I’m in Simone. I watch my penis come and go between her thighs. I can’t stop thinking that she hasn’t offered her hips like this in ten years. I look at her large breasts pointing every which way. Her mouth half open. Her eyes half closed, from time to time opening wide to take in my face. Her generous, comforting belly. I run my fingers through her hair and lightly press the side of her head. Life will not always be so cruel, Simone. And I occasionally swoop down to suck her lips or plunge my tongue into the dark universe of her mouth. Every muscle in my body is tensed. I take in air in compressed doses. With her hands, she spreads the moisture that is constantly replenished on my back. Every moan that comes out of her mouth is like a whiff of fragrance from a spice market. Somewhere, or everywhere at once, all this blends with the images I’m seeing and the sensations I’m feeling through my skin, mingling in a vortex that spins faster and faster, luminous and liquid.
The room is filled with sadness. I feel it, so palpable that I can reach out my hand and touch it. It floats above us in pale strands, like tangled ghosts. Is it Simone’s sadness finally escaping? Or is it mine? Is it the impression, now that this too is done, of having nothing more to hope for? The impression that tomorrow will consist of a total and irreversible absence of desire? Pretty woman sleeping beside me, with your smell of love spiralling up from all your pores, what I would give to be able to stay in your arms. What I would give to stop believing that I have no right to lead you onto this terrain.
First I heard barking in the distance. Brad’s low voice travelled marvellously in the humid night air. I imagined his heavy black jowls shaking in time to his trot, and strings of slobber flying horizontally from his mouth. And Paolo! Shit, shit, shit, that idiot was capable of putting a bullet in my leg. The barking stopped. I turned toward the entrance. Brad would appear any second now. His footsteps reverberated on the ground as he came around the building. I stuck a bag in front of my crotch because I knew that was where he would attack. All I hoped was that he would recognize me before his jaws maximized the kilos of pressure his genetic baggage had endowed him with. But since the imbecile’s eyes were covered with cataracts, I couldn’t count on that. He came into the storage shed snorting like a buffalo. Luckily for me, he misjudged the width of the door and bumped up against the frame, which slowed him down a bit and gave me a chance.
“Brad!”
A glimmer of sense flashed in his eyes and his charge turned into a pathetic dithering. He came to me with his head down, his back rounded and his tail wagging. I crouched down to pet him. Paolo came in right behind him. Correction: the muzzle of a revolver came in, followed immediately by Paolo. He was naked except for boxer shorts and work boots. This guy really didn’t have any class. It took him a few seconds to understand what was going on.
“What the hell are you doing here at this time of night?”
“Well, as you can see,” I said, “I’m moving bags.”
He’d been leaving messages at my house for a week now and I hadn’t called him back. This job was one of the things in my life that was quietly going up in smoke.
“Have you gone completely off your rocker? I could’ve plugged you!”
Brad went back to Paolo and poked his nose in his crotch. The poor guy kept trying to push him away, but the dog kept coming back. Since he’d been trained to go for the crotch, he had a strange relationship with men’s privates.
“I looked for a gym that was open, but it’s not easy to find one this time of night.”
“I’ve had it up to here with your stunts, Édouard. Will you just leave me alone, you lunatic!”
He pushed Brad with his knee, hard enough to make the dog back off a few metres. Before the dog could come at him again, Paolo pointed his gun at him. The animal stopped, but he seemed to consider it a game. I could see the tiny bit of tail he had left wagging. I think he was looking for a way to get around the revolver. The wheels must have been turning in his thick skull. I was worried about him. Paolo was quite capable of losing patience and blowing his brains out.
“How long have I been putting up with your stunts, Édouard?”
“Oh, come on, I’m not doing any harm. I’m moving some bags.”
“How long? Answer me!”
The little bastard was getting off on having a gun in his hand. I think he regretted that his father had chosen horticulture instead of the mafia.
