We’re squatting on a mixture of earth and gravel, surrounded by the smell of oil and tar, very close to each other, we’re puffing on our cigarettes and I wonder if today is the day I’ll manage to kiss her.
The twelve-thirty train is coming. We hear it rumbling in the distance and we feel its vibration all around us. Its awesome wave is gathering to descend upon us. If only it could carry us away, if only I didn’t have to go home soon. Once again, we’ve scattered pennies along the rails, pennies we no longer even bother picking up after the behemoth has passed. It’s amazing how we’ve grown up just this spring.
So the train is coming and I stick my head out to watch it bear down on me. As I do this, I’m watching the girl. She’s more hunched over now, with her arms wrapped around her knees. She’s just a bit scared, just enough, considering that there’s going to be a hell of racket in a few seconds. For the first time in my life, I see through that fear. And I see clearly behind it, or rather within it, that very feminine fear, that feeling that the world represents a threat—to life, to physical well-being, but also to the children she’ll have to bring into the world one day. A kind of feeling, too, unconscious of course, that humanity is not on the right track. Something this girl will perhaps never articulate, but that will always be part of her, like a thread running through a fabric, and that will in a way mark her, creating a certain pattern.
And I begin to grasp my place in this fear, in this fabric. I, too, woven into it—the source of the fear, even, but a check on it as well. The capacity to be both wind and windbreak.
And in a flash, my mind fires off this absurd thought: if you spot a cloud shaped like an animal before the train blocks out the sky, she’ll kiss you today. And a white schnauzer appears and is immediately hidden from view by the oncoming locomotive. I turn to the girl, all smiles, because I love this tumult, this violent noise, the hot wind, the powerful wave blowing under the platform and the fine dry dust hanging in the air and enveloping us.
She grimaces and covers her ears. She’s let her cigarette fall on the ground. I watch her, laughing, laughing very hard. At the terrible noise, at the hot wind, at her slight fear too, which she’s still trying to contain with her hands, wrapping them first around her knees and then around her head. And I’m laughing a lot, because I’ve found my place in that fear, against that fear, in the world.
A girl I’ll lose touch with in a while, at the end of the school year. Who’ll say, “Goodbye, have a nice summer, Édouard, see you in the fall,” and who won’t be there when that time comes. Who’ll leave a vague empty place in the row of desks, in the row of lockers, in the classroom, at the table at the back of the cafeteria, in front of the big white sink in the art room, outside under the old red maple. And everywhere under the sky, in the puddles, behind the mountains, in the river, among the birds in their wild flight.
Betty, who I’ll meet again six years later by chance on the platform of the same station, which has become the terrace of a snack bar appropriately called the Old Station. And who will in an instant, with a single look, a single raise of an eyebrow, fill all the empty spaces she left behind her—and even the others, the ones that had nothing to do with her.
Run, buddy, run. Keep your eyes straight ahead. Lift a leg, put down a foot. Hear that rapid beeping, take it as evidence of your presence on Earth. What’s left of you. An artificial beeping spreading through space. Run, radiate pointlessly, put your synthetic little presence out into the world.
The nurse came back to glance at the monitor. She smiled at me, distressed by something I couldn’t define. Perhaps my age, perhaps the time I had left. As if I hadn’t had my share.
“Everything still okay, sir?”
“Phew, it’s been a long time since I’ve felt this good.”
“Still, you mustn’t overdo it. You don’t have to impress anybody.”
Implying, don’t push your luck, fella, don’t tempt fate, you’re a bit old to piss into the wind, who knows what could come back on you.
If you only knew, honey, what’s already come back on me … And we’re in the same boat, you and I. Run for shelter, you too, before you end up looking at your little sweetie-pie, feeling that’s your only connection to the world, and realizing that this creature is moving, looking for the door, pulling on your sleeve a little harder every day while you try to hold on. And turning around to search the eyes of your other sweetie-pie, the man who’s been with you for years, for a little consolation and finding only emptiness, the dizzying void when it’s all over.
