When the bus arrives Adèle looks around but the snake has vanished. Something tiny subsides within her. Then she gets onto the bus and forgets all about the grass snake and portents, good or bad. She prepares herself for the long day ahead, thinking about it, as she has thought about many things for years now, without any particular emotion. A day is made up of a series of tasks to be performed, each within an amount of time allotted in advance, each at a more or less specified hour, the completion of one activity signaling the start of another and so on.
From Monday to Friday she catches the 7:00 bus to go and work for the Lesparet family. She begins her assignment at 7:45 by clearing the breakfast table while Madame Lesparet buzzes around her, a stream of words spilling out of her mouth (Cecilia Lesparet calls this the morning debriefing). Adèle listens attentively and stores these words away in a corner of her brain. Cecilia Lesparet is a slim woman of thirty-eight with fair, straight hair trimmed to precisely one-tenth of an inch below the lobes of both ears, which are pierced and ornamented with two Tahiti pearl stub earrings. She is a management consultant, as her business card specifies. So, the debriefing. How the children were the previous evening and during the night, together with diverse and varied instructions that are prefaced by “may I venture to remind you that,” but Adèle does not hold it against her. Cecilia Lesparet is always correct, she pays her on the fifth day of every month, cash in a fresh, sealed envelope, she occasionally adds a few restaurant coupons, she puts clothes she no longer wants aside for her, unfashionable handbags, half-used bottles of perfume. Cecilia never asks her questions about her private life, how she spends her spare time. It should also be mentioned that surveillance cameras in the house record the smallest of her actions.
At 8:15 Adèle goes back out of the house to walk the children to school (two to a nursery school, one to the primary school) and less than half an hour later she returns to a big empty house. This could be daunting, the silence, the untidiness, all the things she has to do, all the vacuousness and pointlessness of a strange house, but Adèle does not consider matters in broad terms, in terms of the whole picture, in generalities, making a link between this vast house and her vast loneliness. No, she thinks about the tasks to be performed and this is how her day passes, without mishap, without distress, without bitterness. And once you think about a day like this, the thing is, there’s just so much to do. She is kind and gentle with the children, she makes well-balanced meals for them, plays with them a lot and on the way back from school, where there are no cameras, she treats them to candy and sodas. At 6:45 Monsieur Lesparet comes home. When Adèle hears the gates opening and the crunch of the gravel beneath the wheels of his elegant gray car, she checks off a list of things in her head: meal prepared, housework done, laundry aired, laundry ironed, children showered and fed, any aches and pains to be reported or not. To Pascal Lesparet’s “All well, Adèle?” she has been replying almost every day for several years: “All well, monsieur.” She hugs the children and occasionally, just occasionally, there is something inside her that shivers at this moment, especially if the children hug her tightly, with both arms around her neck and she feels as if she could run away with them hanging around her neck like a human necklace, but it is a transitory feeling, a passing impulse.
From Friday to Sunday, starting at 9:00 p.m., Adèle works as a barmaid at the Bar Tropical, in the city. On Friday evenings, after kissing the children goodbye, she walks down into the city center. She passes along clean streets, observes the private houses, the camellias, the stone pines that she is particularly fond of, the pretty blue tiles with the house numbers on them, the paved areas, the lawns, the gravel, the rough plaster on a wall, the arabesques of ivy. The seasons pass, the colors change, the light fades, the cold surrounds her, the wind buffets her, scaffolding is erected and dismantled, a wall is knocked down, a great tree falls, revealing broad roots finely wrought like lace, there is a certain woman in a sweater who watches her passing day after day with the same expression of astonishment, but Adèle goes on her way and enjoys this feeling of descending into the city, toward the sea, toward the limits of the land. By the time she sees the high gates of the big hotel the air is suffused with particles of salt, becomes denser with humidity. At 8:00 she eats supper in the city: either at McDonald’s, or at a Chinese restaurant, just occasionally at a pizzeria. Adèle always orders the same thing (a standard meal, fries, a soda; a hundred grams of chicken cooked with basil, a hundred grams of rice, a soda; a pizza margherita, a soda). She is never flustered, never vexed, it is as if she were invisible and this is precisely how she wants to be, and it is precisely like this that she survives.
At the Tropical she works at the bar, single-handed for several hours at a stretch. Amid the noise, the music, the shouting, she is
