Other people in the group didn’t agree: ‘… these are the last fun years on the internet! It’s still possible to subvert it, and get into these, kind of, utopian spaces. We’d be daft to abandon this whole area completely, on the contrary, we should be trying to defend it and take it over.’
‘Valentine’s not abandoning anything, she just doesn’t want people to know every minute where she is. That’s quite different.’
‘Utopian spaces – what on earth do you mean?’
‘Well, it’s completely free for a start. And you get instant communication.’
‘Oh yeah? And Apple, and your ISP, they’re your best pals, are they?’
Valentine couldn’t care less about these conversations. All she knew was that what she did could trigger such heated discussions. Valentine was getting to be someone important. She liked that. A lot.
One day, it occurred to her, for the first time in her life, to go and see what her mother’s family was like. Until then, she had modelled her behaviour on that of her father: she wasn’t of mixed descent. She didn’t look ethnic, she was just rather dark-complexioned. She didn’t start sunbathing in May, she just took the sun well. She had her father’s nose and nobody’s eyes. Her mother didn’t interest her. She’d always done as she was told, and had simply blanked Vanessa out. It was Magali who had changed things round, by regularly asking her questions, casually, about her mother. ‘And you never wonder where she is? You don’t know what she’s doing?’ ‘So why does your gran hate her so much?’ Her mother liked money, that was all she’d ever been told about her. Valentine had been taught to feel sufficiently ashamed of her mother to avoid the subject.
She’d decided to find her again. Partly out of curiosity, partly to shake off the rules that had been imposed on her. She had telephoned her mother’s family, they had been glad to hear from her, you would think they thought about her every day. They had invited her round. In their IKEA-furnished sitting room, she had listened sceptically as they went on about the great importance of Allah in everything. They didn’t see her mother any more. They didn’t criticize her, but in this house too, her name was never spoken. She had regretted coming the moment she crossed the threshold. There were limits to her openness to other people. The maternal grandmother, who looked a hundred years old, sitting on the floor in the kitchen among the saucepans, mixing up her couscous, it had been a bit of shock, all the same, to think she was linked to these people by blood. The aunts were better, at least they looked as if they lived in the same century as she did. But she could summon up absolutely no interest in anything they said. Some of the boy cousins were cute, but too many of them looked dumb. As for the girl cousins, they were bimbos, either got up like MTV or like Mecca, narrow-minded, spiteful and stupidly vulgar. She had stayed through the meal until coffee, out of politeness, thinking that for once her father had been right, what good could it possibly do her to go poking about in her mother’s relatives?
And then Yacine had walked in. The shock of his presence. A thunderbolt. Animal passion. And really cool, well dressed and elegant. An authoritarian air about him, lighting up when he smiled, which was rarely. Star quality right away. Sporty-looking. Taciturn. It changed the atmosphere at once when Yacine came into the room. She suddenly stopped asking herself what she was doing there. She didn’t realize at first that he was interested too. He’d scarcely acknowledged her presence, and hadn’t spoken a word to her. Just being able to look at him from time to time would have done, she wouldn’t have thought of asking more. He was a young girl’s dream. And then he had stood up and come over to her. ‘I’ll see you home if you like. You shouldn’t take the RER on your own.’
‘Oh, are you going to Paris?’
She would never know how she had managed to ask the question in a calm and detached voice, while inside her a thrilled monkey was climbing the bars of the cage, gibbering with joy.
He had left her at her door, in the old-fashioned way. He had telephoned a few hours later, on the landline, to ask if they could see each other next day. An overdose of magic. And it had gone on for a while: Yacine was Prince Fucking Charming, and a Rottweiler with it, capable of attacking anyone in the street who looked a bit too hard at Valentine, but with her he was gentle, never turning his strength against her. With him, it was like with nobody else. She had dropped her guard and believed in it for a moment.
What Yacine did best was to speak the language of anger. She adored it:
‘… just open your eyes, and you’ll see it’s always, always, the fault of the same people. They need to be made to feel fear. When they go to sleep at night, they need to be shivering in their beds, to think what might hit them tomorrow. They need to be afraid, to be very afraid, like the poor buggers without anything. They need to be afraid for their jobs, afraid of seeing their kids get their throats cut in front of them, afraid of the police, afraid of prison, afraid of being ill. If fear could change sides, that’s what would be good.’
There was a metallic pleasure in this kind of litany. The same kind of pleasure that came from being screwed up the ass without expecting it, it makes you grit your teeth, you don’t come just at first, but it ends with a powerful nervous discharge. A total explosion. He was right, Valentine knew this in her guts, and that was enough. She distrusted her own intelligence, which would have driven her away from him. So she kept quiet, but her temples throbbed. He was right. He got your anger rising.
