Confidant (9781101603628)

by Gremillon, Helene; Anderson, Alison (TRN)

  As is sometimes the case with arguments, this one brought us closer together. We began to speak more often after that. Madame M. stopped reading her novels, no doubt because of her husband’s reproaches. ‘There is no place for fiction in these turbulent times, to have your nose in a book is to have your back to the enemy,’ she would say, imitating her husband’s voice. I asked her to go on reading out loud, even if it was only newspapers. That was how our conversations began, as we talked about the articles. We were surprised, we got along well. There were nearly ten years between us, but we didn’t really feel it. She had never befriended anyone as young as me. She said it was her wealth that had kept her apart from her generation. In Paris all her friends were older than her. But now she had got to know me, and she thought I was an easy person to like, or at least that is what she said.

  We always ended with the agony aunt column. The stories amused us, even if they were not funny. We could not understand how these women could share their problems with someone they did not know. Thus, we came upon the misfortunes of one poor Geneviève.

  ‘My husband is unfaithful to me, he never dines with me in the evening and comes home late. What shall I do?’

  To which the journalist replied:

  ‘Geneviève, your fate, alas, is that of many women. If you love your husband, continue to greet him as you do, without abandoning your calm. Reproaches would only drive him away from home, that is why I insist that you continue to be a wife in every sense of the term. Your husband will grow weary of his misconduct and will surely return to you.’

  I remember this answer because of the way Madame M. reacted.

  ‘Who does this journalist think she is? What one ought to do or not do, what one is supposed to think or not think . . . Is there no salvation outside of their standards?! I cannot bear this sort of talk!’

  She went into a terrible rage, just like that, for no particular reason. I was astonished; as a rule this column, if anything, made us laugh.

  I thought back on Sophie’s words, ‘Since she has got to know you, Madame M. has been improving by the day,’ and her husband’s ‘If I agreed to come and live here, it was so you would feel better.’

  This woman didn’t seem to be unhappy by nature; there had to be a specific cause. Why had she come to L’Escalier for refuge? Whom was she ‘avoiding’, as her husband put it? I sensed it would serve no purpose to ask her. Not now. Her fit of rage was merely rage, not the beginning of an explanation, and as I did not really know what to say, I had a rather silly idea. I suggested we write a letter to this ‘Marie-Madeleine’, as the journalist called herself, to tell her just how much we disapproved of her advice.

  I had hoped in suggesting we write this letter that it might give me some clue as to what had happened to Madame M., but it didn’t, she merely calmed down as quickly as she had flown off the handle. Letters to ‘Mary Pigpen’, however, became one of our rituals. We never sent them. Just writing them was enough to amuse us.

  Madame M. might never have told me a thing if I hadn’t arrived one morning at L’Escalier in a panic, in the middle of a coughing fit. ‘I’m going to die, I’m going to die, I’m bleeding, look, I’m bleeding.’ Madame M. immediately understood what was going on. She smiled; she too had not dared say a thing to her parents the day it happened to her. She asked Sophie to run a hot bath for me to ease the pain. I don’t know how long I stayed in that bathtub looking at my belly, completely astonished by what was going on inside it. Were there many more secrets like this that life had in store?

  The gong sounded for lunch; Madame M. brought me a bathrobe. When I stood up the blood began gushing down my legs again. I watched as the stain grew larger in the bath water and I thought what a lovely painting it would make. Madame M. was also staring at the red patches that were taking a while to dissolve, and then she gave me an odd look. When I got out of the bathtub, there in front of me she took off her dress and her underwear, and she lay down in my dirty bathwater. I shall never forget, I was so embarrassed. I knew then that she would tell me everything.

  It all began just after their wedding. Madame M. was nineteen, her husband was twenty. They had been devastated by the shocking death of their parents. They were unhappy, overwhelmed by heavy responsibilities. Her husband did not want to take over the family business. Property, land, companies: he decided to sell everything. Already all he could think of was journalism. They spent long months arranging everything and had time for nothing else. But then, as heirs, they had the inevitable reflex: what was the point of their considerable fortune if they had no one to leave it to?

  In the beginning Madame M. wasn’t really worried. All the women in her entourage told her she simply had to wait for nature to take its course, it was only a matter of months. And besides, their parents’ death had been so sudden, one ought not underestimate the shock.

  But two years went by and nature still had not taken its course. Those couples who had got married at the same time they did already had a child, some were even expecting their second. Madame M. was desperate. She had followed excruciating diets. She had taken medication she made up on her own, but nothing worked. Completely at a loss, she ended up inflicting torture on herself to ‘stimulate’ the body into fertility. But no matter what she tried, she did not get pregnant. Her story was horrifying. That is why she had come to settle at L’Escalier. To get away from those terrible memories.

