Underground Time (20 page)

 

Mathilde gets to the station and looks up at the electronic display. She's just missed the train. The next one's been cancelled.

Of all the lines in the Île-de-France, line D on the RER probably holds the record for technical failures, industrial action, mad passengers, gallons of urine, incomprehensible announcements and wrong information.

She's going to have to wait half an hour. Standing up.

 

She goes up the stairs to platform B. The waiting room was demolished several months ago. On the ground you can still make out the footprint of where it once stood.

SNCF has got rid of all closed shelters throughout the Île-de-France to stop the homeless using them. That's what someone told her.

A bit further down the platform a sort of giant toaster was installed at the beginning of the winter. Its red, burning elements gave out heat three feet all around. When it was cold, passengers gathered there, holding out their hands to warm them. On this spring evening, through some sort of strange conditioning, they are clustered around it even though it is turned off.

 

Mathilde has just resigned. She is feeling neither regret nor relief. Perhaps a sensation of emptiness.

 

Mathilde is standing by herself, watching people, the tiredness on their faces, that look of upset, the bitterness in their lips. The FOVA has been cancelled. They're going to have to wait. It seems to her that she shares with them something which other people are unaware of. Nearly every evening side by side they wait for trains with absurd names in this giant rush of air. And yet this doesn't bring them together, doesn't create any link.

 

Mathilde takes out the card which the man gave her a short while ago. His name is Sylvain Bourdin. He's in sales and marketing. He works for a company called Pest Control. Under the logo, in italic letters, the company mission is spelled out: ‘The eradication of pests, bed bugs, lice, cockroaches, mice, rats, pigeons. Insect extermination. Disinfection.'

Mathilde feels laughter in her stomach, like a wave. But it stops at once. If she weren't so tired she would laugh heartily, uproariously. The man on the twentieth of May is a professional exterminator who gets rid of undesirables.

She didn't recognise him. She went past him. She refused to go for a drink. She didn't stop.

It's not that simple. Every time he gets into his car, Lila's perfume turns his stomach. Even though he's left the windows half open since this morning. When he leans over to the passenger side, the perfume is even stronger, it's ingrained.

He'll get the inside of the car cleaned. Next weekend.

 

He remembers that night when he went over to Lila's place very late. She'd called him around midnight and asked him to come, right away. He was hardly through the door when she started undressing him. They made love without speaking. And then they lay down on the bed side by side. In the darkness the whiteness of her body seemed phosphorescent. Lila's breathing had grown calmer little by little. He thought she was asleep. Once again he felt dispossessed, dispersed. Alone.

And then by some strange instinct in the silence he touched her face. Her face was wet with tears. He held her hand on top of the sheet.

He didn't know how to love her. He didn't know how to make her laugh, to make her happy.

He loved her with his doubts, his despair, he loved her from the darkest part of himself, the heart of his fault lines, in the throbbing of his own wounds.

He loved her with the fear of losing her, all the time.

 

The message from the base mentioned a thirty-two-year-old woman with mild neurological symptoms. The appointment was classified as moderately urgent.

Thibault wasn't sure where the street was. He got his map out of the glove compartment. It was 6.35. With a bit of luck, this would be his last appointment. It took him nearly twenty-five minutes to get there. In front of the building, a delivery space had just been vacated as he arrived.

He took the lift and walked along an endless corridor with rendered walls. He looked for the right number among the ten or so doors on that floor. He rang the bell.

 

The young woman is sitting in front of him. He notices her long legs, the strange lopsided way she has of sitting on her chair, her freckles and the few strands which have escaped from her pinned-up hair. She possesses an unusual beauty which moves him.

She told him the story. From the beginning.

A few days earlier, when she was working on the computer, her hand suddenly stopped working. Her hand was on the mouse and she could no longer hold or move it. And then it went back to normal. Later that evening, again while she was working, a black veil obscured her vision. For a few seconds she couldn't see anything. She wasn't too worried. She put it down to tiredness. Two days later she missed her step on the stairs, exactly as though her body were disconnected from her brain for a split second.

And then this morning, the coffee pot fell at her feet without her understanding why. She'd been holding it in her left hand and let it go. That's when she called.

 

She doesn't have a GP. She's never ill.

She's standing in front of him, her hands joined on the table. She asks him if it's serious. And then she adds: ‘I want to know exactly what you're thinking.'

 

Thibault did a full neurological examination.

He is going to have to convince her to have more extensive tests without delay. He is going to have to convince her without panicking her. This woman is thirty-two years old and is presenting the first symptoms of multiple sclerosis or a brain tumour. That's what he's thinking.

‘It's too soon to say. But you must take these signs very seriously. As your condition seems to have returned to normal, I'm not going to ask for you to be hospitalised. But tomorrow you must make appointments for the tests I'm going to prescribe. I'll call the hospital myself so that you're seen as quickly as possible. And if something else happens before then, you must go to casualty.'

She doesn't press him. She looks at him and smiles.

He wants to go over to her and take her in his arms. To rock her and tell her not to worry.

He wants to stroke her cheek, her hair. To tell her that he's there with her, that he won't leave her.

 

He's seen hundreds of patients with serious illnesses. He knows the way life collapses and how quickly. He's familiar with overdoses, heart attacks, sudden cancers and the constant suicide figures. He knows you can die at thirty.