Then came the icy blade up against her throat. One day, he’d said to her that it was pointless for her to call him any more. It wasn’t going to work. She hadn’t had the courage to protest. Hiroshima. She hadn’t argued. She hadn’t been expecting it. It had been so easy between them. They hadn’t had time to quarrel, get bored, clash with each other, nothing. She knew you can get over anything. You get thrown off course, then you pick yourself up. It was soon after that that she had chucked her mobile into the Seine.
She avoids thinking of all that now. An electric shock. A familiar one. Impotence is a narrow prison cell. You can’t breathe properly there. It’s like having your head in a plastic bag. It wakes her up from sleep. A bitter, physical anger: her blood’s on fire, boiling in her veins as it flows through her. Life goes on as if nothing has happened.
She hadn’t returned to see her mother’s family after that. Their mean-spiritedness, their barely concealed material interest, their false declarations of affection. Their grubby stupidity. Her mother’s ashamed of them. Like Valentine’s ashamed of her. When she’d run away from home, her mother had preferred to pay for a hotel rather than take her in. Valentine hadn’t said anything. She’s used to acting as if she couldn’t care less. She’s good enough at it to be convincing. But still, all the same, my dear maman, wasn’t that a bit over the top? Before meeting Vanessa, Valentine had imagined being able to tell her that the more time passed, the more she understood what had driven her to run away from her daughter and everything round her. But her mother had reacted almost with horror. How was she going to get rid of her daughter as soon as possible? She didn’t even pretend to be anxious or concerned. Valentine had felt, with silent astonishment, a space in her chest tearing apart, like Saint Ursula in the picture by Caravaggio. Her grandfather had loved that painting: he’d taken her to Naples to see it. At the time she’d thought she couldn’t care less and was only pretending to take an interest, but the truth is that she’s been thinking of it ever since. It’s stayed with her.
Her mother had been afraid of this little teenage butt being flaunted under the nose of her man. She’s hooked a rich guy, she’s taking good care of him. She knows nothing trumps youth. Old men are all paedophiles. As soon as their lawful has her back turned, they come and tell young girls how much they prefer their firm little arses. Valentine had pretended not to be disappointed when she met her mother. To be content just to have lunch with her. Content to try and avoid spending all day shut up in the hotel room planning the hours: go and buy an ice cream, thirty minutes; go to the b
ookshop Carlito talked about, and look at the covers of the books in the hope that someone would talk to her, one hour; go for a coffee, another half-hour. The worst was the evenings, the TV in her room didn’t work properly, she waited until she fell asleep. Sometimes it took a long time.
Part of her advised her to be calm, not to complain, to play the good little girl while trying to soften Vanessa up, wear her down and wait for her to suggest Valentine come to live with her for a while. In Paris, things are too complicated. She’s not stupid, she knows what they are trying to do is chain her up. Subdue her. They say it’s because she’s out of control. But she’s not stupid. She watched her grandfather die, she saw them fussing around his deathbed. They didn’t even bother to hide what they were after. How much? How much, for the old man’s body? As if they were short of anything. Her mother’s family, her father’s family: all the same. How much could they get their hands on, how much could they grab and put in their pockets? None of them had actually told her he had managed to make sure that she would be the winner in the inheritance lottery. But she had understood. She’s become an important person in her family. They’ve started keeping watch on her, she knows perfectly well what they’re after: a solid leash to keep her tied up until she reaches her majority. So that they can get their hands on the only thing that interests them: some more money. Valentine had been thinking of telling her mother about it, this was her trump card. The day she revealed that old Albert, by some cunning financial strategy, had left almost his entire fortune to his granddaughter, she would be sure that her mother would find room for her in her house. Her grandfather had had a lot of money.
Albert. They thought he was just a vegetable in hospital. How he suffered. He hadn’t wanted to be kept hanging on, but nobody asked his opinion. And it had lasted a long time. He’d waited to be alone with her to talk to her, in his hoarse whisper. He said she ought to run away. Not to trust them. He knew them. His nearest and dearest, his family. Those were the only true ties, those of blood. She’d always been his favourite. He’d take her out every Wednesday when there was no school, he didn’t want anyone else to come with them. It made Valentine’s father laugh. ‘Oh, he’s getting a bit gaga with age, I dare say he’ll take her to the Louvre, what fun for her.’ He liked to take her for walks. He didn’t say much. But he understood very well what she was up to, as she grew up. What was going on with the boys, for instance, he’d understood. He hadn’t had to hire anyone to guess she was doing a bit of dealing. It didn’t bother him. ‘They’re worthless, you’re quite right not to bother with them.’ And after his death, she was no longer anyone’s favourite. He’d told her not to trust them. That they would be angry with her when she inherited everything. ‘You’ll see, at the top of the tree, you’re always alone.’ She doesn’t know whether he was doing her a favour, or whether he was using her just to get his own back on them. She had told herself he was exaggerating. She still believed that her family loved her, she’d always been told she was lucky, she had people to take care of her. And the problems that had come were always of her own making. But the old man knew what kind of thing his family could do. When they put a private detective on her trail, Valentine realized that he’d been right.
