Roch [Rok], Saint. Saint born ca. 1300–1350, who cured plague sufferers during a pilgrimage to Rome. When he in turn succumbed, he withdrew in isolation into a forest. An angel cared for him, a local dog brought him bread, and he recovered. He would later die in prison, forsaken by all those who knew him. In the course of the 15th century the faithful began to worship him all over Europe, but this declined with the gradual disappearance of the plague, which the saint was said to guard against. Saint Roch is typically portrayed with a pilgrim’s staff in his hand. Sometimes he is also shown carrying a satchel, and the hood and cape of a pilgrim. A dog at his side tugs on his cape to show the wound the saint has on his leg. He is invoked whenever epidemics of contagious disease afflict a city. Many monuments, churches, and chapels have been devoted to him.
(The Petit Robert of Proper Names)
Trying to find that particular church with its statue of Saint Roch was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Just like trying to find the village of ‘N.’ with its lake. Or the place where La Gazette was read: you can’t get a name for a newspaper much more common than that.
‘Rue de la Sablière. Rue Hippolyte-Maindron. 14. 32. 46. I don’t know how I managed to find Alberto’s studio. 46, rue Hippolyte-Maindron. Perhaps the puppet strings, once again.’
I went to that address. It was the studio of Alberto Giacometti, no less!
And everything fitted. He did indeed have a brother, Diego, and both of them had fled a few days before the Germans invaded Paris. But he was dead now, so he couldn’t tell me anything. Alberto Giacometti—it was too outlandish to be true. My parents would have told me about him.
This discovery was something of a relief, because I tried to see it as proof that all those letters were nothing more than a writer’s wild imaginings. I felt reassured.
Perhaps he would finally show up at my office. ‘Ah-hah! I had you there for a while, didn’t I—so, will you publish me?’
And it would all finish over a good lunch. And I would go and visit my mother’s grave and tell her the whole story, and apologise for ever having doubted her.
The telephone rang.
The moment I heard the telephone, either here or at the office, I immediately thought it must be Nicolas: would he tell me he was sorry he’d spoken to me like that? That he had thought it over, and that there were plenty of people who didn’t expect to have a baby and who managed very well, so why shouldn’t we?
‘Hello, Professor Winnicott here. Your assistant gave me your telephone number. She said you’re doing research into timber-frame churches.’
He was an American academic who had been living in Paris for nearly fifteen years; he still had a thick accent. He had been sent over by an American museum at the time of the business with the church at Nuisement-aux-Bois.
Nuisement-aux-Bois: it started with N. I listened carefully, my ear pressed against the receiver.
It went back a few years. The terrible floods in Paris between 1910 and 1955 had led to the decision to build several reservoir dams along the Seine and its tributaries in order to control the devastating overflow. But the construction of the Der-Chantecoq lake on the Marne had in turn been the cause of another veritable tragedy: three villages were erased from the surface of the earth from one day to the next. All that remains of Chantecoq is the name it gave to the lake. There was also Champaubert-aux-Bois and Nuisement-aux-Bois. The inhabitants, helpless to prevent it, had watched as the forest was uprooted and cleared, their houses dismantled and burned, and their village razed to the ground and covered with water. So that Paris would no longer be flooded. They were devastated. Evicted from their homes, to see them disappear for the so-called public good: you have to have experienced such a thing to understand what it’s like; some people never recover. The American Indians died of it.
But as every tragedy has its little miracle, there was one church that was rescued, a church and a cemetery. Nuisement.
‘And that is where I come in, Mademoiselle Werner. As this church is typical of the charming timber-frame constructions that are so abundant in the Champagne region, a friend in the United States who is a curator wanted to have it for his museum. He appointed me as his intermediary here. I think we owe the rescue of the church to him. If the United States had not been interested, no doubt it would have sunk to the bottom of the lake like the rest of those three villages. But because this man wanted it, he sparked others to want it, as often happens in life. The church was taken apart and rebuilt piece by piece in a little village just next to the former Nuisement-aux-Bois, Sainte-Marie-du-Lac. All the bodies in the cemetery were also exhumed and reburied in exactly the same places behind the church. The inauguration of this miraculous little survivor was held four years ago now, on the twelfth of September 1971, to be exact. That is all I can tell you about the church at Nuisement, I hope it can be of use.’
‘What is your first name, Monsieur Winnicott?’
‘Robert. Why do you ask?’
‘No particular reason. Thank you for all the information.’
For a split second I thought Louis might be hiding behind this Monsieur Winnicott, but the moment this hypothesis occurred to me I realised it was impossible. Louis used French the way one uses one’s native language, not an adopted one.
I called Mélanie to thank her for having unearthed this precious source of information, and I told her I would not be coming to the office the next day, either; I had some personal things to take care of.
I dashed into the shower, dressed warmly, grabbed my car keys and a road map. There was not much left of Nuisement-aux-Bois, but the church and the cemetery might be of some help.
