As soon as I relinquished the private domain of the novel I was working on—which I naturally had to devote most of my efforts to—these bitter feelings came over me, swamped me, and I found it difficult to rid myself of them. So it was that, not having followed the latest developments in the Alice-Roger relationship—I had no idea where they’d got to exactly—I discovered to my surprise, a few days later, that he was here, recently arrived from the airport, looking vaguely miserable, and that they had decided to have it out with one another.
When I asked Alice where he had been, she replied: “Don’t get mixed up in that. Don’t be unpleasant to him. All he did was to obey me.”
“Obey you?”
“Yes, obey me. Sorry.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “he hasn’t just obeyed you. He’s been carrying on this game under my very eyes, day after day, knowing that I was dead worried, listening to me groaning and allowing me to believe that I’d lost you forever. Obey you? He can roast in hell.”
She sighed briefly. “Tell me, but what is it we have to do, ultimately, in order to hear no more about this business?”
I shrugged my shoulders and kept them raised to indicate my ignorance in the matter, and my subsequent confusion, while she did an about-face.
My view was that everyone was wrong about everyone else. No need to be a genius. Therefore, how could living together have turned out to be a simple matter? How could one have prevented entire nations from sinking into madness when they were founded on ignorance and error?
“Can you make quite sure he hasn’t got a gun? Judith? Do you think you could do that? Do you think you could look into it? Do you think you could stop imagining that these things only happen to other people? Could you open your eyes for a moment? Could you open your eyes just for a second and make sure that he hasn’t got a damned gun at his disposal?”
While I was in my study, seated on the arm of the famous sofa, gazing out of the window, I lavished my advice on Judith over the telephone—wondering whether she was still capable of acting discerningly—and at the same time I was watching Alice and Roger down below, in the garden, busy sorting out their life together.
Alice had landed an important role in a French television series and she had realized immediately that she would have to come to an arrangement with Roger if she was to pursue her career instead of spending her days looking after children. I could not hear what they were saying, but she was waving her arms around in an impassioned way.
“How could I have let you do that, you and Jérémie?” I sighed. “How could I not have prevented it by force? By withdrawing from the race I was not acting in your best interests. Quite simply, I should not have listened to you. I should have locked you in the cellar and blocked my ears.”
Then there was this spectacle: Anne-Lucie on Alice’s lap and Lucie-Anne on Roger’s lap. The sky was blue and streaked with plumes of smoke made by airplanes.
“I know him better than you do. You know that very well. I spent days and days with him. Wait. I went to pick him up when he came out of prison. Why do you make me repeat that? I’m not asking you to give me a speech, I’m asking you to make sure he doesn’t have a gun. Do as I say. Sleeping with him shouldn’t make you forget what he’s capable of. How many times do I have to go on telling you that?”
Now it was the other way around: Anne-Lucie on Roger’s lap and Lucie-Anne on Alice’s lap. The sky was completely blue, with white plumes of smoke made by airplanes.
“I know I’m unpleasant, I’m well aware. I don’t want to be pleasant this morning. I couldn’t explain why. Am I writing? Of course, I’m writing. I’m lucky to be writing. If you are listening to me at this moment, if you have me on the other end of the line, it’s because I am writing. That’s why I’m still breathing. It’s not thanks to you.”
This sofa had withstood the decades to attest to the fact that writing was the last thing left. That there was nothing else afterward. Every second of July I raised a glass in its company.
“The third time he’ll get it right. I’m sorry. Do you hear me? It’s not that I want to frighten you, Judith, but I know this boy. Good God, do I know this boy.”
I was more angry with her for her stupidity than for her infidelity; I would also have preferred to have a rival who was a little older, which would have made the situation a little less painful, a little less obscene, rather than this loathsome triangle that we made up; having my wife snatched from me by a twenty-six-year-old guy who looked barely twenty was something I had never imagined could happen to me. I noticed two paparazzi in the dunes, draped with two enormous cameras. Good old Roger. There was someone who saw things in the long term. The very opposite of Judith. Over the sea, the sun seemed to be crackling. She was silent on the other end of the line.
“It’s your friend speaking to you,” I said before hanging up.
Alice had a far more clear-cut view of the matter than I did. She reckoned that Judith was pathetic. I nodded vaguely. I watched her as she dressed her baby and I reflected on the extent to which everything had dissipated between us, how deep the wound was, the extent to which I had lost her. It was puzzling and terrible at the same time.
“You know that very well. I feel ashamed for her. It’s ridiculous. He looks like her son. It’s like a mother sleeping with her son.”
She was a little on edge, for we had run out of babysitters for the day. Roger had taken the twins to the beach. The baby was whining, expecting better.
She glanced at me. “Don’t you agree? She’s a bit on the old side, isn’t she?”
Alice and Judith had always been on good terms. Never excellent. I had had time to read a good deal about the reaction of a daughter to her father’s remarrying, and I knew that this was delicate, uncertain ground, liable to create tension.
“That’s not the problem.”
“They call it the male menopause. That’s just what it’s all about. Don’t stress yourself. Forget it.”
“Should I stop being concerned about what happens to her? Behave as if she were a stranger?”
“I don’t know. But as far as I’m concerned, I don’t like people making you look ridiculous.”
So she was not exactly glad to see Jérémie move back into his house—and Judith paying him a visit—less than five minutes later. “It’s not good for your career or for mine,” she told me. “It doesn’t make a very good impression, you know.”
Had I not known for a fact that my daughter had no sense of humor, I would have immediately thought that she was joking.
“She’s right,” said Roger, without looking up from his newspaper. “Very bad for both your images.”
Very well. I decided to do without their company in the future.
And so with the summer approaching, in spite of Alice’s various entreaties—in every tone of voice and on every level of pitch, from tears to prayers, from flattery to threats—I agreed willingly to have the little girls to stay for vacations, but neither her nor Roger. I did not want either of them in my home any longer. The page had been turned.
Alice considered me insufferable and let it be known that I had become an irascible old writer, temperamental, narrow-minded, inflexible, and sometimes spiteful, capable of shutting his door on his own daughter, of forbidding her entry into his house. Elderly writers often became perfectly unbearable, she claimed, and I was well on the way. I was just about able to look after a dog and wander around a large, empty house, churning out page after page. An old misanthropic animal.
Very well. I thanked her for the publicity she was providing me with, on the basis that it was better to be spoken about badly than not at all. My agent would not be the one to contradict me.
In the hour that followed, I called Judith at the agency and informed her of the new arrangements that I had made with respect to the unwanted couple. The sky was bright. I added that time was hurrying on and that it was our responsibility to make arrangements regarding the arrival of the twins as soon as possible.
I was proud of standing firm, of not having yielded to my fatherly duties—and yet paradoxically, it had not been so difficult. Possibly nothing else, I told myself, would seem difficult from now on.
I prepared for her arrival. I aired her bedroom for two whole days before she came. I took on a Portuguese cleaning woman. I arranged for the Thai gardener to come.
I was very pleased with this experiment in communal life that Judith and I were going to conduct during these holidays, and with this provisional, temporary return home. Very impatient, very anxious.
I had spoken to her during the course of the previous month, but I hadn’t seen her. She looked to me to be in good shape as I watched her get out of her car and then walk across the garden in her white suit and blue high-heeled shoes, now completely recovered from her wound—the bullet had pierced the side of her abdomen, but already there was virtually no trace of it. I thought her impressive and resilient.
I carried her two suitcases—each of them sixty pounds or so—upstairs to her bedroom.
I wanted to say a few words on this occasion.
“Thank you,” I said to her.
Anne-Lucie and Lucie-Anne rushed over toward me the moment they arrived, as soon as they saw the Petit Bateau bag that I was holding, with a knowing smile on my face, under my arm—we had had a particular discussion in which they had informed me of their liking for basic things, of their fondness for cotton, like their grandmother.
I was in an excellent mood. Judith and I had spent a simple but excellent evening together—both of us very much determined, of course, that it should be thus, but nevertheless, there was no deception, nothing that convinced us we were yet able to sit down opposite one another, each of us was free to get up and declare that it was impossible, with the best will in the world, there was no deception—an excellent evening for both of us, which we concluded in the mild air of the garden in the company of the fireflies.
Alice’s head was covered in a scarf and she was wearing enormous dark glasses; she had not got anything in Cannes, although she was in the running for a prize for acting.
“I’m not going to get down on my knees to you,” she said, gritting her teeth, after drawing me to one side. “I’m certainly not going to throw myself at your feet.”
I smiled at her with total sincerity. “Let’s keep what’s still left to be kept,” I said. “Let’s not be too reckless.”
The twins were waving at me to tell me that their bags could be seen on the conveyor belt.
Alice’s head dropped and she sank into a frosty silence for a while. “Why her?” she blurted out eventually in a voice that was unrecognizable.
I waited for her to raise her head, for her to look me in the eyes, but she didn’t move. “For a thousand and one reasons, Alice,” I replied.
Certainly, Judith and I had no intention of getting back together, each of us being aware that we could not go return to the past and repair our mistakes. But that did not prevent us from doing favors for one another, from time to time, as the days and months went by. There was nothing like living on good terms. Nothing like an ending that offered a glimpse of light. Nothing like an ending that bathed the far shore of the novel in undeserved sweetness.
Well, it didn’t take very much for that fine summer, that soothing feeling I no longer believed in, that haven, to be plunged into unreal and bloody chaos.
So it was that a few months earlier, at the height of a crisis that Alice’s difficulties, among other things, only made worse—it seemed as if my honor was at stake, and my honor appeared to be the thing my daughter valued more than anything else in the world these days—I had eventually decided to—well—put the knife into the wound and, as the stern and flinty evening drew on, I set off.
A warm inland breeze was brewing, blowing toward the sea, clouds were unraveling over the ocean, which was covered in foam, etc.
Pale and gloomy, I had arrived at Jérémie’s door. Pinecones were rolling across the terrace, the wind was soughing in the branches, which were creaking and cracking, the horizon was fading and flickering like a pale altar candle, the porch lighting emanated from a 1900-style lantern that squeaked as it swayed in the gusting wind.
Usually, it was A.-M. whom I saw framed in this doorway, it was she whom I used to visit, she to whom I came and confided my sorrows—and had a drink—but A.-M. had left us and I experienced a shock at seeing Judith on the doorstep—even though I was expecting to find her there.
I noticed that she was holding a glass in her hand and that her ears were slightly red.
“Having red ears, in this situation, seems entirely normal,” I said as I sat down. “Your cheeks are, too. Entirely normal.”
She lowered her gaze. “Jérémie should be arriving shortly.”
“What? Very well. I’m not in a hurry.”
She poured me a glass of wine. I crossed my legs.
I uncrossed them.
“I’ve plenty of time,” I said after a few minutes.
I looked at her for a long while, then I asked her whether she couldn’t control herself or whether she had gone mad, all the while leaning over toward her and asking her to refill my glass.
“Both, I think,” she replied as she opened a second bottle.
I had rarely seen her drunk. It reminded me of some particularly happy or depressing times we had known during those twelve years of living together and I experienced a moment of genuine nostalgia.
Judith had not replaced Johanna and she had, no doubt, chosen a less brutal way of leaving me, but it was proving to be fairly painful all the same.
Time and distance were the enemy. Day after day, the more Johanna’s image faded in my mind, the more I had idealized her, the more I had endowed her with all the virtues in the world. No woman could compare with this infernal machine. As far as I was concerned, anyway, there had been nothing I could do about it. Trying to be reasonable had been to no avail.
I glanced around me. “Did you tidy this house?”
“Here? Of course not.”
“Ah. Very well.”
“Oh my God.”
“What?”
“Oh my God.”
“Of course. What did you expect?”
I drained my glass and started to turn around as she slumped to the carpet. I stood in front of her.
“Alice was right. This meeting is absurd. Don’t say it isn’t. Where is he, are we allowed to know?”
Once again, my gaze was drawn to the photograph of Jérémie’s father, on the mantelpiece—the man was still posing in his vest and shorts in front of his racing bike—and I did not find it strange that this man, with the shifty eyes and a vacant smile, should be at the source of a whole mass of problems that we were encountering here.
“The meat from Grisons? Of course I like it. I’ve lived in Switzerland. But let’s be clear: I’ve not come here to drink an aperitif. Judith. Don’t start frightening me. Be careful. We’re not going to leave one another shaking hands, I assure you.”
“He’s spent the afternoon making you a blueberry tart.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I think he really likes you. Really a lot. You can go and look in the oven, if you don’t believe me.”
I went and sat down again.
“I’d do better to get the hell out of here,” I said after further consideration. I shook my head and then I got to my feet. I looked at the oven as I passed by and the tart was there right enough, I could smell it—and I could see at a glance that he had used my recipe.
Once outside, I breathed long and deeply.
I went back indoors.
“You weren’t looking for anything? You weren’t looking for anything? How can that be, Judith? You weren’t looking for anything?” She tried to hold my gaze, but her own eventually subsided.
He had parked in the lane almost one hour later. Judith had felt much better after having been sick—after often having had a taste for absolution—and she had just emptie
d a bottle of mineral water when we heard him crashing into the garbage cans that stood on the corner of the pavement. As I listened, despite the wind, I could hear a few snatches of music—and I seemed to recognize Jimi Hendrix singing “All Along the Watchtower.”
“What’s he doing?” she asked.
“He’s still sitting at the wheel. He’s drinking a beer. I wonder whether he’s seen me.”
We went outside. I walked across the garden in the bright moonlight, then, as I was leaning over the door, passenger’s side, the car lurched forward and stopped a few yards farther on. I chose to laugh about it and I stood up straight. “Very funny!” I said.
As he went by, I was able to see his swollen face and the cans of beer on the seat.
“What have you done this time?” I sighed as I walked over toward the car again. “Who’s been beating you up this time, you stupid idiot?”
The car lurched forward once again. “Please don’t do that!” I yelled. His dog jumped out through the back window and started to leap around me. “We’re supposed to have a talk, Jérémie,” I said as I put my hand on the car door. “I haven’t got time to play ga—” He almost ripped it off with a burst of the accelerator.
“OK,” I said, raising my hands in the air and turning away. “I give up.”
I picked Judith up on the way, grabbing her by the elbow, as Jérémie swerved around to draw level with us.
“Hey!” he shouted.
I didn’t answer, I didn’t pay him the slightest attention. I held Judith firmly as I walked away, for fear that a moment’s weakness might cause her to go back to her young lover again, but she offered only slight resistance.
“Hey!” he yelled again, braking sharply as we turned into the garden.
A deafening blast of gunfire froze us to the spot. Judith’s eyes met mine. I was no angrier with her than I was angry with myself, quite honestly, but so much stupidity on our part, so much naïveté, so much thoughtlessness, so much foolhardiness as well, was astonishing. Jérémie had a gun in his hand. This same boy who had held up a service station, who had slashed his veins, who had shot himself full in the chest, that boy there, that Jérémie there, and no one else, had a gun in his hands once again and I reckoned he was completely drunk. I cursed between my teeth.
Unforgivable Page 16