He was still standing in the doorway, wearing his same old blue woolen cardigan that was bagging at the elbows, and clutching a hammer and a screw. He seemed to be there purely by accident, and Gabriel decided to tease him:
“I’m not sure what odd jobs you’re planning on doing, but I can’t help thinking you’d be better off with a nail. Or a screwdriver.”
His father smiled and pretended to only just notice it was a hammer.
“I was starting to wonder myself. This wall’s not being very cooperative . . .”
As always, Gabriel felt a tinge of embarrassment at being caught with the photograph frame. He tried to find an excuse at the same time as fishing for some paternal approval.
“I’m sure she would have loved Manon,” he said, pointing his thumb casually at the portrait. “She fits the perfect daughter-in-law profile, don’t you think? She would be proud, wouldn’t she?”
“Without a doubt.”
Gabriel tried hard not to hope for a follow-up. He turned to rummage for a nail in his pot of stationery, pushing aside the Marvel figurines littering his desk.
“How old was she when you met?” he said, then held out a nail he had salvaged from a pile of paperclips, screws, and elastic bands.
“Thank you,” his father said, slipping both nail and screw into his pocket. “She was twenty-six, I’ve told you before.”
“She looks older in this picture.”
His father flinched, as if about to turn the frame over, but he checked himself in time, thrusting his hand back in the pocket of his gray trousers, embarrassed by his sudden gesture. Gabriel shifted his gaze to the window and looked out at the cars lining up on boulevard Beaumarchais. They were in all colors next to the gray of the exhaust fumes, revving their engines at the red lights as they waited for them to change. Even before the lights turned green, the drivers were in first gear, nudging forward four measly inches.
“And Manon’s parents are pleased?” his father asked, his voice a little louder. “We must have them over for dinner. I’ll let you fix a date.”
Gabriel could hardly believe his ears. Dinner? People at their apartment? This was progress . . . To hide his happiness—no, his total elation—he carried on facing the window, closing the blind on the traffic, not that it did much to block out the sound of the cars. Once he had managed to tone down his smile, he dug his cell phone out of the side pocket of his Bermuda shorts: his lucky beige ones, which he thought made his calves look good. Before Manon, it would never have occurred to him that calves could even look good. But now he wore them constantly, no matter how cold it was.
“I’ll call Manon straightaway and ask her.”
The moment of awkwardness surrounding the photograph had passed.
“And the family record book . . . Have you managed to have a think?” Gabriel asked, unlocking his cell phone.
“Yes, yes, I’m taking care of it. But there’s a chance it may take a while. You understand, don’t you, Gabriel?”
“Yes, of course, Papa.”
But actually, no, Gabriel was not sure he did understand. Come the spring, he would officially be taking the step into adulthood. Manon might see this as just an adolescent thought, but she also knew that he’d already taken this step a long time ago.
She was his passion, his refuge, and he was going to marry her. The reality still had not fully dawned on him, and each time he thought about it a little puff of warmth would take him by surprise. His chest was tight with a joy so palpable that it overwhelmed his grief, turning it instantaneously into something else, something like nostalgia.
Gabriel sat down at the edge of his bed, facing the photograph of his mother. She had bequeathed him her olive complexion and the perfect oval of her face. For Gabriel, the notion of perfection stopped at his ears: the left lobe had been torn off when he was barely two years old. A dog, so his father said, but Gabriel didn’t remember. Same with the missing half of the little finger on his right hand: he didn’t remember a thing.
His mother. He still had no idea what happened. When Gabriel was small, his father used to talk about her often. Then the source dried up. Each of Gabriel’s questions was gradually silenced by the tears his father desperately tried to hold back. It made for a horrific spectacle, the giant with the red eyes. Gabriel was not a torturer by nature, so in time he simply gave up, deliberately protecting himself in the thick cotton batting of the unsaid. Soon he would be a father, too, and then it would be his turn to answer. And he would have nothing to say. This was unthinkable. The time had come to search for the truth: an investigation—a serious one—was required.
20
“It is—it’s a very real danger,” Torrez repeated to an impassive Capestan.
With each response, she raised her eyes to the heavens. She was standing in front of the Clio rented car, her fingers touching the handle of the passenger door. The final travelers were drifting out of the parking lot at gare de la Souterraine, relieved that it was all over. The train had arrived an hour late from a journey that ought to have taken less than three. A piece of vandalized cable had fallen onto the tracks. After traveling through miles of beautiful countryside, they had found themselves at a standstill in some lovely bit of urban sprawl, on a railway speckled with patches of yellow grass and lined with a jumble of fences, undergrowth, and cable drums.
