They slipped her restaurant coupons, cinema tickets, some extra cash, double in December, gifts at Christmas, vacation souvenirs. Sometimes, when the holiday season was near, Cecilia would wonder whether she should get a little closer to Adèle, break the ice between employee and employer. (So, tell me, Adèle: What are you doing for the holidays? Do you have a boyfriend, maybe a girlfriend, a cat?) But she never did it, never found the right moment, and by the time it got to January 5 she was congratulating herself on this. She knew all she needed to know about Adèle: she looked after the children and the house well and was irreproachably honest.
“Five messages, Adèle. I left you five messages. So what time are you planning to come?”
Cecilia knows she should hold her peace but this is stronger than her. She feels betrayed. Instead of thinking about the number of times Adèle has helped them out at weekends, during vacations, at a moment’s notice, instead of counting her days of absence (none), the times she has been late (fewer than five), Cecilia Lesparet is thinking about all those restaurant coupons slipped into the monthly envelope, the extra cash here and there, the designer clothes, the leather handbags, the chocolates, the macarons, the soaps, the perfumes, all the things she has been giving Adèle for years.
“Adèle? Are you there? I could come and pick you up if you like. Are you at the teaching hospital?”
On the far side of the city Adèle does not reply. Perched outside the window on a median strip there is a black crow. It gleams in the sunlight and looks enormous. For a moment nothing seems to be happening. Just this bird, motionless and shiny beneath the blue dome of the sky.
Do not Buddhists believe there are several moments contained within a single snap of the fingers and all it needs is an instant of awareness for you to wake up and change your life?
Adèle thinks about the moment when the door closed on the two policemen just now with a little click. Is such a moment all it takes? Does that little muted noise contain the whole of her future life?
The crow suddenly turns its powerful beak toward Adèle. It makes a swift, abrupt horizontal movement of its head. Once, twice, three times.
“No.”
“Excuse me?”
“No. I can’t come today. I need to rest.”
“But you’ve no right to do that! Do you have a medical certificate?”
“Yes, I’ll send it to you. I’m very sorry, Madame Lesparet, but I need to look after myself. I’ll call you next week. Give the children a kiss from me.”
Adèle hangs up, steps out into the soft light of this early March day. The crow is no longer there. Now everything is clear.
The concert
THE MOON HAS RISEN SOFTLY ABOVE THE HORIZON and casts a pale yellow light over the sleeping city. The carousel is closed, the children are in bed, the chairs on the café terraces have been stacked away, the blinds on the stores lowered. A woman crosses the square rapidly, a shoulder bag held against her hip. She is wearing jeans, with a flowery silk top, a cotton jacket, and leather shoes so flat they look like dancing shoes. She has gathered her hair back into a ponytail. On the far side of the square, before walking down the few steps that lead to the Tropical’s parking lot, she suddenly turns toward the sea and the moon lights up her face with a pale glow. Anita smiles.
When the singer with his dense mop of yellow hair begins shaking his kayamb, when the light picks him out with the dust whirling around him like sequins, when he begins his maloya chant, Anita and Adèle—one of them close to the stage, the other at the bar—both feel the same thrill pass through them. They do not understand all the words but these find a way deep into the pit of the stomach, precisely where for the first time each had felt her baby stirring—it is an inner effervescence. This creole blues awakens something within them that comes from far away, from the time when they used to dance free as air, when there were no lies, no dramas, when there were simply the endless, untroubled days of their childhood.
Anita hastily writes down in her notebook the lines that she wants to quote in her article. She is absorbing the totality of this concert: the palms raised to heaven, the heads bowed as if in prayer, the man close to her slowly swaying from right to left, his hands moving like waves, the straps of the dresses sliding over gleaming shoulders, the shirts clinging to backs, the smiles. The photographer from the paper is there as well, he greets her from afar, as if she were a colleague of long standing. She makes a note of the names of the instruments, the change of mood when the drum joins in, she exchanges a few words with some of the audience. She is often interrupted by the club’s manager, Denis, who follows her everywhere, and seems interested above all, he says, in her “career path.” He wants to know where she was born, when she came here, if she is married, how long she has worked on the paper.
At the end of the concert Anita meets the musicians backstage, there is a holiday atmosphere, she is welcomed with open arms, they let her
