The Woman With the Bouquet (14 page)

And so her husband’s secret had been her own self.

In her imagination she had destroyed their love. Alas, it was not in her imagination that she had pushed him into the void.

Why had she given so much importance to what Paulette said? How could she have stooped to the level of that sordid woman, who saw the world in such an abject, petty way? No, it was too easy to accuse Paulette. She was the guilty one. She alone. No one else. Her most powerful argument for losing her trust in Gab had been: “It is impossible for a man to love the same woman for more than thirty years.” Now, she understood that the true argument, between the lines of the first one, had been, rather: “It is impossible for me to love the same man for more than thirty years.” Guilty, Gabrielle de Sarlat! The only culprit!

A bell. Commotion. Excitement. The trial was starting again. It was like going back to the races after an intermission.

“To the question: ‘Does the jury find that the accused deliberately took the life of her husband?’ the jurors have replied, unanimously, ‘no.’”

A murmur of approval went through the courtroom.

“All charges against Gabrielle de Sarlat have been dropped. Madame, you are free to go,” concluded the judge.

Gabrielle lived through what followed in a haze. They kissed her, congratulated her, her children wept for joy, Maître Plissier strutted and preened. To thank him, she declared that when she heard his defense, she had felt deep inside what he was saying: it was impossible, unthinkable, for a woman as blessed and fulfilled in her marriage as she was to commit such an act. Deep inside herself, she added that it was another woman, a stranger, an unknown person who had nothing to do with her.

To those who asked her how she planned to spend her time in the days ahead, she did not reply. She knew she had to spend it in mourning for a wonderful man. Had they any idea that a mad woman, two and a half years earlier, had taken her husband from her? Would she be able to live without him? To survive such violence?

One month after her acquittal, Gabrielle de Sarlat left her home in Senlis, went back to the Alps, and rented a room at the Hôtel des Adrets, not far from the Hôtel Bellevue where she had stayed with her husband the last time.

In the evening, on the tiny desk in white pine that was next to her bed, she wrote a letter.

My dear children,

Even though the trial ended with the declaration of my innocence, and it acknowledged that it would be impossible for me to kill a man as marvelous as your father Gabriel, the only man I have ever loved, it made his disappearance seem all the more unbearable. Understand my sorrow. Forgive me for taking leave of you. I need to be with him.

The next morning, she walked back up to the col de l’Aigle and, from the path where she had pushed her husband two and a half years earlier, she leapt into the void.

L
ucky me, to have such a pretty woman looking after me . . .” The first time he muttered those words, she thought she had misheard and she was angry with herself. How could she transform a patient’s complaint into a compliment? If her subconscious played the trick on her again, she would go to see a psychoanalyst. It was out of the question for her complexes to keep her from working! It was already bad enough that they kept her from living . . .

Disgruntled, in the hours that followed, as soon as she had a moment of respite from her tasks, Stéphanie tried to work out what the patient in room 221 might have actually said. The beginning of the sentence must have been correct,
lucky me, to have . . .
but she wasn’t sure about the end.
Pretty woman?
No one had ever called Stéphanie a pretty woman. And with good reason, she thought.

By the time she left the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière that day, the young nurse had not uncovered the answer. She wandered thoughtfully beneath a sky heavy with rain, almost black, between tall steep towers; at their foot, the avenues bordered by thin acacia trees seemed flat and empty. She lived in a studio in Chinatown, to the south of Paris, a neighborhood with grayish green walls and red shop signs. She felt huge in these streets full of Asians, next to these small, delicate women, busy ants going about their business. Not only did her size—normal—transform her into a giant, but her curves seemed excessive next to these lithe figures.

In the evening, she could not concentrate on the endless nauseating stream of television programs, so she threw down the remote and turned to her highly suspicious, insistent thoughts.

“‘Lucky me, to have such a pretty woman looking after me!’ My poor Stéphanie, you are looking for one sentence under another because it allows you to repeat the one you liked; but he didn’t say the one you liked. So in reality, you’re not making anything clearer, you’re just rehashing your thoughts to flatter yourself and indulge.”

At that point she put in a big load of washing—something that always calmed her—and set about ironing her “backlog of laundry.” On the radio they were playing songs from her childhood, one after the other, so she turned up the volume and enjoyed a happy moment, steam iron in hand, wailing the refrains she remembered.

At midnight, after she’d done several piles of clothes, she had sung so much that her head was spinning and she saw stars dancing behind her eyelids, so she went to bed feeling serene, and thought she had forgotten everything.

However, the next morning she trembled as she crossed the threshold of room 221.

He was so handsome it made you start.

Karl Bauer had already been in intensive care for over a week, and was emerging from shock. Part of his spinal column had been crushed in a car accident, so the doctors doubted he would recover, but they wouldn’t certify anything; for the time being, they were stimulating his nerves, trying to determine the extent of the damage.

