You could burn a whole tree in there. Just like in castles in the Middle Ages.
The confit would have been a better choice after all. The gratin dauphinois is to die for. She’d like to ask for seconds but they’re not at the school canteen.
‘I’m not going to go overboard with the lentils,’ says Bihotz as he places his knife and fork across his plate. ‘They cause flatulence.’
She remembers Madame Bihotz saying, ‘It’s tasty but it’s a taste that leaves you wanting more.’
‘When you leave your cutlery like this,’ he explains to her, ‘it means that you’ve had enough.’
Everything’s shining. The waiters in black and white move back and forth, with little entrechat leaps as they twirl between the tables, performing some sort of acrobatics with their plates and their incredible sentences.
Suddenly all the lights go out and in the dark a blaze of yellow comes towards them—a cake for a neighbouring table crowded with uncles and grandmothers, a strawberry gateau specially ordered for the eleventh birthday of a virginal young girl who looks like she’d wear panty liners.
Can’t I have a dessert?
He looks at her as if she’s said something that was at the same time idiotic and inspired, as if she was a young queen who should be showered with chocolate, tiaras and kisses, glass slippers (which must really hurt your feet) and silver carriages. Something’s bothering him but he can’t find it in himself to ask her.
Yes, you can. Ask me.
She orders the chocolate fondant with crème anglaise and she’d like another glass of the 1978 Haut-Médoc.
‘How many boys have you already had relationships with?’
You’d think it was a lady with a perm asking her how many lollipops she’d like. The pretty English boy (what was his name again?), and the fireman? That’d make two. Three with him, Bihotz (but is she going out with Bihotz?). (If she’s going out with anyone it’s Arnaud—four.)
I don’t know, around ten? She licks the heavy solid-silver spoon. First there was a surfer, and before that there was Christian but we didn’t fuck, and now there’s Raphaël Bidegarraï who wants to go out with me. But right now I’ve got Arnaud, you know that. That makes (she counts on her fingers) three months and two weeks and four days—my record.
She’s crucifying him. Why is she doing it? Doesn’t he want to stop her, can’t he stand up for himself and show who the real man is, right now?
He lights a cigarette and blows the smoke up towards the ceiling. ‘How long will it be before you use the familiar form and say tu to me?’
The fire is glowing, red and gold, in the bottom of her glass of Haut-Médoc. It’s raining now, pattering on the roof of the restaurant, the flames are dancing, and out the window nature is seething in a feverish sunset.
She focuses on the last spoonfuls of crème anglaise.
It’s funny, I’ve already eaten the chocolate fondant and it’s already in my stomach and I still have the taste on my tongue and soon we’re going to leave the table and what I’m saying to you, right now, is like the fine line, the very extreme limit between past and future. And, can’t you see, that’s what we call the present? That’s all it is! What we’re experiencing right now is already the past and we’re straight into the future. What we’re experiencing now literally doesn’t exist, can’t you see? It’s already finished, it’s already slipped between our fingers, like the crème anglaise, it’s nothing at all, how do I get to think this stuff ?
A big lump of emotion threatens to gag her (is she going to vomit?).
‘My mother didn’t let me drink at your age.’
He’s whispering but it’s like he’s screaming. The last thing she needs is for him to be his mother. He pays. He leaves a few five-franc coins, just like that, for show. She breathes deeply, leaning on his arm, scrutinised by the menagerie of waiters—no more playing cat and mouse for those sly foxes.
The countryside has melted in the rain. The horizon is quivering in the distance, the beaded light glancing back at them. Everything is misty, pretty, imitation Japanese. A soggy owl makes its whoo ooh and flaps its wings.
Primary school rhymes come back to her, about the rain in Spain and the honey and money, of the owl, the elegant fowl, and the pussycat, hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, eating with a runcible spoon, dancing by the light of the moon.