One night, she had managed to lose the detective by jumping on the back of the scooter of some lone rider, and gone to talk to Carlito. When she told him about being tailed, she pretended to be cool about it, while really feeling ashamed. So these were the depths they’d fallen to: paying some woman to watch her from behind, noting everything she did.
He had been peremptory. ‘You must stop seeing the others. Now I know about it, we can be careful when we arrange to meet. But keep away from Magali’s, whatever you do.’
Valentine acted as if she was heartbroken but would be able to handle the situation. Except that in fact she didn’t want to see Magali any more, or the friends who hung out with her. Things had gone wrong over Yacine, whom she’d introduced to Magali. Afterwards, Magali had made a big fuss: she’d shot her mouth off about Israel, and feminism, and his luxury tastes, etcetera etcetera. Valentine had said straight out to her, ‘He doesn’t give a shit, you know, he doesn’t care what you think of him.’ And soon after that, it had been the centrepiece of a small-scale showdown, she’d felt she was having to justify who she was seeing, in front of an impromptu jury. For heaven’s sake, having a prison warder riveted to her back, seeing everything she did, to check she wasn’t going astray, she already had that at home. Basta. The crux of the problem, as she vaguely realized, was jealousy. Jealousy on her part: she didn’t like the smile that Magali – who hadn’t spotted it, and couldn’t therefore have prevented it, as per usual – had provoked in Yacine’s eyes. She preferred just to give up on the whole gang. And frankly, she wasn’t bothered: she’d been as far as she could go with them. That way they had of insisting she explain why she was going round with a boy who said things that were politically incorrect. You would have thought she was back at her grandmother’s. All this holier-than-thou stuff, what’s OK and what’s not OK, what you can say and what you can’t say. They draw this imaginary line, and you’re on one side of it and everything on the other has to be criticized and corrected. Or eliminated. Whatever the colour of the chains, she didn’t want to be bound by them.
Valentine had planned her escape. The day the detective had stopped in the metro to help some old biddy to her feet, she knew what to do. She’d made her getaway in broad daylight. The pathetic private eye, who tried to be discreet and who ate her croissant in the bar where Valentine had her coffee every morning: they must really take her for a complete sucker. It had been going on for a fortnight. A whole fortnight of distracting her follower, taking her all over the place, showing her some sights. Give them their money’s worth. A little porn, that would keep them busy. She’d fixed up everything with Carlito. She’d gone to the station, taken a train to Perpignan, paying for her ticket with cash. He’d come to meet her, they’d crossed the Spanish frontier without difficulty, in a borrowed car.
She takes the bus now to the Oreneta park. Sister Elisabeth has advised her not to hang about in the centre of Barcelona. They arrange to meet in parks where there are always plenty of people, so that they don’t stand out, but sufficiently remote that they are unlikely to meet anyone significant. The nun is waiting for her, her little silhouette is reassuring. The brilliance of her smile when she recognizes Valentine. She gives her a brief hug and Valentine immediately feels comforted.
They walk up a slope between cactuses that look like big disjointed rag dolls. Further off is a eucalyptus the height of a building, leaning dangerously over an overhang. Behind them, the city stretches out to the sea. Sometimes they meet wild boars: fat bodies with eyes full of melancholy.
‘Well, now, someone has come looking for you.’
‘Oh really? Is my father here?’
‘No, they’ve sent two detectives.’
‘Oh.’
Her train of thought. There could be plenty of reasons to change direction, take a different path and move away from this current that both terrorizes her and attracts her. Just like when she decided to run away from home. It’s scary. But you have to do it. In a way, she’s been chosen.
‘You think I should go back home now?’
‘I can’t take a decision for you.’
Elisabeth is like a boxer, fighting God’s corner. She skips around you, testing, dancing, then she attacks, a knock-out punch. She has a notion of what dignity is, and it’s linked to the idea that strength has to be worked for, deserved, acquired. Elisabeth isn’t like other nuns. She has essential things to transmit. She’s become her guide. She could have given Valentine the brush-off, been horrified by everything she stood for. On the contrary, she’s helped her. Listened to her and understood her.
She even offered to put her up, for as long as necessary. She had first given her the keys to a little flat, like a cell, in a courtyard in the Poble Sec district. With no name on the letter box. Sist
er Elisabeth didn’t come to fetch her, she said that a nun on her own in the city is too conspicuous. They would meet in the Oreneta park, in the northern part of town. They had long conversations. Sister Elisabeth knew how much Valentine needed her, needed her advice, needed her as a listener. Then she lent her the keys of a small isolated house at La Floresta. It flips her out a bit to sleep up there all alone, and the hot water doesn’t work very well.
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