No, there has never been any ambiguity between her and Jacques. No misty-eyed glances or footsie under the table, no out-of-place comments, not the slightest emotion. No gestures or innuendos.
Of course people have asked her about it. They’ve suggested she think it over. There must have been something. All the same. For things to get out of control so suddenly and drastically. So irrationally. Something to do with feelings and desires, something she didn’t want to acknowledge.
Mathilde searched her memories of those years for a detail that has escaped her. She found nothing. All the times the two of them had stayed late at the office, all the times they’d had lunch or dinner together in a restaurant, all the nights they’d spent each in their own rooms in hotels, all the hours in cars, trains and planes so close to one another, all the perfect opportunities, yet there had never been the slightest touch of skin on skin, nothing appeared on the surface that could have alerted her. It’s true that once or twice at the end of the day Jacques had addressed her in the familiar form. Jacques, who addressed everyone formally. After several years, what could she conclude from that?
No, Jacques wasn’t in love with her.
It was something else. From the start, he had taken her under his wing, he had got her a management job, had personally negotiated her pay rises with the management. He had made Mathilde his closest collaborator, his right hand, he had granted her the esteem with which he was so parsimonious and the trust he refused others. Because from the start he and she had agreed, without anything ever knocking it off course or getting out of control.
In her job interview Mathilde hadn’t mentioned that she was a widow. She told Jacques what she told the others – that she was a single parent. That was true. She refused pity, compassion, she couldn’t bear the idea that anyone had to be careful or indulgent towards her. She hated those words.
She had told him later, without going into detail. One day on the train to Marseilles in a digression from their conversation. They had been working together for over a year. Jacques behaved discreetly and didn’t try to find out more. His behaviour to Mathilde didn’t change and she was grateful to him for that.
Jacques’s view was always broader and more far-reaching than other people’s. He had an ability to anticipate, dazzling intuitions and an instinctive knowledge of the markets. They called him a visionary. From Jacques she learned everything. Beyond the technical and financial aspects, he communicated his conception of the job to her. His rigour and his demands.
Laetitia wasn’t wrong. She was his creature. He had fashioned her in his image, had sensitised her to the battles that were his, had converted her to his causes. He made her a sort of disciple in flat shoes.
But he had always respected her way of seeing things and their rare differences of opinion.
He knew how much she admired him.
She saw him for what he was. Sometimes Jacques irritated her. Drove her up the wall. His sudden rages, his irony, his propensity for excess.
In Milan he called the hotel reception at two in the morning because his carpet was dirty. In fact the vacuum cleaner had brushed it up the wrong way. He told her the story the next morning himself.
In Marseilles he had sent his meal back in a restaurant with two Gault Millau stars on the grounds that the garnish looked phallic to him.
In a business hotel in Prague he called the receptionist up to his room in the middle of the night because he couldn’t find CNN among the twenty-five channels on offer.
Behind the wheel, Jacques would fulminate, he couldn’t bear to wait or get stuck, he cursed at his GPS.
On planes, he always had to be at the front on the aisle, and was ready to have someone else moved to get the seat he wanted.
But Jacques had got a lot calmer. His rages had lost their intensity, their impact.
So people said.
In the past he’d made walls shake. He’d been worse in the time before she knew him, the time before her. When Jacques was commercial director. When his sarcasm reduced women to tears. When he slammed the door in the faces of colleagues. When he was capable of sacking an employee in under two hours. When he hadn’t yet got married.
With age, Jacques had mellowed. There remained a sort of legend about him, fed by dramatic anecdotes and rumours that were more or less verified, supported by sudden authoritarian outbursts, which he still couldn’t suppress.
As far back as she could remember, Mathilde had never allowed herself to be impressed. Jacques’s moods didn’t interest her. And that was probably another reason why he’d liked working with her so much.
The company had been the place of her renaissance.
The company had obliged her to get dressed, do her hair, put on make-up. To get out of her torpor. To pick up the threads of her life again.
For eight years she’d gone there with a sort of enthusiasm, a kind of conviction. She’d gone with the feeling that she was useful, was making her contribution, taking part in something, was a constituent part of a whole.
The company had saved her perhaps.
She used to love the conversations in the morning around the drinks machine, the little plastic stirrers that dissolved the sugar in the coffee, the supply request forms, the timesheets, the assignment slips, she had loved the disposable propelling pencils, the highlighter pens in all sorts of colours, the correction ribbon, the notepads with squared paper and thick orange covers, the suspension files, she had loved the revolting smells from the canteen, the annual appraisal, the interdepartmental meetings, the pivot tables in Excel, the 3D graphics in PowerPoint, the collections for births and the retirement parties, she’d loved the words spoken at the same time every day, the recurring questions, the formulas emptied of meaning, the jargon particular to her team, she’d loved the ritual, the repetition. She needed it.
Today it seems to her as though the company is a crushing place.
