Forgetfulness (2 page)

Florette dozed awhile, her thoughts blown this way and that. The thought would appear at a window in her mind, look in, and disappear. She tried to think of the future, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, the moment she would return to her normal life, routine as that life might seem. Probably she had grown complacent. Many women did when they reached middle age and enjoyed the life they had made for themselves, even if it did not conform exactly to the life they had imagined or hoped for. When she was a girl she wanted to be a dressmaker, a great couturier with a shop on the Place Vendôme in Paris. She had seen such a place in an article in
Paris-Match,
a high-ceilinged second-floor salon with wide windows, spacious dressing rooms, and models in various states of undress, important clients arriving by appointment only. The client pressed a buzzer and a model admitted her and whomever she was with, often a man of a certain age and bearing. All the work was done on the premises, sewing machines whirring from early morning until late
at night. She was the toast of Paris. Even the wife of the president of the republic owned one of her backless gowns, white satin, one of a kind. To wear a Florette was to admit to a particular attitude toward the world; the word for it was ardent. What a life that would have been! But the article did not explain how a girl from Aquitaine might get to the Place Vendôme. Characters in Balzac's novels managed it easily, arriving in the capital by fiacre, ox cart, or on foot from Angoulême or Tours and marching off directly to find their fortunes.

But she was not a character in a novel. She was Florette DuFour, and Florette DuFour had never been north of Toulouse. So her dream was deferred and upon graduation from secondary school she arranged for a job at the post office and at night knitted sweaters, which she sold at the Saturday market in the square at St. Michel du Valcabrère. She designed a label,
Florette
in cursive script, pink on a white background. She sold as many as she could knit during slow times at the post office and at night. She hoped that a couturier from Paris, perhaps on vacation, perhaps only passing through, would admire one of her sweaters and offer to take a consignment.
Florette
sweaters would become as desired as a Schiaparelli evening dress, and in due course
Paris-Match
would take notice and schedule an article, "Florette of the Saturday Market." That was how film stars were discovered; why not sweater makers? But it seemed that couturiers were not in the habit of visiting St. Michel du Valcabrère because she was never discovered, in that way or any way, except as a village artisan admired by her neighbors. Instead, she married the postmaster, an older man, most considerate, who insisted she resign from the post office so that she could stay at home to look after the many children they were sure to have. But there were no children and ten years later the postmaster developed a cancer and died, leaving her a little money, not much, enough to live on; and of course she continued to knit sweaters.

For the longest time she believed that no man would ever look at her, thirty-five years old, a widow, plump around the hips, a trace of gray hair at her temples. Men would look through her as if she were
a pane of windowglass. She would live for Saturdays at the market and dinner alone or with her girlfriends (some of them widows as well), talking about their absent husbands and the life that lay ahead. St. Michel du Valcabrère was not a village that renewed itself. Handsome strangers did not arrive on horseback, as in American movies. Most families had lived in the district for generations, and it went without saying that everyone knew one another and there were the usual feuds and friendships handed down through the years. So it was hard to start afresh in the village because everyone came with a history, intimately known and impossible to revise, and the same was true of reputations. Not long after the postmaster's death, Monsieur Bardèche, father of three, husband to hatchet-faced Agnès, came by her table at the market and bought a sweater, and the next week he bought another and suggested they were so well made and nice-fitting that he might want one tailored to his own specific dimensions, a bespoke sweater, and to that end he would be happy to come by her house any time for the fittings, although Monday would be best because he closed his café early on Mondays; that would give him ample time for the fittings. So it was not true after all that men would look through her like a pane of windowglass. She had many such opportunities and was extremely choosy about which ones she accepted and which she declined but her Monday evenings were filled, mostly. All this reminiscence was in and out of Florette's memory in seconds, and she was left wishing she had taken one of the sweaters with her, the white cardigan or the blue turtleneck, when she had begun her walk that afternoon. She smiled when she thought of the article in
Paris-Match
and how she had read so carefully each word and examined the photographs, particularly the one of the handsome atelier on the second floor of the building at Place Vendôme across from the Ritz. Beautiful automobiles were parked nearby; strollers had stopped to peer into the windows of the jewelry store close to the second-floor atelier. Her eyes filled with tears. And then she heard a rustle in the woods, and someone cursing, and returned to present time.

