I continued my walk. Everything is so simple when you’re walking. Everything is so reassuring. The foot landing on the ground to stop your fall. Then the other foot. Then the first one again. And you never actually fall.
Michel opened the door. I didn’t say anything. All I wanted was his reassuring eyes. There’s nothing reassuring about them in themselves, but just seeing them again was enough for me.
“You look awful,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“Come in anyway. Have you eaten?”
“Yes, the last time I was here. You remember, we had the pleasure.”
He assumed his grandmotherly look and put his arm around my shoulders to pull me inside.
“Are you kidding me? Didn’t they give you anything at the hospital? That’s impossible, it’s ridiculous!”
“Oh, stop crabbing and show me what you have!”
“Claire will make you something. She’ll balance the proteins and all those ‘ine’ things I’ve never understood.”
“You’ve never understood anything about anything, so … ”
“Claire,” he yelled, “our dear Eddy is back! What can we give him to eat?”
“I’d like to start with a glass of red wine.”
He hugged me.
“Oh, I love you, Eddy! Can you tell me why I love you so much? Eat, and then we’ll go to your place and get you some clothes.”
“Why, what’s wrong with my clothes?”
“They’re not really right for the samba, if you want my opinion.”
Part Two
8
MICHEL CAME OUT of the bedroom with his chest thrust out and his chin high. He had put on a snug-fitting black shirt and tight pants … the kind of thing best avoided when you’re two metres tall and weigh a hundred and twenty kilos and a large proportion of the fat cells you’re lugging around are situated between your chest and your knees. As for the shoes, besides the raised heels, which I won’t say any more about, they reflected the slightest glimmer of light, and if it weren’t for his protruding belly, he could have checked his hair by looking at his reflection in them.
“How do I look?”
Claire appeared just then, which spared me having to reveal my true thoughts to him. She was wearing a long dress that looked great on her, with a neckline that showed off her lovely bust. A normal man would have wanted to jump her every time she took a breath. I just smiled at her.
“Your wife is gorgeous. Such a pity she ended up with you.”
I would have preferred them to wait for me in the car while I put on a suit, but they got out, drawn by the mild evening. Michel wanted to take a little lovers’ stroll in my virgin forest. He was the only person who appreciated my work. Claire, a little apprehensive, probably more because of what it revealed about me than because of the actual condition of the property, just clung to his arm and let herself be guided. Michel understood my obsession, I think, and maybe that was why this big idiot was my only friend; sometimes when I least suspected it, he was able to grasp the deeper meaning of a thing.
After months of yelling, “What are you doing, Eddy? You’re throwing away all those years of work. Anybody would sell their own mother for a garden like that!” he had finally shut up, and now he remained silent about what was happening slowly and naturally in my backyard. He loved to walk there, attracted by something indefinable, just as people with vertigo are drawn to the void. Unlike me, Michel certainly had no desire to throw himself into an abyss, but something in him was intensely stirred by being at the edge of one. My most beautiful moments in these last few years were probably those I’d spent on the patio, glass in hand, watching from a distance while my friend walked around my garden.
Obviously, when Véronique had called them this morning, she hadn’t told them the whole story. When they came to the heap of furniture debris near the house, they stopped short and looked up at the window of my son’s bedroom. It was broken and a few vines were dangling limply from the frame. Even a heartfelt “What got into you?” seemed inappropriate.
Claire waited impatiently for Michel to meet her eyes. For some time already, I’d been beyond her comprehension. I think, in fact, that she pitied me. In some people, pity arises precisely where understanding ends. Since they’re unable to explain, they give up, and where others opt for judgment and condemnation, people like Claire go for pity. Who knows which side she would have taken if Michel hadn’t acted as intermediary between us, if his arm hadn’t been there like an invitation saying, “Come, don’t be afraid, I’m taking you to visit a disturbing but extraordinary country”?
I understood this pity and the limits that defined it. Claire worked so hard to keep her grip on the world. The way she’d found to reassure herself was by exercising absolute control over everything that went into her body and into the bodies of those she loved. The universe in which she lived was not expanding. Nor was there any risk of it collapsing on itself in a few billion years. Likewise, it didn’t include hate, injustice or contempt, but consisted only of proteins, carbohydrates and lipids. Of course, in this world, too, there were good and bad elements, but it was so simple to keep your eye on them. Bad cholesterol could be foiled with just a handful of almonds daily and a drizzle of olive oil. And fibre, the hero of the past few years—although we were beginning to suspect it in large quantities of causing colon cancer—could be used strategically to slow down the absorption of carbohydrates and prevent the pancreas from overworking.
This world was not, however, immune from tragedy. It was better, for example, not to mention diabetes in front of Claire—it was her neoliberalism, her globalization. She could see all the people who would fall victim to it in the years to come. And for a few seconds, her strength abandoned her. All of us had worked very hard to build a personal megastructure that would enclose and protect us. Today when mine was falling to pieces, collapsing under its own weight like an empty building being imploded, I felt like loving Claire more, hugging her against my chest and protecting her from my disaster.
