The Postman's Fiancée

by Denis Theriault; Translated by John Cullen

  ‘I know what you did,’ Tania told him.

  In a biting tone, Tania forbade Robert ever to reappear in the Madelinot, at least not when she was there; then she went to get her coat from the employees’ cloakroom. When she returned to the dining room, Robert was cleaning himself off as well as he could with paper towels. ‘You have no right to treat me like this,’ he declared. ‘I did it only for your own good.’

  ‘My own good?’ she blurted out, astonished by such cheek.

  ‘I wanted to warn you. The Guadeloupian woman – I didn’t make her up. Libido’s apartment is papered with the poems he sends to her. He’s really crazy about that girl.’

  Dizzy from the fresh knife wound in her guts, Tania left the restaurant. Once she was outside, she paused a moment to pull herself together, then marched down the pavement like a soldier. She knew where Bilodo lived, not far away on rue des Hêtres, because on a few occasions, unbeknownst to him, she’d followed him home. What did she hope would happen? Was she going to offer him her excuses? Repair the damage done? The closer she got to Bilodo’s place, the more slowly she walked, and in the end she remained immobile in front of his house, unable to take the first step up the exterior staircase. For the problem remained unresolved: he loved another woman.

  It was a comfort to know that Bilodo had played no conscious part in Robert’s scheme, but his heart belonged nonetheless to that Guadeloupian, about whom Tania knew nothing. And so she went away, bent under the burden of an ineluctable fate.

  5

  Tania confronted the spring with clenched teeth. She made an effort to forget Bilodo, but her walks inevitably led her to the foot of that staircase she dared not climb. Sometimes in the evening, standing there on the pavement, she would stare at the lighted rectangle of his window in the hope of seeing something, if only a fleeting silhouette, move behind it.

  Working at the Madelinot grew difficult for her. The delicious anticipation of Bilodo’s daily appearances had given way to a tormenting void. The restaurant’s atmosphere, heavy with the memory of her shame, weighed on her, and in spite of the loyalty she believed she owed Mr Martinez, Tania quit her job at the end of May.

  Wondering what to do with her life, she considered the possibility of going back to Bavaria, and then she thought about finishing her bachelor’s degree, as her father so fervently desired her to do. Instead she found a waitressing job at the Petit Malin (the ‘smart aleck’), a brasserie in the Plateau neighbourhood. Tania soon realized that her new work wasn’t going to quench her thirst for change, and in June she took a lover. He was a handsome, sporty young man who introduced her to kitesurfing and tennis, but she quickly tired of his mediocre intellect and dumped him, with relief, in July. Shortly afterwards, Tania felt an irresistible urge to move house. At the end of a search for new lodgings she rented a place in the suburbs, a modern apartment she planned to refurnish when she moved in at the end of September – provided she survived that long, because all these alterations in her way of living, carried out with the express purpose of driving Bilodo from her mind, instead only underlined his absence and made her miss him more. Wishing to help her friend get through this difficult moment, Noémie strove to find ways to distract her; she took her shopping and accompanied her to films or fashionable nightspots. Appreciative of Noémie’s efforts, and feeling obliged to put on a brave face, Tania pretended to be enjoying herself, but the truth was that her soul was slowly wilting away. Nothing seemed capable of halting that internal withering, and when summer arrived in triumph, Tania, unable to savour its pleasures, preferred to shut herself up indoors, watching her favourite films on loop while stuffing herself with ice cream and wondering, twenty times a day, what Bilodo was doing, what he was thinking about.

  Sometimes she had the sensation that she was slipping into madness. In agitated moments, she would give herself over to frenetic bouts of housekeeping, but then she’d subside into apathy. Aware that she had the advantage of proximity, that her rival was practically on the other side of the world, she would exhort herself to use that advantage to get her claws into Bilodo...but then she’d watch another movie. On some mornings she’d wake up in a warlike frame of mind and decide to fly to the West Indies and face the Guadeloupian woman in single combat...but then common sense would return, she’d resign herself, and she’d acknowledge that Bilodo had the right to love whomever he pleased. It seemed to her that her life was drawing to a close, that all that was left was for her to die. In an earlier time, she would have entered a convent.

