A Slight Case of Fatigue

by Stephane Bourguignon

  “Édouard’s coming with me,” Simone added. “I’ll take care of him.”

  9

  FOUR OR FIVE COCA-COLA cans had been used to make the model ­helicopter Simone had bought in a shop in Ho Chi Minh City. I’ve always been fascinated by that object of dubious taste.

  “We’re still seeing the effects of that war,” I joked.

  There I was, at her place, surrounded by books, photos of Jon and some of the things she had brought back from her travels. An Indonesian pistol sculpted out of banana tree wood and capable, thanks to an ingenious mechanism of elastics, of shooting a sewing needle more than five metres. A jar of PetTrim diet pills for obese dogs and cats—available over the counter in the United States, of course. And my favourite, a hairpiece of pubic hair from Japan, for teenage girls unhappy with their sparse growth at the start of the school year, when they knew they’d have to undress in front of the other girls.

  The floors shone, the furniture was free of dust, and impeccable order reigned. The exterior siding had just been replaced, the lawn was green and bursting with health, and the garden was magnificently organized, exuding the calm and serenity of a cloister. Simone was frozen in time, as I had been before I started going downhill.

  “What are you going to do with your house?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Now that Maxime is gone, why don’t you put it up for sale? Why not come back to the city?”

  To listen to her, Maxime hadn’t been completely wrong; I was ­living in a grim environment. I could have replied, “Have you looked around you at all, at the life you’ve been leading for the past ten years?” But I knew she didn’t believe it herself, that she had asked herself what a ­normal person would have said about my future and had simply ­spoken the answer out loud.

  “No, I love what that house represents.”

  “Which is?”

  “The ruin of my whole life.”

  That house and the jungle now surrounding it had witnessed almost my entire adult life. I had built a love, a family, a working life there, and then, in the last few years, all those things had slowly and inexorably fallen apart, one by one. That house was my life eaten away by time, it was my own disintegration. In fact, I think my ambition was to live long enough to see it crumble completely, worn down by the years and lack of maintenance. From this perspective, I had greeted the first leaks in the roof with great enthusiasm.

  Simone took a swallow of rum. A Barbancourt Five Star with a ­bou­quet of pecans, roasted coffee and dates that she had brought back from Haiti along with a disturbing voodoo doll blessed by a priestess named Sarah. We had decided to continue our samba evening—well, okay, we were mixing cultures a bit, but that didn’t matter. I was getting tipsy and I imagined that Simone was also feeling the effects of the alcohol, although as usual she didn’t let it show. I looked at her face, her neck, her heavy breasts and her bare feet tucked under her. I wondered how events would unfold from here.

  “I’m nervous,” she said. “I’m not used to having a man in my house anymore.”

  I laughed. She raised her hand, thinking I was making fun of her. I found her discomfort when talking about these things touching.

  “I know you’re going to ask me to sleep with you. And I don’t know yet what I’m going to answer.”

  “Why would I ask you such a thing?” I lowered my eyes. The wall-to-wall carpet was gorgeous. Its long synthetic pile, an appetizing beige in colour, reminded me of creamed cabbage without the cream. It made you feel like lying down and sinking into it, letting yourself be absorbed by it.

  “May I sleep with you?”

  Her eyes misted over. She had to open her mouth to breathe more easily.

  “Why are you doing this to me, Édouard?”

  Simone’s wounds were still raw. They hadn’t healed. Since her ­husband’s death at the age of forty-eight in unimaginable pain, she’d been walking around, here and as much as possible elsewhere, in a flayed body. Instead of becoming hardened over the years, she had developed a kind of hypersensitivity, and now everything she saw, ­injustice, lack of understanding or suffering, and everything she felt, sorrow, desire or compassion, was like salt in her wounds.

  “What will happen if you touch me, Édouard?”

  “But I am going to touch you. I’m going to lie close against your back, I’m going to put my hand on your hip. You’ll feel my breath on your neck. And we’ll go to sleep like that.”

  She closed her eyes, shaking her head.