These four were rough, not casual hikers out for a Sunday stroll.
She thought probably they were smugglers of drugs since they did not carry heavy packs. Whatever contraband they were transporting was lightweight, probably penny-ante goods, though the men themselves had an air of seriousness about them. She wondered if they were Berbers. They were dark-skinned and bearded, generally unkempt. She did not like the sound of their language, guttural and hard-edged, a sneering language, no music in it. The one with the lisp spoke so softly he could barely be heard, but his voice was coarse all the same, a sandpaper voice filled with menace. His tone reminded her of her long-absent father, a man whose anger was so deep it seemed prehistoric, the dumb anger of beasts, indiscriminate anger on eternal simmer until suddenly it boiled over. He had a head filled with golden curls and transparent blue eyes. Her father's soft voice and sly smile were always an announcement of violence, his accusation a quotation from Scripture, most often Psalm Forty-seven: For The Lord Most High Is Terrible. He Is A Great King Over All The Earth. He Shall Subdue The People Under Us, And The Nations Under Our Feet. He Shall Choose Our Inheritance For Us ... Her father recited from the Bible as he advanced from one room to the next, her mother retreating before him, hissing like a cat; and then a clamor, a table overturned, a dish smashed, and her father's low monotone. Florette was told to remain in her room until the storm passed but she never forgot her father's words and her mother's cat-hiss, the house filled with discord. He is not one of us, her mother said. He is an alien. Who knows where he comes from or who made him. He said he was born in the Alsace, son of a missionary. His name was Franc DuFour. His father's mission was in one of the former German colonies in East Africa. He worked with the heathen who lived on the shore of Lake Tanganyika. One day the father went away to Africa and never returned. The missionary's son turned up in St. Michel du Valcabrère, a dealer in farm implements, which he sold from the back of a prewar Renault truck.

As Franc was attractive, her mother said, I married him.

I did not know he was a lunatic.

I thought he would provide for us.

Instead, he had a bad outlook on life.

I think he was badly brought up.

Soon enough, Florette and her mother went to live with Tante Christine in Toulouse. When they heard that Franc DuFour had left St. Michel du Valcabrère—a dispute with a farmer over an invoice—they returned to the house in the village. Florette never saw her father again. She was just five years old and her mother told her to forget about him. He was a lunatic with a bad attitude. He was violent and untrustworthy, mean with money. Pretend he does not exist, she said. And that was what Florette did and after a time she ceased to think about him in any specific way, except when she heard a soft voice with a lisp. Then he returned to her whole, his head full of golden curls, his ice-blue eyes, his heavy hands and wide shoulders, his broad brow, and his terrifying words from the Bible. She remembered the only phrase that he had ever said to her personally. She had no recollection of the occasion, only the words themselves: "Tidy up." Those must have been the words he lived by. Florette was distressed that the memory of her father was with her now. She did not want his memory anywhere near her but when she opened her eyes he was still there in the darkness, his bulk, his heavy brow, and his shoulders as wide as an ax handle, his lisp when he recited Psalm Forty-seven, and of course the curls and the evident necessity to tidy up. Her mother told her he was dead and Florette wanted to believe her, but didn't, quite. Well, they were both gone except for the life they maintained in Florette's imagination. This gave her an obscure satisfaction. She was lying injured on pine needles in the snow, her mind teeming with stories. They were her own stories, personal property. No one could take them from her. The conquistador's lisp had reminded her of her father and suddenly her father was alive in her mind. Risen from the dead. They were a family again, if only hallucinatory. He could not harm her, so she reconsidered and welcomed him to her dreams, a ghost from the distant past. She was certain now that she would be all right if she kept her nerve, lived inside herself, and never doubted that help would come. Florette struggled unsuccessfully to get comfortable, wrapped her
arms around her chest, and closed her eyes. Light danced behind her eyelids.