On my way out I bumped into Madame Merleau who was about to ring at my door.
She had a bulky package to give me that would not fit in my letter box. Was everything all right? I hadn’t been out for four days, she was beginning to worry. Yes, everything was fine. I didn’t have time to pour my heart out, and I practically grabbed the package out of her hands to inspect the handwriting.
Obviously I hadn’t heard the last of Louis. I would read it on the way.
From Paris, head towards Vitry-le-François. From Vitry-le-François, take the D13 in the direction of the Lac de Der as far as Troyes. From there take the road for Sainte-Marie-du-Lac.
The envelope contained a package wrapped in brown paper and a very short note, once again in Louis’ hand.
Dear Camille,
I thought I knew all there was to know about this story, and it took me years to understand what had really happened. I wasn’t expecting anything else, because I always thought I knew the truth. Until I was told at last.
I am not angry with Annie for having hidden it from me, she knew how powerful jealousy can be. She had already paid the price.
I immediately recognised her, not from her appearance, but the moment she opened her mouth. It was like an apparition. Her voice did not have the evenness of dialogue; instead she told me the whole long story in one go. With all the immodesty of a guilty woman. And with no thought for my feelings. I felt I had no right to interrupt her. Everything was crystal clear, filthy, but crystal clear.
Dear Camille
With those two words my heart was in my throat.
Oddly, it was at that moment that I knew I was Louise.
I unwrapped the brown paper. Inside was a school exercise book. I opened it.
Louis’ handwriting, as always, more cramped and more vigorous, but this time, writing someone else’s words.
Everything I have done was in order not to lose my husband. I’m not looking for any excuses, I don’t have any. All I know is that I loved that man more than anything on earth.
I don’t really know where to begin.
The first thing that comes to mind is the argument we had at L’Escalier.
The sound of his typewriter
woke me at dawn. My husband was a journalist. He worked a great deal, and having to go back and forth between L’Escalier and his office in Paris did not make his days any shorter. I was often asleep when he came home, but every morning I brought him a cup of coffee which he drank with me. That morning, he spilled it.
‘I cannot believe it, at least a hundred people have died, there’ve been over thirty thousand arrests, everyone’s talking about it, and this comes as news to you?’
Yes, it was news to me. In Germany Goebbels was baying for blood as he hunted down the Jews, and those Nazi scum had broken so many shop windows and ransacked homes that they called it Kristallnacht . . . The more my husband explained what had happened, the more I felt his anger towards me. Suddenly, it overflowed.
‘This cannot go on! If I agreed to move here, it was so you would feel better, not so you would go on feeling sorry for yourself. I do not recognise you. You don’t give a damn about anything, except whether I bought your canvas, your charcoal, your paint . . . It is not by shutting yourself off from the rest of the world that you are going to solve your problem. And now you’ve made me late!’
‘You do that! Get out! Go back to your wonderful world where everybody knows about everything . . . Go and tell your dear readers how the world works and above all don’t waste your time explaining it to me, how our world is going to work with everything that’s happening to us.’
This was the first argument we’d ever had; as if I could hear the cry for blood here, too, I could tell something bad was coming. It was the eleventh of November 1938.
My husband was right, I hadn’t been reading the papers for weeks. I couldn’t stand the campaign that was raging for an increased birth rate; wherever you looked, the same injunction:
‘Have more children! Have more children,
France must make up for her losses in 1914’
‘60 million in France
will be a guarantee of peace!’
‘647,498 deaths for 612,248 births
is not very patriotic!’
So what? Four deaths for zero births, it was not my fault if I could not improve the ratio in our family.
For nearly six years now Paul and I had been trying to have a child.
We were married on the sixteenth of March 1932. I was nineteen, Paul was twenty. By sealing our union, the church bells also began the countdown to conception: in our milieu marriage and children were inseparable.
In the beginning all the mothers in my circle would share their experiences with me; those who were pregnant were the most unbearable, for they thought they were the purveyors of holy writ. Such female solidarity with regard to pregnancy seems to be in the nature of things, like shared male laughter when a lewd joke is told.
In the beginning, they all tried to be reassuring. I had to wait until Nature was ready. They were sure it was only a question of months. And then came our parents’ sudden death; we must not underestimate the shock of it.
That was true, we must not underestimate the shock . . .
The telephone had rung during the night, our wedding night. Our parents’ car had gone off the road, on their way home. It wasn’t a dangerous bend. The driver was drunk. All four of them were killed.
Neither Paul nor I ever wanted to know whose father was behind the wheel. We were much too afraid that we would reproach one another for it, sooner or later, in the course of an argument or a moment of resentment. We already reproached ourselves for not having taken the time to say goodbye to them that night, eager as we were to be alone at last.
And after that, we were alone all right. It was a horrible, relentless time. I cannot even remember how many nights, early in our marriage, ended in tears.
After our shared tears we tried to hide our sorrow, to keep each other from feeling worse. We lived like that for weeks, two red-eyed individuals who would suddenly rush out of the room to go and hide in a place where we could weep alone.
