I didn’t have to go to work and I was by myself, alone as I hadn’t been for ten years. On the second day I did something I hadn’t done since Stepan’s death: I didn’t get dressed at all, I lay in bed, I listened to the radio, I took a shower when I was too hot, I remembered, I didn’t get up. Mother would have been deeply ashamed of me. Papa, examining the cruel crevices in his hands, would have looked up and said with a wink: Why not, if she can? My life already seemed inexplicably long. The next day I spent at the swimming pool sunbathing. From having to stand too much at work I was developing varicose veins. My hands weren’t like Papa’s but they were red and rough. I was never taught to swim. I made an appointment at the hairdresser’s. Mother had never once been to a hairdresser in her life.
Coming out of the hairdresser’s with a scarf over my head, I saw Michel on the other side of the road. He was walking on crutches. I waved and he didn’t see me. His head was down and it looked as though the going was painful. I waited for the traffic and then I ran across the street. When at last he saw me, his face, red and glistening with sweat, broke into a smile.
What a surprise! Always in his faraway voice.
I’ve just had my hair done.
Come and have a coffee.
We went to the brasserie by the post office. A waiter offered him a chair. Obstinately he took another.
Why don’t you take off your scarf?
Order me a café au lait and I’ll be back. I went to the toilet.
Ah! Odile! A beautiful head of hair you have there! All his words had to be hurled across the ravine of what had befallen him.
It’s too fine. It breaks too easily.
Too fine? I wouldn’t know what too fine was! He drank from his glass of white wine and lemonade. You remember the trip we made to Italy?
I nodded.
Thirteen years ago.
The only time I’ve ever been on a motorbike. Afterwards you told me I was a good passenger.
Your outfit has closed down for the whole month?
Like every year.
What about a trip to Paris?
Paris! It’s hundreds of kilometres away.
We take the car and we take four days, there and back. I have to go anyway to get a prosthesis adjusted. It’s not satisfactory … the left one here. If you came with me, it would be a holiday. What do you say?
It’s a long way.
Don’t put your scarf on again.
Are we, Christian, a mother and child flying in the sky?
At that moment I was twenty-nine; Michel was thirty-seven. If I’d been told as a child what the life of an adult is like, I wouldn’t have believed it. I’d never have believed it could be so unfinished. When young we lend so much authority and sureness to our elders. Michel and I had seen and lived a good deal, and yet, as we followed the Rhône along the gorge through the end of the Jura Mountains, we were like children. When I think of it now, I want to protect us.
It was a white Renault 4. He had covered the seats with a fabric, striped like a zebra skin. He liked putting on a strong eau de cologne which, mixed with sweat and the August heat, smelt like mule. I’d bought a pair of white net gloves for the trip. In my whole life I never dreamt of wearing gloves in the summer but I’d seen this pair in a shop in Cluses, a shop where the bosses’ wives bought their haberdashery, and I said to myself: What the hell, Odile, if you’re going to Paris, Paris of all places on this earth, and you’ve got a smart pair of white shoes, you may as well wear white net gloves in August. In addition, they were at half-price.
When I think of us on our way to Paris, I want us to come to no harm.
The white cat died last week. She was hit by a car. Michel was at the shop and I went out into the garden and I heard a meow. She was in the grass by the edge of the road. Her back was broken, so I put her to lie on a blanket by the stove in the kitchen. She lay there, her white mouth a little open and her tongue scarcely less white than her teeth. She turned — or her body turned her — onto her side with her four legs stretched out and her hind legs straight behind her, as if she were leaping. Slowly, with her two forelegs she wiped her face, moving her paws down from her ears over her eyes towards her mouth. She did this once only, rubbing the vision of life out of her eyes. When her paws reached her mouth she was dead.
Can there be any love without pity?
The Jura are not like our mountains. They are more morose, more resigned to their fate. They would never cover a car seat with zebra skin nor wear white gloves in August. We passed a lake which looked as though no boat had ever sailed upon it. Michel talked about General de Gaulle and I didn’t know whether he hated or admired him. Next he talked about the factory. It belonged now to a multinational with factories in twenty-one different countries. TPI. The multinationals, Michel said, are the new robber barons of our time. TPI made eight thousand five hundred million francs profit in ’66.
Michel keeps figures in his head like other people keep the words of songs.
It’s raining kisses
and hailing caresses
till the flood of tenderness
takes the nest.
A man on one of their furnaces, he said, breathes air that contains four hundred thousand dust particles per litre — that’s lethal.
May a mouthful of this on your night shift my darling keep you company between the hot and the cold …
Lethal. No man can stand it indefinitely, Michel said. The forest is dying. The five chimneys spew out one thousand two hundred tons of fluorine waste every year.
Papa had been right about the venom. He had been right too about my being married at seventeen. What he never knew, what he could never have imagined, was that I’d be a widow by eighteen.
A TPI factory in the Pyrenees, Michel went on, has destroyed four thousand hectares of forest in three years and poisoned seven hundred and fifty cows and sheep.
What I’ve lost is more than seven hundred and fifty cows and sheep! I said.
You have a child. It helps.
It helps, yes, but a son doesn’t make up for everything. One day he’ll go.
At least you have somebody to live for.
Sometimes, I shouted, you want to live for yourself!
We each have to live for ourselves, he said.
Sometimes I look at other women and I hate them because they’re, because they’re …
Not living with a ghost?
I’m getting out, let me get out.
You have nothing to be angry about.
Nobody has the right to call him a ghost. Do you hear me, Michel? Nobody. He’s here! I beat my hand on my breast.
And I’m here, Michel said banging his hands down on the steering wheel, I’m here and I have no child so I know what I’m saying when I tell you you’re lucky.
Lucky? Me lucky! I’m about as lucky as you, my dear Michel.
He said nothing more. We were driving between hills of grass which rose to outcrops of rock. The sky was thundery. The cows were clustered together, heads down, wherever there was a little shade. We were both sweating and hot.
If you see a river, I said, why don’t you stop? Then I remembered it would be hard for him to clamber down a riverbank and I regretted saying it. Can you still have children? I asked him after five minutes’ silence.
He nodded without a word.
Around the next corner was a café and we stopped. We were waiting for the sandwich we had ordered when we heard a screeching of brakes followed by a crash. I rushed to the café door. A Peugeot 304, coming too fast round the bend, had crashed into the back of our Renault. The driver, unhurt, was waving his arms and cursing everything he could see. In God’s name, it’s not possible! No warning for the bend! How is it possible to build such a fool road? And to park a car there you need the mind of a cunt! It’s not possible, Jesus, I’m telling you it’s not possible!