For months you waited at the foot of the dais to ask insignificant questions, leaving more and more pregnant pauses until he suggested continuing the conversation at a café, where the discussion mainly featured throat-clearing and eyelash-batting. It took a complete campaign to prompt an invitation to a restaurant and months more of effort to wangle an appointment at the doctor’s office, after consultation hours.
Neglected by his wife, Jacques had precious little experience of love. You have tender memories of his chubby fingers probing the openings in your clothes, hardly daring to venture further. No, the doctor was not really at ease with women, aside from a few flings with patients at the end of their cure, when through sheer boredom doctor and patient had thrown themselves at each other just for something to do. He had observed that this technique significantly accelerated the resolution of transference. After three weeks they would be seeing each other less and less and after two months, not at all. But whenever you came up with some objection, armed with the convictions of your age and the principles inculcated by the university, he would wax ironic about the fanaticism of youth to disparage your arguments. And you, busy shedding your clothes on the chaise to foster a more direct approach to the subject, had come away rather disappointed. Disappointed and pregnant, which you now illustrate by pointing a finger at your belly jammed against the table on which your frankfurters and fries have just been placed, while your neighbor, sitting with her now cold steak and ratatouille, considers you with the stunned amazement of someone who has never before encountered the victim of a sensational incident.
You’re off and running now, you spare her nothing. You describe how the doctor took the news (up on his high horse, as if he’d never gotten anywhere near her), how he made fun of young Angèle Trognon (that’s your name), announcing point-blank that he wasn’t going to leave his wife for a student.
It’s a girl? asks Élisabeth suddenly.
It is a girl. How did you know that?
Just a thought.
You observe your neighbor, who still hasn’t touched her food. You could take an interest in her now, ask if she has children, inquire about her situation. You couldn’t care less about all that. And since you’ve finished the saga of your misadventures, you tackle your present experience, the relentless harassment that leaves you no time to bemoan your fate. The authorities are pressing you about your intentions, about questions of money and inheritance. Bank statements must be produced, expenses justified — you have no idea, you tell Élisabeth, what questions you get asked after a crime.
Well, replies Élisabeth, who is languidly picking the eggplant out of her ratatouille with the tip of her knife, I think I should be going.
You have worn out your audience. There she is putting on her gray coat, dropping a bill on the table without waiting for her change or saying good-bye. The coat sails across the room — sweeping the tables, destroying in its wake any forks and breadbaskets in precarious equilibrium at their tables’ edges — and out of the café, bound for its mysterious destination. You will learn nothing more about the woman who listened to you. Her face is already dwindling in your memory and you have even forgotten her name.
This woman is now walking back along Boulevard de Sébastopol toward the taxi stand at Châtelet. There she takes a Mercedes that reaches Rue des Écoles in eight minutes. Without bothering to whip up an explanation for the young reception clerk, she goes up to room 17 and walks in at 11:09 p.m.: it has been exactly a hundred and twenty minutes since she left the baby, who is just waking up. Viviane carries her away in the taxi still waiting downstairs.
10
Le Parisien announces the next day that the widow is being held by the police. There’s a photo with the article, showing her escorted by two uniformed officers at the entrance to police headquarters. She’s a woman of about fifty, slender, elegant; the doctor must have made a good living. I try to get a reading on her character but it’s a snapshot taken on the fly, printed on cheap newsprint. It reveals nothing except that the woman would no doubt prefer to be elsewhere, nibbling on a pastry in a tearoom or visiting art galleries with her girlfriends while their husbands work in their opulent offices. The article simply says that the police suspect her because she was leading a double life, Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, with that Silverio Da Silva, the man they recently arrested but released.
Then the following day brings a new twist. In connection with this affair they are now interrogating one Tony Boujon, twenty-three, a printing-plant worker. A patient of the doctor’s, but one with a police record. Toward the end of spring, armed with a knife, he’d attacked a girl outside the Lycée Paul-Valéry as she was leaving the school. Detectives had searched the room he still lived in at home with his parents, on Rue Montgallet in the 12th arrondissement, whereupon they’d discovered that this young man owned a lovely collection of knives.
In short, the widow is free, and I immediately take up my post on Rue du Roi-de-Sicile. I had no trouble obtaining the address. Shoved to the front of the stage, the protagonists of police-blotter dramas have not had time to get an unlisted number: they’re all in the phone book. And on the Internet it’s child’s play to locate their block on a city map, cruise over it, and even get an idea of their building’s façade. In the end I managed to pick out a nearby front porch where I could stand guard.
Just as I was ready to go about my business my daughter rose in revolt, and this time I didn’t hesitate to put her to sleep. I gave her a quarter of one of those tablets you are not supposed to administer to children under six. But I know these drugs: the best they can do is induce a vague drowsiness. Then I left the apartment after turning the radiators up full blast. I like my daughter to be cozy.
The cold is seeping between my ears. At times I must step aside to let someone pass and I use my cell phone to make myself less conspicuous. I pretend to text an important message but as usual, no one notices me. I’m a thing they walk by, an obstacle to be avoided, and I’ve no idea how long I’ll have to play the lookout here.
Thick flakes begin to fall. They win out against the asphalt, soon carpeting every aspect of the landscape: ledges, branches, cornices, flowerpots, windshield wipers at rest, recycling bins, transparent green plastic garbage bags, cardboard boxes, bulk trash. To pass the time and take my mind off the cold, I make mental note of the places infiltrated by the snow. I’m not properly shod for this climate; I didn’t bring my gloves or check the weather report, either. I’ve had so much to think about lately.
Shifting from one foot to the other, I consider calling off my vigil. The widow will probably not go out today. I put myself in her place. Wrung out by events, I’d stay well away from the windows, huddled in an armchair to chew my guilt down to the bone, and would now live exclusively off my fierce resentment. I would let myself go, wear threadbare clothes, stop tweezing and grow a unibrow above my nose.
Toward the middle of the afternoon, however, she ventures outside. I can tell right away that I don’t like her kind of woman. Haughty in her furs and her blond coiffure, she looks like a White Russian. Her heels tap lightly along the sidewalk as she moves delightedly through the snow. Trailing behind at a pace somewhat numbed by my wait, I follow her onto Rue de Turenne, where I must struggle not to lose ground. The flakes are falling ever faster, blurring contours, and I bump into passersby, twisting my ankles on stroller wheels. I’m not a bad walker, but the doctor’s wife seems borne along by the wind while I’m buffeted by its twists and turns.