The Fata Morgana Books (9 page)

* * *

Walking in the rain, my head and upper body well protected by the unfurled umbrella, I was overcome with a childlike happiness, albeit slightly tinged with anxiety: I looked around me, examining the trees and cars parked along the sidewalk, but I saw nothing out of the ordinary. The rare passersby, also protected from the downpour by umbrellas or sometimes just a newspaper held over their heads, walked quickly, each had his own goal and no one paid me any mind. Having reached the house, I unlocked the gate, and, closing it carefully behind me, crossed the small garden to ring the doorbell. My shoes and pant cuffs were soaked, but that didn’t bother me; absentmindedly, ringing again, I noticed that I was already standing much more easily. A woman, no longer young, opened the door: “Oh, it’s you! We were wondering where you were. The little one is sick.” Closing the umbrella and placing it in the large stand meant for that purpose, I followed her down the hallway, decorated with reproductions, to the children’s room, leaving traces of wet footsteps on the wooden floor. The boy was lying under several dark covers, curled up, his whole body shaking in long spasms. I reached out and touched his forehead, which burned beneath my fingers, then stroked his hair soaked with sweat. “Has the doctor come?” I asked, without turning, the woman who stood a little back at the entrance to the room.—“Yes. He gave him an injection.”—“When?”—“It was this morning.” I noticed a bottle of pills at the bedside, picked it up, read the label, and put it back down. “Did the doctor leave this?”—“Yes. He said to give him one every four hours.”—“And that’s been done?”—“Yes, you can count on us.” Next to the medicine, on the low table, there was also a carafe of water and a glass; I carefully rolled the child onto his back and lifted his head, carrying the glass to his lips: “Drink,” I said to him, “you have to drink.” He didn’t open his eyes but parted his lips; I brought the glass to them, but his mouth was trembling too much, the glass clinked against his teeth, the water dribbled down his chin. I put his head back onto the sweat-soaked pillow and stroked his hair again. “Bring me a basin of water. With a sponge, or a washcloth.” The woman withdrew wordlessly, then returned with what I had asked for. I placed the basin on the floor, soaked the washcloth, squeezed it out, and, sitting on the edge of the bed, spread it over the child’s forehead. He raised his hand and placed it over my own, it was as light as a cat’s paw, dry and burning. I re-soaked the washcloth and repeated the gesture several times in a row; little by little, the long shivers began to calm down; finally, I managed to get him to drink a little. The woman, behind me, was watching me in silence. I got up and looked at her: “The sheets are soaking, his pajamas too. Change them. Can you do that?” She avoided my gaze and nodded. I went out and headed for the large living room. Several people were there, exchanging pleasantries without much conviction; at the table near the window, some children were listlessly playing cards, a few girls and another boy, younger than they; above their heads, the young lady in pink was still contemplating me with her calm, almost complicit gaze, as if she wanted to invite me to share her peach. I poured myself a glass of wine and took a seat on the sofa, crossing my legs and authoritatively grasping the hand of the woman seated next to me. Whenever a new subject was introduced, I gave my opinion in a firm, clear, decisive voice; the people gathered around me gravely nodded, without ever contradicting me. In the evening, the doctor came by; I had in the meantime washed and changed, and put on a clean suit with a vest and even a tie made of crocheted wool, brown like the suit. I accompanied the doctor to the boy’s room and stood next to him as he examined him, auscultated him, and took his temperature. Several others had followed us into the room, women and men and even a little girl, they couldn’t stand still but came and went aimlessly, without saying a word but fortunately keeping their distance. The doctor finally delivered his prognosis, which coincided exactly with my own: continue the pills and compresses, watch over the child, make him drink. “Did you hear that?” I called out to the people huddling around. “Make him drink, that’s important, that’s what I said.” I thanked the doctor and escorted him to the front door; we separated with a frank handshake, and he promised to return the next morning, early.

