Lovers on All Saints' Day (16 page)

He could have told the woman about these memories and said: “This house is my father, these horses are my father. Now do you understand why I’m leaving?” But he didn’t. He concentrated on practical questions, the total area of the property, the price of the stallions. When his father died, the estate was divided up easily and in less than three weeks, so many people were due a share of the inheritance if the son turned it down. The only condition Oliveira imposed was that Antonio should keep his job, but that didn’t keep the foreman from telling him what was in his head. “One doesn’t throw a life away just like that, kid. One would have to be sick at heart. You act as if you’ve lived alone your whole life, as if no one’s ever loved you.” But Oliveira went ahead, without thinking that selling the property, instead of renouncing it, would have at least gotten him some money, which he was going to need. The compensation he’d received, not for the place but for the purebred his father had given him for his twenty-first birthday, was all the money Oliveira had now.

“I spend my life taking care of horses, and you get rid of them,” said the woman. “Incredible that we’re sitting here together.”

“Don’t you ride?”

“Only very badly,” she said.

They were sitting on one of the long wooden benches in the kitchen, beside the gas stove, trying to warm up a little. The lamp over the sink cast a bright yellowish light around the room, and the stove projected an ostrich-shaped shadow. Oliveira realized that it had been a long time since he’d last exchanged more than a couple of polite phrases with a woman: gratitude for merits not his own but his father’s, promises to keep in touch and organize something with the Beauvais horses at the next festival. Perhaps for this reason he thought it lucky that Agatha had arrived in town by train, that someone else—a gay journalist with a German accent—had given her a lift from the station. Now he, who was heading south, could drive her home to L’Isle-Adam, which was barely out of his way. He suggested it, and the ease with which she accepted allowed Oliveira to consider her vulnerable and fantasize from that moment on about her body and the infinite possibilities that might result from a man and a woman traveling alone between the towns of the Oise, each of them alone but traveling together, with the awareness that a night of sex wouldn’t transform them but might be, as had happened to him with other women for one night, an anesthetic, numbing his solitude.

They left about nine, when the December night had fully settled in. Oliveira’s van was parked under an oak tree; the air vents and the windshield wiper blades were covered with twigs and wet leaves. Agatha saw the logo of the rental company, green and yellow letters slanted as if caught in the wind.

“Oh, but you’re really leaving entirely,” she said. “I didn’t realize things were so serious.”

He spoke to himself.

“Of course I’m leaving entirely,” he said. “I don’t imagine there’s any other way to leave.”

After packing, Oliveira had realized that five cubic meters was quite a bit more than he needed. The blonde at the agency had warned him, of course, but Oliveira couldn’t manage to persuade himself that her face—her upper lip covered in a yellow scab as if she were just getting over a nasty flu—inspired confidence. So, in the cargo compartment, the luggage Oliveira was beginning his journey with took up a little more than half the available space: two garbage bags full of clothes and several cardboard boxes left enough room for a person. Agatha read:
HAUT-PLANTADE, THIERRY GROS CAILLOUX, HAUTS-CONSEILLANTS
.

“They’re all wine boxes,” said Agatha.

“Yes, but only one has bottles in it. The rest are full of records and cassettes, movie magazines. Things like that.”

“Any photos?”

“Photos of what?”

“I don’t know, the maestro, some horse. Is there no part of this house you might want to remember some day?”

Oliveira thought it over or pretended to.

“No, none,” he said finally. “Do you have photos of your family?”

“Only of Alma. My daughter. But that’s because she died two years ago, and I don’t want to forget what she looked like.”

Oliveira was going to say he was sorry:
I’m very sorry to hear that
or
My deepest condolences
, but both phrases seemed awkward, ill-suited to the casualness of the revelation, and he couldn’t think of any others.

“Tell me more,” he said then. “We’ve only talked about me. Tell me what your partner does, for example.”

“He’s long gone. He left when Alma was a zygote.”

Oliveira was shaken by the force of her cynicism. He felt indiscreet: that’s what you get for trying to approach a stranger. Agatha kept talking, seeming at ease. She leaned back toward the load with a cat’s curiosity.

“Which is the box of wine?” she said. “I feel like a drink, maybe that would warm us up.”

