A Slight Case of Fatigue

by Stephane Bourguignon

  “Or worse … ”

  I wanted her in order to win her back. I wanted her in order to regain something that had been lost. I wanted her to make her pay for no longer being that woman who could piss in the sink of a seedy hotel room. And to make her pay for my own disillusionment, my own ­cynicism and disenchantment. To make her sorry for not being able to save me. I wanted her so I could hear myself say, “I love you,” because the absence of those words in my mouth had become unbearable. I wanted her like you want to go home after a journey through hell. Because that was where I had spent most of my time and the path was easy to ­follow and nothing was expected of me, I didn’t need to be ­better or to ­conceal the worst in me, I was accepted and understood far beyond what ­anyone has a right to hope for.

  “Or worse, kiss me right now.”

  I went over to her and held out my hand. She put hers in mine for me to help her up. We found ourselves face to face, a few centimetres apart. Her bathrobe was slightly open and her left breast was peeking out. The down on her cheek glistened in the light. I moved to kiss her. Our lips touched … at first barely brushing, then pressing together. Our mouths opened and our hot breath mingled and then our tongues touched—the room seemed to heat up—and then they ventured deeper and suddenly they were intertwined like copulating serpents.

  I realized at that moment that I still loved Véronique … still loved her enough not to do a thing like this to her. I kissed her neck a few times, then, with my nose buried in her hair, my mouth against her ear, I uttered those words one last time, knowing she would understand what they meant:

  “I love you, Véronique.”

  “I love you too,” Édouard.”

  I pressed her to me and allowed myself, quickly, quickly, the ­luxury of moving my hands over her body. Her back, bum, hips, sex, thighs, sex, belly and breasts, and two kisses on her closed eyes, as if I could in this way kiss the inside of her head.

  And the next thing you know, we belonged to each other again. From the very first glance to this last instant. From her gaze as a young woman of twenty-one who’s just climbed into her girlfriend’s car and turns her head and sees me coming toward her on the sidewalk. And her expression, silent and motionless behind the window, and her ditzy girlfriend grinding the gears, and the glint in my eye as my footsteps take me slowly to the edge of her field of vision. From that instant to today, twenty years, twenty years gone by in a fraction of a second, the blink of an eye, but leaving a billion marks all over … in us, around us in all directions, in every gesture, every word, like pebbles flung into time and space. I hated all those things for disappearing, for being ­forgotten. I hated them for not still being with us for always. Just a hint of something that lasts, that doesn’t wither and die.

  How could I once have been so much inside this woman’s head, nestled in the twists and turns of her brain? How had I been able to be one physically with her, bound together by heart and sex, fingers and lips, like doomed Siamese twins … introduced into her with my sex, my hands, my mouth, my head, and circulating, completely absorbed, in her blood, in her lungs? And now expelled from her, ejected straight into the void. Like a pebble. Another pebble in its ­trajectory always finally mathematically solitary.

  “I’m going home, Véronique, I’m sorry, forgive me, but I’m going home.”

  I had used the word “home,” and when I heard myself say it, I found it absurd. It made me laugh. In reality, I had nowhere to go. Home? It wasn’t home anymore. That was precisely it, I had spent the past six years making that house a hostile place, one that offered no comfort, no relief, no peace of mind. I had driven away my wife, I had done everything possible to make my son run away, believing I was burning my life the way you burn a field to prepare it for seeding, but now it was still burning and the circle of fire kept getting bigger, taking advantage of the slightest breeze to become more violent.

  Véronique, defeated, stood motionless and silent, her eyes clouded. When I got to the door, I turned around to look at her one last time. She represented almost my entire adult life. Everything had come with her, and it had all gone away with her. She was my wife.

  Her bathrobe had come undone and the two sides hung open, ­revealing her belly, her pubic area and part of her breasts. Her reflection ­quivered in the mirror by the door. Her forty-one-year-old body, her burning desire, her longing to be taken by hands that were so familiar that as soon as they touched you, you were transported to a country well-known from years past.

