Lovers on All Saints' Day (15 page)

Selma and Chopin were able to see each other again on March 28, one month and two weeks after she came back from the hospital to her house in the Ardennes, the time she considered sufficient for the small incision to scar over—the obstetrician had prescribed three months but was undoubtedly taking extra care. Léopold had stopped hunting during that time, and took such zealous care of his wife, and such stoic care of his newborn daughter (he got up at four in the morning and went out into the murderous cold to feed the dog, Sido, distract him, and thus postpone his barking), that Selma was occasionally tinged with guilt and almost pity. To what point did that innocent man know that his consideration was at the same time vigilance, that the care he was lavishing on her was most of all taking care of himself. Selma thought of this on the Friday when, after lying to Léopold about some yellow flowers that she needed to buy in the Place de la Cathédrale (not to be the last to celebrate spring), she dropped him off at his office in Mont-Saint-Martin and crossed Liège heading for Guillemins station, driving slowly because the thaw had made the streets slippery. The hoteliers’ lack of imagination struck her as incredible, squandering the opportunity to baptize their businesses with bold or attractive names—were they not, after all, places where bold men and attractive women went to make love?—and preferring to make use of the neighborhood or a cliché, and so a hotel on the banks of the Oise was called Hôtel de l’Oise, and one on the other side of the river was called Hôtel Simenon, in spite of the fact that the writer had never set foot in its premises, and had even died before its construction. And so the Hôtel Guillemins took its name from the nearby station, so nearby that the room rate doubled if the windows did not overlook the incessant rattling and jolting of the trains; but Selma didn’t know if the station was named after the prostitutes’ street, or the prostitutes’ street after the station. She wanted to ask Chopin, but when she found him beside the counter, amusing himself with a telephone book—seeing how many surnames he could memorize before she arrived—all her mouth would do was fall open into a kiss, and the novelty of Chopin’s hands closing around her waist and spanning it made her laugh out loud and also made the blood rush up to her cheeks, because she recognized that she’d become indispensable to the man, or at least had been continuously imagined by him during all that time, and the other novelty, the one she’d foreseen in silence, gave her shivers, because once upstairs, after being almost pushed by those avid hands up against the bathroom wall (the neon lights came on and went out and the lovers laughed), after those hands, as nimble and precise as those of a surgeon, showed so much evidence of clumsiness in undressing her and even popped a mother-of-pearl button off the red blouse she’d chosen so carefully, after all that, then, lying down faceup with legs open to the sweaty body and erect member assailing her, showing herself to Chopin as she’d never done before that instant, was something both as shameful and as wild as losing her virginity all over again, and the space between her breasts that smelled of milk and perfume filled with color and her eyes opened and her stretched belly felt contact with the other skin, and Selma knew she’d never forget the way the cold light from the street was changing on this new belly, on these hips widened by the effort of the delivery, on the bright white stretch marks like slimy trails of a cemetery snail.

After the sex, Selma stared at herself perplexed. The light coming in the window had lowered as if the cheap blind were a workman’s ladder, and the long, horizontal shadows in the room made her feel even more changed and she wondered when the transformation had actually taken place, where the other half of her life was, because Chopin, now getting dressed on the other side of the bed (his back to her, the hem of his shirt barely revealing his skinny buttocks), suddenly seemed like a place where she could lose herself, the man who had deflowered her and demanded to possess her. For the first time, she had seen his face as he penetrated her, his mouth seeking her nipples, which in the semidarkness looked violet, and that image was the one that threatened to colonize her imagination until all that happened again. That’s what she was thinking as she went through the terrible steps that would return her to the real world; however, she did not know, could not know, what was going on inside the magician’s head, because Chopin still remained, in spite of everything, as inscrutable as the day he made her wedding band end up on her husband’s key ring. And so she was not surprised, as they descended the dark stairs and saw the blurry silhouette of a man framed in the etched glass, when her lover identified him immediately, certain that they were facing Léopold and how futile and perhaps childish it would be to turn around—go back to the room, hide in a closet, slip out the fire escape. What shook her first was a shudder of loss, or anticipation of loss, as looking at Léopold’s face she already had her daughter’s image in her mind, and knew that she could renounce the magician but not her little girl’s chance to grow up in the company of her father.

