Five years ago she was still that young girl (a bird on a branch, an innocent blue sky) when she arrived in this city and a distant cousin met her at the airport and took her to her home, on the twenty-fourth floor of a tower block in the suburb of Rosny. Anita stayed for a week, the time it took for the promised room on the university campus to become free. There were sharp corners everywhere in her cousin’s apartment (little square rooms opening onto other rectangular spaces), and it was decorated with plastic flowers and pictures in relief representing scenes (ranging from the Eiffel Tower to the Arc de Triomphe). Everywhere a heavy scent of incense and spices. In this apartment, during the first few moments, as her mind and body took in this new setting that was as dismal as it was unexpected, Anita had wanted to become a child again, so that she could scream and weep and roll on the ground. An unbelievably powerful feeling overcame her when she thought about her parents, their house close to the sea, the spacious rooms flooded with light, the red waxed floor, the garden, their dog who was called Dog, the wide veranda where, as a child, she used to measure the progress of the dawning sun with her school ruler. It was a mixture of nostalgia, sadness, desire, lack, a profound longing to be elsewhere—for the first time Anita was experiencing homesickness.
This cousin of hers, a woman who worked at night and slept by day, was afraid of everything: blacks, Sri Lankans, Romanians, motorbikes, young people, elderly whites pulling their shopping carts in the mornings, dogs, and the full moon. Anita remained a prisoner in that apartment for a week and it was there she wrote her first “New Poem.” There was no bird now, no blue sky. Instead grayness, metal, sulfur, bitter smells. The very things that François Sol finds thrilling.
Just now, having slapped that boy, having seen him put his hand to his cheek with a theatrically questioning look in his eyes (et tu, Anita?), she had muttered some words of apology and locked herself in the bathroom.
What is the matter with her? After all, she had been eager to come with Christophe that evening, she had drunk two glasses of the excessively strong punch, she had danced, she had thought about her parents, a notion that had swollen like a balloon in her stomach, colliding gently with her heart, making her want to cry. She had kissed Christophe. She liked him (a pleasant feeling that did not take up too much space within her) but then she had ruined everything. She would have liked to be able to explain to him, run past him again the film of them fondling one another and then stop it at precisely the moment when Christophe’s hand slides up under her skirt and she becomes the incarnation of the phrase simply in self-defense. I didn’t mean to do it, she would explain, it was just a reflex.
Anita looks around the bathroom. She does not know it yet, but this is her strength, she knows how to look: color, shade, shape, appearance, material, shadow, light, precise terms for things (mixer faucet, pedestal washbowl). Diverse objects (a large green plastic apple for storing cotton balls) take their places in a corner of her brain (that creature with a thousand lights, portals, hiding places, and passageways), go into hibernation, and are later reborn in a short story, a poem, the draft for a novel, an article.
She stands up, catches her reflection in the mirror. If she turns her head to the left she will see her father; if she screws up her eyes and smiles, she will encounter her mother’s features. She would so much like to be spending this New Year’s Eve with them, to be sitting on the veranda looking across at her parents. They would be listening to the radio, they would be reading, her mother would have gotten the three glasses ready, and the bottle of sparkling wine, her father would have taken out the fireworks for them to set off at midnight. What is the sky like on the other side of the world? How are the stars shining? Are her parents thinking of her at this very moment?
A bird on a branch, an innocent blue sky.
No, of course, she has no desire to become that Anita again (she thinks about herself as of a child, tenderly). But she would like to cease being what she is now, this girl forever rushing in, exaggerating her features, violating language. She washes her face vigorously with soap, rinses it with cold water, and spreads a dab of Nivea cream, found in the cupboard above the bathtub, over her skin. She looks at herself and on her face there is a hint of what she once was. Her eyes grow misty with tears. Homesickness overcomes her again.
Escape.
Anita needs to escape. She feels unwell. She staggers out of the bathroom, the music seems to be erupting on all sides, she is looking for the exit. She is looking for her coat. She does not want to go onto
