* * *
Now for an idea of our relationship with each other and the typical atmosphere of Ledada, the restaurant my father opened in the twentieth arrondissement of Paris. At this time, I still have only one child. He’s five years old, and we’ve come to Ledada for lunch, at the invitation of my stepmother. That was something I had to get used to: being invited to visit my own father by my childhood friend, convinced that if I showed up unannounced, if I appeared at the door as if I belonged there, a certain nettled reserve on their part, an exaggerated politeness, would make it clear I’m supposed to avoid any sign of familiarity, which they would find demeaning and upsetting. I sit down with my little boy at the table they’ve reserved for us. My father and his wife are ceremonious. They move the plastic furniture here and there with a distinguished gravity. Pained, I observe that my stepmother is even heavier than last time, and that my father, ever slighter, must weigh half what she does. Once my friend was a slender girl of her time. Once my father was a robust man, skilled in contact sports. Is it all this green that’s undoing them? I wonder, ill at ease in my stepmother’s transparent, emerald gaze. My father disappears into his kitchen, then personally brings us the chicken with lime juice or peanut sauce, and although they’re both serving us, although the child and I are sitting while the other two bustle around us, we know they’re the masters here, the power, the lords of this modest manor, we know it, the child and I, every bit as well as my father and his green wife. They’re displaying their enigmatic intimacy for our benefit, and yet our presence here is unnecessary, is in fact invasive. My deep, longstanding friendship with this woman was over as soon as she married my father. I’ve sometimes told myself this might be for the best. Would it be acceptable for me to hear intimate secrets about my own father? For me to laugh at his behavior as she and I once laughed together at so many boys? No, that would not be a good thing. And maybe it’s also to tell me I’m supposed to keep my distance that my friend has become a woman in green.
One day, one of my father’s sons, a man far older than I, bursts into Ledada while I happen to be dining there. He’s clutching a golf club with both hands. So he’s a golfer, I say to myself, indifferent. Of all my father’s children, he’s the one I dislike the most. He wordlessly raises the club over his head and smashes it down on the counter. My stepmother stands there, motionless and sedate, coldly observing this unpleasant man’s every move. He starts whirling around, brandishing the club before him, mowing down chairs, toppling tables, shattering picture frames. The customers leap up, shout, scatter. My father comes up from the kitchen and stands at the top of the stairs, wrapped in his apron. He looks at his oldest son in silence. He looks at his wife too, but she never so much as glances his way. My father seems abstracted, weary, drained. My stepmother is focused and vigilant. The son drops the club and falls to his knees on the tile floor. His face is wet with tears. He prostrates himself before my father.
“The problem,” I later told my father in Ledada’s ravaged dining room, “is that you have too many children. If every one of your children thinks they have grounds to make you pay for something you’ve done and maybe forgotten, how can you hope to deal with it?”
“I’ve never failed anyone,” my father answered.
“That’s possible. Nevertheless, you have too many children,” I insisted pointlessly, fully aware of my own bad faith.
Because I feared that my father and the woman in green might have a child of their own, or two, or three, and that this would only compound my father’s problems, engulfing all of us, those of his children who feel it in our hearts when some sorrow befalls him. I fear that still, although my friend is no longer a very young woman — does green guard against fertility, I sometimes wonder? No, my friend’s not a young woman anymore, and they still haven’t reproduced. They’ve sold Ledada and gone back to the seed shop, raising pigeons in the back room. Little mauve feathers flutter all around my father wherever he goes. That woman in green, my former friend, is the third to come into my life, and to this day, in 2003, she’s still there, although I almost never see her, out of indolence and spite. I sometimes ask myself: really, what have you got against her? But is it so vital to ask that question, when the answer is obvious? I can’t forgive her for discarding our friendship to take up with my father, a man worn down by too many marriages, too many varied, successive existences, a man who should have elegantly consented to throw in the towel at long last, instead of upsetting the order of the generations, he who had already won so much, and so often. Hard-headed in his emaciation, he’ll come to a pitiable end. His daily rations are those of a child of two. Meanwhile, his wife balloons year after year, to the point that she now has her green dresses hand-sewn, because she can’t find her size in the shops. All the same, there’s no denying it, they exude conjugal bliss. Making them enviable, in the end, in their way — yes, are they not to be envied?
* * *
December 2003 — After the uncertain night, day broke bright and mild. Nothing the Garonne has in store seems too worrisome when the air is blue-tinged and luminous. Several roads around the village are cut off. At eight o’clock the firemen’s siren in La Réole sounds, and that siren, meant to inform us of nothing other than the rise of the water, sends more than one of us into a panic, as we don’t understand what it means. We don’t know, we’ve forgotten, how to interpret it: are we supposed to count the blasts from the beginning, and thus understand that the Garonne has hit ten meters at La Réole (which, for us, means disaster, a catastrophic flood in the offing), or do we count only the short blasts that come after one very long blast, which serves solely as an overture for the counting? We don’t know. A variety of opinions are voiced, in tones sharpened by anxiety. Why do so many men and so few women enjoy this tense atmosphere, this prelude to valor, to heroism? Why do so many women, who’ve been living here forever, aspire only to move to a safe place at last, and so few men? Why do the men say, in spite of the extra work, the exhaustion, the apprehension caused by the threat of a flood, and then sometimes by the flood itself, why do they say, without explanation, “I’ll never leave!”? Why should they see leaving as a sign of failure, when there’s no point in staying?
* * *
2000 — I never met this other woman in green, the fourth or fifth, whose presence in my personal legends eclipses, by its incandescence, some of her more irrefutably real neighbors. I’m not even sure she’s actually a woman dressed in green. In the end, it makes little difference. She remains a pure emblem of a green woman, no matter what. Everything I know of her comes to me from Jenny.
A time came when Jenny found herself at a dead end. She was a little less than fifty years old, and everything that had once been hers, everything she’d worked so hard to succeed at, everything she’d devotedly loved had all flitted away in the space of a year. Her adopted son was wandering the world and refused to see her, her husband had left her, she’d just been laid off. Everything had vanished. She’s a passive and trusting person, and nothing she’d done was really to blame for this ruination. It had simply happened, beside her, without her realizing, and when she woke up it was too late to hope she might recover what was lost.