Léopold greeted Chopin with a handshake that seemed anachronistic and rather affected, something like a slap with a white glove or a message sent through seconds, and asked Selma only where she had parked the jeep and if she minded them, the three of them, discussing this matter at home, so no one would bother them, and so they, the three of them, could make the appropriate decisions, with cool heads, serenely and dispassionately. Selma, of course, could not know how mistaken she was in accepting with that kind of inertia that dragged her (since she was the one who knew where the vehicle was and who had the keys in her bag) to the driver’s seat, from which she could but did not want to look at Chopin, sitting in the backseat, and wanted to but could not look at Léopold, that cruel passenger whose eyes scrutinized her, finding and itemizing the infinite signs of adultery, the flushed blotches at her neck and on her lips, hair messed up at the nape of her neck, the veins on the back of her hand slightly welled up (and on her hand the gleaming ring, silent as a spy). By the time they left Liège it was completely dark, and the amber lights from the dashboard made Selma feel a feverish heat in her hands. On the highway, Chopin disappeared from the rearview mirror; the black waters in the frame were broken only by the headlights of the cars following them. Later Selma would try to recall that instant in general, and in particular what had happened in the backseat of the car she was driving, because it was that brief distraction (the eyes watching the road strayed from it for a moment to find those of her lover) which caused the accident. Leaving the highway, at the exact point where Léopold began to eat his cheese sandwich every morning, something moved under the wheels the way the floor used to move when Selma was pregnant. She slammed on the brakes, honked the horn, but the car kept sliding forward on the frozen drizzle and crashed into the brick wall of a pharmacy. Léopold’s head smashed through the windshield: he must have died instantly. In Chopin’s head something very different happened.

He saw a queen and a king at opposite ends of a deck of cards. He saw the space a wedding band needed to cross to link onto a key ring. He saw his teacher, Jacques Lambert, put a redheaded woman inside a black box and then turn her into a Bengal tiger. He saw an American magician put, in place of the Statue of Liberty, a void of illuminated fog. His hands moved in response to this sketch of replacements, to order the world he’d disordered, exchanged a live body for a dead one, lifted by the armpits a man whose head was broken and put him in the place of the woman who’d been driving. And only when he’d carried out the swap and knew that Selma was safe, that she wouldn’t have to take responsibility for the accident, that no judge could saddle her with negligence or guilt or involuntary manslaughter, Chopin collapsed in his seat with the sensation of having done what was expected of him for the first time in his life. He didn’t know if he lost consciousness, because he confused the imaginary audience’s applause with hurried steps on the asphalt, and only after waking up did he understand that the shouts of enthusiasm, at his magisterial sleight of hand, were not shouts but Selma crying and screaming and tearing at the painful air.

V

Those who went to the burial at the Aywaille cemetery saw him accepting responsibilities not his to assume. Chopin attended those who wished to say farewell to Léopold and even allowed some to go up to see his widow, who was quietly breaking down in an eddy of bedclothes (tears sprang from her open eyes as if from a mechanical doll) and had brought her daughter’s cradle to the side of the bed so she would not stop rocking her for an instant (in the silent icy room, her arm was the only movement). For those present, Chopin was still an employee of the company transformed, by virtue of solidarity or sympathy, into a friend of the family; it was later they learned of his secret life, of the affair, of his role in the accident. By the time the details came to light the lovers had separated, their lives had gone in different directions, one without the other: he to Namur, as an assistant in a whole-food shop and restaurant, and she embedded in her Ferrières house, where she still wakes up in the middle of the night to see her husband standing at the foot of the bed or starting down the stairs as if it’s time to get up and put the coffee on. After a few months, when Chopin visited her with the intention of recovering something, of reliving the confusing emotions that had brought him so close to happiness, she received him out of courtesy and spoke of the father, not of the lover, for the length of time it took to empty a teapot. On her lap, or on the blanket as thick as a poncho that covered her from the waist almost to her parallel feet, was a notebook with iridescent covers and a pencil sharpened with a utility blade and tied to the chair with a leather cord. Without lifting the book, Selma told him that she’d started to write down anecdotes about Léopold—his cheese sandwich, what he said before going out hunting—because she, who had grown up without a father, wished her mother had thought of doing this. It was obvious, from the crossed-out lines and an arrow that ran right over the seam of the book from one page to the other, that her ideas weren’t clear, that the memory of her dead husband was already escaping her; but to Chopin, who was beginning to glimpse the undeserved sentence of solitude, this interested him less than the detail of the hanging pencil, a leather pendulum. When he asked her about it, Selma explained that the cord allowed her to find the pencil easily, without wasting time or having to call anybody, when the spasms of fatigue paralyzed the muscles in her hand and forced her to drop it. The hand is a beautiful apparatus, she said then, but still so far from perfect, and pencils are alive and reluctant and sometimes unkind creatures: one tends to drop them, by accident or out of clumsiness or exhaustion, and they can roll for whole kilometers.

I

Oliveira didn’t really care where the hotel was, because he didn’t intend to stay there any longer than necessary. When she was still sober, Agatha had suggested a family-run inn she thought she’d seen near the Auneuil exit, a few months earlier, one day when she’d been called to take care of an old mare with a broken leg. “Putting them down always depresses me,” she’d told Oliveira in her tired voice, “that’s why I don’t take those jobs anymore. The one that day was the last.” After a routine procedure with no complications, Agatha had thought a coffee with brandy might make the memory of the mare dying easier to bear—the fearful neighing, the tension in the spotted legs that gave way as the drug advanced toward the heart—and had gone into a place with a silhouette of a jockey with a riding whip and spurs on the sign. The inn was so pleasant, and it was run by such a nice old man, that Agatha had promised to return and spend a night in one of the four rooms upstairs.

“The old man fought in the war,” she told Oliveira. “But he deserted to be with his family, and no longer found it humiliating to confess. I congratulated him. I would have done the same.”

It soon became obvious they weren’t going to find the old deserter’s inn: Agatha couldn’t remember which route she’d taken that afternoon, and all the streets in the village looked like the same street with recently painted yellow signs and green wooden doors that looked black at night. It was a relief for Oliveira: he’d imagined the old man’s effusive greeting—he’d have a luxuriant mustache that would cover his lips—curious to know who Oliveira was and what his relationship was to the woman, whether they wanted a double bed, if they wanted to be woken early. He couldn’t help finding the prospect of that sort of affability, that forced familiarity, objectionable.

So they kept driving. They decided to track the arrows, obey the inert instructions, and go to an Etap, one of those automatic hotels for a hundred eighty francs a night where nobody mans the desk after ten, and clients register at a screen and use codes as long as telephone numbers to open the doors of the garage, the building, and the room itself.

“You don’t have to talk to anybody,” said Oliveira. “Don’t have to smile or give any explanations.”

“You’re ashamed to be seen with me?”

“Of course not, Agatha.”

“We could go in separately. I can say I’m your aunt, or something.”

“None of that. Don’t be ridiculous.”

Agatha smiled and closed her eyes.

“How romantic,” she teased. “Our first fight.”

Then the red wine made her start to doze off, and Oliveira found that, if he pressed down the clutch and took his foot off the accelerator, he could hear her breathing, the light snoring of a stuffed-up little girl. When they arrived, Oliveira stopped the van outside the main entrance—a banner of white light bathed the hood in its vulgar brightness, and a smeared handprint appeared on the windshield—took his credit card out of his wallet, and before getting out, heard Agatha stir, open her eyes, and say she was delighted they’d chosen such a well-lit place. For him there was something attractive in that giving in to childhood fears on the part of an older woman he’d met a few hours before and with whom he was now looking for a bed where they could make love.

He came back rubbing his hands together. In his lips he held a little piece of paper with serrated edges. Agatha took it from him gently, holding it between her thumb and index finger and waiting for him to open his mouth. The tremor of his door as it banged shut didn’t startle her, but shook the empty bottle under her bare feet. Oliveira wished at that moment that he’d had a drink as well, because the wine would have warmed him up.

“It’s never been so cold,” he said.

“I was dreaming of my daughter,” she said. “I dreamed she was alive, here in the back, and we were talking about horses.”

“She couldn’t have been back there. It’s full of cases and bags.”

“And my instruments.”

“Yes. The heaviest of all.”

“Don’t exaggerate. But a person could easily fit. The proof is that in the dream all that was there and Alma as well. She was asking me what the syringe was for, the scalpel. In the dream she was wearing a Charleston boa.”

“What does the little paper say?”

“Three nine at the beginning,” said Agatha, “nine three at the end. A few more numbers in between. Do you want me to go?”

Before he could reply, she was standing, in bare feet and furrowing her brow, in front of the sliding garage door. With two long strides that didn’t betray the alcohol levels in her bloodstream she was at the keypad. She reproduced the number—Oliveira could hear the beep each time she pressed a button—and smiled when the white light illuminated the entrance and the door slid along its rail set into the pavement.

Oliveira stepped lightly on the accelerator. There was something familiar in that situation, a certain domestic ease that made it unlike a one-night stand. He opened the window as he passed her: a husband coming home, a man expected somewhere.