In other words, I was vaguely ashamed of this carnage. I was conscious of losing control and I was afraid this would break the last bond of trust that remained among the three of us. But Michel managed to sidestep this delicate moment by offering to put plastic on the window. I honestly didn’t see what use it would be. What was one opening more or less going to change in the comings and goings of the critters that were interested in my domicile?
“Get your wife a drink and sit your fat ass down on the patio. Just give me a couple of minutes.”
I stepped around the sawhorses and tabletop still blocking the foot of the stairs and went up. I had climbed these stairs thousands of times in twenty years. Even after all these years, it reminded me of the feeling of going up to get Maxime, who had woken up and was calling from his bed. But strangely, this evening, what I was thinking about were the times I went to join my wife in the bedroom, when I climbed them slowly, step by step, with my cock stirring just at the thought of finding her in a suggestive position, with her hand inside her panties and her eyes turned toward the door. But there was no one in my house now, neither Maxime nor Véronique. I had no destination, no landing strip, no finish line anymore. Every place was temporary, a crossroads where I could barely slow down.
I was wearing the same clothes as the night before at Michel’s, and I still hadn’t showered or shaved. In the bedroom, I undressed in front of the mirror. Every time I saw myself naked, there was something that bugged me. The body I had developed during all those years of physical labour, the well-defined muscles, the almost total absence of fat, and the tan I had acquired from all those days spent outdoors conflicted with the feeling I had that I was drying up.
My penis looked young. The skin was smooth and soft. My testicles still nestled nice and high—would they lose their majesty after my vasectomy? My ass was well-muscled, firm and round. My torso and shoulders were my main attraction for the female of the spe
cies, and my thighs, which had lifted so many decorative rocks and bags of earth, gravel, compost and fertilizer, were sturdy, yet supple and agile. Though it didn’t show, I could lift impressive weights and sustain effort much longer than other men my age, and more than even some colleagues in their twenties. Eating so little and drinking so much, yet staying in such great shape! I’ll have to take up smoking seriously.
“What’re you farting around with up there?” yelled Michel with typical tact. “If we get there too late, all the pretty girls will be taken. Only the desperate old maids who signed up just so they could trap the guys who arrive late will be left. And I can’t find the corkscrew! You’re not a real alcoholic, real alcoholics have them stashed everywhere. Do you think we should invite Simone? Does she dance? No, I doubt it. She’s so weird, that girl … ”
“I don’t think so,” Claire objected mildly.
“She’s very weird!”
And pop went the cork. So I took the time to shower, comb my hair and put on my suit. When I came back down, Michel was half asleep and Claire was staring into space.
“You didn’t shave?” she asked.
“Don’t ask too much of him.”
I took the rest of the bottle of wine into the car with me and held it between my knees in the back seat. Michel put the top down and drove off as fast as possible. He was soon fuming at the time it took to crawl from one traffic light to the next.
For months, I had been caressed only by the wind, the sun and the rain. My skin had softened, however, as if in supplication. So I took the wind the way you make do with a hooker, my eyes closed, my head leaning back against the seat. If I could have stripped naked, I would have, and if the wind could have blown dead leaves, it would have been even better—leaves, petals, dry or wet twigs sticking to my face, my belly, inside my thighs.
Simone climbed in beside me. She seemed impressed by my suit. She liked the contrast between the classy cut of my duds and the scruffy stubble covering my face. Not to mention the ridiculous hairdo the wind had styled for me. I rested my head against the seat back, finally breathing freely. The wine and Simone …
She took a swig straight from the bottle, glancing at me out of the corner of her eye.
“What the hell am I going to do at a samba evening?” she asked, and burst out laughing.
I smiled, closing my eyes. She put her hand on mine.
“Nobody but you three could drag me to one of these things.”
And I heard the gurgle of her taking another swig.
The car gently started moving again. Things were absolutely perfect and everything was blindingly clear. The state of our lives, the state of the world, I sensed it all clearly, without sadness. The four of us drove on in silence, and I had the impression that everything I had ever done, every word I had spoken in my life was contained within me. From my first steps with my arms clumsily thrashing the air to the newborn baby I had washed with a cloth soaked in warm water. From my own falls to the little pebbles I had plucked one by one from the raw flesh of his knees. From the woman who had given me her breast to the women who had bared their breasts for me. From my father’s seed to my own, deposited thousands of times in Véronique’s warm body. I was all that. I had seen my father die, I had seen him give up without asking for mercy, without asking me to forgive him for going away, and that evening I had made love so that everything would go on. I had seen a woman I loved hit by a car. I had seen her photo in all the newspapers on all the newsstands on all the streets I walked afterwards. I had felt her morbid presence coiled around me all those years, twisted, entangled with the dead presence of my father. Every day, or almost every day, I had felt daunting pains take hold of my belly, wringing everything they could, crushing diamonds like friable rock and making me feel that nothing could ever again hurt that much. My heart had hammered in the void hundreds of times, it had raced, it had heaved. And it wasn’t over. I had put my hands in the earth, I had searched the earth, I had dug in the earth, my fingernails blackened with earth in the smell of earth, of flowers, of sap, of pollen and of leaves. I had sown, waited and hoped. I had prayed. I had dreamed of things for the people I loved, and I had wished them the best when they asked nothing of me. I had made thousands of gratuitous gestures. Sometimes I had been so good that I naively believed I’d done it, I had become a better human being. And I had spent entire nights without sleeping a wink because I was the loneliest person in the world. And then I had turned over and snuggled up against the woman I loved.
