She quickly rises to her feet, but now she has a limp. She tries to hide it by walking very slowly, and I conclude she’s the cavalier sort. I don’t know if I’m supposed to look grave or lighthearted. She tells me to come in for a cup of coffee, even though noon’s not ordinarily an hour for offering coffee. All around us, the countryside is perfectly silent.
“You wanted to see me?” she asks, once she’s sat down across the table, facing me.
She has very pale green eyes, like the ogress in my school when I was a child. I don’t answer her question. We hold our coffee cups with both hands in front of our mouths, and we look at each other over the rims with a hint of suspicion. Truthfulness would require that I tell her, “I had to make sure you exist.” And since I can’t tell her that, I say nothing. She introduces herself, very gracious, obliging, tells me her first name, then her family name, which I already knew. Her words hang in the air. She’s waiting for me to respond in kind, to tell her who I am. Cautiously, I say nothing. In spite of the things surrounding us in this drab kitchen, outfitted in the seventies and never refurbished since, in spite of this woman in green’s face so close I could hold out my fingers and touch it, something intangible, a veil, a glimmer of unreality makes me reluctant to tell her who I am. I don’t entirely believe in what she is. Not that I think for a moment she’s pretending — for one thing, the name she gave me as hers is the very one I’d been told — but I sense that she’s taken on the attributes of some other person, and doesn’t realize it herself. That’s not very clear. I have to explain myself more precisely. I believe that the woman in green, who told me her name was Katia Depetiteville, is not Katia Depetiteville, and I believe that if I asked people in the village for a description of Katia Depetiteville they wouldn’t describe this woman, the woman in green. They’d describe a very different person. But the woman in green doesn’t know that. She sincerely and naturally believes herself to be Katia Depetiteville. And for what reason? Is it so that, at various moments in my life, I might meet up with a woman in green? Because this is only one among many. In a plaintive, toneless voice, she tells me of the difficulties of her existence in this Aquitaine countryside, the frequent absences of a husband who is furthermore alcoholic and over-talkative, the coldness of her grown-up children, now grasping adults in their faraway towns. Her very green gaze is pale and cold. The hours go by as she speaks, giving up on hearing me say a word. The hours go by, but I don’t notice. What exactly she’s saying I’ll soon have forgotten. I’m wondering: where is the real Katia Depetiteville? When, later, in the village or waiting outside the school, I speak of the woman in green, people will answer, dumbfounded: Katia Depetiteville has been dead for ten years or more. And I won’t be surprised, having sensed it in advance.
I want to be away from this house, and the woman in green tries to hold me back. She doesn’t lay a hand on me, she only speaks. Another part of me would like to stay a little longer. I’m always interested in stories. Nevertheless, with some effort, I manage to go on my way. From the yard I can hear her still talking in the kitchen, I hear her lazy voice, her droning sentences, her plain words, and I tell myself: lucky for me she’s not a gifted speaker.
I’ll see her again, we’ll be almost friends. I know she’ll be replaced one day by another green woman, whom I won’t have chosen either.
* * *
December 2003 — Why, since we take pains to protect our cars, since we devote the necessary time to driving them off someplace where the water can’t touch them, why, having done that, do we hurry back to our endangered houses, as if those houses were living beings that we mustn’t under any circumstances abandon to the flood? Why, once we’ve carried the ground-floor furniture upstairs, do we not flee, why do we prefer the prospect of imprisonment in our houses surrounded, if not filled, with cold, silty water, and of a long wait there, stuck on the second floor, idle, bored, and uncomfortable, till the water recedes?
After all, that’s how it’s meant to be. You don’t leave your house. Is it a question of honor? What sort of honor could be involved, when there’s nothing to defend, no one to safeguard, and what will the house remember of all this? What gratitude will the house feel at not having been left alone in the churning waters?
For years my father was self-employed as a seedsman, then as a restaurateur. He picked out the restaurant’s name on his own. He called it Ledada, he furnished it with garden tables and chairs, painted animal frescoes on the walls in bold, sweeping strokes. He grew out his hair, and dyed it to hide the gray. He remarried, and lost so much weight that he began to look strikingly like photographs of himself as a lanky young man, and that filled him with pride. He hung the most flattering of these photos over the tables at Ledada. When some female customer inquires who that tall, lithe, handsome young man in black and white might be, my father answers in a mysterious voice, “Oh, that’s someone who’ll go far.” And then, “Do you find him attractive?” My father likes to make conquests, and now he can indulge in a gratuitous sort of seduction, unhurried and playful, since he’s just remarried. For twenty years his new wife was my best friend. Would she still be today, had she not married my father? Surely she would. She waits tables and takes in the money, and all that would belong to the realm of life at its most banal, in my opinion, were it not for a significant detail that has, ever since she became my stepmother, characterized this woman who was once my friend: she dresses only in green. I believe she had brown eyes. And now, by the grace of contact lenses, those eyes are green. Beaming, she explained that all her life she’d dreamt of having green eyes rather than brown, and she had to wait for a husband with a substantial income before she could dream of fulfilling that desire for permanently green eyes, which cost her no less than five euros a day. I asked my wisp of a father what he thought of this caprice. I wasn’t joking. The fact is, I found nothing at all amusing about it. I told myself: here we go again. Again the ambiguity, the groping, the unanswered questions about all this green.
My father sketched delicate circles on the kitchen floor with the tip of his shoe, and I gauged the extravagant length and slenderness his leg had acquired. I sensed his unease.
“And another thing, isn’t this thinness of yours a bit much?” I asked him more gently. “Couldn’t weighing so little be bad for your health?”
“Very possibly,” he said with a quick laugh. “But, you know,” he went on, “you can’t let yourself go. Look how wiry I am! Fat won’t stand a chance with me.”
I returned to the subject at hand:
“You married a brown-eyed woman, and you must have been fond of her eyes. But if they’re green, doesn’t that change your feelings for her in some way?”
My father went on making his drawings and abstract designs on the floor, looking away, and I understood that his wife’s eyes, my ex-best friend’s eyes, were a subject he’d sooner steer clear of. My father is on his fifth or sixth marriage. Presumably he doesn’t want to take any chances, if he can help it, now that he finds himself aging and tired, and it seems a safe bet that he’d rather avoid speaking words that might be heard or repeated outside the kitchen, with which his wife might one day arm herself to demonstrate that he never loved her. Who am I to go undermining their union’s foundation? It simply seems to me that my father — much thinner than before, yes, but no longer young or strong — has failed to appreciate the enormity of those changes in his wife’s appearance. He pretends not to see the uniformly almond-green suits, the green cotton tights, the bottle-green lace-up flats. Or else he pretends to believe all this is simply a matter of his wife’s personal tastes, on which he prefers to have no opinion, and has no connection with their marriage, or the fact that his wife’s stepdaughter was once her best friend. But how, for my part, not to see a meaning in all this, something fated? How not to see, in the apparent coincidence of my father’s remarriage and the transformation of my friend into an eternal woman in green, a message intended for me, transmitted not only by that woman’s personal color but by the couple themselves, a green woman and a skeletal father? How to read that message I don’t yet know.