At what moment did the things about Anita that had pleased him the most begin to weary him?
“Hi, Adèle. Where are the girls?”
“Hi, Adam. Anita’s gone to the paper. Laura’s at her judo class. Then she’s going to have lunch with her friend Sophie in the city and Anita’s going to pick her up. Are you home for lunch?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Do you have something planned for this afternoon?”
“Oh yes. Anita’s taking us to the lake to see the wild swans. Laura never stops talking about it. I think you saw a whole family there last year. Will you come with us?”
“No. This afternoon I have a meeting.”
“Are you okay, Adam?”
The sound of the peas against the sides of the bowl, the rattle of their bedroom shutter upstairs, the kitchen door shuddering at each gust of wind, the water bubbling in the saucepan, this calm conversation about the swans, about the lake. He sits down at the table, his own wooden table, made by his father, sanded by himself, polished every week by Anita or Adèle. He feels very small, very frail, on the brink of tears.
“I’ve just learned that Imran is ill.”
“Imran, your friend who runs like you? What’s the matter with him?”
“He’s got bone cancer.”
Adèle stops shelling peas.
“Have you known him long?”
“Yes, since we were kids. We run together. We enter all the competitions together. When we were kids he was the only foreigner I knew. He’s from Afghanistan, you know. He’s very good looking, don’t you think? With his very black hair that’s all curly, and his eyes are as green as those peas there.”
Just now Imran’s eyes had seemed to him washed out, evasive. And Adam himself had been evasive, commonplace, coming out with flat, empty phrases (cheer up, old fellow!), not daring to put his arms around his friend, giving him only a pat on the back, the kind you give to losers.
Suddenly Adam begins weeping. For Imran, for himself, for this day, which should have been without any hitch, memorable, even exceptional!
Then he senses a cool hand on the back of his neck that makes him feel marvelous (had he been hot?). And he turns around to bury his tear-stained face in Adèle’s lap. What happens next is automatic, biological, human, swift.
A hand moving up the back of his neck to plunge into his hair, a face pressed against a belly, then moving up and nuzzling against breasts, neck, chin, and lips. This is a woman no one has touched for a very long time and whose body, in a sudden impulse, cries out for a little male tenderness: it is a man kissing a thirsty mouth, tightly hugging a living body that is not that of his sick friend, but one that utters its secret without speaking. Adam marvels at the way his own body is awakened, becomes both more supple and harder. He now discovers another version of himself, younger, more alive, stronger, an Adam he has not been in touch with for a long time. Adèle marvels at thinking of nothing but this, at hearing herself sigh when he thrusts his head between her breasts, at being able to unzip his pants without interrupting a kiss, at rediscovering the movements you need, at not losing her way on this road. Is this being alive? Is this being cured?
The glass bowl falls to the ground, and shatters with an abrupt noise. The peas roll silently in all directions. It does not last long but it is enough to change lives.
At that moment in the city in the editorial office Anita shivers. How odd, she thinks, this sudden touch of bitter cold in the middle of the day. She has completed two pieces to appear in the local news pages and is lingering in the hope of being able to talk to the editor. It is several days now since she submitted to him pen portraits illustrating her theme of the precariousness of life in the mountains. A postal worker, a grocer, a traveling cheese salesman. People who earn just enough to keep a roof over their heads, who buy cheap meat on the last day before, or actually on, the “use by” date, who rarely go to the doctor, occasionally to the village bonesetter, but never to the dentist. Winter is now an ordeal for them since they no longer have the means to keep properly warm, their cars date from the 1980s, as do their pullovers. On New Year’s Eve they watch TV and drink sparkling wine. They are under fifty but they have never found any other way to live.
Anita is sitting at the desk of a staff writer, who has gone to cover a story in Barcelona, a city in crisis for two weeks. She pictures tents pitched on the boulevards lined with palm trees, the demonstrations outside the ancient buildings, the beaches filled with people in search of different lives. Why have she and Adam never been to Barcelona, to stroll along these same shady boulevards, why have they never visited the Sagrada Família, why have they never basked on these beaches? After all, it is less than four hundred miles away. You could do it in half a day. She thinks about their friends who, over the course of a weekend, take in Prague, Florence, London, Istanbul, the way she goes and visits those godforsaken hamlets out there in the mountains and valleys. Anita pulls herself up, she ought not to say “godforsaken hamlets,” she ought not to fall into the trap of scorn for what is unknown and ignored by the guidebooks, she must not think like a metropolitan liberal, is there not as much merit in writing about the postal worker eating a few lumps of sugar to overcome her hunger as in talking about the demonstrators taking over Barcelona?
“Good morning, Anita.”
Christian Voubert stands there before her, his body as slim and lithe as ever.
“Oh, good morning, Christian. Did you read the portraits?”
“Yes, I’ve just done so. They’re excellent, Anita. It’s a terrific idea to present the subject from this angle. Three occupations that we generally see treated in a rather … how did you put it in your text …?”
“As figures from folklore.”
“Yes! That’s it: folklore! I need a short introductory text with some numbers to set it in the context of the rest of the region, something quite simple. Can you do that?”
“Sure. What page will you put it on?”
“What do you think about the back page? With a splash headline on the front?”
Normally Anita would rush to the telephone to call her husband (they’re giving me the back page!! a full page!!) But this is a very special day for Adam. He’s due to met David Schtourm, for heaven’s sake! He’s been talking about it for days, wondering which painting to take, as Schtourm only wanted to see one. A few days before, in bed, he had whispered to Anita: You do realize this could change our lives if it goes well? How could an article in a regional newspaper compete with the prospect of a change of life? What could equal that?
And she’s aware of it now, isn’t she? Anita senses something awakening within her, something that she doesn’t like, but that she takes on board without flinching. Something that resembles jealousy, dissatisfaction, provocation, and it is rather as if she were on the brink of committing an unavoidable larceny. She opens her address book, finds the number, and, as she is dialing it, recalls that office scattered with books, that copy of Ulysses always prominent on his desk. When he picks up on the first ring, as he always did, she smiles, amazed that he remembers her (he says, Well, I received the notices: the wedding, the birth, how old is she now, your daughter? What does he do, your husband? What are you doing yourself?) She tells him she has begun work on a novel and would welcome an opinion. He replies, very simply, Send me the opening pages, Anita.
Anita hangs up, takes deep breaths to calm her heart, stands up, looks out at the city. It was nothing, only a phone call.
It is 11:00 a.m. and the bulletins on the radio announce that it is the first day of winter at last. There is a shower of fine hail across the city. Cars skid, people slip on the ice.
Serge Clément, the director of conurbation planning services, is in bed. He is insisting that Léo must be fed. In one hand his wife holds a thermometer showing a temperature of 103 degrees Fahrenheit and with the other she calls for an ambulance. Léo, his rabbit, died when he was nine years old.
Imran is waiting in a pleasant room in D wing i
n the hospital. He wonders if this is the wing reserved for desperate cases, there is something falsely cheerful about the nurses, they are too well informed, they address him as “Monsieur” and his file was at the top of the pile when he arrived. The soda machine is free, they tell him. So this really must be the wing for people at death’s door. He pauses for a moment in front of the window on the machine, presses 53, and a black and red can comes down. It reminds him of that Christmas tree at Adam’s office and he finally decides that artifact is not so bad, after all.