A totalitarian place, a predatory place, a place of illusion and the abuse of power, a place of betrayal and mediocrity.
Today it seems to her that the company is a pathetic symptom of the most futile sort of mindless parroting.
Thibault got back in his car. He started it up, let off the handbrake and drove away.
He went as far as villa Brune in the fourteenth arrondissement for a case of gastro-enteritis, then to avenue Villemain for a case of nasal inflammation. Next he had to return to sector four to see someone who was unable to breathe properly, but not before he called the base to protest.
Audrey had just come on duty. She responded to his remonstrations in the same way as Rose several hours earlier: ‘Thibault, things are crap today.’
She was right. Since that morning, Thibault had felt around him a kind of resistance, an unusual thickness to the air, a sense of everything slowing down but without any accompanying feeling of softening. In fact, it seemed to him now that things had been touched by some unspoken violence which the city couldn’t contain.
He stops in front of Monoprix and checks his next address. He’s much too far up. He must have driven right past it without realising. He’s going to have to turn around. He sighs.
After three one-way streets, he manages to make a right. A double-parked taxi is blocking his way. He’s stuck again. Inside, the driver and the passenger are deep in conversation. Thibault slips the car into neutral. He takes his foot off the clutch and shuts his eyes.
Some days are fluid: things follow one after the other like links in a chain. Then the city clears a path for him, lets him get on. And then there are days like today: chaotic and exhausted, when the city cuts him no slack at all, when he’s spared nothing: not the traffic jams, nor the detours, nor the endless deliveries, nor the parking problems. Days when the city is so tense that it seems that something might happen at every junction. Something serious and irreparable.
Since this morning, now that he’s alone, scattered words come back to him, trying to find meaning in the light of his failure. Now that he’s alone,
Lila’s voice has crept inside his head, with its low, self-controlled cadences.
‘Why did I meet you now?’
She’s lying on her side, facing him, stroking his wrist. They’ve just made love for the first time. That’s enough to know that they’re good together. It’s not a question of technique. It’s a question of skin, of smell, of substance.
But right at the start, that question brings disharmony. There’s so much contained in that ‘now’. Now what? Now, when she still isn’t over a previous affair? Now that she wants to go and live abroad? Now that she’s just changed job? It doesn’t matter. He’ll have ample opportunity to imagine, surmise, invent. Now isn’t the right time.
And then there were other words . . .
‘If you manage another week, I’ll buy you a toothbrush.’
‘Imagine that when I got back from Geneva I said to you: let’s get an apartment together and have a baby.’
‘The risk isn’t that I don’t love you enough, it’s that I love you too much.’
In these words he caught sight of her own dream, her capacity for illusion, words circumscribed by the moment and its fleeting magic, words which he had no answer for. Contradictory words divorced from reality, untranslatable.
Lila would talk in the dark after night had fallen, or in a light alcohol-fuelled haze after she’d had a few glasses. Lila spoke as though she were singing a song written by someone else, enjoying the alliteration or the rhyme, unconnected to the meaning. Fugitive words with no consequences.
He didn’t believe in this fragmentary, intermittent love, this love which could do without him for days and even weeks, this love without content.
Because Lila always had something more important to do.
It wasn’t the right time. And he always came back to that: the love affair was used up before it had even happened. It was worn out from running on empty.
He wanted to be far away, to put some distance between him and it. He wished that time had already passed, the uncompressible time of suffering which he’d have to get through for six months, a year. He wanted to wake up in the autumn and feel almost like a new person, to look at the wound and see only a fine scar.
It’s a matter of structuring his time until he can live again.
Killing time.
The sound of a horn brings him back to reality. The road ahead has cleared. Thibault goes round the block and eventually parks in front of the building where his next appointment is. He grabs his case with his left hand, which he sometimes does when he’s tired.
At the age of twenty, so as not to draw attention to his disability, he gave up being left-handed. Little by little, through force of will, he learned to use his right hand. Over the course of the years, his gestures changed, his way of writing, of drinking, caressing, standing, speaking, blowing his nose, rubbing his eyes, concealing a yawn. His left hand quit the limelight. It disappeared, was folded back on itself or hidden in a sleeve. It was protected. Sometimes, though, it still reaches out when he least expects it.
As he climbs the stairs, he’s thinking about that: the way things come back, return to the surface.
The paint is peeling off in strips; the yellow walls exude dampness. Above the second floor the landing lights no longer work. Before he lived here, he didn’t realise that the city could be abandoned. Could be falling apart to this extent. He didn’t know its ravaged face, its decrepit facades, its perfumes of dereliction. He was unaware that the city could exhale such a stink and allow itself to be gnawed away at little by little.
On the fourth floor, he knocks on the door. He waits.
He’s about to knock again when he hears shuffling footsteps approaching. After several minutes, the bolts slide back.