“Thanks,” he said.

“It’s like Ali Baba’s cave,” said Agatha.

The room was on the second floor. They had to go up a couple of flights of stairs with green carpeting, so worn that their feet barely felt it, and walk down to the end of an ammonia-scented corridor. Only the electric hum of an ice machine broke the silence. When they got to number 17, again she was the one who punched in the code. The tones they found when they entered were violets and fuchsias, the bedspread a lewd purple, the metal bed frame was pink like icing. Beside the bed a half-length mirror reflected a man not as young as Oliveira. He ran his hands over his temples and some loose hairs stuck to them, and he noticed calmly that his forehead had broadened over the last couple of years, like a shoreline during floods.

“Three nine, nine three,” she said.

“What about it?”

“It begins with my age and ends with my age.”

Oliveira kept his face as straight as a gambler’s. He could smell the woman’s breath, sour from wine and lipstick.

“But backward, no?”

“Yes, backward,” said Agatha. “It would be a palindrome of my age if the numbers in between weren’t so disorderly.”

Agatha crossed her arms over her waist and took off her blouse without even unbuttoning it, as carefree as someone trying on old clothes in a theater dressing room. Her breasts had white parallel stretch marks like trails of milk. Between the cups of her cotton bra hung a silver cross that Oliveira hadn’t seen when they pulled out of the gas station. The Christ, as if made of pearl, seemed stained by lotions, perfumes, and sweat.

“Did I tell you what your surname would be in Iceland?”

Oliveira shook his head, his back to her. He was looking for a hanger in the closet to keep his shirt from getting wrinkled. He couldn’t help smiling: a bachelor’s habits.

“Franciscosson,” said Agatha. “That’s what your surname would be. Horrible, don’t you think?”

II

He had found her (it was exactly the right verb) at an exhibition of circus horses six kilometers north of Beauvais, on the property the equestrian Francisco Oliveira’s heirs, one of whom he had no desire to be, had turned into a fairground. The place was no more than five minutes off the A16, but the willows and the whistling of the wind and the horses kicking in their stalls, or perhaps a combination of it all, warded off the din of traffic like erasing the static on a tape recording. At dusk, when the public had left, Oliveira wanted to take one last look at his father’s property, not out of any kind of nostalgia, but in order, later in his life, to be able to describe what he’d given up. There were people in the livery stable. Oliveira circled around the back wall, trying to identify the voices coming from inside without being seen. He peered through the cracks in the wood: there was Antonio, the Portuguese man who’d looked after the stables for the last seven years, accompanied by a woman. Between them, a Lusitanian stallion lowered and raised his head. It could be Elmo, might be Urano. Oliveira never called the horses by their names; he refused to put himself on the same level as them in his father’s regard. Urano, Elmo, Oliveira junior: three different forms of the old rider’s satisfactions. Was that what Oliveira had been, one more lodger at the stables? As a boy, that question had frequently crossed his mind. Now, about to leave it all behind, he was almost ashamed of remembering those regrets.

He walked around the side of the livery stable and undid the wooden bar latch. The bar fell beside him with a crash that startled the woman. The horse didn’t bat an eyelid. Oliveira realized he was sedated.

“Don’t stand there gawking,” she said. “Come and help us.”

“I don’t know anything about horses,” said Oliveira.

The woman wore a cooking apron that said
MON ROYAUME POUR UN CHEVAL
. Her hair was the color of a crow’s feather, and her angular, sad facial features looked as though they’d been carved with a knife on a bar of soap. She obviously didn’t know she was speaking to the son of Francisco Oliveira.

“You know how to hold a bag up in the air,” she said.

Oliveira approached. Minutes earlier he’d been walking beside the stream that flows out of the Thérain, and now the sawdust stuck to his shoes and the hems of his jeans. The woman handed him a clear plastic bag half full of a transparent liquid. It wasn’t sunny, but the slanted winter light still managed to play with the prism of water in the bag. On Oliveira’s wrist and arm it drew red, yellow, and purple figures. From the bag a tube descended and disappeared into the animal’s side; they had shaved the area where the needle went in. Oliveira felt the absurd sensation of localized cold, as if only in that space where the flesh was visible the skin bristled. He looked through the bag. He saw the oblong sign on which Francisco Oliveira had summarized his idea of horsemanship:
CADENCE, LÉGÈRETÉ, GÉOMÉTRIE
. He saw two deformed heads—a soapstone bust that had once been beautiful, black, lively hair—and the huge eyes of a horse beginning to nod off.

