Lovers on All Saints' Day (10 page)

In the front hall, where there had always been a stone angel stationed under the staircase, there was now no staircase, but rather a solid oak bookcase, and the stone angel was an armchair for reading. Three rooms shared the space that thirty-nine years earlier had been the living room: one for the hunting weapons, one for winter clothes, and another that Madame Michaud did not verify, because it looked dark and perhaps deep (she thought there was a banister descending to a cellar), and she was afraid of getting lost. The main floor was unrecognizable; Madame Michaud was consoled by the fact that she could not go upstairs—she didn’t know how to get there—thus she avoided having to feel her way blindly again and the unfamiliarity, the painful unfamiliarity.

Madame Michaud was not alone in the house, but the other presence would not have given herself away for all the gold in the world. From the rose windows of the attic, Sara saw her leave, and it was as if she could feel the cold that stung her older sister’s face. Sara did not miss out on a single detail: before her anxious gaze, Madame Michaud saw that a sort of hut without walls stood on the spot where, as she remembered, the barn for the Lusitanian horses had been, and then, with a hand to her forehead, she discovered that the distant garden with its sleeping plants had once been a dense grove of trees. She was grateful that the taxi was still waiting, because she wasn’t sure she’d be able to find the way out among so many new lanes leading to so many new outbuildings, to the many recent constructions that Sara had planned and erected with the patience of an artist over the course of thirty-nine years, in many cases not even yet occupied or serving any purpose, because their only justification was to replace a memory or an affection in the mind of Madame Michaud so that now she, in the backseat of the taxi, would be wondering where she might go, what place remained for her in the world.

Y
OUR NAME AND ADDRESS
are typed on the envelope, as I didn’t want you to recognize my handwriting and throw the letter away without even opening it. This is the sentence at the top of the page on which I tell Viviane about what has happened to me over these last few months—without going into too many details about the illness, because I don’t even have any myself—and ask her to come with me to visit my father. Now, for the first time since I posted it, I think she might not come, and I feel I wouldn’t blame her. I said to meet at the Gare d’Austerlitz—the railway stations are practically the only places in Paris open on Sundays—and I’ve sat down to wait for her on a bench that smells like bleach and the coffee a tramp is drinking very slowly beside me and the sweat of weekend joggers. The cold has let up a little bit: it’s now possible to see people carrying their sweaters as they walk, days are getting longer and dawn now breaks without fog, and the last layer of gritty ice on the sidewalks has melted away. Whole centuries seem to have passed since November. Would these first months of single life or solitude have been the same for her? When I see her coming, I rush over to meet her so she won’t have to come into the entrance hall, because she, perhaps the woman most sensitive to cold in existence, is still wearing her overcoat and scarf despite the newspapers saying that winter ended a week ago, and she’s always detested going into warm places because of the extravagant unwrapping and wrapping up again involved. I don’t know how I should greet her; she reveals the same awkwardness. We don’t kiss. We don’t shake hands. Viviane’s gaze passes over my shoulders and hair, avoids immediately focusing on the inflammation on my neck. The white and polished midday light bathes her face with a deceptive pallor. I’m not surprised that, six months after our separation, she still strikes me as unusually beautiful. But nobody has ever said we should stop finding a woman attractive once we’ve left her.

“So, you didn’t tear up the letter,” I say to her.

“No. But I do want to ask you that we get this over with as quickly as possible.”

“You bought some new earrings.”

“A couple of weeks ago,” says Viviane. “Where are we going?”

“To République. You’ve been to the apartment, I don’t know if you remember.”

“Your father’s still there?”

“Still there. What’s the matter?”

“It can’t be healthy. Isn’t it full of bad memories, ghosts?”

“Of course,” I say. “But they only scare the guests.”

“You know what I mean,” says Viviane, irritated. “Don’t play the fool.”

My mother left the apartment on Rue de la Fontaine-au-Roi when I was sixteen years old. Her departure was foretold, and no one held out any hope during her brief resolution to force herself to restore family life: those were the good intentions that anticipate the definitive decision, and that was obvious even to my father. Until we were officially engaged, I hid certain aspects of that process from Viviane. At the time I thought and said that it pained me to touch on the subject; now, that conviction has deserted me. When I finally told her about all that, of the nights when my father would come home drunk and furious with my mother for leaving him and their son, kicking doors and startling me awake in the middle of the night, Viviane reproached me for taking so long to tell her. She complained about my silences, about the walls I seemed to put up around myself. She complained about not feeling needed. Referring to my mother, she said, in a moment of rage, that I had probably been happy about it, because all my life I’d been happy when I was able to do without someone: an occasional girlfriend I decided not to see anymore, a friend who silently drifted away until he stopped talking to me, guests whose stay was reaching its end. She was always disturbed by the ease with which I excluded others or allowed them to exclude themselves.

