Concerto to the Memory of an Angel (15 page)

“You're crazy!”

“If anything happens to me, you are fucked.”

They stared at each other with hatred. It was as intense as desire, as violent as love, and it reminded them of how important they had been to each other a long time ago, at the beginning of their relationship, with the sole difference being that their feelings now led them both to desire the other's death rather than a shared future.

The doctor came in, stopped and looked at the two tense individuals, thought he was interrupting a passionate declaration, and cleared his throat.

“Excuse me for disturbing you, Madame, Monsieur le Président.”

Catherine immediately put a friendly smile on her face and said in a breezy manner, “Do come in, Professor Valencienne, do come in.”

As he did not want to stay in the background, Henri also indulged in a few friendly courtesies. He congratulated the professor, then pulled up a chair so that he could join them beside the bed.

Embarrassed, hesitant, the doctor reluctantly drew closer.

“Well, Madame, Monsieur le Président, we ran certain tests when Madame was admitted to the emergency ward. As regards the shock and its aftereffects, I think that our service has covered a maximum. You will be able to go on with your life as before. However, during our exams, we discovered something else.”

The President motioned to the physician to sit down. He refused once again and turned to Catherine.

“We have to discuss a more serious health problem, unfortunately. The blood tests have revealed the presence of a tumor.”

“A tumor?”

“A tumor.”

“Do you mean cancer?”

The professor nodded.

Catherine and Henri looked at each other with mixed feelings.

Henri stood up and said with an authority that demanded a frank and immediate response: “Is it serious, doctor?”

Professor Valencienne bit his lips, turned to look at the wall to his left, then the wall to his right, as if he were looking for inspiration and did not find it, and while looking at his white shoes he replied, “Worrying. Extremely worrying.”

There were no better words for it.

The President let out his usual swearword, “Oh, shit”; as for Catherine, she fainted.

 

Catherine's health declined rapidly.

Once she was back at the Elysée Palace in their apartments under the eaves, for a while she went on hoping she would recover, although the exams showed that because the cancer had been diagnosed too late it was progressing at lightning speed.

Chemotherapy exhausted her. She lost her appetite. Her hair fell out. The specialists stopped focusing on the invasive metastases and decided to abandon any treatment. Catherine realized this meant she would not recover; she felt a strange sense of peace.

“So this has been my fate all along . . . I was bound to end up like this . . . and now . . . ”

Contained within the fear of death, there are three distinct fears: we do not know when we will die, we do not know how we will die, and we do not know death itself. For Catherine, two of these factors had been clarified: she would die soon, from a generalized cancer. The anxiety that might now overcome her concerned only the actual state of death; and because ever since childhood she had been a believer, she did not dread the mystery of it; to be sure, she knew nothing about it—no more than the next person—but she had faith.

Henri insisted she remain by his side at the Elysée Palace, to be there for her friends who often came to visit.

They were all surprised, as was her husband, by her gentle docility. This tranquility came from the fact that she had interiorized her cancer. One day she questioned a young nurse who was giving her a shot of morphine: “If I had spoken sooner, if I had come out with what I had on my mind, could I have avoided the cancer? If I had freed myself through speech, perhaps the disease would not have taken hold inside me?”

“Cancer is an accident, Madame.”

“No, it is a consequence. Sometimes cancer is the form taken by secrets that weigh too heavily.”

Obviously, she did not claim to be right, but her point of view enabled her to accept, and to acknowledge that it was happening to her, and really to her, and only to her. Far from being an attack from outside, her cancer was becoming a story created by her body, her soul, her own self.

Rigaud, the President's director of communications, was lurking about. As she knew that he despised illness to such a degree that he had refused to enter the hospital where his own father lay dying, she concluded that it must be something other than compassion that had brought him there, so she asked him, over a cup of tea, to ease his conscience.

“I have something to ask you,” he admitted. “The President was supposed to do it in my place, but he is so upset by the events that he doesn't dare. The fact is, may we make your condition known and announce your . . . difficulties . . . to the press?”

She looked him up and down, coldly. No sooner had she tamed her illness than he was plotting to take it away from her.

“Why?”

“The President will be embarking upon his campaign for reelection. And people are beginning to wonder about your absence. Some are saying that you are opposed to his new term; others maintain that you don't get along anymore; and still others claim that you are having an affair with a New York art dealer.”

She could not keep from laughing.

“Oh, poor Charles . . . My Parisian antique dealer, now he's been transformed into a New York art dealer. And by crossing the Atlantic he's become a heterosexual! How well rumors do work . . . ”

Rigaud went on, embarrassed: “Yes, Madame, we are hearing more and more rumors, each one more false and insidious than the next, and the President's grave expression only makes matters worse. So I have come to ask you to reveal the truth. You owe it to yourself, to the President, and to your exemplary marriage. Let us make all these dark shadows to disappear.”

She thought for a moment.

“Will people be moved, Rigaud?”

“People adore you, Madame. You may expect numerous expressions of sympathy and sorrow. You will be submerged.”

“No, what I meant was, will people be moved by Henri Morel, yet again, good, courageous Henri Morel, who survived an attempt on his life before his first election and who now before his reelection is nobly accompanying his wife's dying days.”

“Well, it would seem that misfortune has not spared poor President Morel.”

“Do you really believe what you are saying, Rigaud?”

He stared at her, intransigent, imperious, intense, and he chose not to lie: he fell silent.

With a nod of her head, she approved his silence, thus showing him that she was no fool, and that she knew a great many things . . .

A minute went by and neither of them moved.

“My answer is yes,” she concluded.

 

An hour later, Henri, informed by Rigaud, rushed into their apartments to congratulate her warmly: “Thank you, Catherine. So you agree to let me run for a second term?”

