Asunder (16 page)

Afternoons, Pierre tended to awaken as if by some inner alarm clock. From one second to the next the unwound toy on our sofa would start to move and sit up, and Daniel would rush over to offer him coffee, which he would down like a shot of whisky. After Pierre bathed, another activity he relished judging by the time it took him, they would slip on their coats and set out. Daniel would ask whether I wanted to come along. Half of me wanted to say yes, but then I’d imagine walking alongside them while they discussed their business, every now and then turning, out of belated courtesy, to ask me a question, and I decided I’d rather be on my own. Well, what did I expect; the balance of a ship is always tipped when someone new comes onboard.

And so I did what I had always done best. I stood back and observed, withdrew into the quiet, neutral zone that felt comfortably familiar, registering voices and movements without interfering.

Yet as the days wore on, that long, smooth expanse of patience began to curl up at the edges. Often I’d leave the two men to their hermitage and go for walks on my own. I spent an inordinate amount of time window-shopping and came to know the ornaments and mannequins in the shopfronts near us quite well, imagining a secret dialogue between the shiny black marble of the local undertakers, the bright red machines at the twenty-four-hour laundrette and the pouting plastic heads in the wig shop. I also walked further, through lavish gardens and humbler squares, down imposing avenues and narrow streets full of stalls, and entered every church I passed to warm myself for a few minutes.

Pierre stole six days from our twelve in Paris, large black Xs in the calendar. He turned Daniel’s attention away from me and I found myself wanting it back. Christmas came and went, or maybe it was New Year’s, in any case, a night like any other apart from what our guest contributed to dinner, four bottles of wine with fancy labels and a bag of white-capped gingerbread biscuits he must have found at a shop on rue Mouffetard unless he brought them from Sweden. We lit candles, worked our way through a chestnut casserole, then spent two hours tidying up while Pierre sat pensively on the sofa, saucer balanced on knee, smoking one cigarette after the other.

Late one morning when Daniel was out I decided to vacuum the flat. We had yet to do any cleaning and I’d begun noticing large dustballs in the corners that floated up whenever someone walked past. If I didn’t clean, no one would. I made my way down the corridor to the living room where Pierre lay asleep on the sofa. At first I avoided the area but after cleaning all around it, including the invisible moat encircling Daniel’s desk, I slowly advanced towards Pierre, noticing a few especially large clumps of dust by his briefcase. Despite the machine’s loud rumble he didn’t stir.

Once I finished, I returned the vacuum cleaner to the cupboard and went to have another look at Pierre. It was fascinating to see how profoundly he slept. I had never witnessed such deep sleep in my life, a sleep that seemed to block out the present so determinedly, it was hard to know in what time zone he existed.

My eyes fell on the briefcase. There it sat, just waiting to be opened and inspected. Tiny screaming devils jumped up and down in my head and, despite never having trespassed in my life, I couldn’t help but listen. The latches made a snapping sound. Pierre didn’t react. My fingers trembled as I lifted the lid.

Yet inside I found no secrets, at least as far as I could tell, only a small, personal arsenal for survival: eight opaque medicine bottles with labels in Swedish, two bundles of addressed envelopes from foreign lands, three felt-tipped pens, a couple of books in French by strange-looking characters named Michaux and Daumal, a thick leather address book with loose pages, six bags of liquorice coins, and a red plastic comb with two missing teeth.

Pierre mumbled something behind me. I jumped up and turned. His eyes were still closed, he was in the exact same position as before. I quickly relatched the briefcase and returned it to its place. Pierre mumbled again, something like turkey gurgling in various languages, a kind of sleeptalking Esperanto, and I took it as a warning, issued from beyond, to stop prying.

I hurried away just in time. Daniel was at the door, key turning in lock.

The following morning I rose to discover the men had gone out. Alone, I cast my eyes around the flat and after a full wander was gripped by an overwhelming magnetism, as if someone had thrown a lasso round my waist and was pulling me, towards Daniel’s desk. Until then it had been silently and unconditionally off limits but now, as the day before, I felt entitled to explore.

