Last night we did away with sleep. In the morning my face looks grey in the mirror: a shelled walnut. Knife handles burn me, damp cloths chill me, the fridge light dazzles me. I have to sit on a stool to check over my filets mignons. Every movement comes at a price. A potato weighs as much as a wild boar, a sprig of parsley as much as an ancient oak. The peppercorns bursting under the pressure of my blade and the coriander seeds breaking up in the mill squeal and scream. A customer puts his coffee cup down on his saucer a little too violently and the clatter of china startles me. I say ‘ah!’ but no one hears me. My voice is buried somewhere in the depths of my stomach. I get up to fetch some prunes from a jar on the shelf and collapse half-way there. As my head smacks the floor I check that the knife I had in my hand hasn’t planted itself in my body. No, there it is, a few centimetres from my face. Phew! I’m not dead.
When I wake up I’m in a bedroom. The sun is filtering between drawn curtains. Beneath my head, a pillow of goose-down. Over my body, white sheets. I’m fully clothed, in an unfamiliar bed. The room is small, with bare walls. I sit up. My jaw feels stiff. I slowly heave myself to my feet, pushing off from the single mattress. I check that I can stand and, walking along the walls in case I lose my balance, make my way out of my cell. The rest of the apartment is plunged in deep shadow striped with sunlight: rays of light stream through gaps in the closed shutters. It smells of mothballs and washing powder. Most of the furniture is covered with see-through nylon sheets. Lengths of white cloth cover the ornaments. I lift the skirt on a clock and find two naked golden cherubs smiling beneath a glass cover. There are display cabinets harbouring tea sets, sets of glasses and dessert services. The bookcase, a meagre one, contains only the complete works of the Marquis de Sade, three apparently identical editions of a treatise on sexology and five leather-bound volumes dedicated to skin diseases. I’m just heading towards what I imagine to be the kitchen when I hear a key turn in the lock a few metres from me.
‘Ah, you’re awake,’ says Charles, seeing me standing there in the corridor.
I don’t understand what my brother’s doing here. Maybe I’m at his house. Maybe he’s moved. I’m ashamed of his pitiful bookcase. I’m also ashamed of the nylon covers. I think what the carpets and gilt-framed mirrors must have cost, now punished under their shrouds of sheeting.
‘I was as quick as I could be,’ he apologizes. ‘How are you?’
I don’t say anything. He comes over and sweeps a lock of hair off my face. He laughs.
‘You did that properly,’ he congratulates me. ‘You look like elephant woman.’
I feel my head. There’s a huge bump, like the beginnings of a horn, distorting my forehead.
‘Am I ugly?’
‘Hideous,’ Charles tells me.
He looks at me and laughs.
‘But I’m obviously funny.’
‘I’ve just come from your harem,’ he explains. ‘They got in touch with me.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘What are they called again? I’ve forgotten their names. Your staff at the restaurant. They called me at work.’
‘I don’t have any staff,’ I tell Charles.
‘Right, go back to bed.’
‘Who are you talking to like that?’
‘To a little girl I’m going to take for an X-ray as soon as she comes round properly. How many fingers?’ he asks, hiding his hands behind his back.
‘You’ve got the same number of fingers as me and I don’t need an X-ray. I feel absolutely fine. I’ve been wanting a little snooze for a few days. Well I’ve had one now so I’m going back to work.’
I go to get my coat from the bedroom.
‘Your place is so big!’ I call from the end of the corridor. ‘And so ugly!’
‘It’s not my place,’ Charles calls back. ‘But you’re right, it is ugly.’