“Is it in my power to stop you?”

He remained puzzled, wondering whether because of her treatment and medication she had forgotten her threats. He went up to her gingerly and took her hand: “Can you tell me what you think?”

No, she could not. She no longer knew. Everything had become so confused. Tears stung her eyes.

Henri kissed her, held her for a long time in his arms, close to him, then when he felt she was relaxing and slipping into sleep, he let her rest.

Her illness had changed everything between them: aggressiveness would no longer be allowed access.

Catherine, in yielding to her tragic destiny, did not want to fight anymore; not only was it not in her nature but it reminded her of the weeks leading up to the discovery of her tumor; clearly she had been confusing irony, sarcasm, and verbal violence with the deterioration of her health!

Catherine consigned herself to silence, while Henri practiced conditional amnesia: he behaved “as if”—as if she had never expressed her disdain, as if she had never threatened to reveal what she knew about the attack on the Rue Fourmillon, as if she had not left a compromising testament somewhere abroad. He had been hiding these episodes so deliberately that he was beginning to wonder if they had ever taken place. He clung to his position as an ideal husband the way a drowning man clings to a lifebuoy, it was his salvation, the reality he wanted to manufacture. “The show must go on,” he often murmured to himself, “Keep playing the part, show nothing of my inner turmoil or how worried I am.”

And wasn't he right? Appearances could be a saving grace. When chaos threatened, only appearances could keep one from the edge of the abyss; appearances were very strong, they could hold, they could keep one from falling. “I mustn't fall,” he said over and over, “I mustn't collapse, or give way to fear, not the fear of what she is going through, nor the fear of what she will inflict upon me.”

They no longer knew what they thought. Either about themselves or about each other. The disaster had scattered onto the table the cards of a game whose rules they did not know; the illness, however, had brought both of them an unexpected wisdom: to live in the present moment, to know that they were ephemeral, to trust only what was temporary. Henceforth every morning they found themselves at the foot of a mountain, and they did not think about how hard the next day's climb might be. Although many details remained unresolved, they would take care of them when the time came, not before.

 

The media announced Catherine's illness and the news spread like wildfire. The radio, newspapers, and television spoke of nothing else for an entire week, for she was extremely popular, which meant respected and beloved. Catherine got the impression she was reading her funeral eulogy; from time to time a compliment would flatter her self-esteem; she often found herself pretty, even very pretty, on the old photographs they reproduced or the archival films the TV channels dug up, all the prettier for the way in which these recent weeks had taken their toll on her beauty. Whenever she caught herself in a moment of self-congratulation, at first she blushed, and then she forgave herself: after all, what other narcissistic pleasures were left to her?

However, when she discovered that the paparazzi were camping out in the neighboring streets or parking just across from the exit she always used at the end of the garden, La Porte du Coq, or even that they were climbing the walls to use their telephoto lenses to get their pictures of the mortally ill first lady, she summoned the President's director of communications.

“My dear Rigaud,” she said, “ these journalists will have to stop, otherwise they'll have no ammunition left for my death.”

Rigaud swallowed his cake and promised that he would deflect their commentary onto the president.

And indeed, Morel's campaign, his dignity, his courage, the incredible strength which enabled him to wage so many battles monopolized people's attention. While as a rule politicians are shown grinning widely, Morel was increasingly photographed with pursed lips, a frown on his brow, and a dark look in his eyes.

As soon as he could, and far more often than she would have imagined, he came to join her for a silent moment or one where, in a brilliant monologue, he would share with her his confrontations, his plans, his intentions, and the disappointments of his adversaries. She listened to him with kindliness.

 

Finally there came the day when the doctor who was treating Catherine demanded that she be placed in a special home, better adapted to her weakening condition. Henri tried to protest and rebel; she merely nodded.

As soon as they were on their way, she wondered what his protestation meant: did he want to keep her by his side out of love, or was he afraid he could no longer control her if she were away from home?

 

They were driving to La Maison de Rita, a clinic located in the lush green countryside of the Loiret, a superb building set in the middle of an estate of centuries-old trees where, according to the publicity flier, there were thousands of bees.

The President went with her in the limousine to help her settle into this new home, and he grew indignant when he saw the name carved in fine gold letters above the entrance gate.

“La Maison de Rita! What sort of taste is that! To refer to Rita, patron saint of lost causes, to designate a medical facility!”

“Henri, I'm no fool,” murmured Catherine. “I know it's a palliative care center for terminal patients.”

“But—”

“I know I'll never leave again.”

“Don't say that.”

“Yes. So, La Maison de Rita suits me fine. Do you know Rita's story?”

As the car drove down the lane, gravel crunching beneath the tires, Henri looked at his wife in astonishment, wondering whether she wasn't making fun of him. As a precaution he answered in a neutral tone, “No, I'm not an expert in hagiography.”

“Before she became an item for religious bazaars, Rita was a woman, a real woman, an Italian who lived in the fifteenth century and who managed to do something absolutely impossible: reconcile two families who had excellent reasons to hate each other: her husband's family, and the family of the murderer who had stabbed her husband. No one could match her when it came to attenuating hatred and pettiness, or exalting love and forgiveness. She suffered from a purulent wound on her forehead, but she managed all the same to live to a ripe old age, full of kindness, energy, and optimism, doing good all around her.”

“You surprise me, Catherine.”

“While you may not believe in the saints of the Catholic church, you still have to acknowledge that this
appellation contrôlée
is not awarded to evil individuals.”

“True.”

“Who knows what might happen in a house with such a name?” she added, rolling down the window and greedily breathing in the trembling leaves, the odor of the fresh earth beneath the plants, the beds of tulips bursting with health.