On Monday, Selma woke up sure that something was burning. While her husband went down to the kitchen to make sure everything was in order, Selma exchanged the intense smell for a ball of nausea the size of a horse’s eye, stuck in some part of her trachea that would give no respite. She spent the morning throwing up, the horse’s eye refused the most innocent glass of warm milk with honey as she’d always liked it, until her vomit came out yellow and translucent and the heaving finally stopped. For two days it was impossible to stand up without the carpet at the end of the bed beginning to wrinkle and the waves threatening to throw her to the ground if she dared to take a step across it. When the dizziness passed, Selma decided what she needed was air and trees, so on Thursday morning, wrapped in a cotton housecoat over her flannel nightdress and all that covered by a red windbreaker that she hadn’t been able to do up over her belly for quite a while, she was giving Heredero the horse his first meal of the day (she was unable to bend over even a little, and had to pour the concentrate from on high as if it were water for the plants), when she heard her husband coming back. He must have forgotten something; he would have realized as he reached the turning onto the highway. Angry with himself, he would have turned around at the traffic lights, on the blind curve that descended toward the valley, swearing and speeding up more than was prudent at such a dangerous point in the Ardennes route. His routine was so rigid that it struck Selma as laughable, so ridiculous to watch him change gears as he pulled onto the highway, first, second, between second and third he would locate the foil package beside the hand brake, between third and fourth, unfold the wrapping and find the Gouda sandwich still steaming; this was his breakfast every day, weekends included, and before getting to Liège he would already have finished it, folded the tinfoil evenly, placed it on the dashboard, covering the speedometer, and he would use it again the next day, and the next, and sometimes for five days in a row. The first time Selma witnessed the routine, Léopold explained it came from his father, a man who’d lived through the war and poverty and after whose death they found fifty cans of preserves, mushrooms, peaches in syrup, plain and pickled herring, forgotten in the back of the cupboard, camouflaged by boxes of contracts and policies and testamentary minutes, which his father had accumulated in case of another war, another German attack. Selma remembered all this as she heard him walking (a careless way of stepping in leather-soled shoes on gravel), breathing as if he were smoking (but the cold air didn’t transmit smells very well, or was it that she was monopolized by Heredero’s breath), saying hello with a different voice. The fright was momentary but intense: Selma crossed her arms over her inflamed body, protecting her pregnancy. Standing before her, wearing a business suit but no tie—two shirt buttons undone, a hairless chest, the shiny diagonal of a small gold chain—was Chopin. On his face, which was not that of a sailor, was the expression of someone kneeling down before a child to disinfect a graze.
Almost instantly her hands flew to her cheeks and touched her nose, numbed by the cold, and her nose was still in its place, and the same bits of skin on her chapped lips. (Perhaps to confirm that her body still existed, that machine able to feel desire.) Selma went into the stable and turned over the hay at the back, reached inside her jacket, and took out a small white paper rectangle, which she opened with her teeth and emptied onto her glove, held her glove up to Heredero’s lips, and wished the horse’s tongue would erase her from the world as it erased the sugar from her glove. Nothing happened: nothing wanted to save her. Then Selma must have accepted it, because she began to cross the gravel path (her heavy ankles, thighs full of water, hips asleep under the weight of the baby) and went inside her house through the kitchen and double-locked the door, climbed the carpeted stairs, and only as she reached the last step did she notice the magician’s hand was in her hand, not accompanying her, but holding up the unpredictable and oscillating mass of her figure. And at the end of a long gallery of doors, dark because all the rooms were closed so the warm air wouldn’t escape, at the end of this strange domestic tunnel in which Selma remembered the trick of the deck expelled from the hand and the chosen card landing in a brandy glass, at the end of the corridor, their passive, concealing accomplice, was the master bedroom that Selma walked into and the matrimonial bed, unmade and still smelling of matrimonial sleep, on which Selma lay down, on her side in the fetal position, perhaps imitating the one she carried inside her. She was already naked when she did so; the naked man came to her from behind, and she discovered almost in a panic that she didn’t know what to do with her own arms, perhaps because in this position she’d always put them where her belly now was. Selma felt the heat of another waist against her back, the pubic hair that tickled her buttocks, and felt him penetrate her at the same time she saw the magic hand come over the moon of skin and caress her full breasts, and his index finger, able to shuffle at a vertiginous speed and to feel a card of a fractionally different size in the deck of a cheating magician, played with her protruding belly button. Then the hand clung to the headboard, the magician’s open mouth fell onto Selma’s shoulder, and she, if she concentrated a little, could feel a thin stream of saliva trickling down her back that might even reach the pillowcase, which she’d have to wash and hang over the bathroom radiators to dry before Léopold came home from work for lunch and afterward felt he’d earned a nap.
