I struggle to remember the way to the building where, as the younger one told me this morning on the phone, my two sisters still live. Close beside me, Katia is gloomy and quiet — was she hoping for something a little more fun? Hoping this visit to the two girls was only a pretext for, once we reached Paris, going out on the town, seeing people? I don’t know. I don’t understand her. I really do not understand this Katia. But time has gone by, and my sisters look nothing like the girls they once were. Now they’re two very heavy, very bulky women, who greet us with none of the awkwardness and timidity I recall from before. Their faces are pleasant, jovial, their eyes bright. Their beautiful black hair curls identically over their two pairs of shoulders. They’re dressed in athletic wear of a fashionable style and brand, though it’s entirely clear that neither of them practices any sport. Even I am surprised by the joy I feel on seeing them again. I embrace them one after the other, and under my fingers I can feel their bra straps digging into the abundant flesh on their backs. And then, from her sullen air, I deduce that Katia is disappointed by my very round, very substantial sisters, that she’s already banished any impulse of sympathy or respect for them from her mind. She stands with her back pressed to the door, her arms crossed over her green sweater, her mouth disdainful, her green eyes motionless, distant. Angry, I whisper to her:
“No one’s forcing you to stay, you know.”
Forever a woman in green in my memory, Katia Depetiteville opens the door behind her and backs out of the room with a wan smile on her lips. I never saw her again. I never heard anyone mention her again. Oh, she’ll be back — but in what form? She’ll be back — how can I know that?
* * *
My sisters have settled down now, their lives are almost established. The first one shows me a photograph of a young man with a brutish forehead: she’ll be marrying him in a few weeks. Both of my sisters work, together, in some sort of government office.They inspire confidence, they’re at peace — why is all of this nevertheless so sad? It’s nothing more than life at its most ordinary — why is this all so sad? A wicked thought comes to me as I sip my tasteless tea, bored, in their little kitchen: it wasn’t worth losing Katia Depetiteville just to come pay this charitable call on my sisters. Because I think of my mother, of Ivan’s wife, of my stepmother, and I fear I’ll see myself as a senseless fool should all those women in green disappear one by one, leaving me powerless to prove their existence, my own originality. I then wonder, in my sisters’ tidy kitchen, how to find bearable a life without women in green exhibiting their slippery silhouettes in the background. In order to slip serenely through these moments of stupor, of deep boredom, of crippling inertia, I need to remember they decorate my thoughts, my invisible life, I need to remember they’re there, at once real beings and literary figures, without which, it seems to me, the harshness of existence scours skin and flesh down to the bone.
“Did you go see Maman?” my younger sister asks, with that naive and unwavering kindliness I always find so moving.
“Did you go see Maman?” asks my other sister, more severely.
I tell them I saw our mother in Marseille, but they shake their heads with a “tttss,” tell me they won’t hear another word about that, and inform me that our mother is now once again living in this same building, on another floor, alone. She was lucky enough to get her old job back, in the neighborhood school.
Disoriented, I ask:
“What about Bella? Where’s her little girl?”
My sisters lower their eyelids, fringed with long, thick lashes. They hide their eyes, but I can see the inflexible creases of their mouths.
I stand up, mumble “Goodbye,” and hurry out. An artificial scent of honeysuckle hangs in the air of their apartment, and my head is swimming. I’d seen more than one can of that freshener in every room, and three or four times in the course of my stay I saw one or the other of my sisters go and reflexively press the button to fill the air with perfume.
I start downstairs, gripping the banister. I reach the landing on my mother’s floor and go to her door, pressing one ear against it, and from the other side I hear the regular sound of deep breathing, as if my mother were sitting on a chair with her own ear glued to the door, waiting, inert, perhaps lulled to sleep by the rhythm of her own breathing, so heavy, so masculine. I feel anger and pity. A little later, as I was nearing the ground floor, I thought my mother’s door had swung open. Maybe she saw me, maybe she called out to me — maybe not.
* * *
That same year, determined to put my affection for my father to the test, I accept an invitation from a Cultural Center in Ouagadougou to take part in a literary symposium, knowing that my father and his wife, who’ve left Paris and the seed shop, now live in that part of the world — although I can’t be sure it’s the same wife, my one-time friend, since, out of vanity, boredom, and restlessness, my father has never let his marriages last. Whatever I find there, I tell myself, and whoever this person is whose life he’s now sharing, in his inability to be alone, whatever I find there, I tell myself, I’ll pass no judgment, I’ll inflict no acidic or severe or sarcastic gaze on this probable new couple. I’m going to see him because he won’t come and see me, and my solicitude for him, my devotion, all those tender feelings, however tinged with regret, couldn’t bear for long the distance between us, couldn’t bear for long the years going by without seeing or speaking to each other. He doesn’t know me all that well, never having lived with me, and I think he forgets about me when he doesn’t have my face before his eyes to remind him of the girl he one day engendered. And besides, this man, my father, this anxious, intelligent, disturbingly thin man, prides himself on never opening a novel, so I know he hasn’t read my work, I know he’d rather have no notion of the reality of my books’ existence, out of respect for me in a sense, since he considers literature so ignoble a thing. All of that I can put up with today, all of that has ceased to anger me, all of that might almost strike me as funny, and in any case I no longer seize on it as grounds for recrimination. Why take it amiss? I ask myself. Isn’t it actually better this way, isn’t it best that parents not read their children’s novels? What might they find there that could possibly be good for them?
And so, invited by the Cultural Center and not by my father, I get on the plane for Ouagadougou with my oldest daughter Marie, who’s eleven. We’re met at the airport by the center’s secretary, a certain Monsieur Urbain, who already seems to know everything there is to know about us. Straight off, he asks: