Lovers on All Saints' Day (2 page)

“It’s possible he doesn’t do it to protect me,” she said. “In his family terrible things have happened, if only you knew, it’s as if nothing comes out right for them. But maybe, just maybe, he does it to look out for himself. To get home at night, having seen his sister or his father or whoever, and feel that he’s entered another world, that he’s safe. I don’t know, ‘cursed’ is a strong word, I feel horrible saying it. But there is something he’d like to hide from. If he takes me to these things, if he lets me go with him and I get soaked in that pain, what hiding place remains for him?”

—

A
T ABOUT TEN
we walked back to Claire’s house. The wind had dropped and the streetlights cast shadows of bare branches. We skirted a park and a basketball court. I noticed that the hoops didn’t have nets and then I saw the nets piled up on the concrete bleachers. Claire was carrying her phone in her hand, not in a pocket or in her bag, but prepared for it to ring as if urgently answering Philippe’s call would alleviate the gravity of events or prevent their consequences. The women she shared her studio with hadn’t picked up on anything; we’d discussed Claire’s paintings, those pregnant wombs and cartilages and lungs that she was able to bring to life on the canvas. We ate stuffed peppers, and one of her friends (maybe Vera, the one with short hair and a bullfighter’s pigtail) pointed out that they resembled the saffron-colored lungs of the paintings. Claire said yes, maybe, that one never knows where shapes and colors come from. But her head was elsewhere, and I was starting to understand that much more than a child’s life was at stake: for Claire, something immense and something of her own was at risk that night, as if she’d placed a bet, as if her happiness or ruin depended on a call about another person’s fate.

Claire turned on the living room light just long enough to get to the kitchen, and the kitchen light just long enough to fill a plastic IKEA glass with water. She was turning off light switches as she walked through her house as if she were alone there. But the porch light stayed on, waiting for Philippe. We went upstairs without speaking, and on the second floor, Claire took a telephone with a long cord out of the study and left it on the stairs, against the banisters.

“If you come downstairs, be careful not to trip.”

“You should put a phone in your bedroom,” I said. “Like we do back home.”

“Yes, I know. You’ve told me that before.”

I went up to the guest room, on the fourth floor, and found that I could move around without turning on the light, because there was a skylight in the ceiling and the brightness of the street illuminated the outlines of things: the tall headboard of the wooden bed, the wardrobe filled with clean towels. The noise of a nearby party could be felt through the walls, an electronic beat of intense bass notes that echoed in my stomach. I closed my eyes, tried not to listen. The house was dark, but not asleep: it was impossible to forget my wide-awake hostess waiting in that very particular way waiting for a telephone call becomes, such a modern kind of waiting, undoubtedly more anguished than the old waits in romantic novels, because there’s nothing more sudden than a phone ringing and there are no other situations where you can go, in less than a second, from well-being to loss. Waiting for someone implies their footsteps before they arrive at the door and waiting for a letter implies the time the envelope spends in our hands before being opened, but a phone call changes the world in an instant: it’s not there, and then it is. That’s how fast things happen.

I woke up when the phone rang. Somehow I’d fallen asleep, unaware.

I tried to hear, unsuccessfully. The creaky wooden floors prevented me from going down the stairs and listening to the conversation without being discovered. But the silence was not total: Claire’s murmuring, thin and soft as tends to happen when we speak to someone who loves us, reached me from afar, through the rude rhythms of the neighbors’ music. Claire spoke for three, maybe four minutes. I heard her hang up; I didn’t hear her close her bedroom door. I decided to go down: the bathroom, after all, was downstairs. I would have that pretext if I needed one.

I found her sitting on the third step, in front of the open door to her room, with the yellow light from the street barely illuminating the space her compressed body took up on the stairs. She was hugging her knees tight to her chest with her head between her arms, like a beggar in the subway. I put a hand on her shoulder: it was one of the first times I’d touched her (she was or is Belgian, and in spite of our friendship, physical contact was or is unusual and restrained), and Claire raised her head and I saw that she was crying softly, silently.

“The boy died,” she said. “Philippe isn’t coming home tonight, he’s staying with his sister.”

