by Anne Serre
She held slightly aloof as she spoke, brushing aside any allusion to our childhood, driving the images of the past conjured up by my presence far behind her the moment they arose and leaving them to implode in the shadows. She nattered on about my new haircut, about her son, her pregnancy, the labor and the delivery, the work her husband did in the garden, then again about her son, again about the labor and the delivery, her husband and the garden, without once leaving a gap in which our eyes might meet and address the question that was written there, a question so serious and profound that it would have been terrifying to have to confront it: “How are you?”
I played along, feigning an interest in the pregnancy, the garden, her husband’s planting. Ingrid knew I was playing along. And she also knew I would play along for as long as she wanted. She let me see she knew and thanked me for it, a little at a time, prudently, with a few seconds of silence in the flood of words or a brief relaxation of the tension in her limbs. “No,” I said silently. My eyes, my whole body said, “No, Ingrid, you have nothing to be afraid of, I won’t mention the past, I won’t bring up anything from our past.” “Thank you,” said her body, then the body of the baby she held in her arms, “thank you.” And her deep dark eyes, open onto the night within, said: “Let’s not speak about that. You know we need to live somehow.” And so we returned to her pregnancy, the baby, her husband’s gardening, my new haircut.
We didn’t go round in circles. No. On the contrary. We wove a little net in which our exhausted bodies could find rest. We toiled blindly, one behind the other, for my part in the most conscientious fashion, setting the tone, as it were, defining a form, a structure whose chief characteristic was simply to be alive, to reach out to life, to secure and uphold it.
II
I left Ingrid’s house with a new drop of peace in my heart. I’ve always loved traveling by train. The return journey, when I had to change trains three times, is one of the most beautiful memories I possess. For one of the connections, I remember, I had to wait two hours. With Ingrid I had secretly unfolded the map of our life on a dark table and, for the first time perhaps, had been able to make out clearly the layout of the roads and the lay of the land, so I awaited my train in the station buffet with confidence. Everything seemed to be in its proper place: the waiter wiping glasses behind the bar, the passengers disembarking, the lost souls stopping in for a drink. Even the conversations I overheard seemed somehow right, exactly as they should have been. The world took on a spellbinding clarity.
Giddy with it all, I went for a short walk in town. The streets were empty — it was a Sunday — so I walked as far as the church, which turned out to be a cathedral whose black spires sent me hurtling back into my extraordinary childhood. And I realized that they were the same spires I had seen when Pierre Peloup, in his stationary, silver-gray sedan, in the middle of an enormous plain, was busying himself on top of me, inside me, beneath me, while I observed a bird on the other side of the car door, and Marianne, my mother, on fire with lust, waited for a visitor to call. And I saw that everything was right with the world, that it laughs as it traces its loops and spirals, and that you only had to pay — as I had always known and believed — close attention for a terrible joy to be born in your life, for a work of art to be forged from your body, your hands, your eyes, your poor broken heart.