“When I started here, you were still pissing sitting down, Paolo. Your father spent his days ranting about you, and half the time, I stood up for you. The rest of the time, unfortunately, I had to admit he was right.”
“Leave my old man out of this. Your problem is that you never got it through your head that I’m the boss now.”
“You know why your father went back to Italy? Because one morning he looked at you and he realized the kind of defects the new world could produce.”
“My old man was never able to adapt. That’s why he left.”
“Your old man had the right to be whatever he wanted in whatever country in the world, you cretin. Some day you’ll understand that free men don’t need to sacrifice what they are to supposedly integrate.”
“Okay, thanks for the civics lesson. Now you’re going to pick up your things and get the hell out of here. I never want to see you again.”
It was a damn good idea. Only my heart was beating a hundred and twenty or a hundred and thirty a minute, which was causing secondary effects: my muscles were fully irrigated and I could have drawn on maximum power in a fraction of a second. I simply didn’t see why I should stop there.
I asked Paolo what it was still possible to believe in. He was taken aback. If I had punched him in the face, it would have shaken him less.
“Okay, Paolo, since you understand the meaning of life, tell me what all this shit is good for?”
“Stop or I’ll call the police.”
“Why not shoot me instead? I’m sure you’re dying to do it.”
He took a step back.
“You’d just have to say you surprised me robbing you and I attacked you. Just one bullet, Paolo. For a friend of your father’s.”
Now I was the one who was scaring him. He pointed the revolver at me and Brad took advantage of the opportunity to go for his testicles. Paolo was so surprised that the gun went off. For a fraction of a second, I thought I was done for. I think I even gasped. The bullet had ricocheted off the wall to my left.
“All right,” I said, “you’re starting to express yourself.”
“You’re one sick son of a bitch. I don’t want to see you in my nursery ever again.”
Since Betty hasn’t been living with me, her absence is so dense it’s spread from wall to wall in our apartment. It even seeps out under the doors and through the gaps in the warped windows. Wherever I go, I remain stuck in the memory of her.
One morning, walking toward the literature department, I see three workers who are about to cut down an old maple tree. The tree has a large cavity at the base of its trunk. Since the hole has weakened its structure, the tree constitutes a danger to the safety of the students. There’s no other solution, one of the men explains to me.
Five years later almost to the day, I’m walking to the ministry with my attaché case, my black shoes and my grey suit. Véronique had turned away with a sigh when I kissed her. Maxime is two years old, and he was sick all night. She was the one who took care of him. It was her turn. She won’t go to work this morning. I walked past Max’s room, making as little noise as possible. He was asleep, lying on his back, exhausted from repeated vomiting. I love my life. I have a tired wife who still sighs when I kiss her in her sleep, I have a child burning with fever, I do translation for the government. My future is as hollow as a dry river bed. I just have to flow into it and follow its course. When I left the apartment I shared with Betty, I carefully caulked all the openings so that nothing would ever again escape from that place and catch up with me.
The sound of a small electric chains
aw buzzes in the air. At the end of a yard just a few streets from my house, I see a man using the saw inside a cavity in a big tree. I stop to watch him for a while, but very soon my watch tickles my wrist and I continue on my way to the ministry.
Three days later, same place. Now I hear the sound of hammering. The man, wearing oversize work pants, is driving nails into the cavity in the tree. A pickup with the words “Bertolini Landscape Gardener” painted on the side is parked in the driveway. The ten metres of lawn between me and the horticulturist are wet with dew. I look at my leather shoes aligned neatly and sensibly side by side on the sidewalk two or three centimetres from the grass. And I take a first step. And then a second. And before I’ve gone half way, the tops of my shoes are completely covered with little drops.
