Chez Moi

by Agnes Desarthe

  When he touched me I came out of myself, left my own body. I can remember the feeling, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, something akin to anaesthesia. People - well, most people, I mean - are frightened of being put to sleep artificially. I’ve always loved it. I take delight in leaving myself. At least I did. Rainer could put one hand between my thighs and whoosh! I tumbled like a parcel in the post, light and colourless, falling into the abyss, into absence. It was a drug. I never asked myself whether or not I liked it. I just didn’t imagine it could happen any other way, his hand made me forget every other hand. The whoosh! of a parcel had replaced the music of that wood in Norway. And very soon, after the baby was born, I even stopped questioning my lack of curiosity about what we did because my mind was on other things; I was alert, yes, but it was something completely different that held my attention. I was waiting, with meticulous and persistent patience, for maternal love to come back. It took absolutely all my energy. Let’s behave normally, I told myself, let’s make love with the husband, let’s have supper parties and go out, let’s play with the child, keep an eye on his homework, go on holiday, yes, all that, everything normal, and perhaps if we carry out every gesture with calm conviction, the timid little creature, the warm graceful creature of a mother’s love for her son, the animal that fled, frightened by a slap on the cheek - poor little thing… perhaps it will come back, at night, treading softly, when I’ve even stopped waiting for it, because how many times have I mistaken the shadow of a stray cat for that too keenly awaited presence, how many times have I sat up with a start in the night and thought, there it is, it’s back, but no, I had to go on waiting, to earn its return, to give up hope of it. Anne, sister Anne, can you see anything coming? Stop going up to the tower, stop using the binoculars, make believe and it will come, as faith comes to those who regularly kneel down and pray, joining their hands just as their spiritual adviser told them. Except love isn’t faith. Or… is it?

  Sometimes, looking back, I’m amazed by my persistence and even resent it. You should have given up, I tell myself. You were so tense, so demanding that the love could have come back without your even noticing. You missed it so much you forgot what it was like, you made such a saga of it. And what if you did actually love your son, I tell myself. But I know I didn’t. I know from the tearing sound, like worn silk between brutal hands, that that sentence sends through me.

  At ten past twelve Simone comes into the restaurant. She is alone. Her eyeliner has run in long trails over her cheeks. She looks like an owl: tousled hair, shining eyes, pinched nose and hunched shoulders. Ben goes over to kiss her hello but she pushes him away and sits at the table under my bookshelf, directly beneath Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. I contemplate inverting the order of my books to create a different type of crown for her: Arnold Lobel’s Uncle Elephant, I.B. Singer’s Shosha and E.E. Cummings’s collected poems. A benevolent headdress. A soft downy hat. I can see she’s terribly upset. I note that Hannah is not there: screamingly, obscenely absent. This place is for eating, I feel like telling her. Not crying. It’s bad for business. But I stop myself. I wipe my hands on a cloth, ask Ben to keep an eye on the chicken livers I have just flambéed and which are now caramelizing in the pan, and go and sit down opposite her. Using a napkin, I dab her cheeks dry. She lets me.

  ‘What a bitch,’ Simone murmurs.

  And I know who she means. The bitch is her alter ego, her recently amputated right arm.

  ‘Anyway, she’s always been a hypocrite,’ she adds.

  I like that word ‘hypocrite’, which launches me far into the past all of a sudden, like a flying carpet.

  ‘She’d got it all worked out. She told me she wasn’t in love with him, but that was just her pride. That’s all. Because he never even looked at her. But then afterwards, when we were together, she couldn’t stand it…’

  Hannah has stolen Simone’s boyfriend. It’s very, very serious. You have to picture a battlefield and streaming blood, a bamboo village buried by flowing lava. Her every sentence is so banal, paltry and hackneyed but you have to go with her in her suffering, accept the magnitude of it, respect the enormity of it. I remember my first disappointment in love, how it made adults laugh, how sweet they thought I was. I have no idea what I should say to console the inconsolable. What would I have wanted to hear at the time? I’ve forgotten. I’ve even forgotten what it feels like not being loved any more, being cheated on, humiliated and betrayed. Still, I find it hard convincing myself. I wonder whether Ben hasn’t made the right choice - but have to remind myself that it isn’t a choice, that’s just the way it is, there’s no love in his life. If there were no love anywhere, or desire, or sex, Hannah would be here, sitting next to her best friend. No one would cry and murderous hatred would never be hatched. I suddenly have a vision of a pacified world, a simple universe, washed clean of lust, peaceful and functional. Men and women live side by side, helping each other. Everyone has masses of time to read and go to the theatre, exhibitions and concerts. Instead of running breathlessly to clandestine meetings with our loins on fire, we head calmly through the friendly hubbub of the street towards a booth selling tickets for a ravishing dance show which moves us to tears. Our minds are free to be enlightened and our bodies - which have lost none of their energy, far from it - to enjoy every kind of sport and martial art. People massage each other in this society devoid of all ambiguity, they dance close together, and fat people are no longer ashamed to go to the swimming pool or the scrawny to the beach.