III
Very little was known about that man and his reasons for taking a shine to Selma. Years earlier, when he decided to get a degree in Romance languages at the University of Liège, sure that the study of Latin declensions (those miniature spells) would save him from tedium, the professors who interviewed him wanted Chopin to tell them about his childhood, and he summed it up saying he was born in the Esneux hospital and at the age of twelve he’d first managed to throw a card more than thirty meters in an open space, the Quai de Jemmapes, for example, as long as a seagull didn’t take it thinking it was food. Between his birth and the flying card it was as if he hadn’t existed, he avoided the subject, his face emptied of all presence, and he became mute if someone insisted. He could not bear questions about his parents or when he’d stopped living with them or the way they’d injured him or the qualities, more or less physical, of those injuries, and on the stairways of the main university building, on those worn steps like those of the neon-lit medieval constructions of the amphitheater, he crossed paths with people who mentioned his name and pointed him out and were still talking about him several steps farther down, not the way people talk about a celebrity or a sports star, but expressing surprise, vague admiration, and much pity. Some said that he’d inherited a small fortune, that he lived alone at number 53 Rue de la Loi, and that as a child he’d been an altar boy; others attributed daily visits to Maastricht, the nearest Dutch city on the other side of the border, to buy marijuana where marijuana was legal and cheap, and where he had once put up with threats from a couple of frustrated buyers who refused to understand why Chopin didn’t want to sell, especially not to them, a small bag, and who ended up punching him in the stomach. (Before that, the only time anyone hit him outside his home was the afternoon when he guessed, over and over again for more than half an hour, which shell the marble was under on the cardboard table.) When these rumors reached his ears, Chopin slipped into the university projection room and, without turning on any lights, lay down on the floor, between two rows of folding chairs, and lowered the seat board over his head, so the world at that moment became black, blacker than natural black, but also so that over him, near his face, was a surface his breath would bounce off and he could smell it, feel it, breathe it back in again. That made him feel less cold—the smooth brick floor always seemed to be damp—and less afraid, or at least he summoned up the hope, never fulfilled, that later he would go out into a luminous and lived-in world and the simple contrast would determine, by a sort of sorcery, that the other students would forget his existence, or in the worst case would confuse it with one of their own.
Reality (but
what reality, if what seemed real to the rest of them was variable and horribly uncertain to him) had undoubtedly played a dirty trick on him. He had never pinpointed exactly how old he’d been when he found, stuck in a train ashtray between Liège and Brussels, a plastic box that his father told him not to touch, saying it was filthy with cigarette butts and slime and maybe bits of rotten food, and which Chopin imagined full of glass marbles or little nails, things that had always helped him pass the time agreeably. The two of them were traveling alone and his father was distracted; with luck he’d forget about the dirty box in the ashtray as soon as the conductor came by to check their tickets—which his father tucked into his shirt cuff so he wouldn’t have to go through all his pockets looking for them, mumbling excuses and poking around with nervous hands while the blood invaded the skin between his eyes and beard. But before getting off at Guillemins station, his father picked up the edge of the box with the tips of his immaculate fingers and handed it to the conductor, who looked at it, opened it, and put the transparent lid under the black box and laughed crudely, because inside the box there were no nails or glass marbles but photographs of women (they weren’t just photographs, they were something more; but Chopin could not recognize that yet). His father took him by the forearm and they walked together along the platform and down the stairs and through the frenetic tunnel out to the street, the large hand closed around the wool sleeve of his coat, his fingertips scraping the buttons of the cuff as if they were guitar strings. Something happened at that moment, the intuition of a loss: Chopin wriggled out of his father’s grip and ran back down the corridor. As he ran up the stairs, his eyes fixed on the sharp edge of each step, he bumped into the man he was looking for, who earned his eternal gratitude and unconditional loyalty by winking at him and sliding into the collar of his sweater the cold rectangle that promised all the excitement in the world and wouldn’t just enable him to put up with his father’s shouts and the pressure on his sleeve, renewed and more painful than ever, but also provoked true convulsions of emotion when he could at last lock himself in his room, kneel on his bed, untuck his shirt from his trousers to let the new object fall blandly onto one of the red diamonds of his quilt, and it turned out that those diamonds, exquisitely symmetrical and intensely red, were exactly the same as those behind some of the photos, or was it perhaps that the photos were behind the diamonds, not all of them, fortunately. Twenty days later, Chopin had learned how to shuffle; four months would go by before he exchanged his deck for one not adorned with indecent images.
