Happy Are the Happy (4 page)

I’m very sensitive to light. I mean psychologically. I wonder if everybody’s sensitive to light this way or if I’m particularly vulnerable. I can put up with exterior light. I can put up with dismal weather. The sky’s there for everyone. All men and women go through the same fog. Interiors return you to yourself. Light in enclosed spaces attacks me personally. It strikes objects, it strikes my soul. Certain lights deprive me of all sense of the future. When I was a child, I ate in a kitchen that looked out onto a closed courtyard. The illumination that came from the ceiling made everything gloomy and gave me the feeling of having been forgotten by the world. When we got to the central hospital of the Tenth Arrondissement, where Caroline had just had her baby, it was around eight in the evening. I suggested to Luc that he should go up with me, but he declined and said he preferred to wait in the car. He wanted to know if I was going to be long, and I said, no, no, even though the question seemed a bit out of place, not to mention uncouth. It was raining. The street was empty, likewise the lobby of the maternity ward. I went to the room and knocked on the door. Joel opened it. Pale and happy, Caroline was sitting on the bed in a dressing gown and holding a tiny infant, a little girl, in her arms. I bent over her. She was pretty. Very delicate, really very pretty. I had no problem saying so and congratulating them. The room was exceedingly warm. I requested a vase
for the anemones I’d brought. Joel told me flowers were forbidden in the rooms. I’d have to keep my bouquet. I removed my coat. Caroline handed the baby to her husband and got into bed. Joel took the little bundle in his arms and sat down on the imitation leather armchair, nodding his head, puffed up with papahood. Caroline took out a Jacadi catalog and showed me a foldable baby travel bed. I made a note of the item. On a Formica shelf, there were some packages, still half-wrapped, and several bottles of hydroalcoholic gel. I asked if there was an intensive care unit in the building, because I was on the verge of a heat stroke. Caroline said they couldn’t open the windows because of the infant and offered me some discolored fruit paste candies. A disposable baby bottle and a crumpled baby blanket lay in the transparent crib. The strange ceiling light made all the cloths, sheets, napkins, and bibs look yellow. A life was beginning in this confined, indescribably dreary world. I stroked the sleeping baby’s forehead, I kissed Joel and Caroline. Before leaving the building, I put the anemones, which were drooping from the heat, on a counter in the lobby. In the car, I told Luc that my friend’s new daughter was really pretty. He asked, what are we doing? Shall we go to your place? And I said, no. Luc looked surprised. I said, I feel like a change. He turned on the ignition and started driving at random. I could tell he was miffed. —We always go to my place, I’m tired of being the easy option. Luc didn’t reply. I shouldn’t have said it that way. I regretted using the words
easy option
, but you can’t control everything. Rain was still falling. We rolled along without speaking. He parked the car just ahead of the Place de la Bastille. We walked to a restaurant he knew. It was fully booked. Luc protested, but to no
avail. We were already far from the car, and we’d wandered around quite a bit before finding a place to park. At one point, while we were still on the street, I said I was cold, and Luc said, let’s go there. I could hear the irritation in his voice. —No, why there? —You’re cold. We walked into a place I disliked on sight, and Luc immediately accepted the table the owner proposed. He didn’t ask whether the choice suited me until we were taking our seats. The evening had already turned dicey, I didn’t have the nerve to say no. He sat across from me, his elbows on the table, his hands crossed, his fingers at play. I was still feeling so cold that I couldn’t take off my coat or my scarf. The waiter brought the menu. Luc pretended to be interested in it. His features looked drawn in the pale neon light. He got a text message on his cell phone from his youngest daughter and showed it to me: “We’re eating a raklet!” His wife and children were on a mountain holiday. I begrudged Luc his lack of delicacy and incidentally found his parental doting