Bonnard, standing in the bathroom or sitting on the toilet seat of their tiny flat.
I was affected by visions of constancy. In the busy lanes behind the central market I watched an old couple helping each other along the broken-down pavement. He, short and stocky with a countryman’s arms, now infirm and reduced to a walking stick. She, of similar height, overweight, carrying her shopping in an old-fashioned bag.
She walked beside him protectively, spying out broken cobblestones, steps, and the feet of beggars.
“You walk next to the wall,” I heard her say, “I’ll walk on the outside so no one kicks your stick again.”
They swapped positions and set off once more, the old man jutting his chin, the old lady moving slowly on swollen legs, strangers to the mysteries of the Genetic Lottery and the glittering possibilities of a Chance.
When the sun, in time, caught Carla’s beautiful face, she opened her eyes and smiled at me.
I felt so damned I wished to slap her face.
It was unbelievable that this should be taken from us. And even as I held her and kissed her sleep-soft lips, I was beginning, at last, to evolve a plan that would really keep her.
As I stroked her body, running one feathery finger down her shoulder, along her back, between her legs, across her thighs, I was designing the most intricate door, a door I could fit on the afternoon before her Chance-day, a door to keep her prisoner for a day at least. A door I could blame the landlord for, a door painted orange, a colour I could blame the painters for, a door to make her miss her appointment, a door that would snap shut with a normal click but would finally only yield to the strongest axe.
The idea, so clearly expressed, has all the tell-tale signs of total madness. Do not imagine I don’t see that, or even that I didn’t know it then. Emperors have built such monuments on grander scales and entered history with the grand expressions of their selfishness and arrogance.
So allow me to say this about my door: I am, even now, startled at the far-flung originality of the design and the obsessive craftsmanship I finally applied to its construction. Further: to this day I can think of no simpler method by which I might have kept her.
12.
I approached the door with infinite cunning. I took a week off from work, telling Carla I had been temporarily suspended for insolence, something she found easy enough to believe.
On the first day I built a new door frame, thicker and heavier than the existing one and fixed it to the wall struts with fifty long brass screws. When I had finished I painted it with orange primer and rehung the old door.
“What’s all this?” she asked.
“Those bloody painters are crazy,” I said.
“But that’s a new frame. Did the painters do that?”
“There was a carpenter, too,” I said. “I wish you’d tell the landlord to stop it.”
“I bought some beer,” she said, “let’s get drunk.”
Neither of us wanted to talk about the door, but while we drank I watched it with satisfaction. The orange was a beautiful colour. It cheered me up no end.
13.
The dwarf crept up on me and found me working on the plans for the door, sneaking up on his obscene little feet.
“Ah-huh.”
I tried to hide it, this most complicated idea which was to lock you in, which on that very afternoon I would begin making in a makeshift workshop I had set up under the house. This gorgeous door of iron-hard old timber with its four concealed locks, their keyholes and knobs buried deep in the door itself.
“Ah,” said the dwarf who had been a handsome fellow, resting his ugly little hand affectionately on my elbow. “Ah this is some door.”
“It’s for a friend,” I said, silently cursing my carelessness. I should have worked under the house.
“More like an enemy,” he observed. “With a door like that you could lock someone up in fine style, eh?”
I didn’t answer. The dwarf was no fool but neither was he as crazy as I was. My secret was protected by my madness.
“Did it occur to you,” the dwarf said, “that there might be a problem getting someone to walk through a doorway guarded by a door like this? A good trap should be enticing, or, at least neutral, if you get my meaning.”
“It is not for a jail,” I said, “or a trap, either.”
“You really should see someone,” he said, sitting sadly on the low table.
“What do you mean, ‘someone’?”
“Someone,” he said, “who you could see. To talk to about your problems. A counsellor, a shrink, someone…” He looked at me and smiled, lighting a stinking Fasta cigarette. “It’s a beautiful door, just the same.”
“Go and fuck yourself,” I said, folding the plans. My fishing rod was in the corner.
“After the revolution,” the dwarf said calmly, “there will be no locks. Children will grow up not understanding what a lock is. To see a lock it will be necessary to go to a museum.”
“Would you mind passing me my fishing rod. It’s behind you.”
He obliged, making a small bow as he handed it over. “You should consider joining us,” he said, “then you would not have this problem you have with Carla. There are bigger problems you could address your anger to. Your situation now is that you are wasting energy being angry at the wrong things.”
“Go and fuck yourself,” I smiled.
He shook his head. “Ah, so this is the level of debate we have come to. Go and fuck yourself, go and fuck yourself.” He repeated my insult again and again, turning it over curiously in his mind.
I left him with it and went down to talk to the bream on the pier. When I saw him leave I went down below the house and spent the rest of the day cutting the timber for the door. Later I made dovetail joins in the old method before reinforcing them with steel plates for good measure.
14.
The door lay beneath us, a monument to my duplicity and fear.
In a room above, clad by books, stroked slowly by Haydn, I presented this angry argument to her while she watched my face with wide wet eyes. “Don’t imagine that you will forget all this. Don’t imagine it will all go away. For whatever comfort you find with your friends, whatever conscience you pacify, whatever guilt you assuage, you will always look back on this with regret and know that it was unnecessary to destroy it. You will curse the schoolgirl morality that sent you to a Chance Centre and in your dreams you will find your way back to me and lie by my side and come fishing with me on the pier and everyone you meet you will compare and find lacking in some minor aspect.”
I knew exactly how to frighten her. But the fear could not change her mind.
To my argument she replied angrily: “You understand nothing.”
To which I replied: “You don’t yet understand what you will understand in the end.”
After she had finished crying we fucked slowly and I thought of Mme. Bonnard sitting on the edge of the bath, all aglow like a jewel.
