Sylvie was crying while eating now, shaking her head.
On the oven, the clock read 22.47.
‘It should have been me who was burnt, not you, my Sylvie.’
Sylvie looked up, brushed the tears from the swollen lids of her eyes. She sniffed and coughed and pushed the table away from her and slid out, her napkin tucked into the high waist of her skirt.
‘One postcard I’ve had from him,’ she said, walking over to the dresser Baseema had polished. She opened the door with trembling fingers, brought the postcard back to the table.’
‘It’s postmarked from Mexico, and this address is the one I replied to.’
‘This is a Mayan ruin,’ said Baseema, peering closer at the print on the postcard.
Sylvie took the card and straightened herself to read the words that were written in black ink on it.
Just as a mother would protect with her life her own son, her only son, so one should cultivate an unbounded mind towards all beings, and loving-kindness towards all the world. One should cultivate an unbounded mind, above and below and across, without obstruction, without enmity, without rivalry.
Standing, or going, or seated, or lying down, as long as one is free from drowsiness, one should practise this mindfulness. This, they say, is the holy state here.
Sutta Nipata
‘You don’t need to be ashamed, Ma. After all, this…’
‘I gave him up.’
‘You had no choice.’
‘Pah! I had choice. We all have some choice, Sylvie.’
‘You weren’t to know any of this would happen.’
Baseema lifted herself a little higher in the chair and then her body slumped forward. She was beginning to feel so tired.
‘Fire was Daniel’s means of requesting help. He didn’t kill Frederic. Frederic killed himself. You know that, don’t you, Sylvie? He loved Daniel with all his heart. He didn’t want to be gay. He didn’t want to be gay… And Daniel loved Frederic. Daniel needed help himself. Perhaps he still needs help.’
‘He’s a grown man now, Ma. All this will be so far behind him.’
‘He won’t want to see me.’
‘I think he will come back here, though. I do think he will come back here. Of his own choice.’
‘We have to get on, Sylvie. We have to get up, get dressed, build ourselves a day, each day.’
‘And the others?’
‘Who?’
‘The people who get crushed?’
‘Who gets crushed?’
‘People get crushed, Ma. Like I said. People like me. People like Papa. Daniel’s free. He’s not crushed. Everyone loves Daniel. And you too, Ma. You’re free. Like Kate Glover. But not me. I am one of the people life fucks over. Like Frederic. Like Papa. Like me.’
8
In the Pyrenees, the early-morning air was wet and warm. Baseema drove fast on the road, which wound in a series of tight hairpin bends through the mist. She leant forward over the steering wheel as the wipers slushed back and forth. Her mind was empty, her body felt big and stiff with tiredness. She breathed slowly, then hardly at all.
In the driveway, she pushed the car beneath the dripping pines and drove round behind the guest rooms to the wooden cabin with its lights on in the windows.
She reversed the car into the double space beneath the low hanging boughs that no one had thought to trim. There was another car parked here. A small white van that she hadn’t seen before. She looked up the wooden steps to the cabin with its gingham curtain in the window.
She barely noticed the way things had been rearranged: the slight, but only slight sense of disorder: a couple of cups, a stain, smeary fingerprints on the windows, a book on the floor, as if, while she had been away, the cabin had tilted quickly on its side, displacing ornaments, here and there.
It was quiet inside. And calm. He was standing by the stove, a cup of coffee in his hand. But it wasn’t her standing there before him. As least, it didn’t feel like her. It felt as if she had found herself in another world where houses flipped over like cards in a breeze, and minds warped without warning, emptying out in an instant while the animal Arnaud had said to her was in us all, was all we were, had finally found its opening and burst forward, eyes rolling, teeth bared, like a horse breaking into the house of its abuser and rearing up, using the last of its strength to take revenge.
Lollo did nothing. He went down like a leaf and lay there to be pummelled. His face was white, his lips slack.
And afterwards they sat across from one another at the small kitchen table and Lollo called his wife a Maghreb cunt. There was a bottle of Russian vodka between them and they took it in turns to drink from the bottle. Baseema’s head was empty, eerily so. Lollo sat with a towel wrapped around his hand. He wept. After a while he stopped.
Above their heads a naked bulb burnt low over the table.
‘What did you do with the light shade?’
‘I binned it.’
‘Oh.’
‘I moved things.’
‘Is the car yours?’
‘What car?’
‘The car parked outside. A van.’
‘There’s no car outside.’
Baseema drank vodka from the bottle and swilled it round her mouth. She would have liked to get up and show him the van, but for this strange feeling of exhaustion, this slowly creeping desire to crawl into bed upstairs and give it all up. But still there would be peace here, in this cabin in the mountains. There would still be the lemony light to recover, the quiet rhythm of her days.
She looked at her husband now and the way his lips were moving to try and form some words and she wondered how on earth she had stuck it out so long. How on earth she could have gone on pretending he almost didn’t exist.
Still, she didn’t know what to do.
After a while she got up and she carried her bag up to the bedroom, noticing the changes now, the few things left off kilter, the dust on the stairs, on the table.
