I went out and bought a road map, and drew a semi-circle with the dividers: two hours from Paris, to the south. It still left me with a vast area to search.
Night after night I studied the map by the light of my bedside lamp. It was killing my eyesight. There were so many villages beginning with N., it would take me months to visit them all. It was discouraging. I looked at the lamp. The first night Nicolas came to my house I had changed the bulb for a weaker, more ‘romantic’ one. I would have done better to leave the big fat white bulb that was so unflattering. Perhaps we wouldn’t have made love and at least I’d be able to read this fucking road map that was dancing before my eyes. I looked at my belly, feeling uncomfortable the way I did whenever an unpleasant thought crossed my mind; forgive me, baby, of course I’m happy you exist.
There was a sudden shrill ring at the door.
Nicolas? Look, my village too begins with an N.
‘It’s us! Open up, Camille, we have loads of food . . . and booze!’
It was just like my girlfriends to show up without warning. I hadn’t told them anything yet, I wasn’t strong enough to confront them. But now that I’d made my decision, now that Nicolas had said what he had to say, I’d be able to tell them as well. I was glad they had come. We would be able to talk about it, they would surely reproach me for embarking on this adventure all by myself, but they would not spare Nicolas either, and it would do me good to hear them say bad things about him.
They were overjoyed for my sake, they would be there, they would help me, had I already chosen a name? Three pairs of wildly enthusiastic hands wandered over my tummy. My girlfriends: they are the best thing that has happened to me in life. You have to pick them well, you lose a few along the way, but the ones I have kept are the most wonderful girls on the planet.
Two of us were not drinking champagne: me, for obvious reasons, and Charlotte, for no other reason than her palate. No, really, she said, the only thing she liked about the Champagne region were the timber-frame churches.
‘The what?’
‘The timber-frame churches. They’re churches made all of wood, all lovely and warm, like chalets. You only find them in Champagne, a dozen or so in all.’
Charlotte always knew how to catch us off guard.
‘I was overcome by a certain sweet feeling, and I rediscovered with pleasure the smell of wood that was so peculiar to that church.’
Oh my God, there it was! I had the missing clue.
The village of N. must be in Champagne. It was less than two hours from Paris by car, to the southwest; it corresponded perfectly.
Charlotte will never find out what she did for me. And while they were having a field day bad-mouthing Nicolas-that-filthy-bastard, I looked at my friends with all the love I felt for them. Louis would not get away from me now.
First thing the next morning I asked Mélanie, the young intern, to look up the names of all the villages where one could find timber-frame churches.
When she brought me the list, there was not a single one that began with the letter N.
It was Tuesday, and no matter how many times I read and reread the letters, I could not unlock the past.
At five o’clock sharp I heard the key turn in the lock of Annie’s cell. We were free; our lives would not be used to compensate for the misdeeds of others. It was still pitch black outside and when we left the premises it was drizzling. We headed for my house. We wouldn’t really have time to get any sleep but we’d be able to rest, if she wanted. Annie came closer and put her arm around my waist; I put mine on her shoulder. We had never walked like this together; I felt invincible.
Moustique didn’t wake up. We went into my room and lay down on my bed. When I tried to kiss her, determined to make love to her, Annie gently pushed me away. She sat up against the headboard. She wanted to do it with her husband, she said, not with a man ‘like the others’. But it wasn’t a matter of making me wait, we could get married that very evening, if I liked. Father André would do it even if we showed up without warning. Father André was our village priest. And after that, she would be happy, her mind at rest. We would love each other as man and wife, and we would go and get Louise as man and wife, and as her parents, if I was all right with that, if I agreed to play the role.
I looked at her; she was unfathomable. I hadn’t known she was so pious. The crucifix in her room the previous day had surprised me.
Annie suddenly got up. She burst out laughing, but ever so gently. She skipped round in circles humming, saying ‘here is a dance for my fiancé’, lifting her sweater as she moved, hiding and revealing her beautiful breasts, naked beneath the sweater. And then she froze there before me and huddled against me and asked me to hold her closely. She would come for me at two o’clock, when I finished work, and afterwards we would go directly to the church. Would that be all right?
This was wonderful! But how did she know I finished work at two o’clock? I was about to ask her, when Moustique came into the room shouting at the top of his lungs in his usual way, ‘Breakfast is ready, comrade!’ ‘Comrades,’ he added, when he saw Annie. Her presence at my side did not surprise him for one second. Quite the opposite.
‘Well, well! It looks like you finally found each other, the two of you.’
I had my answer. Annie had asked Moustique about me.