When she woke, she was thinking of Thomas. The night was so dark he would never find her unless he stumbled on their bivouac, perhaps heard the men's voices or smelled their tobacco. Surely by this time he would have realized she was lost and set about organizing a proper search. He knew the trail very well. On Sunday afternoons Thomas often came walking with her, carrying a blackthorn stick and telling amusing stories as they ascended the trail, snow glittering on the slopes of the high mountains to the south, Catalonia beyond. They rarely met anyone on the trail and always returned before nightfall. Florette insisted on it. Mountains were unsafe after dark and the Pyrenees were no exception, inhabited as they were by vengeful gods without conscience. So Thomas would know her approximate location and there had always been a kind of sixth sense between them similar to the shared oneness of identical twins. They noticed when things were out of place and read each other's moods as easily as they read the weather; and they knew when not to inquire too closely on those occasions when there was silence at the other end. An explanation would come in due course. But night had fallen and there was no sign of Thomas. She thought she had never seen a blacker night, as if the gods had pulled a curtain over the heavens.

She tried to imagine him now with his American friends, the table disheveled, candles guttering, something on the stereo, Broadway show tunes or a hummable opera,
La Bohème
or
Cavalleria Rusticana,
songs by Edith Piaf or Billie Holiday. The friends did not speak good French so their conversation was in rapid English, usually politics, difficult for her to follow even when Thomas turned to her and translated. Capitalism's responsibility for the turbulence of the modern world, its heedlessness and chaos, its savagery, its utter self-absorption, capitalism the canary in the mineshaft. But it's what we have, isn't it? No turning the clocks back. Against the jihadists, we have capitalism. Will money trump faith? They all had stories of
catastrophe from remote parts of the world, Thomas filling glass after glass of Corbières as they made their way through the cauldron of cassoulet. Bernhard Sindelar had stories from
NATO
headquarters and the various security services of Europe and elsewhere. Russ Conlon, overweight and semiretired, was content to eat and contribute anecdotes from unnamed friends at Interpol and the Paris bourse. Florette's mind wandered as she gazed out the window at the golden afternoon, the sky a washed-out blue, the trees beginning to turn. Autumn in Aquitaine was a natural masterpiece. What a mistake to remain indoors. When Bernhard lapsed into German, Florette knew the men were back in the factories of the small Wisconsin town they grew up in, red brick factories now abandoned, windows shattered, industrial locks rusting on the Cyclone fence that protected the property from vandals, though there was nothing left to vandalize and no one to care if there were. Capitalism's song: the downtown began to decay and then, overnight it seemed, the streets were full of Puerto Ricans and no one knew what there was about wintry LaBarre, Wisconsin, that would attract people from the sunny Caribbean—and here Thomas turned to her and explained that the Puerto Ricans had been there all along, the grandchildren of workers imported to do manual labor at the wire mill and the foundry during the Second World War, labor brought by rail from Miami on the very same tracks that now lay rusting beside the clapped-out factories that during the war had been running eighteen-hour shifts, good wages, good benefits, job security, war's prosperity. And now the grandchildren were grown up with children of their own who lived in a community with a dead economy. Now they called it an enterprise zone. Famous photographers came to take pictures of the factories, exquisite examples of early-twentieth-century industrial design. Form followed function and how quaint it all seemed, as quaint as a tin lunchbucket. Capitalism's epitaph: form followed function and sometime around 1955 the money evaporated, went west, went south, went back to Wall Street, Qué pasa, hombre? Qué pasa? And that was how a community founded by central European immigrants came to be mostly Hispanic, growing
old together in an enterprise zone. Florette enjoyed listening to them speak of the village where they grew up, as exotic to her as Moscow, if Moscow had a dozen nationalities all crowded together in one small space. How ever did they manage it? What means "clapped-out factory"?