What he did not tell the interviewers, what he never told any other human being, he recounted in detail to the woman he was to save, the woman who was described or prefigured in every movement of his life: his decision not to go to Louvain but to stay in Liège, the idea of putting his name on the municipal youth employment register, accepting the first offer he received after doing so, from an industrial cleaning company. Could anyone think his meeting with the woman feeding horses was not written? Was it possible, if not for the intervention of the good offices of a higher destiny, that a socially inept man like him, with mediocre aspirations and hardly any talent for life, might be allowed to enter the life of such a creature, not to mention be loved by her, touched by her? If anyone had ever told him that one day he would know this kind of lightness in his own body (a cold wind inside his head, behind his eyes), this momentary oblivion of the leaden mass of skull on neck, he would have refused to believe it. That was denied him, had to be denied him; if not, why had he so feared that he would never find her, why had he cried in the mornings, while the kettle boiled, and why had he enjoyed punishing himself by placing the childish whimpering of his eyelids in the path of the steam when he opened the teapot? This woman had arrived so that would no longer happen. He knew it from the first time he heard her speak—it was a question about the cards, but he had never thought the cards and their movements could interest anyone—because her voice was nothing like his mother’s and yet also seemed to have been speaking to him in secret or by stealth since he was a boy. That night, returning to Liège in his van, twice he thought he saw her driving the cars that overtook him, thought he saw her long, black hair like a Bedouin’s djellaba, saw on a finger of the hands on the steering wheel of each car a ring identical to the one he’d used to perform in public the oldest trick in the world. And the next morning, while reading in bed after breakfast the last pages of David Copperfield, he realized that Mrs. Micawber was no longer gray-haired and fifty, but appeared suddenly young again, carrying a riding whip all the time and keeping her throat wrapped up in a scarf with two embroidered stirrups. The exchange was like an order: Chopin knew that he had to go and see her. Distracted by the emotion of the image, he put the book down on top of the plate stained with egg yolk and began to practice in front of the mirror, as the only way to kill time, the way to make a queen of hearts be replaced by the king in spite of the entire deck separating them. It was a trick he’d been practicing for thirteen days and which would spring to mind a few months later, at the very moment of the accident, as if it were also written that he’d never iron out the final details and that Selma would never be allowed to see it executed perfectly. But he knew none of this that morning, nor the following Thursday, when he went home after making love for the first time with a real woman (so real that she was expecting another man’s child), a woman he would protect forever, a woman different from those prostitutes on Rue des Guillemins he’d unburdened himself with before and who now, according to a decision by the municipality of Liège, had begun to pose in illuminated display windows instead of putting on their coats and strolling around the neighborhood, so the puritanical or timid pedestrian who passed by without looking at them, the hand shielding the eyes like a horse’s blinders, was forced to step on these suggestive shadows: a torso and a pair of shoulders and the line of a garter belt projected onto the paving stones of the sidewalk, or in the case of a woman as tall as Selma, as far as the curb.
