Clementine gone, the apartment is empty, a single dwelling for a solitary man.
But (you will ask, Father) why must I despair?
For all I know (you will say) she is not missing but—as the officer said—merely somewhere else.
For all I know, she may return. For all I know—
But no, it is not completely empty. For company now, I have the gray stranger who leans toward me out of the mirror. I have my typewriter. I have whoever it is I imagine you to be, Father.
And, of course I have my faithful correspondent.
Could it have been my correspondent who provided Clementine with the mimeographed clipping? I wondered. How else could she have found it? And yet, why should she not find it herself? Why shouldn’t a daughter undertake to learn all she could about her mother?
Now that she had found the article, had she found what she needed? The revelation that Miriam had taken her own life, was that enough for Clementine? Or had the discovery awakened in her a desire for more, a hunger for raw detail, for the naked facts of the gendarmes’ or coroner’s reports, so that she too could construct and reconstruct the events, just as they have made and remade themselves in my memory?
Miriam had died without fanfare. She had not leapt from the bridge. When the divers finally found her, it was clear that she had waded into the water from the bank, downstream from the bridge, just as the picnickers do in the summer, though she had done so at night, her body weighted down with several meters of chain. The length of chain would have been heavy enough by itself, but she had secured the chain through the hub of an iron flywheel, increasing the burden by another thirty kilos at least. “Elle ne rigolait pas,” an old man had said in a Nevers café, standing beside me at the bar, when this update was announced on the evening news. She was not kidding around.
“Kidding?” said the proprietress of the café. “I’ll tell you who wasn’t joking: whoever trussed her up and chucked her in, that’s who!”
The old man flicked his hand as though to swat away the suggestion. The proprietress had heard the news, just like everyone. Miriam had mailed the padlock key to the police the day before so they would know where to find her, along with a note saying what she was going to do—or, rather, what she had already done.
Again and again I imagined Miriam at a postal box, the envelope balanced for an instant on the lip of the slot before she let it fall. Did dread threaten to overtake her? Or had all misgivings departed? By then she would have purchased the chain already. The owner of a hardware store had come forward to say that a young woman had bought the remainder of her stock two days before. As for the flywheel, God knows where she found it. Had anyone remarked a young woman rolling an iron wheel along the road? Had she somehow transported it along with the chain, or had her preparations required multiple trips as she built up her little cache of iron in the bushes along the sandy banks of the Loire?
How often have I worked it out, the process, each step contemplated, weighed, the first step, the next step, what material, where to find it, how to move it, how to use it, just as she must have worked it, reworked it, figured it out, a way to thwart the body’s agonal panic, limbs pinned, wrists bound, the lock shut, its key far away in a post box or mailroom, sealed in its envelope, as yet unopened….
It must have been a kind of satisfaction she felt, however awful, satisfaction to know that the key was on its way to its destination, perhaps there already. Was it satisfaction, the sensation of the chains now tight around her, metal warming with the heat of her last exertions, a satisfaction to bear the weight, to carry it down to the water and out into the stream, bearing it up just a little longer, out a little into the current, the water now taking some of the weight, some of the warmth, from the chain, the chain taking some of the warmth from her body, the body from which shortly all warmth should dissipate in the cold flow of the river?
Sometimes it happens (usually when I am at the edge of sleep, but not only then) that her final image visits itself upon me. It is subdued to a flatness outside of time, her image like a saint’s set in stained glass, the stiff form wreathed in chain, the wheel held against her side, as a martyr holds in expressionless triumph the weapon of her execution. Without recognition, without acknowledgment, her gaze passes through me, just as the light passes through her own body.
FIFTEEN
That Brazilian woman, what was her name? Fernanda? Ana Clara? I do not remember. She was my patient when Clementine was a baby, before we had returned to the States from Paris. She had come to analysis because she was, as she put it, “ruining her children.” Her English was better than her French, so she had chosen me to be her analyst. “But you are so frustrating,” she said. “I want you to take something away from me, and you keep giving it back.”
And what, I asked, was that “something” she wanted to give away?
“The pain. The crazy,” she said. She said there was a little shrine, somewhere in the north of Brazil. The land was dry, the town impossibly poor, but people would travel for hundreds of miles to get there, to leave candles, gifts, and ex-voto offerings thanking the saint for answered prayers, for healing, for having