Although he was lying under a sheet and a bandage covered his eyes, everything she could see of his face or body affected Stéphanie deeply. His hands, to begin with: the long hands of a man, elegant, with oval, almost mother of pearl nails, hands made to hold precious objects or caress a lock of hair . . . And the color of him, his dark skin, the brown shadow of fine hair on his taut muscles, the luminous black of his curls. And his full, well-shaped mouth, that seemed to draw your gaze . . . And that nose above all, like a blade of flesh, precise and strong, alluring, so manly that Stéphanie could not look at it without feeling something stirring below her belly.

He was tall. Even lying down. They had had to bring a special bed up from the basement to fit his body. Despite his immobility, and the tubes hanging everywhere, his size impressed Stéphanie, because it seemed to confirm his splendid manliness.

“I fancy him so much I can’t think straight. If he were ugly, I would never have deformed his words yesterday.”

Today she kept her ears open, the better to understand him. While she was dosing the IV, and counting his pills, he woke up and sensed her presence.

“Are you there?”

“Hello, I’m Stéphanie.”

The wings of his nose were quivering. Taking advantage of her invisibility, Stéphanie observed his nostrils, so curiously endowed with their own life.

“Did you come already yesterday morning?”

“Yes.”

“I’m glad you’re here, Stéphanie.”

His lips parted in a smile.

Stéphanie stood there silently. She was touched that such a severely injured man, who must be suffering a martyrdom, could be so tactful as to voice his thanks. He was not your usual patient.

“Maybe that’s what he said yesterday,” she thought, “something nice, surprising. Yes, that must have been it.”

Calmer, she continued the conversation, talking eagerly about little things, the treatments they had in store, the organization of his day, the fact that the next day he would be allowed to have visits. After babbling for ten minutes, Stéphanie deemed that she had managed to recover her normal behavior. And so she was absolutely paralyzed when he exclaimed, “How lucky I am, to have a pretty woman looking after me.”

This time, she was sure of what she had heard. No she wasn’t crazy. The identical words, yesterday, and today. And he was talking to her.

Stéphanie leaned over Karl to check the expression on his face: a voluptuous contentment spread over his features, confirming what he had said; his lips were swelling like breasts; he even gave her the impression he was looking at her with pleasure, despite his blindfolded eyes.

What could she do? She was incapable of continuing their conversation. Respond to his compliment? What might he add? How far would it lead them?

These questions tumbling over one another upset her, and she fled from the room.

Out in the corridor, she burst into tears.

When she found Stéphanie on the floor, her colleague Marie-Thérèse, a black woman from Martinique, helped her to her feet, handed her a handkerchief, then led her into a discreet little room where bandages were stored.

“Tell me, honey, what’s going on?”

This unexpected tenderness merely doubled Stéphanie’s sorrow; she sobbed against her colleague’s soft, round shoulder. She would never have stopped if the smell of vanilla wafting from Marie-Thérèse’s skin hadn’t calmed her, reminding her of childhood happiness, birthday parties at her grandparents’, or yogurt evenings at the house of her neighbor Emma.

“So tell me, what is making you so sad?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it work or private life?”

“Both,” moaned Stéphanie, sniffling.

She blew her nose noisily to put an end to her ludicrous behavior.

“Thank you, Marie-Thérèse, I feel much better now.”

Although her eyes remained dry for the rest of the day, she did not feel better, particularly as she could not understand what this crisis was about.

At the age of twenty-five, Stéphanie had studied to become a nurse, but she did not know herself well. Why not? Because she was wary of her own self, a distance she had inherited from a mother who did not look kindly on her daughter. How could she give her own self any importance when the person who had brought her into this world, and who was supposed to love her, denigrated her? Léa, in fact, found her daughter neither pretty nor intelligent, and she never missed an opportunity to tell her so. And each time, she would add, “What do you expect, it’s not because I’m a mother that I’m not allowed to be lucid!” The mother’s opinion, slightly altered, controlled the daughter’s opinion. And while Stéphanie had managed to overcome her mother’s mockery as far as intelligence was concerned—Léa had no diploma, and continued to sell clothes, whereas Stéphanie had passed her baccalaureate and managed to complete her paramedical training—in the visual realm she had adopted her mother’s aesthetic canon without question. Since a beautiful woman had to be slender, with narrow hips and breasts like apples, just like Léa herself, well, then Stéphanie was not a beautiful woman; she figured, rather—as her mother often repeated—in the fat lump category. She weighed twenty-five pounds more than her mother, although she was only three inches taller.

As a result, Stéphanie had always rejected Léa’s offers to “make her over,” fearful that she would only add insult to injury. Convinced that lace, silk, braids, chignons, curls, jewels, bracelets, earrings, or necklaces would look as shocking on her as on a transvestite, she knew she was a woman physiologically, but she did not hold herself to be any more feminine than a man. Her white hospital scrubs suited her, and when she hung them up in the locker at the hospital, it was only to replace them with their black or navy blue equivalent, while she swapped her orthopedic clogs for a pair of thick white running shoes.