pathetic. But I smiled amiably. I said, she’s lucky. Luc said, yes she is. An emphatic yes. Nothing lighthearted about it. I was in no mood to figure out how to protect myself from that tone of voice. I said, aren’t you joining them? —Yes, this Friday. I thought, he can go to hell. There was absolutely nothing on the menu that I could eat. Nor on any other menu in the world, in my opinion, and I said, I’m not hungry, I’d like just a glass of cognac. Luc said, I’m going to have the breaded veal escalope with fries. I was stricken by melancholy in this crummy, supposedly intimate booth. The waiter wiped the varnished table but stopped before it was really clean. I wonder if men suffer from this sort of attack without ever admitting it. I thought about the baby girl who was living through the first
hours of her life, swaddled in her waxen room. A story occurred to me and I immediately told it to Luc by way of filling the silence. One evening at dinner, a psychiatrist – who’s also a psychoanalyst – recalled the words of a patient of his, a man who suffered from solitude. This patient said to the psychoanalyst, when I’m home, I’m afraid someone will pay me a visit and see how alone I am. The analyst had added, sniggering a little, the guy’s a broken record. I told Luc that part too. Luc was ordering a glass of white wine, and he sniggered exactly the way the psychoanalyst, Igor Lorrain, had sniggered–stupidly, and tediously, and appallingly. I should have walked out, I should have left him there in that absurd booth, but instead I said, I’d like to see where you live. Luc feigned astonishment and acted like a man who’s not sure he understands. I repeated, I’d like to go home with you and see how you live. Luc looked at me as though I was getting interesting again and crooned, aha, home with me, my little hussy? I nodded in a vaguely mischievous way and immediately scolded myself for simpering like that, for being unable to stay my own course in Luc’s presence. Nevertheless, I backed up a little (the waiter had just brought my glass of cognac) and said, you didn’t like the story about the patient? You didn’t understand it as a perfect allegory of absence? Luc said, absence from what? —From the other. —Oh, yes, yes, of course, Luc said, squeezing the mustard container. Are you sure you don’t want to eat anything? At least take some fries. I took a fry. I’m not used to cognac or any strong liquor. My head starts to spin at the first swallow. It didn’t even occur to Luc to take me to a hotel. He was so used to coming to my apartment that he couldn’t conceive an alternate idea. Men are totally
immobile creatures. We women are the ones who create movement. We wear ourselves out invigorating love. I’ve been going to a great deal of trouble ever since I met Luc Condamine. Some noisy young people, full of energy, occupied the booth behind ours. Luc asked me if I’d seen the Toscanos recently. We’d met at the Toscanos’ apartment. Luc is Robert’s best friend. They work at the same newspaper, but Luc’s a senior correspondent. I said I’d been working late and hardly seeing anybody. Luc told me he’d found Robert depressed and so he’d introduced him to a girl. That surprised me, because I’d always thought that Robert was a different kind of man from Luc. I said, I didn’t know Robert had affairs. —He doesn’t, that’s precisely why I’m arranging things for him. I reminded Luc that I was Odile’s friend and he was giving me too much information. Luc laughed and wiped his mouth. He pinched my cheek with a semipitying look on his face. He’d already gobbled up his bowl of fried potatoes and was bearing down on the remains of his escalope. I asked, who is she? —Oh, no, Paola! You’re Odile’s friend, you don’t want to know that! —Who is she? Do I know her? —No, you’re right, it would be bad if you knew. —Yes, it would be very bad. So who is she? —Virginie. Medical secretary. —Where do you know her from? Luc made a sweeping gesture, indicating the vast world of his acquaintance. I felt cheerful all of a sudden. I’d drunk an entire glass of cognac in an unusually short time. But I was cheerful because Luc himself had brightened up at last. He ordered an apricot tart and two spoons. The tart was acidic and too creamy, but we fought over the last piece of fruit. The young people behind us were laughing, and I felt young like them. I said, will you take me home with you, Luc?