In the sweet-smelling J7, Bihotz goes for her, too hard, too fast, trying to grab her, hold her, so that instead of (it doesn’t take much) thinking only about skewering herself on it (jamming it in, ramming it in, mounting it, milking it, moaning for it) she gives him a bit of a hand job (a bursting sausage in her butterfly-ringed fingers) and then she stops, we’re not animals.
‘Oh, come on,’ begs Bihotz.
She holds back for a bit when he chews the inside of her thighs, but it feels so good, and when he puts his tongue in and then rubs his palm there like she’s shown him how to, it’s absolutely unbearable—she pushes him back and sits on top of him, a ding-dong between the steering wheel and the gear stick, he comes very fast but so does she, that’s lucky. Her itchy cunt is calm again.
She can’t help reciting a poem from her childhood, by Maurice Carême. She must be completely drunk. He opens the window and lights a Marlboro. In the darkness (not a single light, not a single house) he’s almost good-looking. Colossal, manly. It would be so practical to be in love with him. It would solve the whole issue of the future, what to do, what to think, all the problems. They’d live together, her parents next door. They’d have a baby boy that she’d give to her parents. (She must get her head around the whole pill thing, etc.) They would pretend to be together for real, while floods and catastrophes engulfed the world.
That reminds me of one of my father’s jokes (she laughs so loudly that she has to stop and rest for a moment). A travelling salesman books into a hotel, he’s exhausted and all that, but there’s a knock on the door of his room and a really young girl says to him (Solange imitates the voice of the really young girl): ‘For ten francs I’ll do it to you with one hand, for twenty francs I’ll do it with two hands, and for thirty francs I’ll do it with my tongue as well!’ So even though he’s exhausted and all that, he says fine, fine, he gives her thirty francs and the young girl goes: nananabooboo! She sticks out her tongue and wiggles her hands like rabbit ears.
He looks at her in silence.
He’s so hard to talk to, he’s just so boring when it comes to conversation.
Orgasm n. (from Greek organ, to mature, to swell). The most intense point during sexual excitement, sexual intercourse, sexual congress.
Sexual congress The act of sexual procreation between a man and a woman. Having to do with sexual reproduction.
Reproduction n. Any of various processes by which an animal or plant produces one or more individuals similar to itself. || An imitation or facsimile of a work of art. || The quality of sound from an audio system. || The act or process of reproducing. || A revival of an earlier production, as of a theatrical play.
‘Most women don’t like it,’ Nathalie pronounces.
There’s that song by Brassens, ‘Ninety-five times out of a hundred, the woman gets bored during sex.’ And all those articles about frigidity and the postpartum period and lighting incense and putting on soft music and starting with a massage.
Real women are vaginistic, according to Nathalie. The others are clitoristic. The main thing is to find the G-spot.
‘Men are looking for the Holy Grail, women are looking for the G,’ says Rose sarcastically. (Nobody reacts because nobody understands.)
Concepción said she wouldn’t come over anymore because we only spoke about horrible things, but in the end she turned up. Delphine came too (she still has purple hair but apparently she’s got over her tragic gesture). Her mother tolerates their little get-togethers at Rose’s—even though the parents are left-wing, they’re good people. But no one sees Lætitia anymore since it’s got around that she’s a dyke.
&n
bsp; What a fuss.
‘She’s just a snob,’ says Rose. ‘Anyway, what would she see in you?’
Rose’s room is impeccably organised (they have a cleaning lady) and she hasn’t got anything stuck on her walls, everything’s so white, so trendy. They’re allowed to smoke here (only tobacco). The ashtray is an enormous lump of glass with bubbles inside. They drink tea from a very heavy teapot. Rose is lounging in a black wood and leather armchair she has nicked from her parents.
What a performance.
‘When I was on language exchange in England,’ she begins, ‘there was this Lebanese guy who’d been living in the residential college since the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War. He was’—she lights a cigarette—‘much older than me, he had a room to himself, well not exactly but his roommate had gone away and he offered me a massage. He put a chair against the door to stop anyone coming in, and he massaged my back. He went down past my waist, massaged my buttocks and it was only when he started to massage between my thighs that I started to wonder…’
Concé is getting stressed. Everyone bursts out laughing.