I thought of his sister’s husband, the man who, according to Monsieur Gibert, mistreated her.

“And her husband . . .”

“Of course, him too. Imagine that guy’s rage when he finds out his son is dead.”

“They don’t live together?”

“It’ll be her fault, of course, she sent the child off on the excursion. And the guy’s rage. Shit, I’d be scared to death, wouldn’t you? Of course, they’re all expecting Philippe to be there to protect them. And who’s going to protect him? Who’s going to comfort him?”

She picked up the receiver and dialed a long number.

“Good evening. I’d like a taxi, please.”

—

T
HE DRIVER
, a Flemish man whose mustache completely covered his mouth, took us to our destination in twenty minutes. Schaerbeek was a neighborhood or suburb I’d been through on the train once or twice, on my way to the airport. Claire had never been to the house we were looking for, but she had an address taken from the invitation list for their wedding. The place just seemed dead: the sidewalks were dull cobblestones, and cars slept on both sides of the road. They were not the latest models: there were Fiats and Renaults from the early eighties, and they all had stickers on the bodywork or the bumpers, glow-in-the-dark cartoons making love in every possible position, or Flemish phrases—signs of admiration, underlined words—which I didn’t understand and had no interest in deciphering. The taxi pulled over and slowed to a walking pace. On the dark brick or gray stone walls, beside windows adorned with lace curtains, the house numbers came into view and disappeared again. When Claire found the one we were looking for, she said:

“It’s here. Stop, please.”

But we didn’t get out immediately.

“Are you sure?” I said.

“Of course not. If I were sure, everything would be easier.”

“Seven hundred and ninety,” said the taxi driver.

“Keep the change,” said Claire.

And there we were, the only two people on the empty street, the collars of our coats turned up (Claire was better protected with her black shawl), frowning at the cold. We looked up toward the second floor of the house, where the windows were boxes of silent light.

“It must be there. Philippe has told me about this, the house is divided into apartments. They don’t get along with the neighbors and the common areas are filthy with grime because nobody wants to clean them.”

It was number 8 Rue Goossens. The eight was wrought iron, sticking out from the concrete wall. Claire approached the list of doorbells, her index finger running down the four names. “Ah,” she said, and pressed a button. From the street we could hear an intercom buzzing. Someone I didn’t recognize looked out the window; presumably it was the same person whose voice came through the intercom.

“Who is it?”

“Claire Gibert. Claire Vial. Philippe’s wife. Good evening, madame.”

I’d never heard her introduce herself with her married name. The intercom went silent again and then a new buzz sounded, this time the door. I opened it and we stepped into the dark hallway. The stairs were on the right, and Claire walked toward them as if she knew the way, suddenly in a hurry. I followed her, but I didn’t take my hand off the rough handrail for a second.

Philippe was waiting for us in front of the half-closed door to the apartment. He looked at me and it was as if he were blaming me for something. He was wearing a black, unironed shirt, half untucked like an untidy schoolboy. Behind him there was nothing but silence. I had expected murmurs, accusations, disapproval, gossip.

“What are you doing?” he said to Claire.

“I couldn’t not be with you,” she said. “I love you and I wanted to be with you.”

“This isn’t . . . she’d rather be alone right now, you know. She’d rather that we—”

Then two doors opened: the neighbors’ and the one Philippe was guarding like a soldier in some fairy tale. The neighbor had a patch over his left eye and was wearing a red dressing gown. The woman who came out behind Philippe had too steady a face to be his sister.

“Mais, qu’est-ce que vous faites?”
said the neighbor. “Could you not carry on your little chat inside your house?”

“We are inside our house,” said Philippe.

“We’re in our house,” said the neighbor.

“And watch your manners, if you don’t want a punch in the face.”

“Let’s go in,” said the woman. “Philippe, it’s not worth it.”

“Salauds,”
said the neighbor.

“Vieux con,”
said Philippe.

“In,” said the woman.

She closed the door and some bells jingled (they were copper, tied with red and green thread). Philippe took them down off the door hook.

“That noise gets on my nerves. I don’t know how you can stand it.”

