At the Tropical she works at the bar, single-handed for several hours at a stretch. Amid the noise, the music, the shouting, she is always the same and this never ceases to amaze Denis, the manager and owner. He recruited her on a sudden impulse, this tall girl, as muscular as a hammer thrower. Adèle was running a stall of produce from the West Indies at the street market, in high summer. She stood there with a length of madras cotton tied about her neck as a scarf, offering plates of “accra” fritters and slabs of bread spread with spicy vegetable relish. Despite her silence, her giant stature, her shaved head, there was a crowd. Denis had just been walked out on by his barman (what was it he yelled as he left? I’ve had enough of working in your shitty club for a black man’s pay or was it working in your black man’s club for shitty pay?). He had gone up to her stall and, as he chewed on his minuscule slab of bread and relish, had said: “How would you like to work for me?”
She had eyed him with a calm stare and he had felt embarrassed and sheepish. He began again in somewhat softer and more respectful tones.
“My name’s Denis Anicet. I manage the Tropical, the club on the big beach. Do you know it? I’m looking for someone to work in the bar.”
“To do what?”
“Serve the customers, make cocktails, that kind of thing.”
“I don’t know how to make cocktails.”
“No problem. We’ll teach you. It’s from Friday through Sunday. We open at nine and close at two.”
“How do you pay?”
Not how much but how. That had not escaped Denis’s attention but her dense, earthy, dark-brown gaze kept him from crowing.
“However you like. By check, by bank transfer, in cash.”
“I prefer cash.”
“No problem. Can you come and see me tomorrow?”
“Yes, at one p.m.”
“Okay, then. See you tomorrow.”
“I can make punch.”
That was what she had said, or at least what he thought he had heard.
The next day she was waiting there in the parking lot, dressed in black, the same dark-brown eyes, the same shaved head. Denis had been struck and a little intimidated by her appearance. What a woman, he had thought.
So how long has Adèle been there now? Six years, maybe seven? Never any trouble, never one word louder than the next, never one word too many, either. All he had gathered was that she came from Mauritius and had no papers. But she seemed to be uncomplaining about this and the last thing Denis wanted was to get involved. At the bar she attracted a great crowd just as she had on that stifling day in August. And, as she had said, or not said, the punch she made would knock you flat.
Adèle always dresses in black, the only ornament she wears is a fine silver wristband. She has a perfectly shaped cranium.
At closing time she leaves the bar gleaming (bar top, floor, shelves, bottles, sink) and waits patiently for Denis at the entrance. He drops her off outside the gates to the development where she lives on the outskirts of the city. During the fifteen minutes it takes to make this drive through a city now emptied of its inhabitants, sometimes it feels to them as if they were little motionless figures in a glass bowl. Silence does not disturb Adèle and as time has gone by Denis has learned to be equally appreciative of these moments when time stands still. He no longer fidgets on his seat, he no longer steals glances at her, no longer asks her questions. When they reach the second traffic circle, the one dominated by a structure in the form of an arrow, he slows down and drops her close to the bus stop. He has never dared to walk with her up to the front of her apartment building. He leaves the engine running for two or three minutes, his ear cocked, his hand on the steering wheel, the car door locked—there are lots of stories about certain districts in this suburb and at this time of night he has no desire to invite trouble. Adèle walks around the bus shelter, goes into the development, waves to him, and disappears. Denis shifts into top gear and accelerates sharply, driven by the desire to get back to his fine house, his garage with two car spaces, like in American films, the lawn, and his wife’s flowers that suddenly seem so precious to him as he makes a U-turn to get onto the bypass. He will go and kiss his children, take a shower, and later, as he is quietly finishing off a cake, his face illuminated by the light in the fridge door, he will wonder what Adèle’s apartment looks like.
Adèle’s place: a space nine feet by twelve, a futon bed, an armchair, a table, a hot plate, a sink, a few cooking utensils, a chest of drawers made of plywood, picked up one lucky day down at the bottom of the apartment building. The toilets and bathroom are out in the corridor.
In her room: bare walls, every surface white and clean.
One has to picture her, this big woman just under six feet tall. Dressed in black, as always, coming into this room twelve feet by nine. She hangs up her bag, her jacket or her coat on the hook behind the door, takes off her shoes, puts on her Chinese slippers, things made of brightly colored satin, very comfortable but not durable. She makes her way with a slow tread over to the washbasin and briskly soaps her hands and forearms before rinsing and drying them. When she comes back from the Lesparets’ it will be barely 8:00 p.m. and she settles down in the armchair, her hands resting on her knees. She lets the sounds of the apartment building come to her, banging doors, mothers raising their voices, quarrels, television, laughter, footsteps above her, next door to her, and soon the world is nothing but a jumble of noise, exploding into white bubbles beneath her closed eyelids.
The evening passes, neither quickly nor slowly. She washes, eats, reads and cuts out odd news items from the papers, as if seeking to attract something that eludes her.