  One night at the end of August, ill from having consumed too much pistachio ice cream, Tania decided that things couldn’t continue as they were and resolved to go and see Bilodo. Not with the intention of winning him over – she forbade herself to harbour so much as an iota of hope on that subject – but in order to have a candid talk with him, to set the record straight, and to shed light on everything that had been festering in darkness since the unhappy tanka episode. Having done that, would she then be able to turn the page in complete serenity? Already dispossessed of everything, what did she have to lose?

  Tania rang the doorbell. In her nervousness, she began to hope that Bilodo was out, but then, when she’d already turned on her heels, she heard the first in a series of metallic clicks. Several locks were unbolted. The door opened and Bilodo appeared. When she saw the way he looked, Tania froze. He hadn’t shaved for months, and it had no doubt been just as long since a comb last touched the shaggy mane that fell to his shoulders. Bilodo had the complexion of a person buried alive, and dark circles surrounded his eyes. He was wearing a sort of red kimono. Tania felt as though she were standing before a stranger. The fresh, clean-shaven young postman, as straight as an arrow – where had he gone? How could he have transformed himself into this cave-dwelling hippie?

  Bilodo’s eyes were feverish. He looked exhausted. Tania, perplexed, asked him if he was all right, admitting that she found him quite changed. Bilodo smiled weakly – so it was him, after all – and averred that he’d never felt better in his life, although Tania remained unconvinced. He apologized confusedly for the tanka business, and for what had happened, but Tania assured him that she knew he was innocent. She attributed most of the blame to herself, she recognized that it had been her fault more than anyone else’s, she proposed that it probably wouldn’t have happened had she not let herself imagine... imagine certain things, isn’t that right? Tania waited for Bilodo to confirm what she’d just said, or perhaps contradict it, but he didn’t reply. Embarrassed, she changed the subject and informed him that she no longer worked at the Madelinot, and that she was going to move into a new apartment soon. She gave him her new address, in case he...if he should ever want...Bilodo examined the sheet of paper, on which she’d written her future contact details in Japanese-style calligraphy, with a brush.

  ‘Give me a ring,’ she ventured, ‘if you feel like it.’

  ‘Yes...’

  An awkward moment followed. There they were, standing on the balcony, and Tania had a feeling that something was about to take place. It was one of those rare moments that come when you least expect them, and during which you feel that anything can happen, that the merest nothing would be enough to change your destiny for ever. Tania knew this was her time to speak, to make a gesture, but the fear of making a false step smothered her spontaneity, and all that she incredulously heard herself say was, ‘Well, I have to go.’ If Bilodo had reacted, if he’d asked her to stay, everything would still have been possible. But he remained silent.

  The magic moment was over. Unwilling to burst into tears in front of him, Tania went down the steps. On the balcony, Bilodo seemed petrified. She swallowed her sobs and moved away, hoping he would implore her to come back. He did nothing of the sort. Tania quickened her pace, turned the corner into a little side street and it was only there, out of his sight, that she gave herself permission to liquefy.

  On the pavement the wind was biting its own tail, making whirlwinds of newspaper scraps and de
ad leaves.

  ‘Rue des Hêtres? Beech Street? Can somebody please tell me how it got that name? There’s nothing here but bloody maples!’ raged Tania, overcome by a mighty sense of injustice as she hurried along that absurd street, as absurd as her own existence. Had the street been planted with beeches in former times, and then those beeches replaced by maples? Or was the street’s name the result of simple ignorance, the work of some old-time civil servant incapable of distinguishing between two different types of tree? ‘Something must be done about this!’ she exclaimed, getting excited. And suddenly she saw herself carrying that torch. The Pasionaria of arboricultural democracy, besieging the mayor’s office, insisting that the street be renamed ‘rue des Érables’, Maple Street. Struggling to overcome the inertia of a resistant administration, canvassing the neighbourhood, raising citizen-awareness of the importance of this poetic issue. Gathering support, but nonetheless becoming the target of conservative factions opposed to changing a usage consecrated by centuries. Refusing to be intimidated, hoisting the banner of her cause all the higher, marching heroically at the head of her troops in tempestuous demonstrations that degenerated into riots, with fuel-doused maple trees set ablaze and chain-sawed beech trees crushing police vehicles, with signposts bearing the name of the accursed street torn down and brandished like halberds in an acrid fog of tear gas seasoned with cayenne pepper, and herself, Tania, attacked by a pro-beech extremist, hacked to death with a machete, elevated to martyr status, portrayed on T-shirts, and finally canonized...This strange sacrificial fantasy was obviously nothing more than a sophisticated form of mental escape that allowed her to channel her anger and her despair.