What had happened in room 221? Joy or despair? The joy of being considered pretty? The despair that her only admirer was a blind man?

In reality, Stéphanie’s emotion—she grasped this as she slid under her comforter—came above all from the shock: his words had placed her back on the market for seduction—that vast, sunny square where women are attractive to men—and here she had thought she was excluded, living off on her own the way she did, determined never to elicit a man’s gaze or a declaration of love. Stéphanie was a well-behaved young lady, if you can call “well-behaved” someone who has never known misbehaving. Her complexes left her austere, and she dared not try anything, but fled from parties, bars, and nightclubs. To be sure, she might dream about a love affair, for the duration of a film or a novel, but she remained well aware that it was merely a fantasy. Things like that didn’t happen in real life.

“At least, not in my life.”

Like an old man who is used to his retirement, she had pictured herself as peaceful, out of reach, endowed with a body that was dead, or almost, and now here was someone upsetting her, talking about her charm. It was unexpected, abrupt, jarring.

The next morning as she was walking to work she decided that if Karl started up again, she would rebuff him.

The hospital routinely filled her life. The moment she went through the door at the Salpêtrière, guarded like military barracks, she entered another world, a city within a city, her city. And behind the enclosure that protected this medical citadel with its high walls there was everything: a newspaper kiosk, a café, a chapel, a pharmacy, a cafeteria, social services, administrative offices, and meeting rooms, in addition to the numerous buildings devoted to various pathologies; in the gardens there were benches for weary strollers, and a few flowerbeds, and birds hopping in the grass; the seasons passed here as elsewhere, with winter leaving its snow, and summer its heat waves; holidays marked the passage of time—Christmas trees, the solstice; people came here to be born, to get better, to die; sometimes they even saw famous people. A microcosm in the megalopolis. Not only did Stéphanie feel she existed, here, but she also proved herself useful. One hour followed closely upon the next, busy with care, visits, trips to the infirmary, temperature taking: why should she need another life, a life elsewhere?

The feeling that she was being useful gave her a pride that made up for anything that might be missing. “I don’t have time to think about myself, I have too much to do,” she would say to herself whenever she caught a glimpse of her solitude.

“Good morning, Stéphanie,” said Karl with a smile, although she had only just come in, and hadn’t said a thing.

“Good morning. You are finally going to get some visits today.”

“So I fear.”

“Why? Aren’t you glad?”

“Sparks will fly!”

“What do you mean?”

“From your point of view, it will probably be rather amusing. Somewhat less so for them than for me.”

“Who do you mean, them?”

“Can’t you guess?”

“No.”

“Well then, be patient, you’re in for a show.”

Stéphanie decided to drop the subject and set to work.

He was smiling.

The busier she got around the bed, the bigger his smile.

After she had sworn she would not ask, she eventually gave in and exclaimed, “Why are you smiling like that?”

“A pretty woman is looking after me . . .”

“What do you know? You can’t see me!”

“I can hear you and I can sense you.”

“Excuse me?”

“From your voice, your movements, the air you displace with your gestures, and above all your smell, I can tell that you are a pretty woman. I’m sure of it.”

“You’re teasing me! What if I have a wart on my nose or a birthmark?”

“That would surprise me.”

“Will you bet on it?”

“All right: do you have a wart on your nose?”

“No.”

“A birthmark?”

“Not that either.”

“Well!” he concluded, glad that he was right.

Stéphanie gave a laugh and left the room.

Unlike the day before, she continued her day in a good mood, having recovered her cheerful nature.

That afternoon as she went from one room to the next, she understood what Karl had meant earlier that day—it was funny, no, the way he wrote his name with a K rather than a C? In the waiting room, seven young women, each one more magnificent than the next, were glaring at each other with hatred; they looked like a lineup of models competing for a shoot. Not one of them had an official tie with Karl except for the tall striking redhead, who was boasting to the head nurse that she was the “ex-wife,” and thus obtained priority. The six others—the mistresses—shrugged their shoulders as they saw her go away and continued glaring at each other in an exceedingly unfriendly way. Had they just found out about each other? Were they successive mistresses or simultaneous mistresses?

Stéphanie did what she could to go by there as often as possible, but she didn’t manage to find out anything more. The moment they left their seat to go to see Karl, they all went through the same rigmarole: in one second, as soon as they headed down the corridor, they left behind their glower to put on a face that was ravaged with anguish, eyes damp with tears, handkerchief in hand. What actresses! Besides, which was the actual performance? Their masterful self-control in each other’s presence, or the trembling arrival at their lover’s bedside? Were they ever sincere?