She brought a sponge and a clean towel from upstairs, a T-shirt for him to put on.
‘You’re a bitch,’ he said, as she wiped the blood from his face and under his neck. ‘You should leave the blood, but you can’t bear to see it, Baseema. Your own violence. You will clean it up as you have always cleaned everything. Trying to make yourself shine. Always thinking you were somehow better than the folk in the village. With your clothes and your privilege. Fancy thinking you would get the chateau; that the nephew would actually give it to you – just like that. But you don’t have strength and you don’t have courage. You can’t even face your own son.’
‘Daniel came to see us,’ she said, standing with her back to him at the sink, her eyes on the view. ‘I think he was seven. He came one Sunday to sit in our kitchen. It was you who answered the door. Don’t you remember? It was raining and Daniel was standing there, holding a bag with his toothbrush and a plastic bag with some toys inside. He said he’d come to stay with us for a while. I can stay here? Would it be all right?’
Lollo said nothing. He was winding the towel around his hand.
‘We fed him a cream cake and then we turned him away. He was scared. Do you remember?’
‘What fucking choice did we have?’
‘Right!’ shouted Baseema, spinning round now and baring her teeth at him. ‘That house we had. That café. Well, God above, we were like royalty. Except it was better than that. We weren’t like the Borjas. Were we? We weren’t from the city. We were like everyone else, accepted by everyone else. Except for the fact that we had more than them. We had the best of both worlds. Friendship and privilege. Accepted and better off. And well we knew it. Well we knew.’
‘So you turned him away.’
‘No, Lollo! We turned him away. We did it, you and me. We fed him a cream cake and shut the door.’
‘He would have burnt us into the ground.’
‘He was seven years old.’
‘He was damaged.’
‘Seven years old!’
In the lobby, she switched the lights on and looked around. There was a tall vase of exotic flowers on the desk, and black and white photographs of mountains on the walls. She was proud of this job of hers in this quiet hotel. How she loved this vase of flowers and the computer that waited for her behind the desk. After her swim she would come in here with her hair washed and dried and ready herself for what was left to salvage of this day. She would make a cup of coffee and sit quietly, sifting through her emails. Things would start to seem better then. After all, what damage had been done? It wasn’t a question of pride. She was holding onto what she knew in order to protect him from the pain of their reunion. It was the only thing she could do for him, after all this time.
In the pool room, the lights came on automatically. Beneath the water, there were cones of yellow light from the spots on the sides.
Baseema put her towel on one of the loungers and held onto the bars as she eased her body down into the water. When she sank beneath the surface, the water held her hair up above her head so that it waved like velvety weeds clinging to a rock.
Yes, she was ready for winter. She was ready for the winter that would come and lock the secrets of the summer in. She loved how quickly it came and stripped the trees and flushed the dirt from the roads, how it went over everything with its cold hard brush and then laid the snow down so that everything could be covered over and quietly contained while the earth turned beneath.
Rape wasn’t right. Because rape wasn’t what it was. She’d been fourteen. Only just on her period. Fresh little eggs popping into the bright clean blood of her for the very first time. Lucie had explained everything. She took her through it all. There were diagrams that Lucie sat down at the kitchen table and drew. It wouldn’t hurt. Nine months was all it would be. She remembers the hot fondling in that tower room; remembers how quickly Arnaud got to sucking at her breasts. She was still a child. And now, after all this time.
It was a joke, Lucie had said, when she’d gone that evening to get the gun from the cage above the fireplace. She’d wanted to have a baby. She was barren, and too old.
It was a joke and not a joke.
She had clicked the gun and pointed it at Arnaud, who laughed and shook his finger in the air. But Lucie wanted them to do this.
Baseema didn’t care for the wine they had given her. But they had made such a fuss of her. Even she was giggling at the strangeness of it all. And when at last it happened, it happened. And after it, life went on, and she was carried forward, living as she always had, under the gaze and direction of the Borjas. It was early evening. Lucie was standing just inside the doorway, with her arms folded and her neck lifted right up like that of a startled bird. No, it wasn’t that unpleasant. The shutters were open in the bedroom. It was a beautiful evening. The sky was pink. And she didn’t like the wine but she soon got used to it.
Now she held her head up high above the water. When she moved she stretched her arms right out in front of her and propelled herself forward using her strong muscular legs. She made it all the way to the end of the pool and she felt the water rinse and purify her, seeping into her pores.
The white van that was parked under the pines was gone, leaving only a trail of angry tyre marks, like a game of brown dominoes in the mud.
On the table in the kitchen, beneath the bottle of vodka, there was a piece of a paper. It said, ‘Bye, bye. I’m going home,’ in his writing that was as bad as a child’s.
Baseema took the paper out from under the bottle. He had finished the bottle before leaving. And in her mind she saw him hunched behind the wheel, the spray of grey curls, those feeble fingers on the wheel. And she wondered, for a moment, about his intention. It was possible someone would find him in a day or two, the car gone down into a ravine, in between the dripping mountains; and buried in the mist and the forest, he would be fallen, hunched up over the wheel. They might wonder, peering in for a moment, what wild dog had been here for him and pinned him down, tried to rip out an eye. These policemen wouldn’t know it wasn’t him she had been after but the man in him, the deep stubborn unapologetic French man sunk down and drowning deep inside.