And this evening I was all that.
I first met Simone at the plant nursery. She was just a stranger wandering up and down the aisles looking for flowers that she didn’t know and that would surprise her. I was looking at the trees, at a weeping birch—Betula pendula—about fifteen feet tall. I was making sure that skeletonizers, chewing defoliator insects, hadn’t set up camp in it. I was wishing I had the strength to put it on my back and carry it home with me on foot. I don’t know why, I was just turning this idea over in my mind as I walked around it, examining the sturdiness of its branches and the strength of its roots.
Simone puts a flat of flowers in her shopping cart. She will soon be a widow, and the sensation of death is already a constant presence. She has made it an ally. I do not yet know that when you’re with her, your feet are in the void, the abyss is there below, ready to swallow you up, and that she makes you dizzy with that look of not knowing which side of the invisible line she’s on. Nor do I know yet that, for the same reasons, she has an aura of indescribable peace, a tranquility that’s beyond this world.
I go over to her and offer my services. When Simone smiles, you want to throw her down in the bushes and do unspeakable things to her, and at the same time, you want to take her in your arms and tell her life will not always be so cruel, and you want her to press your head to her breast. I know already, without knowing her, just by observing her, that she’s one of a kind. And I understand then why I would have liked to carry my tree away: so that Simone would say to herself, “Look at that, a man with a birch tree growing out of the middle of his back. A rare breed.”
Most steps of the samba can be performed in a small area, so you can dance it in place like the cha-cha-cha or like rock, but it’s basically a dance that should make use of the entire dance floor, like the tango or the waltz. And that’s what Michel and Claire were doing, gliding gracefully among the other couples. Their teacher, a stiff little man whose panache derived from an astonishingly arched torso, stood on the side of the dance floor and clapped his hands, shouting encouragement. Simone and I sipped our mojitos, wide-eyed in amazement. I would have liked to find some fault or failing so that I could make fun of them when their little session was finished, but I couldn’t find any. I was almost proud to be seen in their company.
Every time the favourite couple passed close to our table, Michel would flash us his silver-plated smile while Claire, much more modest, pretended to concentrate on the footwork. Simone had put her hand on my thigh, tenderly, as always. It reassured her to see me so relaxed. Actually, it reassured me too. I turned my head and looked into her eyes. They shone with sadness. How can I explain it? Sadness was her backdrop, her canvas. Everything Simone did, even her laughter, was placed against that horizon and ended up not looking sad anymore. Maybe that’s what melancholy is.
So we looked at each other for a moment. And I felt for the first time that I could have gone a long way with her. I could have taken her hand and followed her anywhere without asking any questions. All the way to death, even. To plunge into her eyes was to look on the other side, into the savannah within, at the edge of time. Mysterious Simone. Two hundred thousand generations ago, bands of humans migrated slowly on perfectly virgin land. The Earth had cooled and the last remaining clumps of trees east of the Rift Valley were gradually disappearing, the bush antelopes becoming running antelopes, and the hipparions becoming horses. And an extraordinary transformation was coming in humanity. In fear and anxi
ety, faced with the urgent need to adapt, the hominid brain made a meteoric leap forward, and consciousness was finally dragged kicking and screaming out of the darkness.
All that was there in Simone’s eyes. Along with lofty headlands towering over the sea, with geysers throwing up sudden columns of steam, with entire sections of icebergs breaking off and sliding toward the sea with a loud crack that resonated to the marrow of your bones.
“Take me home with you.”
The smile faded and all that remained was the horizon of sadness.
“Let me spend the night at your house, Simone. I’m not well.”
Michel and Claire came back just then. They planted themselves in front of the table, awaiting our verdict. They were both out of breath and Michel was sweating huge drops.
“So?”
“Phew!” was all I could say.
“Yes? Were you that impressed?”
I was moved, but it had nothing to do with them. I nodded anyway. The little teacher immediately came over to congratulate his pet students. Michel and Claire turned toward him and my eyes stayed riveted to Michel’s back. I felt Simone stand up. She’s going to leave, I said to myself, I’ve gone too far. She joined Michel and Claire on the other side of the table.
“Congratulations. It was splendid. Really.”
Claire smiled broadly, visibly pleased.
“I think I’ll be off now. I’m going home.”
Michel was disappointed that the little party was ending so soon. For him, an evening that ended before six in the morning and with him still completely conscious was an absolute failure.
A Slight Case of Fatigue Page 5