At the entrance to the rain forest greenhouse he’d asked when you were thinking of putting it on the market. You’d scraped a bit of gravel in the path with the tip of your shoe and made embarrassed faces. Finally you’d said I’d rather not sell, we don’t need the money, we make a good living, let’s forget it. He then asked how long you had been holding on to this apartment. You took ten euros out of your wallet to pay for the greenhouse tickets. He asked again in front of the prickly pear cactus. Suddenly you felt very hot. You took off your jacket and fumbled in your purse for a tissue, hoping to take as long as possible. When you looked up, Julien had moved off toward the palmetto palm. You took a little stroll, patting your cheeks, then joined him near the orchids. He’d asked the question again. You’d answered to get him off your back. Seven years? Eight? He’d said Viviane, there’s something really wrong here.
In the cradle the child has set out to break her toy, tired of these stupid animals that go around in circles without ever leaving their orbit. Great thrashings of the lower limbs communicate their contradictory injunctions to the mobile, sending lions and giraffes flying in every direction, crashing together like clacking castanets. You’re about to take her in your arms when the doorbell rings. It’s nearly midnight. No one has yet visited you in this apartment and you wonder who it could possibly be.
Well it’s the police.
In the doorway stands that inspector from the other day, that Philippot with the tender, inviting eye, who were he to go about it more skillfully would wangle out any and all confessions. He is accompanied by a subordinate but you don’t register any details of his physiognomy. You look the inspector up and down, waiting for an explanation and he offers none, showing you his police credentials according to regulations and saying Madame Hermant, you’re to come with us, collect the child’s things and please come along.
What does one do in these circumstances. One flutters in vain, asking questions nobody answers. The policemen hurry you along, put things into your hands barking you’ll be needing this and that and in the end they hand you a travel bag they’ve found in a packing box and you stuff your daughter’s things inside it. Plucking the cradle from its frame, they carry it out to the stairs and you run after them, dashing down the steps behind the child they’re carrying off, tripping over the coat dangling from your arms, your shoes only halfway on your feet.
A vehicle is parked outside the building. Its door is open; a policeman motions you inside while the officer who’s carrying the cradle and the traveling bag hands them over to a man who has come out of the shadows. It’s Julien. He’s there, he doesn’t look at you, he grabs the loot and disappears. You’re given no time to take in this picture. The policemen push you into the backseat where you find yourself between the inspector and his subordinate. The driver pulls away immediately and you look desperately into the rearview mirror, pleading for a sign, an augury, some hope, but the face in the mirror does not recognize you.
15
Let’s see where we are, says the chief inspector. On the other side of the desk, the prisoner is slumped in defeat. We received a phone call from your husband, he continues; it seems that you are not yourself these days. So tell me, what are those marks on your arms, Madame Hermant?
The woman’s arms are covered; she studies them without moving. Then the chief inspector explodes: he stands up, pounding his fat fist on the desk, and walks around it yelling stop fucking with me, show me your arms now and tell me how they got that way.
Since she still does nothing, the inspector who brought her in steps forward and pulls up one sleeve of her sweater. The chief inspector is right next to her, the mass of his face swollen in a grotesque close-up. All she sees is an orbit, black against the backlighting because it’s the accused who is illuminated, the lamp shining in her face, the face of an animal dragged from the depths of its burrow. But in that instant she loses all fear. A feeling of destiny sweeps over her: she awaits the fatal blow.
You’ve been fighting? bellows the chief inspector, his thick breath shooting directly into the nostrils of the accused woman, you had a fight and the other one fought back, is that it? You look like a middle-class lady but you have your little moods, get angry and then you can’t answer for yourself? Huh, Madame Hermant?
The echo of these suppositions dies away in the office, and she says yes looking down at her lap, yes I had a fight. And who with? continues the chief inspector in the same vein, the syllables falling like projectiles around the person in pain. With the Boujon kid, she admits at last, I fought with Tony Boujon.
The two men draw back smartly. What the hell were you doing with him? demands the chief inspector. So then comes the admission that she’d undertaken some research. Cut out newspaper articles. Waited for him in the Gare de l’Est to talk to him but regrets that now, it wasn’t a good idea in the end. Then she falls silent once more. After which neither the shouting of the chief inspector nor that of the inspector when they switch roles (counting on the contrast to soften up the target) nor their kicks at the chair she clings to until she finally lets go and winds up on the floor — nothing will rouse her from the mutism into which she has withdrawn, and they lock her up out of spite.
The cell is about six feet deep by four and a half wide. Provided with a cot and a door of safety glass, it is absolutely clean. The walls do not weep with humidity; no insect scoots around the tile floor. If one wishes to go to the toilet, permission is granted; one is accompanied by an officer of one’s own sex. One can also obtain a glass of water but nothing to eat. At last the possibility of a phone call is offered. The person in question ignores this offer. She curls up on the cot with her palms over her eyelids to make everything black, because that’s still where one sees the best.
This will give you time, the chief inspector said before tossing her in the hole, to think about the consequences of your actions. Well that’s just what she wants, to bring some order to her memory. Instead of coming to light, however, events are retreating ever deeper into darkness.
Bereft of her recent past, she shelters in ancient history. She remembers the mother who has no more beginning than end, impossible to date by any method, introspection or carbon 14. And next to the monolith appears a tiny shadow. A personage who was loved after a fashion, with what remained of affection, but who then simply evaporated one fine day: they were no longer three in the apartment on Place Saint-Médard, they were two, face-to-face like two porcelain figures. And if the disappearance of the third element upset the equilibrium of the landscape for a while, it was quickly relegated to the status of remembrance, like those bibelots on the mantelpiece one polishes automatically but would never give up for anything in the world, so indispensible are they to the new configuration of the whole. Explanations were doubtless demanded, around the age of twelve or fourteen, when one hopes through skillful inquiry to obtain justice and amends. It quickly becomes clear, however, that an absence of cause is better than a slew of unsatisfactory motives, and silence reclaims its due.
The person on the cot sways from right to left and vice versa. Time passes and might flow on forever, but a back twinge or a tiny ache in one knee finally brings the body back to mind. Leading to a lifting of the head, a change of position. An examination of what’s going on outside, beyond the glass door, in the corridor where a few scarce officers pass without ever looking at the prisoner.