‘He massaged me right where you’re imagining and I could feel him rubbing his dick against my buttocks. And I said to myself, what was I thinking? Nothing’s for free in this capitalist society. So we made love.’
She laughs. So everyone laughs.
This story doesn’t fit at all with the image of the bloodbath—of the butchering that Nathalie told her about after Rose had told Nathalie about her deflowering in this same residential college (so she did it again?).
‘And your surfer?’ Nathalie asks her, Solange. It’s a trick.
She heaves a little sigh of rapture. She can’t talk about it (her surfer), it was too great, too amazing, they wouldn’t understand.
She told Nathalie everything about Bihotz, begging her not to say anything to anyone, or only to talk about it using the word ‘surfer’. Nathalie understands the sex project: how she’s sleeping with Bihotz because Arnaud isn’t around. She just changed a few details (with Arnaud I discovered what real sexual pleasure is) (‘it’s true that you don’t orgasm in the same way when the relationship is serious’—it creates a real bond—‘to orgasm like that is real love, that’s for sure’). They did the Marie-Claire quiz about the difference between loving and being in love: from an emotional point of view, there’s no comparison. And what is certain is that you can’t love two guys at the same time.
There are girls who think a lot, like Rose or Lætitia, and girls who live hard, who feel things intensely, and that (as Nathalie said) is incalculable, you can’t put a price on it, that’s what life is really about, in the end the body speaks the truth—Rose doesn’t get it.
Bihotz has bought her an inflatable pool, the biggest he could find, she can do two breaststrokes across it (she bangs into the other side). He pours in two tubs of hot water so that she can get in without freezing.
Maman has gone away to have a rest somewhere.
The population of Clèves has reached a new milestone—2500 inhabitants—the difference between a village and a town. From now on we live in a town. The central business district of Clèves now even boasts a bakery and a driving school.
Rose has come over to try out the new tennis game that Bihotz has loaded on the TV. There are two joysticks connected to a box with wires, a vertical line in the middle of the screen and two little white lines that bat a square of white light back and forth. It’s fun.
He’s weeding again, wearing his wolf T-shirt, which has had its fair share of outings, and which he only wears now for ‘outside’ jobs.
‘You’ve always been a bit rustic,’ laughs Rose. ‘You’ve got to go out with someone in the same league as you.’
Rose knows. About Bihotz. Even though she’s under the influence of Bidegarraï, she’s teasing her in a kind way. With (even?) a hint of admiration in her voice. Bihotz. An adult, working-class, and even a bit of a misfit. ‘Regarded as a misfit,’ Rose adds.
(And her father, regarded as a loser?)
She can see herself in a few years’ time, lying by a brick swimming pool, drinking red and yellow cocktails with straws and little umbrellas (there are heaps of them at the Kudeshayans). There she’d be, in Clèves, in the sun, Bihotz would be looking after her in his misfit way, she’d play sport, she would have lost five kilos, she’d watch TV and get into reading, crosswords and nouvelle-cuisine cooking.
‘Love is stronger than the class struggle,’ Rose says approvingly.
She can glimpse a future full of romance and confrontation. Everyone in the village confused. Her divorced parents opposing the union. She and Bihotz escaping on the first available plane with the help, finally, of her father. She and her father embracing on the tarmac. In his parting adieu, he says he loves her.
She cries a little as she jiggles her feet in the pool. She’d like to live by the sea but it’s too expensive, and even if Bihotz sold his mother’s dump of a house, what would they get for it, a little studio without even a view and then what would they do?
Nathalie says that the whole thing with Bihotz is ridiculous.
In a little studio with Arnaud. By a pool with Arnaud. Panting and arched over.
‘Let’s go away,’ says Bihotz. ‘Let’s fill the J7 with canned food and leave. What’s stopping us? I’ll find work doing odd jobs. We’ll renovate run-down houses. We’ll plant vegetable gardens. We’ll reinvent life, you’ll see. We don’t have to do anything we don’t want to. We’ll find some place right by the sea and we’ll stare at it for as long as you like.’