  “Why are you doing this to me?”

  When she opened her eyes again, they were brimming with tears. I stood up and held my hand out to her. She didn’t budge, didn’t even glance at me. I persuaded her to get up and led her to the stairs without turning my head. Something told me she didn’t want to be seen. In the bedroom, I didn’t turn on the light. I led Simone to the bed and simply let go of her hand. She sat down. I was standing sixty centimetres from her. I took off my jacket and laid it on the chair. Then I removed my shirt, and my shoes and socks. When I undid my belt buckle, she raised her head. I pulled down my pants and my underwear in one movement. Sixty centimetres between my belly and her cheek, between my penis and her lips, between my thighs and her hands. Her eyes were shining with something like the memory of a past life. As if she finally realized what a sacrifice she had been making all these years—which we had seen in her, from the outside, for such a long time.

  I held out my hand again and Simone stood up. I gently undid her blouse and slid it down her arms. She was afraid of what I would think of her breasts. I could sense it in the way she held her head. I waited. She finally resigned herself and unfastened her bra, looking to one side. She held the two ends behind her back, but she didn’t take it off. I took them from her hands and slowly released her large breasts, which ­tumbled down beautifully. I’d had enough of the fresh, perky breasts held high and proud by young, firm tissue, those haughty little breasts whose nipples pointed to the constellations in the heavens. I wanted maps of the land, of the roads and boundaries on the ground, outlined by the nipples of heavy, warm, veined breasts.

  I moved my hands five or six centimetres toward her and held them in front of her as if I were caressing her breasts. She watched me for a moment in amazement, and then she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Her right nipple became hard. I could see the bronzed skin of the areola tighten. I moved up to her neck, still not touching her, and then to her face. She tipped her head slightly back and to one side. It’s hard to explain, but even without her smiling, even with her eyes closed, it was as if her features had opened up. Her lips were parted and she looked like a grieving widow who in her pain is touching ecstasy.

  She undid her pants and let them drop to her feet. I felt such an intensity in her. Everything in her was vibrating, buzzing, humming. Then she had a flash of self-consciousness.

  “Don’t laugh at my panties.”

  And, of course, I burst out laughing. My laughter filled the bedroom. She took the panties off and I shut up. I could guess what it meant for a woman of fifty-four to strip naked in front of a man ­thirteen years her junior.

  We’re sitting side-by-side in the movie theatre. It’s been less than an hour since I met her. The movie is about love. We didn’t pick it—we came in in the middle of it without knowing what was playing. Simone is inconsolable. Several times I suggest that we leave, but she doesn’t want to.

  I had noticed her from a distance in the nursery, just standing there not moving. I was serving customers, and from time to time, I’d glance at her. After about ten minutes, since she still hadn’t moved, I went over to her. “Can I help you?” Coming out of her torpor, she had the look of a hunted animal. I led her to a bench and went and got her a glass of water. It was closing time, and customers and employees were ­coming and going in front of us. Simone held her glass on her knees, her back hunched, her hair disarranged, her eyes red and puffy.

  “Did you come by car?”

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sp; “I don’t know … No, of course not, I don’t have a car.”

  I offered to drive her home. She didn’t object. But she insisted on taking a shrub or a tree, something that would last.

  “When I drop you off, I’ll take a look at your garden, and ­tomorrow I’ll bring you an appropriate species.”

  I held her arm as far as my car. I started driving through streets, turning here, then there, in a strange state. After a few minutes, she undid her seatbelt and asked me to take her to the movies.

  So Simone is crying, and I’m suggesting that we leave the theatre. I’m squeezing her hand and patting her shoulder. She’s silently weeping over her husband’s death and she’s not bothering anyone. She’s totally alone in this sorrow. And suddenly she takes my hand and shoves it between her legs, at the crotch of her pants, right against her sex. And it’s so warm there, so sadly warm. And she presses that hand against her vulva while watching the man and the woman on the screen who are going to leave each other and crying profusely for the man who has gone, leaving her behind. And that hand is pressing against her sex the way you put pressure on a wound to keep an injured ­person from bleeding to death.