The desk gave off an aromatic wooden smell as if the drawers were full of shavings. A few books in Slovenian lay piled in a corner beside a very smooth, very white stone that seemed to have come from the sea. Closer to the centre were Daniel’s implements, a French-English dictionary and four other books, a stack of manila folders, the mug holding pencils and pens.

I picked up a lined page torn out from his notebook, from what I could decipher mostly scrawls about the snow leopard, and was wondering how it would look shredded into smaller pieces, half a word here, half a word there, when I was distracted by a book. Dozens of pages had been marked with strips of paper that emerged from the top and sides. What drew me to it wasn’t the obsessive marking, however, which I’d often seen in books at Daniel’s flat in London, but the cover. It was an explosion of white against black, like a self-combusting, dust-cloaked star: the ghostly spasm of a woman in a bed engulfed by the darkness of a room.

Intrigued, I drew the book closer, opening it to a random page. Upon seeing the first pictures I was so startled I almost took a step back. Inside, dozens of black and white photographs of somewhat savage women, much more intense than the women I’d been seeing on the street, rose to greet me. Most of them wore nightgowns or else fitted dresses or two-piece outfits that called to mind brothel residents from another era. They stood, sat or lay in bizarre positions, one with her back arched into a bridge, another swooning in a chair with her right leg stretched outwards and her wrist twisted counterclockwise. One woman stuck out her tongue to the left, another smiled dementedly into the distance. Another sat with folded arms and a crooked mouth while disembodied hands jabbed pins into her temples. Another had a face like an empty cage, her agitated hands like the birds that had flown away. Others stood in odd, rigid positions, their arms at ninety-degree angles to their trunks. In every picture there was something deviant, one body part that refused to conform, like branches rejecting the sun.

The text was in French but I didn’t need language to read the faces and bodies lost in disorienting studio black. Unframed, the figures floated like dying stars at the centre of the page, or, pinned to a bed, like cosmic butterfly nebulae without the symmetry. As much as I tried, I couldn’t understand who or what they were, what all this energy, white against black and body against bed, could mean.

I closed the book and went to take a shower, making the water hotter and hotter until I could bear it no longer. Yet right after drying off I went straight back to the book, desirous to continue. New faces rose to meet me, together with some I’d glimpsed earlier, and I began to feel similar to that restless matter, whatever it was, somehow trapped in the wrong casing. Several of the women looked into the camera seductively but others seemed to push away an invisible aggressor; I couldn’t understand why they’d allowed themselves to be photographed.

The rest of the afternoon, squandered. I couldn’t pull myself away. Over and over I thought of leaving the flat but would then pour myself another glass of water, make myself a sandwich, a cup of tea, then another, then another sandwich, more water. Every so often I returned to the living room and circled Daniel’s desk, or rather, the book, half expecting something to drift up from its pages and free me. Finally, at a quarter to five, I forced myself to go for a walk but by then the sun had withdrawn so I stuck to familiar streets in the neighbourhood.

That evening Daniel decided to try out a recipe he recalled from his married years; dinner was pushed back an hour. While he rushed around the kitchen banging, clanging and dropping things, Pierre and I sat in front of the small black and white television whose surface was coated in a sticky layer of dust. Every now and then I got up to change the channel but found nothing I could understand, and Pierre didn’t really seem to be watching. I considered turning up the volume all the way to startle him into action but just as I was leaning forwards to move the dial Daniel announced the food was ready.

Towards the end of our meal, wholewheat pasta in a peculiar mushroom, sesame and avocado sauce, Daniel asked me about my afternoon. I shrugged and said I’d taken a nap and then gone for a walk, to which Daniel replied I must be getting to know the area well. Pierre shook two tablets out of his medicine bottle and knocked them down with wine, his way, I couldn’t help thinking somewhat enviously, of flushing out the day.

Once Pierre had merged with the sofa and our dishes were stacked in the sink, the person to wash them still undecided, I felt I’d waited long enough. Just as Daniel was about to get up from the table and head to his desk for a late-night session, I asked about the book.

‘Which book?’