“You’d better stop, sir.”
“Phew, you think so?”
My heart was beating at a hundred and ninety-five and my running was completely uncoordinated. The sweat was falling in big drops all around me, I was liquefying, but I was totally unable to stop. She tried to turn off the treadmill, but I wouldn’t let her.
“I don’t think this is very sensible,” she said.
“What could happen, for chrissake, I’m at the clinic!
“I’ll have to go get the cardiologist.”
“Do that, and while you’re at it, tell him to bring the defibrillator, you never know.”
Go on, run, Édouard, get off the machine, take the corridor, turn left, pass the reception desk, leave the clinic, cross the parking lot, turn onto the street, go to the boulevard, speed up, faster, faster, push yourself to the breaking point, the point of collapse.
“Hey, you! … Yes, you. Have you by any chance seen my life go by?”
“There was a very nice one that went thataway. It was golden, with fine burgundy lines. Classy. A helluva life, the kind you rarely see.”
“No, mine is brown and beige with a hint of mustard.”
“No, then. Sorry.”
When the nurse and the cardiologist came back, the treadmill was going full tilt and I was lying face down on the floor, my left arm tangled up in the electrodes. They rushed to turn me over. The cardiologist wasn’t laughing. He took my pulse, his forehead furrowed with concern.
“It’s okay, no harm done, I just lost my footing.”
The girl had never seen such a lunatic. She couldn’t believe it. She was already dying to tell her girlfriends. The cardiologist got me up and helped me to his desk, where I collapsed into a chair. He had this way of looking at me, as if I was beyond his comprehension. Don’t worry, I felt like telling him, you’re not the only one. Finally, he checked the electrocardiogram and assured me that my heart was in perfect condition.
“But you’re going to have to take care of yourself. You don’t look well.”
“I would like to remind you that I’ve just run a marathon.”
“And you collapsed.”
“I lost my footing.”
“And the day before yesterday, when the paramedics picked you up at your house, had you lost your footing then too?”
He gave me the usual sermon, but with a dose of real compassion. The machine wouldn’t last very long if I kept pushing it like this. The next time, the consequences could be much more serious. I listened to him, convinced that what he was saying was true but not seeing how in the world I could change anything. He paused a moment, and then he suggested, a bit awkwardly, that he could refer me to a psychologist.
“No, thanks. That won’t be necessary. However, I’d really like an emergency vasectomy.”
He looked at me in a way that said, “Are you pulling my leg or what?” I don’t know why that idea had come to me, but I was sure it was the right thing to do. I’d even say I hadn’t been this excited by a plan for a very long time. I had sat up again in my chair, my eyes bright. I had come back to life. The cardiologist scribbled a few words in his notepad and handed me the sheet. It was the name of a private clinic, which meant I’d have to pay the entire fee myself, but if that was what it would cost not to rot away at the bottom of a waiting list, I didn’t care.
“He’s a urologist. A friend.”
“I have a friend who’s an eye doctor, bu
t I never recommend him to anyone. As an eye doctor, he’s not bad, but as a friend … ”
I got up and put on my shirt. He went with me to the door. There he revealed what it was that had been bothering him.
“Was it a woman who did this to you?”
“You think a woman could do all this on her own? No, this is the work of a lifetime. Years of labour … ”
He held out his hand, nodding. I really liked this doctor. We could have been friends. I could see a painful past in his dark eyes. His life appeared to me like an X-ray. I could see the incomplete fractures and the mended breaks in it. So I shook the hand he held out to me. He took the opportunity to add that I obviously hadn’t chosen the easiest course, whatever that might be, and that I might have to pay dearly for this little escapade.
This guy could read the future in the lines of an electrocardiogram. Not everybody can do that.
6
AS SOON AS I STEPPED outside, the sun stopped me short. That was all it took, I was that far gone. I felt as if I were undergoing a final interrogation, as if a hundred-billion-watt light was trained on me. Who are you? Where are you from?