* * *

During the meal, the banal, disjointed conversation continued; without arrogance but firmly, I discouraged useless discussions, put an end to pointless controversies with a fair opinion, warned off those who got too excited, supported those who spoke sensible words. It wasn’t that I took myself so seriously, on the contrary, I felt like a kid playing at being an adult, but playing seriously, so seriously that no one suspected, and when I commented in detail on the grave foreign policy crisis brewing, everyone listened to me attentively, drinking in my words without interrupting me. The children ate in silence, with just a slight clink of silverware, at times asking politely, in the interludes between subjects, for salt, or water, or some more food. A boy brought his hand to his lips: I looked at him, he blushed and grabbed his napkin to wipe his face. Their meal over, the children excused themselves and cleared their places; I poured more wine for the grownups and handed out cigarillos to those who wanted them. The woman seated to my left, who kept her beautiful clear eyes fixed on me as she listened to my words in silence, raised a lighter and lit it; I brought her hand to the tip of my cigar, thanking her with a smile, holding her fingers delicately so the flame wouldn’t tremble. She contemplated me with boundless gratitude, but at the same time a vague anxiety disturbed her gaze, making her indistinct and rarefying her features, just as was the case for all those gathered around this table. I heard a noise and raised my head: the blond child was standing in the doorway, his feet bare, pale as a sheet. I put my cigar down in the ashtray, got up, joined him and took him in my arms before heading for one of the empty rooms where I placed him on the embroidered bedspread. He murmured a few indistinct words, I brought my ear closer, the words took on strength and began to form phrases, I listened attentively, he spoke in a loud voice now, his eyes wide open and focused on a point that I couldn’t locate, his words had become clear but I was incapable of grasping their meaning, he was uttering sentences whose syntax was impeccable but whose key word, the one that would give meaning to all the others, remained incomprehensible, a group of syllables seemingly significant but tied to nothing, or else there came a word perfectly comprehensible, obvious, but inserted into a completely scrambled sentence, incapable of supporting its signification. I spoke too, calm and peaceful words, I answered his statements without thinking, trying to bring him back to a sense of reality, but each time his words only placed themselves in the wake of mine in order to overtake them and then race away again in the opposite direction, to a dizzying distance, at the depths of which they turned round and came back, following the opposite path with the same implacable logic. I had asked for the basin and applied cold compresses to him, stroking his back and speaking gently; in spite of that, terror was overcoming him, his features contorted, I repeated my reassuring words with a smile, his eyes remained open but I had no way of judging if he saw anything, I didn’t know if he had awakened or if he was still sleeping and dreaming out loud, incorporating my words into his dream, I didn’t want to startle him, I kept wetting his forehead and his head and trying to bring him back to reason, to the reality of the room where we were. Slowly, the flood of words slowed down, the phrases spaced out; finally, the child closed his eyes and his wet head fell against my chest, where I held it in my palm, which seemed immense next to his little face. With a towel someone gave me, I dried his hair, then lay him down in the bed, before lying next to him without even taking off my shoes. Pacified, he breathed with a whistling but regular noise, his eyelids, swollen and translucent, quivering over his eyes. I put my arm around him and stayed for a long time next to him. Much later, the child was deep in a regular sleep and I got up: “You, stay with him,” I said to the first person I met in the hallway. The others had scattered throughout the house, I glimpsed one or another of them through a half-opened door or at the end of a hallway; it was all the same to me, I returned to pick up my extinguished cigar and, relighting it, sat down beneath the portrait of the girl with the peach, opening the newspaper lying there to study the latest declarations of the foreign leader who was threatening us in such an incomprehensible manner.

* * *

At breakfast, the people gathered around the table seemed even less substantial, even more ephemeral than the day before. The woman who had spent the night with me twirled a teaspoon in a soft-boiled egg, without raising her eyes to me; her body, under a batiste robe, must have kept some traces of our nighttime games; it may have been she who had held out the light for me at the previous night’s dinner, but I couldn’t be sure. The children were silent and swallowed buttered toast and glasses of fruit juice; for my part, I leafed through the morning paper, full of still more unsettling news on which I found it hard to concentrate, so much did the feeling of my own presence distract me: I felt so solid that my joints ached. The doctor was announced: I joined him in the hallway and in a few words filled him in on the night’s events. “There’s nothing to worry about,” he affirmed, “it happens at that age, with strong fevers. The main thing is to bring the temperature down, as you’ve rightly done.” In the bedroom, he examined the child, who submitted with a tired air, without protesting; the doctor tried to ask him some questions, but he didn’t remember anything. The fever had diminished. “He should eat a little,” the doctor decreed, putting his instruments back in his bag. “Broth, stewed fruit, a little white rice if he can.” Outside, it was still raining, and I took the large brown umbrella to escort him to his car, stepping aside to let him pass through the gate in front of me while protecting him from the rain. Alone in the street, with my back to the gate, I hesitated: what if I returned to the apartment? I looked at the street in that direction and my throat tightened when I glimpsed the two men in black, each armed with an umbrella. They held them very high up, which allowed me to see with a growing fear their shining, lifeless eyes, and their lips open in wide predatory smiles. With calm, even, resolute steps, they advanced toward me.

