The friterie on Saint-Roch was a mobile home permanently parked on the corner of Rue Saint-Roch and Route de Marches. It was white and dirty, and inside they served sausages and hamburgers and frites and gaufres with hazelnut cream that I’d never tried despite having passed through there a thousand times. As I walked up the wooden steps, I ran into a group of German tourists, and thought they must have come to see the races at Spa. The premises smelled of bleach. I found a two-hundred-franc note among the bullets and shells still in my pocket. At the table in the corner, beneath a collection of old bottles, two men were drinking beer. Above the window frame were disposable cups and a thick glass key ring. The men’s checked shirts were identical except for the color; it was as if one of them had bought both shirts, or as if someone else had chosen them. Apart from those two and the woman in a ridiculous red uniform, who was making the cash-register buttons chime as if her life depended on the volume of that ringing, there was nobody else in the place. I ordered the same as those men, frites and a beer. I chose a table I could see my truck from. The men didn’t look at me.
The older one had a harelip and his sparse mustache made it even more noticeable; the fingernails of the younger one were covered in a black film. I didn’t get as far as figuring out what kind of work they did but thought they would probably be taking a transport truck to Brussels or even to Paris, because they didn’t seem to be in a hurry to leave. The whole scene gave an impression of false calm, because the woman had stopped manipulating the cash-register keys and now her hands were busy organizing the things on the counter. There was something vaguely vulnerable about her, and it amused me to realize she was frightened. But then I thought it was perhaps legitimate that a small young woman—she wasn’t actually that small, but her fragility created that illusion—should be frightened, working alone and late in a fast-food place on the side of a dark road. I went up to the counter.
“What did you have?” said the woman.
I pointed to the remnants on the table. A cardboard plate with a bit of mustard on it and a can of Judas.
The woman wrote large numbers on a paper napkin. She pronounced a sum and I gave her some money. When she was handing me my change, a five-franc coin fell on the sheets of grease-stained wrapping on the counter.
“Don’t be scared. They’re truck drivers, they won’t hurt you.”
The woman looked at me, as if checking to make sure she didn’t know me. Then she looked toward the back, avoiding my gaze. In the irises of her eyes, I saw the brief reflection of the illuminated window. Suddenly I felt uncomfortable, intrusive, unwanted.
“Sorry,” I said. “I thought—”
“It irritates me that people can tell,” said the woman. “Everybody knows what I’m thinking, it’s terrible. It’s as if my face is a neon sign.”
“You wouldn’t be great at poker.”
“No,” she said. “You’re not the first to tell me that. Do you think they’ve noticed as well?”
The truck drivers were drinking unhurriedly. Nothing ever happens in the Ardennes; but all men are unpredictable, and anyone can be a rapist or a murderer. I felt that my presence was the only thing that gave the woman any peace of mind, and that power seemed immense and valuable. Or the woman’s peace of mind was valuable, and the possibility of her being afraid again hateful.
“I can stay for a while, if you want.”
“Oh, no,” she said with a sudden pride. “None of that. I can look after myself.”
“I can stay until they leave.”
“And how can I be sure?”
“Sure of what?”
I thought I saw her smile.
“That you’re not the one who’s going to attack me.”
The woman behind the counter smoothed a pleat in her red uniform, rubbed her index finger over her full, penciled eyebrows. Her skin was ash-colored, paler on her cheeks and broad forehead, darker under her eyes. On her right nostril sparkled a tiny diamond, worn with elegance like a family crest; when a wisp of hair fell over her face, she pushed it back under the red taffeta ribbon holding her hair flat.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess you have no way of knowing.”
She looked at me and smiled, but the fear had not evaporated from her face. Maybe it was a permanent feature, as Michelle’s red hair was for her, or the scar to the right of her belly button. When she was twelve, Michelle had had an appendectomy.
“Why don’t you ask for a morning shift?”
“There are no shifts here. I work all day.”
“Oh. You’re the boss.”
“The bosses live in Aywaille,” she said.
She turned around and took the aluminum mesh basket out of the hot oil.
