Delicacy (4 page)

Twelve

Distance from Paris to Moscow

1,540 miles

Thirteen

Natalie was often exhausted on weekends. On Sunday, she liked to lie on the couch and read, trying to alternate between pages and dreams when drowsiness got the better of fiction. She put a blanket over her legs. And what else? Oh, yes, she liked to make tea, of which she drank several cups, by small sips, as if the tea were a never-ending spring. The Sunday when everything happened, she was reading a long Russian tale by a writer who’s less read than Tolstoy or Dostoevsky and can make you think about the injustice of posterity. She liked the hero’s spinelessness, his inability to react, to imprint daily life with his energy. There was a sadness in that weakness. She liked romans-fleuves the way she liked her tea.

François came up to her. “What are you reading?” She said it was a Russian author, but she wasn’t more specific because he seemed to have asked the question only out of politeness, mechanically. It was Sunday. She liked to read, he to run. He was wearing those shorts she thought looked a bit ridiculous. She couldn’t have known that she was seeing them for the last time. He was hopping all over the place. He had that way of always wanting to do his warm-up in their living room, working himself up to breathing
hard before going out, as if he wanted to leave a big emptiness behind him. He’d succeed at it, that was sure. Before going out, he bent toward his wife and said something to her. Strangely, she wouldn’t remember these words. Their last exchange would vanish into thin air. And then she fell asleep.

When she awoke, it was difficult to know how long she’d been dozing. Ten minutes or an hour? She served herself a little more tea. It was still warm. That was some indication. Nothing seemed to have changed. It was exactly the same situation as before she’d fallen asleep. Yes, everything was identical. The telephone rang during this return to the identical. The sound of the ring mixed with the steam from the tea, in a strange synchronization of sensations. Natalie answered. A second later, her life was no longer the same. She instinctively put a bookmark in her book and rushed outdoors.

When she got to the hospital lobby, she didn’t know what to say, what to do. She stayed there without moving for a long moment. At reception, she was finally told where to find her husband, and she found him on his back. Perfectly still. She thought, It looks as though he’s sleeping. He never moves at night. And for that particular instant it was just like any other night.

“What are the chances?” Natalie asked the doctor.

“Negligible.”

“What does negligible mean? Is negligible none? If that’s the case, tell me it’s none.”

“I can’t say, ma’am. The chance is minuscule. You never know.”

“But you do, you ought to know! It’s your job to know!”

She’d shouted that sentence with all her strength. Several times. Then she’d stopped. She’d looked hard at the doctor, and he, too, was absolutely still, paralyzed. He’d witnessed a lot of dramatic scenes. But without being able to explain why, he experienced this one as one degree higher in the hierarchy of tragedies. He contemplated this woman’s face, contorted by grief. Unable to cry because the pain had drained away everything. She came toward him, ruined, vacant. Before collapsing.

When she came to, she saw her parents. As well as François’s. A moment before, she’d been reading, and suddenly she wasn’t home anymore. Reality pieced itself together again. She wanted to travel backward into sleep, backward into that Sunday. It can’t be. It can’t be, was what she kept repeating in a delirious litany. They explained to her that he was in a coma. That nothing had been lost, but she sensed quite clearly that everything was over. She knew it. She didn’t feel like fighting. For what? To keep a life going for a week. And after? She’d seen him. She’d seen his stillness. You don’t come back from that kind of stillness. You stay that way forever.

They gave her tranquilizers. Everything and everybody in the world around her had collapsed. And she was supposed to speak. Cheer up. It was beyond her.

“I’m going to stay with him. Watch over him.”

“No, there’s no reason for it. It’s better for you to go home and rest a bit,” said her mother.

“I don’t want to rest. I have to stay here, I have to.”

As she said it, she was about to faint. The doctor tried to convince her to go with her parents. She asked, “But what if he wakes up and I’m not here?” There was a pained silence. No one believed he would. They tried to reassure her, but they were kidding themselves. “We’ll let you know immediately, but right now it’s really better for you to get some rest.” Natalie didn’t answer. Everyone was pressuring her to lie down, to give in to the pull of gravity. So she left with her parents. Her mother made some bouillon that she couldn’t swallow. She took two more tablets and fell into bed. In her bedroom, the one from her childhood. This morning she’d still been a woman. And now she was sleeping like a little girl.

Fourteen

Possible Sentences Spoken by François
Before He Went Running

I love you.

*

I adore you.

*

Sports first, relax later.

*

What are we having to eat tonight?

*

Enjoy your reading, darling.

*

Can’t wait to get back to you.

*

I’m not planning on getting run over.

*

We really need to invite Bernard and Nicole to dinner.

*

You know, I should read a book, too.

*

I’m going to work really hard on my calves today.

*

Tonight we’re making a baby.

Fifteen

A few days later, he was dead. Natalie was in a daze, knocked out by tranquilizers. She kept thinking of their last moment together. It was too ridiculous. How could all that happiness be shattered in such a way? End with the absurd sight of a man hopping around a living room. And then those last words spoken into her ear. She’d never remember them. Maybe he’d just given her a little puff of air on the neck. He had to have been a ghost already, the moment he left. In human form, certainly, but able to create only silence, because death had already settled in.

The day of the funeral, everybody was there. They all met where François had spent his childhood. Such a crowd of people would have made him happy, she thought. But then, they wouldn’t, since it was ridiculous to think about that kind of thing. How can a dead person be happy about anything? He’s decomposing in a box made of four wooden planks: happy? As she walked behind the casket surrounded by close relations, another thought occurred to her: they were the same guests who were at her wedding. Yes, all of them were here. Exactly the same. A few years later, we meet again, and some of them are definitely dressed the
same. Dusted off their only dark suit, suitable for good fortune as much as for misfortune. Only difference: the weather. Today was beautiful, you almost felt too warm. A high point for the month of February. Yes, the sun goes on and on. And Natalie, looking straight at it, almost burned her eyes doing so, blurred her vision in a halo of cold light.

They put him in the ground, and that was it.

After the funeral, Natalie’s only wish was to be alone. She didn’t want to go back to her parents’. She was tired of the pitying looks they gave her. She wanted to lie low, lock herself in, live in a tomb. Friends rode back with her. During the entire car trip, nobody knew what to say. The driver suggested a little music. But very quickly, Natalie asked him to turn it off. It was unbearable. Every song reminded her of François. Every note echoed a memory, an anecdote, a laugh. She realized how horrible it was going to be. In the seven years they’d lived together, he’d had time to leave traces of himself everywhere, on every breath. She understood that there was nothing she could experience that could make her forget his death.

Her friends helped her bring up her belongings. But she wouldn’t let them come in with her.

“I won’t ask you to stay, I’m tired.”

“Promise to call if you need anything?”

“I will.”

“Promise?”

“Yes, I promise.”

She hugged, kissed, and thanked them. What a relief to be alone. Other people wouldn’t have been able to stand being alone at that moment. Natalie had yearned for it. And yet, these circumstances added more of the unbearable to the unbearable. She walked into their living room, and everything was there. To the smallest detail. Nothing had moved. The blanket, still on the couch. The teapot, on the low table, as well, holding the book she’d been reading. She was struck by the sight of the bookmark, especially. The book was cut in two by it: the first part, read while François was alive. And at page 321, he was dead. What should she do? Can you keep reading a book interrupted by the death of your husband?

Sixteen