by Marie Ndiaye
“This is a friend of Alfred’s, we’re supposed to put him in room 12,” said Charlotte in her flat voice.
“Does he have a suitcase?” asked the mother. “Alfred’s friends are always welcome.”
And her little eyes narrowed with a simper whose meaning was lost on Herman. She abruptly held out a limp, warm hand.
“Not at the moment,” said Herman, embarrassed.
She gave a little bow, humble, welcoming. She was wearing jeans like her daughter, and grimy-toed espadrilles.
“Full meal plan for him too.”
“How much will this be?” asked Herman, making no attempt to hide his concern.
“A hundred and fifty for the room, two hundred for the three meals, plus twenty francs tax, which makes a grand total of three hundred and seventy.”
The mother’s tone was even warmer than before, courtly and deferential, and she stood bent slightly forward, her hands clasped over her belly, not looking Herman in the eye.
“That’s far too much for me,” he said briskly.
Annoyed, he let his gaze wander around the room and saw nothing that could justify such a price. Everything was plain and dull gray. Nonetheless, he resigned himself, since neither Charlotte nor her mother was answering him, and the mother was still frozen in mid-bow. Thinking he’d been rude, he blushed faintly. In any case, the president having decreed that Herman would take the full meal plan for the duration of his stay, Herman had to admit that at the moment he didn’t have the courage, or a clear enough understanding of his situation, to make other arrangements. He sighed, then consented. The mother asked Charlotte to show him to his room, holding her bow until Herman was a few meters away.
“Charlotte doesn’t make such a big production,” he thought in relief.
More than anything, he was struck—unpleasantly—by those dirty espadrilles, so ill-matched to these elaborate displays of gentility.
3 – The room was tiny and looked onto the courtyard. Patting the wall, Charlotte confirmed that the president, Alfred, lived next door in room eleven, as if, Herman told himself, she were trying to reassure him, to certify that everything was just as he’d been promised. Then she went on her way, but he thought he heard her next door, in the president’s room. She must have dropped onto the bed, which creaked and squeaked, informing him that sounds could clearly be heard from one room to the next, and even that they immediately identified their source. He thought he heard Charlotte mumbling, then humming. Her foot gently tapped the floor, keeping time. Herman listened blankly for a long moment, standing in the middle of the room, torn between the irritation of finding the lodgings so deficient and an amorphous, tender pleasure he couldn’t help feeling, knowing Charlotte was so nearby.
“Because she’s going to help me,” he mechanically repeated to himself. “The closer she is, the better for me. Given who she is, just think of all the things she must know!”
“Lunch is at one,” Charlotte called to him, giving three little raps on her side of the wall.
Then she left, closing the door to room eleven, but, he noticed, not locking it. He went to the tiny window, dimmed by a thick grate. He managed to pull it open, and the rain came spraying in. What he saw below him hardly counted as a courtyard, more an uncovered storage area with a row of trashcans. But the room was on the top floor, and Herman had a view over the slate roofs studded with satellite dishes, to the hills beyond, now lost in the gloom. Directly facing him, the back side of the charcuterie only had one window as high as Herman’s. He spotted a face, seemingly an old woman’s face, watching him through the glass. Seeing him look back at her, she nodded several times in greeting, smiling insistently. Troubled, he closed the window, and through the bars he saw the woman still gazing toward his room.
He sat down on his bed and tried to consider his next move. Although he did his best to think of Rose and the child with a compassion befitting their plight, his mind wandered, disoriented, and when it lingered on some thought it more often concerned the president or Charlotte or the receptionist than it did Rose and the boy, about whom he couldn’t think of what to say to himself, except, with a little impatience, “How terrible!” He accused the abundantly flowered paper on the walls and ceiling of distracting him. Everything in this room irritated and repelled him: the chenille bedspread, the little armoire, the Formica table, the shag carpet. He wasn’t used to this kind of world; he’d always lived in an atmosphere of refinement. Feeling oppressed, losing his spirit, and since the old woman was still spying on him, he got up to leave in spite of his fatigue, locking his door and going down to the dining room. It wasn’t yet one o’clock, but the three big tables were already full. He had the disagreeable feeling that they’d been waiting for him, and when, from the end of the central table, the president approvingly waved him over and hailed him by his name, Herman hurried in, chiding himself even though he wasn’t technically late. They’d saved him a place on the president’s right, facing Charlotte. And the receptionist was there too, next to her.
