Lovers on All Saints' Day (5 page)

“It always happens like that?”

“I’ve read a lot. It’s the same for everyone. Sometimes the stupidest thing occurs to me: I think if only I’d been prepared, everything would be easier now. But I wasn’t prepared.”

“You weren’t prepared.”

“No. How were we going to imagine?”

“What?”

“That we wouldn’t have time. Why didn’t anyone tell us how everything worked?”

I wanted to touch her. I felt that would help. Then she said:

“Can I ask you to spend the night with me? Just to stay here, not to do anything, I’m not asking for anything and I don’t want anything more. Can I ask you that and for you to respect it?”

Her blouse was missing a button. I hadn’t noticed before. Behind the material, her collarbone was rising and falling like that of a cornered animal.

“I’d need a blanket,” I said. “It’s horrible to sleep with your jacket on.”

—

I
LOOKED AT MYSELF
in the bathroom mirror. It was true that the pajamas fit me, and curiously, I didn’t feel too out of place. I’d only asked for a blanket, but Zoé led me to the bedroom and opened a drawer with a geometric design etched into the wood.

“They were Graham’s.” She handed me a shirt and pair of pants the color of smoke. “I’m sure they’ll fit, you’re the same size. If you don’t want to wear them, it doesn’t matter. I’m just giving them to you so you can be more comfortable.”

“I want to be more comfortable.”

“Oh, good. Then you can change in the bathroom.”

And again I saw her smile. But this time she bit the tip of her tongue, and I could almost recognize that texture and felt a breath of tea and fresh water. Absurdly, her smile became a sort of prize or offering.

Now, from outside I could hear minimal noises from Zoé, who moved around the house like a little mouse, collecting the drinks, rinsing the glasses in the sink. I heard her come into the bedroom, open and close a closet. She knocked three times on the bathroom door.

“Yes?”

“Don’t come out. I’m changing.”

“Okay. Let me know,” I said.

I kept myself busy by snooping around the bathroom, the details of someone else’s bathroom. Since I was little, a locked door has always given me a sensation of absolute impunity. There was a cheap tape recorder in Zoé’s bathroom, sitting on a small enameled glass shelf. Beside it, a disorderly pile of three cassettes without cases. All the labels said the same thing:
RADIO MUSIC
. I imagined this woman recording songs from a radio station without bothering to edit out the commercials, and listening to the recordings until she knew both sides of the tape by heart, and then repeating the whole operation. I had never looked at solitude so closely. It was as if at that instant someone revealed the rules of the game.

When I came out wearing the pajamas, smelling of wood and mothballs and dotted with flecks, Zoé was already waiting for me between the sheets. I was cold, the skin prickled on the back of my neck. I wasn’t obliged to make conversation: my script only called for my staying in the bed until dawn, filling a form whose emptiness was painful for Zoé. But I wanted to know what Graham was like, put a face to that name, and Zoé took out a spiral notebook with black pages, opened it to the first one, and showed me a dark photograph. I recognized the bed where I was now lying, the lamp on the bedside table to my left that in the photo appeared beside a crystal glass and a pair of sunglasses barely visible in the shadowy image, and I thought that Graham must have had a headache that night and the water was to take a pill with, if indeed it was water, and the headache might have been due to the strong summer sun during some maneuvers. However, in the photo only Zoé appeared, seated in the lotus position on her pillow. Her body was the only luminous point in the frame. The rest were vague suggestions of objects or profiles that were lost entirely in the uniform black of the edges.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“Almost everywhere. We were studying photography, going together to a studio here in Ferrières.”

I brought the paper close to my face. I examined it.

“He’s here?”

“Yes, he’s walking. If I look illuminated it’s because he’s standing beside me shining a light, first on one side of my face, then my body and knees. Then he walked around the bed and in front of the camera, and he lit me from the other side.”

“He’s walking past here. He’s in front of the camera?”

“But we’d turned off all the lights. The room was in complete darkness. He was explaining what the teacher had explained to him. He was saying: “Now I’ll open the diaphragm as wide as it goes, and take the photo over the course of fifteen minutes. You have to stay still the whole time, try not to blink.”

