Léonine Toussaint’s mother . . . The families weren’t from around here. It’s only middle-class types who send their brats to dip their bums in the lake of a château. I thought the parents were just ticking the cemetery-visit box when they came to our parts, and that they hurried back home once they’d left flowers and crucifixes on their kids’ tombs.
What’s she after? What does she want? Is she going to come to my place? Is she going to ask around? Letellier’s panicking, I’m not, I stopped being afraid of anyone ages ago.
There were six of us at the château. Letellier, Croquevieille, Lindon, Fontanel, Petit, and me.
Thinking back on all that, it reminds me of the first time I saw him. Not the last, the first. Usually, I think of the last. And I have hatred burning in my veins, like rivers of sour candies.
The first time, it was an end-of-year party for the local nursery schools. I had sick on my shirt, milk reflux from my youngest, who’d been suffering due to the heat. I’d opened it up a little, so people wouldn’t see the stain. He didn’t look at me, he just glanced down at my nursing bra. I trembled. The look of a randy dog. He made me want him. Bad.
He didn’t see me, but me, “I had eyes only for him,” as the rich would say.
The two months of school holidays were a real downer.
Then I was employed as a domestic assistant for the nursery schools. On the first day, I waited for him, like a mutt. When I saw him entering the schoolyard to pick up his offspring, my skin went as hard as the leather of his biker jacket. I’d have liked to be the creature they’d cut into pieces to keep him warm.
He rarely came. It was always the mother who dropped off and picked up the child.
It took him months to say a word to me. He probably had nothing better to do that day. No other girls to do. He was a skirt chaser and, hell, was he dishy. You could tell he was a good screw from a hundred meters, with those T-shirts and tight jeans. With his icy blue eyes, he undressed anything in a skirt, like the mothers who came and went along the corridors that reeked of ammonia.
The windows I cleaned with Ajax after class . . . The brats I took to the toilets . . .
One day, I stopped him, just to say any old thing to him. Some story about glasses I’d supposedly found in a child’s locker. Did they belong to him? He was as cold as the freezer in the school shed. He said, “No, they’re not mine.” He was used to females approaching him, you could see it, you could breathe it. He had the look of a devilish prince, a traitor, a swine, the handsome types, the ones in the old films.
At the end of the school year, after seeing me hanging around the corridors in the hope of bumping into him, cornering him, he finally gave me a date. Not a date to whisper sweet nothings in my ear; no, by giving me the time and place, he’d already undressed me.
He just came out with it, “One evening, and a quickie.” Because he was married, like I was. He didn’t want any hassle, or a hotel bed. He screwed in nightclub johns, against trees, or on the back seats of cars.
I took hours to get myself ready. Removing the hair from my legs, covering myself in Nivea cream, slapping a clay mask on my face, on my big conk, spraying perfume under my arms, dropping the kids off to a friend who’d keep mum. One who slept around, and whom I’d already covered for. One whose adultery would stop her from talking.
We were supposed to meet near the “little rock,” as the locals called a big stone placed at the edge of town, a kind of broken boulder, a dark corner where kids had smashed the streetlights long ago.
He arrived on his motorbike. He placed his helmet on the seat. Like someone not staying long. He didn’t say hello, good evening, how are you, to me. I think I barely smiled at him. My heart was pounding. Enough to make my chest burst. My new shoes were sinking in the mud, they’d given me blisters.
He turned me around. Without looking at me. He pulled down my underpants and tights, separated my thighs. No caresses, no gentle words, or rough ones. No words at all. He made me come so strong, I almost died. Started shaking like a dead leaf the tree’s in a hurry to get rid of.
After, when he’d gone, my blisters and my eyes started weeping at the same time. Love, my mother had always told me that it was stuff for the rich. “Not for a good-for-nothing.”
Every time I met him at the little rock, he screwed me from behind without looking at me. He came and went inside me, making me squeal like a sow having its throat slit. He never knew that my cries, they were heaven and hell, good and evil, pleasure and pain, the beginning of the end.
I felt his breath on the back of my neck, and I loved it. I wanted more. While he was doing up his fly, I’d say to him, “Meet again next week? Same time?” He’d reply, “OK.”
The following week, I was there. I was always there. And him, not always, not every time. Sometimes he didn’t come. He screwed elsewhere. Me, I waited, leaning against the freezing little rock. I waited for the lights of his motorbike. It went on like that for months.
The last time I saw him,
