Liar! Who said that?
What is the matter with him? His whole body begins to shake. Adam staggers out of the noisy room, passes through the kitchen, walks along a corridor, finds himself in a dimly lit room. At the end of it a sofa piled high with coats. He dives onto it, head first, his body curled into a ball, with both the determination of someone plunging into a melee and the desperation of someone longing to return into his mother’s womb. Adam, half man, half child, that is how he settles onto the sofa, his neck at an angle, like a duck sheltering under its own wing, his chin on his knees, his hands clasping his ankles.
It is here that the dagger pricks him most deeply, here that the two words, Foreigner and Liar, make themselves clearly heard, and with them a mass of details crowds in: his regional accent, which he tries hard to smooth over since he is so sick of people asking him where he comes from (Belgium? Switzerland? Canada?); the endless waiting for some surge of enthusiasm that never arrives (just look at that avenue! that light! that dome! that face! those legs! that energy!); his studies, at which he turns out to be merely average, after having always been top of his class; his vain efforts to be like everyone else, up to the minute, in fashion, a smoker, a drinker, a nonstop talker, a womanizer, isn’t that what being young is all about? Adam used to think that here in this city he would be transformed into a more sophisticated, more intelligent, and more ambitious version of himself. He believed he would be inspired by the centuries-old paved streets, the monuments, the gardens, the flights of steps leading to romantic squares, the cabaret theaters, the songs, the brasseries, the hundreds of thousands of people going down into the metro every morning, the woman from next door laying a hand lightly on his chest as she speaks to him, the milliner’s store at the end of the street, the perfect chocolate cream puff, the white and gold carousel, the folded metro ticket at the bottom of his pocket.
In his brain (that creature with a thousand lights, portals, hiding places, and passageways) a notion arises and offers Adam the solace of truth.
I don’t belong here.
I don’t belong here.
I don’t belong here.
Adam becomes aware that he is repeating this sentence out loud only when the pile of coats replies to him:
“Welcome to the club, my friend.”
Anita is sitting, or rather crouching, hugging her upraised legs, head lowered, forehead resting on her knees, inhaling her own warm vanilla scent. There has been substantial traffic since she took refuge here. People walk in, dump their stuff on the pile that is already quite high or on top of her, and go out, laughing. Everyone is laughing this evening, animated by an unrelenting collective gaiety. This is how the new year must discover us when it arrives; sparkling eyes, open mouths, glass in hand, arm around a friend, body gyrating. Better that than huddled up on a green sofa, all alone and buried under a pile of coats.
And yet it had all started well. She had arrived with Christophe and they had been kissing. But when he had tried to slip his hand under her skirt she had slapped his face. Oh yes, it had been a real good slap, swift, hard, impossible to dodge. It had been a reflex action—and yet for such an action to occur doesn’t there have to be thought, a connection made, the alerting of the nervous system, the transmission of data? There was just that sudden impulse in her right hand, arising more or less at the level of her wrist (“an impulse arose,” that’s something she ought to write down in her notebook, where she writes things down, words, phrases, ideas for use later, in, shh, the novel). At the very moment when her hand was striking that boy’s cheek, she was once again astonished at the girl she had become. In the old days she would never have slapped him. She would have resisted, wriggling this way and that (in her mind’s eye she sees her place being taken by a fine silvery gray fish in Christophe’s grasp, he leans forward, his mouth half open, concentrating on his catch), she would have uttered frightened little squeals and her eyes would have filled with tears.
But here, in this city, Anita has become high-strung, impulsive, often filled with bitter anger. Once she used to write neatly turned, well-rhymed things, charming verses (the way you might knit a charming sweater, arrange a charming bouquet). She wrote what she saw: a bird on a branch, an innocent blue sky … and she won prizes for her poetry. She dressed in pastel shades and plaited her black hair into delicate braids.
Now jagged words well up inside her, arranging themselves almost involuntarily into poems that are published in a well-regarded literary magazine that sells few copies and is edited by François Sol. Thrilling poems, François Sol had said to her, some months previously, laying a hand on her arm. Anita is afraid of François Sol, his office piled high with editions of classic writers published in the Pléiade series,
