Viviane (2 page)

You said no, I'm the one who's leaving. Keep everything, I'm taking the child, we won't need alimony. You moved out on October 15, found a babysitter, extended your maternal leave for health reasons, and on Monday, November 15—yesterday—you killed your psychoanalyst. You did not kill him symbolically, the way one sometimes ends up killing the father. You killed him with a Zwilling J.A. Henckels Twin Profection
santoku knife. “The unique forging of the blade's edge offers optimal stability and exceptional ease in cutting,” explained the brochure you were studying at Galeries Lafayette while your mother was getting out her checkbook.

This knife, which belongs to a set of eight, you picked up at Julien's apartment sometime that morning. You grabbed the case without a moment's hesitation. It went straight to the bottom of your purse, the zipper of which you closed with a firm yank. Then something very strange happened. You were about to leave the apartment; your hand had already grasped the doorknob when a black veil fell over the room. Suddenly you were no longer leaving the apartment, it was the apartment that was swirling around you, rising on all sides, floor, walls, ceiling, as everything was suddenly overturned. Sweat pearled in the palms of your hands as thousands of insects thrummed inside your skull, a swarming army attacking the slightest bits of bare skin, blocking exits, closing off your eyes, nose, and mouth.

You slumped down on the linoleum, your head on your knees to help blood reach the brain. Dug the bottle of mineral water out of your purse. Drank a few swallows, prayed to God knows whom, hoping that the
terror would fade away. From beneath a low cabinet, the cat's yellow eyes—all that was visible in the darkness—observed you cautiously.

At last you remembered that you regularly consult a specialist. When your fingers stopped trembling so much, you grabbed your cell phone, scrolled through your address book, and selected Shrink.

He answered in his usual offhand tone because he was with a patient and because that is his normal voice. The doctor doesn't bother with formalities, they are against his code of ethics and detrimental to the cure, as he has told you many times. You're already lucky that he has agreed to see you in this emergency, at six thirty tonight, a canceled appointment. In any case, he's been nagging you for months to move up to three sessions a week.

You went home to drop off the carryall with the toaster, then on to the sitter's to ask her if, this once, she would keep the baby until that evening. But no, she does not find that convenient at all. You take your daughter home, nurse her, and spend the afternoon in the rocking chair searching for a solution.

Actually, you have already found one, you're simply trying to get used to the idea. Whenever the baby falls
asleep, she's out for three hours. This will leave plenty of time to dash off to the 5th arrondissement, a direct shot on the 7 line. You will shut off the gas, unplug the heating unit, and you will not lock the apartment door so that the firemen can get in easily if a fire breaks out in spite of all your precautions. Such arrangements clearly cast no luster on your maternal instincts. You're not proud of this and will not be gaily recounting the scene to your eight- or nine-year-old daughter when she decides to start finding fault with you, having established by comparison with the classics of children's literature that you are not the ideal mother glorified by family-values novels. So there it is, you won't tell a soul, ever: you know how to keep your little secrets.

Toward the end of the afternoon, you feed the child, put her to bed, then head up Rue de l'Aqueduc to the métro station. Censier-Daubenton is seventeen stops and a good half hour away. By the time you arrive, night has almost fallen. In two minutes you have crossed the square and reached Rue de la Clef, which is deserted. You do not meet anyone while going up to the fourth floor of No. 22A, either. You ring and, when the buzzer sounds, you enter the waiting room. Five minutes later there's a murmured au revoir, followed by the closing
of the landing door. You're kept waiting while someone apparently makes a few phone calls, has a smoke at the window. You leaf idly through the only reading material within reach, a boring seventeenth-century play by Pierre Corneille. The fan of pages is coming loose from the binding. No real effort seems to have been made to alleviate the stage fright of those waiting for the curtain to go up, and now you think, in hindsight, that if there'd been a
Paris Match
or any other magazine available, something even vaguely intended to relieve your distress instead of reinforce it, you might not have wound up where you are.

The doctor receives you after a long fifteen minutes, wearing a small satisfied smile. Stepping back to let you pass, he even seems to bow slightly.

So, he begins, with false good humor, as if he were about to tell you a good story. But this is a trick, an infallible way to make the patient fall into the trap. You've been aware of this trick for a long time yet cannot resist the doctor's mysterious power.

It reappeared this morning, you begin. It had gone away while I was pregnant, now it's back. I wound up on the floor in my place, well really in my husband's place, in what used to be my apartment. Something needs to
be done, I can't take it anymore, I have to look after my daughter.

The doctor says yes.

Yes what? you reply. I'm telling you something must be done, no yes or no about it. I haven't come here to go all the way back to the Flood, I'm tired, I need help now.

But you know perfectly well, Madame Fauville, excuse me, Hermant, you know that the symptoms are only symptoms. That one must go back to their source, isn't that so, Madame Hermant?

My dear doctor, I tell you I couldn't care less about their source. For three years now you've been running me around in circles, three years of the same old same old. If you can't do anything for me, just say so, I'll go somewhere else.

Yes?

Doctor, you're not listening to me. I don't want to play anymore, I give up. Some other method is required or there's no point in my coming here again.

Really now, blackmail.

This has nothing to do with blackmail, you announce, raising your voice just a little. On the contrary. I would like to stay, I would like this to work, but I can't go on endlessly with no results. I haven't the means.

The means?

Yes, the means, right, the means, and now you're yelling. The time, the money, the necessary resources. There are the bills, the rent, the babysitter, it's not my husband who's going to help me out here, must I remind you, my husband who left me for some fresh young idiot or other, so I'm on my own, as the saying goes, on my own with my daughter, we're two on-our-owns and we need to get out of this mess.