“Fifteen minutes,” I said.

“In those conditions, the camera only captures what is very still and illuminated from up close. Nothing is shining on him and he’s also moving. That’s why he can’t be seen.”

Zoé passed her hand over the image, as if she were performing a magic trick.

“But he’s there,” she said. “Even though we can’t see him.”

Zoé put the notebook back in the drawer. “Can you hold me?” she asked, and I stretched out my arm and she took refuge in my embrace. Her head smelled slightly of sweat. I thought that she would be taking in the familiar scent of Graham’s clothes. Before starting to feel sleepy, I heard her speak, almost to herself.

“When I feel very lonely, I turn off the lights. I pretend that this is the room in the photo and I am the one in the photo, and Graham is here running back and forth. There’s nothing odd about my not being able to see him. It’s just a question of optics.”

—

I
WOKE UP SHORTLY
before first light. Zoé was sleeping with her back to me, breathing through her mouth and with her arms relaxed. As I was getting dressed, I thought
Saturday, November the first
, and then I thought
All Saints’ Day
and then I thought of Michelle. I left the pajamas neatly folded beside the headboard of the bed. I left without saying good-bye, so as not to remind Zoé that she’d slept beside another man, to let her live for a few minutes more inside the spell she’d woven.

The house had been devoured by a bank of damp fog. The pickup’s fan was on, and what the night before had been heating was now a blast of ice-cold air. I didn’t turn on the radio. I wanted, without knowing why, to preserve the predawn silence, the gentle repose of the mountain, the pleasure of not seeing anyone in the sleeping streets: all that filled me with the sensation of testing out a new pair of eyes. In a short while, the men who had survived the night of the dead would begin to come out of their homes. All those who had worn disguises—as had I, who spent the night in a dead man’s clothes—to survive this night, would soon be emerging, and all those who had bribed the spirits with offerings. I counted myself among them. I was alive, in spite of having been chased by souls of sinners trapped in animal bodies. Because I knew that the night that had just passed was the last of the old calendar, the moment when debts are paid, revenge is taken, and the dead are buried so their bodies will rest during the winter. But on this night, the curtain that separated this world from the other was torn: souls were freed from their captivity and some walked the earth, divesting men of their brief pleasures, sowing discord, broken hearts, and terrifying solitude among them.

It amused me to think of all that. It was Michelle who first told me about the superstitions of Halloween. She told me it was a shame that children here didn’t dress up and go out and ask for candy. She told me about Celtic legends, drew their symbols, wrote out for me the names of some of their goblins. Pinch. Grogan. Jack-in-Irons.

Michelle, the woman who was still my wife. Who had been far from me for so long, too long.

—

W
HEN
I
GOT HOME
, the fog had not yet cleared. I opened the gate and the iron stuck to my fingers like dry ice. Before I got to the stone steps, I saw Michelle standing in front of me in underwear and a T-shirt, a paper tissue clutched in her right hand. Her eyes were the color of her hair and the tip of her nose looked irritated.

“Go inside,” I said. “You’re going to catch cold.”

“You told me,” she responded.

“Calm down, nothing happened.”

“You told me you were coming back. I fell asleep, but I was waiting for you until half an hour ago. I was waiting for you, I fell asleep, you didn’t come back.”

I held her gently: her body was like a badly fired ceramic and was threatening to crack or fall to the floor and smash into pieces. She kept talking.

“But I don’t want this to happen again. I don’t want nights like this.”

“Nobody wants nights like this,” I said. “But we still have time.”

“You wanted to leave. I know it. You don’t have to lie to me.”

“Come on, let’s go upstairs.”

“I’ve been crying all night. I’m tired.”

“Yes, but you don’t know how much I want to be with you.”

We went upstairs. It was warm in the bedroom and it was good to be back. I took off my clothes and lay down on the bedspread. Michelle lay down beside me. “You’re exhausted,” she murmured. “I can tell.” A crow flew past the big window that overlooked the lake, and I asked Michelle to close the curtains. In that lake there were small trout. The day I asked Michelle to marry me, I remembered, I’d caught two. At that moment, two trout had seemed like a good sign.