Then they took the N1 south, a bottle of Saint-Julien held like a baby’s bottle between Agatha’s feet. By the time the van merged with the heavy traffic of the A16, the surface of the wine was below the top of the label. The rainy season was late in coming; the sky seemed clogged up, invariably gray. Soon the highway was no longer illuminated, and all Oliveira saw was the glare of the lights of northbound cars, that sort of permanent eclipse behind sheets of zinc that separated their lanes from oncoming traffic. Agatha slid down in her seat, took off her shoes with one hand, and put her feet up against the glove compartment. Then she turned on the heating. It blasted Oliveira in the face.

“Sorry. Do you want a sip?”

“Not for me, thanks.”

“Very good,” she congratulated him. “One does not drink at the helm, everyone knows that.”

After passing under a concrete bridge—a fluorescent sign ordered
FAITES LA PAUSE TOUTES LES DEUX HEURES
—Oliveira slowed down. He changed into the right-hand lane; Agatha asked him if they were going to stop for something as he pulled into a rest area, a concrete bay surrounded by pines. “I just need to use the rest room,” he lied. The noise of a fight came out of a bus parked a few meters away. Two teenagers were rolling around on the ground, and the sound of a fist as it thumped into a skull seemed exotic to Oliveira, something forgotten, a childhood memory. “I won’t be long,” he said as he got out. This, however, was true: he crossed the parking bay toward the services hut, found a tin vending machine built into the wall, put in ten francs, and a little pack of condoms, square and perfect as if no one had ever touched it, dropped into the palm of his hand. The dispenser also offered toothbrushes and razors. Oliveira decided he wasn’t in need of anything else and returned to the van.

Agatha had finished the bottle. Her raincoat was hanging over the hand brake, between the two seats. When she spoke, it was clear her tongue was beginning to get tangled up.

“Do you like me, Oliveira?”

He didn’t answer.

“Are we going to make love? Because I’d rather not go to my house, that’s the only thing.”

“Well, let’s go somewhere else, then,” Oliveira heard himself say.

He waited a moment and added:

“That is unless you’re in any hurry, of course.”

“None at all,” said Agatha, lowering her head. “It’s winter and the fucking night never ends.”

III

The television was a luminous window hanging in the corner attached to the wall, and the slanted view Oliveira had from the bed was that of a man with thick glasses standing beside a map of France, indicating with a pointer the route of some electronic clouds across the western half of the hexagon. He was moving his lips but not saying anything, because underneath France, between Nice and Marseille, the word
Mute
ordered his silence. Then a series of squares appeared, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Oliveira saw that he’d have nothing but bad weather for the whole trip, but thought he might reach Clermont-Ferrand ahead of the rain they were forecasting. Who was that man? Why was Martine Desailly not there, the woman who’d been in charge of predicting the weather for years? The one-o’clock news was part of Oliveira’s routine, and his day incomplete without the most recent scandal from the Assemblée Nationale or the images of the dead in Algiers, more or less sophisticated forms of violence that vindicated his desire to leave, to hide away from the world. Agatha was sleeping. After sex, she had locked herself in the bathroom for fifteen minutes; Oliveira was going to ask if she was feeling all right, but then saw that she hadn’t redone her makeup, as he’d thought at first, but that the dampness of her eyes was displacing her mascara a little. He thought it would be futile to ask her why she’d been crying, when they were going to say good-bye in an hour and never see each other again in their lives. He felt cynical but also justified in refusing to accumulate other people’s sadness when it wasn’t within his power to alleviate it. “I’m going to sleep for a little while, if you don’t mind,” Agatha had said, “but don’t be embarrassed about waking me up if we have to get going.”

“Don’t worry, have a good sleep,” said Oliveira. “Shall I turn off the light?”

“No. Leave it on.”

“I don’t mind turning it off. So you can sleep better.”

“It’s fine as it is, Franciscosson. Leave it on.”

Oliveira saw her move one hand over her forehead and chest in a quick blessing degenerated from use, like a businessman’s signature. Agatha, with her eyes already closed, kissed the Christ on her necklace and rolled over.