“Thank goodness it’s time to close. I’m not in the mood to stay here tonight.”
“I can give you a lift, if you want,” I said. “As long as you don’t live too far away, of course.”
“Don’t worry. I live right here.”
“Here?”
“A couple of houses down the street. Very close by.”
“Just as well,” I said. “Is there a phone?”
The woman moved her hand in the air. I walked toward the back of the place. On an old pedestal table, in a little back room, was a black telephone with several automatic dialing keys. It wasn’t a public phone: the woman was doing me a favor.
Michelle’s voice sounded alert.
“I thought you’d be asleep.”
“Where are you?”
“In Saint-Roch. I wanted to let you know.”
“I want you to come back. I didn’t mean to say what I said. This isn’t going to end, is it?”
I’d heard that question a thousand times. In those moments I felt that Michelle, by forcing me to be optimistic, was also forcing me to lie. I reproached her in silence. I know you’re going to leave. That’s what was waiting for me: a woman who tells me she’s leaving. I was glad not to be able to see her now, and that she couldn’t see me. I felt hypocritical when I said:
“Of course not. We’re going to see this through.”
When I hung up, I stood by the little table for a few seconds. I’d wanted to hear Michelle’s voice, but now the conversation was ringing in my head like a rising bruise after being punched. The silence of the place bothered me. I went back out into the restaurant and again the air filled with the smoke of burned oil. The men in the checked shirts had left. Without bothering anybody, without putting anybody in danger.
The woman had taken off her red uniform. She was wearing a long black skirt and a windbreaker for the cold. “I changed my mind,” she said. Under the neon lights, the diamond in her nose looked like a drop of mercury.
“It’s so cold out,” she said. “Can you give me a lift?”
—
THE WOMAN LIVED up Rue Saint-Roch toward Rue sur-les-Houx, about five hundred meters from the friterie. I imagined her repeating the route every night, at this time or later, and in the image I conjured up, I don’t know why, it was snowing. I didn’t believe for a second that her name was Zoé, but I didn’t tell her that. We pulled into a small cluster of three identical houses, with smooth mown lawns as if nobody had ever stepped on them. When I stopped the pickup, I saw a silhouette spying on us from the house opposite.
“Don’t pay any attention,” said Zoé. “That’s Madame Videau. She’s very old and very nosy.”
In the redbrick walls, not a single light was visible.
“Nobody’s waiting for you?”
But Zoé had already gotten out. I watched her walk toward the door, red like the door of a doll’s house, with her hands clasped behind her back. She stopped as if gazing at the façade. She turned around and her mouth moved soundlessly. I rolled down the window on the passenger side.
“I asked if you’d like to have something to drink,” she said.
> I caught a whiff of Michelle’s perfume from the back of the seat, where her red hair had rested. No more than twenty kilometers separated me from where she was sleeping, or not sleeping, alone and without me. I looked at the clock: it was still early. I’d never made love with a woman who had jewelry in her nose.
“Sure,” I said. “I’m still freezing to death.”
I followed her inside. The living room was an enormous exercise in mimesis: nothing in it proved that Zoé had any taste of her own, much less decorative fancies. There was barely room for the two floral-print sofas and glass table, on which sat a box of cigars and a paperback copy of The Little Prince in English. I looked for the room where things would happen that night. The hallway Zoé was walking back up, with a lacquered tray in her hands, led to two closed doors. Zoé put the tray down on the table. “I don’t have any alcohol,” she said in a slightly apologetic tone, as if she were embarrassed. I asked her if we could light a fire and she nodded. I pointed to the cigars, asked if I could have one, and Zoé stammered, she said of course, said I don’t know where the matches are, sorry, I’m a terrible hostess. It was suddenly obvious they didn’t belong to her. I left my cap on the back of the sofa and asked:
“Is the book his?”
Her eyes rested on the mantel of the fireplace.
“Is your husband away on a trip?”
“My husband died three years ago,” said Zoé. “He was a test pilot for new planes.”
