Lovers on All Saints' Day (9 page)

“He’s ready,” she said. “We can go to the wake.”

“You want to go?”

“Of course. I don’t know. I hadn’t considered not going. I feel bad, dear.”

Georges looked down. Dry leaves were piling up beside the stone wall. He tried to exaggerate an impatient face so it would be visible in the half-light.

“And why you? What do you have to do with this?”

“You told me yourself that he talked about me on the way to the hunt. He’s been in a bad way for a long time, everybody told us. And it’s as if what happened before banned us from worrying, you know?”

“No,” said Georges. “What you’re saying is absurd.”

“He was our friend. And we haven’t allowed ourselves to take him seriously, to lend him a hand. As if what happened before would come back, what a couple of idiots. Jean wants to talk to me, but I’m not going alone. Will you come with me?”

Georges did not cushion the harshness of his words. He felt contemptible and, without knowing why, also felt that he didn’t deserve Charlotte. But that didn’t stop him from saying what he was going to say.

“No. It’s late. I’m tired and we’ll have more than enough tomorrow.”

Charlotte looked distressed. She spoke to him of the man who had wanted to escape this life, of the terrible confirmation that it was another life he would have liked to live and hadn’t. Charlotte accepted that it was stupid, but in the past few years she had wondered what fault any of this was of hers; she had asked herself so often that now she couldn’t help devoting all her attention to him: to try to accompany Xavier, even if only in spirit. Georges turned away as if to cut off his wife’s words, because the mention of the spirit invoked for him, through some sort of piercing contradiction or terrible irony, the map of the Islands of Pleasure. On the lawn a rectangle of a more lively green was projected. Georges felt something fuzzy rising in his throat. He held his breath, and the nausea descended. He spoke to the silhouette’s shadow.

“I’m going to be on the tractor for a while longer.”

“I’m not going to go alone, dear. Won’t you come with me?”

“No,” he said. “It’s your affair.”

—

I
NSTEAD OF WALKING
toward the orange shape of the tractor, he went around the house by the shed side and found, in the middle of the rough carpet of stable sawdust, Xavier’s Porsche. For a moment, he wanted to sit inside it, but then the idea struck him as macabre. He leaned on the boot; the darkness was total. “Do you know what that means?” Charlotte had said to him. “Regretting now, at the age of seventy, the life one’s chosen?” Of course, she’d said, it was hard for him to see all that: for him things had come out well, like for a poker player. A few years or months or days ago, even just yesterday, Georges would have said: This is what all past life is, the results of an ongoing strategy.

Now he wasn’t so sure. But he had a hunch: the past would become imagining Xavier wearing his father’s hunting jacket, a Frenchman who’d belonged to the
louveterie
and devoted his life to hunting wolves. Because that was a man, the clothes of those who’d gone before, and Xavier’s were heroic clothes: imagining him like that, romantically dressed up as a gentleman of bygone days, could justify Charlotte’s feeling attracted to him. But that tranquillity was artificial. Meanwhile, neither they nor anybody else could guess what had gone through Xavier’s mind. Maybe it was absurd to think he’d killed himself over her, but everything in Charlotte’s words seemed to suggest that. Now, it seemed obvious to Georges that only her sense of decency had prevented his wife from confessing that certainty. One doesn’t reach such decisions by chance, that was true. But to think of such a long-ago cause . . . Did that really happen? Did men really kill themselves for love, and for long-past love affairs? What surprised him most was how Xavier’s image began to change: he could no longer remember him as he was, those memories were already contaminated by his suicide. Georges admired the courage: not just of putting the barrel of a gun beneath one’s face (just one traditional barrel; Xavier had not succumbed to the fashion for double-barreled shotguns), but seeing himself reflected, a second before, in the death of a dog, and carrying on with the process of one’s own death. It was incredible what frustrated love could do to a man. It could track him, the way dogs tracked the trail of the scent of prey (a wolf, for example), and hold him at bay. Georges, too, standing on the sawdust-covered floor, was a man at bay. He imagined Jean’s phone call, the questions he would have asked Charlotte, that woman his father had loved. Georges hated him: he hated him for involving his wife in all that. Then he retched again, and this time, without kneeling, Georges threw up watery bile smelling of wine and stale bread.

