Viviane Page 3
I’m free to go? asks Viviane in surprise.
Right, you’re free, replies Yul as he escorts her to the exit, limiting contact with the grateful eyes of the mother and the more cautiously circumspect gaze of the child. You really could have found someone to take care of her, you know, he says a bit more pleasantly.
5
The article in Le Parisien the next day, Wednesday, November 17, poses all sorts of problems. According to the paper, the doctor’s body was not found until the morning after his death—and not by his wife or a patient but by a green-eyed redhead in an advanced state of pregnancy, a resident of L’Argentière-la-Bessée in the Hautes-Alpes, someone about whom one might well wonder what she was doing there on Tuesday at six thirty a.m. Then there was some difficulty in tracking down Madame Sergent. Although officially residing with her husband in a comfortable apartment on Rue du Pot-de-Fer, she appeared to spend her nights in a two-room flat on Rue du Roi-de-Sicile belonging to one Silverio Da Silva. Who—a psychoanalyst but not a psychiatrist, or even a doctor or state-certified psychologist, in short a simple lay analyst credentialed by the goodwill of his peers—did not deny being the widow’s lover. Instead of getting huffy when the investigators asked him, in their petty bureaucratic way, if it didn’t bother him to borrow another man’s wife, he attempted to point out that the human experience cannot be reduced to the laws of civil society, or rather that one sometimes enjoys transgressing them. Well naturally, riposted the public servants as they locked him up for the night. “Love: You are paying less and less attention to your look. Success: Avoid decisions that might affect your future. Health: Allergies.”
Viviane finishes her coffee at the café-bar on Rue Louis-Blanc, where she is beginning to be a regular. She has a cup there while waiting to pick up her daughter. It seems that the other mothers are overburdened, delighted to hand off their children in return for an hour or two of freedom, and Viviane wonders what for, as there are not enough administrative procedures to take up an entire life, nor enough creative resources at any hair salon to justify going there more than once a week. She closes the paper and winds up back at the intersection, next to the northbound railway tracks of the Gare de l’Est, which run beneath the elevated métro track. Thus all the streets in the neighborhood seem spread out like a fan, held together by the traffic circle where Louis-Blanc intersects Rue Cail, and gathered up at the other end by the metal ribbon of the métro above Boulevard de la Chapelle.
Beneath a sky dimmed by a profusion of bare branches, she veers right, along a strip of foreign grocery stores, Western Union agencies, cheap variety bazaars, butcher shops, and telephone retailers. Groups of Sri Lankan men without Sri Lankan women are deep in discussion at every doorstep. They might comment on the passage of this tall pale woman, so exotic in their eyes, and yet they pay no attention to her when she slips through their ranks, checking out of the corner of an eye to see if she’s attracting any looks but no, she remains as invisible to the Sri Lankans as she is to the others, psychoanalyst, police, and all the rest.
You’re going to take a stroll for no reason. One of the privileges of your present situation. You are utterly free and God knows it won’t last long, all the mothers say so, insisting that at least twenty years of slavery lie ahead of you.
In the variety store windows there are slippers, socks, teapots, coffeepots, skeins of wool, shirts, pajamas, DVDs of musicals, and rolling luggage, lots of rolling luggage. You have no use for wheeled suitcases. Wherever would you go? Your trips are entirely taken via the Paris public transportation system. Slippers, on the other hand, you might use. Tucked into the rocking chair with your child, you’d find those fuzzy bloodred slip-ons comfy on your bare feet. Or tucked into your cell, gently rocking in your solitude, you’d find them reminiscent of the very rich hours you are busy living, these last moments before the bureaucrats come to their senses and toss you into the hole. You enter a variety store.
The aisles are organized by categories of objects, from the decorative to the utilitarian. At the entrance, little blue-and-mauve mermaids loll on greenish rocks. Near the cash register, it’s colorful multipurpose plastic basins, and between the two displays stretches the gamut of kitchen utensils, toilet articles, children’s toys, and items for their mothers: sewing kits, sponges, feather dusters, brooms. You pick up a mermaid looking in your direction, turn her from side to side between your thumb and index, wondering how anyone could buy such an ugly object. You put the mermaid back.
She continues to study you from her shelf. A little nearsightedly, because her eyes have been hastily sculpted by some worker in Southeast Asia who hasn’t given much thought to either the intensity or the precision of her gaze. He has simply painted the pupils, but such as they are, these eyes are looking in your direction. You pick up the mermaid again. Posing on her rock, she reminds you vaguely of someone. A thinker on his pedestal. A parrot on its perch. A shrink in his armchair.
It’s just about the time when you ought to have been there. Sitting a few yards from him, fiddling with your fingers in search of your absent wedding ring, some valid association that would earn you a good grade. And he would be in his usual place, absorbed in contemplation of the wall behind you. His mitts would be resting on his stomach while he meditated on a cooking recipe or a crossword problem, waiting for you to show yourself worthy of his profession by agreeing to give up your defensive maneuvers in order to become . . .
Become what, exactly.
A subject. One day he’d said subject.
You’d replied verb, direct object.
He’d said you’re avoiding it.
What?
The subject.
Subject. You don’t understand what that means. You consult the mermaid, she has nothing to say on the matter and neither do you. You had a husband, a job, a child, obligations that piled up from morning till night. The slightest moment of your existence was ruled by necessity, and you could clearly see that it was the same for everyone else, from the receptionists to the CEO of the Biron Concrete Company, from your mother to the babysitter. You had no idea what could be wrong with such well-oiled systems, you were a completely normal person until you were pressured to become who knows what, and now here’s the variety store manager interrupting your tête-à-tête with the mermaid.