We’re at Ben’s house. Or, to be precise, at Ben’s late parents’ house. Charles opens the living-room shutters and shows me, bang opposite, on the other side of the street, my restaurant with its lack of sign and its bare windows. Ben the local boy, I think to myself. Then I remember the evening when he claimed to have missed the last Métro so he could sleep at the restaurant. I’m touched by his lie, more than I would have been by an admission. I screw up my eyes to try to see through the panes whether the restaurant is empty or full. I can’t make out any movement. It’s the quietest time of day, mid-afternoon. From up on the second floor I look at our short wide street in the late winter sunlight. The buildings are dirty, leaning slightly, growing beards of straggly weeds, metal shutters half-lowered like weary eyelids, vast porches opening onto wizened little courtyards along a vice-like formation of façades bouncing the sun’s reflection back at each other, quickly, quickly, in a billiard game of light. A little further down on the right-hand side, parked by the pavement in front of Vincent’s shop, I notice a blue van, a unique blue, a blue from our childhood, clear and hard.
‘Shit!’ I say. ‘Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!’
Charles looks at me inquiringly. He can’t help smiling. It’s because of my bump. That bump has made his day.
‘You see that van?’ I ask him.
He nods.
‘Well… that vehicle is extremely important to me.’
I’m conscious of the fact that this sentence has no hope of reassuring him about my mental faculties, but I don’t know how else to explain things. I stand facing him, in the light, and pull my hair back: I want him to tell me honestly how I look. He bursts out laughing.
‘That bad?’
‘Look at yourself in the mirror,’ he tells me. ‘It’s brilliant. No, really. And it’s beginning to go quite a colour now, tending towards greens, and purples… a bit of yellow too.’
I don’t want a mirror. I drag as much hair as I can over my face. ‘And like that,’ I ask him, ‘how’s that?’
‘Like a dog,’ he says without a moment’s hesitation.
A dog, I think to myself, perfect. It is as a dog, then, that I will see my old friend, Ali Slimane.
‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ Charles asks me.
He looks so sad, I think to myself. Why do we never see each other? I don’t look after him. I don’t deserve to be a big sister. That makes it a full house for me then. What’s that all about, growing up together, bound together like the fingers of a hand and then losing touch like boats set adrift? No one warned me. As children we were a fortress. I came home from school and there he was with his Lego and cars. I thumped him. He bit me. We watched TV, huddled together. He rifled through my things. I passed my ear infections onto him. He wore my trousers and jumpers. We were each other’s alibi, against our parents. Occasionally we betrayed each other. We hated each other. I made fun of his spelling. Then we would club together to buy a purse on mother’s day or a tie on father’s day. We were in the same boat. How could I have believed it would go on forever? How could I have let the moorings break away?
‘I’ve been useless,’ says Charles.
‘What?’
‘All these years. I’ve been useless.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘About your fuck-ups, and my own.’
I laugh.
‘Oh,’ I say philosophically, ‘my fuck-ups!’
I want to ask him for news of Hugo. It’s almost there, on the tip of my tongue. I know he’s seen him. There have been Christmases, birthdays, funerals. Where is my son? Just that. I want to know where he lives. I want to see him. I miss my son.
‘Which one of them’s your lover?’ asks Charles.
I don’t understand.
‘The young one or the up-tight one?’
‘It’s none of your business.’
‘Go on, tell me.’
He has opened the apartment door. Once we are out on the landing he locks it up.
‘Did he give you his keys?’ I ask.
‘He’s very polite. What’s-his-name.’
‘Ben.’
Ben really hesitated but he thought it would be good to let a member of the family know. He felt guilty because he thought I should possibly have gone to hospital but he couldn’t miss a shift, he thought I would be furious with him if he shut up shop.
‘The other one, the up-tight one,’ Charles says, ‘came and gave him a hand.’
‘He’s not up-tight,’ I say. ‘He’s a florist.’
‘I don’t see the connection.’
‘Well, I do.’
We go our separate ways outside the building.
‘Go back to work,’ I tell my brother.
‘You too.’
He straightens my dog-like hairstyle and I give a little bark in reply.
‘By the way,’ I say when he’s already a little way away, ‘what did you think of Chez moi?’
I wave my hand in the direction of the restaurant.
‘Very you,’ he tells me. ‘But it’s a bit small, isn’t it?’
This male conspiracy is beginning to get on my nerves.