  Her belly, her thighs, her untended bush formed a beautiful whole. Full and engorged are the words that were imprinted in my mind. I wanted to say, “Touch me, hold me, I want your hands, your breath, wide swathes of your burning skin on mine, pieces of you plastered against me like bandages or grafts. Put a blanket of love over my tired shoulders, massage my stiff muscles with your love, lubricate my corroded joints with your love, turn me into a hot, well-oiled machine, with the air pumping rhythmically in and out of my lungs, with my stout heart beating slow but strong, so that I become a well-aimed force, a ­precision instrument.”

  I crossed the distance separating us. I forgot my own troubles—only hers remained, her resignation, her fears, her shame at having grown old alone. Her breasts spread out and pressed against my chest, her belly glued itself to mine, and my sex took refuge against hers, in her luxuriant fleece. Her deep breathing reminded me of the breathing of my son when he was young, after an injury that had led to tears, trembling and hiccups. With calm restored, at the moment when the throbbing of pain and fear stopped, his breathing would become strangely muted, as if it rose from very deep. Simone’s breath now was coming from that place where all is relief.

  “You see?” was all I said.

  “I’m scared, Édouard.”

  “I know.”

  She was afraid of reviving something, something that would change her life forever. Her fear was tangible, palpable, I could almost trace its outline, and it seems to me now that its remarkable intense ­presence prevented me from feeling my own fear.

  “You don’t have an erection. I don’t turn you on.”

  “I don’t feel like making love.”

  “I understand. I wouldn’t want to either, if I were you.”

  She turned away and moved to the other side of the bed. She ­suddenly looked old. She lay down and pulled the covers over her. I had the impression I was witnessing a scene that had been performed here every night in the most absolute solitude for the past ten years.

  The fact that I didn’t have an erection wasn’t a problem for me. Lately things had been happening slowly in this area, and interest had disappeared at the same rate as capacity. Or vice versa. I hadn’t made love for some fifteen or eighteen months. I wasn’t masturbating either. In any case, I didn’t desire Simone. I had never really thought of her in that way.

  I went and sat down beside her. She put out a hand to stroke my arm and then my chest.

  “Don’t be angry with me,” I said.

  “I know.”

  She moved her hand down to the base of my penis. She slid her index finger all along it as if it were an object she was seeing for the first time, not an object of desire, but an object of curiosity that she had discovered on a trip. Then she lifted it between her thumb and her index finger. She looked at the underside. She turned it, stretched it, pulled back the foreskin. I think she was wondering how that little creature and its counterpart managed to cause so much excitement. And how she, Simone, had been able to do without all that for so many years.

  And then suddenly, her expression changed. She looked up at me and, even though I shook my head, she moved closer and took me in her mouth. She let out a long sigh of relief. I felt it had very little to do with me, that it was like a kind of reconciliation. To my great astonishment, I immediately began to get hard. I got big in her mouth in no time at all. Beneath the covers, her other hand took refuge between her legs.

  Simone wakes up in the middle of the night. When she turns over in the dark and stretches out her arm, she finds nothing. She sits on the edge of the bed to regain her wits and then she stands up, completely nude. Her body no longer moves in quite the same way. Her hips roll without constraint, her round bum swings freely, her breasts make ­little up-and-down movements in time with her walk and sway from side to side, so that her nipples trace pretty little circles in the air. All her tissues are now engorged with blood, with sap, with desire.

  “Édouard?”

  She walks across the bedroom and then to the bathroom.

  “Édouard?”

  Finally the kitchen. The coolness of the ceramic tiles feels good beneath her hot, swollen feet. She goes over to the window. It’s ­possible that Édouard is lying on the grass naked under the decorative almond tree he gave her the day after her husband died. With something beside him, such as a bottle of Barbancourt. But no, he’s not there.

  10

  I COME FROM FAR AWAY.