Now, Oliveira watched her sleep. He did not envy her turbulent sleep; the woman’s body frequently shook as if she were falling through the air in her dreams. Her constant little kicks had uncovered her: her hips had the marks of someone who had lost weight quickly—perhaps after pregnancy, Oliveira already knew that her daughter was dead but didn’t want to know more—and on her thighs the dimpling of cellulite gave her skin the look of fine cork. The hair on her body glistened with the changeable halo of the television like synthetic thread, like the nylon line on a fishing rod. Oliveira went around the other side of the bed, knelt down on the carpet, his gaze at the level of her barely visible vulva. This woman had been beautiful, that was obvious; Oliveira had been aroused by her innocence in bed, her apparent docility, her reluctance when he suggested she turn over.

Then she seemed to sense Oliveira’s gaze.

“What’s up? Do we have to get going?”

He hadn’t thought of that, but he looked at his watch. He still had to take Agatha home and find a rest area, perhaps on the other side of Paris, to get a little sleep before dawn, so he wouldn’t be nodding off on the drive south. Ever since he’d decided to leave he’d found himself in moments like this, when it seemed like his arrival was something illusory, something that would never happen.

“Yes, it’s time,” said Oliveira. “Shall I hand you your clothes?”

The woman sat up in bed. Her breasts dropped slightly, not scrawny but full like bags, like the bag of serum Oliveira had held that afternoon.

“Well, then,” Agatha grumbled like a girl getting up for school. “If we have to go, we have to go. Of course, I haven’t got a vote on this.”

Outside, an icy wind bit their ears and dried their lips. As soon as they stepped into the garage, a motion detector switched on a bright light. Her shadow gathered in on itself, a shapeless, inhuman silhouette.

“So,” said Oliveira. “Tell me how to get to your house.”

“My house,” Agatha repeated in irritation. “You know what? If it were up to me, I’d stay here until morning.”

“Well, stay. What’s the problem?”

“The problem is that France is not covered in railway lines, monsieur. Or perhaps you’ve seen a train going by here? And with the price of a taxi I could pay for five nights in a hotel like this.”

“Exactly,” said Oliveira. “That’s why I’m going to drive you, that’s why I need to know how to get there.”

Agatha didn’t say anything.

“How do you get there?” Oliveira insisted impatiently.

“Yeah, yeah, don’t badger me,” said Agatha. “Just follow the signs for Paris, that’s all. You’ll see L’Isle-Adam soon enough, it’s pretty straightforward.”

This time, however, there was no traffic. Every once in a while, a pair of red lights would whistle past in the left-hand lane and disappear as quickly as they’d appeared; occasionally the van would overtake a transport truck, the bodywork jostling and the steering wheel trembling in Oliveira’s hands as he pulled out of the slipstream. Agatha was silent, as if Oliveira had offended her by saying they had to leave the hotel. To make up for the mistake he couldn’t quite identify, out of cordiality to a woman he’d slept with or simple pity, pity for the sadness Agatha seemed to carry with her like a snail’s shell, Oliveira tried to start up a spontaneous conversation. What would his name be in Iceland? What had she said he’d be called?

“Franciscosson. The son of Francisco. Francisco, your father, the great Portuguese rider of this century.”

“And you?”

“Me what?”

“What would your surname be?”

“Ah.” Agatha straightened up in her seat. “Well, my father’s name was Raymond, so I would be called Raymonddóttir. The daughter of Raymond. But the two letters together, the
d
of
Raymond
and the
d
of
dóttir
, sound ugly and grating.”

“Yes, a little,” Oliveira admitted.

“It would have to be Raymondóttir, with just one
d
.”

“Doesn’t sound that great, either.”

“No. Good thing I’m not Icelandic.”

Oliveira smiled. Suddenly seeing her like that, lighthearted and carefree, pleased him as if the well-being of this stranger had begun to matter to him.

“Have you been there?”

“No. But I’d like to, God knows I’d really like to. It must be a lovely country, don’t you think? Do you know how to say ‘I’m lost’ in Icelandic?
Ég er týnd
.”

“Eg er tynd,”
Oliveira tried to repeat.

One of Agatha’s hands moved to her chest; through the material of her blouse her fingers closed over the Christ figure.

“God knows I’d like to live there. Maybe one day I’ll be able to. The night hardly lasts at all, Oliveira. In June, dawn breaks at three in the morning, and night doesn’t fall until twelve. And anyway, the sky never darkens completely, it stays as blue as the sea, it never gets this repugnant black we have here.”