We came to terms with our strange, sad family situation as best we could. It was like a void and a burden at the same time, like a long endless fall that would stop only with a pregnancy, or at least that is what I hoped. I prayed that an infant’s cries would put an end to this macabre silence. Moreover, it would be a way of seeing them again, somehow: in a nose, a mouth, the shape of a face. Our beloved parents.
Like all those who truly love one another, we enjoyed our time alone together. But the tragedy for us was that, from now on, that is all there would ever be. And yet our family reunions had been so joyful. Our parents had got along marvellously, and we used to seize every opportunity to dine together. They even saw one another without us. When he saw the wedding cake, my father, with his usual sense of humour, could not help but quip, ‘It is not an arranged marriage we are celebrating this evening but an arranged friendship!’ And he had raised his champagne glass in a toast to Paul’s parents. ‘Champagne!’ I often wondered if that sip was one of those that had killed them.
It was like a punishment in a Greek tragedy. Death resembling a curse. So when we were unable to conceive, it was as if fate was trying all the harder to hound us. Was our lineage doomed to vanish from the planet? Was this God’s will?
Three years went by: nothing. All my friends had children. Some were already expecting their second child, whereas I was still sporting a ‘svelte figure’. Inquisitive gazes had become pitying. It was no longer the problem of when; the problem was now me: they were absolutely sure of that. Muttered conversations had replaced advice; we had gone from the things others speak about without giving you the right of reply, to the things one simply does not speak about.
I felt so helpless, so alone. Neither Paul nor I ever broached the subject, either. I had no one to confide in.
Pasquin, our family doctor, was a charming man, but he could not help sharing the problems of his consulting table with his dinner table.
‘This sole is delicious! It is excellent for your health, did you know that, ladies? A woman who eats fish will increase her fertility tenfold. Oh, and now that I think of it, I must tell poor Madame Werner, it might help her . . .’
And that is how two mouthfuls of sole and the prattle worthy of a fairground hawker were enough to prove that I was infertile.
Books were all that was left. I had to find help somewhere. I was so ashamed that I went into a bookshop on the Left Bank, far from home, and I even pretended the books were for a friend.
The expert in the matter was a certain Auguste Debay.
Health and physiology of marriage. A natural and medical history of married men and women. Health and hygiene for pregnant women and infants.
If I remember such a complicated title so accurately, it must be because I found myself imagining that the book had cured the infertility of the bookseller’s wife. I clung to any hope I could find. To be sure, this Debay book dated from 1885, but it was still the leading reference book. There was not a single contemporary book on the subject.
‘Have more children! Have more children,
France must make up for her losses in 1914’
The government did not pull any punches to increase the birth rate: abortion was prohibited, contraception as well, and while they were at it, so was any information whatsoever to do with sexuality. Already the fact that no one talked about it meant that things weren’t about to get any better. Their strategy was straightforward: the less people knew about it, the freer Nature would be to do her work. They could have tried to combat infertility, it would have meant a few more births, but power knows how to prohibit, not how to cure. And in those days, infertile women were just a handful of inconvenient second class citizens whom they preferred to ignore. Their calculations were precise: the loss of thirty grams of sperm was the equivalent of one thousand two hundred grams of blood. Waste must be avoided, and all the medical tomes denounced copulation with infertile women an
d their ‘destructive, useless lovemaking’.
This bookseller was obviously very well informed on the matter. As I worked my way along the shelves of his shop, I was seized by a mad hope. In a few seconds I would be holding the ‘reference book’ in my hands, and while it might be dated, it still remained the reference book. And after all, if old wives’ remedies worked, I could just as easily go for advice to the doctors who looked after those old wives.
The bookseller handed me the volume, quietly wishing me good luck. He must be used to catering to women like me who came to look for books they maintained were not for their own use. He must recognise them by the way they snatched up the books and held them against their chests, the way one might clutch a remedy, not a printed text.
The man’s discretion touched me, and I thanked him sincerely. It was vital to me not to lie to the one person who had held his hand out to me in so many months. This might be a sinister thought, but I realise that that bookseller was the last individual in my life to whom I did not lie.
Health and physiology of marriage. A natural and medical history of married men and women. Health and hygiene for pregnant women and infants.
I threw myself into the book heart and soul, and believe me, that is more than just a mere expression.
If one were to believe what one read, having children was not difficult, it was merely a question of one’s health. Already trapped in a mindless spiral of desperate hope, I followed all the advice.
To fight against the ‘inertia of genital organs’ one must favour ‘stimulating nutrition’. My maid Sophie served nothing but the so-called recommended food: rocket, celery, artichokes, asparagus, truffles . . . I wolfed everything down when my husband wasn’t looking, then forced myself to dine with him as well, even though I was no longer hungry. The very thought of sitting down to a meal became a nightmare. But I took comfort in the knowledge that so many infertile women had become fertile.
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