But this evening, facing this woman, that seems intolerable.

This evening he feels as though he has lost his layer of protection, that invisible distance without which it is impossible for him to pursue his profession. He's missing something, there's something he lacks.

This evening he is naked.

 

He looks for the switch on the landing and turns on the light.

The young woman waves again, thanks him. She closes the door behind him.

 

He sits in his car. He's unable to drive off.

For a long time, in the absence of God, he has looked for a higher reason in illness.

Something which would give him a meaning.

Something which would justify the fear, the suffering, the flesh eaten into, exposed, the hours of immobility.

But he's no longer looking. He knows how blind and pointless illness is. He is familiar with how fragile the body is.

And against that, ultimately he can do nothing.

 

For the first time in ages he wants to smoke a cigarette. He wants to feel the smoke burn his throat, his lungs, invade his body, numb him.

He notices a card slipped under his windscreen wiper.

He gets out of the car and removes it. He sits back down again to read it.

‘Mr Salif, medium, can resolve your most desperate problems in 48 hours. If your girl/boyfriend has left you, he/she will come running back like a dog after its master. Speedy return of the loved one. Affection rediscovered. Spells broken. Luck. Work. Sexual power. Success in all fields. Exams, driving tests.'

He feels laughter in his stomach, like a wave. But it stops at once. If he weren't so tired he would laugh heartily, uproariously. Thibault throws the card out the window. He couldn't care less about the city and its dirt. Today he could quite cheerfully empty into the gutter all the crumpled papers and empty wrappers that have littered the floor of his car for weeks. He could spit on the ground and leave his engine idling for hours. He doesn't give a fuck.

 

The base called to ask him if he could go to the police station in the thirteenth arrondissement for an arrest. The cops had been waiting two hours for a medical certificate for a minor.

He said no.

He has no desire to go and examine some sixteen-year-old kid who's just stuck another kid with a blade to confirm that he's in a fit state to be detained by the police.

It's beyond him.

 

He remembers in the early days the time he would spend at his window, watching people, the attentive hours spent in cafés when he dined alone, listening to other people, guessing their stories. He loved this city, the tangle of its stories, these shapes multiplied to infinity, the countless faces. He loved the effervescence, the crossed destinies, the sum of the possibilities.

He loved that moment when the city grows calm and the strange rumble of the asphalt when night falls, as though the street were giving back the violence it's absorbed, its excess emotion.

It seemed to him then that there was nothing more beautiful, more dizzying than this great mass of humanity.

 

Now he sees three thousand patients a year, he knows their irritations, their loose coughs and their dry coughs, their addictions and their migraines and their insomnia.

He knows their loneliness.

Now he knows how brutal the city is and the high price it exacts from those who expect to survive there.

And yet he wouldn't leave for anything in the world.

 

He's forty-three. He spends a third of his time in his car looking for a parking place or stuck behind delivery trucks. He lives in a big two-room apartment above the place des Ternes. He's always lived alone, apart from a few months when he was a student. None the less he has known a certain number of women and some of them loved him.

He hasn't known how to put down his bags and stop moving.

He's left Lila. He's done it.

You can't make other people love you. That's what he repeats to himself, to justify his actions.

At other times perhaps he would have fought.

But not now. He's too tired.

 

There comes a moment when the price becomes too high. Exceeds your resources.

When you have to get out of the game, accept you've lost. There comes a moment when you can't stoop any lower.

 

He's going to go home.

He'll pick up his mail in the letter box, climb up five floors. He'll make himself a gin and tonic and put on a CD.

He'll take stock of precisely what he's done. He'll be able to cry, even if just to show he's still capable of it. Blow his nose noisily, drown his sorrows in alcohol, kick his shoes off on his IKEA carpet, give in to the stereotype, wallow in it.

A voice was asking passengers to stand back from the edge of the platform, as the train drew slowly into the station. Mathilde got into the second carriage so that she could get off near the escalators when she reached the gare de Lyon.

With her forehead against the window, she’s watching the apartment blocks alongside the track go by, with their half-open curtains, underpants on the line, symmetrical flower pots, a child’s tractor abandoned on a balcony, these tiny lives, reduced, uncountable. Further on, the track crosses the Seine. She makes out the pagoda-shaped Chinese hotel and the smoke from the factories in Vitry.

On the train home, people take stock of their day, they sigh, unwind, grumble, exchange indiscretions. When the information is really confidential, they lean closer to each other, lower their voices, sometimes they laugh.

She closes her eyes. She listens to the conversations around her, she listens without seeing, eyelids shut. She remembers the hours she spent lying on the beach as a child, without moving, soothed by the high-pitched cries and the noise of the sea going out, surrounded by voices without faces. ‘Don’t leave your wet swimsuits on the sand.’ ‘Martine, put your hat on.’ ‘Stay in the shade.’ ‘Come and get your sandwiches.’ ‘Who left the cool box open?’

She used to be in the habit of reading, but she hasn’t been able to for several weeks. The lines slip away from her, become jumbled. She can’t concentrate. She stays like that, with her eyes closed. She observes the relaxing of her limbs, waiting for the tension to lessen little by little.