81.
I’m not sure you’re inside of me, or that I am inside of you,
or that I own you. I think we’re both inside of another
being we have created called “us.”
Gabriel Prudent didn’t like what his wife picked. He automatically fell asleep in front of the films she rented from Vidéo Futur, the VHS temple on the corner of their street. She always rented romantic comedies. Gabriel preferred Claude Lelouch’s L’aventure c’est l’aventure, the dialogues of which he knew by heart, or Belmondo and Gabin in Un singe en hiver.
With the exception of Robert De Niro, Yanks didn’t do much for him, on the whole. But he never did anything to annoy Karine. And also, he liked that Sunday-evening ritual, sitting on the sofa, snuggled up to his wife, eyes closed in her warmth, in her spicy perfume. The dialogues in English gradually faded away. As he fell asleep, he imagined beautiful actors with impeccably blow-dried hair meeting, tearing each other apart, separating, bumping into each other on a street corner, and finally kissing, wrapped in each other’s arms. Karine, red-eyed after the soppy film, would gently wake him up during the closing credits, and say, at once amused and annoyed, “Darling, you fell asleep again.” They would get up, stop at the room of their child, who was growing too fast, look at her with wonderment, and then make love, before he left once again, on Monday morning, for the courts, where the accused, protesting innocence, awaited him.
On that evening in 1997, Gabriel didn’t fall asleep. As soon as Karine slotted the video into the recorder, and the first images appeared, he was gripped by the story. As though consumed by it. He didn’t see an extraordinary man and woman acting, but actually living their passion before his very eyes. As though he, Gabriel, were the privileged witness of it. As he was of all those strangers who filed onto the witness stand, whom he questioned for the prosecution or the defense. He sensed Karine silently looking at him, repeatedly, concerned that he hadn’t fallen sound asleep.
And when, in the final minutes of the film, the heroine, seated beside her husband, didn’t open the door of his car to go to the other car, in which her lover awaited her, and when the latter switched on his turn signal to leave forever, Gabriel felt the emotional dam he’d put up over the past four years to forget Irène gradually give way to the pressure of a storm, a hurricane, a natural disaster. He felt the rain of the film’s final images running over him. He saw himself again, on the way back from Cap d’Antibes, waiting for Irène in his car. “I’ll be back in five minutes, when I’ve dropped off the car keys.” He had waited for her for hours, clutching the steering wheel. For the first few minutes, behind his windshield, he had imagined life at Irène’s side. He had dreamt of a future in which he would be two. And then the wait had gone on forever.
He had finally let go of the steering wheel. He had got out of his car to go into the rose nursery. He had fallen on a shop assistant who hadn’t seen Irène for several days. He had searched for her in the streets, randomly, desperately, refusing to understand that she wouldn’t return, that she’d made the choice to remain in her life, that she wouldn’t change anything for him. Doubtless out of love for her husband and her son. Against her will—there was an expression he’d heard many a time in trials.
He had got back in his car, and through his windshield, in the headlights, he had seen darkness, and nothing else.
And then one morning, at the office, he had been told that Irène Fayolle had requested an appointment. At first, foolishly, he had thought it was just a similar sounding name. But when he had seen that phone number he knew off by heart, the number for the rose nursery he had never dared to call, he had known it was her.
There had been Sedan, other hotels, other towns for a year, and then Paul’s illness and Cloé’s birth. On one side illness, on the other, hope.
No news from Irène for more than four years. What had become of her? How was she? Had Paul pulled through? Did she still live in Marseilles? Did she still have her rose nursery? He remembered her smile, her look, her smell, her skin, her freckles, her body. Her hair that he had so loved to mess up. With her, it had never been like with the others, with her it had been better.
As he watched the closing scene of the film, when the children scatter their mother’s ashes from a bridge, Gabriel cried. In Gabriel’s world, men didn’t cry. Even when hit with the craziest verdicts, the most unexpected, the most unlikely, the happiest, the saddest. The last time he had cried, he must have been eight years old. He’d had a gash in his head stitched up without anesthetic after falling off his bike.
As for Karine, she didn’t cry. Normally, while watching such a melodrama, she would have been wringing out her handkerchief, but the attention Gabriel had paid to the film stopped her from feeling anything but fear.
She remembered Irène in the rose nursery. The fineness of her hands, the color of her hair, her clear skin, her perfume. She remembered the morning when she had handed her Gabriel’s identity card, to convey to her that she existed, and was pregnant.
Karine had discovered Irène’s existence when Gabriel’s office had left him a message: the concierge of the Hôtel des Loges, in Lyons, wished to return some belongings Gabriel had left behind during his