Let’s go, he said. I couldn’t tell whether this was a good idea anymore. In fact, my ideas were uniformly unclear. Things remained light for a little while. We ran through the rain. In the car, the mood was still light, at first. Then I dropped one of the CDs Luc kept in the center storage console. The disc slipped out of its case and rolled under my seat. When I came back up with the CD, Luc was already holding the case. Still driving, he took the CD out of my hands and put it back in its container himself. Then he stored it in its former place, tapping it a little to get the alignment right. All this was done without sound. Without words. I felt clumsy and maybe even guilty of an indiscretion. I could have considered the obsessiveness of his actions and deduced that Luc Condamine was a maniac, but instead I felt a stupid urge to cry like a child caught doing wrong. I no longer thought it was a good idea to go to his apartment. Once we were in the lobby of his building, Luc used his keys to open a glass door. On the other side there was a staircase with a baby carriage and a folded stroller hanging from the banister. Luc had me go ahead of him, and we climbed up to the fourth floor on stairs that wound around a shaft occupied by an invisible elevator. Luc turned on the lights in the entrance hallway of his apartment. I could make out some shelves with books and some coathooks where anoraks and overcoats were hanging. I took mine off, along with my gloves and my scarf. Luc showed me into the living room. He adjusted a halogen floor lamp and left me alone for a moment. As in every living room, in his there was a sofa, a low table, and a few mismatched chairs. A rather worn leather armchair. A bookcase with some books and framed photographs, among them one of Luc in the Oval Office, hypnotized by Bill Clinton. An assembly of
haphazard elements. I sat in the leather chair, on the edge of the seat. The curtains were printed in a pattern I’d seen somewhere before. Luc came back. He’d taken off his suit jacket. He said, do you want something to drink? Cognac, I said, as if in the course of a single evening I’d become a woman who drank cognac at every given opportunity. Luc got a bottle of cognac and two glasses. He sat on the sofa and poured our drinks. He dimmed the floor lamp, turned on a smaller one with a pleated fabric shade, and sprawled backward on the sofa pillows, gazing at me. I was sitting on an inch or two of armchair, my back straight, my legs crossed, trying to give myself a Lauren Bacall air. Luc spread his legs and sank into the sofa. There was a sort of pedestal table between him and me, and on it stood a framed photograph of his wife, laughing with their two daughters, apparently at a miniature golf course. Luc said, Andernos-les-Bains. They have a family home in Andernos-les-Bains, near Bordeaux, which is where his wife’s from. My head began to spin a little. Moving very slowly – I found him almost melodramatic – Luc started unbuttoning his shirt with one hand. Then he pulled the shirt open. I understood that the idea was for me to do the same thing, to strip off my clothes in the same slow rhythm a few feet away from him. Luc Condamine has a great hold over me in this regard. I was wearing a dress under a cardigan. I bared a shoulder. Then, to get ahead of him, I pulled off one cardigan sleeve. Luc took off one shirt sleeve. I took off the cardigan and threw it on the floor. He did the same with his shirt. Luc’s upper body was naked. He was smiling at me. I pulled my dress over my head and rolled down one stocking. Luc removed his shoes. I took off my other stocking, knotted it into a ball and threw it at
him. Luc unbuttoned his pants. I waited a little. He freed his sex, and all at once I realized that the sofa was turquoise. A turquoise that shimmered in the soft lamplight. Considering the rest of the room, I thought, it was rather surprising they’d chosen a sofa of that particular color. I wondered which member of this couple was responsible for interior decoration. Luc stretched out in a lascivious position I found both alluring and embarrassing. I looked around the room, at the pictures hanging in their false half-light, at the photographs, at the Moroccan paper lanterns. I wondered whose books these were, and whose guitar, and who claimed the horrible elephant’s foot. You’ll never leave all this, I told him. Luc Condamine raised his head and gazed at me as if I’d just said something immeasurably weird.