I’d lost all my answers. Six years before, I could have said, “I’m Véronique’s husband, the one who loves her, who cares for her, who tries to make her forget the primordial void we try to fill with love.” Even yesterday, I could have said, “I’m Maxime’s father, I’ve fed him, cared for him and done my best to help him discover himself.” These were the only concrete actions I had managed to take against the surrounding carnage, and they were puny and ridiculous. And none of that existed anymore. I was no longer of any use. I no longer had a definition.
I stood there like that for a moment, my arms hanging at my sides, my eyes closed, my face turned toward the supreme interrogator. A woman went by trailing a familiar perfume. So at the very least, I was a man standing with his eyes closed who recognized a perfume. In the ground, thousands of bugs were instinctively performing the tasks necessary for their survival; the egg layers were expelling eggs, the workers were digging galleries, the warriors were attacking enemies, driving their stingers into their armour and spitting their acid juices into the wounds. And there I was, kayoed, when there was so much to do. Parasitic mites were using all their energy to dig into the epidermis of a mammal; scavenger beetles were rushing to bury the cadaver of some small vertebrate to lay their eggs in it before it was invaded by maggots and blowflies. And the woman walked away, the sound of her footsteps slowly dissolving into the general clamour, and I let go of what was perhaps my last anchor to this world.
Who are you? A forty-one-year-old man with nothing behind him and a woman walking away in front of him. And the idea of losing her suddenly seemed intolerable. If she disappeared, I would disappear too. If there’s no one to hear a tree fall in the forest, does the tree make a sound? There’s Édouard in freefall! Could somebody somewhere open their ears!
She stopped to light a cigarette. I walked toward her. She took a drag, sucking in her cheeks, and began to walk again. We were barely a dozen paces apart when I passed her still-smoking match. The word agony burst open in my mind like a bud with its leaf—so meticulously folded, such a tender green—unfurling in fast-forward.
She was wearing a black dress, with a bag slung over her shoulder. Her hair was black too. I didn’t give a damn about any of that. I didn’t give a damn about her shoulders, I didn’t give a damn about her ass, I didn’t give a damn about her legs. I only cared about her ears. Hear the man with forty-one rings in his trunk falling.
“Excuse me, do you have a light?”
She stopped, studied my face for a few moments, and opened her bag. Three seconds later, there was the crackle of a new match. I heard myself saying, take me with you, take me away, be somewhere else and wait for me; at your place, pace up and down looking at the time and wondering what on earth I could be up to; in front of a movie theatre two minutes after the movie has started, rage against me for always being late, such an idiot, but wait for me somewhere so I can put my lips to your ear and whisper things that should never be said out loud.
“Would you have a cigarette too, while you’re at it?”
She smiled. How do you tell a stranger that you want to lie down naked with her and do nothing else? Just that, skin against skin, to just let osmosis happen, to pass through her skin like a medication from a patch. It should be possible to say that. With six billion human beings, three billion women, there must be one somewhere who can understand that, who’s waiting for the same thing. I’m not interested in your sex or your life, it’s your shape I want to embrace, I want your body to delimit mine, to trace my form, because I’m dissolving in this void.
“It’s been nearly twenty years since I smoked. You must wonder why I want to start again.”
Her face opened up.
“So you can approach me, maybe?”
“No. In fact I’m looking for a definition for myself. ‘Smoker’ is the simplest one I can find for now. May I walk with you?”
“If you want.”
I did want to. Out of gallantry, I moved over to the street side. Unless it was an old protective reflex—which might not be so bad, after all.
“It’s a great clinic, eh?” She laughed.
“I found everyone absolutely charming. It really makes you want to go back.”
She must have been forty-six, forty-eight. I took a first drag on the cigarette and my head started to spin. I had to grab her arm to keep my balance. She could have stiffened or pulled away disdainfully, but she didn’t. We were made of the same stuff. The damn stuff they don’t want to put on display counters anymore because people turn up their noses and keep going. Outmoded, they say, rushing to the synthetics department. Give us rayon, vinyl, Lycra!