‘Come and eat there some time.’
He doesn’t answer but smiles, then disappears on his huge and impeccably clean motorbike.
I cross the street, shakily. The blue van is staring at me with its wide-set headlights on either side of its metal grill snout. I’ve got a metallic taste in my mouth, the taste of blood. When I get to the door I take an elastic band from my pocket and put my hair in a ponytail. Goodbye dog. Goodbye beauty. I go home as a novice unicorn. There are three knights waiting for me.
My return is a success. Their expressions, their laughter. They invite me to sit at their table. I shake Ali’s hand, without meeting his eye. Never in my life have I felt so intimidated.
‘Mr Slimane agrees with us,’ announces Vincent.
‘Yes, fine, that’s enough,’ I say. ‘Do you really think I’m in a fit state to conquer the world?’
I run the tips of my fingers over my bruise. The pain brings tears to my eyes.
‘You know some people think the bumps on our heads mean something?’ Ben says playfully, ‘well yours means you’re a born businesswoman.’
‘Did you shut your shop?’ I ask Vincent.
‘No, we sorted it out. Simone didn’t have any lessons so we gave her the choice between washing-up and selling bouquets. She chose the bouquets.’
Why are you helping me? I want to ask them. What is this new world where people come to the aid of their neighbour? Are we actually creating the first viable phalanstery? I’m terrified by the mystery of goodness. Everything suddenly seems unbearably solemn. I don’t deserve this. I don’t feel I belong here as queen of the kindly kingdom of gentleness and fine feelings. I’m a dangerous woman. I’m a wicked woman. The biggest fucker-upper the world has ever brought forth. Prison is what I deserve. No one has actually complained but that’s no excuse. I should have given myself up, gone to the first police station I could find and asked them to put me in hand-cuffs for sleeping with an adolescent, corrupting him, giving in to my abject urges, failing to protect him from his own folly. Did I harm him? What was he avenging? Because it was to do with revenge, and premeditated, with recordings and photos to back it up. Documents he made a point of passing on to my son and my husband.
I don’t remember seeing Hugo again after that. Only the settings are still imprinted on my memory, empty of actors. I can picture the ransacked apartment, my clothes strewn all over the place, even down the loos, the broken doors, upturned chairs, shattered mirrors, crockery in the corridor, books torn and trampled. I can hear Rainer’s voice bellowing ‘You had no right! You had no right!’ He should have killed me. He certainly could have done and wanted to. I know what stopped him: he didn’t want both Hugo’s parents to be criminals. He kept a modicum of restraint for his sake, for our child. ‘Your mother’s mad,’ he told him. ‘Your poor mother doesn’t know what she’s doing.’ Where was my son at this point? Holed up in his bedroom with his head on his knees, struggling to blot out the memory of his mother’s moaning and gasping, her thighs, her breasts. Try as I might, I can’t find him anywhere. My memory is very good and very bad. I can remember the exact angle of one of my skirts which had waltzed over onto a lampshade, the folds in the silk, the light from the bulb filtering through the pattern; I can remember the rose in the middle of a plate broken in four under the bathroom cabinet, my eyes locked onto it when I crawled in there with my head on the tiles, looking for shelter; I can remember the perfume bottle spilt on the bedroom carpet, the sickening smell, the orangey stain; I can remember the sense of relief now that, at last, my life was just as chaotic on the outside as it was on the inside as if, for all those years, maintaining order had been the most unbearable lie. In any event, we were there. We no longer had to fear the worst, it had happened. Those images are as clear in my mind as if I had spent hours constructing them and organizing them. Terror brought an end to terror, swallowing itself up, and slowly - even though everything was happening very quickly - I started to think thank you, thank you.
Rainer dragged me from one room to another, pulling me by my hair. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Look what you’ve done.’ I registered every last detail. Every garment turned inside out, every piece of furniture hurled upside-down was a reward. I had thoroughly demolished the pretty life of buttered bread and hemlines, the pleasant existence of Sunday roasts and freshly-ironed clothes. At the beginning I probably took a bit too much of a run-up for the simple somersault that turns a young girl into a wife and mother: I had landed, head over heels, infinitely grotesque.