Moustique, the fellow with the lewd smile. The day I began work at the post office he had offered me a room: his best friend, who had been renting it, had been taken prisoner, and while Moustique was happy to wait for him, in the meantime he needed the money. I could stay until he came back. But three years had gone by, and he hadn’t come back, and neither Moustique nor I saw any reason to change our arrangement. He was messy, I was tidy. Rather than fight about it, I would pick up his mess, and he would add a bit of mess to my life, since I was too timorous to do it on my own. I always met my girlfriends through Moustique. You might have thought we didn’t live in the same town: I simply could not see the pretty girls, but for him it was as if he created them. There was not one of his conquests who wasn’t charming, and luckily for me they all had friends who were just as charming. There are people who are gifted at this sort of thing, able to find beauty no matter where they are. When I asked him how he met these women he always said, ‘Just horsing about.’ Since the death of Annie’s mother I could not stand that expression, but no matter how often I told him so he always forgot. He wasn’t being cruel, that’s just the way Moustique was.
‘You see, if you know how to horse about you can find a lot of women, but not a thoroughbred like her. Now I understand why you never noticed my women.’
That’s what he said while Annie was in the bathroom. We had had a very lively breakfast, the three of us, full of laughter. And then I had to go to work. Moustique had the day off, as did Annie, or so she said. She walked with me as far as the post office, and to say goodbye she kissed me on the cheek close to my lips, murmuring, ‘I will see you later, my almost husband.’ I shall always remember.
I spent the morning looking at the clock, raging against the slowness of the hands. At three minutes to two I put on my pea jacket and went out. Annie wasn’t there. I didn’t worry, I was early. But at half past she wasn’t there either. I waited for her until three o’clock, pacing the same bit of pavement, not knowing what I was supposed to think. I was furious. Where had she got to? Did she intend to let me down my whole life? At three-twenty I was pounding on the door to her room. No one. I turned the knob. The door opened, it wasn’t locked. I thought of waiting for her there, but it was as if the sculpture on the table—the ‘Invisible Object’—were staring at me. And in the hands of the woman who only yesterday had seemed to be holding nothing but empty space, there was a sheet of paper. I went over; on the paper was a hasty sketch.
A drawing which, although I had never seen it, was uncannily familiar.
It was
a picture of a little boy playing with a doll by the side of a lake. A pile of stones next to him.
And in the lake, Annie had written a sentence, seven words I wish I had never shared with her.
‘Here, at last, I am at peace . . .’
I had once told Annie all about the painter Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun. This was the epitaph she had carved onto her tombstone at the end of her sad life.
It was as if I had been struck by lightning. I couldn’t understand a thing. What had happened between this morning, when she had painted such a radiant future for us, and this letter, and this drawing, which made me fear the worst?
My thoughts were racing, but I couldn’t move, until I felt something beneath my fingers, like a low relief etching, and I turned the paper over: letters had been cut out and stuck to the page.
IT ISN’T NICE TO GO HIDING THINGS
WHO’S GOING TO TELL
YOUR NEW BOYFRIEND
THAT HE’S SLEEPING
WITH A WHORE
My blood ran cold. Annie, a whore?
She must have received the anonymous letter that morning.
I scrambled down the steps four at a time, leapt on my bicycle and pedalled as fast as I could.
So she knew my secret of the porcelain dolls: she must have caught me at it on one of the drowning days.
I didn’t stop, I tore along. I shouted so people would get off the pavement and make room for me. It was impossible, she wouldn’t do such a thing. And with each spin of the pedals a new detail came back to me and suddenly took on all its significance in the light of this sinister revelation.
The keys that she was supposed to have forgotten to take to her colleague.
I pedalled.
Her haste to go and wash as soon as she got home. Had she agreed to one last client? Just to please her madam—she was bound to be attached to her, after all these years. Or for the sake of a regular who was so insistent that she preferred to comply rather than explain? It would be quicker. Bound to be a jealous client, one who was in love. She must have had dozens like that. Perhaps he was the one who had written the letter. To frighten her, to hurt her. To take revenge on her for giving everything up for someone else.
I pedalled. I had to catch up with her.
And that sculpture she’d brought back, out of the blue. The only thing she cared about from her room back there, where she had left all the rest of her past, that ‘past that didn’t count’. Because the room where she had taken me was not her room: it suddenly made sense.
I pedalled.
The way she turned this way and that as she prepared the chicory, opening all the cupboard doors until she found the cups; and I’d thought it was emotion that had made her hesitant.
And the way she failed to answer when I asked her about the plants she had growing in those pots. She didn’t know. Quite simply because that was not her room.
I pedalled. One village after another, but not fast enough.
She must have asked friends to lend her the room, just for the time she needed to take me somewhere.
I pedalled.
The ugly underwear. How horrible to have come in another woman’s smell.
I pedalled.
And that strange crucifix above the bed, which I had taken for a sign of piety. I hadn’t understood a thing. She wanted to make love with her ‘husband’, not with a man ‘like the others’. It was her way of showing respect for me, in order not to sully me, to give me a more important role in her life; it was the only solution she had found to keep me from becoming part of the dark mass of men who had been bedding her for months, for years.
I pedalled. I was watching out for the forest on the horizon.
Had she recognised someone from that dark mass in the bar where I’d been waiting for her? Was that why she didn’t come in and just knocked on the windowpane? And the restaurant where we had dinner: had she chosen it because she was sure she wouldn’t see anyone she knew there?
