Today
ANITA HAS PLACED THE FILE ON THE KITCHEN TABLE and eyes it as if it were a dangerous animal temporarily asleep. She has only a little time, Laura has dozed off but that won’t last. All those years in the attic have not altered either the blue of the file or the strength of the cotton strap that holds it together. Nor have they erased the title, written across it by her hand in black felt pen.
The Melody of Adèle.
She had, as she promised Adam, erased the text from her computer, but she had kept a printout of it in a cardboard box in the attic. What is to be done with this now? Throw it in the fire? Tear up every page one by one until her fingers bleed, turn it into confetti to blow away across the forest?
Things would have been so different if only she had listened to Adam. Right at the start, when she had written just a few pages, he had advised her to talk about it to Adèle. In Adam’s mouth the words had a disarming simplicity, Adèle, I should like to write your story. But Anita had never found the right moment and the words remained stuck in her throat like a lump of hard bread. The months went by, she wrote, she asked questions, she listened, she made notes, she checked and wrote some more. Then Adam started painting and the two of them turned into thieves, imposters, traitors, liars.
Anita would so like to hate this ill-omened object, to be able to spit on it, hurl it against the wall, but oh, the absolute tenderness she brings to merely touching the thing is heartrending. She runs her hand gently over the blue of the file, she undoes the strap. Just a page, she tells herself, just one. After that, promise, she will throw it away.
A breath of magic is released and she cannot stop herself. What is it? A perfume, the memory of what it had been to write those words? Has the ghost of the old Anita just settled on her shoulder, or is it Adèle’s spirit?
Title: The Melody of Adèle
CHAPTER 1
When I was little and they asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I used to say I’d like to work in an office. My friends always said things like astronaut, airline pilot, TV presenter, prime minister, sailor on a submarine. It seems to me that even when I was little I didn’t want anything extraordinary or unbelievable to happen to me. You see when I thought of things being “extraordinary” or “unbelievable” I’d think of my uncle who enlisted in the First World War and came back with half his face missing. When my parents and all the family talked about him they always used to say, “What he did was unbelievable!” “What a hero! What an extraordinary life!” When I knew him, he was already a very elderly gentleman and his face looked like an old black grape. He was a gueule cassée, one of those Great War veterans with bad facial injuries. That’s what Adam has told me. I didn’t know it at the time.
But I’m going too fast.
I was born in Port Louis at the end of the 1960s. My parents called me Melody and I’m the youngest of three. My father chose the name. He’d heard it on one of his voyages when he was at sea. “Me-low-dy,” that was the way he always said it.
I had a happy childhood. I enjoyed the affection parents often save for their youngest child. I have memories of whole afternoons spent playing in the great wilderness behind our family home that served as a backyard. I used to watch columns of ants on the march. I saw weaver-birds building nests that hung from the branches of eucalyptus trees. I wore out my sandals skipping with a rope. Some people said I was a very good girl. Others said I was a bit odd.
But despite those early fears and wishes of mine, my life has turned out to be quite unbelievable. At the age of twenty-nine, one Saturday morning at 9:40, I died. I mean that at that moment, Melody, the person I’d been before, died, along with her husband and her son in an old white Fiat. I so loved that car. It was upholstered inside with black imitation leather. The seats sloped back too far, and the left-hand window wouldn’t open anymore. The following Tuesday at 10:20 when the police officer came to my house and gave me the fateful news, my mother fainted with a great crash. But I didn’t fully grasp what had happened and my first thought, my first sorrow, was for the car. I realize I loved that car the way you love a domestic animal. Later, when I finally understood the whole situation, it was a different story, of course. My grief was something terribly physical and violent. It felt just as if my head and body had been blown into little pieces but each of the scattered pieces was still alive and throbbing.
But you see, even at the worst of times you can’t escape from your true nature. I’ve always been a dutiful wife. I wanted to give my husband, Ben, and my son, Vicky, a proper funeral. In any case I was sure I wouldn’t survive them for very long. I say sure, because I didn’t see how else it could turn out. Even today, I sometimes ask myself what I’m doing, still alive, here on earth. So I ordered flowers, I chose the wood and the style for the coffins. I compiled the announcements for the paper. I chose the clothes and took them to the funeral parlor myself. I wasn’t able to see the two of them but, no matter, I was convinced I’d be seeing them soon enough,
