She insisted and I went to see if I could help, but no, nothing could be done, not for the moment. In hospitals, there aren’t many private rooms, and they’re reserved for the most serious cases. She’d been hiding her panic well, but now, without my knowing exactly how it had happened, I could feel it rising inside her. It was on her lips, but never spilled over. We finally came to an agreement with the admissions people. She could change rooms as soon as possible. In the meantime, she’d be in 115. She had no idea how long she’d spend there, only a few days at first, but afterwards? The woman in the bed beside hers couldn’t have been older than thirty. But most of the others in the ward were distinctly older than Marie. She told me very soon, maybe two weeks after they started the treatment, that she couldn’t stand the unfairness of it, suffering the same thing as people much older than her, do you realize, why is it happening to me?
When we got there, her neighbor in the ward was reading Elle, she nodded at Marie, that was all. From that floor you could see the wing of the great building added to Beaujon and behind it, toward the Seine, that was where I came from. Ever since I was born, I’d seen that hospital. Along with the Seine, it was part of my first landscape. Marie looked at the empty closet, and when she’d finished her inspection of that emptiness, she said can you leave me please? I said yes, all right. I looked for words I couldn’t find, but a woman like Marie doesn’t need too many words, especially at moments like these.
She was due to be operated on the day after tomorrow, she’d already seen the anesthesiologist. We said goodbye. She walked me to the door of the ward. I turned around to look at her as I waited for the elevator. She’d gone into the glass office at the end of the corridor, she was talking with the on-duty nurse she’d already asked about the private room. Was she already trying again? I took that for a good sign. I managed to tell myself that it would pass very soon, that she’d sail through it, and then later, outside, after the big admissions desk, there was all that green on the trees, and I told myself that I didn’t know how to pray. I had always been against praying.
I walked toward the Seine to have a quiet smoke. Turning around, I searched with my eyes for the ward where she was, without being sure. When I got to the riverbank, I ran across the road. They’d just demolished the apartment block where I’d spent the first years of my life, my mother having quickly stuck me with a sitter because she’d found a paying job. But there are some memories you can’t demolish as easily as that. I lit another cigarette from the butt of the previous one and sat down on the grass, taking care to avoid the dog shit and all the garbage that was there. Beer cans, supermarket carts, debris from all over the world, and sometimes, toward the far end of Clichy, near the Île Saint-Denis, syringes that reminded me of Antoine, Marc-André’s son, every time. I was under the poplars on the riverbank. They’d always been there for me, straight and clear, not saying anything, watching and waiting. Opposite, there were barges moored, and behind them, the building where Marco’s parents had lived, when was it they’d died? I talked to Ben too. Did he have any idea of all the time I spent talking to him, almost every day, without telling him?
I didn’t feel like going back to Marie’s place that evening. She’d have liked me to live in her apartment, she was worried about security and she was also scared of missing important messages. She didn’t want to tell her patients that she’d be unavailable for a few months. She wanted to go back to work as soon as possible, they really needed her, she thought. Who needed me now? I decided to go back to my apartment, even if I went to sleep at her place afterwards. I often hoped that Ben would never love without being loved in return. At other times, I hoped a whole lot of other things for him. The Seine was heavy today. When
I stood up again, I decided to give him a ring to suggest we have a meal together, if he had time. They were going to move soon. The storage facility at the port of Gennevilliers was another of those old memories I didn’t cherish. Just after the divorce, I lived all over the place, and sometimes, later, Benjamin and I even spent the weekend in a furnished room rented by the month in Bécon-les-Bruyères, because I know the landlord. I filled out his social security statements and the papers for his accountant instead of him, to thank him. He could have been one of those guys walking up and down the boulevard near where Marie lived. Or else a guy like him. I always felt better after a good quarter of an hour near the Seine.
At home I waited until evening. I called my son but it was Anaïs who picked up, how are you?
“Yes, we’re exhausted, we’re still packing. Ben’s in the basement, he’ll call you back, OK?”
He called back ten minutes later, was I still on for the storage facility the following Saturday, was it all right with me? I said yes, preferably in the morning. Then I don’t know how it happened, but we started talking about scooters, and he laughed, I’d been wanting one for so long, it might be better if I gave up the idea, unless maybe I waited until winter? That was what decided me, I think. That and all these other complicated desires to go around the old places I’d known in my life. It wouldn’t take me more than ten minutes to get to Beaujon if I had a scooter. To get to the office, I could always park near the railroad station at Pont Cardinet.
“How’s Marie?”
“Not very well.”
I heard him stiffen at the other end, he must have made a sign to Anaïs— oh, those irritable signs his mother made, I remembered them so well — what’s wrong with her? She has breast cancer, I told Benjamin, she went into Beaujon today for an operation. She should pull through. That was the phrase I’d heard more than once, it came to me like that without thinking. Benjamin was silent at the other end.
“Maybe we could meet before Saturday, if you like.”
“Yes, if you like, how about coming to dinner?”
He whispered some things to Anaïs and then said no, we’re busy, can you come here? That way you’ll see the mess we have! Marie had switched off her cell phone. The message on it wasn’t one she’d recorded herself, and since it bothered me that I hadn’t been able to speak to her, I made a detour and went past Beaujon, just to wish her good night from the side where the windows on her floor were. I don’t know why I had the impression that would help her without her being aware of it. After all, nobody would know apart from me, but anyway.
Marco did the same thing sometimes. When his son wasn’t doing well, he’d go to the church at Porte de Champerret and light candles, like an idiot. He’d never set foot in there before he was forty, and he didn’t tell anyone about it, not even Aïcha. Of course it hadn’t cured Antoine of his addiction, he would always be an ex-junkie, with chronic hepatitis and a criminal record, but in his opinion it was thanks to the candles that he’d always had the courage to visit him in the hospital, in rehab, and at Fresnes prison, where his son had done six months, and to look him in the eyes. It was just a matter of finding places where guys like him and me could be alone and quiet for a moment, to do their black or white or blue or pink or whatever magic. I got to their place around nine in the evening. It was really nice to see them again, surrounded by all those boxes. When he came into the kitchen, Benjamin asked me to come and help him, and he told me that his mother had asked about me.
“Oh, yes?”
“Yes.”
He was handsome, my son, with his curly hair tumbling over his forehead and his eyes still like a child’s, despite his job in the labs in Switzerland, and maybe later, in the United States. By the time he finished studying, he’d be over thirty.