Concerto to the Memory of an Angel (13 page)

“You have men choose your perfumes for you now?”

“Why not? You're not going to go and have a jealous fit over some perfume?”

“No, I'm not stupid: I have better reasons than perfume to have a jealous fit; in that department, I'm spoilt for choice.”

He looked at her, on the alert, ready to go into battle, a political beast who could convince a bald man to let his hair grow.

She forestalled him by quietly saying, “I won't make a scandal. I don't feel jealous at all.”

“Oh . . . good.”

“Not one bit. I'm as calm as a millpond. It's strange though . . . Perhaps people are right when they say—even though it just seems like common sense—that jealousy is a proof of love?”

He shuddered, wounded. Poor President, she thought, amused, he's so used to flattery, and has been so over-protected, that now he's vulnerable: he's as vexed by a furtive remark as if he had slipped at the polling booth.

“I'm not sure I understand,” he whispered.

He was insisting because, as a rule, he had nothing to fear from a discussion like this. Catherine had grown accustomed to keeping her recriminations to herself. She recalled this character trait and at that moment she decided that he really was too lucky, and for once she would go against the grain of his habits.

“You heard me, Henri. I don't love you anymore. Not at all.”

The President suddenly looked like a little boy who's been caught and punished, who is hurt and disappointed, and who is trying to stand up to the hurt and behave like a man. To finish him off she added, “And this is nothing new!”

“Catherine, are you joking?”

“Do you find it funny?”

“No.”

“So it's not a joke.”

He stammered, choking with rage. As frightened as a rabbit caught in a car's headlights, overwhelmed by anxiety, he recoiled sharply, then wrinkled his nose, then his whole body began to tremble. All he could produce was an incoherent spluttering, and he was about to say something when Catherine interrupted:

“I assure you, Henri, you're not suffering. It's just your male pride that is wounded. And male pride counts for a great deal in who you are. How much? Let's say eighty, eighty-five percent of your personality? Fortunately in a few minutes your mistress—you know, the nose, the perfumer—will be there to console you.”

He went pale, incapable of determining what shocked him the most, Catherine's words, or her tone—distant, amused, almost indifferent.

“And has it been a long time?”

“A long time what, Henri?”

“That . . . that you . . . that you no longer . . . What you just said.”

“Oh, that I don't love you any more?”

She stood thinking.

“A very long time. I could say it has been since you no longer have a moment to spare for me, but that wouldn't be true, it started even earlier. I could say it has been since you started using our marriage to convince the French that you are a man just like them, but that wouldn't be true either, it was even earlier. I could say it has been since you started kissing me in public and never in private, but that wouldn't be true either, it was even earlier. I could tell you that it's been since you took your mistresses, but that wouldn't be true either, it was even earlier. I could tell you that it has been since you had the indecency to use our daughter's deafness to make public opinion feel sorry for us, but that wouldn't be true either, it was even earlier. The truth is, it has been since the time of the attack. The attack on the Rue Fourmillon.”

He swayed, his lips trembling with rage. His voice echoed against the age-old paneling, cold and sharp: “What do you mean by that?”

“You heard me. I know.”

“What do you know?”

Everyone in France remembered the attack on the Rue Fourmillon. According to political experts, if that year Henri received the votes that he had failed to get before, it was because he had been the victim of a despicable aggression. While he was on official business, two men in balaclavas had opened fired on the car. Henri had been wounded, yet he tried to run after them, then abandoned the chase to turn back to his driver, who was bathed in blood. Public opinion had praised his courage; by the very next day he had become a political hero; in forty-eight hours his detractors were taxed as extremists and fundamentalists, dangerous men capable of ordering an assassination. His opponents had been discredited by the affair, and Henri had won the presidential election hands down.

“I know, Henri dear, I know what some people suspected but didn't dare put in writing. I know what you will deny until the end of your days, firmly and indignantly. I know what you did: you conceived, organized and paid for the attack. It was a pure exercise in PR. Nicely thought out, too, because thanks to your plan, you became president. It is a pity that because of your ambition your former employee is now quadriplegic and glued to a wheelchair. I have had nothing but scorn for you since that day.”

Silence put an ever greater distance between them. A cold hatred permeated the room.

“I think you're going mad,” he said slowly.

She picked up the magazine and handed it to him.

“Now look! Since you know what I know, look! See what a great actress you live with . . . I know just how low you can go, but I'm smiling. I'm bored, but I smile. I am unhappy but I smile. I despise you but I smile. It's remarkable, isn't it? I don't look like a victim or a torturer. It's great acting, why don't you applaud? You ought to, because you're the only one who can gauge just how good my performance is. ‘A Perfect Love Story'—your Rigaud has every reason to be pleased with this article: you've gotten off easy!”

“So it's war?” he asked.

“Not at all, it's our life.”

Henri looked for something to say in reply, could not think of anything, and walked toward the door, stiff, starchy, and furious.

At the door he turned around and said, “Why are you coming out with all this today? Why this sudden fit of sincerity? Why now?”

She opened her eyes wide like the dials of a clock.

“Well, I really don't know. Truly.”

“Oh, really,” he grunted, skeptical.

“I swear, Henri. And on top of it I feel so relieved that I wonder why I waited so long.”

He shrugged, went through the door, slammed it, and stormed down the stairs.

If he had not been beside himself with anger, he would have gone closer to Catherine's face and would have seen that for the last few minutes she had been crying.

 

The months that followed merely increased the tension between them.

From the outside, it seemed nothing had changed: the presidential couple continued to assume its responsibilities—receptions, visits, travel—which also meant miming their love for each other; not a single hurtful word was uttered, either in public or when they were alone.

But their silence did not calm them; on the contrary, it served to exaggerate beyond measure the fatal words that had been at the origin of their falling out; as for their impeccable behavior, oiled from years of practice, it became the curtain behind which their hostility grew and intensified.

