospital and all that she has lost. Those are difficult days. She is upset, furious, desperate, refuses her medicines, loathes her life, her mother, her father. At other times, as today, she thinks she is still eight years old, she does not know that her father is in prison and that Adèle is no more. She believes she can climb trees, run about in the garden, go to school.
Anita goes up to her, slides the bar down, slips in beside her daughter.
“It’s only a bad dream, ma chérie. Go back to sleep for a little while, it’s still early.”
“Will you stay with me, Maman?”
“Yes, of course, ma chérie.”
Adèle often used to sleep in this room. A few of the things she loved are still there: the pretty turquoise box on the bedside table, the lamp mounted on driftwood, the faded postcards of the region in frames the color of old gold. She used to say to Anita that this house was as warm as a mother’s embrace. She told Anita that here she could forget her past life.
Anita chokes back her tears. She presses close to Laura. If only she could borrow a little of her amnesia from her this morning. It would be so good for the space of a few hours, to forget those four years, five months, and thirteen days. It would be so wonderful still to believe in that destiny of hers.
PART TWO
The day of the grass snake
ON THE MORNING OF HER MEETING WITH ANITA, Adèle catches sight of a grass snake behind the bus shelter. She spends a good while observing this long creature, which is yellower than she would have expected, the way it slithers very slowly toward the fallow land nearby, and the stirring of the vegetation as it moves along. She cocks her head on one side, intrigued by the presence of this reptile, as if it were an animal from another era, not quite prehistoric, but from the days of her childhood (she calls to mind the columns of ants she used to like watching in the backyard). She remembers her mother used to say that a grass snake was a portent of change, but Adèle has long since ceased to believe in such things.
They are all there at the bus stop, the daylight phantoms, more or less the same as those she has been coming across there for quite a few years. (Adèle does not count, she says a few, quite a few, a long time, not such a long time, many, not many, a few, very few.) She does not remember faces but she recognizes the look of things, habits, sounds, smells, gestures: the blue smoke from a cigarette being shared by the young people gathered at the back of the bus shelter, the sound of tapping on a packet of Tic Tac mints held in the palm (a rhythm of maracas), a ring finger applying balm to the lips, the cotton print skirts of women from Senegal, the brand names plastered across T-shirts, the white tracksuits, the black pants made shiny by frequent ironing, the Nigerian women’s brightly colored scarves, the Jamaican caps, the electric-blue mascara, the eyeliner in the style of the singer, Barbara, the sandalwood-based beauty masks of the women from the Comoros Islands, the tsiit, tsiit, tsiit of the personal stereos, the slim-line dance shoes, the cork platform shoes, the sneakers with huge tongues.
When the bus arrives Adèle looks around but the snake has vanished. Something tiny subsides within her. Then she gets onto the bus and forgets all about the grass snake and portents, good or bad. She prepares herself for the long day ahead, thinking about it, as she has thought about many things for years now, without any particular emotion. A day is made up of a series of tasks to be performed, each within an amount of time allotted in advance, each at a more or less specified hour, the completion of one activity signaling the start of another and so on.
From Monday to Friday she catches the 7:00 bus to go and work for the Lesparet family. She begins her assignment at 7:45 by clearing the breakfast table while Madame Lesparet buzzes around her, a stream of words spilling out of her mouth (Cecilia Lesparet calls this the morning debriefing). Adèle listens attentively and stores these words away in a corner of her brain. Cecilia Lesparet is a slim woman of thirty-eight with fair, straight hair trimmed to precisely one-tenth of an inch below the lobes of both ears, which are pierced and ornamented with two Tahiti pearl stub earrings. She is a management consultant, as her business card specifies. So, the debriefing. How the children were the previous evening and during the night, together with diverse and varied instructions that are prefaced by “may I venture to remind you that,” but Adèle does not hold it against her. Cecilia Lesparet is always correct, she pays her on the fifth day of every month, cash in a fresh, sealed envelope, she occasionally adds a few restaurant coupons, she puts clothes she no longer wants aside for her, unfashionable handbags, half-used bottles of perfume. Cecilia never asks her questions about her private life, how she spends her spare time. It should also be mentioned that surveillance cameras in the house record the smallest of her actions.
At 8:15 Adèl
e goes back out of the house to walk the children to school (two to a nursery school, one to the primary school) and less than half an hour later she returns to a big empty house. This could be daunting, the silence, the untidiness, all the things she has to do, all the vacuousness and pointlessness of a strange house, but Adèle does not consider matters in broad terms, in terms of the whole picture, in generalities, making a link between this vast house and her vast loneliness. No, she thinks about the tasks to be performed and this is how her day passes, without mishap, without distress, without bitterness. And once you think about a day like this, the thing is, there’s just so much to do. She is kind and gentle with the children, she makes well-balanced meals for them, plays with them a lot and on the way back from school, where there are no cameras, she treats them to candy and sodas. At 6:45 Monsieur Lesparet comes home. When Adèle hears the gates opening and the crunch of the gravel beneath the wheels of his elegant gray car, she checks off a list of things in her head: meal prepared, housework done, laundry aired, laundry ironed, children showered and fed, any aches and pains to be reported or not. To Pascal Lesparet’s “All well, Adèle?” she has been replying almost every day for several years: “All well, monsieur.” She hugs the children and occasionally, just occasionally, there is something inside her that shivers at this moment, especially if the children hug her tightly, with both arms around her neck and she feels as if she could run away with them hanging around her neck like a human necklace, but it is a transitory feeling, a passing impulse.
From Friday to Sunday, starting at 9:00 p.m., Adèle works as a barmaid at the Bar Tropical, in the city. On Friday evenings, after kissing the children goodbye, she walks down into the city center. She passes along clean streets, observes the private houses, the camellias, the stone pines that she is particularly fond of, the pretty blue tiles with the house numbers on them, the paved areas, the lawns, the gravel, the rough plaster on a wall, the arabesques of ivy. The seasons pass, the colors change, the light fades, the cold surrounds her, the wind buffets her, scaffolding is erected and dismantled, a wall is knocked down, a great tree falls, revealing broad roots finely wrought like lace, there is a certain woman in a sweater who watches her passing day after day with the same expression of astonishment, but Adèle goes on her way and enjoys this feeling of descending into the city, toward the sea, toward the limits of the land. By the time she sees the high gates of the big hotel the air is suffused with particles of salt, becomes denser with humidity. At 8:00 she eats supper in the city: either at McDonald’s, or at a Chinese restaurant, just occasionally at a pizzeria. Adèle always orders the same thing (a standard meal, fries, a soda; a hundred grams of chicken cooked with basil, a hundred grams of rice, a soda; a pizza margherita, a soda). She is never flustered, never vexed, it is as if she were invisible and this is precisely how she wants to be, and it is precisely like this that she survives.
Waiting for Tomorrow Page 5