  ‘Did you love him very much?’ I ask Simone.

  She utters a heart-rending yes and starts to sob helplessly. Etienne, one of the older nursery school children who particularly likes our turkey sandwiches, is watching her anxiously. He comes over and puts his tiny hand on Simone’s arm but she doesn’t notice.

  ‘You’ll love plenty more,’ I tell her.

  That’s what one of my mother’s friends told me when I went to her house to cry aged fifteen-and-a-half. I remember thinking she was a stupid old cow.

  I take Etienne back to his table, reassuring him as best I can.

  ‘Give Simone a bowl of soup’, I tell Ben. ‘Put some cream in a separate little bowl. And keep some of the chestnut mousse for her.’

  I watch my livers browning, turning them with the tip of the spatula. I feel about a hundred and three.

  If there was no love, or desire, or sex then Vincent wouldn’t come asking for his daily kiss as well as his espresso.

  Shall I pour you a coffee?

  If you want.

  Shall I kiss you on the mouth?

  If you want.

  And what else?

  Whatever you want.

  Except I don’t know what I want.

  Yesterday evening after we closed Vincent came in through the door into the hall of the building. He smelled of chrysanthemums and he had a pompom of camomile caught in his hair. He didn’t see me straight away: I was behind him, busy arranging my books. I had time to breathe in the smell of him, to get used to his presence. It was after midnight and I wondered what he had done between his closing time and mine. He hadn’t been home (otherwise he wouldn’t have had that flower in his hair), he hadn’t been to a bar (otherwise he would have smelled of cigarettes) or a restaurant (he would have smelled of burnt fat). He must have stayed at his premises when they were closed, imitating his neighbour, to see what it was like. He’d lain down on the floor, with his back on the damp surface strewn with flowerets. He had embraced armfuls of vigorous stalks, buried his face in pillowy petals, bathed his hands in the cold fragrant water in his tin-plate buckets.

  He turned round when he heard my breathing. I felt like asking what he was doing there. But I knew the answer. I had started it. I had kissed him. I belonged to him now. If I wanted it to stop we would have to have a row. I would have to be unkind. Without a word he took me in his arms. His mouth was different. His mouth tastes of cinnamon, I thought; I like it.


  From the application with which his tongue accomplished its circuits I could tell he was bored. It wasn’t enough. I’ve always thought that intellectual curiosity played a part in matters of love. Before the first kiss we imagine it’s going to be a monumental discovery, an opportunity to visit this other mouth and touch other teeth with the tip of our tongue. And then, after a while, we’re there, we know it, we’re used to it, we want to know more, to be initiated to the recesses and hidden corners, to see what no one before us has seen - how ridiculous, but we still believe it with the elation of a conquistador. Something in us wants to understand, and the light flickering at the end of the tunnel promises relief to our inquisitor’s body. Personally, I’ve always tried to understand, but perhaps I’m alone in this. No, that’s impossible, we’re all looking for the same thing: we are guided by a thirst to know, and anyone who calls it a thirst for power is wrong. Vincent wants to understand me and, in order to achieve that, he slips his hand between the velvet of my trousers and that of my skin. He gets inside my clothes, with me, beside me, as if I am at last growing the fifth limb promised by Charles Fourier. His hand is cold and smells of chrysanthemums, his rather long nails scratch me where I am all tenderness. This isn’t right. What he’s doing is incongruous, makes me blush. I already know everything about Vincent and he knows everything about me. There’s nothing to understand. Almost before becoming one, we are an old couple. We can go through all the motions but it won’t be necessary, we have nothing to gain from it, or to lose. We’ve gone astray. We thought we were sailing towards the mysteries of the Indies and have ended up berthed in the drab bay of America.

