After she has spent ten minutes in the waiting room, the doctor ushers her into his office. He invites her to take a seat in a chrome tube armchair, then sits down in another one a good distance away and at a slight angle to the sight line between them. He says nothing. The patient waits for questions that do not come, considers describing the episode that has led her here, then rethinks her options. The décor. She studies the décor to decide whether she can entrust herself to this man, looking for evidence of his integrity. A familiar object, a book she might have read, a little something to cling to.
Next to her stands a table laden with specialized magazines and brochures advising prudence with regard to alcohol and various drugs. In front of her is a chaise longue that seems to serve as a couch. The doctor has seated himself to the left of this chaise, his heavy eyelids turned toward the window blind behind the desk. A mild day is filtering in from the street. It’s the beginning of spring, that period so hard to distinguish from autumn. The light is at the halfway point and without a calendar, there’s no way of knowing if it’s on the upswing or the decline. Between doctor and patient lies a carpet with complicated motifs in reddish-orange tones.
She embarks on a second tour of inspection. Studies the objects on a shelf fixed to the wall over the chaise. They sit in front of a row of books that don’t tell her a thing because they’re in German and her first foreign language in school was English, a fact she suddenly feels obliged to mention, and Spanish was the second, professionally more useful than German which only philosophers and composers ever need — although they keep avoiding it, which is proof enough.
Proof of what, says the doctor.
Which closes the first circle of what will endlessly reproduce itself for three years. The patient selects an object in the décor and makes it say what it doesn’t say, revealing the fragile mechanism of her unconscious. Of course, this presupposes belief in the little art of Viennese sorcery practiced by the doctor. He himself admits that one must believe in it or else it won’t work any better than voodoo would on a congregation of Pentecostalists, and in the beginning the patient doesn’t know if she believes in it but she’s willing to let herself be convinced.
She’s willing because she has noticed a knickknack in front of the German books on the shelf that reminds her of something her mother has. It’s made of copper and is of unknown provenance. It has a long spout with a pouring lip and seems designed to contain a liquid such as oil, tea, or coffee. It might even be a funerary urn intended for the ashes of a small animal. A cat, for example. The patient has a mother who has a cat. But she really doesn’t see anything interesting about this story, she announces as she bursts into tears.
And now you’re crying. You’re sobbing on your bench in the little square on Boulevard de la Chapelle where all action ceases. The children in their sandbox stop excavating, their red or blue plastic shovels frozen aloft, while their mothers stop gossiping and the people palavering beneath the chestnut trees stop conducting their obscure transactions. Everyone rushes over to help but you quickly give them the slip. Fleeing toward the tracks of the Gare de l’Est, you pass the post office and the railway bridge. On the boulevard, you’re running past variety and grocery stores again, sidewalks cluttered with yams, sweet potatoes, bananas, then there’s a kebab place and a café, a bank, and we’re back at the Stalingrad métro station.
It’s ten to two; Viviane goes to pick up her daughter.
6
There’s this child on our hands and we wonder how it happened. The babysitter handed her over without a fuss, pretending to believe that she was our legitimate property. We sneak off with her, hugging the walls all the way to the building on Rue Cail, in case the woman changes her mind. Once safely in the sixth-floor apartment, we settle into the rocking chair and observe the child for a very long time, waiting for a response, a revelation.
Sometimes she looks at us as if she has known us since forever, and we think she’s mistaking us for someone else. Or is it that we aren’t the ones we think we are: that’s a possibility.
We have no idea where she comes from, this being who knows more about us than we would ever suspect, and who yet expects us to take care of her in every way. To maintain the illusion of familiarity, we must respond to her warbling and she is the one who guides us, shapes our conversation, insists on building up this recalcitrant family connection. And perhaps she is also the one who, in her naked need and tenacity, will carry the day. Thus we will become mother and daughter simply through her stubbornness.
In the middle of the desperately bare room, we reflect upon what we could do to deserve so much love. No doubt we should take decorative action, consult furniture catalogs, acquire bibelots, stir up the fire of our maternal instinct in the warmth of our home. But we do nothing, passive as usual. The child’s crying is always at the same low volume; she seems incredibly satisfied with her situation, a miracle that is frightening at first, although delightful upon reflection, leaving us with no other choice than to carry on as before, obeying the strictures of necessity. Feed, get ready, go out, come back, sleep: it’s the body alone that moves forward when we have relapsed into mutism.
We think her satisfaction might come from her father, who perhaps bequeathed her the gene of equanimity. That’s one explanation. We know him well, though: it’s not very plausible.
We have considered the father of Valentine Hermant from many aspects. There is the side of him we saw when we first met and for a while thereafter, when simply recalling his name sparked the desire to throw all clothing out the window and run to him. There is the perspective of recent days, when he pronounced the definitive words we know, and between these two points lie various intermediary states linked to different factors: the vagaries of his moods, the progress then decline of his affection for us. From one autumn to the next, passing through all the colors of the year.
It was in this very season that we met. After we began seeing the doctor, unexpected events took place. We enjoy remembering those already distant times, but not the intrusion of this telephone now vibrating in our pocket. We answer it. Inspector Philippot is asking for a prompt appearance at the police headquarters of the 5th arrondissement because he has a few more questions to ask you.
7
The second time, the bloom is always off the rose. However risky the situation might still seem and even if the stakes are higher, the modus operandi is locked in. It’s all a done deaclass="underline" the routine, the little idiosyncrasies, the question/answer contests to see who’ll come out on top. It’s practically a bore already.
Viviane holds the baby close throughout the entire trip to the police station. The child’s eyes are wide open but she’s quiet, perfectly content to be an amulet, a protective fetish against evil. She registers the elements of the landscape (nippy breeze, encroaching darkness, crowded métro car, curtain of dark coats forming a surrounding well) then turns toward her fists, inexplicably muffled in mittens. Her mother is deciphering advertisements: mattress clearance sales, evening courses, adult English classes, mathematics for grades six through twelve. My daughter, she thinks proudly, will never need remedial courses. She takes after me, it’s obvious: she hardly ever cries.
This time they send her up to the fifth floor of the police station, which proves to be a lot more spacious than the fourth. The corridor serves half as many offices and there are no policemen in uniform. Through the blue-tinted glazed partitions, Viviane can see solemn men ballasted by a long career of overly rich lunches.