Bertolini explains to me in a mixture of French and English that he’s saving the tree. With the help of gestures, he relates how he first used the chainsaw to cut out the rot down to the healthy wood, the way a dentist drills out a cavity. Then he sterilized the wound with a propane torch. Then, today, after waiting three days for the tissue to dry out, he came back and lined the inside of the wound with galvanized nails. I watch and listen with my suit and my attaché case, and I realize that when I go in to work, I look like an educated bureaucrat to anyone at the ministry, but to this Italian man, I could just as well be a brush salesman.
I look up and my eyes follow the sinuous lines of the giant’s branches reaching toward the sky. The Italian cuts some wire mesh so that it fits perfectly into the cavity. The wound looks like a pin cushion, and the mesh is held firmly inside. Next he will pour some cement and shape it so that water can’t accumulate around it. The nails and the mesh are only there to reinforce the cement. The purpose of all this is to restore the tree’s mechanical strength. The expression “cathedral of trees” pops into my head. This Italian mason is renovating a natural cathedral. I go back to the ministry and even the security guard doesn’t recognize me.
Paolo was twenty-six years old and represented just about everything I feared my son would become. I saw him day after day changing the company his father had founded, for reasons of productivity, profit and logistics. In fact, trees and flowers occupied less and less of the space because they needed much more care than bags of earth, birdfeeders and decorative fountains. Little by little, Paolo was destroying a tradition, a sincere love of plants and a desire to communicate that love to others.
Without asking myself any questions, without thinking about the consequences, I gave in to an impulse that had been bugging me for years and jumped him. We rolled in a tangle on the ground, neither one able to overpower the other. Brad, all excited, stuck his muzzle between us, hoping to take part in the fun. Frustrated, he backed off a few steps and let out a few heartfelt barks before coming back to stick his muzzle in wherever he could. Paolo had never worked very hard, to the despair of his father, and that was evident today. Despite his youth, he simply couldn’t get me under control. I was able to hit him as much as I wanted. I felt like I was fulfilling an old dream of his father’s. Hey, Bertolini, my old friend, watch, I’m giving your son what’s coming to him. I should have left with you, you friggin’ deserter. We would have had such a great time in the olive groves, all the trees we ever wanted to take care of, do you realize?
And pow! Paolo gets another whack.
“This one’s for your father!”
Bertolini, at four in the morning, loaded on grappa, braying like a donkey in the middle of his nursery. And I’m the one his wife calls because she knows he won’t listen to anyone else—me, his “son,” as he sometimes calls me, laying his meaty hand on the back of my neck. And I rush over for my father Bertolini, who doesn’t talk a lot, but who has that way of turning his eyes toward you that’s worth a thousand fathers talking bullshit about their so-called love for you. “What are you up to, Bertolini? You want the cops to come and take you in again?”
“Come have a drink with me, Édouard, come dance with me. Do you know this dance?” “Of course I know it, Bertolini, you do it every time you get drunk. That’s quite often, but I wouldn’t mind seeing it again and I’m not expected anywhere.”
And pow! Paolo gets another whack.
“This one’s for all the pain you caused your father.”
“Go get another bottle of grappa, Édouard, and bring me my wife. I want my wife beside me. I didn’t spend forty years of my life with her to leave her inside on a night like this. Bring me my wife and give her a pat on the bum while you’re at it, you’ll hear her coo. Warm her up for me, Édouard.” And I’m already far away, already at the house, knocking on Maria’s door, saying, “Lovely Maria, charming Maria, your husband is waiting for you among the flowers, he wants you by his side at this difficult time, he loves you. I know he’s drunk and it’s often when he’s drunk that he loves you, but that’s because he realizes life is short and beautiful and drunkenness without Maria has no meaning.” And Maria turns to get her jacket and I give her a gentle pat on the rear, saying I’ll wait for her outside. And Maria comes out two minutes later with a bottle of grappa, with her fabulous ass that she swings right and left with every step, and with a big smile.
And pow! Right in Paolo’s kisser—I was almost forgetting him.
