“I thought it would make you laugh,” says Marie-Thérèse as the acrid smell fades.
“What?”
“The letter. I thought it would make you laugh.”
“Now you see.”
“After you I was in love with Evelyne Estivette's brother, Rémy, I don't know if you knew him, he was a year older than us and went to a private school in Paris. Nothing happened there either,” she laughs.
“In fact up until the diploma exam nothing ever happened,” she says gaily.
“I see.”
Marie-Thérèse sits on an arm of the chair. For a moment she does nothing, then she picks up the class photo and studies it, swinging one leg in the void. The tapping of the awning and the cries of the seagulls can be heard again. A memory flits through Adam's mind. An afternoon in the Rue Lalande, at the house of his first publisher, they were both sitting there, having exhausted all topics. In a cage some kind of exotic bird was picking out grains with its beak. Suddenly, for no reason, in a convulsive movement the bird had emitted a strident cry and then fallen silent. A mysterious call no one noticed. You look as if you've hit rock bottom, Adam.
“Is that so?”
“You look terribly depressed.”
“You think so.”
“Even the way you say you think so.”
“Oh.”
“You think so,” she mimics him.
“I didn't say it like that.”
“You did.”
“You tell me I look depressed, I say, you think so?”
“You didn't say it like that.”
“I didn't say it like that because I find it staggering that a person can come right out and tell someone they don't know at all that he looks as if he's hit rock bottom.”
“I do know you.”
“No, Marie-Thérèse, you don't know me at all.”
“I can see clearly that you're not well. I could see that right away, back at the Jardin des Plantes.”
What gives her the right to judge what state I'm in, he thinks, what gives her the right to deliver an assessment of the state I'm in, this limping female rat in the rain with her bags of samples. What gives her the right to decree that I'm not well, this nauseatingly robust ghost from the past. It's not that I'm not well Marie-Thérèse, I'm extremely unwell, I'm experiencing indescribable grief and I've no idea where consolation might come from, but you cannot know that. You cannot imagine it, Marie-Thérèse, because your energy betrays you and your courage betrays you. A being who can live in this hole without being annihilated, who can open their shutters onto this barren landscape without weeping bitter tears, cannot judge the state I'm in. A being who can face that long, narrow kitchen and that lineup of domestic appliances without feeling mortally bereft cannot judge the state I'm in. I have no admiration for your energy, it injures me. I have no admiration for your good temper, it confounds and revolts me. Nothing in you speaks to me and nothing in me can speak to you. And just because fate put me into your Jeep Wrangler today it doesn't mean you can claim the least complicity and tell me, with such gall, that I look as if I've hit rock bottom, and with what stupefying authority, that you could see clearly that I'm not well and that you'd seen it right away back at the Jardin des Plantes. You can understand nothing about my life because you, Marie-Thérèse, were damned from the start. You accepted this damnation and you live with it. You've blended into the mass, you've ironed out all the discords between the world and yourself, and made your nest there, you say bottom line, you talk about the image of a washing machine, you say I have positively bloomed, a woman who talks about my business with that fervor is forever alien to me. You're one of those people who never long for the impossible and one way or another have avoided expecting it. Homespun sages, I'd call you. People who succeed because they're genuine and authentic in a milieu in which any sensitive spirit withers and disintegrates. I refuse to believe that God has departed, leaving the field open to your sort of humanity. There's no parity between you and me. We don't resemble each other in any way, I forbid you to think we might be equals to the extent that I could allow myself to confide in you. Defeat and the sense of desolation are beyond your ken. You don't know what solitude is. You get up alone, you've no children, you've bypassed the universal model, but you do not experience my solitude. If you experienced it you couldn't survive for two minutes between your burrow in Viry and your operation setting up outlets in amusement parks. My own solitude clings to me, I'm never free of it. Whether I'm with Irene, or with the children amid the family life that'll be the death of me, in which a man only demeans himself and sells himself cheap, whether I'm in company or on my own, the feeling of solitude never leaves me. It's what rules my life. If it had ruled yours, Marie-Thérèse, you would be lying at the bottom of the lake, for you wouldn't be able to endure opening your shutters onto that dead water and those distant cries. At one moment in the Jeep you said to me: we're not even fifty, you said we, as if we were from the same stable, you and I, as if the absurd class we were in at the lycée had any meaning. Marie-Thérèse, I hardly remember you at the lycée, you were the most invisible being ever. When you came up to me with your bags of samples and your umbrella, I pretended to be renewing a nonexistent link out of the kindness of my heart. When in the Wrangler you said we, I realized my mistake, I realized it didn't strike you as an immense honor for me to be sitting on the seat beside you and an immense honor that I could accept your unthinkable invitation. Now I learn that I was not even your equal but your protege. I made your heart bleed, bald and alone on my damp bench, and you loaded me into your four-by-four the way you would one of the zoo animals if they could be taken out of their cages. One cannot be too wary of people of your type, supposedly inoffensive people who crush one with a sentence. People who bring you down in the worst possible way, without you asking anything of them, without you granting them the privilege of the least familiarity, and who take advantage of your weakness to demolish you. Marie-Thérèse, I've held on to the naive dream of becoming a writer, that is to say a man who tries to save himself from himself. A man who, in order to hold on to a little momentum toward the future, attempts to exchange his own existence for that of words. I don't want to hear I'm not well. Such phrases are of abject insignificance coming from you, Marie-Thérèse. My hair is turning white, my teeth are turning yellow, and my hands are shrinking. I forbid you to notice. I'm losing my sight. I forbid you to notice. Even if I'm in the throes of death, I forbid you to notice that I'm in the throes of death, you have no right to notice anything at all about me, you can understand nothing about what I am, you have chosen to live as Marie-Thérèse Lyoc, you have chosen to be part of the hoi polloi of humanity, we do not belong to the same caste, I forbid you to notice my decline.
He gets up brusquely and says, Marie-Thérèse I must go home. She says, so soon? He replies, I can't stay any longer. She asks if he's separated from his wife. He replies that he's not separated from his wife, why should he be, and demands a taxi straightaway. Marie-Thérèse says, it's rare, you know, men who are free in the evening at the last moment. But not as rare, he feels like replying, as men capable of burying themselves alive with one great shovelful after another. Do you know a number here? he says.