Unforgivable

by Philippe Djian

  The inspector who had made these comments to me slightly increased my anxiety, for I had not yet envisaged the possibility that my daughter’s life was in danger. “I never imagined this for a second, Anne-Mar. Not consciously, at least. How would I have had the strength to imagine such a thing? How can you imagine something that could destroy you?”

  Anne-Marguerite nodded. For three days, she had been in Paris making inquiries, and she had come back totally empty-handed. I began to feel really isolated. The presence of the twins—whom Roger, still apparently off his rocker, was taking back home—made the ordeal less difficult, but the only moments that gave me a real breathing space were when Anne-Marguerite came to see us and took over from me, for in this way I benefited freely from their presence a little, and from the invigorating sound of their conversation, without being required to join in.

  It was to Judith—to her symbolic absence, her lack of concern about supporting me—that I owed this painful situation.

  Ten years of marriage had left us both punch-drunk. Strangely groggy. Incapable of explaining lucidly what it was that had happened to us. As if anesthetized. We were incapable of expressing it, but we did not pretend to be unaware of it.

  She went away quite readily. More and more frequently. It was not uncommon for her to disappear now for several days and I was satisfied with her explanations; I did not seek to know the details of how she spent her time. I was amazed to discover how insurmountable was the wall that stood between us. Looking into one another’s eyes no longer served any purpose. When she set off, I wished her a safe journey. She promised to call me. And she did so—without losing out on her fixed rate of charges, of course.

  Be that as it may, leaving me alone with the twins was a really dirty trick. In the tense, worried condition I was in. But it was not for me to tell her so.

  That evening, she had dined in a cider house with some Spanish estate agents and had been unable to extricate herself any earlier.

  “You shouldn’t have telephoned to say that you were on your way,” I said. “They were waiting for you.”

  “I nearly ran over a porcupine.”

  “I had a devil of a time getting them to go to sleep. After your phone call.”

  “It delayed me. I had to make sure it got across the road safely. Didn’t I do the right thing?”

  The doorbell rang. Anne-Marguerite wanted to walk away immediately, imagining that she was disturbing us, but I insisted and introduced them to one another.

  Anne-Marguerite, or Anne-Mar, whom I now called A.-M.—that was what her son called her—had come to see whether all was well with the twins, and I could see a mixture of gratitude and irritation—just a fleeting hint—in Judith’s expression at my detective friend’s remark.

  At the age of fifty, Judith still belonged to the desirable category, no question of it—whereas I was not sure of being so any longer. In fact, I had made the terrible mistake of wanting her to replace Johanna, Alice’s mother, and look where my madness had led us, to this uncontrollable and disastrous distancing—this gradual and deadly struggle—which Judith and I, hypnotized and numbed by the progress of such failure, watched happening.

  A.-M. appeared to be upset by my stories, but she herself knew how sorrow could make one foolish—I had to believe her—and she therefore refused to be too critical of me.

  It was twenty-one days since Alice had disappeared. I continued to take my daily dose of a hundred sixty mg of pantoprazole to control the burning in my stomach.

  A.-M. had gone back to Paris to explore new leads, but without any success.

  “What do you think? Tell me if you think it’s a lost cause, A.-M. I prefer to know. Listen, if you have discovered something, the slightest thing, tell me. Even if it’s only a hunch.”

  “Nothing is lost, Francis. I believe she has been abducted, as I’ve told you. I’m convinced she’s alive.”

  I was very glad when she said that: I’m convinced she’s alive.

  I had called Roger. I had allowed him to moan and wail, then I had asked him to come and collect his daughters. Why? Did I have to provide him with explanations? “Because I’m no longer twenty, Roger. Of course I love them. Of course I adore them. That’s not the problem.” Then Judith had called me from Madrid, an hour later, to tell me how heartless I was. The nerve of that woman!

  But I hadn’t given in. Roger arrived by plane the following day and we had scarcely exchanged more than a few words while the girls packed their suitcases. I had not found him as distraught as I had imagined I would after listening to him whining and moaning down the phone. Apart from the lines of bitterness around his lips, he did not look too bad—he was naturally pale.

  At the front of the house, the eucalyptus trees were losing their bark. I was annoyed with him for having forced me to ask him to come and collect his children. I gazed at the swaying Chinese lanterns that the girls had hung on the lower branches for the party they had organized the previous day and from which I had only barely recovered. Olga, my daughter who had died, used to make very pretty ones, of different shapes, when she was their age. She was someone who was particularly gifted with her hands.

  Once they had finally left and set off for the airport, I felt a bit low and wondered whether I had made a mistake. How silent it suddenly was. How empty.

  What a void I felt around me.

  I made a fire—just for the sake of the crackling, and the flickering dance of the flames from one wall to the other—and I settled down with the letters of Flannery O’Connor, who generally proved to be a good cure. Dusk was falling. The Spanish coast was already steeped in darkness and high above the garden the first stars were twinkling. But Alice’s disappearance made me feel dejected.

  Helplessness was the worst torture of all.