“Hold the bag up high,” said the woman. “Above your shoulder, at least.”

The horse began to wobble. His front legs trembled for an instant, and then his body fell sideways like the façade of a building, raising a cloud of sawdust with the dull thud of his flesh. But he refused to put his head on the floor, and the woman had to kneel on his neck and all her weight was barely able to overcome the patient’s resistance. The horse blinked; he panted; his lips hung open like resin revealing the pink gums, the white teeth hard as plaster. Antonio tied a strap around the left hoof and fastened it to the railing of the stands. As he pulled the strap, the horse’s legs separated and revealed the genitals, black as oil against the brown of the groin. The woman brushed the dust off the testicles with her bare hands, washed the area with a bile-colored liquid and then with hot water, and an apparition of steam rose in the cold air. She moved her hands in the pail of water—Oliveira noticed the edges dirty with dog food—dried them with a mauve towel that she spread out on top of the sawdust, and on the towel the instruments for the operation. The woman took out of an aluminum case a small scalpel, the size of her little finger, and drew a precise line on the horse’s scrotum. It wasn’t as if she were cutting: the scalpel was a felt-tip pen and the animal’s skin fine paper. But the blade had cut. The scrotum opened like fruit rind, separated as if it had a life of its own, and the smooth white testicles were exposed to the air, luminous against the black skin.

Then the woman made another cut. The first trickle of blood appeared; immediately the white fruit of the testicles was covered in red. The woman squeezed both hands at the base of the scrotum and the testicles popped out. She raised the scalpel and cut something else, but at that moment Oliveira had to kneel down in the sawdust because he felt his head emptying of blood and the world before his eyes turning black.

“What’s the matter?” said the woman.

“He’s going to faint,” said Antonio.

“Stand up, for God’s sake. I need that serum flowing.”

Oliveira heard them, but had no voice.

“Well, you hold the bag, Antonio. I’ve almost finished.”

Oliveira didn’t see her finish. He stayed on his knees, his back to the animal. When he turned around, a sort of masculine shame kept him from looking between the horse’s legs: his gaze came to rest on the horseshoes that reflected the darkened sky. In this cleansing space the woman appeared, and Oliveira thought the fatigue in her expression was not the result of the operation, but had been with her for a long time.

“Are you all right?”

“I’ll get over it,” said Oliveira.

“Do you want to come in? A cup of tea, or something hot, would do you good.”

Oliveira shook his head.

“I have to get going.”

“But you’re not going to drive like that, it’s dangerous,” the woman said.

Oliveira saw she wasn’t smiling: her voice was more pleading than polite.

“Half an hour more, half an hour less,” she added. “Wherever it is you’re going, it’s not going to make any difference.”

—

W
HEN
O
LIVEIRA TOLD HER
that all of that, the stables and every mare and every stallion, the livery and the right to use it, the two hectares of arable land surrounding the large house, could have belonged to him and he had renounced it all, Agatha’s hands flew to her head and she called him crazy, foolish, deranged. Then Oliveira heard himself explaining his father’s life with indifference that wasn’t exactly genuine and without too many details—but touching on the subject, even if only in monosyllables and short phrases, was already a rarity—speaking about the man who was the master of equestrian artistry and traveled all over Europe and even as far as Brazil teaching admiring students the art of sitting in a saddle. Agatha had also admired him at some point, and Oliveira couldn’t find a way to make her understand his contempt for the world of Lusitanian horses: she would have found it absurd to abandon a place like Beauvais with the arguments that sounded too much like those of an only son jealous of his father’s profession, the tantrum of a spoiled little boy. Had it been a simple slight, Oliveira thought, his motives would be easily explicable. But the memory of his father was tainted with resentments, pinned not on a lifetime’s assessment but on precise and painful images. Oliveira did not belong anywhere and that was his father’s fault. He had only two or three memories of his mother, as if he’d concentrated all his energy on that paternal anthology of reproaches. They’d arrived in France when he was still a boy. Their route had been the opposite of that of most other immigrants: they began on the outskirts of Paris and, as they became more secure, as the rider’s prestige was recognized in Brussels and Stuttgart, they moved away from the capital and out to the provinces. Oliveira grew up with the notion of living in a foreign country, but knowing that none belonged to him. He earnestly pretended whenever faced with a flag. He envied other children who used French without feeling clumsy. Gradually he noticed, little by little, he was forgetting his own language.