I pedalled furiously. I had already gone past the signpost for N. and the hairpin bend. The lake was only a few hundred metres away. But as I went past L’Escalier I slowed down instinctively, as I had done so often on those evenings filled with disappointment. And what if she, too, had stopped there instinctively, what if she had felt her resolve flagging? What if her feelings for Louise had once again prevailed, offering her reassurance? Whispering that a child loves its mother no matter who or what she is or has been. I hunted for her bicycle, it might be somewhere, leaning against a wall. But there was no sign of life, other than a curtain fluttering as it was sucked in through the French doors in a room on the ground floor. Like a ghost. The vision made me pedal that much faster, I had to get there in time, I had to stop her.
Had she coughed last night on purpose? Merely pretending to have an asthma attack? Preferring to be taken by the Germans than by me? We weren’t risking anything, it had already happened to friends of hers and they’d been released . . . That way she’d be granted a night’s reprieve and she wouldn’t be faced with the difficult task of refusing me, wouldn’t be obliged to make excuses. We would make love as husband and wife or not at all.
She was so happy this morning. She was going to start all over, rebuild her life, rebuild everything with Louise and me. She wanted to escape from the life she was leading, and whoever wrote her that letter must have known it and couldn’t bear the thought.
I pedalled. With every bend in the road I hoped to see her appear, hoped to catch up with her, hold her in my arms and tell her that I agreed, yes, there is always a part of another person’s past which does not matter. Or perhaps I might find her curled up at the edge of the lake, because she lacked the courage, because to be human is to be cowardly, and a good thing too. Or because she had come to her senses and realised that I would not abandon her because of it, that I didn’t give a damn. Or perhaps she would have gone no further in the water because this was where on summer evenings she used to picnic with her parents, the three of them. I’d see her silhouetted against the horizon. I’d see her and put my arms around her. And we would kiss, deeply, sincerely, our first adult kiss that would be nothing like our children’s kisses. And nothing we had planned that morning would have changed, we would go to the church and get married in that place where I had first begun to love her. And we would be the first bride and groom to be married without wedding rings, but Father André would make an exception in our case, because he knew we were ‘those inseparable kids’, and because lovebirds, after all, don’t have fingers.
You always hope you will get there in time, before it’s too late.
I called out at the top of my lungs. I shouted her name as I ran around the lake, and then I saw her bike in the tall grass by the water’s edge. And just there, by the rear tyre, there was a spot that had been cleared of a few stones. I feared she had filled her pockets with them, and now they were at the bottom of the lake with her. I jumped in. I dived in here and there, but the silt made it almost impossible to see. Or was it my tears, I don’t know. When I finally gave up, it had been dark for a long time. I waited for Annie’s body to rise to the surface. Stones could drown a doll, but not a corpse bloated with water. The force of the water would be stronger than the stones. Stone-paper-scissors. WATER.
Annie’s body never rose to the surface.
Annie has always been a part of my life. I was two years old, just a few days short of my second birthday, when she was born; and I was twenty when she died, a few days short of twenty. If when you’re a few days short of two you don’t realise you’re about to meet the love of your life, when you’re a few days short of twenty you do know when that love has died. And you wonder why you still exist. There are people who think they will die when their inseparable other disappears, but I have always known that we are not so fortunate; my father never murmured to my mother that one could ‘die
of love’.
For two weeks there were no more letters.
This man bursts into my life claiming that my mother is not my mother, that my so-called mother—this ‘Annie’—was dead, and then he goes and disappears, just like that. Never mind that I can no longer sleep at night.
He could have provided a conclusion, could have said: That’s it, I think you get the picture, you are Louise. I’m sorry to inform you in this way, but here is my telephone number, call me if you would like to talk about it . . .
No, that would be asking too much, too complicated for a guy who believes that secrets should die with the people who keep them. So why did he open his filthy trap, the bastard? My mother was dead, right? Both mothers, in fact!
It wasn’t my name, after all. It wasn’t my date of birth, either. I tried to find comfort where I could. And I still didn’t have a clue about this possible village somewhere, beginning with N, where there was supposed to be a timber-frame church. And all the other clues were slipping through my fingers, too.
‘There was an art gallery in the street perpendicular to hers, I had to go past it and then take the first right. Number 65.
I rang the bell.
It was Madame M. who opened. She was holding the baby in her arms.’
As far as I could recall, we had never lived at a number 65 anywhere.
‘L’Escalier was the name given to a fine estate in the middle of our little village, as out of place as a swan among starlings.’
There, too, I found it hard to believe that my parents would never have mentioned that house to me. And I had done my research, to see if there was a hamlet or a place by the name of L’Escalier—to no avail. I was walking on quicksand.
‘And what if my next breath proved to be my last? Terrified, I held my breath and turned to the statue of Saint Roch, imploring him; he had cured the lepers, so surely he could save me.’
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