  By the time she stopped talking the water was cold, her lips were blue. Sophie was knocking on the door. Madame M. stood up, and I could not help but look at her body. Her skin was marked from her buttocks to her knees. The lesions were healing but I could still see the scars from the blows she had inflicted on herself. ‘To awaken the sleeping organs’, books advised ‘whipping the lower back and the inner thighs until they bleed’. I could not understand how she could have subjected herself to such a thing. Her answer was chilling. ‘Because that is the only advice there is for infertile women.’ She had never looked at me like that. In that moment I remember thinking she no longer found me such an ‘easy person to like’, as she put it.

  We sat down at the dinner table. Neither one of us was hungry, but we forced ourselves, so we wouldn’t have to speak. It seemed to me that I understood her. In a way I missed the brother or sister I had never had as much as she missed the child she could not have. I just wanted to reassure her when I told her that some day it would work, that my parents had also waited a very long time before they had me. She didn’t answer. She went on eating in silence.

  After my parents, and then Madame M., I thought it was something of a coincidence, all these people around me yearning for children. And as I had never known what purpose I served in life, that day as I sat there staring at my piece of lamb I believed that my role in life would be to fight infertility. Suddenly it became absolutely clear to me. ‘The room without walls’, the paintings, Alberto—at last I had a way to thank her for everything she had done for me. I did not know how to tell her. The agony aunt column was there before me. I took a sheet of paper and a pencil and I wrote, reading it out loud.

  ‘Dear Mary Pigpen, a woman I love with all my heart cannot have a child. I don’t want children. The only thing that matters to me in life is painting. So I would like to bear her child for her. That way I could, in turn, give her what she needs in life.’

  Madame M. did not look up. I saw her tears flowing into her plate, she went on eating without looking at me, shaken by terrible sobs. She eventually managed to say that the young girl who was writing this letter was extremely kind, but she didn’t know what she was saying, and Mary Pigpen was bound to bring her back to her senses. And then she stood up and left the dining room. We did not speak of it any more.

  When, two months later, she told me she would do it, at first I did not understand. And then she murmured that we would have to be very careful so that no one would know. At the time I did not know what
to say. I had made the suggestion in the heat of our conversation because everything had got muddled in my head. The idea of my recently-discovered fertility. Her infertility. Her sorrow. My gratitude. Now the idea seemed a bit foolish. But I quickly reassured myself: her husband would never agree to it.

  ‘I have managed to convince my husband: you will try just once, and if it works, it works, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. God will decide.’

  She did not ask me my opinion again. She explained in minute detail how it would all come about. I would not have to do a thing, it would not take long, she promised. She had arranged everything. Her husband would be coming back within the hour and she thought it would be a good idea if we made the most of this time.

  I could not believe he had agreed.

  ‘Let’s wait until tomorrow.’

  That was all I managed to say. I could tell I was headed for disaster but all the courage I could muster was that of avoidance. ‘Let’s wait until tomorrow.’ I didn’t want it to happen under these conditions. Not with a man I did not know. Not for the first time.

  Madame M. must have thought I was trying to wriggle out of it, but that wasn’t it. I just needed some time. I would keep my promise. I couldn’t go back on my word now, I had never seen her so happy. Besides, I wasn’t afraid. With all her explanations it felt like I had an appointment at the doctor’s. No more, no less. And that was something I was used to.

  Just to be alone now. And stare at a canvas. Not to think, just not to have to think. Madame M. seemed embarrassed. When I went into the room without walls, I understood why. A bed had grown there overnight. And the mirror had vanished behind a drape that was even redder and newer than all the others. I could not stay in that room. As I walked down the driveway I passed her husband. I did not dare look at him.

  But the next morning I kept our appointment. And everything went just as she had hoped. I became pregnant ‘with the efficiency of a virgin’.

  We left three months later. Before my clothed body could betray us. She had planned everything. We would leave the village for the duration of my pregnancy and come back after the birth. And life would go on as before. As if nothing had happened, except that at last in her arms she would be holding the infant she had so desired. How could I have believed things could be that simple?

  T hroughout her entire story Annie had been pacing the room, her cup of chicory between her palms. As if suddenly reminded of its existence, she put the cup down on the table and came to sit next to me again.

  ‘You are the first person I have ever told this story to, Louis. I wrote it in a letter to my parents. But they never received it. Even though Sophie swore to me that she would post it. I shall never forgive her.’

  Annie was probably expecting me to ask her questions. ‘What happened?’ ‘Where is your child?’ But as a poor jealous man I could find nothing better than to insult her.

  ‘That kind Monsieur M. was no luckier than I was. Well, it looks like one time only is all any of us can expect from you!’

  Annie’s expression grew tense, she had tears in her eyes. But for once I didn’t care—about her, about what had happened, about her unhappiness; all I could think of was myself and I wanted to make her pay for what I felt she still owed me, despite the years: my unrequited love.

  Her wedding band was an offence to my eyes. She must not have known how to tell me she was married.