  Now that he’s left, she wants Édouard. She wants him on top of her, with his shoulders bare to her gaze, his sex inside her body, his sex in her head like a short circuit, his momentary frenzy like that of a crazy horse, and his collapse. She would like him to fall upon her again, to crumple, broken because of her. And she would restore him.

  But she has a bath to take. She locks the door and puts on the chain. Too bad for Maxime and Philippe. Let them wait. In her head, the drawers are opening and closing independently of her will. The sieve and the channels are blocked. The separation of the components no longer occurs.

  The robe falls to her feet. The water is room temperature. A comforting tepid quality in the heat of this day. Like her life, she thinks, relaxing into it. Under the water, sometimes, there’s nothing anymore. Water is the desert sometimes. That’s it, the desert, thinks Véronique, that’s the solution … all this never happened. She’ll keep it outside ­herself forever. She’ll be able to recount it to a girlfriend quite precisely, but as if she were reporting someone else’s adventure. As if she weren’t the one who had almost lost her heart there.

  In Jerusalem, there’s one attack after another, fragments of men, women and children are flung into the air. Fibres of clothing, explosive material and flesh are all mixed together. Véronique believes God has abandoned that place, that he has deserted this world without anyone realizing it. She doesn’t understand why someone would want to visit a place like that. There’s such a great distance between what the city claims to be and what it really is.

  Véronique turns toward the sink. It’s one of those fake antiques, with ornate porcelain taps. It’s so high that no woman would be able to urinate in it. And if there happens to be a woman who, for whatever reason, has relieved herself there, Véronique considers herself very lucky not to know her.

  Part Four

  22

  THE RELATIVELY SIMPLE OPERATION, which eliminates, for both the man and his partner, the distress of seeing this dubious race perpetuate itself, consists of blocking the passage of spermatozoa from the testicles to the urethra. They therefore can no longer mix with the ­spermatic fluid to spurt out of the male organ and do their dirty work. Even though everything looks the same, the juice is sterile, lifeless and useless. What a joy!

  The surgery doesn’t require hospitalization. It’s done by a urologist under local anaesthesia. Two small incisions are made on the scrotum—one on the left side and one on the right—in order to allow the professional snipper to go in and cut out a segment of the ducts that are so elegantly called vas deferens. Don’t try to get those little pieces of tubing back—although they belong to you, they’ll be needed to prove to the hospital administration and the Ministry of Health that the operation was actually carried out.

  Few side effects have been reported, other than pain and swelling that may last a few days. Personally, in hindsight, I think that if they weren’t reported, it was because the patient couldn’t get to the phone.

  The majority of the men in the waiting room looked pretty glum. Most were accompanied by their wives, who had a hand resting ­gently on their spouse’s thigh or were solicitously stroking his arm. They were staring off into space, and conversations—usually initiated by the women—began with a certain energy but died out very quickly. No enthusiasm, no joy at the prospect of the amputation that was to come. I was the only one who—despite my dramatically pale complexion and bloodshot eyes—was whistling cheerfully.

  A guy came back fro
m the operating room. He was a broken man. He crossed the room slowly, his face wan and his gait unsteady. All the other patients followed his journey—which was suddenly starting to look like the Way of the Cross. All the life had gone out of him, even that damn male pride had left him. He looked like a puppy trapped in the body of a gorilla lugging two watermelons between its legs.

  I applauded. A little enthusiasm, please, why these long faces?! After all, this man had rendered a huge service to humanity. The others looked at me askance, but when I started whistling, some of them gradually joined in, and their wives followed suit. In the end, there were a good twenty of us expressing our admiration for that poor wretch. But he had just one thought in his head: to get home and put his testicles on the rocks. I have to admit we were not all applauding for the same reasons. But it doesn’t matter whether or not they knew what cause they were serving, or rather, whether they were serving it consciously or unconsciously, the important thing was that those little pieces of tubing continued to accumulate on the administrator’s desk.

  My name crackled on the loudspeaker.

  “That’s me!” I cried excitedly.