We wait for the metro on the Bobigny side. The trains still run aboveground at first. The car we get into is empty, except for two North African women who are sitting on the drop-down seats as if they preferred to be uncomfortable, as if they felt unworthy of the spaciousness of the main benches. Viviane turns away from me, and her face, during the dark stretches between stations, is reflected in the glass as if it were a mirror. Behind that face, deep in the black wall, is mine: suspicious eyebrows, Mediterranean fisherman’s nose, bandage. My attention goes back to Viviane. When she squeezes her eyelids shut, I notice she’s not wearing any makeup. When we said hello, she’d successfully pretended, but now that talent is beginning to evaporate.

“Please don’t cry,” I say.

“Why not? So your father won’t imagine things?”

I don’t say anything. I don’t want this day to start with an argument.

“Don’t you think he’s going to realize we’re not together anymore?”

Her resentment toward me is visible, and it’s obvious she’s been nurturing it with dedication. At first, months earlier, I used to stop and wonder what Viviane was feeling, what questions were going through her mind, or what sorrows, what things she’d be regretting. I soon stopped, out of fear of the small private abyss that this solidarity opened in front of me. Lovers are not made for pondering the consequences of their own actions. Viviane asks me:

“How long has it been since you last saw him?”

“A year, more or less. There’s no reason he would have found out about us. So this is the favor I’m asking of you.”

“I already know that, don’t hassle me so much. Leave me alone for a while, please.”

She looks at me. The sadness in her eyes is almost intolerable. It hurts her to be with me, see me, and hear my voice for the first time in four months. If she agreed to come, I think, it’s because she knows as well as I do how much her presence facilitates relations with my father, and because she understands my desire to avoid explaining anything, describing my life, going into my reasons for leaving her: she understands, in fact, that I’d rather give my father the impression that my family is intact and that the son of a wife who left will not inevitably abandon his own marriage. We’ve been talking in shouts, as people do so the roar of the metro won’t carry away their words, and the women looked at us out of the corners of their eyes, as if through their veils. I feel like insulting them. Then I realize they’re looking at my face, not a banal dispute between former lovers. Viviane has also noticed, and with the hand still wearing her wedding ring—or has she put it back on this morning, perhaps she was even lucid enough to think of that—she touches my cheek and jaw and the bandage covering the swollen lymph node. She examines it.

“It might not be anything serious, right? It
might
be something else.”

I say yes, the doctors don’t know yet.

“I hope you’re not lying to me.”

“I explained everything in the letter, Viviane,” I say, letting my head drop. “Can we not overdramatize this, please?”

“Don’t be like that. Look at me.”

I obey.

“That’s better,” says Viviane. “You’re ill, I have a right to worry.”

This encounter must be much more difficult for her than it is for me. She has no hidden motives; I, however, am thinking all the time about this visit I’ve decided to pay, and for which Viviane is instrumental. Perhaps she’s now grown used to my absence, after who knows what efforts, and then I show up and write to her asking that we see each other again. I want to question her: Have you gotten used to it? Viviane, have you stopped loving me? I don’t, perhaps because it would be an awful way of playing dirty. I want to play fair with Viviane. I owe her a lot, and I know it. I thank her for coming, for putting up with this. But at the very moment I speak, the car fills with noise, because the train has gone into a tunnel.

“What did you say?” she asks me.

“Nothing, nothing,” I say. “I like it better when the train is aboveground.”

Viviane doesn’t reply.

“Here we are.” I nudge her gently with my fingertips. “We have to get off here.”

Of course I am ashamed of my cowardice; I don’t know if the harm I’m doing to Viviane is justified. But seeing my father is, today at least, a necessity. When we come up outside, my shoes are heavy as if I were walking on sand.

—

F
IVE WEEKS
after leaving Viviane, while reading an uninteresting essay by Georges Perec one night, I felt a hardness under my jaw. Bending my chin down, as one often does when reading in bed, I felt like I had a glass marble stuck to my skin. I spent the whole night bending my neck, lowering my chin, moving my head; discovering all the positions in which the marble made its presence known. Up till then I had never been ill: illnesses were things that happened to other people, someone else’s anecdotes or passing difficulties. A week later, after blood tests had been done, when each doctor whom another doctor referred me to evaluated the same symptoms and asked the same questions about pain, about my family medical history and possible fatigue, I began to experience a new sensation. As I crossed Paris by metro for another appointment or to pick up the results of the latest test, I was afraid, because each time a doctor touched my throat, I felt certain—it was an exaggerated but not entirely false certainty—that the marble had doubled in size. I was afraid because all the doctors asked me to undress, although for me it was a simple inflammation in a place that had nothing to do with my armpits, my elbows, the backs of my knees, or the flesh of my abdomen, and, nevertheless, the doctors pressed all over, with their fingers of greenish latex, looking for other inflammations. The first time this happened, a young doctor on Avenue de la Motte-Picquet told the woman who had recommended him to me what she then told me over the phone later that day. I don’t know if he confided in her with the express intention that she would repeat it to me, almost word for word, as she in fact did. “Xavier says that you shouldn’t worry too much. If it really is cancer, we’re going to find out relatively quickly.”