  A.-M. knew this. A.-M. understood this. She was kind enough to come by. She had probably realized that Judith and I no longer enjoyed the perfect love life and that I needed a bit of support, given the storms that I was going through and the gales that were blowing across my path.

  “She’s still a very beautiful woman,” she said. “Superb breasts.”

  “True. And to my knowledge, she has never breast-fed. That’s the reason for that.”

  I got up to mix us some Bloody Marys—it was a drink she was fond of.

  She had just come back from the prison, from one of those distressing visits to her son, after which, in a ludicrous reversal of roles, it would become my turn to offer her my shoulder. I knew everything now about Jérémie Lémo. I could recognize him in a crowd without ever having met him.

  On the day I accompanied A.-M. to the prison visiting room, I was momentarily flabbergasted by the resemblance between the original and the portrait his mother had painted for me.

  As for him, he stared at me suspiciously. However much he frowned, he seemed so much younger than his supposed twenty-five years.

  A.-M. maintained that her son was responsible for every single white hair on her head. He had just treated his mother like a whore after having refused to shake my hand, and as a result she and I, feeling rather piqued, were retracing our steps back to my car, in the lee of a west wind that had blown up from the sea.

  We folded back the sunroof. When all was said and done, the notion that her son should have thought we were lovers brought smiles to our faces.

  A.-M. was as old as I was. What would be the point in my taking a mistress who was as old as me? Even if my dreams were filled with lively young women, every one of them more attractive than the other . . . and by the way, while on the subject, the latest Philip Roth had depressed me and left me feeling half-dead for days afterward.

  A.-M. was not repellent in any way. It was simply that her body no longer sent out any signal, at least not in my direction. Somewhere, buried deep down, the batteries appeared to be dead. But let’s be quite clear, that did not mean she was ugly or repellent, merely old.

  Her features were regular. In certain photographs dating from the seven
ties, she looked like Juliette Gréco—with her original nose.

  Judith very much enjoyed selling houses. Ten years previously, she had sold me the one in which we live today, and I can attest to her skill at conducting property transactions. Like A.-M. in matters that required investigation, Judith was the best in her field. All the most attractive deals went through her hands. She knew the area like the back of her hand and she was very proficient at her job. She spoke Russian and Spanish. Characters used to arrive from the Urals and the steppes with suitcases full of cash—which I sometimes had to keep in our house for a few days, thereby risking having my throat slit—and she did the deal in the buyer’s language—Russian made her garrulous—a service that no other agency offered, and one that made it an absolute must for our brothers from the East who came to these parts in quest of a little calm and quiet, to breathe the pure ocean air and enjoy the spray of the sea. The Russians blew their money happily. The mayor and his counselors had traveled as far as Saint Petersburg to sing the praises of the region and to point out the benefits of settling there, investing, etc. As a result, Judith had no time left for me.

  Nothing obliged her to fill her appointment diary to the hilt. But we were passing through the most difficult period since we were married and we had agreed to stand back a little. Property was rocketing in San Sebastián.

  When she thought of it, she brought me back cigarettes. She handed me a carton and said to me: “You know, that woman . . . I’ve nothing against her, but . . .”

  “No, wait . . . I know what you’re driving at, it’s just . . .”

  “On the contrary, far be it from me to suggest that . . .”

  “She has done everything that was possible. I know that. There’s absolutely nothing to blame her for. I know she’s done everything. She really is very good. Believe me.”

  Although it wasn’t yet very pronounced, the tension between us did not ease off. I don’t know whether it indicated she was having an affair, or merely frustration; there were throngs of glossy-haired hombres on the other side of the border.

  “Do you think the police have done any better?” I added. “They’ve made no progress at all.”

  Because she understood what I was going through better than anyone else and was aware of my previous tragedy, she was able to treat me tactfully in spite of my occasional bad moods.

  It had taken me some time to convince myself that no woman was going to replace the one I had lost. The momentum of my recovery had been akin to continental drift, so much so that everything—the essential things, at least—had deteriorated before my very eyes without my realizing it.

  Quite simply, I believe I had made her lose heart.

  These types of thoughts went through my mind now that my life was starting to collapse and that I was no longer in a state to do anything about anything; the appalling disappearance of my daughter had affected me like a paralyzing poison with every passing day. Was it possible for a man to lose his two daughters in the space of twelve years? Could fate dog one like this?

  Merely thinking about it made me shiver. Nevertheless, I could see only too well that any reasonably sensible woman—and Judith was certainly that—would not wish to come back from work to find a creature like me and endure his depressing company. I could easily understand that she would be in no hurry to return home and spend the evening with me.

  I had made her lose heart. It was as simple as that.

  I should probably even congratulate myself that she had not yet left me. I more or less thought as much, anyway. Even though I would go out and practice a few breathing exercises on the seafront, I was unable to fill my lungs. Occasionally, she came and massaged my shoulders.

  I was obliged to phone Roger, otherwise, he didn’t call me. “I want you to call me, do you hear? Even if you’ve got no news, I want you to call me. You can easily do that, can’t you? Even if it’s just to tell me you’ve got no news, OK? It’s all very well to sigh, but do as I tell you.”

