Ben on the veranda, reading, between two anti-mosquito coils.
Vicky in tears on the hood of the white Fiat. Ben, laughing, half stretched out on the hot gleaming surface, is holding him by the waist.
Ben in front of a poster for the village elections when his movement put up three candidates.
I also had a drawer full of compilations on tape of our favorite songs. I always had a tape ready in the recorder and whenever the radio played a piece of music I liked I pressed the red “record” button.
Record: my life recorded in transparencies, photographs, tapes, trinkets. My life recorded on my skin, my heart.
This evening I shall sleep in a beautiful room on the first floor. There’s a great soft bed, a warm quilt, a wooden chest of drawers, a few shelves with books on them, a pretty turquoise box on the bedside table, a lamp mounted on driftwood, old postcards of the area. My sheets smell of lavender and I have the feeling that this house is filled with wisdom, that it knows my past and my future and is helping me to recover. I like being here with them. Sometimes the four of us are all together in the living room. The two of them, the child, and me. She’s curled up in her armchair, he’s telling a story, the child laughs, and I’m with them, in the warmth, in shelter. Just outside the great window in the living room there are flowers growing, there’s wind in the trees, the stars are shining. I feel as if the world is watching us and we make up a single, selfsame heart, living and perfect. At such moments I forget Ben, I forget Vicky, I forget that I was once called Melody.
CHAPTER 5
They dropped me off at 8:50 outside the hall where the final exam was being held for the course in “information technology and management” that I’d been pursuing for two years in order to achieve promotion within the bank. Ben had an increasingly public career. He wrote opinion columns for the papers beneath a head shot. He’d changed jobs and now had a post in the personnel department of a private bank. In the village he’d become an influential and effective local councillor. He’d been invited to the university to give a talk on capital punishment. [I sometimes had the feeling he was growing away from me and I started to be jealous of all the intelligent young women who surrounded him. What did he say to them about me? “My wife’s a secretary.” And, above all, how did he say it?]
It was a quick goodbye. Good luck, Melody. Good luck, Maman. We’ll come and pick you up at 3:30. I remember Vicky’s face lit up when Ben told him he could sit in front. They were looking forward to spending that day as boys together, by the sea.
At about 9:10 they stop. They go into one of the old stores beside what used to be the main highway. A dark stone building with a red corrugated tin roof. Worn paving stones on the ground, a smell of rum, iron, mildew, and rancid oil, a low, L-shaped window crammed with an odd assortment of items (colored rubber bands, pens, balls, a hammer, ropes, metal cups, remnants of cloth), a huge refrigerator with bottles of soda and beer. At the back jute sacks containing rice, dry grain, and flour. On the counter a glass jar containing candles.
In the store they order a Coke and a Fanta, which the owner’s daughter serves to them with straws. According to her the boy takes a long time to finish his drink and the man has a chat with her. He asks her questions few people ever put to her and that’s why she remembers them and the time at which they left. Ben asks her how long her family has had the store, what’s the product that sells best, whether their trade has dropped since the opening of the self-service minimarket two hundred yards down the road, whether she’ll take over the family business. He asks if they still sell cigarettes individually and when she says they do, he buys one. I know all this because the young woman called the police after the papers published the news of Ben and Vicky’s disappearance. She showed them her account book, one Coca-Cola, one Fanta, one Matinée brand cigarette, one packet of chocolate Smarties.
Ben didn’t smoke. I asked all his friends and his father, but they all said the same thing. Ben didn’t smoke. I looked in his desk, I sniffed the clothes he wore the day before, left in the laundry basket, I looked in his shoulder bag, I searched the garden on my hands and knees. I said to myself maybe he smoked in secret at night and tossed the butts in among the plants. I didn’t find anything.
The girl—her name is Julie, she was sixteen at the time—added that Ben tucked the cigarette behind his ear, shook hands with her, and drove off with Vicky at 9:40. No one would ever see them alive again.
At 9:40 I was just a back bent over a sheet of paper in complete silence and I wasn’t thinking about them. At noon, when I opened my bag on a bench in the shade of a big leafy bush I don’t know the name of, I discovered a little note from Ben in my lunch box. It was written in a slightly shaky hand, as if he’d been hesitant. But it was very simple: I have faith in you, good luck. No signature. No I love you, no darling. A solemn note that the police kept for long weeks before returning it to me crumpled and slightly torn on the right-hand corner.
I emerged from the hall at 3:20 and