He’s started tinkering again. He’s taken out the back seats of the J7 in preparation for an elaborate wooden construction that he’s drawn to plan and cut out with the jigsaw, including rounded corners and recesses. He’s making them a bed, with pull-down bedside tables and little bedside lights—during the day they’ll be able to fold up the bed and use it as a bench. He’s aiming for a cushioned but uncluttered effect, all in curves and jointed panels, like the interior of the spaceship in 2001 (they just watched the movie again together on TV).
Everything’s in the joinery, he announces. It’s got to be smooth, so that you can’t feel any imperfections and you can’t detect any of the joins when you look at it. It’s in the gaps, in what is uneven, unglued, badly squared off, that things collect—like dirt and chaos, disunion, discord, evil.
It’s raining on the little swimming pool but it’s nice in the house.
Lulu is taking forever to die; when she’s dead we’ll be able to leave, there’ll be nothing more to keep us here. He spreads out road maps and traces the routes with his finger, curving roads highlighted in green, all spreading out from Clèves, which has turned into a minuscule town in a shrunken corner of a microscopic country.
Take a plane and cross the ocean, with Arnaud. New York. Los Angeles. Hawaii.
Bihotz comes in from the garden and tells her that the weather is improving.
Arnaud coming home from work. He’s an engineer. A computer specialist. Guitarist. He tells her about his day, the people, the world.
She practises concentrating, so she can try to grasp the difference between the two of them, the different lives and different futures.
An apartment in town. Arnaud has other women. She has to fight to keep him. To stick to her promises. A guy like him would motivate her to get ahead.
Bihotz asks her if she’s finished her homework. She is stuck in limbo. Like those characters in Star Trek when the transporter breaks down and they’re dematerialised in space-time.
Sure, there’ll be more of them (boys) (that’s what Rose and Nathalie keep banging on about) (it’s not like you’re going to get pregnant and be, like, forced to marry him) (Nathalie screeches in horror).
But what if there weren’t any more? It’s already undreamed of that she has a choice. It would be better to know what the future will be, and then wait for it without doing anything anymore, like Lulu. A life of being pampered versus a life of
adventure.
She has a vision of herself by the pool (the big, brick one) sipping a fruit cocktail while Bihotz is weeding, or by the phone, waiting for Arnaud—he’s coming home, he’s coming back. He puts his helmet down (he has a motorbike). He undoes the fly on his biker pants and nods at her. She runs over, panting, she takes out his dick and licks it, he remains impassive, grabs her hair and makes her gradually swallow up his inordinately large dick, deep into the back of her throat. He takes his time and she gets wet like a bitch.
She stares up at the ceiling, a faraway look in her eyes and a faraway feeling in her body. Bihotz’s voice interrupts her—‘Lunch is served.’ For a while now he’s been making jokes that are not funny. And his face is changing. He never stops smiling, as if he was a bit frightened. And when they’ve finished their ding-dong, he often says to her, half-laughing, ‘It wasn’t me who taught you how to do all that.’
She puts her hand out to him (they’d had a fight earlier—he was missing a hundred francs and supposedly she’d taken them). She pulls down her underpants and sticks his face between her legs. When she’s had enough, she can see that he looks different again: glistening, slimy, like a fish; that shrouded gaze, its impenetrable force, which sees nothing but wants everything, and wants an end to it—the emptiness of that gaze that has no name.
Bihotz.
He snaps out of it and looks at her now with a tenderness that is worse than the other look. A good old loving gaze from the old days, an incredibly sweet gaze for my angel, Solange.
She rolls over onto her belly, at least she doesn’t have to look at him anymore. He pats her hair but she shakes her head—she pushes her hips in the air, inviting him. He throws himself into it immediately, enthusiastically, but that’s not where she wants it, she guides him higher up. ‘Are you sure?’ and ‘I’m not hurting you?’ and lots of ‘Oh my darling’.
All the Way Page 17