I got up and took a few steps in the garden. There’s love and there’s the other side of love. There’s absence and there’s the other side of absence. I want him to take me in his arms again and I never want to see him again. I don’t want to know where he went, but I want to feel he’s somewhere in the world, that his presence is pulsating, that it’s sending waves through space and that in the more or less long term, those little waves will reach me, and will continue to reach me once per second, forever.
There’s death and there’s the other side of death. There’s me, Simone, in a coffin carried by a cortège of friends, sweethearts and lovers. They’re walking silently toward my house, where my mother, my father and Jon live. Simone is dead in her life of a dead person, she’s now going to pass over to the other side, the other side of death, and she’s being taken back home so that she’ll remember the way to the place she lived all those years as a dead person, now that she’s alive for eternity.
Part Three
13
IT’S TRUE THE FRONT OF MY HOUSE contrasted dramatically with those of the other houses in the neighbourhood. My son hadn’t told me anything I didn’t already know. The herbaceous plants, left unattended, had grown to two or three metres; the Amelanchier canadensis were out of control and were nearly six metres high; clusters of mauve flowers cascaded from the Sidalcea malviflora; the hedge of Tatarian honeysuckle was spreading—or rather, exploding—in all directions; the Gramineae, their woody stems and branches shaken by the wind, were swaying nonchalantly or whipping furiously against the siding of the house, which was covered with vines. The place looked wild, hostile, untouched. “The scene of the crime” was the expression that came to mind as I pulled into the driveway.
I took the revolver from the passenger seat. Five bullets, that was five times as many as I needed.
I went behind the house and took a few steps into the backyard. I heard all kinds of noises—cracklings, chirpings, rustlings. There was invisible life teeming all around me. And only the invisible kind. I stopped and looked at the house. It did not totally belong in its surroundings. It still stood out. It still flaunted the supposed supremacy of humans, with an arrogance I could no longer bear. The broken window of Maxime’s bedroom gave me an idea. I opened the patio door.
Maxime, twelve years old, grabs the chance to run outside. His plate is still on the table and little blobs of grease are congealing on the edges. Véronique and I eat in silence. Not complete silence, since there’s the clinking of our forks and knives when they touch the plates after cutting through the meat. And the sound of our glasses when we put them back down on the table. And there’s the creaking of our chairs. And the rustling of our pants when we shift position. And the sloshing of the food in our mouths, although we’re doing everything we can to muffle it. And finally, the sounds of our swallowing.
And there are our heads turning occasionally toward the door, thinking of Maxime, regretting that he’s left us alone. There are our minds half-heartedly seeking an idea, a possible subject of conversation that has been impossible to find all these years. There are our eyes never meeting anymore. And there’s the bread in its little basket, already starting to dry out.
One after the other, I lifted the glass doors off their rails, creating an opening two metres by one metre eighty to the backyard. Much better this way—the wind, the light, the birds and even some small animals could now go wherever they pleased. Then I attacked the kitchen window. Already the light indoors was changing—of course, in taking out the windows, I’d also removed the vines that grew across them.
It’s the first time Véronique and I have guests in our new house. I’m a civil servant, well-educated, I speak fluent French, English and Spanish and can stammer a few words in German. I’m reassuring in my grey suit and seductive in my black suit. I’ve chosen the former for the occasion. Véronique’s mother is examining every nook and cranny of the house, every room, every door, every floorboard, and giving us a running commentary that isn’t necessarily disparaging but is still annoying. Her father has retreated to the living room with a Scotch and water, and he’s doing everything in his power to forget his wife. Véronique and I are in the kitchen preparing the appetizers. Véronique’s face is expressionless. She regrets inviting them. They’ve descended upon our first house like a barbarian invasion and laid waste to everything with their bitterness and the emptiness of their lives. They throw their sad existence at our feet and, try as we may, we can’t find a single thing of value in it.