“You eat lunch here?” Herman couldn’t help but ask, surprised.
“Every day.”
Smiling, she gestured toward the two other tables.
“Everyone who works at the town hall eats lunch at the Relais. Actually, we’re required to.”
“Even the mayor?”
“Oh no, not the mayor.”
She laughed out loud, joined by all her colleagues who’d heard Herman’s question.
“Why do you have to eat at the Relais?” he asked, hoping to put the moment behind him.
She paused and thought, slightly uncertain, then shrugged. All the others stayed silent, visibly not knowing how to answer. Suddenly sorry he’d asked, Herman sensed she was cross, not because she’d been exposed in her ignorance but because, for courtesy’s sake, she felt forced to come up with an answer that would satisfy him.
“Maybe,” she said, brightening, “maybe they want to be sure we’re not late when work starts again at two.” A murmur of agreement ran through the room. The colleagues, mostly women, kept their jackets on for lunch, the dark blue jackets Herman had seen them all wearing at the town hall, and some still had their pens in their hair, making them look as if they were still at work there in the dining room of the Relais, which Herman found slightly intimidating. The older woman beside him had some ten pens sticking out of her breast pocket, and two more in her hair. When Herman sat down, she pushed back her chair, leaned toward him, and wished him bon appétit. The president lay his hand on Herman’s.
“So nice to see you again! We’ll be side by side from now on, down here and upstairs. What do you think of your room?”
“There’s someone looking at me through my window,” Herman said quietly, pulling his hand away.
“Yes, that must be the charcutière’s mother. Don’t trouble yourself over her, she’s perfectly fine. To tell you the truth, she sits at her window all day long, so…”
“But I don’t like that, I don’t like that at all, being watched,” Herman whispered, put out.
“Well, that’s how it is here, there’s nothing you can do. When you’re out, when you’re home, someone’s always watching you, what does it matter? Like I told you, you mustn’t hide, quite the opposite, you have to let yourself be seen, you have to appear…absorbed, melded with the life of this place, just as I said. Be exemplary, show yourself, you have to lose every last bit of yourself, all right? Yes, let people see you, talk to you, invite you into their homes! You didn’t lock the door to your room, did you?”
“Of course I did, why wouldn’t I?”
“No, that’s very bad!”
The president frowned, almost angry.
“Give me your key.”
Herman reluctantly handed it over. The president passed it to Charlotte, whispered something in her ear, and Charlotte impassively left the table, dragging her feet slightly as always, just as her mother scuffed her espadrilles over the floor as she emerged from the kitchen with a big sala
d bowl of crudités, her upper body still bowed in the same affected, obsequious, but not entirely graceless pose Herman had seen two hours earlier.
“Charlotte’s going to unlock your door,” Alfred whispered. “Don’t ever lock it again, people will wonder what you’re hiding, and that would be the end of all your attempts to inspire confidence.”
“Who’s going to check to see if it’s locked?”
“Oh, everyone, the other customers, our tablemates, all these ladies, maybe Métilde, everyone will find some pretext to go upstairs when you’re out and have a look at your room, just to see.”
The president broke into a spirited laugh, patting Herman’s knee under the table. But Herman’s dismay had waned the moment he heard the receptionist’s name. Moved, he looked at her, and Métilde smiled back with an air of genuine friendship.