—

W
HEN HE WENT BACK
to the house, it was after eleven, and Charlotte, perhaps, would be asleep. Georges preferred to stay downstairs. A long time had passed since the last time he hadn’t said good night to his wife—both beneath the covers, he overcome by weariness and she trying to read a couple more pages of some Montherlant novel—in the way routine prescribed. He imagined Charlotte was still dressed. Ready to go out, he thought, ready to go and see Xavier no matter how late.

He knew he loved her. He had always loved her, even when he found out about the deception. Now those episodes came back as if fresh, with that terrible attribute the past has of never passing, of staying here, and keeping us company. How could he have prevented it? How comfortable the future was, that future people so feared. Of course, they ignored how difficult the pain of the past was and the memory of that pain, because it was like clothes that have fallen in the hay in summer and keep scratching your neck and back all day long.

The previous night, after Xavier had left, Georges had spent a couple of lazy hours cleaning his Browning, using silicone to repair a frayed strap, brushing the buttons on his hunting jacket. The implements hadn’t been put away, and were still there, looking at him as if they’d warned him that today would be special and it would be better to stay home, that he should have made up some excuse to not go out boar hunting. He looked for the biscuit tin that he’d used to store ammunition as long as he could remember and took it into the kitchen. He put the kettle on, and the air smelled of gas and then burned match. While he was waiting, Georges began to organize the cartridges and bullets that got mixed up over time or just stayed there, on the windowsill and in the cutlery drawer, making the reality that no children lived in this house unmistakable. When he had all the 8x57s in a single pile, the kettle began to fret on the stove. Georges put a lemon tea bag in a thick glass, striped from use, and let two sugar cubes dissolve in the boiling water. With the biscuit tin in one hand and the glass of tea in the other, he went to sit beside the telephone. He took out the map of the Islands of Pleasure; for the first time he looked at it closely. Water flowed around a circle, and in the water two fish swam, one coming and one going, one trying endlessly to catch up to the other, but it was impossible to tell from the drawing which one was chasing and which escaping its pursuer. Georges turned the photocopy over and wrote on the back in pencil:

Charlotte Lemoine

Xavier Moré

Georges Lemoine (me)

Charlotte

Georges

Xavier (him)

To have lost her forever

Never to have been with her

He heard dogs barking, far away and distorted by the echo. Their house seemed different at night, and this silence, through which he usually slept, now stimulated him, made him tense and alert, aware of the whole world. He saw his reflection in the windowpane, translucent like a negative; he saw the shadow of the guns in their rack, like billiard cues, steady and disciplined. Perhaps overwhelmed by detail, in a mental atmosphere too similar to that of an opium addict, Georges did not pick up the phone at the first ring—he might have confused it with the barking, or he might not have heard it—and when he did, the black receiver fell asleep in his hand. Jean’s voice called from the other end of the line, serious, electronic, disconsolate.

“
Allô? Allô?
Madame Lemoine, are you there? Madame, I need to know, I need to speak with you. You’re the only one who might know.”

Georges realized that revealing his presence would be like surrendering. Accepting that Charlotte formed part of that small tragedy, that she’d had power over the life of a man who was not her husband, would be to discover that he and his wife had not lived alone all these years, that there had always been a specter between them. Then he also realized that all those precautions were futile. It was naive or ingenuous to believe that the past was capable of burying its dead. From this night on, Moré would appropriate part of the house: he would be a permanent lodger, someone Georges would see by just turning his head while smoking a cigar or brushing his teeth, someone who would watch him and his wife sleep, standing next to their bed wrapped up in his father’s green hunting jacket, until the end of time. Georges hung up the phone; he immediately unplugged it, yanking with such force that he broke the socket, leaving blue and red wires sticking out of the wall. He didn’t stand up; his legs would not have done his bidding. He thought he was unable to go upstairs, to confront Charlotte’s sadness, her silent tears, her likely guilt and perhaps her accusations. So he would stay faintheartedly downstairs, as he’d read about wolf hunters doing centuries ago in the Black Forest: parties of armed men who would allow night to overtake them among the trees, unable to return to the village without the body of the beast that had stolen their hens, dismembered their goats, and disturbed the slumber of their defenseless wives.

