Antoine gets off his bench and, with his hands in his pockets, heads for the rue du Havre. His apartment is close by. At this hour of the night the city is deserted. He thinks about his new pal. Can’t get over the fact that Félix carries around a rosary. A fetish! He can’t stand all the religious hardware that he himself threw in the garbage at the end of his childhood. He takes malicious delight in declaring that God is dead, denouncing the lies of religion. Proudly proclaiming himself to be an atheist, he impresses his friends by the cutting aspect of his declaration. He has no place for doubt. He makes no concessions and he judges severely the hesitations and half measures of his professors when he hounds them with his metaphysical questions. The vastness of that which exists above his head resonates with mystery, and he insists on not storing that mystery in the drawers of religion. He is appalled by the banal and suffers from being just a simple student among others, in a sleepy city surrounded by forests and lakes.
As he undresses for bed that night, he finds Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter still wedged behind his belt. He takes the book to bed. He doesn’t know Simone de Beauvoir. He will spend the night with her.
Had Alice anticipated her death? Pretentious question. No, not pretentious, mercenary. This journalist wants to sell his wife’s death to her readers. Alice was a thousand times more alive than he is, the shadow of her own death had never touched her. That was what got on his nerves about Claire, yes, that way of living for which he envied her. Claire? What was Claire Langlois doing in his head? An embarrassing slip of the tongue. No, it’s not a … a sexual dream, not with her, with that journalist …
He wakes up.
4:20 a.m. The hour when a muffled anxiety hauls him from his sleep. Antoine feels that he is in the throes of a silent torment suffered by a fish emerged from the water and flung onto inhospitable land. Since the death of his wife, sleep has become a precarious undertaking. He behaves as if the only moment when a dead person could act was when the living one was asleep. As if Alice, for the duration of a dream, entered his memory and judged him – from recollections he had buried and padlocked so forcefully that he’d forgotten their existence. Antoine no longer likes to sleep.
He switches on the reading light above his bed. For one brief moment he is taken over by the sense that she is asleep at his side. He can’t help lifting the sheet. She’s not there, of course. For more than six months now her ashes have been resting in a ridiculous urn, in a columbarium of dubious taste, but chic. He goes there now and then to do the things expected of a mourner.
At the bathroom mirror, Antoine searches for traces of his dream. All he sees is a haggard face. The face of a woebegone dog. And old. Alice had seemed much younger than him. Both of them born in 1954. The last wave of baby boomers. Alice invested significant sums in creams, spas, massages. The worst thing was, they worked. The photo on the back of her latest novels shows a vivacious woman with teasing eyes, a perfectly drawn smile, with dazzling teeth that invite the reader to dip into a healthy book. She looked thirty-five at most. She’d been forty-four on December 23, 1998, the day of her death. Antoine, still busy studying his reflection in the mirror, thinks that he looks ten years older. His puffy face looks as if it’s one of his bad days. Too much humidity in the air.
An erotic dream! How long has it been since his unconscious has treated him to that? He notices a damp spot on his pyjama pants.
A photo. She wants a photo of him. Very well, let her come and take it now, he’s ready.
He opens the medicine chest. Alice had chosen it herself. Impressive, enormous, with a number of shelves on which are lined up the tubes, the jars, the various flasks necessary for healthy skin, elastic, soft, and firm. All of it still there. Antoine hasn’t thrown out or given away anything. Not even to the cleaning lady, who has asked him several times if he wanted her to “clear some space in the medicine chest.” It’s not at the columbarium, in front of the niche where the urn sits, that he can have the feeling that his wife is still there. It’s on opening the medicine chest to let out all the scents that danced around her, pervaded her clothes, perfumed her hair. All those fragrant little totems make up Alice’s altar, the altar of her soul, if she has