At the hotel, in one of the suites with a terrace that gives a feeling of being poised above the sea, David Schtourm is lying on the bed, with Adam’s painting placed beside him. At the center of the white canvas there is a great black circle, the lower part of which has run and extended beyond the frame of the picture. The four corners of the picture are spotless. This first layer of black is smooth, gleaming, and dense. It gives the impression of a skin that one could lift right off the canvas. Drops of an extraordinary vermilion red spread across this black circle from left to right. When Schtourm placed the picture on the chair beside the door and backed away as far as the window on the other side of the room, this red was transformed into a ruby necklace displayed in a black jewel case. When he studied the picture close at hand he noticed that tiny pink-and-white bubbles were trapped within the red. Here and there they had risen to the surface and had exploded into stars. These red drops (rubies, splashes of blood, pomegranate seeds, a chain of faded flowers?) had a heart, they were alive, he saw them stirring, as if the picture were not quite finished, the paint not quite dry. The gallery owner studied it for a long time, fascinated by this optical effect and by the feeling in his stomach of being inside the painting, of being underwater, of being, ever so slowly, in motion. And then he thought about something that had happened a very long time ago when he was a little boy and spending the summer in a house in the country with his grandparents. He and his grandmother had stretched out on the thick grass and watched the clouds changing, ever so slowly, from one shape into another. David Schtourm will never cease to marvel that an abstract picture can call up such a personal and precise recollection. He has several times turned the picture around in all directions, has even shaken it a little, as if he were searching for something.
As he lies there on the bed with his eyes closed, all at once it comes to him. This painting is an extract, it begins somewhere else, it does not end here. This painting is an interpretation of the present in its infinite complexity; an individual and shared present, a present that is not static, a present filled with a thousand instants, coming and exploding on its surface. David Schtourm’s heart begins to beat very fast and he hears a clock striking. Eleven o’clock. Still four more hours to wait before meeting the creator of the painting that bears the title Melody.
The swans on the lake
ANITA IS WALKING AT RANDOM, turning this way and that, lingering in front of splendid shop windows. She goes into several stores, spends a long time trying on a beige woolen coat she does not buy. She spins the stands containing pretty postcards at the newsagents, spends quite a while in the bookstore on the square. She contemplates the piles of books displayed on the table in the middle of the store as one might contemplate a table spread for a feast. As she is leaving, a young man stops her. He has red hair, a complexion like fresh milk. Excuse me. Do you speak English? Anita laughs. She has once more become that young woman of eighteen from Mauritius, strolling through a French city, marveling at the sidewalks, at a cup of steaming coffee, at red flowers on a balcony, at all the books in all the store windows, taking her time, as if the intoxication of youth, the immensity of the future, and this present were all a single entity.
In a café Anita orders a cheese sandwich and eats it at the counter while watching the whole ballet of waiters in red aprons, people dawdling in the café before returning to the office, kissing, talking, passing by. In the mirror, across from the counter, she catches her face. It looks more solid than before, as if her jaws had grown harder. She has lost the fullness of her cheeks, the rounded cheekbones. Although she likes to consider that she is free of vanity (“beauty is an inner quality” and other such nonsense) she monitors every change and could make a detailed catalog of this body from head to toe, where it has slackened, been discolored, stretch marks, brown spots, a slight stoop, dryness, rolls of fat. In a few months’ time she will be thirty-nine. She pays the bill, slips down from the stool with unexpected grace. It is time to go home. Who knows? Perhaps this winter will be wonderful. She pictures the possibility of receiving a whole avalanche of good news. Those first few pages are excellent, send me the rest soon: it’s high time we gave you a proper contract; the paintings will be exhibited in Paris in February; go ahead, Anita, of course you can draw inspiration from my life to write your first novel; look, Laura, the swans are there!
After washing the kitchen floor, disinfecting and polishing the kitchen table, Adèle looks for a sheet of paper. There are plenty of notebooks and binders in this house but she would like to write her letter on a plain unattached sheet. She does not yet know what she would say in it, maybe just forgive me. She opens the door to the room she has never entered, where Anita sometimes shuts herself away for hours at a time. She sees the ream of paper between the computer and the printer. She moves forward swiftly with her eyes lowered, holding her breath, because she does not want to linger over the books, the bookcase, the photographs, she does not want to admire the forest through the big window, she does not want to inhale the scent of vanilla mixed with that of timber—she is no longer a part of this life, she has smashed it with her own hands, this life, but what’s the use of torturing herself, she will write her letter or her single word, something, at any rate, and then leave. With two nimble steps she reaches the desk, stretches out her hand toward the stack of paper, and, in spite of herself, her gaze settles on the gray, loose-leaf binder and, oh, it’s just like the one she used to use at school, she has not seen a binder like that for ages. She picks it up (simply to stroke the rough grain of the cover, to smell the scent of the pages, things you do when you come across something old) and there, underneath the binder, she discovers a pile of loose sheets neatly squared off and on the top page there is this:
The Melody of Adèle
It seems to her as if these words have no meaning, are they written in a foreign language? are they a scholarly expression?, but she does not have Anita at her side so as to be able to ask her (how many times has she done this since that first time on the beach? And always Anita replies with the same patience, unscathed, ditto, sinecure, fallow, the difference between a news story and a filler, bimonthly, algorithm, cursive, cruciform, the poilus, the gueules cassées, a wartime blockhouse, a pine tree tapper, a pepper mill, rutabaga). She opens the gray binder, recognizes Anita’s handwriting.