T
HIS IS WHAT HAPPENED
when Madame Michaud got out of prison. It happened at Les Houx, the Michaud family estate, and was not written up in a single Belgian newspaper. The oldest episodes of the story occurred thirty-nine years earlier, and were much commented on at the time, but now there is probably nobody outside the family who remembers. I’ll tell the story as it was told to me.

Les Houx is a piece of land of about three hectares, acquired by Madame Michaud’s great-grandfather toward the end of 1860, when the country was young and, in the principality of Liège, property changed hands without any formalities. Madame Michaud’s grandfather grew up and lived his whole life there, and so did her father. Madame Michaud and her younger sister, Sara, were born and raised there, and both lived there until, shortly after turning forty, in September 1960—a century had passed since the family took ownership of the property, which was their emblem and their pride—Madame Michaud was tried for the murder of Sara’s fiancé. She was found guilty of having fed the man rat poison used in the stables of Les Houx, and given a long prison sentence.

Madame Michaud’s first name does not matter, but a clarification regarding her surname and civil status is in order. Michaud was her family name and the one on the sign at the entrance to the property:
LES HOUX, PROPRIÉTÉ PRIVÉE. FAMILLE MICHAUD, 1860
. Until that September, Madame Michaud was still
Mademoiselle
Michaud; she’d never been known to have a beau, and very few men visited her more than once, but no one ruled out the possibility that, even at forty, she might marry, for a piece of land like Les Houx was worth as much as the richest dowry and made either of the daughters a good catch. But when it emerged that Mademoiselle Michaud had been sentenced to forty-five years in prison, the
Madame
started to slip into people’s conversations. There was in the title a mixture of respect and pity toward a person who could not now marry, and whom it was going to be impossible to carry on calling
Mademoiselle
while she grew old in prison. Madame Michaud was released six years before the end of her sentence, and the first thing she’d do, as everyone surely knew, was to visit the house at Les Houx.

Her love since childhood for the house and stables, the crops and woods, and even the bare fields that led out to the road, that boundless love, would be her undoing. Since she learned to walk, her favorite pastime was wandering through all the nooks and crannies of the house on her own. There was not a single corner of the immense building she did not know or would not have been able to find with her eyes closed. This might not seem such a great feat to those who don’t know Les Houx. So I should say that the three-story house has two stairways that lead to the first floor (one from the kitchen and one from the front hall) and one more that goes directly to the attic. Its perimeter was regular, a perfect closed rectangle like a safe; but the design inside was not at all symmetrical, full of unpredictable niches and alcoves. There was a doorless room entered by sliding the false back of a wardrobe: their grandfather had hidden potatoes and cabbages there from his harvest to induce a rise in prices at the turn of the century, and their father had hidden a Jewish couple there during the war. Between the two events, the room had belonged to the girl. She was solitary by nature, and not even her sister knew where to look for her when it was time to sit down at the table or when she needed her for something. They’d know she’d been in the stables because she’d show up smelling of hay and manure; they’d know she’d spent the morning in the woods because her dresses would be torn by twigs and pinecones and completely ruined by sap from the trunks. When she grew up, her parents got worried: Mademoiselle Michaud saw doctors and the odd apprentice psychoanalyst, because it was incomprehensible to people that a nineteen-year-old girl would spend the whole day by herself instead of seeing her friends. No one understood why she could never be found in the same room of the spacious house; no one understood why she would squander her summers wandering around the three hectares like a cat marking her territory. The war broke out, and Mademoiselle Michaud gained sudden importance in the functioning of Les Houx: during the nightly bombing raids, when the whole country’s electricity was cut so the planes could not locate their targets, she was the only one who could find things lost in the darkness, or cross the property from one end to the other if the horses needed feeding or a message needed to be taken to the steward. All this determined that, in 1949, when the girls’ father died, their mother, who until then had taken little interest in such matters, entrusted the administration of the estate to the only person who could obtain satisfactory results; and Mademoiselle Michaud had the perfect excuse to forget or overlook the eagerness for marriage of the young men of Ferrières or Liège or even Louvain. In that state, which for her approached paradise, she was able to remain for several years. The house had never known—nor would it know—such splendor.