Véronique is washing lettuce under the tap, her eyes on a distant landscape, a place where the humus layer has been swept by the wind and rain, and sterility prevails. I am beside myself. We’re twenty-three years old, dammit! We’re so beautiful, so extraordinarily beautiful, and the future still stretches out to infinity ahead of us.
Rebuilding is urgently needed, and I’m the man for all construction. Every time I pass near Véronique, I slide a hand over her hip or lift her hair to kiss the nape of her neck. This time, I lean against her and press my cock against her bum. I know the effect this usually has. Her head tilts back just enough to let me kiss her lips and then slip my tongue into her mouth. Whole sections of wall go up, perfect rows of pipes line up in the framing, the smell of sawdust and plaster is everywhere. I cup her breasts in my hands and squeeze them together.
But with her mother walking around the house—she’s upstairs, we hear the floor creak in the future baby’s room—making comments from time to time, Véronique won’t easily let herself go. I steal a glance toward the living room, and since her father is completely taken up with his drink and his newspaper, I slip a hand under Véronique’s skirt and pull back her white panties. She protests a little, but I persist … With my index and ring fingers, I spread her labia and place my middle finger flat on the exposed flesh. Véronique turns her head toward the living room … nothing, Papa is reading. Above our heads, Maman comes out with a comment we can’t quite make out. A shiver runs down Véronique’s spine and resonates in my own backbone. Her body responds so well to my touch, I’m so completely with her, my cock is so hard, so instantaneously, how could life be anywhere else? I slip my other hand under her sweater, under her bra, and cup my hand around her right breast. Her nipple hardens between my thumb and index finger, I pinch and knead. She’s losing control. She tries to resist, but I hold her against the sink, pressing my cock harder against her. The water runs over the lettuce leaf she’s holding limply. Her mother starts down the stairs and we feel a flash of panic.
“The drapes in the bedroom are too pale, Véro.”
My hand moves faster. With my index, middle and ring fingers together on her plump, juicy pussy, I make little circles, applying just the right pressure. She glances quickly, quickly, behind her, toward the stairs, her lips parted and her nostrils quivering.
“With walls that pale,” her mother continues, coming down the stairs, “you should have gone for something darker.”
She won’t be able to see us until she gets to the ground floor. So I put my mouth against Véronique’s ear and whisper, “Come, I want to hear you come, right here, right away.” She turns her eyes toward me in torment, as if to ask why I’m doing such a thing to her. And since the footsteps stop two thirds of the way down the stairs, we can finally envision the possibility of getting there.
“You should put in a wrought iron railing. Don’t you think it would be safer for the children, Léon?”
“Uh-huh,” he replies without looking up from his newspaper.
Véronique inhales violently. She’s almost there. Her eyes roll back under her eyelids and her whole body stiffens, then relaxes. At the sight of this fabulous spectacle, an intense heat clenches like a fist in my belly and a long spurt of sperm wets my underwear. As her mother approaches the kitchen, I withdraw my hand from Véronique’s panties and the perfume of her sex provides a magnificent culmination to the event.
“Since when do they build stairs with
no banisters?”
We have our backs to her.
“It’s the new style,” I say to spare Véronique from having to speak.
“Can I help you with anything? I must say you seem a bit stressed.”
“No, no, we’re fine.”
“Okay, as you wish.”
She heads for the living room and I realize my other hand is still cupped under the right breast of the love of my life.
“Do you think maybe we should separate?”
Véronique lowers her newspaper slightly. I turn my eyes toward her. For the first time in several months, we really look at each other. There’s a channel connecting our eyes, and when we look at each other, salvos shoot back and forth like nerve impulses.
“What are you talking about, Édouard?”
“Don’t you think we’ve come to the end of something?”
“You say it just like that, as if it’s nothing, as if you feel nothing … ”
“That’s exactly it, I do feel nothing. I’m past that point.”
She puts the newspaper down. For some reason, the rustling paper makes a terrible racket.