When she comes back from the club she goes to take a shower in the bathroom on the landing. Then she goes to bed, but whether at 10:30 or at 3:00 in the morning, sleep never comes soon enough.
All those years waiting for it to end. She had seen the start of the new century, magnificent fireworks over the sea, people hysterically happy, and she could not understand how she could still be there. It was not what she had foreseen when she sold her house, gave away her possessions, emptied her bank account. When she had gone into that dusty travel agent’s office and paid for this trip to Europe. It was not what she had dreamed of when she shaved her head for the first time. Since she had not managed to die (oh, that inability to take her leave of life of her own accord!), she had thought she would disappear. She had read somewhere that thousands of people in the world vanish without a trace. So this was what she would do. Leave the land of her birth, take a train, then another, stop somewhere at a station at random, burn her papers, sleep in hotels, hang around, stop speaking, stop thinking, face up to strangers who don’t look at you, expose herself to unfamiliar climates, spend or give away all her money, wander about, end up in the street, in a dark corner where no one will come looking for you, die, the way so many people die here—from cold, from hunger, from loneliness. Here, in Europe, death seemed to her more within reach, more silent.
But years later Adèle is still there. Sometimes she would like to reach down into herself with her hand and rummage about, the way fishermen rummage about in the innards of fish, to seize and root out the tiny spark, the tiny stubborn and vital spark, that causes her to survive, in spite of herself. What is it made of, this wretched thing, since she no longer has hope, or joy, or friends, or husband, or child?
In the end sleep overcomes her, a sleep full of dreams of days gone by (grass snakes, ants, husband, child, sunlight, typewriter). At dawn when nothing else remains behind her closed eyelids, she seems to see this little spark dancing. Then she gets up, as silently as the dust motes in the rays of the morning, and so she enters another day.
On that Friday, the morning of the day she will meet Anita, the grass snake is already far away, and the bus is particularly crowded. Adèle stands in the middle, facing the double doors. The young are gathered at the back, in a cluster, true to their gregarious instinct. Her right hand lightly grips the rail. The other is
holding her bag slung over one shoulder. She gazes at the flattened, rather greasy hair of a young, highly scented woman who is sucking a Tic Tac mint. An old man is chewing the inside of his cheeks as he reads the free newspaper. There are two strollers close beside her and Adèle feels the weight of a little wheel on her foot. She does not stir. The children are fast asleep. There is a light ripple of talk from different parts of the vehicle and there, amid a mixture of smells, metal, damp wool, and sickly sweet perfume, she is thinking about the special event at the club this evening, a grand concert devoted to maloya, the traditional music of Réunion. Denis has asked her to make a dozen gallons of punch. She will have to get there earlier than usual, she will have no time for supper. She lets go of the rail to check that she has brought her cell phone.
Is there a sudden silence or has Adèle imagined it? As if something had sucked in all sounds, with the terrible sharp squeal of brakes suddenly applied. Adèle is hurled against the doors, which restrain her and throw her back onto the girl with the Tic Tac, then there is a great crash! She is flung against the doors once more. They burst open and Adèle comes flying out like a black eagle. She hears that voice, the one she knows well, saying this is it, it’s happening now. But the feeling of being high up and floating does not last. She comes down onto something soft. She is not in pain, maybe she really is dead. She is on her back and the sky is so blue, so luminous, my God how beautiful it is! she says to herself. For the first time in half a lifetime she is using the words God and beautiful in the same sentence. She could reach out her hand and pluck down a scrap of sky. How would it taste? An airplane passes at that moment, floating, floating, it is a paper airplane, it is a perfect sky, the blue dotted with fleecy little clouds. There is a scent of earth, it has the good smell of childhood.
Adèle gets up on her elbows and everything becomes confused in her head. She recognizes this part of the suburbs, which is called Ville Nouvelle, with its meager, recently planted trees, the numerous traffic circles, the low walls in pastel shades surrounding the new residential areas, the newly tarred streets, and yet she has gone right back home, she has traveled through time. It is her son and her husband who are in the white car embedded under the bus. Adèle, whose name is not yet Adèle, is just about to undergo the ordeal of her final exams in information technology and management at the very moment when an accident befalls her husband and son on the old road leading to the lighthouse. Their car slipped down the cliff, soundlessly, it appears, since no one heard anything and for several days they were reported missing. Now Adèle has gone back to rescue them. Someone or something (maybe the snake) has given her this chance. She begins running toward the bus, which is strangely tilted, as if it were listening attentively to the asphalt. She throws herself at the rear door of the car, it does not open, she wrenches the handle, hears herself yelling, and finally uses her boots to break the window, and opens the door from inside. Her little boy has certainly grown, he must be fifteen now, he is unconscious, but he’s alive all right, she can see the vein in his neck throbbing, his gaze is wild, his mouth open, his eyes dry.
