Adam Haberberg (11 page)

“It makes no sense to keep this letter.”

“You've kept it for thirty years.”

Marie-Thérèse tries to take back the rest of the letter. Adam screws the sheets into a ball and hides them behind his back.

“Give it to me.”

“No.”

Adam dodges Marie-Thérèse's hands. Was she vexed by his lack of reaction? Vexed by his silence, the unhappy woman now wants to destroy all trace of her past error. To burn her shame, he thinks as he uses the armchair as a shield, and sizes up the inexplicable puerility of his own behavior. They make several feints around the armchair, then Adam escapes toward the window. Come on, give it to me! She laughs, waltzing around him. Give it to me, laughing her incongruous throaty laugh. Marie-Thérèse laughs. This is how great love affairs begin. People spinning around each other laughing. The lover holding the parcel and the coquette spinning this way and that, trying to grab it. Granted, the drama is not generally played out in the morgue at Viry-Châtillon, the principals are not fifty-year-olds, don't have thrombosis, don't sell merchandise. But no matter. This is a variation. Adam passes the ball of paper from one hand to the other, raises his arms, Marie-Thérèse hops around chuckling, without her sneakers she's just a little shorter than him. She has abandoned all
restraint, her face is pure toothy glee, foolish rapture, he thinks. He surprises himself in several physical pranks, feints, wrong-footings, high throws, the ball flies, disappears. At a given moment Adam miscalculates his lunge and inadvertently throws it across the room. The ball lands on the top of the sideboard. Both rush for it. Adam bangs into the corner of the low table, Marie-Thérèse grasps the tattered scraps. Got it! she cries. Got it! she sings, letting the pages flutter past her eyes as she unfolds them and Alice Canella's coarse blue handwriting, crossed out in places, reappears on them. Adam has collapsed onto the sofa. He's hurt his knee and the pain in his forehead has invaded new territory, he notes, it's now reached his nose and upper jaw. On the bookshelf Andreas smiles crookedly in his silver frame. Maybe I should consult a dentist as well, thinks Adam. Marie-Thérèse glances through the smoothed-out fragments of the letter in silence. She thrusts the pages at the candle and lays down the little torch on the trefoil-shaped ashtray. There's a mild blaze, the pages stretch out and curl up, there are flames, smoke, a lingering bluish glow, and then a blackened mass.

“I thought it would make you laugh,” says Marie-Thérèse as the acrid smell fades.

“What?”

“The letter. I thought it would make you laugh.”

“Now you see.”

“After you I was in love with Evelyne Estivette's brother, Rémy, I don't know if you knew him, he was a year older than us and went to a private school in Paris. Nothing happened there either,” she laughs.

“In fact up until the diploma exam nothing ever happened,” she says gaily.

“I see.”

Marie-Thérèse sits on an arm of the chair. For a moment she does nothing, then she picks up the class photo and studies it, swinging one leg in the void. The tapping of the awning and the cries of the seagulls can be heard again. A memory flits through Adam's mind. An afternoon in the Rue Lalande, at the house of his first publisher, they were both sitting there, having exhausted all topics. In a cage some kind of exotic bird was picking out grains with its beak. Suddenly, for no reason, in a convulsive movement the bird had emitted a strident cry and then fallen silent. A mysterious call no one noticed. You look as if you've hit rock bottom, Adam.

“Is that so?”

“You look terribly depressed.”

“You think so.”

“Even the way you say you think so.”

“Oh.”

“You think so,” she mimics him.

“I didn't say it like that.”

“You did.”

“You tell me I look depressed, I say, you think so?”

“You didn't say it like that.”

“I didn't say it like that because I find it staggering that a person can come right out and tell someone they don't know at all that he looks as if he's hit rock bottom.”

“I do know you.”

“No, Marie-Thérèse, you don't know me at all.”

“I can see clearly that you're not well. I could see that right away, back at the Jardin des Plantes.”