  I come from my mother so cheerful and so loving. My mother ­humming while driving my father’s old car, with both her hands on the steering wheel, her back too straight and her head too far forward. My mother humming at the stove as she wipes her hands on her apron while the pots give off their familiar smells of onion, garlic and stewing meat. My mother singing as she darns, with her precise, graceful movements. My mother putting on her make-up and glancing at me out of the corner of her eye while I sit on her bed and watch her, and exaggerating her every movement because she wants me to start remembering them.

  My mother so cheerful and full of life, with her unpredictable laugh that comes out of nowhere like a butterfly and crosses the room in ­electric flight. And her soft hands that wash my hair in the kitchen sink. And her reassuring eyes when she says I’m going to be beautiful. My mother so tender, taking my father’s arm and curling up against him.

  My cheerful, loving mother, who finally committed suicide, ­leaving only a brief note: “Forgive me, Simone, but everything is so hard.”

  I come from far away. I come from my father, silent and loving. My father so strong he can pick me up and swing me under his arm or throw me over his shoulder and carry me off anywhere while I squirm and giggle with my shrill little girl’s laugh. My father, who plants his huge hand on my burning belly to make some vague pain go away. My father, and his full lips and scratchy cheek on my belly, on my torso, on my neck, on my cheeks. And me, wriggling like a worm. I come from there, from the eyes of that man who sees in me something unhoped-for. Something that makes his wife so cheerful. And that brings him closer to his own body, to touch, to warmth, to smell, to wanting to be in contact with the world. Something that saves him from the darkness.

  My father and my mother overheard a thousand times talking at the kitchen table. My father recounting his day at work in few words, in his deep, calm voice. And I imagine a huge building where people walk around in boots even in summer, and where there are only big, gentle men with stained clothes and grease marks on their faces and arms, who leave dirty fingerprints on the white bread of their sandwiches.

  I also come from the time, when I was about twelve, when my father drew a sharp line between his body and mine. All over, forever. I come from his sidelong glance when he’d surprise me bare-breasted, quickly crossing the hall from the bathroom to my bedroom. That ambig­uous
look. That look that embarrasses me, but that I like because it’s all that’s left of what was physical between us. No question of desire here—rather, a fear of desire. I come from this thought: I cause fear of desire.

  My father looking at my mother and thinking he’s lucky to have found a butterfly woman. And then after her death, my father seen a thousand times sitting at that same table gazing into empty space. So empty. All those square metres neglected, that wasteland, that stone desert she left for us. Years and years of breaking stones, in the kitchen, in the living room, in the bedroom, centuries of shovelling gravel.

  “Come sit on my knee, Simone.”

  I’m sixteen, and it’s been four years since my father has touched me. Two months since my mother died. His body and his heart are mired in a liquid darkness. The air presses so heavy on his shoulders that they become more stooped every day. He’s totally at a loss. Later, I will understand. Later, I will understand so well. I go over to him, a bit fearful because there’s a whole new path to be cleared. He pushes his chair back from the table and offers me his lap. In four years, my bum and my hips have developed, my breasts have grown bigger. And desire sometimes, often, comes suddenly, liquid and warm between my legs. I’m all alone having to deal with a woman’s body and those looks coming from all sides, in the street, at school, with my friends—­without my mother’s eyes and her reassurances that I will be beautiful. I place my bum on my father’s lap and put my arm around his neck. I feel my breast touch his shoulder. He puts his arms around me and hugs me finally, crushing me, finally taking his place again, four years after, finally, and all my fears instantly vanish. His hand becomes huge on my back, his father’s smell envelops me, and his tears roll down my neck and under my sweater, the disturbing tears of a strong man ­broken that can turn the world upside-down.

  I also come from the arms of Jon. I’ve fallen from his arms, his ­powerful arms around my waist or under my bum with his whole body crushing me in the front doorway and his belly pressing against mine and his penis opening a burning passage in me. From his hands ­massaging, squeezing, kneading my bum, my breasts, my thighs, my hips with a tender violence I want to last forever.