“Good evening,” said Claire.

“Every time it opens, every time you close it.”

“Good evening,” said the woman. “I’m a friend of the family. Anne. A friend.”

We said hello, and I noticed that Claire didn’t know quite how to introduce me. This was not the moment to go into details about nationality and profession; I was not going to be of any use to her this time, to break the ice in gatherings of strangers. In the living room, two armchairs and a small sofa were covered with white sheets, and both windows had lace curtains. The woman sitting on top of the sheet, at one end of the sofa, seemed like she hadn’t moved in a long time. It was Philippe’s sister, the woman whose son had died. Her eyelids were swollen and she had a red mark on her neck. Her head was hanging slightly to one side, her gaze fixed on some point in the sisal rug. Philippe sat down next to her, and Anne, the friend, sat in the other chair. But it was as if Claire and I weren’t there, as if we hadn’t arrived yet. Claire went over to Philippe; he didn’t look at her. He’d put a hand on his sister’s knee like someone setting down a cup of coffee. And he did not look at Claire. Not once did he look at her.

No one spoke, the bodies barely moved, and the sound of clothes brushing against the sheets, when that happened, was as clear as a violin in the still air of the room. The only thing I wanted to know was where the dead boy was and if there was anything we could do to help: take care of some of the procedural paperwork, recover the car from the accident site, any of those routine tasks that are terrible because they take us away or distract us from the pain. I said:

“I’m sorry, madame.”

Nothing happened. No one looked at me. Philippe’s sister did not move her head. And that was when Claire, perhaps tired of standing like a statue at Philippe’s side, approached his sister, knelt down at the foot of the sofa, and embraced her. It was a simple gesture, and didn’t seem to have any consequences until Claire tried to go back to her place, and the woman’s arms surrounded her and kept her there and her voice released a wail, he’s dead, Claire, my baby’s dead, and I saw the clenched, pale fists against Claire’s black shawl. They were heavy hands and they pressed Claire’s back and clothes, and the fingers wore no rings and her skin was so fair that blue veins were visible in the faint light. Philippe, sitting beside the two embracing women, looked at the bells he’d put on the coffee table. He picked them up, hung them from one finger, and shook them so it sounded like someone had just come in.

—

L
ESS THAN A WEEK LATER,
I had to pass through Brussels again, on my way back from Paris, but I was able to change trains at Midi station and continue my trip to the Ardennes without seeing Claire and Philippe. In the house in Aywaille, as soon as I arrived, I began to organize my notes and write the article. About the bookshop’s bedroom, I wrote: “It’s a child’s room, a child who has not visited in a long time. The doors of a wardrobe have been removed in order to fit a little bed inside it, but there are still checked blazers and winter jackets hanging from the rail. There’s nothing as lonely as the spectacle of abandoned clothing. It smells of mothballs and ammonia, because the bathroom is right next door. From the portraits, which absorb my attention, I discover that this room belonged, some time ago, to Sylvia Beach Whitman, George’s daughter. In the photographs, the little girl plays wearing nothing but a necklace made of flowers or she appears with Baskerville, her German shepherd. It is in fact an altar arranged by George for the adoration of his daughter. There is one thing lonelier than abandoned clothing, and it’s a child’s room abandoned by the child.” As I was writing, I was thinking of Philippe’s sister’s dead son.

One spring Sunday, three or four weeks after that night, Claire came to Aywaille to talk to Monsieur Gibert. I was pleased to see her, and to see her lightness as she stepped out of the car and the casual air with which we all chatted, standing in the narrow kitchen, warmed by the steam pouring out of the pans and hitting the tiles.

After lunch, Claire and I stayed downstairs. When quite a long time had passed in silence, Claire said:

“Let’s go outside. It’s hot in here, the windows are all steamed up. Let’s go for a little walk.”

It was cloudy and the sky looked like rain. We took the path toward the woods, walking on tiptoes between the puddles and fresh mud.

“What a change,” said Claire. “I’d never live here, but it’s really good to come out here once in a while.”

“Nice to breathe fresh air.”

“It’s so quiet,” said Claire. “No parties next door.”