When she comes back from the club she goes to take a shower in the bathroom on the landing. Then she goes to bed, but whether at 10:30 or at 3:00 in the morning, sleep never comes soon enough.
All those years waiting for it to end. She had seen the start of the new century, magnificent fireworks over the sea, people hysterically happy, and she could not understand how she could still be there. It was not what she had foreseen when she sold her house, gave away her possessions, emptied her bank account. When she had gone into that dusty travel agent’s office and paid for this trip to Europe. It was not what she had dreamed of when she shaved her head for the first time. Since she had not managed to die (oh, that inability to take her leave of life of her own accord!), she had thought she would disappear. She had read somewhere that thousands of people in the world vanish without a trace. So this was what she would do. Leave the land of her birth, take a train, then another, stop somewhere at a station at random, burn her papers, sleep in hotels, hang around, stop speaking, stop thinking, face up to strangers who don’t look at you, expose herself to unfamiliar climates, spend or give away all her money, wander about, end up in the street, in a dark corner where no one will come looking for you, die, the way so many people die here—from cold, from hunger, from loneliness. Here, in Europe, death seemed to her more within reach, more silent.
But years later Adèle is still there. Sometimes she would like to reach down into herself with her hand and rummage about, the way fishermen rummage about in the innards of fish, to seize and root out the tiny spark, the tiny stubborn and vital spark, that causes her to survive, in spite of herself. What is it made of, this wretched thing, since she no longer has hope, or joy, or friends, or husband, or child?
In the end sleep overcomes her, a sleep full of dreams of days gone by (grass snakes, ants, husband, child, sunlight, typewriter). At dawn when nothing else remains behind her closed eyelids, she seems to see this little spark dancing. Then she gets up, as silently as the dust motes in the rays of the morning, and so she enters another day.
On that Friday, the morning of the day she will meet Anita, the grass snake is already far away, and the bus is particularly crowded. Adèle stands in the middle, facing the double doors. The young are gathered at the back, in a cluster, true to their gregarious instinct. Her right hand lightly grips the rail. The other is holding her bag slung over one shoulder. She gazes at the flattened, rather greasy hair of a young, highly scented woman who is sucking a Tic Tac mint. An old man is chewing the inside of his cheeks as he reads the free newspaper. There are two strollers close beside her and Adèle feels the weight of a little wheel on her foot. She does not stir. The children are fast asleep. There is a light ripple of talk from different parts of the vehicle and there, amid a mixture of smells, metal, damp wool, and sickly sweet perfume, she is thinking about the special event at the club this evening, a grand concert devoted to maloya, the traditional music of Réunion. Denis has asked her to make a dozen gallons of punch. She will have to get there earlier than usual, she will have no time for supper. She lets go of the rail to check that she has brought her cell phone.
Is there a sudden silence or has Adèle imagined it? As if something had sucked in all sounds, with the terrible sharp squeal of brakes suddenly applied. Adèle is hurled against the doors, which restrain her and throw her back onto the girl with the Tic Tac, then there is a great crash! She is flung against the doors once more. They burst open and Adèle comes flying out like a black eagle. She hears that voice, the one she knows well, saying this is it, it’s happening now. But the feeling of being high up and floating does not last. She comes down onto something soft. She is not in pain, maybe she really is dead. She is on her back and the sky is so blue, so luminous, my God how beautiful it is! she says to herself. For the first time in half a lifetime she is using the words God and beautiful in the same sentence. She could reach out her hand and pluck down a scrap of sky. How would it taste? An airplane passes at that moment, floating, floating, it is a paper airplane, it is a perfect sky, the blue dotted with fleecy little clouds. There is a scent of earth, it has the good smell of childhood.
Adèle gets up on her elbows and everything becomes confused in her head. She recognizes this part of the suburbs, which is called Ville Nouvelle, with its meager, recently planted trees, the numerous traffic circles, the low walls in pastel shades surrounding the new residential areas, the newly tarred streets, and yet she has gone right back home, she has traveled through time. It is her son and her husband who are in the white car embedded under the bus. Adèle, whose name is not yet Adèle, is just about to undergo the ordeal of her final exams in information technology and management at the very moment when an accident befalls her husband and son on the old road leading to the lighthouse. Their car slipped down the cliff, soundlessly, it appears, since