“I went to that clinic to have an electrocardiogram and I came out planning to have a vasectomy.”
“Do you think it’s related?”
“Well, it’s an ideological thing. I want to take part in the collective sterility.”
She turned and looked at me, raising an eyebrow. I had already fallen in love with a girl because of a raised eyebrow. Even today, every time I see one, I feel a pang.
“I tried to escape the general drought, but I have to admit it’s finally caught up with me.”
“I had a hysterectomy six months ago. That makes two of us.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No need to be. I’ve never defined myself by my internal organs.”
I envied her. I had made that mistake, and now that everything that had come of it had disappeared, I had the impression I was becoming invisible.
“I know what that’s like. A woman in her fifties is barely visible these days.”
“An insignificant quantity.”
“Yes, that’s right. What kind of work do you do?”
“I’m a horticulturist. But I’m not sure I still have a job. It’s been a while since I set foot in the nursery. Let’s just say my boss and I were having more and more disagreements about landscaping. I don’t really believe in organization or order anymore.”
“That could be a problem.”
She worked in a laboratory, identifying bodies. I had nothing to lose, so I took a chance.
“If I sent you my teeth, could you tell me who I am?”
“Possibly.”
We walked a few metres in silence. I wondered if I had gone too far. She looked at her watch and decided she had better take a taxi. I stepped into the street and immediately spotted one. Things always go great when it isn’t the right time. I opened the door for her. A whiff of leather protector emerged. I followed it through space and watched it dissolve in the hot air coming up from under the car.
The woman in black got in. She gave the driver an address and then smiled at me. I would be lying if said I wasn’t hoping for a whole bunch of things at that moment, that I didn’t picture several scenarios involving an impersonal hotel room, a bag of peanuts from the
mini-bar torn open on a night table beside a clock radio and a handful of shared disappointments.
“Good luck with your vasectomy.”
“Thanks.”
And she left, taking with her all sorts of techniques that can, at times, be useful when you’re trying to discover the identity of a dead person.
7
A HOUSE, A WOMAN AND A CHILD by way of shelter. A bunker against external threat, against the unbearable. A life built like a palisade. An entire life out of sync with the world. The fenced-off property marvellously landscaped to make you forget that in reality it’s surrounded by walls. Locks on the doors, literally and figuratively. Not just anybody can enter the peace of mind, can come and move around as they please and risk disorganizing the organization.
Gazes at one another that are like chains. So that no one can ever come and destroy the link that connects us and carries the complex fibre of our feelings. I look at you a hundred times in a few hours when we’re in public—we still have to go out—and in this way I attest that you’re mine and I’m yours and that no one else has this exclusive right. This channel is reserved for us. Stay away. I’m protecting everything, I’m armouring it slowly but surely. Twenty years like that, a life like that, putting up walls, shoring up embankments, digging trenches against the whole world, against cruelty, against the absurdity of suffering, against the unfairness of chance, but against external love too, against life too, indiscriminately, always beautifying the inside of the refuge in order to ignore the fact that it’s nothing but a refuge—and then inadvertently, or maybe through cowardice, forgetting that the threat can also come from within.
I was standing there on the sidewalk without moving. This time I’d had it. The impulse behind my every action, the motivation for my every word, the spark that ignited my every thought, the carbon, oxygen and nitrogen of all life that had nourished my every movement for twenty years, no longer existed.
I looked to the right, then to the left. People were walking by, cars passing—only time wasn’t moving, it was standing frozen on the other side of the street looking at me with the bulging eyes of a sick doe. What had happened to the beautiful era of sacrifice? Somebody, please give me a dagger so I can throw myself on the mercy of the gods! Sacrifice something to make a connection with the invisible, put out pleas as if casting lines upward in order to mark out this world, to map it so that all this space can be held in one hand and finally have meaning. It was a plea for meaning.
A Slight Case of Fatigue Page 4