“Come, Maria,” I say, slipping my arm around her waist, “let’s make Bertolini jealous.” And we walk toward the father, who watches us coming, standing in the middle of the aisle, arms dangling, ready to fall on his knees as if he saw Sophia Loren coming.
“Why has the good Lord been so good to me? Why did the good Lord give me Maria Gubitosi? I don’t deserve her.” And the beautiful Maria Gubitosi, with her ass that’s renowned throughout Italy, answers simply, “God bless the grappa that makes my husband see so clearly!”
And pow! On the top of Paolo’s head.
“This one is for your mother, you cretin, for all the worry you caused her.”
Bertolini and Maria dance a slow dance while I collapse in the flowers. I see all kinds of impossible things in the sky … Véronique’s face, her goddamn face that will take me years to forget—and that has been with me so clearly since yesterday. And her head, everything that was in her friggin’ head, everything that went on in there, all the ideas that popped up in it, all those pointed remarks she made on reality, which I observed with curiosity and fascination.
And pow! Another one right in Paolo’s kisser.
“This one’s for my ex-wife.”
“I don’t even know her!”
And pow! One to shut him up.
“I spent fourteen years of my life with her, you should know her. And Simone, does that name mean anything to you?”
“No.”
And pow! One for Simone.
“There, the introductions have been made. Simone is the one I’ve just pushed into the void.”
I stood up and headed toward the door. I’d had enough of this little game. Brad looked disappointed and howled pleadingly. When Paolo said that if I ever set foot here again, he’d call the cops, I didn’t turn around.
“I know, Paolo, I know.”
I went out the door and took the annuals aisle back the way I’d come. It was maybe the ten-thousandth time I’d passed that way. When I got into the car, I tossed something on the passenger seat—I think it was Paolo’s revolver with the five unused bullets in it.
12
IN NORTHERN CHINA ONE DAY, we came upon a funeral cortège on a narrow dirt road. Jon and I were in a 4X4. I was the first one who saw the column of walkers in the distance. We followed the procession for almost three hours. It was an old custom that had almost died out with the Cultural Revolution. When someone died far from home, they would organize a cortège to take their remains back home. When they came to a river, a mountain or a crossroads along the way, the procession would stop and the participants would shout to warn the deceased person so that he or she would never forget the way home.
I was sitting in the garden holding
a glass of juice. I felt the hot breath of the sun on my face. All around me, the trunks and stems stood erect, the leaves stretched and unfurled, the roots plunged deeper into the earth seeking moisture, the sap ascended to the leaves and went back down bubbling, transformed and enriched, like my own blood in my veins. Magnesium instead of iron, that was about the only thing that differentiated them. Everything was engorged with nutrients, salts, proteins and enzymes. I was alive, and all this life was flowing now, in my head, on my lips and in the hollow of my belly, nibbling and tickling me.
There’s love and then there’s the other side of love. Like the suede gloves looking so absurd on the hall table in the middle of June. There’s the glove, and when you turn it inside-out, there’s the other side of the glove. Love and the other side of love are sometimes joined like Siamese twins, and if they share a vital organ, they can’t be separated without endangering their lives. Sometimes, too, there is only the other side of love, something that has its shape but not its lustre or its finish. That’s not the part of love you want to exhibit in public, saying, “Look at me, I’ve just been chosen.” That’s not the side of love that cries in airports or on train platforms when the distance separating it from the loved one becomes tangible, physical and concrete like slabs of cement falling one after another in the emptiness that extends ahead. Nor is it the love you want to celebrate, fanning the flame with memories and signs of destiny to make sure it’s as beautiful and momentous as in the movies. No, it’s the inner part of love, the part that gives it its shape but is not all of it. It’s feeling the effects of love without being in love. Or it’s being able to be in love only in the absence of the other.
Édouard was gone and his presence still lingered in my house. Did he go home? Did he take refuge with Michel, who at sensitive moments could show such a lack of sensitivity that everything was turned around inside-out to show its other face?
A Slight Case of Fatigue Page 8