He wants to know if you’re going to buy it (five euros). You were not aware that it isn’t good form to try something out before buying it and you tell him so quite readily—and a trifle brusquely—but still, you leave the store with the slippers you’d noticed in the window. They’re two big balls of synthetic fur, like a pair of very soft hedgehogs.
At the end of Rue Louis-Blanc, the Sri Lankans give way to a more cosmopolitan population, offering black-market cigarettes or staked out in the middle of the boulevard with their hot-chestnut carts. Musing over these chestnuts, you decide they are a far cry from the ones sold in front of the big department stores on Boulevard Haussmann when you were still a real bourgeoise, shuttling between two plush arrondissements of Paris, in blessed ignorance of this rundown eastern part of the city.
You cross the boulevard, hesitate between the railroad overpass to the right, which would take you back home, and the Gare du Nord bridge to the left, leading toward Barbès-Rochechouart. From there you would make for the 18th arrondissement (subtropical population, street stalls overflowing with inexpensive accessories) or the 9th arrondissement to the south, with its elegant citizens and boutiques dedicated to this enclave of socioprofessional advantage. All this means making choices. An infinity of microdecisions, each presenting major implications. You are in no position to make choices. You are a slave to necessity, a position that suits you quite well, you have never asked for any other.
Across from you is a modest park where poor children and drug dealers take the air. You push open the gate, sit down on a bench in the sun and, taking the slippers from their bag, slip your hands inside them, where they get quietly warm.
You were nice an
d warm in the shrink’s armchair, too. That was three years ago, when you landed there essentially by chance. As usual, you were on your way to work. You still lived in your first solo apartment, Rue Pradier, métro station Pyrénées, which meant you took the 11 line to République, then the 9 to Saint-Philippe-du-Roule. You were neither happy nor unhappy to be going to Biron Concrete: you never asked yourself the question. You had an excellent position in a big company, in charge of all public and in-house promotional activities, brochures, partnership materials, sponsorships, patronage. Your boss had complete confidence in you, you’d made connections throughout the building industry, and you used them. At cocktail parties or seminars, you didn’t shy away from chatting up some design engineer. This would play out in one of the hotel rooms reserved for the event and the next morning, you’d both arrive at the nine o’clock meeting all mussed-looking and wink at each other across the conference room. Such behavior was stupid and immature but still, it was fun to rattle your audience and it would also reawaken the interest of Jean-Paul Biron, who over time tended to confuse you with the office furniture.
So: you’d just gotten off the 11 line at République when the tiled walls of the underground corridor suddenly riveted your attention. And then you couldn’t see anything anymore except the horizontal ceramic tiles blocking your horizon. You walked up the steps taking passengers to the main correspondence corridor, also accessed by passengers from three other lines. You went with the flow of the crowd, advancing blindly, listening to the roaring in your arteries that drowned out the noise all around you. You reached the croissant shop at the corner where the 9 joins the main passageway. Smelling the nauseating aroma of fast-food croissants, you took a deep breath of this artificial Viennese pastry in an attempt to surface from the depths. When it was your turn, the young vendor in his ridiculous fast-food uniform said yes, madame, what will you have, madame? The other customers began to grow impatient. They were in a hurry to get to work and wasting time, and it took nerve not to know what you want at a croissant shop at nine in the morning, a lady behind you made that thought crystal clear. You looked at her in the hope that a catfight would revive your survival instinct but you didn’t see her, all you could see were tiles.
Then the vendor said, so, madame, a croissant, a pain au chocolat, perhaps, are you sure you’re all right, madame, because if not I’ll call security, no point in causing a panic like this, people have to get to work. You looked at him in supplication with your blind eyes. You would have loved to say a single word of reassurance, to assert that you knew perfectly who you were, where you were going, and what you wanted in the way of Viennese pastry, but your jaw no longer worked. Your lips opened onto a wall of white tiles, and the young man said right, I’m calling for assistance.
Feeling slightly guilty, the lady behind you led you over to the wall and told you to breathe deeply while awaiting help, it will pass, believe me, I’m a social worker, it always goes away. You were able to say thank you and she turned back toward the onlookers with a look of triumph that said I told you so. Then the rescue services of the fire brigade arrived. They asked you the usual questions to which you replied listlessly, they patted you on the shoulder, repeating what the lady had said, that you were simply overtired, that they were going to take you to the emergency room as a precaution and that you’d be back in shape to go to work that afternoon. You replied the same thing that everyone says in such circumstances, no, not the emergency room, and they gently insisted, because what’s the point of putting on a big show unless you’re going to go there. The doctors will get you back on your feet, believe us, said the firemen, who always say us.
They helped you out of the métro and into their van to go to the hospital, where you did not feel too proud of yourself. You were thirty-nine, had a good position, no reason to complain, and you couldn’t begin to fathom this moment of weakness that already seemed far behind you. But you intended to consult a specialist, since they said it would be advisable. And that’s how you wound up seeing the doctor.
The plaque at the entrance to his building specifically says doctor. The patient therefore expects to be seen by the classic health professional sitting at a large desk graced with a pen stand, an emerald-green opaline glass lamp, and a prescription pad.
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.