—
With what care, what diligence, one nourishes a hatred for an earlier self. At times I feel that I am pressing the intervening years into that earlier self as one might lean with all one’s weight on an oar, pinning a person underwater until his struggling ceases. But his struggle never ceases; in fact, he hardly seems to struggle at all. Look at him where he sits, impassive and preoccupied behind the flashing windscreen of a Peugeot on the A6 autoroute, while the café owner talks and smokes and talks. See how the road appears to vanish into him, as though he were swallowing a string, like a spider eating its web. At the end of the line is Paris, is New York, is the future, and he will make it to the end. He is on his way.
After all, he was convinced, certain, he was in the right. It is I, on the other hand, the man typing these words, who was wrong—intricately, extravagantly, unforgivably wrong. The truth, by contrast, could not have been simpler. Miriam was pregnant. She was carrying our child. Digging weeds from the garden, peeing in the middle of the night, fumbling back to bed, at every instant she had been carrying our child. Some people conceive children. She was one of those people. And why not? We had never been particularly careful.
Miriam had known it. Béatrice had known it. And Béatrice would have told me outright, I am certain, if Miriam had not extracted a vow of confidence. Miriam would keep the child; an abortion was out of the question. So, therefore, was the novitiate. Everything had changed. When the phone had rung in Miriam’s apartment, when I had stepped off the train in Auxerre, everything had already changed. The question had never been whether or not I was obligated to Miriam. As the father of our child, I was already bound. The question for Béatrice was merely whether or not I would keep faith with that obligation once Miriam informed me of it. There were no choices but those.
I had thought Béatrice was inviting me to consider a new possibility, a new life. But the new possibility and the new life were already real, a new world brought into being by us and through us, a world that a new person would inhabit, a new person who in time would outlive us, whose world would absorb our own once we were nothing but memories. That I had turned heel on that world and fled made no difference. It was to follow me regardless. I might as well have tried to flee the moon overhead, shadowing me in dogged and silent pursuit through the branches.
THIRTY-ONE
I must have leapt from the bed at the first ring of the phone, crashing into the doorjamb on my way to the hall. I must have managed to get to the phone anyway, to pick it up and answer it. But it must have happened before I was awake because all I remember was the song and the pain in my head and the awareness that I was not standing but lying down, the phone pressed to my ear and the song, really just the refrain of the song, playing over and over, punctuated with a faint click:
Il y a longtemps que je t’aime, jamais je ne t’oublierai.
Click.
Il y a longtemps que je t’aime, jamais je ne t’oublierai.
Click.
Il y a longtemps que je t’aime, jamais je ne t’oublierai.
Click.
The voices were children’s voices, distant, nearly submerged under echoing scrapes, coughs, whispers, as though the recording had been made in the hubbub of a school auditorium. The only distinct sound was the unmistakable “chhhut” of a French speaker commanding silence.
So long have I loved you, I will never forget you.
Click.
Then nothing.
When Clementine was six or seven, she took to asking me about “her sisters.” “Her sisters” were the nuns who looked after her in the hospital during the months after Miriam’s death. She never asked how she got there, content, it seemed, to assume that all babies spent some time—a few months, give or take—in the hospital after they were born. It was the sisters’ job to make sure that she was healthy and happy, I had said.
And did they play games with her, and sing her songs?
They did, I said.
Which song?
She knew perfectly well which song, I said.
Would I sing it again?
And I would sing it again, as best I could, having looked up the words in the public library and memorized them:
Chante, rossignol, chante,
Toi qui as le cœur gai,
Tu as le cœur à rire,
Moi, je l’ai à pleurer.
Il y a longtemps que je t’aime,
Jamais je ne t’oublierai.
The words felt alien in my mouth (Sing, joyful nightingale) as I rehearsed them under my breath (Your heart is full of laughter, mine of tears).
And did sisters tell her stories?
She knew perfectly well they did, I said.
But those stories I could not memorize in the library, because they had to change each time. She knew too well how I had told them before, making them up as I went along; she knew even better how she had wanted them to end. They were stories about a mommy who had gone away—sometimes to become an angel, sometimes because she had been transformed into a swan, sometimes because it was revealed she had been a fairy all along. One way or another, she left her baby with the good