What gives her the right to judge what state I'm in, he thinks, what gives her the right to
deliver
an assessment of the state I'm in, this limping female rat in the rain with her bags of samples. What gives her the right to decree that I'm not well, this nauseatingly robust ghost from the past. It's not that I'm not well Marie-Thérèse, I'm
extremely unwell
, I'm experiencing indescribable grief and I've no idea where consolation might come from, but you cannot know that. You cannot imagine it, Marie-Thérèse, because your energy betrays you and your courage betrays you. A being who can live in this hole without being annihilated,
who can open their shutters onto this barren landscape without weeping bitter tears, cannot judge the state I'm in. A being who can face that long, narrow kitchen and that lineup of domestic appliances without feeling mortally bereft cannot judge the state I'm in. I have no admiration for your energy, it injures me. I have no admiration for your good temper, it confounds and revolts me. Nothing in you speaks to me and nothing in me can speak to you. And just because fate put me into your Jeep Wrangler today it doesn't mean you can claim the least complicity and tell me, with such gall, that I look as if I've hit rock bottom, and with what stupefying authority, that you could see clearly that I'm not well and that you'd
seen it right away
back at the Jardin des Plantes. You can understand nothing about my life because you, Marie-Thérèse, were damned from the start. You accepted this damnation and you live with it. You've blended into the mass, you've ironed out all the discords between the world and yourself, and made your nest there, you say
bottom line
, you talk about the
image
of a washing machine, you say
I have positively bloomed
, a woman who talks about
my business
with that fervor is forever alien to me. You're one of those people who never long for the impossible and one way or another have avoided expecting it. Homespun sages, I'd call
you. People who
succeed
because they're
genuine
and
authentic
in a milieu in which any sensitive spirit withers and disintegrates. I refuse to believe that God has departed, leaving the field open to your sort of humanity. There's no parity between you and me. We don't resemble each other in any way, I forbid you to think we might be equals to the extent that I could allow myself to confide in you. Defeat and the sense of desolation are beyond your ken. You don't know what solitude is. You get up alone, you've no children, you've bypassed the universal model, but you do not experience
my
solitude. If you experienced it you couldn't survive for two minutes between your burrow in Viry and your operation setting up
outlets
in amusement parks. My own solitude clings to me, I'm never free of it. Whether I'm with Irene, or with the children amid the family life that'll be the death of me, in which a man only demeans himself and sells himself cheap, whether I'm in company or on my own, the feeling of solitude never leaves me. It's what rules my life. If it had ruled yours, Marie-Thérèse, you would be lying at the bottom of the lake, for you wouldn't be able to endure opening your shutters onto that dead water and those distant cries. At one moment in the Jeep you said to me:
we're not even fifty
, you said
we
, as if we were from the same stable, you
and I, as if the absurd class we were in at the lycée had any meaning. Marie-Thérèse, I hardly remember you at the lycée, you were the most invisible being ever. When you came up to me with your bags of samples and your umbrella, I pretended to be renewing a nonexistent link out of the kindness of my heart. When in the Wrangler you said
we
, I realized my mistake, I realized it didn't strike you as an immense honor for me to be sitting on the seat beside you and an immense honor that I could accept your unthinkable invitation. Now I learn that I was not even your equal but your protege. I made your heart bleed, bald and alone on my damp bench, and you loaded me into your four-by-four the way you would one of the zoo animals if they could be taken out of their cages. One cannot be too wary of people of your type, supposedly inoffensive people who crush one with a sentence. People who bring you down in the worst possible way, without you asking anything of them, without you granting them the privilege of the least familiarity, and who take advantage of your weakness to demolish you. Marie-Thérèse, I've held on to the naive dream of becoming a writer, that is to say a man who tries to save himself from himself. A man who, in order to hold on to a little momentum toward the future, attempts to exchange his own existence for
that of words. I don't want to hear
I'm not well.
Such phrases are of abject insignificance coming from you, Marie-Thérèse. My hair is turning white, my teeth are turning yellow, and my hands are shrinking. I forbid you to notice. I'm losing my sight. I forbid you to notice. Even if I'm in the throes of death, I forbid you to notice that I'm in the throes of death, you have no right to notice anything at all about me, you can understand nothing about what I am, you have chosen to live as Marie-Thérèse Lyoc, you have chosen to be part of the hoi polloi of humanity, we do not belong to the same caste, I forbid you to notice my decline.

He gets up brusquely and says, Marie-Thérèse I must go home. She says, so soon? He replies, I can't stay any longer. She asks if he's separated from his wife. He replies that he's not separated from his wife, why should he be, and demands a taxi straightaway. Marie-Thérèse says, it's rare, you know, men who are free in the evening at the last moment. But not as rare, he feels like replying, as men capable of burying themselves alive with one great shovelful after another. Do you know a number here? he says.

“I'll take you back.”

“You're not going to do the journey there and back again. Call a taxi.”

“It'll cost you a fortune.”

“That's not a problem.”

“What's the matter with your eyes?”

“Nothing.”

“You keep covering your eye with your hand.”

“It's nothing.”

“What is it?”

“A speck of dust, Marie-Thérèse! It'll pass.”

“Don't get annoyed. Why are you shouting?”

“Call one, please.”