“Yes, you’re going to help me,” Herman said to himself, “and then…”
Flattered, happy, he was caught up in a sort of euphoria that made him want to talk to everyone around him, to explain, to earn their pity and esteem. When Charlotte came back and sat down, he leaned toward her and Métilde, and in a voice loud and clear enough to be heard by everyone in the room he recounted at length what had happened to his family, his failure at the gendarmerie, the idea he’d first had of going to see the mayor. All the while, he studied the two women’s faces respectfully turned toward his, their eyes attentive, their brows thoughtful. A flood of joy washed over him, and he forgot to be ashamed of it as he told them of Rose and his little boy. He didn’t think anyone had ever listened to him so closely, so patiently, with such consideration and goodwill. Everyone around him had fallen silent. Frozen in mid-bow, Charlotte’s mother pressed the salad bowl to her belly as if in prayer, meditative, drinking in Herman’s words. The corners of Métilde’s mouth were delicately turned up in a caring little smile. Herman exulted in feeling so tragic: Had anyone ever thought of him that way, had he ever, even once, moved someone? The thought of Rose turned abstract, supplanted by the intense pleasure of attracting the sympathy of the women around him, of holding their unknown, obscure minds in his grip.
When he finished, he glanced at the president. Alfred was contemplating him, leaning back in his chair. Herman couldn’t make out if he approved. But he was vaguely troubled, once again, by the strange, unpleasant sense of a syrupy wave of affection pouring from Alfred’s face, a face as fleshy and severe as a wary pasha’s the moment Herman turned toward him, even briefly.
“Poor man,” his neighbor with the many pens remarked in a soft, melodious voice.
She gave him a gracious smile, and, still sitting, made a kind of rudimentary curtsy, then went back to lunch, having put down her fork to hear Herman speak, like all the others. Then everyone stood up and came to press Herman’s hand, murmuring a few formal words of sympathy. The women bowed down until their chignons grazed his forehead, the three or four male colleagues touched two joined fingers to their foreheads, faintly clicking their heels.
“Yes, poor man,” said Métilde in her turn.
“Poor man,” repeated Charlotte, in the same light, perfunctory tone.
All around the table, everyone was smiling at him with great benevolence and a forced but still charming display of sympathy. And Herman smiled back, disconcerted, seeing no way to get out of reciprocating this barrage of fine feelings. The meal went on, the discussion turned to professional matters. Herman’s sad story never came up again. Métilde launched into a quiet tête-à-tête with Charlotte, and Herman had the impression she was chiding her for something; Charlotte merely nodded in reply, agreeing with everything, imperturbably serene. Herman wished he’d gone on a bit longer about his problem, asked these people some questions, all these people who now seemed so well disposed toward him, if they remembered what he’d just told them and understood the gravity of the situation (which, from the look of it, they didn’t). No one was paying him any more mind than they would a perfect stranger, who couldn’t be asked his opinion on the digitization of the survey maps and to whom there was therefore nothing to say.
Defeated, Herman leaned toward the president.
“So what about my problem? Have they forgotten it already? No one had a single suggestion, nothing that could possibly help me.”
“What makes you think your case is more important than any other?” Alfred whispered, shocked. “I think you’re making too much of it. Oh, it might come up again, but really now, there are other things to talk about, every bit as interesting: we’ve just renovated the town hall, everything’s modern and new, as you saw. Calm yourself, my dear friend, and be patient.”
He put his hand on Herman’s knee and squeezed it a little too hard. Irked, Herman stopped eating. A deep sense of aloneness contracted his throat. He couldn’t stop himself from asking Alfred:
“Well, where can they be? My wife, my son…”
“Oh, we’ll see.”
Alfred shrugged and tucked away a few healthy chunks of beef. But his indulgence toward Herman seemed bottomless. He often touched him, with his elbow, his foot, as if he didn’t realize he was doing it, and soon Herman stopped noticing. He even asked if the president would like to finish the food on his plate, and Alfred eagerly accepted, fixing his gluttonous, tender, cunning eyes in turns on Herman and on the plate. As it happened, Alfred didn’t care for that day’s dessert. He stood up, clapped his hands, and declared it was time to get back to the office. Everyone immediately pushed back their chairs, desserts untouched. Diligently silent, they lined up behind Alfred in single file, took their raincoats and umbrellas from by the front door, and hurried out, hunching their shoulders. Only Charlotte stayed behind.