Hugo! Hugo! I call him, in vain, in my memories. No one answers.
A period scene springs to mind. Lit by candlelight, smell of hay and cattle, blood trickling lazily into an enamel bowl. ‘The mother or the child?’ the doctor asks the weeping father. ‘Which of them should I keep alive? Which of them, sir, will make you happier?’ ‘The mother and the child,’ replies the father, emphasizing the co-ordinating conjunction which gives his life meaning. But the doctor completely misunderstands, instead of saving them both he assassinates them. There, you can be happy now. No mother, no child. No jealousy.
The sun is sinking. Ali Slimane takes me on a tour of my kitchen. When he walks, not a sound. When he talks, a gentle murmur.
‘Preserved food there.’
The butcher’s block is adorned with two rows of multicoloured jars.
‘Fresh vegetables there.’
He leans forward and I lean with him; my knees crack, his don’t. He has created an opening under the window and built a larder cupboard of wicker and bamboo. Luxurious cabbages, self-satisfied leeks, arching chard, earthy carrots, ravishing little turnips and all sorts of different squashes, some with markings like an ocelot, some shaped like gourds and others sheltering under impish bonnets of stalk.
‘Dried vegetables.’
In wooden pails, raised off the ground by hollow bricks, there are black-eyed beans watching me, lentils sleeping, haricot beans slithering and chickpeas tumbling.
‘Dairy products.’
There is now a portable chiller cabinet above my fridge. It is opened by means of a large aluminium handle which you lift then turn. It’s a precious old-fashioned kitchen unit harbouring the cool half-light so beneficial to goat’s and ewe’s cheese, fresh cream and yoghurt in strainers.
‘As for the meat,’ he says, ‘I’ve given you lamb, poultry, and a few partridges too. I supply every two days. I can sort something out for fish but it’s more complicated.’
‘Forget about the fish,’ I tell him. ‘All this is wonderful as it is. Have you got a bill for me?’
He hands me a piece of paper and quickly turns away. He whistles a slow tune between his teeth. His prices are lower than in the market. It’s a very good deal for me, but for him too. I’m sure of that.
‘You’ve given me a special price as a friend,’ I point out.
‘As an ac
quaintance,’ he rectifies. ‘It’ll be more expensive in the summer. With all that delicate fruit which is difficult to pick, raspberries, gooseberries, blackcurrants.’
‘Will it always be you who delivers it?’
‘Always me.’
I dare not ask how he will find time to run his business if he spends so much of the week on the road.
‘You need looking after,’ he says, his eyes on my bump.
My eyes scoot about, zigzagging in every direction to avoid meeting his. He waves at me to sit down under the light. Outside on the pavement I can see Vincent and Ben having a cigarette and making goodness knows what sort of deductions.
Mr Slimane examines me. He takes my face between the palms of his hands and tilts it from right to left and back to front.
‘I should have put some ice on it,’ I say.
He shakes his head.
‘Lie down.’
I obey him. Lying on the banquette, I look at the cracks on the ceiling and wonder which is the line of luck, of life and of money. All three of them are very long and that doesn’t surprise me because recently I’ve had a lot of luck, I’ve earned too much money and I’ve had enough energy to take me galloping beyond 120. I wait for my treatment, letting myself be lulled by the occasional sounds Mr Slimane makes in the kitchen. He asks no questions, understands where all the utensils live, knows how to light the gas cooker, and doesn’t confuse salad servers with wooden spatulas. After a few minutes an unfamiliar smell reaches my nostrils: a mixture of sage, irises, caramel and tar. The lemon only comes through as an afterthought. How strange, I think, lemon usually comes first. Ali comes over to me with a saucepan in his hand, stirring its contents so gently it borders on laziness.
Chez Moi Page 17