My ashes. I don’t know what should become of them. Should they be shut up somewhere, or scattered? I ask myself this question while sitting in the kitchen in my bathrobe, my eyes fixed on the laptop computer. Jeannette comes and goes, like a woman glad to spread herself out on a holiday. She opens cupboards, turns on machines, rattles the cutlery. I’m trying to read the electronic version of a newspaper. I say, Jeannette, please! My wife replies, nobody forces you to occupy the kitchen the moment I start to make breakfast. A rumble of bad weather comes to us through the window. I feel worn out and stooped, I’m squinting in spite of my glasses. I gaze at my hand as it wanders the tabletop, clutching the tool called a
mouse
, part of my body’s struggle with a world to which it no longer belongs. The other day my grandson Simon said, old folks are people from the past stuck in the future. That kid’s a genius. The rain starts to beat against the windows and images come to me, images of the sea, of the shore, of ashes. My father was cremated and the remains placed in an ugly, square metal box. It was painted a shade of brown, the same color as the classroom walls in the Lycée Henri-Avril in Lamballe. My sister Marguerite, our two cousins, and I scattered the ashes from a bridge in Guernonzé. He wanted to be in the Braive. A hundred meters from the house where he was born. At six in the evening. In the middle of the
town. I was sixty-four years old, a few months after my quintuple bypass. There’s no spot that bears my father’s name. Marguerite can’t get used to the idea that he’s not localized. When I go there – once a year, it’s far away – sometimes I snatch a flower from somewhere nearby or sometimes I buy one, and in any case I toss it furtively. The flower floats away on the water. And I feel, for ten minutes, a sense of fulfillment. My father was afraid of being shut up like his brother. A brother who was the opposite of himself. A big-time gambler. A kind of Great Gatsby. When he went into a restaurant, the staff would grovel before him. He was cremated too. His last wife wanted to put him with her family, in the pharaonic tomb they have. An underling from the funeral home cracked open the engraved bronze door, set the urn on the first of the twelve marble shelves, and then closed the door again. As we were driving back from the cemetery, my father said, all your life you brag about your free access to high places, and then in the end they slip you inside through a crack in the door and plop you down at random. Me too, I’d like to merge with a flowing stream. But ever since I sold Plou-Gouzan L’Ic, I no longer have a river. And as for the river of my childhood, it’s not very pleasant anymore. It used to be wild and unspoiled, grass grew between its rocks, a wall of honeysuckle ran its whole length. Now its banks have been paved over, and next to it there’s a parking lot. In the sea, then. But it’s too vast (and I’m afraid of sharks). I say to Jeannette, I’d like you to throw my ashes into a stream or a river, but I haven’t chosen one yet. Jeannette stops the toaster. She wipes her hands on the dishcloth that’s lying within reach and sits down in front of me. —Your ashes? Ernest, you
want to be cremated? Too much consternation in her face. Too much pathos. I laugh, baring all my mean teeth, and say yes. —And you say it just like that, like you’re talking about the weather? —It’s not a significant topic of conversation. She remains silent. She smoothes the tablecloth and says, you know I’m against it. —I know, but I don’t want to be stacked up in a vault, Jeannette. —You aren’t bound to do everything just like your father, you’re seventy-three. —That’s the right age to act like one’s father. I put my glasses back on. I say, would you be so kind as to let me read? You stick a dagger in me and then you go back to your newspaper, she answers. I’d be happy to see a newspaper appear on my screen, but I’m missing a password or some kind of identifier or something, how should I know? Our daughter Odile’s taken it into her head to retrain me. She’s afraid my brain will crumble away and I’ll become isolated. When I was in business, nobody suggested I fall into step with modernity. Sinuous bodies flutter across the screen. They remind me of the flies that used to float before my eyes when I was a child. I talked about them to a little girl I knew. I asked her if they were angels. Yes, she said, they were. I felt a certain pride in them. I don’t believe in anything. Certainly not in any kind of religious nonsense. But in angels, just a little. In the constellations. In my role, however minute, in the book of causes and effects. It’s not forbidden to imagine that you’re part of a whole. I don’t know what Jeannette’s doing, fooling around with that dishcloth instead of finishing the toast. She’s twisting the corners of the cloth and wrapping them around her index finger. This distracts my attention completely. I can’t have a serious discussion with my wife. Making myself understood