She fell silent for a second. Then she added, as if this would rescue the balance of the conversation:
“But he didn’t read that book, either. He wanted us to read it together to help me learn English, but he died before we did.”
The revelation shocked me. Not so much what I’d heard, because cuckolding a dead Englishman didn’t trouble me, but rather the color of those words, the melancholy, the unexpected innocence. I put the cigar back in the box. A bit of leaf came loose and fell onto the glass of the table.
“His name was Graham. His plane crashed just before he reached Dover.”
“We don’t have to do this, if you don’t want to.”
“Right in the English Channel, imagine. No survivors.”
“I can leave right now and nothing will happen.”
“The sea is icy cold there. I’ve been told there are sharks, but I think it’s a lie.”
“Listen. Maybe it would be better if we saw each other some other day.”
“Stay there,” she said. “Please don’t leave.”
She straightened up the box of cigars, which I’d moved, to restore the symmetry of the table. The tray troubled her, and she ended up putting it on the floor. Zoé moved around her house as if it were a museum, and I realized she tried at all costs to keep it as it had been when Graham was alive. But she kept talking.
“Have you ever met anyone like this before?”
“Like what?”
“A woman like me. A young woman whose husband has died.”
I imagined the effort it was costing her to call herself a widow. I pronounced the word in my head. Widow. Its sound and the image of Zoé did not correspond to each other.
“No,” I said. “Never.”
“Ah. Well, now you see. We’re an interesting race. The first days, you worry a little when the person doesn’t arrive at the usual time. And then you remember, see? That’s the first days, and it hurts. Later, you start waking up at night, very late or very early. You think someone’s holding you, and then you start to cry and you don’t know whether out of love or out of fear. That always happens. To everyone.”
“It always happens like that?”
“I’ve read a lot. It’s the same for everyone. Sometimes the stupidest thing occurs to me: I think if only I’d been prepared, everything would be easier now. But I wasn’t prepared.”
“You weren’t prepared.”
“No. How were we going to imagine?”
“What?”
“That we wouldn’t have time. Why didn’t anyone tell us how everything worked?”
I wanted to touch her. I felt that would help. Then she said:
“Can I ask you to spend the night with me? Just to stay here, not to do anything, I’m not asking for anything and I don’t want anything more. Can I ask you that and for you to respect it?”
Her blouse was missing a button. I hadn’t noticed before. Behind the material, her collarbone was rising and falling like that of a cornered animal.
“I’d need a blanket,” I said. “It’s horrible to sleep with your jacket on.”
—
I LOOKED AT MYSELF in the bathroom mirror. It was true that the pajamas fit me, and curiously, I didn’t feel too out of place. I’d only asked for a blanket, but Zoé led me to the bedroom and opened a drawer with a geometric design etched into the wood.
“They were Graham’s.” She handed me a shirt and pair of pants the color of smoke. “I’m sure they’ll fit, you’re the same size. If you don’t want to wear them, it doesn’t matter. I’m just giving them to you so you can be more comfortable.”
“I want to be more comfortable.”
“Oh, good. Then you can change in the bathroom.”
And again I saw her smile. But this time she bit the tip of her tongue, and I could almost recognize that texture and felt a breath of tea and fresh water. Absurdly, her smile became a sort of prize or offering.
Now, from outside I could hear minimal noises from Zoé, who moved around the house like a little mouse, collecting the drinks, rinsing the glasses in the sink. I heard her come into the bedroom, open and close a closet. She knocked three times on the bathroom door.
“Yes?”
“Don’t come out. I’m changing.”
“Okay. Let me know,” I said.
I kept myself busy by snooping around the bathroom, the details of someone else’s bathroom. Since I was little, a locked door has always given me a sensation of absolute impunity. There was a cheap tape recorder in Zoé’s bathroom, sitting on a small enameled glass shelf. Beside it, a disorderly pile of three cassettes without cases. All the labels said the same thing: RADIO MUSIC. I imagined this woman recording songs from a radio station without bothering to edit out the commercials, and listening to the recordings until she knew both sides of the tape by heart, and then repeating the whole operation. I had never looked at solitude so closely. It was as if at that instant someone revealed the rules of the game.