  What to do with his hand? I haven’t dared take hold of his arm and tear it away from me as I would a weed in the vegetable patch. If the hand carries on, I keep thinking, it’ll get lost, the boredom will send it to sleep, it will come back up to the surface, break away from me and attach itself back onto him, without shedding any light on anything, an opaque hand in an opaque body. But no, it’s carrying on with its exploration and, in order not to disappoint it, so that it feels welcome (because I don’t have the strength to push it away, amazed as I am by its stubborn determination) I think of something else. I think of someone else, someone I haven’t allowed myself to think about for several years, but I know that his name - like a key whose weight alone can reassure the hand about to turn it in the lock - will open me. A huge smile spreads across my incorrigible face. Octave, the widest and least enigmatic interval between notes. No one’s called third, no one’s called fifth, and certainly not seventh, and yet… and yet… Octave, oh yes, that’s a name. It’s his name. It’s the name of the boy I threw my life away for. And it’s actually his tongue coiling round my mouth at the moment. But let’s not rush things.

  He had slipped out of our lives and we no longer thought about him. Hugo had driven him away because Octave had betrayed him, cheated him, humiliated him. Fine. I was sorry, but what could I do about it? He was replaced by Karims, Matthieus and Pierres. I played the game: welcoming, suggesting they came to tea and on outings. My son’s friends were unanimous. They all thought I was nice. Some said I was a better cook than their mothers. Others thought I was pretty and asked Hugo how come I was so young. My big boy passed on their comments in a soft weary voice. I listened indifferently. The little brats were too much for me. They were lively and noisy, bright, well-socialized, well-adjusted; they could roller-blade and dribble and tackle, and were never tired. I thought nostalgically of Octave’s laziness, his languor and ineptitude. What was the point, he had been repudiated.

  One morning, succumbing to a new strategy to re-conquer my maternal feelings, I asked my son to tell me about his friends. He replied with his characteristic good grace, making lists and establishing categories. He was thirteen at the time, and his face - which should have been breaking out in spots and displaying a huge new nose, a hideous intruder between cheeks hollowed by his rapid growth - was still utterly beautiful: an elfin oval with translucent skin.

  ‘And Octave?’ I asked.

  ‘Octave?’

  ‘Do you remember? He was your friend in Mrs Merle’s class, or was it Mrs Arnaud’s, I can’t remember…’

  ‘A complete arsehole.’

  I raised an eyebrow, not used to that sort of language from Hugo.

  ‘He was crap. He couldn’t do anything, but he thought he was so superior. He told me all sorts of rubbish and I went and believed him.’

  ‘What did he tell you?’

  ‘It was so stupid.’

  ‘Tell me anyway.’

  Hugo shook his head. He didn’t want to. He was ashamed. But I would have been capable of torturing him to get him to own up, and he must have known, he was such a clever boy.

  ‘He made me think he came from another planet,’ he said eventually.

  He was probably expecting me to burst out laughing, but I didn’t even smile so he went on.

  ‘One day he asked me to his house. It was weird.’

  ‘Were his parents there?’

  ‘I never saw his parents. There wasn’t even a babysitter. It was big. There were loads of abstract paintings on the walls, huge things with colours puked over them, horrible. And sculptures too. Loads of pukey sculptures. He told me he lived alone and he’d been sent by his race… hey, I can’t even remember what his stupid bloody race was called. Apparently they’d parachuted him to earth to find out about us. The worst thing is I believed him. I made notes for his research, I put together files for him. He was so useless. Do you remember? He couldn’t tie his shoe-laces, he ate like a pig and, you see, I thought it was because he came from somewhere else. He convinced me he’d had lessons to be like us and he asked me to help him improve. He told me it was a secret and if anyone here on earth knew who he was, or if anyone back where he came from found out he’d confided in an earthling, he’d be destroyed.’

  He stopped for a moment.

  ‘Actually, I think he was a nutcase.’

  I didn’t want Hugo to stop. I didn’t know what to do to set him off again. I wanted him to describe the planet to me, to give me more details. My heart quivered in my chest. Octave, my little one. I remembered the way he abandoned his light little head between my hands when I kissed him.

  It was the end of our chat. Yet another failure to debit to our limping relationship.

  Thinking back to that scene, I’m struck by my own stupidity, but I do know that we should never judge passion or sorrow because - whatever causes them and however they manifest themselves - we only ever see them superficially; we only see a lowly version, we remember what was visible on the surface, and have forgotten everything else when later, once we have healed, we study the painless scar of the deep-seated emotions the affair provoked in us. We have recovered. The convalescence has managed to minimize everything, to grind down the sharp shards of glass and reduce them to thousands of grains of sand so eroded by the implacable sole of reason that they have lost their cutting edge. We wipe them away with the flick of a hand, a crystalline powder, specks of glitter. All that remains is the elusive spark picked out occasionally by a chance ray of light, just when we least expect it, but it goes out the moment we try to encourage it, or blow on it to fan those former flames. I will never know what came over me.