I’ve started writing Adèle’s book. I’ve been calling it that in my head for months. It’s a physical being that is ever present in my thoughts, my dreams, my desires, my conversations with myself, my reading. Her presence is so extraordinary that sometimes I long for her never to go away. When she’s there I feel as if she were a fountain at which I quench my thirst. This tide of words, I can’t get over it. Where were they all those years when I was calling out to them? Perhaps because I had nothing to say, no story to tell? Adèle’s story never leaves me now. It’s as if it were my own story, my childhood, my body, my husband, my child.
Shivers run through Adèle. She glances swiftly through the rest of the binder. It is a journal kept by Anita, but there are also photographs cut out of magazines (a white Fiat, cactuses with orange flowers, a blue porcelain tea service, a typewriter), newspaper cuttings (the maloya concert, the bus accident, police raiding a factory that only employed illegal immigrants, an article on mourning), dried flowers, a sprig of lavender, a drawing of Laura’s, showing a man and two women beneath an enormous tree with heart-shaped leaves and a fairy flying above it.
Adèle hears
a noise downstairs and swiftly picks up the binder and the pile of pages. She does not completely understand what she is holding in her hands but she knows it is connected to her, so it must disappear too. She has allowed herself to stray from her path, the path she had chosen so many years ago. All it has taken was a grass snake, an accident, a conversation on the beach, a ride in an old car. She picks up her black bag from her bedroom, puts the binder and the pages into it. Her actions are swift, precise. She closes the door, walks downstairs, and, as she crosses the living room, notices the paintings on the sofa.
“Are you going away?”
Adèle gives a start. Adam is there, beside the fireplace. He is crouching, bent in on himself, his arms hugging his stomach.
“Adam?”
“Are you going away, Adèle? Take this stuff with you, please. Take it all far away from here.”
Adam stands up grimacing, and in a broad, weary gesture indicates the paintings on the sofa. Adèle notices his shirt is incorrectly buttoned and Adam suddenly seems to her like a giant with feet of clay, a man lost in his own body. What has happened to the flamboyant architect, the magnificent swimmer, the secret artist, the tireless marathon runner, the man who could construct both a solid house and a dream catcher as light as a soap bubble?
“Everything I’ve painted is for you. I’ve no talent of my own, you know. Look at those things on the wall, soldiers, wooden houses, beaches, water, it’s all nothing. I’m just a Sunday painter, terrible daubs all my life until you came along. Take them, please. Do what you like with them. Burn them, throw them away. It’s all one to me.”
Adèle hugs her bag to her. Where have these paintings come from? What is that binder and that text in her bag? But as she edges toward the sofa something happens, it is like a change in the composition of the air and the light. The paintings come to life, the shapes move. That thick yellow circle is the winter sun she loved so much, beside the sea on the island of Mauritius. That black S is the march of the ants. Those are mustard seeds about to burst open and soon their sweet and piquant scent will fill the room. There is the blue mist that covers the mountain of Port Louis at nightfall. This is precisely the color and shape of the eggplant for curried fish. Here is the great wave and its foaming spray mixed with drops of blood. Here is her childhood, her life, her unhappiness. Here is Melody calling her back.
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