is impossible. Particularly within the marital framework, where everything turns into a criminal case. Jeannette abruptly snaps the cloth off her finger and says lugubriously, you don’t want to be with me. With you where? I ask. —With me in general. —But I do, Jeannette, I want to be with you. —No you don’t. —Everyone’s alone in death. And stop with that dishcloth, what are you doing? —I’ve always thought it was sad that your parents aren’t buried together. Your sister thinks so too. Papa’s very happy in the Braive, I say. And your mother is sad, says Jeannette. —My mother’s sad! Once again I show my mean teeth. All she had to do was follow his example instead of having her parents’ bones put into ossuaries to make room for her in the family tomb. Who made her do that? —You’re monstrous, Ernest. —That’s nothing new, I say. Jeannette would like us to be buried together so that passersby could see our two names. Jeannette Blot and her devoted husband, securely stashed away in stone. She’d like to erase forever the humiliations of our married life. In the past, when I’d stayed out all night, she’d rumple my pajamas before the housemaid arrived. My wife is counting on the grave to outfox spiteful gossips, she wants to remain a petit bourgeois even in death. The rain drums on the tiles. When I’d return from Bréhau-Monge to Lamballe, where my boarding school was, the evening breeze would be blowing. If raindrops streaked a windowpane, I’d press my nose against it. Renan says somewhere, “When the bell rings at five in the afternoon …” What book is that in? I’d like to read it again. Jeannette has stopped manipulating the dishcloth. She’s gazing vacantly into space, into the gray weather. When she was young, she had a kind of impudent look about her. She resembled the
actress Suzy Delair. Time changes everything, including the soul of a face. I say, don’t I even get a cup of coffee? She shrugs her shoulders. In the old days, I never paid any attention to this dizzying loop of day and night, I wouldn’t even know whether it was morning or afternoon or anything else. I’d go to the ministry, I’d go to the bank, I’d chase after women, I’d never worry about eventual consequences. I’ve still got enough joy left in me to do a little chasing, but after a certain age, the preliminaries are wearying. Jeannette says, you can also choose to be cremated without having your ashes scattered. I don’t even react. I turn back to my false cybernetic activity. I’m not opposed to learning something new, but to what end? To stimulate my brain cells, my daughter says. Is that likely to change my worldview? There’s already enough pollen and crap in the air without adding corpse dust, it’s not worth the trouble, Jeannette says. I say, I’ll ask someone else to do it–Odile, or Robert. Or Jean, but I’m afraid he’s going to pass on before I do, that idiot. He wasn’t looking very good last Tuesday. Throw me in the Braive. I’ll rejoin my father. Just take care not to inflict any kind of ceremony on me, no funeral service or other foolishness, no tiresome blessed words. For all you know, I’ll die before you, Jeannette says. —No you won’t, you’re robust. —If I die before you, Ernest, I want there to be a service with a blessing, and I want you to tell the story of how you proposed to me in Roquebrune. Poor Jeannette. In a distant time that’s nothing more than a subject of confusion now, I asked her for her hand through the judas window of a medieval dungeon I’d shut her up in. If she only knew how utterly Roquebrune has lost all meaning for me. How that past has dissolved and turned into vapor. Two
people living side by side, and every day their imaginations separate them more and more conclusively. Deep down inside themselves, women build enchanted palaces. You’re mummified somewhere in there, but you don’t know it. No licentiousness, no lack of scruples, no act of cruelty is considered real. The moment of eternal farewell arrives, and a story about two youngsters must be told. Everything is misunderstanding, and torpor. —Don’t count on it, Jeannette. Happily, I’ll disappear before you do. And you’ll attend my cremation. And don’t worry, that sort of thing doesn’t smell like roasting pork the way it used to in bygone days. Jeannette pushes back her chair and stands up. She throws the dishcloth on the table. She turns off the gas stove – the water for my eggs has almost boiled off anyway – and unplugs the toaster. As she leaves the room, firing a parting shot, she says, good thing your father didn’t choose to have himself chopped up in pieces, otherwise you’d want to be chopped up in pieces too. I think she turns off the ceiling light while she’s speaking. There’s hardly any light coming in from outside, and so I remain in darkness, good riddance to me. I take the pack of Gauloises out of my pocket. I promised Doctor Ayoun I’d stop smoking. Just as I promised him I’d eat salads and broiled steaks. A nice guy, that Ayoun. A single cigarette won’t kill me. My eyes fall on the shrimp net with the wooden frame that’s been hanging on the wall for decades. Fifty years ago, somebody used to plunge it under layers of seaweed and thrust it into rifts. In the old days, Jeannette would put bouquets of thyme, laurel, all sorts of herbs in that net. Objects pile up, items no longer of any use. And neither are we. I listen to the rain, which has dropped down a tone. The wind too. I lower the
lid and close the laptop. All that our eyes can see is already in the past. I’m not sad. Things are made to disappear. I’ll vanish without a fuss. There will be no coffin and no bones. Everything will go on as it has always done. Everything will float blithely away on the water.