Love, Anger, Madness

that makes me feel alive…

The mother had gotten up. He calmly looked at this body of hers, still desirable, reassuring himself that she thought herself old. She stood by the window watching the stakes, nervously smoking a cigarette. Though she had her back to him, he had the impression that she was following each of his movements with sustained attention. Her thoughts were palpable to him and he thought, She’s angry at me, no doubt about it. And he understood that should she break this silence with a single word, he would no longer be able to lie to himself. At that precise moment, she turned around:

“Never again,” she said. “Never again will Rose go with you to that lawyer, you hear me, never again.”

There was such force in the measured tone of these words that he looked at her stunned.

He saw a grimace of disgust on her lips and he felt ashamed. The other woman is the one lying to me, he told himself, disconcerted. I may be a good lover, but I am not a man.

“That’s what I was telling myself,” he answered. “These lawyers’ offices have become veritable brothels.”

“You didn’t know that?” Paul shouted at him.

“No,” he replied, “I didn’t know that.”

The invalid began to fidget in his chair and would have fallen out if his mother hadn’t rushed to him in time.

“Calm down, come, come,” she urged. “Come, I’ll put you to bed.”

“I don’t want to go upstairs,” he protested. “Rose is crying and I don’t like to hear people crying.”

“Let him be,” the grandfather then said.

“He really hears too much for his age,” the father murmured.

“Grandfather says that heroes are predestined and that those who are predestined are beings set apart,” he pronounced in a superior little tone.

“Give us a fucking break with your heroes,” Paul retorted, looking him up and down.

“Oh, if you only knew, if you only knew… But I won’t tell you.”

“Come with me,” the grandfather said.

And getting up, he took him in his arms and carried him to the porch, from which one could hear them whispering.

The mother went to Rose’s room. She was lying on her bed and calmly reading a book, which she closed.

“I don’t know what came over me,” she said. “I have no idea”-she laughed in mild amusement-“probably just nerves…”

“You don’t need anything?”

“No, thank you.”

“And there’s nothing you want to tell me?”

“No, why?”

“I thought maybe you’d had a shock at the lawyer’s office, that you’d seen or heard things you might have found unpleasant.”

“No. He just insisted that I bring him the five hundred dollars he wanted from Papa.”

“Five hundred dollars!… I forbid you to return there.”

“I have to.”

“What does that mean?”

“That I’m old enough to stand up for myself.”

“Alas, my poor pumpkin! They’ll devour you before you can say how do you do.”

“I’m not afraid of them.”

“You talk like a child.”

“I’ll ask Paul to wait for me outside.”

“And if you take your time coming out?”

“He will come get me.”

“So they can tear him to pieces? Rose, you’re smart enough and you’ve seen enough to understand…”

“But, Mama, what is it that you want?” the young woman cried out with impatience. “That we fold our arms and wait to get old and die like you?”

Her mother closed her eyes and bit her lips before answering.

“You really think I feel that old and close to death?”

“Look, how should I know? Forty-year-old women put up with everything! But us young girls, we have to have our say, we have to fight even if it’s over nothing. Maybe that’s because we still have our strength, because life hasn’t yet knocked us around. Even though we know that life isn’t all peaches, we want to struggle with it, see where it will take us, just to test our strength. Do you understand?”

“I was young too once. I beg you, my little girl, think twice about what you’re about to do.”

“Don’t try to frighten me, Mama, don’t do that.” She threw her book on the bed and got up.

“Don’t you feel like it has to be done? For Paul, if only for Paul.”

“Don’t go, Rose, don’t go…”

With these words she ran away, and Rose heard the door to her room close behind her.

She sat on the bed, eyes fixed in front of her. Her senses were recording every sound as faithfully as a tape recorder. From beyond the other side of the stakes, she could hear the men in black talking and walking around, and she shuddered in horror at the memory of the Gorilla whose hairy hand had touched her knee. If he ever touches me, I’ll die, she told herself.

When, at lunchtime, a truck dumped its first load of stones with a crash under the trees in the garden, they rushed to the dining room window. Under the watchful eye of the men in black uniform, twenty beggars dressed like convicts in striped shirts were digging around the stakes with picks, while twenty others mixed mortar.

“They are building a wall to cut us off from the land,” the father said calmly.

Paul, who in the past two days had only left the house to buy cigarettes, grew pale and bravely plunged back into his book as if he wanted to break all connection between himself and the noises outside that seemed to grow more intense minute by minute. The invalid asked to be brought to the window and stared at the trees with his strange, precocious and burning eyes:

“We’ll still see the oaks, wall or no,” he cried out. “It’ll never be as tall, never.”

Interrupting his reading, Paul looked at the invalid, his brow wrinkled as he considered a thought that this childish statement had randomly inspired in him. How difficult it is to escape, no matter how hard one tries, he thought. The noises outside entered into me, as did the voices of the grandfather and the child. They pursue me in my sleep and torture me. Now I know that, just like human beings, things have their own lives. Despite the screen that my will has imposed, I hear the noises of the picks and trowels, the heavy pounding of the stones. They ring in my brain, relentlessly. I have to get away from here, make myself forget for a moment. Neither Papa nor Rose will be able to accomplish anything. They can fool themselves all they want. Why was Rose crying? It’s the first time I’ve seen her like that. What is she up to? What about Grandfather? Why is he always whispering to the child? We have split up into two factions. And maybe Mama and I are in a third without realizing it. Is this what it means to take courage? To live. To go on living. When life, from birth until death, is nothing but fraud! No, the cheating doesn’t start until later! From earliest childhood, pure and carefree, until death. That’s why, despite his whims and moods, Claude has never known childhood. And Grandfather, who has found a friend in him, doesn’t know why he loves him. Why did they come on our land? Why this punishment? Why this curse? Is it to force us to take stock of our cowardice that life tests us? Or, rather, is it to help us find ourselves? I have to stop thinking about them and come out of my state of prostration. Otherwise, I’ll become sick. See Fred again. Don’t take no for an answer, get back on the team, find a girl ‘willing to love me. That’s it, love, love! Yes, but which girl? Anna, Dr. Valois’ daughter. Beautiful, wise, intelligent. Is it possible for so many qualities to be gathered in one woman? Rose? A big question mark for me lately. She carries on like I don’t know what. If I get to know Anna, won’t I find that she crumbles under my very eyes like the others? So narrow-minded of me! I’m just like Grandfather and he doesn’t even know it… Can’t listen to any of this anymore. Got to get away! Forget! Forget!

The sentences coming out of him displaced those scrolling under his eyes in the book. From the window, the mother watched the wall go up. She had undone the top of her blouse and was breathing with difficulty. She remembered that one morning she had noticed a bird perched on her window. The presence of the man sleeping