  The sky was black, reflecting Tania’s mood. A storm threatened. She went down into the subway and submitted to being hauled about by the train, with no more definite plan in mind than to get back home and inject herself with a fatal dose of pistachio ice cream.

  Two stations further on, an octogenarian couple entered the carriage. Tania gave up her place so they could sit together. The fragile old lady placed her wrinkled hand in that of her companion. Moved at seeing them like that, still complicit in affection after so many years, Tania imagined herself in half a century, clinging to the arm of a solicitous Bilodo, still proud to be at her side. ‘But that won’t happen,’ she told herself, mortified. Once again she evoked that special moment on the balcony, the one she’d been incapable of seizing. ‘What were you waiting for, Tania Schumpf? Why didn’t you try something?’ In a delayed reaction, she thought about what she should have said, about what she could have done, and the analysis of her pathetic act of omission left her furious at herself. She resented her cowardice, the pusillanimous shyness that disabled her. Thus galvanized, she decided she wouldn’t let things end like this. She would certainly not allow her beautiful love story to culiminate in so deplorable a failure. She left the subway carriage and boarded the train bound in the opposite direction, ready to go for broke and risk all.

  ‘I’ll tell him how much I love him,’ she thought, conceiving a plan on the escalator that was carrying her back up to street level. ‘And if words fail me, I’ll kiss him: I’ll make him see stars, and he’ll know we’re meant for each other.’ When she emerged from the subway, Tania saw that the storm had burst. It was a veritable deluge, so heavy that for an instant it caused her to hesitate. But the fear that her resolution would crumble carried her on; resolved to act while she felt strong, Tania braved the elements.

  She wasn’t more than a hundred metres or so from Bilodo’s building when she became aware that a crowd had gathered over there, right in front of his apartment. People were milling around a truck. An accident? Tania began to run, praying that her horrible premonition might not come true.

  She broke through the circle of onlookers, ran around the truck, which had come to a stop in the middle of the street, moved closer...

  Bilodo was lying on the wet asphalt. Just as in the nightmare that had frightened Tania after Gaston Grandpré’s death. Except that this was no dream. It was appallingly real.

  Robert was bending over Bilodo. When he saw Tania, he greeted her with a fatalistic gesture. She ignored him and knelt beside Bilodo. His beard was spattered with blood so thick that the rain, though torrential, failed to dilute it. His eyes were wide open, drowned by the downpour. His breathing had stopped.

  ‘No!’ cried Tania, protesting with all her might.

  Because it was impossible. Bilodo couldn’t do that to her. He had no right to die like that, at the moment when she was coming to offer him her heart; it was too cruel.

  Robert tried to draw Tania away from what was now only a corpse. She pushed him away and began to give Bilodo mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Robert maintained that it was useless, but she kept on nevertheless, deaf and blind to everything that wasn’t Bilodo. She administered a cardiac massage and performed all the CPR manoeuvres she’d learned in the first-aid course she’d taken six years previously, never suspecting how crucially useful it would be to her one day.

  When the ambulance came, Tania was still working away, keeping Bilodo artificially alive.

  6

  After a surgical intervention that lasted for six hours, Bilodo was transferred to Intensive Care, where Tania was allowed to see him. Finding him half-mummified in bandages and connected to an array of machines, she felt faint. Bilodo was unconscious. His beard had been shaved off, and so had his hair. His left leg was in a piteous state. A doctor explained to Tania that Bilodo’s most severe injury, a skull fracture, had caused a major stroke. His fate remained uncertain: the next hours would be decisive. ‘Fight, my love!’ Tania urged Bilodo before she was obliged to leave the little room where he was hovering between life and death.