“Don’t you find it’s all become a huge lie?”
“Not for me. I still love you, if that’s what this is about.”
“There, that’s the lie.”
She knits her brow.
“You’re disappointed in me. You’re disappointed with what I’ve become. You don’t understand me anymore. And you know what? You’re not even trying to anymore.”
“That’s not true. I love you, Édouard.”
“No, you love the life you lead.”
“You’re the one who doesn’t love me anymore.”
“That’s true too.”
The words radiate in the air like a wave. A wave that breaks against the wall and against the couch, a wave that sweeps across the living room carpet and dies in its fibres like a twin-engine plane sliding over the desert sand before crashing. And after bouncing back and forth, echoing off wood, plaster, skin and fabric, a final wave gathers and gains strength, incorporating all the waves that have criss-crossed, and with an infernal noise, a horrific violence, crashes into Véronique’s ear.
“And Maxime? Have you thought about Maxime?”
“That’s all I do. I don’t want him to see this.”
She’ll kneel in front of me, she’ll start to cry, she’ll break things, she’ll threaten me, she’ll hit me, she’ll be weak, she’ll be contemptible, she’ll be terrifying, she’ll kill me, she’ll destroy me psychologically, she’ll pull down my pants and take me in her mouth, she’ll pound the ground with her fists, she’ll put a blade to her wrist and threaten to use it, she’ll dial her lawyer’s number, she’ll ask forgiveness of me, ask me to give her another chance, beg me to try again, to start over and change everything that can be changed, she’ll do something, she’ll retrace her steps— she can’t just walk to the stairs, put her hand on the wrought iron banister and let the words drop from her mouth like pennies you accumulate in a pocket without counting them and drop carelessly into a beggar’s cup.
“Maxime is ten. That’s too young.”
I’m waiting for Véronique to come home. She had an interview for a job in a bank. I’m twenty-seven. She’s twenty-seven. I’m so anxious for her to come home and tell me everything went okay, and I’ll give her a hug. Or for her to tell me it went terribly, and I’ll give her a hug. So anxious to hear her muffled footsteps upstairs when she goes to look in on Maxime, who’s taking his nap, her sighs of indignation watching the TV news, so anxious to see a newly fallen eyelash caught under her eye, to see her uncrossing her legs and crossing them the other way, to surprise her changing her bra, to kiss her and notice a few minutes later that I’ve picked up a hint of her perfume, to not be able to find the sugar bowl and discover that she decided to put it somewhere else.
I’ve made something to eat and I’m waiting for my wife, completely absorbed in waiting. There’s nothing else. Every second, in all its density, flows over the previous one and combines with it like molten metal. I have no thought of anything else. Only thoughts of her. Where is she? On the bus? In the subway? A triumphant grin or downcast eyes? Is she walking? Is she cold? Is a man looking at her? Could she be gone forever?
I’m waiting for her like a supplication and she’ll appear to me like the answer to a prayer.
I run into her by chance downtown. On her finger, she’s wearing the ring I got her for her thirty-fifth birthday; on her arm, a man she got for herself. I have to admit they really form a couple. There’s the world, and there’s them against the world. I don’t form anything anymore. In fact, I deform a lot of things. Actually, I’m lying—she’s not wearing my ring. Only the man is real. She sent the ring back to me in the mail soon after we broke up. The thing arrived one morning when the blue of the sky was dazzling. And when I picked up the little scarlet box to look at it in the light, it contrasted sharply with the blue of the sky.
I come out of the shower and find a hair that belonged to her. It’s been two years since she set foot in the bathroom. How did this hair get here? Maybe it travelled on my son, and then, mysteriously, when I hugged him, it was deposited on my sweater or got caught in my own hair. How can a single hair go so far? And do so much harm?
She’s fallen asleep on the couch. Her chest rises and falls softly with her breathing. Her mouth is slightly open, and her warm lips vibrate with the passage of the air. I stand there contemplating her, trying as seriously as can be to enumerate the criteria of perfection.