  The church bell struck seven. Annie suddenly felt for the pocket of her cardigan. She said she had forgotten to leave the keys for her colleague who was supposed to close up the shop where they worked, she was sorry, she had to go back there, she couldn’t afford to get herself sacked. She asked me to wait for her; she had so many things to tell me. She begged me to forgive her if she had hurt me; she hadn’t meant to. She was distraught. She hurriedly put on her shoes and went out, shoelaces trailing. I listened to her footsteps as they faded away on the stairs; I had not lost my schoolboy habits.

  I had been deeply troubled upon seeing her again; for almost three years I had believed that she was married or lost or even dead, and now she had reappeared in my life without warning. And she was telling me everything. I certainly had not reacted in the way she expected. But I already knew her story.

  What Annie didn’t know was that Sophie had indeed kept her word, and Annie’s mother had indeed received her letter.

  I can still see the anxious old woman dripping with rain under the awning outside my house, holding a huge umbrella. It was pouring that day. She handed me the letter. I immediately recognised Annie’s hand. The envelope contained several pages of closely written handwriting, on both sides, as if she had been afraid she would not have enough paper. She had already been away with Madame M. for several months.

  Eugénie looked distraught.

  ‘This is so worrying, such a long letter, something must have happened!’

  ‘For a mother, too long or too short is always a bad sign . . . ’ I replied, in what I hoped was a cheerful tone. But the length of the letter surprised me as well. Up until now Annie had never sent her anything but very laconic postcards. My expression must have changed.

  ‘What has happened? Louis, tell me what is going on?’

  The time it took for me to look up from the letter and meet her gaze it was done, I had already lied.

  ‘Nothing. Everything is fine. Everything is fine. But I’m late, please forgive me. Go on home, I’ll stop by and read it to you tonight.’

  And I had rushed to my room with the letter in my hand, in order to go over it on my own. To understand how all this could have happened.

  ‘. . . The next day I came as agreed and everything went just as Madame M. had hoped. I became pregnant ‘with the efficiency of a virgin’. I will be giving birth in a few days. The child will be called Louis if it’s a boy, and Louise if it’s a girl. I am so afraid, afraid of dying and never seeing you again. I love you. I hope you can forgive me.’

  These were, more or less, the only words Annie had written to her parents that she had not repeated to me in her account.

  I copied out these few pages into an exercise book, to have a record of them, then I sat under the awning and watched as they melted in the rain. I had decided not to read them to Eugénie: it would be too cruel, she was too fragile. Annie pregnant with another woman’s baby: she could not bear it. Even I could not understand how it was possible—how could she have allowed that man to make her pregnant?

  As I watched the raindrops softening the paper I tried to find comfort in the thought that one often regrets confiding in others out of fear, and Annie would be relieved to know what I had done. And besides, I was not destroying the truth, merely deferring it. If by the time she got back from her journey she still wanted her mother to know what had happened, then she would tell her. But at that moment I sincerely thought I was acting for the best as far as everyone was concerned.

  The letter was illegible. The ink had spread in huge blots. I apologised ten times over to Eugénie, I had left the letter on my desk, I hadn’t noticed that the window was open, I was so sorry.

  So I had to make up another story—the war had just begun, the confusion on the front, all sorts of things which—and this did surprise me—Annie had not mentioned at all in her letter. But I reckoned that with everything she was going through she must have her mind on other things, and then again perhaps in the South of France the tension was less noticeable than here.

  Eugénie nevertheless found my version rather short in comparison to the length of the letter. I replied that things always seemed shorter when spoken than when they were written. I was ashamed to be taking advantage of her weakness, but I knew she would not say anything. I was right: she nodded her head humbly, without daring to ask anything else. She took my fabricated rule for a golden one, and merely remarked happily that her little girl had regained something of her talkativ
eness.

  I had never asked Eugénie why she had picked me to read her daughter’s letters to her. Had she sensed I was a young admirer who would be easy to corner? Did she hope I would read them out loud without paying attention? Or that I would talk to her about them, thus relating the precious contents?

  ‘I don’t know how to read.’

  She could not have asked me the time of day in a more offhand manner, but bent over on the stool in the passage she eventually murmured that it was a real torment for her. No matter how many hours she spent staring at Annie’s letters, she couldn’t understand a thing. At night she would go to bed hoping for a miracle, but in the morning nothing had changed. She felt utterly stupid because of a pile of letters. She had never told anyone. Neither her husband, nor Annie. She had always managed to keep them from finding out.

  Eugénie was crying, blowing her nose fitfully. Even the day Annie had come home sobbing because Mademoiselle E. had told her that any mother who loves her children reads them stories—even that day, she had managed to find a way round it.

  ‘I don’t read you stories . . . that’s true . . . but that has nothing to do with love . . . Love is . . . it’s more mysterious than that . . . Where love is concerned, my darling, you mustn’t ask, mustn’t beg. Don’t ever try to make people love you the way you want them to love you, that’s not it, that’s not true love. You have to let people love you their own way, and my way, it isn’t about reading you stories, but it might be about sewing you all the dresses I can, and all the coats, skirts and scarves that you love so much. Aren’t we happy like that? You don’t want another maman do you? Tell me, Annie, you don’t want another maman?’