  Tania spent an anxiety-ridden night in the hospital waiting room. She could still feel the chill on Bilodo’s lips when she’d given him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation: far indeed from the first kiss she’d envisioned in her dreams. At the darkest point of that nocturnal vigil, she felt a moment of irrational panic upon seeing a black woman in the corridor – who turned out to be only a nurse. Tania reassured herself: Ségolène, at the other end of the galaxy, could know nothing of the drama that was being played out here; there was nothing to fear from that quarter, not in the short term, anyway. Besides, whatever the future might hold, Tania decided she’d acquired a right that the Guadeloupian woman could never claim: ‘I saved Bilodo’s life. He belongs to me from now on,’ she told herself.

  The following day, Bilodo was still breathing. The patient would survive, the doctor said, but he didn’t dissemble the chances of serious after-effects caused by the oxygen deprivation Bilodo’s brain had undergone during those too-long minutes when he was clinically dead. It was, for the moment, impossible to assess the extent of the said after-effects – they would have to perform tests once Bilodo regained consciousness. In the meantime, he’d been put into a medically induced coma to give his injured brain a better chance of healing. He would remain asleep in this way until his condition improved. The possibility of seeing Bilodo as a disabled person didn’t frighten Tania. She felt ready to confront the worst ordeals. Having obtained permission to remain at Bilodo’s bedside, she glued herself to a chair, resolved to watch over him for ever if necessary. ‘I’m here, my love,’ she murmured in Bilodo’s unconscious ear, adjusting her heartbeats to the slow, hypnotic rhythm of the machine through which his heart was beeping.

  The following afternoon, just when Tania was nodding off, a woman appeared in the room, carrying a bouquet of periwinkles. Tania, who knew nothing about Bilodo’s family situation, presumed that this lady was some relative – his mother, perhaps? She introduced herself as Madame Brochu, declared herself to be Bilodo’s landlady, the owner of the building in front of which the accident had occurred, and disclosed that she had witnessed, from her front porch, Tania’s heroic intervention. ‘What a calamity!’ Madame Brochu exclaimed. ‘If I had only known...If I could have foreseen...’

  Tania poin
ted out that it had been an accident, unforeseeable by nature, but this observation was of scant comfort to Madame Brochu: ‘I feel that it was to some extent my fault,’ the lady said. ‘I had nothing to do with it, needless to say, but I’m starting to wonder whether that apartment might not be jinxed. After all, this is the second tenant who’s been hit by a truck in front of my house.’

  ‘The second?’ repeated Tania, surprised.

  ‘Indeed,’ Madame Brochu confirmed, looking guilty. ‘A similar accident killed my previous tenant, poor Mr Grandpré.’

  ‘Gaston Grandpré?’ asked Tania in astonishment.

  ‘You knew him?’

  ‘Not really,’ Tania stammered. ‘He lived in your building?’

  ‘Before Mr Bilodo, yes. A polite, respectful tenant – never a problem. That is, until the day when that truck ran over him right in front of the house, in exactly the same spot as Mr Bilodo, exactly a year later. It’s weird, a coincidence like that, don’t you think?’

  Tania gazed at the sleeping Bilodo. Madame Brochu’s statement was correct: one year, to the day, separated the two accidents. Tania thought back to the feeling she’d had on the balcony when she discovered Bilodo’s astounding transformation, the impression of his physical resemblance to someone she hadn’t been able to place right away, but whose identity was now obvious – Gaston Grandpré. He was the person Bilodo had put her in mind of.

  Madame Brochu was right: so extraordinary a coincidence couldn’t be attributed to mere chance. What could have impelled Bilodo to rent the deceased’s former apartment? And how to explain the incredible repetition of the circumstances of Grandpré’s accident? What connection had there been between the two men? Tania remembered that Bilodo was greatly affected by Grandpré’s death. In the days following the passing of the man with the red carnation, Bilodo had often come into the restaurant and sat at the deceased’s favourite table, asking Tania to serve him what the late Grandpré customarily ate and then chewing it morosely, his nose to the window and a lost look in his eyes. Tania had wondered why he was so troubled by the death of a stranger. Grandpré had died in Bilodo’s arms, certainly a traumatizing experience, but Tania nevertheless found such a reaction excessive – as far as she knew, the two men had never exchanged a single word. Bilodo’s lugubrious mood had fortunately dissipated by the end of September, not long before he’d been suddenly seized by a passion for Japanese poetry, and Tania had given no more thought to his previous gloom. But now she was compelled to admit that a relationship of some kind must have existed between Bilodo and Grandpré. But what could have been the nature of their secret bond?