  With a demented grin, I rubbed my hands together and looked at my companions. Again, most of them appeared mystified. I headed toward the operating room with my fist raised, chanting my name.

  “Édouard! Édouard! Édouard!”

  The nurse was very glad to get an optimist for a change. I joked with her for a few minutes, and then went into the little room she directed me to, where a johnny shirt was waiting for me.

  While she was preparing my file on the other side of the curtain, I took the opportunity to say a few words to my dick.

  “You lose, fella. Sorry.”

  “Everything okay?” called the nurse cheerfully.

  Seeing how she had reacted earlier to my cheap jokes, I felt in all humility that she liked me. She must have thought the woman waiting for me at home, the one for whom I had agree to have my vas deferens pruned, was pretty lucky.

  “You look awfully happy. Is it the prospect of not having to use ­contraceptives?”

  “No, I don’t have a partner.”

  “Oh … ”

  “It’s the prospect of putting a monkey wrench in the gears of the survival of the species.”

  There was silence on the other side of the curtain. Then a polite and oh-so-professional “That’s nice” sounded timidly as the nurse left the anteroom. I stepped out of my hiding place completely naked and joined them in the operating room. I shook the doc’s hand and thanked him in advance.

  “Men like you should be honoured. All these little miracles you ­perform every day!”

  I lay down on the operating table and spread my legs, asking how many like me he did per year. It pleased me to imagine all these ­specialists all over the world—there must be thousands of them—with men lining up to be sterilized. A factory! Five thousand men a day? Ten thousand? Who knows? Tears welled up in my eyes.

  He daubed me generously with antiseptic and covered me with a sheet in which there was an opening. He grabbed my nuts and popped them through the hole. Seen from above, only my head and my ­scrotum were outside the sheet. I had been reduced to my simplest terms. All my troubles had come from those two parts of me. I proposed a combo to the doc: electroshock and a vasectomy, two for the price of one. He didn’t take me up on it.

  “I would like to watch the operation, if that’s possible.”

  “Would you like someone to hold a mirror for you?”

  “Yes, please.”

  The nurse held the mirror while the doctor picked up a syringe from a tray behind him. He pulled the skin of my scrotum with one hand. The needle slowly came closer.

  Papa stops the car. I don’t yet dare turn my head to look at the schoolyard of my new school. I stare at the horizon, at a vague point in the distance. I’m eleven years old. The Easter holiday is over. My life as I knew it before is over. I am balancing with one foot on each side of a chasm that’s growing wider by the day.

  “Will you remember the way home?”

  We moved the day before. Since Maman went away, it’s much ­easier for me to leave my friends. Nothing really gets to me, and if something sticks, it’s only temporary. People, attention, smiles bounce off me like stones off a locked door.

  Everything here is new, the country, the smallness of the village, the light, the smells. I’m still staring off into the distance, but in my peripheral vision, my new schoolyard seems bigger than any I’ve known before.

  “Good luck, Eddy.”

  I turn my eyes toward him. I can’t stand it when he calls me Eddy. My name is Édouard, that’s what I’m called. I hate that name, but I want to live it as strongly as possible. It was my mother who chose it. It’s a name that doesn’t suit me, but it’s the only thing I have left from her.

  My father is also staring at something far in the distance. I open the door and get out.

  “I’ll be working late, so you’ll probably be asleep when I get home.”

  “Okay.”

  “There’s a piece of steak in the fridge.”

  I turn toward the schoolyard. The shouting of children is the same all over the world. I hear my father’s car drive off behind me. Leaving is always the same too. There’s the same sound, and then the same silence comes over everything. I survey the place: the red brick school, the asphalt schoolyard, the rubber balls bouncing, the skipping ropes describing ellipses, the whiffs of tar the wind carries from the railway tracks. I throw my bag over my shoulder, put one foot in front of the other and advance toward those two hundred strangers.

  “Everything okay? Are you holding out okay?”

  “I’ve had lovers who were less delicate than you, doctor.”

  “If you start to see your life passing in front of your eyes, let me know.”