In 1958, Sara received a visit from Jan, a young man from Flanders whose surname no one could quite remember: neither her mother, due to lack of effort, nor her sister, due to self-absorption and indifference. Every Tuesday and every Saturday for two years he was seen arriving in a rosewood-colored Studebaker—which he parked in front of the house, where their father had parked since he bought his first car—and leaving as soon as night began to fall. He rarely crossed paths with Mademoiselle Michaud in the house: as soon as she saw his car come through the gate, she disappeared. She found the man unpleasant from the first moment, and frankly repulsive from the summer Saturday when he arrived, not in the afternoon but before midday, with a crew of assistants carrying measuring sticks. Mademoiselle Michaud, from various corners of the property, watched them taking inventory, measuring the side that bordered the road, the area of the woods and the fields on which nobody had built anything, or ever thought of building anything. The following Saturday, further measurements were taken, following the same routine; and when she came inside, that night, Mademoiselle Michaud sat down facing her mother, who was calmly reading
The Red and the Black
. That trivial detail would stay with Mademoiselle Michaud forever, because at no point in the conversation did her mother close the book or even rest it in her lap to talk. With the book open in front of her, the leather spine facing the anxious daughter, her mother explained that Jan (and she made an attempt at pronouncing his surname) had asked for Sara’s hand: she had found no reasons to turn him down and more than one to accept. Their father being dead, the decision fell to her and was not up for discussion. They would be married early the following spring. The first week of April seemed to everyone an excellent moment.

Mademoiselle Michaud began a slow study, which she herself perhaps did not even notice and whose object was Sara’s future husband. This might be called intuition, but also mistrust: the mistrust of a woman (because by then, Mademoiselle Michaud was a woman) who had never had much to do with human beings; whose friendly connections, in essence, had always been with the objects of the house, the beams of a ceiling and the carpets, the whitewash on the walls and the gravel of the courtyard or the wood of the sheds. Things and their arrangement in physical space were Mademoiselle Michaud’s company; it was logical, then, that the presence of the betrothed and his measuring men should perturb her. She followed and spied on the couple; her knowledge of the terrain allowed her to go unnoticed. She saw without caring that, when they found themselves alone in the living room, they didn’t just kiss, but his hand disappeared under her sweater, and hers among the folds of his tweed trousers. She saw, toward the end of August, that the fiancé began to arrive earlier, and he and Sara would take advantage of her mother’s afternoon nap to hide in the room behind the wardrobe, from which the odd shy moan would escape. And at the beginning of September she saw Jan using the upstairs telephone to make a business call. He spoke of the time when half of all this would belong to him; he spoke of the necessity of putting so much unused land into production. The details he mentioned worked on Mademoiselle Michaud with the force of a catapult. Around that time she had to go to the border, where prices were lower, to purchase a large quantity of woodchips. Some merchant was able to supply the small grinder she was looking for. She returned home after dinner, and blindly emptied the contents of a little bag, a coarse, heavy powder, into the suitor’s
pousse-café
. Jan did not survive the night.

Her mother, wisely, sent Sara to the house of one of her friends, in Aix-la-Chapelle. The trial was held swiftly, for the malice was obvious and the evidence overwhelming. A truck came to take Mademoiselle Michaud to the women’s prison, near Charleroi. Her mother did not come out to say good-bye. I imagine the woman who until the age of forty had lived in the world of a little girl, and then had murdered someone, looking for the last time at the family estate. Two days later, Sara, still feeling sick, returned to Les Houx. She could not sleep, but that was the least of her woes. Before anyone noticed, she was bedridden with anorexia, a doctor had come to save her life, a therapy begun and punctually carried out; with time, her sadness became no more stubborn than any other sadness, and bit by bit her appetite returned. An accident occurred one day: her mother tried to force her to taste a
gâteau de macarons
she’d bought for her from André Destiné’s patisserie, which had always been her favorite; Sara refused and in the face of her mother’s insistence lost control, gesticulated too close to the table beside the glass door, and smashed a ceramic vase, which had belonged to her great-grandmother. Sara noticed the space on the table, the circle that shone like a moon where the vase had stood, unmoving, for so many years. It might be said that this moment marked the beginning of her recovery. She said that the dining room was now brighter; the next day she moved the table to a different spot; a week later, hired three workmen who, along with the steward, widened the frame of the glass door two meters on either side, and ended up replacing it with a large window from the parquet floor to the ceiling.