Overwhelmed by surprise, Henri suffered more than Catherine did, and while like most prideful people he had no problem with the knowledge that he was disliked, he could not bear the idea that he was scorned, still less when the disdain was coming from the person closest to him, who knew him best of all. Three possible solutions sprang to mind: either he admitted Catherine was right, which meant conceding that he had indeed deceived his close collaborators and cheated in order to win; or he could try to justify himself to his wife; or he could deny everything outright. Naturally, he chose the last option. Relieving his conscience, never for a moment envisaging that his better half might be justified in her rebellion, he forgave himself and rewrote history: the problem no longer stemmed from Henri himself, Catherine had become the problem. He began to complain about the fact he had to put up with such a companion—she was crazy, schizoid, bitter, jealous of his success and successes. What a strange personality! She was false, two-faced, split in two, charming in appearance and hateful in reality, like Dr. Jekyll turning into Mr. Hyde.

As for Catherine, she found this new situation very amusing. She enjoyed tormenting her husband. At least she had left behind her decorative role as well as that of the helpless, deceived little wifey. He was afraid of her. Now she imposed the presence of an unpredictable woman on him, a stranger whom he dreaded, as could be seen by his forehead full of tics and his eyes with their black irises that seemed to be pleading anxiously: “What will she do next? What will she say? What is she thinking?” Catherine made it a point of honor to withhold any answers or clues; she gave him no purchase; better still, the more she slipped away from him, the more she forced him to look at her constantly, obsessively. She only got up on the stage of her life for Henri's sake. She had had millions of spectators for years now, in France and abroad, since her position placed her in the limelight of global attention, and yet until now she had only ever fascinated naïve boobies who assumed she was in love with Henri and happy to be the first lady. Since her confession she had gained a lucid spectator who appreciated her performance and could tell just how much she was expressing the opposite of what she felt; henceforth, not only did Henri realize, he was also horrified. How delightful . . . The President, however, like any politician worth his salt, knew that no one could simulate constant sincerity, that people lied, used cunning, made promises, and forgot; and, like all politicians he also believed up to a point what he was playing at: emotion, indignation, anger, determination, power, helplessness. Therefore to him Catherine's utter cynicism was like an abyss where only the damned moved restlessly about.

Henri hated this forced cohabitation with his wife. Then, through contamination, he began to hate Catherine herself.

He made less and less effort to hide his feelings. He removed the mask of the attentive husband the moment there were no more witnesses; no sooner had the couple settled into a car, no sooner did he return to the palace than irritation, hostility, and rage ravaged his features. He was filled with spite and bile, he boiled with suppressed rage.

Catherine could not get enough of this sudden violence—it was like a whip, bringing her to life, tearing her away from ennui; she delighted in it the way a tree delights in the sap rising in springtime. For while it may not have meant a revival of their love, it was certainly a revival of their story.

One day when she was wandering from boutique to boutique in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, escorted by two bodyguards and a chauffeur, she noticed off in the distance an individual in a beige mackintosh who crossed her field of vision several times.

She knew immediately what this meant: her husband was having her followed. She exulted. Not only did she pretend not to see the detective but she also distracted the attention of her bodyguards several times so that they wouldn't notice him either.

“What is Henri looking for? What does he want to know?”

After a month had gone by she discovered the reason why she was being tailed: the president was compiling a list of his wife's friends, in order to send each of them an invitation to the Élysée Palace for a “casual breakfast” without Catherine, where he would cleverly try to worm information out of them. His guests may not have realized, but the former lawyer who was now head of state was able to gauge how close each of them was to Catherine, and how much admiration or hostility they felt for his own person, his overall purpose being to determine whether Catherine might have shared with a confidant the explosive secret she possessed.

She thought it was great fun when her friends related their visit. They had been intimidated, flattered, and manipulated, but had never guessed the true reason behind Henri's behavior: his security.

“If he's tailing me, it's for his sake, not mine. He's only interested in himself.”

As the man in the mackintosh, or a pale replacement, continued to trail her, she decided to play a trick on them.

She asked a certain Charles, a friend of friends, an antique dealer on the Left Bank, to receive her in his bachelor flat. The handsome forty-year-old—tall, slim, elegant, and still youthful despite the strands of white that made his dark hair iridescent, was honored, and agreed enthusiastically. Every day from five to seven she went to his house with an ostentatious discretion. Together, behind closed curtains, they drank tea, conversed, laughed, and listened to music, in such a way that she did not even have to feign the contented expression she wore on her face on leaving his building—click, photograph . . . Would this suffice to arouse President Morel's suspicions?

After a week had gone by she could see in Henri's eyes that he had been informed. How could she tell? From the gleam of joy: he hoped he had nailed his wife, since he had caught her red-handed.

She went on for a second week with her eager visits.

Once his suspicions had been confirmed, Henri could hardly hide his jubilation. Catherine, on the other hand, hid hers very well.

The third week she delivered the coup de grâce: she waltzed around Paris on Charles's arm, going to restaurants and the theatre. Then, since the hoped-for reaction was somewhat slow in coming, she made a few clever phone calls, with the end result that the paparazzi took pictures of the two new friends without them knowing.

On Saturday morning a picture appeared in the worst weekly gossip rag, with this caption: “With a favorite like him, the first lady isn't likely to make the President jealous.” And the journalist went on to emphasize the fact that the antique dealer was a well-known homosexual. Indeed, the moment anyone made inquiries about Charles, they would immediately discover that he had a pronounced and exclusive preference for men. Only the two spies in their mackintoshes—because they were stupid—and her husband—because he was too fond of women—had overlooked this detail and assumed that Catherine had taken Charles as her lover.