Why have you made this choice?

You clench your fists, squash your spine against the back of the armchair and close your eyes. A tiny rain of rage escapes from the corners of your eyelids. You see yourself again, a month and a half earlier, hunched deep in the rocking chair in the Rue Louis-Braille apartment, facing your husband as he dismisses you, trying to keep calm by deciding on the spot to move out because it was your last chance to take him by surprise.

You snatch up your purse. Fumbling for some tissues, you feel the case of knives, which is rather heavy, but you were in such a hurry when you left your place, so uneasy at the idea of leaving your daughter alone, that you'd paid no attention to it. You find the tissues; the purse sits open on your lap.

I didn't choose anything, it's my husband who left me.

But we all make unconscious choices.

You're suggesting that I pushed him out.

I'm not suggesting anything, you're the one who's saying that.

Your arms jerk up from the armrests and your hands begin to shake.

Listen, Madame Hermant, here's what we'll do. You'll take these pills for me for a few months, you know, the antidepressants, plus the ones for when your nerves give way, they'll help stabilize the hysteria. They worked rather well the last time, didn't they, Madame Hermant? Here, I'm writing you a prescription. Be nice now, start the treatment again, come back to see me on Wednesday, and we'll move to three sessions a week. Monday at eight, does that suit you?

Suddenly you are quite calm again. The doctor has found just the right word. Nice. You will never be that again. Your fingers rummage in the purse, find their way into the knife box, feel the blades and remove the largest knife from the ring securing it to the synthetic velvet lining. You take the knife out of the purse, stand up, step forward. The doctor is still smiling, waiting for
what happens next as if he were at the theater. Naturally he doesn't believe you're capable of this, either. He has never seen you as anything but a colorless middle-class careerist, a run-of-the-mill neurotic to be brought to heel with blue or white pills. At last he will see what you're made of. And in fact, as you close in, the sneering laughter dies down while his flabby features freeze. But when he realizes what's coming, it's way too late.

You're only inches away, towering over him with your height and high heels. You raise the knifepoint to his stomach, clumsily, as if feeling your way, not quite sure if this will work. He opens his mouth wide; a cry gathers deep in his throat. Then you know you must not hesitate: you shove the knife in just below the lowest rib, up to the hilt. The viscera are as soft as butter. You move up toward the lung but already the little man is expiring, lying prostrate before the armchair from which he will no longer play the tyrant with anyone.

The bloodstain seeps into the blue shirt. Soon it's a puddle on his left side, then a pool spreading to the rug. You move the toes of your shoes out of the way. You have nothing in mind, no strategy, but perhaps some memory of a film or crime novel prompts you to consider that it might be better not to be seen, in the
next few minutes, leaving the doctor's office looking haggard and splotched with blood. You wipe the knife on your pullover; the liquid soaks through the wool to wet the skin of your abdomen. In the pocket of your raincoat you find a plastic bag scrunched into a ball. The knife gets wrapped in that. You check to make sure you haven't forgotten anything, leave the room and at least a thousand pieces of evidence behind but, overwhelmed, you couldn't find them even if you stayed all night, having never thought of polishing up your skills as a murderess.

Rue de la Clef is as empty as it was a little while ago. The first person you come across is a young woman at the corner of Rue Monge, with a baguette under one arm, a little boy hanging on the other, and a grumpy Monday-night expression. You reach the intersection where the métro station is, as well as several brasseries with heated terraces and therefore dozens of customers who have nothing better to do than watch the traffic and note the most picturesque passersby. You dive into the subway.

On the platform, the electronic display shows a three-minute wait for the next train. You sit down on an orange seat, stealthily examining the nearest travelers:
three young men in suits; two female students with studs in their noses, eyebrows, and the lobes of their pretty ears; an African man draped in an ample green native costume. You wait for them to unmask you. It must show in your face, that you just killed a man. And yet the African is absorbed in a free daily paper, the students are watching the mice scurrying around the tracks, and the others discuss the latest sales figures for the auto industry.

The train enters the station. The passengers press up against the windows until the doors open, pour out onto the platform, pour obediently back inside at the urging of the warning beeps, and the new arrivals elbow their way into the car. You move slowly into the heart of the crowd. A few men consider you absentmindedly, but your face seems to vanish from memory as soon as they look away.

At Stalingrad, the human surge throws you off the train and up to the surface, on Boulevard de la Chapelle. In five minutes you're outside your building. You don't see a single soul on your way up to the sixth floor, apart from the white cat on the third, who has finished his rounds and is waiting for someone to let him back into his apartment. Hunting for your keys in the outer
pocket of your purse, you remember that you don't need them, you didn't lock the door. One twist of the doorknob and you hear the burbling coming from the cradle: the baby has only just awakened. You run to the washing machine to throw in all your clothes. Completely naked under the equally naked bulb, you clean the knife with dish detergent, bleach, and turpentine, then put it away with the others in its case. You warm the bottle; cradle the little girl; she feeds and falls asleep. Seated in the rocking chair in the middle of the bare living room, you forget.

3

The next morning, Tuesday, November 16, memory has completely returned. The digital clock down by the foot of the bed says 5:58. There are about two minutes left before the child wakes up, two minutes in which to find a solution, to clear away as much as possible of the debris strewn around by the previous day.

Viviane gets up and goes over to the cradle. With the tip of an index finger, she nudges the mobile attached to one edge by a curved metal stem. It's a little merry-go-round of lions and giraffes, the former suspended one notch above the latter, which therefore seem safely out of reach. But if you nudge the mobile a bit harder, the animals now not only turn around but dance up and down as well, which means anything can happen. The child opens one eye. Surprised to see her mother already there, she forgets to cry.