Adèle’s great body is like that of the snake that morning. It wriggles somehow or other to release the driver, it extracts the young man somehow or other and lays him down on the asphalt with a kiss on his brow (years later people who were on the bus will remember that kiss), it returns to the car but the adult is trapped, his legs and the dashboard have become fused together. The man looks at Adèle. He has big blue eyes, as blue as the sky that morning. He looks at her as one looks at one’s child for the first time, as one looks at something infinitely beautiful and miraculous. He says, and his bleeding mouth gives him a voice full of bubbles, thank you, madame.
Blue eyes.
Thank you, madame.
Her husband had dark eyes. Her husband did not call her “madame.” Adèle hears the fire department sirens and begins to weep. This is not at all what she had expected.
At the hospital two hours later the police are out in the corridor and Adèle, lying on her bed, knows they are there for her. They have given her a drip feed in her arm, she is waiting for the results of the X-ray of her back. Several people have come to congratulate her, to talk to her about what she remembers only vaguely. She recognizes skirts, mouths, handbags, pants. People stay with her for a while, some kiss her and say see you on Monday. One young man (big black earphones, white tracksuit, nylon backpack) sits beside her bed in silence for half an hour. A nurse gives her news: twenty-three people were more or less lightly injured, the children were well strapped in and the brakes on their strollers were firmly locked in place: Adèle was the only person to be flung out of the bus, several people are being kept in the hospital under observation, the driver of the car is in the operating room but “he is in stable condition,” his son has recovered consciousness, he has nothing broken, he is hungry, he has asked to see Adèle. His mother and sister are with him. The nurse says it is a miracle.
Adèle repeats the word miracle several times in a soft voice until it no longer has any meaning. She feels helpless on this bed and can already picture what will happen to her, in five minutes, or an hour from now. Is this how it will all end? The police will come into her ward, they will question her, they will take her to the police station, and a day later, a week later, she will be deported. It will be simple, done smoothly, without bloodshed, and what can she say to avoid it? I’m sorry, I didn’t come here to stay, I didn’t come here to benefit from your handouts, I never intended to deceive you, I just wanted to disappear, that’s all, I had no desire to deceive you, I had no desire to break the law, I thought it would be easier to die here. How can you explain the crazy actions of a woman who shaved her head, sold everything she possessed, paid for a two-week trip to Europe (Paris, Barcelona, Lisbon, London, Geneva), and stepped off the plane at Roissy airport one Saturday morning and never flew any further?
Deported. Up until now, in the subterranean world she inhabits, this word has been hovering above her without really touching her, as if it did not concern her, she who had burned her papers in the washroom in a hotel at Tours, or maybe it was Poitiers, she no longer recalls. A heap of gray ashes swirling around in the pan.
Up until now Adèle had done all she could not to exist, or, at least, to exist only minimally. The notion had never occurred to her that one day she would be plucked out from the hazy anonymity in which she existed and sent home (but where was it, this home, now?). She had learned to live like someone with no papers and, in truth, she realizes now, in this hospital bed, attached to this drip feed, it is thanks to this that she has survived. She has found a world parallel to that of those who are alive, who laugh, who make noise, normal people, people with identities. A soundless world where the inhabitants speak in whispers, walk by in silence, where doctors ask you neither your name nor your address, where dozens of intermediaries are there to arrange things (a place to stay, a job, a husband, a wife). A world with no contracts or signatures, no bank accounts, no vacations, no mail, a world where you are paid discreetly, a world with no plans, no dreams, no pity, no one to turn to, no friends, where everything is in cash, where everything has its price and where everybody can disappear from one day to the next. A world made for her.
Could it be that, by some kind of irony, she clings to this life? Could it be that the woman called Adèle actually exists a little?
Two policemen come in. They greet her and examine the notice attached to the foot of the bed. They note her false name.
“We’ve come to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind. Could you tell us what happened this morning?”
Adèle sits up and tells them simply and truthfully what she saw, what she remembers. One of the officers listens, with his hands behind his back, the other writes things down in a tiny notebook with a spiral binding, using a blue ballpoint pen. When she has finished she nods to them and turns away toward the window. She is waiting for them to ask for her real name, her address, her papers. She hears a move
ment in the room and the one who was listening with his hands behind his back goes out, the other one goes up to her. He has a lean face, without warmth but with no malice.
“You rescued a man and his son today.”
“The father was trapped. I couldn’t get him out.”
“You stayed with him till the firefighters got there, you held his hand and talked to him. He’s going to pull through.”
“I don’t remember.”
“That’s the shock. An accident always shakes you up.”
He concludes by staring out of the window like her. At the end of the corridor there is a metallic noise, as if someone were bumping into a cart piled high with medical equipment, and the other police officer returns. The man with the lean face turns around.
“This is all in order. Madame lost her bag in the accident. She will come to the station tomorrow so we can take down her statement.”
Waiting for Tomorrow Page 6