They never received any news of Madame Michaud—this was how the public now referred to her—and Madame Michaud had no news of them. People commented that it was as if she’d been sentenced to the harshest exile from the start and, in time, that exile had turned into plain oblivion. But that was not true: Sara never forgot that her sister was living in a cell for having poisoned the man who was going to make her happy. Madame Michaud, for her part, could not feel the guilt they attributed to her, or any repentance for her actions: her universe did not allow for such possibilities, because it was not a human one; things are not guilty, and constructions do not feel repentance. It’s a cliché to say that she lost track of time; but the prison guards said she rarely went out into the yard and hardly ever associated with the other convicts, and that she lived, in all other respects, at the margin of any evolution, ignorant of the routines of the world inside and the revolutions outside. Enclosed in the minimal space of her cell, Madame Michaud did not hear that her mother died of natural causes during the winter of 1969, and never found out that, on her deathbed, she’d forgiven her. Would this pardon have made her glad? It’s impossible to know for certain. Her cellmate, who very soon exhausted her longings for conversation, tells that Madame Michaud (whose hair turned gray, whose transparent skin dried and peeled like birch bark) spent the days rolling and unrolling a piece of paper over the floor of the cell. On one side of it was printed an old calendar brought from France:
1954—DIXIÈME ANNIVERSAIRE DE LA LIBÉRATION
was the caption set above the months and days. On the back of the calendar, Madame Michaud had drawn a pencil sketch of Les Houx in such detail that her cellmate exclaimed, when she saw the plan for the first time, that she knew the place. It was not true, but the perfection of the details had prevailed over her memory. The illusion, momentary for the other convict, was complete for Madame Michaud; and she lived her years of imprisonment within that plan, oblivious to her increasing old age. It’s not difficult to imagine her bending over windowsills that were a simple thick line, or thinking she was hiding behind walls that were made not of bricks and concrete, but of the careful shading of a slanted pencil.

I imagine it was prisoner Michaud’s good conduct that, paradoxically, caused the distraction of the directors of the Charleroi prison. No one, during the final years of her imprisonment, seemed to remember her; and it’s easy to believe that many more years would have been commuted had she submitted an official request before. When it was decided she deserved early release, she was six years from completing her sentence. But ten years earlier, the same pardon would have been conceded: her behavior was the same during that whole life within a life that is a murder conviction. In December 1998, Madame Michaud was summoned to the César Franck room of the prison, where she answered a series of questions meant to confirm her willingness to return to and be a useful member of society. At the end of the session, they asked her if she would prefer to get out before or after the holidays: on the brink of freedom, Madame Michaud did not want to spend one single day more in jail. The prison officials placed among her belongings (the toilette she’d arrived with and a calendar on the back of which was the plan of a house) an envelope with three thousand francs in five-hundred-franc notes. On December 19, Madame Michaud spent the night in a Charleroi motel—nobody had been waiting for her outside the prison gates—and before dawn she was ready to return to Les Houx. (At seventy-nine years of age, Madame Michaud no longer slept much, and always awoke with the first light.) She didn’t have to explain to the taxi driver where her family’s property was.

The taxi drove slowly up the drive, for it had snowed and a layer of ice made the surface slippery. Madame Michaud wiped the condensation from the car window to see the house, her house, and must have thought she’d open the main door and it would be as if not a day had gone by. She didn’t dismiss the driver as soon as she stepped out of the taxi, perhaps because she felt that it wasn’t gravel beneath the snow but pebbles. But she kept going, and her hand moved instinctively to the place where the large door knocker had always been: her hand fell on emptiness. It must have seemed implausible to her to have to look for the latch, and to have to try twice before being able to get it to open. She had to imagine the possibility that she’d not been paying attention on her way there, that the taxi driver had brought her to someone else’s house. She looked around. On her face was confusion. Madame Michaud felt disoriented.