Marguerite Blot
In the distant era of my marriage, in the hotel where we used to go as a family in the summer, there was a woman we would see every year. A cheerful, elegant woman with a sporty cut to her gray hair. She appeared everywhere, moving from group to group and dining at a different table every evening. Often, late in the afternoon, she could be found sitting with a book. She’d settle herself into a corner of the lounge so she could keep an eye on the comings and goings. Whenever she saw anyone who looked the least bit familiar, her face would light up and she’d wave her book like a handkerchief. One day she arrived with a tall brunette woman wearing an airy pleated skirt. Afterward, they were never seen apart. They had lunch on the lakeshore, played tennis, played cards. I asked who the tall woman was. Une dame de compagnie, I was told: a lady companion. I accepted the designation as one accepts an ordinary word, a word without a specific connotation. The two women appeared every year at the same time, and I’d say to myself, there’s Madame Compain and her lady companion. In due course, a dog was added to their party. They’d take turns holding its leash, but the animal clearly belonged to Madame Compain. We’d see all three of them stepping out every morning, the dog pulling the ladies forward as they strove to hold it back by modulating its name through all the keys, but without any success. In February this past winter, and therefore a great many years later, I went on a mountain holiday with my son, who’s a grown man now. He skis, of course, with his friends, and I walk. I love to go on walks, I love the forest and the silence. The staff at the hotel suggested some trails I could take, but they were all too far away and I didn’t dare. One shouldn’t walk too far alone in the mountains and the snow. I laughed, thinking that I ought to put up an ad at the reception desk: Single woman seeks someone pleasant to walk with. Anyway, I immediately thought about Madame Compain and her lady companion, and I understood what it meant to be une dame de compagnie. My understanding frightened me, because Madame Compain had always struck me as a woman who was a bit lost. Even when she was laughing with other people. And maybe, now that I think about it, especially when she was laughing, and also when she was dressing for the evening. I turned to my father — that is, I raised my eyes to heaven — and murmured, Papa, I can’t become a Madame Compain! It had been a long time since I’d last spoken to my father. Since he died, I’ve been asking him to intervene in my life. I look up at the sky and talk to him in a secret, vehement voice. He’s the only person I can speak to when I feel powerless. Besides him, I don’t know anyone in the next world who would pay me any attention. It never occurs to me to address God. I’ve always thought you can’t disturb God. You can’t speak to him directly. He doesn’t have the time to get involved with individual cases. Or if he does, they have to be exceptionally serious. On the scale of entreaties, mine are, in a manner of speaking, absurd. I feel the way my friend Pauline did when she lost a necklace she’d inherited from her mother and then found it in some tall grass. As they were passing through a village later, her husband stopped the car and rushed over to the church. It was locked, and so he started frantically rattling the door handle. What are you doing? Pauline asked. I want to thank God, he replied. — God doesn’t give a shit! — I want to thank the Blessed Virgin. — Listen, Hervé, think about the size of the universe, think about the countless evils on earth, think about all the things that happen down here. If there’s a God, if there’s a Blessed Virgin, do you really believe my necklace matters to them?… And so I address my father, who seems more accessible. I ask him for specific favors. Maybe because circumstances make me desire specific things, but also because — below the surface — I want to gauge his abilities. It’s always the same call for help. A petition for movement. But my father’s hopeless. Either he doesn’t hear me or he has no power. I find it appalling that the dead have no power. I disapprove of this radical division of our worlds. From time to time I attribute prophetic knowledge to my father. I think: he’s not granting your wishes because he knows they won’t be conducive to your welfare. That upsets me, I feel like saying, mind your own business, but at least I can consider his nonintervention a deliberate act. That was what he did with Jean-Gabriel Vigarello, the last man I fell in love with. Jean-Gabriel Vigarello is one of my colleagues, a professor of mathematics at the Lycée Camille-Saint-Saëns, where I myself teach Spanish. In retrospect, I tell myself my father wasn’t wrong. But what’s retrospect? It’s old age. My father’s heavenly values exasperate me. They’re quite bourgeois, if you think about them. When he was alive, he believed in the stars, haunted houses, and all sorts of esoteric baubles. My brother Ernest, despite the way he makes his unbelief a cause for