Anita is silent because she feels certain Adam would not understand what she might manage to say. This man standing before her, her husband, has lived here on this terrain since his birth, he knows the trees, he knows the highways and byways. His local knowledge matches his own memories. He is not trying to be a different person, he is not trying to make people forget the color of his skin, his accent. When he gets up in the morning and looks at the pine forest, no images of the tangled masses of banyan trees come to his mind. Adam would not understand the efforts she makes each day to finally belong here, so that, in the end, words (in articles, in short stories, in a novel) may take her place and speak for her. That evening Anita feels very remote from her husband. That evening she is a stranger in her own house.
Encouraged by Anita’s silence, Adam continues. He warms to the topic, feels proud, hears himself as he speaks. This evening he is finally going to convince her. He takes another step forward.
“Those people are exploiting you. They send you out scouring the countryside. You take all the pictures yourself. You write your stories. You hand them in neatly and tidily. They’ve no grounds for complaint about you, that’s for sure. They pay you peanuts and you’re happy with that, you sign up for more. You’re due to meet the editor tomorrow, aren’t you? What are the odds that he’ll say there’s nothing for you at the moment, but he’s well pleased with your work? He’ll hold that carrot out to you forever, Anita. You’re worth so much more than that.”
Adam is very close to his wife now. All it takes is for him to lean toward her a little and with an almost imperceptible rustling, a fluttering of wings, she falls into his arms and he gathers her up. He would like to tell her how much he truly misses her. Her bracelets, her hair that becomes curly in summer, her soft brown skin, her long skirts that finish up with dirty hems by the end of the day, her wooden bead necklaces that reach down to her navel, the untidy bunches of wildflowers she used to scatter throughout the house, her passionate outbursts of high praise for some piece of prose or verse, the way she quickly grew heated about some conflict, some idea, some topic, the idiosyncratic way she had of carrying Laura on one hip, with a hand tucked under her buttocks, as if this were all perfectly normal, this conjoined being growing out of her hip, the stillness of her body when she is making notes in her gray binder, her vanilla scent.
“Okay, Adam. If the editor doesn’t offer me anything tomorrow, I’ll quit.”
Adam hugs her tighter still, the way she likes to be hugged, and lifts her into the air.
Later Adam wakes up, with the hairs all over his body standing on end. He cocks an ear but all that reaches him is Anita breathing deeply beside him. He turns his head toward her and the contours of her body beneath the cover seem to him quite angular, as if gathered up in a little heap, and that makes him think of the carcasses of famished dogs. The vision only lasts for a moment but it makes him feel quite uneasy. He does not like thinking about his wife’s body as a little heap, he does not want his wife’s pinched body to remind him of dead dogs. He squeezes close to her. She stirs, murmurs something. Her warm breath, amazingly sweet, as if she fed only on milk, lingers over Adam’s face and he feels better. He strokes her brow, following her hairline. He closes his eyes.
Ideas and images dance gently behind his eyelids: the meeting at 10:00 a.m. at the town hall to present the plans for the new gymnasium, Laura’s red boots in the trunk of the car, Anita’s black bra hanging from the bathroom door handle …
Then he sees Anita standing upright in her study, lost in thought, reflecting as if within herself. When had he seen her like this? Yesterday, last week, three months ago? The more the image imposes itself on him the more Anita seems to be disappearing amid the yellow light spilling into the room, crossing it, engulfing it, swallowing it. This light becomes dense, a yellow shot through with orange that dazzles everything, a rippling sunlight blotting out all traces, all shadows, all presences.
How to capture this color, this density, this impression of movement that is both slow and elastic?
Adam gets up, fully alert. He walks along the passage, glances in at Laura, goes downstairs, opens the door, crosses the garden. The wet grass attaches little drops to the bottom of his pajama pants. He goes into the wooden hut at the edge of the forest.
Within a few years this space, which is as big as their tiny apartment in Paris, has become what artists like to call a studio. Adam does not yet dare to use this term, there are a good many words like this that he keeps at arm’s length and is wary of when they