That was not the case: we did not know relatively quickly. The diagnoses continued to be imprecise, and I continued to walk around Paris—now almost all the doctors I saw were in the 15th arrondissement, which, at least, meant I didn’t have to spend the whole day underground in the metro—with the feeling that something was getting away from me: time, the city I was beginning to hate, the simple truth, daily calm. Unidentifiable lytic detritus, the detection of macrophages, all this was like a keyhole, barely suggesting the illness with a hermeticism resembling poetry. People’s curious glances soon began to try my patience. But then I’d get home, look in the mirror, and forgive them, for it was impossible to pretend that the deformity on my face might not attract attention. It had transformed into half a sphere, as prominent as if someone had sewn a pocket onto my left jawbone, and it was tender and the skin covering it was a lighter color, milky like the water in a puddle. I was tormented by the lack of symmetry, the bulge I’d occasionally catch sight of on my shadow, the hindrance if I looked back over my left shoulder; but more than anything else, my lost invisibility, the notoriety my face acquired in any public place. I was no longer nobody, now I was
a person
among the abstract assembly of
people
in the metro. I didn’t know, until that moment, the importance I gave to the possibility of being incognito, and now, suddenly, everybody I crossed paths with on the street was like a relative who looked at me from afar until realizing, by the time they were at my side, that no, we’d never seen each other before. I learned to hate. At a pedestrian crossing at the Jardin du Luxembourg, a woman waiting beside me to cross Rue de Vaugirard approached me to ask, point-blank, what that was I had on my face; the youngest daughter of Madame Schumer, my landlady, refused to greet me with a kiss, and her expression revealed disgust and fear at the same time. She was an eight-year-old girl, but I felt contempt for her (and for all the rest of the children I saw outside, clean and healthy, unaware of their bodies) and avoided her from then on.

The same day I had a chest X-ray and an MRI, I received a call I didn’t get to in time because I was in the shower trying to wash the blue gel the doctor had smeared on the scanner wand off my neck and chest: a cold lubricant that left me feeling, on the way home, that my cotton clothes were constantly sticking to my skin, not like sweat, but like dry nectar. The absurd possibility that it had been my father calling lodged in my head. It was absurd, because he didn’t know I was no longer married, didn’t have my new phone number, and knew nothing of my indecipherable illness; it was absurd, above all, because my father never had any reason to want to talk to me. Now, imagining it had been him who called seemed unusual for me, almost fantastical, except for the fact of probable death. In the cinema, walking along the Canal Saint-Martin, over breakfast, the probability I was dying of lymphatic cancer had begun to dog me. Maybe I still had a few doctors to consult; I still hadn’t received test results proving it irrefutably, but I had already stopped feeling I had more than enough time.

A couple of days earlier, then, I made up my mind. I’d just undergone the last tests: several punctures that extracted a sepia-colored liquid from the swollen lymph node, a liquid that would be left to ferment for three days on a saucer like the ones we used in school to separate salt from water, and which would, according to Dr. Fauchey, give us fundamental information about the nature of my illness. I didn’t actually see the instrument used: I felt a sharp itch but no real pain, because the skin covering the node lost sensitivity and became almost dead tissue. While I was waiting for the results, I went out for a walk through Montparnasse, perhaps trying to catch a little of Parisians’ feigned frenzy, but my impatience obliged me to look for a pay phone and call the doctor. His secretary answered; she said that Fauchey was out of town until the weekend. “Call him on Monday,” the woman had said, and I felt something like hatred toward her. “Does the doctor have a mobile?” I asked, and heard a no, first of all, and then a long silence on the other end of the line. “Give me that number,” I said. “I might have . . . I might be very ill and not know it. It’ll be your responsibility, mademoiselle.” The threat was infantile, but effective. The strange thing was my difficulty in pronouncing the name of my possible illness. For some time now the word itself, seen by chance in the display window of the Odéon medical bookshop or even in a magazine horoscope, would provoke slight dizziness and an empty feeling in my stomach.