Your husband, Julien Antoine Hermant, a civil engineer in the Highways Department, was born forty-three years ago in the small provincial town of Nevers. On September 30 he put an end to two years of conjugal misery. He said Viviane — coming home at some late hour from his so-called planning department — Viviane I’m leaving, it’s the only solution, anyway you know that I’m cheating on you and that it isn’t even from love but from despair.
You absorbed this rib-crushing blow with perfect impassibility. Your shoulders barely shrugged, the rhythm of the rocking chair barely faltered, your fingers barely tightened on the armrests. Viviane he said again, listen to me, you have the child whereas I–I need some air. And I can’t give you what you want, maybe you expect too much from me. Viviane, I’m begging you, say something.
You said no, I’m the one who’s leaving. Keep everything, I’m taking the child, we won’t need alimony. You moved out on October 15, found a babysitter, extended your maternal leave for health reasons, and on Monday, November 15—yesterday — you killed your psychoanalyst. You did not kill him symbolically, the way one sometimes ends up killing the father. You killed him with a Zwilling J.A. Henckels Twin Profection santoku knife. “The unique forging of the blade’s edge offers optimal stability and exceptional ease in cutting,” explained the brochure you were studying at Galeries Lafayette while your mother was getting out her checkbook.
This knife, which belongs to a set of eight, you picked up at Julien’s apartment sometime that morning. You grabbed the case without a moment’s hesitation. It went straight to the bottom of your purse, the zipper of which you closed with a firm yank. Then something very strange happened. You were about to leave the apartment; your hand had already grasped the doorknob when a black veil fell over the room. Suddenly you were no longer leaving the apartment, it was the apartment that was swirling around you, rising on all sides, floor, walls, ceiling, as everything was suddenly overturned. Sweat pearled in the palms of your hands as thousands of insects thrummed inside your skull, a swarming army attacking the slightest bits of bare skin, blocking exits, closing off your eyes, nose, and mouth.
You slumped down on the linoleum, your head on your knees to help blood reach the brain. Dug the bottle of mineral water out of your purse. Drank a few swallows, prayed to God knows whom, hoping that the terror would fade away. From beneath a low cabinet, the cat’s yellow eyes — all that was visible in the darkness — observed you cautiously.
At last you remembered that you regularly consult a specialist. When your fingers stopped trembling so much, you grabbed your cell phone, scrolled through your address book, and selected Shrink.
He answered in his usual offhand tone because he was with a patient and because that is his normal voice. The doctor doesn’t bother with formalities, they are against his code of ethics and detrimental to the cure, as he has told you many times. You’re already lucky that he has agreed to see you in this emergency, at six thirty tonight, a canceled appointment. In any case, he’s been nagging you for months to move up to three sessions a week.
You went home to drop off the carryall with the toaster, then on to the sitter’s to ask her if, this once, she would keep the baby until that evening. But no, she does not find that convenient at all. You take your daughter home, nurse her, and spend the afternoon in the rocking chair searching for a solution.
Actually, you have already found one, you’re simply trying to get used to the idea. Whenever the baby falls asleep, she’s out for three hours. This will leave plenty of time to dash off to the 5th arrondissement, a direct shot on the 7 line. You will shut off the gas, unplug the heating unit, and you will not lock the apartment door so that the firemen can get in easily if a fire breaks out in spite of all your precautions. Such arrangements clearly cast no luster on your maternal instincts. You’re not proud of this and will not be gaily recounting the scene to your eight- or nine-year-old daughter when she decides to start finding fault with you, having established by comparison with the classics of children’s literature that you are not the ideal mother glorified by family-values novels. So there it is, you won’t tell a soul, ever: you know how to keep your little secrets.
Toward the end of the afternoon, you feed the child, put her to bed, then head up Rue de l’Aqueduc to the métro station. Censier-Daubenton is seventeen stops and a good half hour away. By the time you arrive, night has almost fallen. In two minutes you have crossed the square and reached Rue de la Clef, which is deserted. You do not meet anyone while going up to the fourth floor of No. 22A, either. You ring and, when the buzzer sounds, you enter the waiting room. Five minutes later there’s a murmured au revoir, followed by the closing of the landing door. You’re kept waiting while someone apparently makes a few phone calls, has a smoke at the window. You leaf idly through the only reading material within reach, a boring seventeenth-century play by Pierre Corneille. The fan of pages is coming loose from the binding. No real effort seems to have been made to alleviate the stage fright of those waiting for the curtain to go up, and now you think, in hindsight, that if there’d been a Paris Match or any other magazine available, something even vaguely intended to relieve your distress instead of reinforce it, you might not have wound up where you are.
The doctor receives you after a long fifteen minutes, wearing a small satisfied smile. Stepping back to let you pass, he even seems to bow slightly.
So, he begins, with false good humor, as if he were about to tell you a good story. But this is a trick, an infallible way to make the patient fall into the trap. You’ve been aware of this trick for a long time yet cannot resist the doctor’s mysterious power.
It reappeared this morning, you begin. It had gone away while I was pregnant, now it’s back. I wound up on the floor in my place, well really in my husband’s place, in what used to be my apartment. Something needs to be done, I can’t take it anymore, I have to look after my daughter.
The doctor says yes.
Yes what? you reply. I’m telling you something must be done, no yes or no about it. I haven’t come here to go all the way back to the Flood, I’m tired, I need help now.
But you know perfectly well, Madame Fauville, excuse me, Hermant, you know that the symptoms are only symptoms. That one must go back to their source, isn’t that so, Madame Hermant?
My dear doctor, I tell you I couldn’t care less about their source. For three years now you’ve been running me around in circles, three years of the same old same old. If you can’t do anything for me, just say so, I’ll go somewhere else.
Yes?
Doctor, you’re not listening to me. I don’t want to play anymore, I give up. Some other method is required or there’s no point in my coming here again.
Really now, blackmail.
This has nothing to do with blackmail, you announce, raising your voice just a little. On the contrary. I would like to stay, I would like this to work, but I can’t go on endlessly with no results. I haven’t the means.
The means?
Yes, the means, right, the means, and now you’re yelling. The time, the money, the necessary resources. There are the bills, the rent, the babysitter, it’s not my husband who’s going to help me out here, must I remind you, my husband who left me for some fresh young idiot or other, so I’m on my own, as the saying goes, on my own with my daughter, we’re two on-our-owns and we need to get out of this mess.
Why have you made this choice?
You clench your fists, squash your spine against the back of the armchair and close your eyes. A tiny rain of rage escapes from the corners of your eyelids. You see yourself again, a month and a half earlier, hunched deep in the rocking chair in the Rue Louis-Braille apartment, facing your husband as he dismisses you, trying to keep calm by deciding on the spot to move out because it was your last chance to take him by surprise.