“That Alfred has a lot of authority,” Herman observed.
“He’s the office director,” answered Charlotte, as if it were so obvious it didn’t need to be said. She soon got up to help her mother clear the tables. Having nothing to do, Herman went back to his room; he was disappointed that he’d missed a chance to get closer to Charlotte, but the mother’s presence, however discreet—and, in some way that still wasn’t quite clear to Herman, pandering—bothered him. He had no doubt that the benevolently smiling mother had deliberately left them alone in a corner of the dining room. But Herman was determined to have a talk with her later concerning the price of his room and board, and he didn’t want to have that talk after taking advantage of her faintly servile kindliness, which, he thought, she must reserve for guests she assumed were well-off. But the longing to talk to Charlotte tortured him, it even made his head spin a little. And he who had always loathed forwardness pictured himself taking Charlotte’s arm, putting his face close to hers, giving her a gentle shake to convince her. He was sure she wouldn’t be overly surprised. The sort of placid resignation he foresaw—already picturing it on her stolid face—gnawed at him painfully as he climbed the stairs, left him at once impatient and elated. It took some effort not to go straight back downstairs to take hold of Charlotte and bring to her face the submissive, unrepentant, unsurprised expression he found so mysterious.
“That girl is limp and dull,” he told himself. “How could she possibly help me? But she must be twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old. Is she slow-witted? I’m not used to this sort of thing, I’m not used to it at all.”
With her, he sensed, he had a boundless capacity for power and cruelty, which no one had ever let him glimpse before.
In his room he found a young man pacing back and forth from the bed to the armoire, who let out an infuriated little sigh when Herman came in. Suddenly tired, Herman fell onto the chair. He kept his back to the window, but through the rain he’d had time to see the watchful, smiling face of the old woman across the way, now so firmly pressed to the glass that her nose was misshapen. With a weary, distracted ear, he heard the young man eagerly introduce himself, standing before him, legs spread as if he feared Herman might try to flee. Who was he? Well, he was Gilbert, Charlotte’s younger brother, the one who, as perhaps Herman already kn
ew, played tennis every week with the district councilor, being the only inhabitant of the village—Gilbert that is—who knew how to hold a racket, that’s why he and no one else had the good fortune to head off every Saturday to L., thirty kilometers away, where his tennis partner lived, for a friendly two-hour contest, summer and winter alike, for which—for that purpose alone, which must show Herman what kind of hope people here placed in his connections—his parents, the owners of the Relais, had bought him a car, a bright-red little 205 turbo, so he could get to L. on his own after the district councilor, Lemaître, his tennis partner, had offered to come from L. every Saturday and pick him up, so intent was he on having Gilbert for his weekly tennis match. Did he, Herman, play tennis? When he was a teenager, not since. And at the moment he was literally exhausted; he was broken. Gilbert knew Herman was a Parisian—which, to tell the truth, was the real reason for his visit, so Herman could tell him a little more about that, because Gilbert had every reason to be extremely interested.
Vexed, Herman put a finger to his lips.
“Let’s forget I’m a Parisian,” he whispered. “For the moment I’m not one, and I can’t say when I’ll ever see Paris again.”
“Oh, no, I’m not going to forget that!” Gilbert cried.
And immediately his brow darkened, he looked almost cruel. He was a tall young man with a handsome, hard face, as single-minded, determined, and high-strung as Charlotte seemed tranquil and complacent. Although he grated on Herman’s nerves, the sort of blinkered resolve that clenched his jaw amused and attracted him. So what did Gilbert want? Nothing, besides making Herman’s acquaintance, now that they were neighbors. Because Gilbert lived in room thirteen—he gently knocked on the wall over the head of the bed—just through there. At the same time he was very eager, once Herman could find the time to invite him in for a while (but, mused an anxious Herman, could he dare refuse to give a young man as manifestly impulsive as this all the time he might want?), to get Herman’s advice and expertise on the possibilities that he, Gilbert, might have of finding a well-paid job in Paris, something in high-power business.