‘The one with the women,’ I said.

‘Which?’

‘Photographs . . . Of women.’

‘Oh, the hysterics.’

‘What do you mean?’

Daniel didn’t answer.

‘Were they agitators?’

‘No . . . ’

Daniel reached for the dented silver case Pierre had left on the table, extracted a cigarette and lit it, though he rarely smoked.

‘Victorian porn?’ I thought of Lucian’s abundant collection.

He laughed.

‘Then what do you mean?’

‘No, as I said, they were hysterics.’

‘Why do you call them that?’

‘I don’t. Their doctor did.’

‘They all had the same doctor?’

‘Yes, they formed part of his collection.’

I couldn’t tell whether he was having a laugh.

‘Daniel, what are you talking about?’

Lowering his voice a little though Pierre was way past hearing, he began to tell me about a doctor who at the end of the nineteenth century ran the largest neurological clinic in Europe at a hospital in Paris, a former gunpowder factory that was now starting to produce, one could say, a new kind of explosive, and how this doctor called the place his living museum of pathology, with a constantly updated collection.

‘And this is the catalogue?’

‘I guess you could say that . . . he manipulated his patients to pose in different ways to illustrate states of hysteria. And then took pictures.’

His cigarette was more than half ash without him having drawn on it more than twice. He put it out and pushed the saucer to the other side of the table, as if disgusted by it.

‘Why do you have this book?’

‘Research.’

‘They turn you on, don’t they?’

‘What?’

‘You find them attractive.’

I was about to mention the wayward eye at the Drunken Duck when he leaned forwards and asked darkly, ‘Marie, what were you doing at my desk?’

‘You were out.’

‘So?’

‘You’re always out.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘And when you’re home you’re with Pierre.’

‘He’s our guest.’

‘No one invited him.’

He threw a glance in Pierre’s direction.

‘You’re welcome to come with us on our walks.’

‘I don’t want to.’

He shrugged and rose from the table.

‘I’m tired, I’ll see you tomorrow.’

I said goodnight and remained seated, watching him limp off down the corridor and into his room.

Once in bed and fuelled by darkness, my thoughts ran wild as I imagined women pinned down while men gathered round to capture signals and frame their unrest. I thought about this doctor’s gaze and how he’d reduced his patients to wraiths, the headboards of their beds like tombstones and the inscriptions on their pillows rewritten. Of female lives condensed into a series of dramatic gestures. The male gaze, nothing seemed free of it. It plundered the living and the dead, manipulating bodies cold and stiff or warm and supple; in either case, depriving them of tranquillity.

I pulled the duvet up around me, half willing Daniel to reappear at the door though I knew that that night he wouldn’t, and tried to beckon sleep as I lay with the ghosts of the former couple and the ghosts of the hysterics and the image of our guest stretched out on the sofa, the flat becoming more populated with every passing hour.

Given the fog in which he moved, I was surprised when Pierre announced that his last day in Paris was some kind of
Journée du patrimoine
, similar to our National Heritage Day, and suggested we go and see something old and stately. To this day I don’t know how he came to choose Challement, a hamlet in Burgundy with a little-known chateau, whether he’d been given a pamphlet or was told by a friend.

We set out at ten and bought three tickets to Clamecy, the station nearest the chateau. Daniel surprised me by coming to sit by my side while Pierre took the seat opposite us. He pulled out a newspaper in German, opened it to the middle and frowned as he began reading something in the upper right-hand corner. Once the train left Paris we rushed through the suburbs and before long were hurtling past wall after wall, or rather one continuous wall, of pine trees, thousands of green needles made one by velocity as they filled our windows. Daniel nodded off, his head resting on a shoulder, but I was eager to stay awake to the scenery. Every now and then Pierre would reach into his jacket pocket and extract a liquorice coin and slip it into his mouth, making loud smacking noises from behind his newspaper.

After a while the trees fell away, revealing a second landscape hanging parallel to the first: that of the granite sky, which seemed suspended by a few rusted threads that could at any moment snap, leaving this heavy lid to collapse on to the fields and vineyards blanched by winter.