Héloïse, let’s go over my files, you announce without any more preamble. But of course everything is in order: not one e-mail unanswered, not one phone call forgotten. Show me my brochures, you say next. The young woman explains that they’ve just arrived from the printer’s and there hasn’t been time to unpack them. You slash open the blister packaging with a letter opener and feverishly scan the introduction in which Jean-Paul describes the relative merits of bituminous concrete, self-compacting concrete, fibrous concrete, prestressed concrete, and cyclopean concrete; at the twenty-second line you hit pay dirt: grannulometric spectra has an extra n. You collapse onto a chair, fainting with relief.
They suggest having lunch together, but you’d rather take a little advantage of your freedom. See you very soon, Jean-Paul; good luck with your job search, Héloïse. Your eviscerated gift package under your arm, you head for the Champs-Élysées where you pay brief attention to the Christmas decorations before noticing the crowd gathered in front of the Vuitton boutique. So over you go as well to see if there’s something new in the window. But the objects are stamped with their usual brand logo, and perhaps that’s what the passersby have come to check on, to see if values still hold firm, that the International Prototype Meter still resides in Paris.
In the pocket of your raincoat, the phone begins to vibrate. After a moment’s hesitation you fish it out and see the name Julien Hermant on the screen.
It’s me, he announces uselessly.
I can see that it’s you you reply, jostling your way out of the crowd.
How are things going, Viviane?
Not well at all, as you can imagine.
Julien clears his throat, says I spoke to the police.
I know, they told me.
I said that you were a wonderful person and that you would never have done such a thing.
Obviously I would never have done such a thing.
I insisted on the fact that you were a very good mother and very professional at work. That in spite of all our differences I still had complete confidence in you.
That’s fine, Julien, you said what was needed.
Now I’d like you to take back the cat.
A little silence falls. Then you reply I took the child, you can at least keep the cat.
I don’t want the cat, says Julien. I want my daughter, every other weekend and during the vacations.
You’re not going to start all that again.
We have to see each other Viviane, we have to talk. That’s what people do.
You think it over. You say all right, we’ll see each other on Sunday. I’ll go to my mother’s to do a bit of cleaning, you can join me there.
I’d rather it be elsewhere.
I don’t feel like arguing.
Okay then, replies Julien.
* Throughout this chapter, the narrative voice addresses Viviane with the familiar pronoun tu instead of the formal vous. — Trans.
12
All gangling limbs, Tony Boujon looks out at me through his too-long bangs: a young man whose story is easy to guess. From neglectful parents to keeping bad company, the natural faults of childhood confirmed by the pressure of toxic influences, he has developed the character of a little creep and inspires no sympathy. In the spring he followed a girl for several weeks before accosting her with a knife one day outside her school, but the intended victim just stared at him with her big round eyes until he backed down and put away his knife, all ardor squelched. He got three months in jail, a suspended sentence of two years, plus mandatory psychiatric treatment.
I called out to him at the Gare de l’Est at 8:31 a.m. as he was getting off the commuter train on his way home from his job. Tony Boujon works in a printing plant in Lagny-Thorigny. His shift begins at midnight and ends at dawn. In the pale light sifting down from the glass canopy of the train station, I could immediately pick out his skinny form among the other passengers. I stepped in front of him with a big smile and said you’re Tony Boujon.
He gaped at me like a carp.
I repeated you’re Tony Boujon, I saw your photo in the newspaper, I think I can help you.
Help me with what, he snapped, I didn’t do anything, and who are you anyway, I already talked to the police.
How about some coffee? I suggested while leading him gently toward an exit.
We chose a rather dark place on Boulevard de Strasbourg.
Tony chews on his ink-blackened nails while I stroke my glossy manicured fingertips.
My name is Élisabeth I begin, without getting him to look up. He makes a show of yawning, begins fiddling studiously with the seams of one of his sneakers and I press on saying I know, yes, I know that you were one of the doctor’s patients.
The boy looks up in spite of himself.
He wasn’t much help, was he? I add with a complicitous wink, and in passing I graze his knee with mine under the table. Tony straightens up like a shot in his seat, his long bangs flopping limply down on his forehead furrowed with dismay. I say sorry, it’s a reflex: we nurses are so used to touching people we don’t even notice anymore. So he relaxes, his lips almost ready to crack a smile. A nurse, he’s fine with that. He knows there’s no reason to be offended by these kind and professionally maternal women: if they like you, it’s from vocational bias.
After that, it’s easy. I listen to him tell me all sorts of things I already know, he knows that I know them because I just told him I was the doctor’s patient too, but he doesn’t care. He tells me about his experience with the big zero, that’s what he calls him, who swallowed his bullshit whole; what a sight the guy was, going all sympathetic and trying to catch him with gentleness when Tony respects only fists and cold steel.
The boy isn’t used to having a friendly audience. He irritates me but I keep smiling and listening, and when he starts over on the same story for the third time, I interrupt him saying why don’t we go to your place? He’s startled, hesitates. Is going to refuse but changes his mind. I pay for our coffees, we walk to the métro station and take line 8 in the opposite direction from most commuters heading west to their office buildings. We get off at Montgallet, down in the southeast corner of Paris.
Tony still lives with his parents but they’ve left for work, and I learn that they’re pharmacists. This surprises me because given his hangdog persona, I’d imagined his parents as drunks or incurably unemployed. Then I remember the facts I’ve read about crime, statistics in the newspapers showing that although parental maltreatment is more prevalent in the disadvantaged social classes, it can crop up anywhere.
Their home meets my expectations. The parquet floor in the hall is littered with pitfalls, craters between the loose slats and thickets of splinters at all the joints. I can see a living room and a master bedroom, furnished in mismatched functional things smacking of legacies from postwar houses in what were then modern suburbs. But you, where’s your room? I ask Tony and he points down the hall to a door I’d assumed hid a closet. I set my lips in an expression of tender pity and observe you really don’t get any breaks, do you.
Tony shoots me a nasty look then shrugs and leads me to the kitchen where he starts making coffee. I check out the sink with its reddish-brown crusts of crud and the shelves coated with greasy dust. Your parents, I remark, they don’t seem to pay much attention to you, do they?
He clenches his fists; I twist the knife, adding it’s obvious, one can see right away that you didn’t get enough love, otherwise you’d never have done what you did in June outside the Lycée Paul-Valéry. The paper said poor girl, but right away I thought poor boy.