An old woman appears in the half-open doorway. Bent double, her hands gripping her stick, she looks at him for a few seconds before opening the door completely. Her flimsy nightdress gives an indication of how thin her body is. She can barely stand.
Inside, the stench is so strong it’s almost unbearable. It’s a smell of old age, of closed-up rooms and refuse. From the hall, Thibault can make out the state of the kitchen. Washing up is piled in the sink and there are about ten bin bags lying on the floor.
The woman leads the way, taking small steps as she goes towards the dining room.
She invites him to sit down.
‘So what’s the matter, Mrs Driesman?’
‘I feel tired, doctor.’
‘How long have you felt that way?’
She doesn’t reply.
He looks at her grey skin, her emaciated face.
She’s put her hands on her knees. Suddenly Thibault thinks to himself that this woman is going to die here in front of him, that she’ll go out like a light without a sound.
‘Tired in what way, Mrs Driesman?’
‘I don’t know. I just feel very tired, doctor.’
Her mouth has entirely collapsed, her lips have disappeared.
‘Don’t you have dentures?’
‘They fell under the basin. I can’t bend down.’
Thibault gets up and goes into the bathroom. He picks up the dentures from the floor and rinses them under the tap. The floor is black with filth. On a shelf he notices an old tube of Steradent. By chance there’s one tablet left. He comes back with the dentures floating in a glass. He puts it down in front of her on the oilcloth on the table.
‘You can put them back in in an hour or two.’
He’s seen hundreds of men and women like Mrs Driesman. Men and women whom the city harbours without even knowing it. Who end up dying at home and being found weeks later, when the smell has become too much to ignore or the maggots have worked their way through the floor.
Men and women who sometimes call the doctor simply in order to see someone. To hear another human voice. To talk for a few minutes.
Over the years, he has learned to recognise the signs of isolation. The people who go unnoticed, hidden away in shabby apartments. People no one speaks about. Because people like Mrs Driesman sometimes go for months without anyone realising that they no longer have the strength to go and collect their pensions from the post office any more.
Today something has hit him hard; he can’t maintain the necessary distance between himself and this woman.
He looks at her and wants to cry.
‘Do you live alone?’
‘My husband died in 2002.’
‘Do you have children?’
‘I’ve got a son.’
‘Does your son come to see you?’
‘He lives in London.’
‘Do you get out of the house, Mrs Driesman?’
‘Oh yes, doctor.’
‘Did you go out yesterday?’
‘No.’
‘What about the day before?’
‘No.’
‘How long has it been since you last went out?’
The woman has put her head in her hands. Her body is convulsed with sobs.
Apart from two cartons of condensed milk, the fridge is empty. In the cupboards, all he finds are tins of tuna and sardines. He returns to the dining room and goes over to her.
‘How long has it been since you were last able to go out, Mrs Driesman?’
‘I don’t know.’
He listened to her chest and took her blood pressure.
He told her that his preference would be to send her to hospital long enough to sort out some follow-up with the social services. That after that she would be able to go back home and would get a daily visit from a home help.
Mrs Driesman clutched the table top with both hands. She didn’t want to hear any of this. Leaving her apartment was out of the question.
He couldn’t force her. He didn’t have the right.
He got back in the car, having promised he’d call back tomorrow. Before he drove off, he called Audrey so that the base could file a report. A few months ago, Thibault had seen a patient in a similar condition. The old man refused to go into hospital a
nd died of dehydration in the night.
As he turned the key in the ignition, he reflected that over the years his mistakes had coalesced to form a compact ball which he would never be rid of. A ball that would keep growing exponentially.
He’s a doctor in the city: that sums up his life. He’s never bought anything durable, he doesn’t own an apartment or a house in the country. He has no children and isn’t married. He doesn’t know why. Perhaps because he doesn’t have a ring finger on his left hand. No alliance is possible. He goes back to see his family only once a year.
He doesn’t know why he is so far in general, so far from everything apart from his work, which monopolises all his attention. He doesn’t know how the time has gone by so quickly. He will soon have been a doctor for fifteen years and nothing else has happened to him. Nothing significant.
Thibault looks at the shabby apartment block where this woman has lived for the last forty years.
He would like to go home. To draw the curtains and lie down.
His life is nothing like those of the characters in that French soap opera which was such a big hit in the 1980s. The doctors in that were brave and alert – they dashed through the night, parked on the pavement and ran up the stairs four at a time. There’s nothing heroic about him. He’s got his hands in the shit, and the shit sticks to them. His life does without sirens and flashing lights. His life is made up of sixty per cent cases of nasal inflammation and forty per cent loneliness. That’s all his life is: a ringside view of the full scale of the disaster.
The world has closed in around her. The windowless office, the business park, the whole space. Mathilde is no longer able to think, she no longer knows what she should do and shouldn’t do, what she should say and when she should keep quiet.
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