“Yes, she will sleep a day or two and then she will wake up.”
The ash from his cigarette fell on Annette’s face and Jean Luze, bending over her, blew it away.
I am watching and waiting for Annette to wake up. I am sitting by her side, arms folded. My eyes don’t leave her. It’s over. Let her live her own life. I failed to reach my goal with her. I am going to play my next card. No third party this time. Unexpected confidence fills me. Slowly I feel it emerge. Is this maturity? I run my hand over my face to feel the first transformations in my features. Yes, I have changed. My moist lips are parted on a tentative decision still unclear to me. I realize my worth. Everything that has fermented in my mind over forty years-my unappeased desires, my unheard pleas, the oblivion of solitary pleasure-is rising up within me. A revolution. I feel ready to answer to the demands of my being.
Jean is anxious again. He’s got two sick women on his hands. He knows full well that he is partly responsible for Annette’s suicide attempt. What’s going on inside him? And what’s going on inside me-I who am fully responsible? For the second time in my life and the first time in the last twenty years, I don’t want to know what’s inside me.
Annette opened her eyes two days later. She didn’t cry didn’t say a word. She took the milk on Dr. Audier’s orders and swallowed it with a grimace. Legs shaky she went to the bathroom and then got back in the bed I had remade for her.
“I don’t want anyone else but you in the room, you hear me, Claire? No one else…”
Her mournful stare inspires no remorse in me.
“Not even Jean?”
“Not even him.”
“And Dr. Audier?”
“Well, he is my doctor.”
She too has taken a decision. Maybe we took it together.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she adds with a sort of dignity, “and I took too many sleeping pills… How many days was I unconscious?”
“Two days.”
I stop Jean Luze at her door with malicious glee.
“She doesn’t want to see anyone.”
“Not even me?”
“Not even you.”
He lights a cigarette.
“Naturally, I haven’t told Felicia anything,” he tells me, “and I’m relying on your discretion. Whatever Annette’s reasons, there is no excuse for what she did. She only thinks of herself. She’s only a dirty little egoist, you hear me? The dirtiest little egoist I have ever known.”
An emptiness in me. Graves, ravines, chasms, aren’t deep enough to bury me. I lie beneath the last geological layer, at once dead and alive. No, dead, truly dead. A kind of automaton. I no longer have a soul. Is this what despair is? I can’t fool myself anymore. If I were to throw myself at him, I now know what to expect. He has made up his mind about us.
“Dirty little egoist,” he said. “Cracked-up women”… And we are indeed that, me and Annette, I know.
I’m alone in the dark cradling my doll. Her little artificial body is cold in my hands. Cold, this hair the wind has never tangled, cold, every part of her is cold, like death, like Jean Luze.
There was such wealth in my impoverishment! Back then anything that came from him was bliss. What possessed me to be demanding? Look how I am being punished! I angrily swallow my hopes and my love. There is nothing but hatred in me. Its roots spread, I feel them take hold of every part of my being. In every human being there is a blessed soul made miserable by the pursuit of happiness. All those who pray demand favor from God. But He’s tired of it all and He gets His revenge by botching His work. We are merely the rough drafts Nature cynically employs in its quest for Perfection. Tormented creatures, a frightful mixture of the monstrous and divine, thrown pell-mell into an inhospitable world to wait for death! What choice do we have? But love must protect me from myself. I am afraid of finding myself alone with all this hatred. What would happen to me if I looked it straight in the face, if I gave in to it?…
The heat of desire scalds my soulless body, all the same. A new condition for me, but little by little I will become accustomed to it. I’m burying the sentimental old maid, her dreams of love, her false and overwrought ideas about life: love is nothing but two pieces of flesh rubbing together, I conclude cynically. Is this realist definition trying to retaliate against me? That very night, for the first time I saw another man’s face over me. I felt his hands caressing me and I heard his voice begging me, crying out with love, weeping with despair. I closed my eyes and drew him to me, a naked, big, and black athletic body I did not want to recognize.
Jean Luze is cheerful again. He’s watching Felicia breastfeed his child.
I rummage around their room, under the pretext of tidying up. I open drawers, explore their trunks, out of morbid curiosity. Hatred and jealousy have made me so vigilant that I want to penetrate into their most intimate spaces. In a fury I break the lock on one of Jean Luze’s suitcases while Felicia sleeps. I find the picture of a very young woman with big, sad, dreamy eyes who looks strikingly like Felicia. A relative of his, no doubt. Not a terribly revealing clue. Nothing. Look at me now, spying on their life in earnest.
The stars multiply, separate, and scatter. Everything comes to an end and then starts again. Suddenly, the moon’s cheerful face smiles in the naked sky. No, she’s not in the sky. She promenades between sky and earth. Alone like me. She smiles. She carries out her lunar duties with bliss. She accepts her lot. She is at peace.
I continue to take care of Felicia and the child. I am the one who bathes them, I am the one who prepares their meals. I live in their room more than in mine. Jean Luze comes and goes, uses the bathroom, changes his shirt, paying me no mind. All they talk about is Jean-Claude. They talk about that larva as if it were a human being. When Felicia says “our son,” Jean Luze looks up at her adoringly. Larva or not, for them he exists. And that’s what matters.
Mme Audier also came with a gift for Felicia. She wiggles about like an old monkey under Jean Luze’s impassive gaze.
“All is well now. Jules told me so. Isn’t that wonderful?”
She always feels the need to imply that her husband is a miracle worker.
The way her eyes are darting around, she must suspect something. She can’t contain herself any longer.
“And what about our lovely Annette? I don’t see her anymore.”
“But she’s at work right now,” I answer.
She smiles hypocritically. How has Dr. Audier managed to live with this woman for so long? And what can you expect from such a man? Despite all the respect I have for him, I can see why Jean Luze snubs him. He sets an example of caution, resignation and cowardice for the younger generation. I feel like shouting this at his wife. She is watching for Felicia’s reaction as she speaks. She talks up Annette’s beauty, mentions her flings with an angelic little attitude in contrast with her wrinkled, cunning old devil-eyes.
“She’s just a stylish girl who isn’t made for provincial life. If she didn’t make an effort of some kind, she would mildew with age! She is right to shake off her yoke…”
She laughs but her laugh rings false. One can feel how she is embittered by old age. How she must hate Annette for her youth! With her dwarfish legs, she has always looked like a vile jointed doll. Jean Luze is in the way. As long as he is there, she will hold back her venom. Is she completely tactless, or is she intentionally talking about Annette hoping to see Felicia snap? But she will not get such satisfaction. I know my sister. She will submit to torture before betraying herself. We try to wash our dirty laundry only among family. I will do my part to disappoint Mme Audier and save face. Jean Luze leaves, and she starts in on Jane Baviere.
“She’s a disgrace. She has no shame. There she is now, parading her kid right under the noses of decent folk. What a pity you were not able to attend mass Sunday! Father Paul’s sermon was clearly directed at her…”
If the things happening in this town haven’t changed this old woman, well then we are truly lost.
In any case, I can’t imagine Jane prattling about Mme Audier, watching her every move. She must not even remember that she exists: you attack your neighbor to mask your own envy, but what could Jane envy her for?
Just to shock her, I want to praise Violette, the prostitute, but I dare not. Confident I share her opinions, she