“I wonder where the bird is,” said Michelle. “I hope he’s died, poor thing.”

“Hope so,” I said.

I thought later I’d go out to look for the pheasant, and that I’d like Michelle to come with me to look for it. I thought of proposing this to her, but she’d fallen asleep on my shoulder. I wanted to explain that we were going to be okay. I wanted to tell her that we’d made a lot of mistakes, and hurt each other a lot, but we didn’t do any of it out of cruelty, but rather trying, maybe in mistaken ways, to suffer as little as possible. I surprised myself feeling that the most difficult part had just begun.

“Nobody wants nights like these,” I said to Michelle, although she couldn’t hear me. “We’re not going to have to live alone.”

With the tip of my thumb I wiped away a dribble of saliva at the corner of her mouth. She snuggled her head against my chest and I closed my eyes to listen better to the silence of the early hours, the way the murmur of the heating mingled with the sounds of the Ardennes just as Michelle’s breathing began to mingle with mine.

—

W
E LET THE MORNING
go by without rushing it, and around midday I discovered there was no dry wood to light a fire with. I hadn’t been able to at Zoé’s house, either—Zoé, that already strange name, that distant night that belonged to her, not to me—and now the image and feeling of a crackling log fire turned into a sort of craving. But I didn’t go out to Modave to get a bundle, because I didn’t like the idea of being away from Michelle. Instead, I phoned Van Nijsten’s shop, in Aywaille, and a woman asked me to wait, and while I did an electronic version of a Jacques Brel song played in my ear. Then the same woman told me that Van Nijsten wasn’t there but someone would deliver my order in thirty minutes.

“Anything else?” asked the woman.

“She’s asking if we want anything else,” I said.

“Not for me,” said Michelle.

Michelle had taken a long shower, and after her shower we’d made love slowly, having taken the time to unplug the telephone and turn the digital alarm clock around, and then she had dried her hair and put on a soft pearly lipstick. But what I remembered, after all that, was how I had sat on the floor to read while she was showering, leaned against the wall beside the bathroom door, and a sliver of wood from the frame had snagged the right sleeve of my pullover. I took the sweater off and fixed the bunched thread by pulling on it with my teeth, while I heard the water pouring over Michelle and let myself be calmed by it, because the running water meant that Michelle was there, and hearing her shower, worrying about a sweater that she had given me, I felt comfortable and simple and satisfied, and I thought that must be happiness.

When the doorbell rang, Michelle was about to say something.

“Go ahead, get the delivery,” she said then.

I opened the door to a man with a bare head. His scalp was so cleanly shaved the glass of the door was reflected on it. The man put the wood down beside the poker and left the bill on the mantel, took the money, and left, all without saying a word. I knelt down in front of the fireplace.

“Okay, now we’re ready,” I said, rubbing my hands. “You were going to tell me something.”

“Have you got matches?”

I said yes, I had matches and several editions of
La chasse aujourd’hui
to burn. I made a bed of paper twists on the grate. When I was arranging the kindling and logs, I heard Michelle.

“On Thursday I was at my parents’ house. I’m going to spend some time with them.”

I stayed still, as if paralyzed. Maybe I believed that, if I pretended not to have been listening, the words would fall into oblivion.

Michelle went on talking. She said she no longer had any hopes for this, and that love seemed to her a distant emotion, something that no longer had anything to do with us. It hurt her to speak of love that way, like a dog that had run away in the middle of the night, while she was alone. But that was the truth. She had glimpsed it last week—on Tuesday, after eating alone in front of three bulletins from Euronews—and she’d talked to her mother and her mother had told her to think it over carefully. She did as she was told: she didn’t want to give in to her first impulse; she preferred to give us a few more days, give life a chance to straighten out its course.

“Now I’ve thought about it, while I was in the shower. And that hasn’t happened, nothing has straightened out. I want to be alone. I don’t want us to go on hurting each other.”

“Is that why you took so long?”

“What?”

“Showering. That’s why you were so long in the shower?”

“I don’t know, love. I don’t think that changes anything.”