IV
Caroline meant strong and brave, and was also the feminine version of Charles, Selma’s father’s name; and for a combination of both reasons she insisted on this name, in spite of its vaguely Germanic sounds not being much to her husband’s taste. The baby girl was born near the beginning of February, on the tenth, which that year fell on a Sunday and immediately after a heavy snowfall. On the way home, Selma tilted her seat back until all she could see were the electricity cables (at first), the crowns of the oak trees (later), and the woven new wool that was the winter sky (always), and she was grateful that her eyelids closed on their own from the exhaustion of giving birth in spite of three whole days of doing nothing but sleeping and swallowing salted biscuits, a total of four bottles of milk with honey, and all the green apples from the fruit baskets that kept arriving in the room, with bows and cards, while her little girl recovered in a glass case, not crying very much according to the nurse—who did like the name because it was also that of the princess of Monaco—crying nonstop according to that nervous husband who paced back and forth in front of the cribs like a hungry vulture. When she was little, Selma had played a game of lying down on the backseat of her parents’ old Studebaker and guessing, from glimpses of treetops or chimney features, which part of the journey they were on, how much longer until they’d be home. This time, however, her fingers were moving, counting: a closed fist and her fingers coming up in turn, one, two, three, because Selma was trying to figure out how long it had been since she’d seen Chopin, how many days it would be prudent to let pass before going to find him. Something palpitated in her womb, and between her legs was a disarray of muscles, a sort of phantom contraction, like the way soldiers (her husband had told her) felt pain in a leg after it had been amputated. But it must be an effect of the delivery, not desire, never of headstrong desire.
Since that autumnal Thursday that Selma had received the magician and taken him to bed, until the day her contractions started, she and Chopin had met every Saturday at nine i
n the morning, taking advantage of the hunting season and the invitations Léopold received (to Modave, to somewhere near Spa, some farther afield, almost to the French border) to go and kill boars or small deer that would sometimes be cooked in the host’s kitchen and served at his house the same night, events Selma would attend with good spirits and better appetite, letting her husband make her comfortable in a nice wicker chair, put his hand on her hair as if she were a sick child, and bring her plates of food and glasses of lemonade, without her having to move even to clean off a little cherry sauce she’d dripped onto her dress. They had decided, as coldly as if it were a judicial concession or a signature on a mortgage, that Chopin would continue coming to see her, he would be the one to drive the twenty minutes (a bit less on empty Saturday roads) from Liège to Ferrières, because the full moon of flesh and skin prevented Selma from getting into a driver’s seat without her belly button coming into contact with the padded steering wheel. So it was the magician, whose supernatural sense of time enabled him to do without watches without ever being late, who arrived at the house in the Ardennes when barely forty minutes had passed since Léopold’s departure, parked on the other side of the road—in front of the abandoned caravan where a family of Albanian gypsies had lived for a few months—came through the gate looking straight at the dry rectangle left on the gravel, the white space the husband’s four-by-four had occupied during the rainy night, and entered the house through the French doors of the kitchen, which Selma unlocked when she came down, just after dawn to put the coffee on the stove. The smell of fresh coffee in the air worked as a secret code on Chopin and at the same time as an arousing drug, and so he climbed the stairs, hands in his pockets (a key ring, a deck of cards), his gaze fixed on the last step like that of a missing person returning, but without hunger or shock, simply wanting to slip into a warm bed and feel protected. Selma, for her part, knew that she had time for a shower after seeing Léopold off, but instead of taking one she undressed under the covers, opened her legs as if she were already in labor, and began to touch herself, her fingers barely caressing her pubic hair and then her inflamed vulva, fondling with fascination all the changes in her vagina. Chopin rapped twice on the door frame before going into the bedroom and immediately hung his jacket on the doorknob, and when he got into bed with Selma he had a curious impression of the fluidity of his body, as if the lover didn’t even have to lift the bedclothes to find himself beside her, nuzzling her underarm with his head like a newly hatched baby bird and searching out her lips, the earthen rings of her nipples. Unlike Léopold, he did not fall asleep after ejaculating inside her with his mouth open on her back, salivating, his hips shaking; instead he lay on his side, his head resting on his right hand, and looked at her, but in his gaze there was no realization but a sort of diaphanous blank, as if the orgasm had emptied him also of the ability to identify where he was, the name of the woman whose bed he was sharing. After sex, she filled her bathtub with hot water and delighted in entering that rudimentary void; it was a pleasure to lose the sensation of weight, feel light although round as a bottle, free of the unfriendly gravity that made her ankles ache all day long. Then she called Chopin and asked him to sit on the lid of the toilet and explain how he did one of his tricks, and thus, floating in bathwater up to her neck, breathing in the steam and the delicate scent of the oatmeal soap, facing a magician doing what magicians never do (facing a telltale magician, a traitor to his breed), she felt full and contented, thought there would never be any reason to modify this routine.
Lovers on All Saints' Day Page 13