  I’ve always loved it in films or books or at the theatre when a ghost from the past comes back. Everyone loved the person but they’ve disappeared. Everyone thought they’d died but here they are alive and well. Everyone thought they were heading for fame and fortune, but here they are back and perfectly ordinary. Platonov occupies a strategic position on my bookshelf, whichever way I arrange it. It’s at the beginning or the end like a bookend, except that it is a book itself, and rather slimmer than the others. I don’t know what it is in this pendulum motion that moves me so profoundly: the return of the hero, my favourite theme and one which - I think - conceals within it the true mystery of existence.

  Vincent has undone the buttons of my blouse
and unhooked my bra, and is gazing at my breasts. It’s going on for ever! I feel like telling him to get a move on. I haven’t got all night. I would like a few hours sleep before going to the market. Because he’s taking so long to put his hand on my breast, because he can’t stop wondering at how beautiful I am, so beautiful he doesn’t know what to compare me with, it’s quite beyond him, really, it’s incredible, even the most beautiful rose, oh! my goodness! unbelievable, how can I be so soft… because he’s taking so long and it’s making me lose my concentration, I have no option but to imagine more going on and, instead of his motionless hands, I solder my last lover’s arms to his body. Octave’s vague, wandering fingers venture over my shoulders. An electric current sweeps from my head to my toes. Vincent has no idea of the passion throwing me at him. I push him to the floor. I’m going to eat him alive.

  But now I’m the one at fault for being too hasty. Because we haven’t got to that stage. We’ve got to Myriam, alone, at home, one spring afternoon. Someone rings the doorbell. But Myriam’s not expecting anyone. She looks at her face in the mirror in the corridor. Her skin has a bluish tint back-lit in the gloom. She thinks about the ice fields: yes, that’s it, she tells herself, I’m caught in the ice. Slowly, she makes her way to the door, puts her hand on the doorknob. The metal is ice-cold, but it’s nothing compared to her hand. She opens the door and he appears. It’s two years since she spoke his name for the last time. She recognizes him immediately. He has changed, though. At sixteen, Octave is much taller than her. He is well dressed, his hair tidy. ‘Hello,’ he says. She looks at him for some time, can’t believe her eyes. He’s so good-looking, his eyes so tender and mischievous. He leans forward to kiss her. His lips have barely brushed against her cheek before Myriam’s face flushes furiously. She thinks how truly ugly the dress she’s wearing is, that she hasn’t got any perfume on and her fingers smell of garlic. She would like to start the day again, make herself beautiful. She’s not thinking of love, but dignity, yes, that’s all. Being presentable. It’s not like when they were little. ‘How kind of you to drop by,’ she tells him, unable to take her eyes off him, wondering whether he has a girlfriend, and if he has what her name is, where they meet and exactly what they get up to. She needs to know everything, urgently but ohhh! how to go about it? ‘Well, don’t just stand there,’ she says, bursting into gales of affected laughter that she instantly loathes herself for. ‘Hugo’s not at home but…’; her son’s name coagulates in her mouth. She didn’t really succeed in pronouncing it, she said Hiuhino. ‘I was just passing,’ says the boy, ‘so I thought…’. If he’d been truthful he would have said: I thought I’d fuck up my old friend’s life, and really do it properly this time. But Octave is not truthful. He never has been, that’s just the way he is. It’s all part of his twisted charm. His irresistible, complete nutcase charm. He comes in and goes straight to the kitchen. Myriam pours him a glass of orange juice. She thinks of the vitamins in the drink, of the good they will do inside that tall unknown and yet familiar body. She looks at the time on the clock. More than fifty minutes before the end of lessons and Hugo coming home. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be at school?’ Octave gives no reply. He smiles. He has a plan. Myriam doesn’t know this. He knows exactly what he has to do. Talk a bit. Look at her. Wait. Come back. Look at her again. Put all sorts of intentions in his eyes. Suggest outings to her. Fill the void of her days with his total availability. Together they go to museums, the cinema, cafés. They laugh at everything and think of nothing. This all goes on during office hours. Rainer is at work; he’s taken on a new medical secretary. ‘It’s too much work for you,’ he told Myriam. ‘You need to rest.’ He hopes the time she spends at home will put some colour back in her cheeks. He is satisfied. After only a few weeks off work Myriam is pink-cheeked. As soon as he talks to her she flushes scarlet. Why hadn’t he thought of it sooner! He congratulates himself.