I put our luggage in the trunk and get in the car with her. I know I love her, but I also know that this love sometimes runs out of steam on the way from her to me, and turns back.
She offers me her breasts, her ass, her thighs so soft and especially so open, her warm, patient mouth, her teeth a few times, and her lovely face that still saves me every time I see it. My father died today. Beside the bed, in a brown paper bag, there’s a razor and shaving brush.
Véronique is sitting on the bed, her legs folded to the side, and she’s crying. She’s furious with me. I’m standing in the doorway, impervious to her sorrow, her pain, her anger, her whole being. I watch her as if she were a strange animal, with that hair growing on top of her head, those mammary glands that are strangely protuberant compared to those of other females of the animal kingdom, and that mobile mouth that’s capable of forming words as well as kisses, loving as well as wounding. How have we come to this? How could we have done such a thing? She’s putting away freshly washed clothes and I’m in the bathroom cleaning the dirt from under my fingernails. We made a few remarks to each other about me always making us late when I was working in that damn garden. Then she passed by the door and I noticed how hard her expression was. I tried to get those features to soften by making a joke, but that just made her madder, and when she walked by again, not only was her face closed, but her expression was scornful. I felt that gaze like a punch in the stomach, and it knocked the wind out of me in the same way. I didn’t understand how two creatures—even human beings—who loved each other could come to look at each other like that. I followed after her and grabbed her hand to make her stop and look at me, hoping she would do so in a way that would erase all that. We stood face to face for a moment. I don’t know if we were thinking about the same thing. For me, that distance, that thirty centimetres separating us, became opaque for the first time. That was the first stage. The first time neither she nor I was able to cross that insignificant distance to stay with each other, even when we were at odds. I was suddenly so ashamed. And so afraid. I had to smash all that, for me but also for her. My hand, until then hanging free against my thigh, took flight. It went straight up, and like a bird that’s going to crash into a window, it flew through the air between us. It crossed those thirty centimetres with wings spread and hit Véronique’s face. And immediately, as if a warning cry had sounded, as when danger threatens, all the other birds took flight, chirping. And they
began to flap their wings between us in their wild, unpredictable flight, and they struck us in the face, on the head, on the shoulders, making throaty cries. And they banged into each other, hitting each other’s wings, breaking their feathers, disrupting their flight even more. Finally, exhausted, wounded, bruised, they flew away. The last beating of wings reverberated for a moment in the house, and then the silence of a natural disaster fell over everything. And now Véronique is crying on the bed, and I’m watching her as if she were a strange animal.
Opening the front door, I found a new notice from the municipality. They were giving me forty-eight hours to clear the part of the lot between the house and the street, failing which the municipal employees would do it and I would pay the costs. I had to laugh.
From a certain point of view, if you didn’t take in the whole backyard in one glance, you really had the impression you were in the middle of a forest. And my lair would soon take its place in this space, like an ancient ruin with no doors or windows, or an abandoned temple. The outside would invade the inside. In the house, I would now also be in the yard. I loved the idea … taking my life, sticking my hand down its throat, grabbing the end of its tail and turning it inside-out.
I was so tired. Impossible to calculate precisely how many hours I had gone without sleeping a wink. The sequence of events was becoming more and more hazy. Last night, the one before, the hours lying on my back staring at the ceiling of the hospital room, the furniture shattering as it hit the ground under my son’s window, supper at Michel’s, Simone’s white belly, I was balancing on a strange tightrope, on the crest between reality and dream, unable to sleep, to let go, to give in. That’s it, I wasn’t able to let go. I dug my heels in, I refused. Everything. The loss of Maxime, the loss of Véronique, the loss of Simone as I had known her, the loss of hope above all, and the appearance of cynicism and disillusionment like an appendix to that loss.
A Slight Case of Fatigue Page 9