But she didn’t want that for her spouse. Of course she didn’t want that. She wanted him to be back where he felt safe, in the village, in his house with Sylvie, the house she had readied for his return.
And she knew that the chances were he’d have pulled over and fallen asleep somewhere. Then he’d wake with the first of the light and shake himself and gun the engine so that he could get to Sylvie’s in time for coffee, for bread and jam.
He’d shuffle in through the front door as if he’d never been away. He’d seat himself at the kitchen table and grin, looking around. He’d look at the line of Spanish plates falling on the wall, and he might remember, as Baseema couldn’t, who from the village it was who had made the gift.
The man would be back in his house then. Across the square he’d see the lights on in the café. He wouldn’t see the dark lumps of the chateau behind the wall. He would only see the café, and the women walking through the square with their baskets on their arms. He’d seat himself at his old table in the house that once was and would always be his, and he’d cross himself then and know that he was home.
DANIEL
Paris, July 2006
Lollo Pépin didn’t say hello. He wasn’t smiling. The waitress had disappeared.
He leant forward over the bar. ‘I drove here. From the Pyrenees. I stopped and slept in the vehicle. All because my determination was to face you, finally.’
Daniel tried to focus on what the man was saying. On Lollo’s head was a black triangle of sweat. It looked as if his crown had been pressed with the tip of an iron. Daniel felt the advantage of his height, the length and breadth of his torso. The simple black T-shirt and jeans that he wore to work were effective by contrast with the stained collar and crumpled beige trousers before him.
‘They cut him down,’ Lollo said, staring shakily up into Daniel’s face. ‘I sat with his head for hours. I just sat there like a mug…. and you had disappeared.’
Daniel’s eyes filled up with tears very quickly in the shadows behind the bar. ‘He was my friend.’
‘Yeah,’ said Lollo. ‘Pissssssth,’ he said. Then he seemed to lose courage and he rocked on his elbows. He looked to the street, drew phlegm from the back of his throat. A coach load of pale staring tourists rumbled past the window.
In a moment, the kitchen door swung open and in came Suzette with armfuls of napkins. She smiled shyly at Daniel, unaware of his customer. Daniel watched as she settled herself at table 12 and began to fold the napkins. He stared at the brightness in her gleam of blonde hair.
Lollo had walked the entire stretch of the Boulevard St Michel to find the restaurant Daniel was working in. It was a shock for both of them. To come face to face like this, after so many years.
‘Who do you think you are?’
Daniel said nothing. He took the bottle of tequila down. Lollo’s jacket creaked as he leant over the bar. ‘Maghreb,’ he said. ‘Fucking Maghreb bastard. That is what you are.’
Daniel gave Lollo another drink.
‘Your biological mother was from Algeria. And… You know, don’t you? You know who I mean.’
‘I…’
‘Maghreb.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Fucking Maghreb bastard.’
Daniel stared at the clear liquid as it filled his own glass. Maghreb was a word that snagged in the throat. He didn’t know much about Algeria. In his mind, it was an area of confusion and unres
olved pain. A bartender had told him once that the Algerians were waiting for an apology. Acknowledgement. Recognition. The bully who cut off relatives’ hands. But France, like the silent dad, refused to concede the damage done.
Daniel looked at Lollo’s face and saw how the years had hollowed him. Where once his eyes were slitty and hard, they now drooped at the corners and seemed pinned into the top of his face. The two men drank. Time had slowed down. Daniel nodded his head in the darkness, and he placed both hands on the bar and experienced some kind of emotion that felt a bit like wind. He hit the flesh on his chest and coughed the alcohol into his stomach.
It didn’t come as a surprise to him, what Lollo was telling him, drip by drip, about the truth of his birth. It was clear: Lucie was not his biological mother. His biological mother was the quiet woman with the dark chignon in the square. Lucie had kept him close and tried to keep him warm – he got so warm he nearly died for lack of air. Love to the point of asphyxiation; her timid little fretful voice breathing deep into the drum of his ear. From the balcony railings Baseema was far away; she was Frederic and Sylvie’s mother. She was strong, and calm, like lake water.
‘Why do you look at me like that, huh?’
‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘Me? I don’t give a shit what you say.’
Lollo grunted for more tequila. He wasn’t finished. ‘Now the chateau is your property, Daniel, and you have a chance to make amends.’
Daniel’s gentle nodding was a tiny movement but there, nonetheless. Guilt was his reflex. He had felt it always, without knowing why.
‘What do you say?’
‘I said the chateau is nothing to do with me. I want nothing to do with it.’
‘Ah! Fuck this, fuck that. Don’t take responsibility for this or that. It’s all the same with your generation. Chiefly the rich cunts like you.’
We All Ran into the Sunlight Page 15