  “Yes, yes, don’t worry,” I force myself to reply with a chuckle.

  The door of the house closes again with a kind of sucking noise. Everything becomes muffled, like in an airlock. The smell of cardboard and newsprint still lingers in the air. Our dishes from last night’s ­supper and today’s breakfast are sitting in the sink. I wash a plate with a scouring pad. To dry it, I rub it against my T-shirt in little circles. In the fridge, I find a piece of steak.

  I put some butter in the hot frying pan. When it starts to bubble, I shake the pan to spread it around and I drop the piece of meat in. It immediately starts to smoke, so I turn on the fan.

  I wash a knife and fork, which I also wipe on my T-shirt. The house is filled with noise now … the meat sizzling, the fan sucking up the smoke and sending it mechanically outside. Everything looks so ­normal that a woman could come out of the bathroom and walk toward the stove, wiping her hands on her apron; a man could pass by the ­window pushing a lawnmower; a kid could be watching TV in the living room. I turn the steak over with the fork. I take a glass out of the cupboard and empty the last of the carton of milk into it. I turn off the stove and the fan. I sit down at the end of the table. From here I can see the neighbour’s dog across the way. He’s sitting there at the end of his chain, watching the cars go by.

  At around ten, I put on my pyjamas and brush my teeth. A last glance at the kitchen before I go to my bedroom. Everything is tidy. My ­mattress is on the floor. The base got broken in the move. Papa said one of these days he’d buy me another one. I arrange the covers, turn out the light, and grope my way back to my bed. The sheets are worn and comfortable. They have an old smell that’s hard to define, a mixture of things. I turn onto my side, I bring my fists to my chest. There isn’t a sound, the silence is total. Then our old fridge starts up and its purring surges through the house like warm waves on an empty beach.

  Papa comes home at twelve forty-nine. I hear the car pull in, the door close, his footsteps on the driveway, the key in the lock, the doorknob, the hinges. I’ve put my plate back in the sink with my knife and fork. I’ve washed my glass and the frying pan I used to cook the stea
k. I haven’t left a trace. He turns on a light and walks through the house. I hear the floor creak, and he stops in the doorway of my room. He looks at me. My face is half under the covers and my back is to him. All he can see is a small, vaguely human shape under the blankets. The only trace I can’t remove.

  When I left the hospital, that idea was still in my head. I was thinking of my garden and my house again and, ironically, I had to admit that what I had been trying to do for the past six years was precisely to erase any trace of what I had been before. I had been going backward over my steps with a branch of a tree in my hand, using the leafy tip to blur the tracks I had left.

  On the sidewalk, I stopped. I didn’t remember where I’d parked the car. My testicles were still completely frozen and weren’t causing any discomfort, but the special underpants the doctor had given me, something between a diaper and a super-absorbent sanitary napkin, took up more space than I would have liked in my pants.

  A guy came out right after me and slapped me on the shoulder as he went by.

  “You’re not laughing so hard now, are you?”

  “I’m just savouring the moment.”

  It was done, I was sterile. Erasing my tracks, disappearing bit by bit. Two little pieces of tubing today and, who knows, maybe an appendix tomorrow and a lung in a few years. Meanwhile, how could I live the rest of my life without leaving any tracks? After all, an optimist might say I was still young. I could settle permanently into sterility, that’s it; only do things that couldn’t lead to anything, couldn’t ­generate anything. Adopt the same sterile language as everyone else, not oppose anything, or, if I did, oppose it in a sterile way, being careful not to ­generate any productive discussion. No more demanding, claiming or bitching. Let’s smooth everything over and join the silent majority.

  The first new thought that entered my mind was to call Maxime and tell him everything was okay now, that he could come by when he wanted, with or without a girlfriend, and have a nice quiet drink on the patio. I’ll be there, Max, perfectly civilized. I won’t talk ­nonsense anymore, I promise, I’ll go to the kitchen and mix some sophisticated drinks and bring them to you in pretty glasses with ice cubes tinkling and droplets of condensation going plink as they fall on the treated wood.