I

My head broke the surface and my mouth opened to gulp air just as, amidst loud splashing, my hands found the edge, took hold and, transferring the force of my momentum to my shoulders, hoisted my dripping body out of the water. I stood for a minute balanced on the edge, disoriented by the muted echoes of the shouts and water noises, dazzled by the fragmented sight of parts of my body in the long mirrors surrounding the pool. Around my feet, a puddle was slowly growing; a child shot by in front of me, almost making me topple backwards. I caught hold of myself, took off my cap and goggles, and, throwing a last look over my shoulder at the gleaming line of my lats, went out through the swinging doors. Dried off, clothed in a grey, silky tracksuit, pleasant to the skin, I found myself back in the hallway. I unhesitatingly passed an intersection, then another, it was rather dark here and you could barely make out the walls in the indistinct lighting; I began to run, in short strides, as if I were jogging. The dull-colored walls streamed by; occasionally, I seemed to glimpse an opening, or at least a darker part, I couldn’t really be sure, sometimes also the cloth of my jacket brushed against the wall, so that I swerved to the middle of the corridor, which must have been curving, but very slightly, almost imperceptibly, just enough to throw my running off-balance; already I was sweating, even though it was neither warm nor cold, I was breathing regularly, inhaling an insipid gulp of air every three steps and then exhaling it almost in a whistle, elbows held close to my body so as not to bump into the walls, which sometimes seemed to grow farther away and sometimes to get closer, as if the corridor were snaking back and forth. In front I could make out nothing, I moved forward almost at random, above my head I could see no ceiling, perhaps I was already running out in the open, perhaps not. A sharp shock on my elbow made me stumble, I rubbed it reflexively and turned around: an object on the wall stood out from the greyness, gleaming. I put my hand on it; it was a door handle, I leaned on it and the door opened, dragging me with it. I found myself in a familiar garden, quiet and peaceful: the sun was shining, spots of light were scattered over the mingled leaves of the ivy and the bougainvillea, neatly trimmed on their trellis; further away, the twisted trunks of old wisteria emerged from the ground to cover with their greenery the tall façade of the house, raised in front of me like a tower. It was hot and I wiped the sweat beading on my face with my sleeve. Then I went in. In the back of the hallway, through a half-opened door, a series of curious sounds reached me, low-sounding plosives interspersed with whistles: the child must have been playing war, knocking his tin soldiers over one after the other in a deluge of shots and explosions. I left him there without disturbing him and headed for the spiral staircase leading upstairs, pausing on the landing to contemplate the ironic gaze, lost in the void, of the large reproduction of the
Lady with an Ermine
hanging there. The woman was in the kitchen; at the sound of my steps she put down her knife, turned around with a smile, and came over to kiss me tenderly as she pressed against me. She was wearing a pearl-grey house dress, thin and light; I caressed her hip through the cloth, then plunged my face into her Venetian blond hair, done up in an artfully disheveled bun, to breathe in her smell of heather, moss, and almond. She laughed quietly and disengaged herself from my embrace.“I’m making dinner. It’s going to take a while.” She brushed my face with the tip of her fingers. “The little one’s playing.”—“Yes, I know. I heard him when I came in.”—“Could you put him in the bath?”—“Of course. You had a good day?”—“Yes. I got the photos, they’re upstairs on the dresser. Oh, another thing: we have a problem with the electrical circuit. The neighbor called.”—“What did she say?”—“Apparently there are voltage spikes, it’s causing power outages at their house.” My face darkened. “She’s out of her mind. I had our circuit overhauled twice. By a professional electrician.”—“Yes, I know.” I turned my back to her and went back downstairs. The sounds of battle had ceased. Before opening the door, I went into the adjoining bathroom to run the bath, checking the temperature to make sure it wasn’t too hot. Then I went into the child’s room. He was only wearing a t-shirt; his buttocks bare, he was squatting and photographing with a little digital camera the tin cavalrymen armed with lances and rifles, carefully lined up on the rug spread over the grey tiles. I watched him for a minute, as if through a glass wall. Then I came forward and tapped his buttocks: “Come on, it’s bath time.” He dropped the camera and threw himself in my arms, squealing. I lifted him up and carried him to the bathroom, where I took off his t-shirt and put him in the water. Immediately, he began slapping the surface with his hands, splashing the walls and laughing. I laughed with him but at the same time drew back, leaning on the door to watch him as he plunged completely underwater.