vanity, resembles our father a little more every day. Recently I heard him repeat in his turn, “The stars incline us, they do not bind us.” I’d forgotten how much our father adored that slogan, to which he’d add, almost threateningly, the name of Ptolemy. I thought, if the stars don’t bind us, Papa, then what could you possibly know about the immanent future? I became interested in Jean-Gabriel Vigarello on the day I noticed his eyes. It wasn’t easy to spot them, given that he wore his hair very long and it totally concealed his forehead — a hairstyle at once ugly and impossible for someone of his age. I thought at once, this man has a wife who doesn’t take care of him (he’s married, naturally). You don’t let a man who’s pushing sixty wear his hair like that. And most importantly, you tell him not to hide his eyes. Color-changing eyes, sometimes blue, sometimes gray, and shimmering like a mountain lake. One evening I found myself alone with him in a café in Madrid (we’d organized a school trip to Madrid with three of our classes). I got my nerve up and said, you have very gentle eyes, Jean-Gabriel, it’s pure madness to keep them hidden. After that statement and a bottle of Carta d’Oro, one thing led to another and we wound up in my room, which overlooked a courtyard with howling cats. Once we were back in Rouen, he immediately replunged into his normal life. We’d cross paths in the halls of the lycée as if nothing had happened. He always seemed to be in a hurry, carrying his schoolbag in his left hand, his whole body leaning to that side and his graying bangs covering up more of his face than ever. I find it pathetic, the silent way men have of sending you back in time. As if it was necessary to remind us, for future reference, that human existence is fragmented. I thought, I’ll write a note and put it in his mailbox. An inconsequential, witty note, containing a reference to an incident in Madrid. I stuck the note in his box one morning when I knew he was there. No response. Not on that day, and not during any of the following days. We greeted each other exactly as before. I was assailed by a kind of sadness, I can’t say heartache, but rather the sorrow of abandonment. There’s a poem by Borges that begins,
Ya no es mágico el mundo. Te han dejado. The world’s not magical anymore. You’ve been left. He says left, an everyday word, a word that makes no noise. Anybody can leave you, even a Jean-Gabriel Vigarello, who wears his hair like the Beatles fifty years after. I asked my father to intervene. In the meantime, I’d written another note, a single phrase: “Don’t forget me completely. Marguerite.” That completely struck me as ideal for dissipating his fears, if he had any. A little reminder in a jesting tone. I told my father, I still look good, but as you can see, nothing’s up, and soon I’m going to be old. I told my father, I leave the lycée at five in the afternoon, right now it’s nine in the morning, you’ve got eight hours to inspire Jean-Gabriel Vigarello with a charming reply that I’ll find in my mailbox or on my cell phone. My father didn’t lift a finger. In retrospect, I see that he was right. He’s never approved of my absurd infatuations. He’s right. You choose some faces from among others, you set out markers in time. Everybody wants to have some tale to tell. In former days, I launched myself into the future without thinking about it. Madame Compain was surely the type to have absurd infatuations. When she used to come to the hotel alone, she’d bring a great deal of luggage. Every evening she put on a different dress, a different necklace. She wore her lipstick even on her teeth, which was part of her elegance. She’d go from one table to the next, drinking a glass with one group and then another with another, always animated, always making conversation, especially with men. At the time, I was with my husband and children. In a little warm cell, from which one looks out at the world. Madame Compain fluttered around like a moth. In whatever corners the light reached, however feebly, Madame Compain would appear with her lacy wings. Ever since my childhood, I’ve made mental images for time. I see the year as an isosceles trapezoid. Winter’s on top, a confident straight line. Fall and spring are attached to it like a skirt. And the summer has always been a long flat plain. These days I have the impression that the angles have softened and the figure’s not stable anymore. What’s that a sign of? I can’t become a Madame Compain. I’m going to have a serious talk with my father. I’m going to tell him he has a unique opportunity to manifest himself for my welfare. I’m going to ask him to reestablish the geometry of my life. It’s a matter of something very simple, very easy to arrange. Could you — this is what I’m preparing to say to him — could you put some lighthearted person in my way, someone I can laugh with and who likes to go on walks? Surely you know someone who’d keep the ends of his scarf crossed and smoothed flat under an old-fashioned coat, who’d hold me with a solid arm and lead me through the snowy forest and never get us lost.