When I came out wearing the pajamas, smelling of wood and mothballs and dotted with flecks, Zoé was already waiting for me between the sheets. I was cold, the skin prickled on the back of my neck. I wasn’t obliged to make conversation: my script only called for my staying in the bed until dawn, filling a form whose emptiness was painful for Zoé. But I wanted to know what Graham was like, put a face to that name, and Zoé took out a spiral notebook with black pages, opened it to the first one, and showed me a dark photograph. I recognized the bed where I was now lying, the lamp on the bedside table to my left that in the photo appeared beside a crystal glass and a pair of sunglasses barely visible in the shadowy image, and I thought that Graham must have had a headache that night and the water was to take a pill with, if indeed it was water, and the headache might have been due to the strong summer sun during some maneuvers. However, in the photo only Zoé appeared, seated in the lotus position on her pillow. Her body was the only luminous point in the frame. The rest were vague suggestions of objects or profiles that were lost entirely in the uniform black of the edges.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“Almost everywhere. We were studying photography, going together to a studio here in Ferrières.”
I brought the paper close to my face. I examined it.
“He’s here?”
“Yes, he’s walking. If I look illuminated it’s because he’s standing beside me shining a light, fir
st on one side of my face, then my body and knees. Then he walked around the bed and in front of the camera, and he lit me from the other side.”
“He’s walking past here. He’s in front of the camera?”
“But we’d turned off all the lights. The room was in complete darkness. He was explaining what the teacher had explained to him. He was saying: “Now I’ll open the diaphragm as wide as it goes, and take the photo over the course of fifteen minutes. You have to stay still the whole time, try not to blink.”
“Fifteen minutes,” I said.
“In those conditions, the camera only captures what is very still and illuminated from up close. Nothing is shining on him and he’s also moving. That’s why he can’t be seen.”
Zoé passed her hand over the image, as if she were performing a magic trick.
“But he’s there,” she said. “Even though we can’t see him.”
Zoé put the notebook back in the drawer. “Can you hold me?” she asked, and I stretched out my arm and she took refuge in my embrace. Her head smelled slightly of sweat. I thought that she would be taking in the familiar scent of Graham’s clothes. Before starting to feel sleepy, I heard her speak, almost to herself.
“When I feel very lonely, I turn off the lights. I pretend that this is the room in the photo and I am the one in the photo, and Graham is here running back and forth. There’s nothing odd about my not being able to see him. It’s just a question of optics.”
—
I WOKE UP SHORTLY before first light. Zoé was sleeping with her back to me, breathing through her mouth and with her arms relaxed. As I was getting dressed, I thought Saturday, November the first, and then I thought All Saints’ Day and then I thought of Michelle. I left the pajamas neatly folded beside the headboard of the bed. I left without saying good-bye, so as not to remind Zoé that she’d slept beside another man, to let her live for a few minutes more inside the spell she’d woven.
The house had been devoured by a bank of damp fog. The pickup’s fan was on, and what the night before had been heating was now a blast of ice-cold air. I didn’t turn on the radio. I wanted, without knowing why, to preserve the predawn silence, the gentle repose of the mountain, the pleasure of not seeing anyone in the sleeping streets: all that filled me with the sensation of testing out a new pair of eyes. In a short while, the men who had survived the night of the dead would begin to come out of their homes. All those who had worn disguises—as had I, who spent the night in a dead man’s clothes—to survive this night, would soon be emerging, and all those who had bribed the spirits with offerings. I counted myself among them. I was alive, in spite of having been chased by souls of sinners trapped in animal bodies. Because I knew that the night that had just passed was the last of the old calendar, the moment when debts are paid, revenge is taken, and the dead are buried so their bodies will rest during the winter. But on this night, the curtain that separated this world from the other was torn: souls were freed from their captivity and some walked the earth, divesting men of their brief pleasures, sowing discord, broken hearts, and terrifying solitude among them.
Lovers on All Saints' Day Page 4