  The police eventually admitted that a month without news was not a very good sign. “And you came just to tell me that?” I asked. “Both of you.”

  I hardly slept anymore, except for brief periods. My nights were split into a dozen phases in which I slept and woke alternately. As a result, I would fall asleep three or four times during the day, nodding off no matter where, in the supermarket, or in the bar, or in the newspaper shop.

  People knew what was troubling me, and some of the shopkeepers offered me a chair and sympathized with me as my head slumped forward onto my chest. It was as if half the town was trying to pat me on the back. When they had heard about the deaths of my wife and my daughter, they had had masses said for their intentions. With choirs; some of them had even come down from the mountains especially.

  The majority of them had followed Alice’s career—such a pretty girl, such a good actress, how proud her father must be—and not a day went by without some woman coming up to me and reciting my daughter’s entire curriculum vitae, without dwelling on certain less savory episodes, of course.

  “Why don’t you go for a drive in your car?” Judith suggested. “Go and do your shopping in Spain . . .”

  “What do you expect me to buy in Spain?” I replied.

  Furthermore, I had no desire to drive. I wasn’t hungry either. If I was alone, I didn’t eat. I didn’t think of it. If she knew I was alone, A.-M. would break off from her current investigations and bring sandwiches, hot dogs, Chinese or Indian meals, Italian, Greek, or even Japanese food, it didn’t really matter, it was all the same to me—to the extent that I was able to chew on a large lump of pickled ginger without batting an eyelid.

  Since I scarcely spoke, it was A.-M. who took responsibility for the conversation. With a bit of luck, a sperm whale had been washed up on the beach. Another day, it was heroin, packed in one-kilo packets and cast up by the sea. Or the opening of a new golf course; the physical condition of the rugby team; an attack on a Guardia Civil garrison; gays who had been nabbed in the bushes at the foot of the lighthouse. Etc.

  Otherwise, she talked to me about her son, Jérémie, who was going to be let out soon, and she was dreading the moment because the fellow was not easy. A real hothead, in my opinion.

  A.-M. reckoned that it was necessary for the boy to see us together, for him to get used to my being with her when he came out, for him to digest the fact that his mother had found a friend—not a guy to sleep with.

  On the day he was released, I went to collect him and things didn’t go too badly, even though my mind was elsewhere. How long was it since Alice had disappeared? A month and a half? I was worn out. Jérémie looked at me as I drove toward the pine forests, bouncing over the speed bumps, then he eventually came out with the statement that, yes, it was beginning to be a long time, forty-five days.

  I dropped him off outside his house. A.-M. appeared at the doorway. I waved and then drove off.

  Jérémie had been arrested at a holdup at a service station. A stray bullet had hit the checkout operator full in the chest.

  He had just done six years in jail. The thing he appeared to cherish most in the world was his CD player. He listened mainly to English rock music.

  “Let me know when you’re ready to look for a job,” I said to him. “I may be able to give you a hand.”

  “Mind your own business,” was his reply.

  A.-M. wanted to allow him some time, a few weeks more, before raising the matter. He was her son. It was not for me to tell her what she should do; I didn’t know either, being incapable of addressing my mind to anything other than Alice’s disappearance.

  One morning, as I was taking an early morning walk along the beach, clambering over the dunes in the pale, damp whiteness of dawn, I came across him, sitting on the sand. He was tossing a piece of wood for a puppy that had been hanging around the area for a few days.

  “It must be tough. I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes,” I said to him.

  On my way back, he was still there
. The dog, too. Below him, a few small waves were encroaching on the sand, which was now gleaming in the morning light. It almost made you blink.

  “How about going to have a coffee?” I suggested. I had an irresistible need to talk about Alice and, viewed in this light, the boy struck me as some vast uncharted territory.

  I sat down opposite him. “You must have seen her in the last James Bond,” I said to him. “Or else in Voici.”

  Occasionally, when I spoke about her, an image of the two dead women attached itself to that of Alice, a sob would suddenly constrict my throat, and I would let out a sort of gurgling sound, or I burped, or else I doubled up.

  Jérémie, unlike the others, did not bat an eyelid when a groan slipped from deep within me just as I was recalling the time when I was father to two grown-up girls and husband to an exceptional woman, Johanna, whom I had watched die in front of my very eyes. He did not ask me whether I was feeling all right. “Can I have some croissants?” he asked me. Some young men, dripping wet, emerged from the sea with their surfboards and sat down on the terrace to look at the ocean.

  “Have whatever you like,” I told him. “Far be it from me to disapprove of her conduct. Far be it from me, of course, to hold up my daughter as an example. But she could be granted extenuating circumstances, I reckon . . . no, don’t you think so? And we know that milieu, don’t we? We know that it’s virtually impossible to escape from it unscathed. Wouldn’t it be better just to take your child and chuck her out of the window? I’m joking.”

  I bent over toward the puppy to give it a lump of sugar, but Jérémie stopped me, claiming it wasn’t good for its teeth. “They’re his milk teeth, old friend. He’s going to lose them,” I said to him.