Marie-Thérèse goes back into the room at the end of the corridor. For a moment he hears nothing. The noise of the refrigerator, birdcalls coming in waves, some of them as soft as plucked strings, voices in the fog, he thinks. He looks at the flower in its pot on the low table. He notes also, closer and barely perceptible, the crackling of the altar candle. He looks at his shoes, still damp from the rain, his trouser bottoms, too. I must go home, he thinks. Marie-Thérèse returns with a little booklet for the area. I'll try the stands, she says. I'm calling the train station, she says, dialing a number. The ringing at the other end of the line can be heard. An immediately futile ringing, he thinks, who's going to be waiting at the station terminal at night in Viry-Châtillon? Marie-Thérèse hangs up. The market terminal is hardly worth trying, she
says, dialing another number. Again a long unanswered ringing in the receiver. Marie-Thérèse stares out at an opaque horizon beyond the French door on the lake side. Then she gives up. I'll try a company in Juvisy, she says, failing that we'll call the Taxis Bleus. On the low table, beside the trefoil-shaped ashtray where the black cinders have leveled off, is the tray with the empty cherry liqueur glasses and the saucer the Tue crackers were on. Also the glass of water and the torn sachet of Veinamitol. Hello,
bonsoir
, Marie-Thérèse suddenly shouts, 2, Rue Claude-Debussy in Viry. Viry-Châtillon, she repeats, increasing the volume by a notch. At the other end Adam can hear a woman's voice. In Paris, shouts Marie-Thérèse. A Xantia? She yells, fine, thanks. A gray Xantia in fifteen minutes, she says, putting down the telephone. Another quarter of an hour, thinks Adam. She's hung up. They're standing. Finally she says, we could sit down for a few more minutes? She says it like a question, she doesn't dare make the decision. So they remain standing, for even if he wanted to grant her that little favor his knees refuse to bend and his body to return to the armchair. A return to the armchair, he thinks, incompatible with his wish to hurt, to indicate his desire to be gone and the superior urgency of his real life. On the other hand, he thinks, am I going
to stay on my feet for a quarter of an hour? Whether I'm sitting down or standing up the thing to be feared is time stretching out. Which, in his experience, it never does at moments of happiness. What kind of cavity in existence have I fallen into to be worrying about whether I'm sitting or standing? He sits on the very edge of the armchair, a position both uncomfortable and pathetic, he notes. He picks up the class photo, as he would pick up a brochure in a waiting room, an ultimate gesture of boredom, he thinks of the line of Borges:
the meager yesterdays of photographs.
Alice Canella is blurred. Hervé Cohen and Tristan Mateo are blurred. Demonpion, Serge Gautheron, Lyoc and Haberberg and those whose names he doesn't know, the faces studied a few moments before, are, so to speak, erased. He raises his hand. His fixation being to look with the bad eye, he raises his hand at once, but stops halfway and contents himself with shutting one eye, for Marie-Thérèse, that vulture, is observing everything, hungry for disaster, he hates her viscous solicitude, people who meddle with your health are malevolent people, people who categorize you as ill and are on the lookout for serious trouble. So he shuts one eye. And sees nothing. An indistinct gray mass. But you've never known how to wink, he tells himself, you always screwed your
face up and you always saw a blur. He covers the good eye with his hand. The faces do not appear. With a beating heart he brings the photo close to the candle and receives only a vaguely turbulent impression. I'm blind, he thinks. He covers the bad eye. The faces recover their nebulous clarity. You're lucky, the optometrist had said, the vascular incident could have occurred anywhere else at all, not excluding your brain, the thrombosis could have affected a vital organ. Do we both have the same understanding of what is
vital
, Doctor? Can one even talk to people who don't consider the loss of one of one's senses as a
vital
loss? And don't you tell me you've lost only an eye, you haven't lost your sight. Someone who's lost one eye, Doctor, knows that he can lose the second, what struck the first could very well strike the second, especially in an individual suffering from a genetic anomaly, a single eye contemplating half a world is more vulnerable, besides, it's also threatened by the glaucoma, my God, the glaucoma, he thinks, what a horrible word it is too, maybe I should go tonight to get my visual field test done in the emergency room at the Quinze-Vingt eye hospital, why wait three weeks, these doctors have no sense of time. When will they understand that anxiety aggravates the disease, that waiting's a killer, waiting destroys
me, Doctor, I speak as an expert, oh I've pressed my face against the glass, I did it for real at a time in my youth when I lived beside the Seine in Boulogne, I used to watch the river and the barges, I watched life passing by outside, my years were swallowed up by the void. Beside Demonpion in the photo he recognizes the hazy, puffed-up face of Nana Sitruk. What has become of Nana Sitruk, who never even got her diploma, he remembers, a housewife, a mother, a postal clerk, Nana Sitruk, vanished into life like the others, one becomes nothing, he thinks, one never becomes anything. One day, who knows, in some Jewish cemetery or other it may be possible to see the names Nana Sitruk and Adam Haberberg, engraved there in the same row, words translated from the night, monotonous stone inscriptions beneath the same sky. One day the older boy on his return from vacation had said to Irene, Mummy, you've got to tell me what you do to make people miss you so much. Nobody misses me apart from you and Daddy. He used to go to summer camp, too. He didn't like the camp but he liked the mountains. Had the boy liked the mountains? Had he liked the footpaths, the tangled roots, the thousands of pine needles? Did you like the footpaths that twist and turn who knows where, I'll wake you when I get home tonight and ask
you how you run along the thorny paths. I want to see the children, I want to go home. I want to see Irene, I want to roll into a ball, curl up like a dog, its paws tucked in under its legs, I'm tired, I'm tired of falling apart, I'm afraid. Tuck me up, Irene. I don't understand what's happening to me. Marie-Thérèse has sat down on the sofa. She's lit another cigarette and says, do you want my glasses? She studies me, she observes the least of my gestures, these people who have no lives of their own dissect other people—what would I want with her glasses?