Four Novels (13 page)

“He’s a child who’s always alone,” she said, looking towards the end of the dock.

The patronne picked up her red sweater, and didn’t answer. Another tugboat, loaded to the gunwales, entered the port. The child shouted something unintelligible. The man came over to Anne Desbaresdes.

“Won’t you sit down?” he said.

She followed him without a word. As she knitted, the patronne followed the tugboat’s every maneuver. It was obvious that in her opinion things were taking an unfortunate turn.

“Here.”

He pointed out a table. She sat down across from him.

“Thank you,” she murmured.

The room had a cool, dark air of early summer.

“I came back, you see.”

Outside, not far away, a child whistled. She started.

“I’d like you to have another glass of wine,” the man said, his eyes on the door.

He ordered the wine. The patronne silently obliged, no doubt already past worrying about the strangeness of their ways. Anne Desbaresdes sat back in her chair, momentarily relaxed. Unafraid.

“It’s been three days now,” the man said.

She made an effort to sit up, and again drank her wine.

“It’s good,” she said quietly.

Her hands were steady now. She sat up straighter and leaned slightly forward towards the man, who was looking at her.

“I meant to ask you, you’re not working today?”

“No, I need some free time for the moment.”

Her smile was timidly hypocritical.

“Time to do nothing?”

“That’s right, nothing.”

The patronne was stationed at her post behind her cash register. Anne Desbaresdes spoke in an undertone.

“It’s difficult for a woman to find an excuse to go into a café, but I told myself that I could surely think of something, like wanting a glass of wine, being thirsty . . .”

“I tried to find out something more. But I couldn’t.”

Anne Desbaresdes made an effort to remember again.

“It was a long, high-pitched scream, that stopped when it was at its loudest,” she said.

“She was dying,” the man said. “The scream must have stopped when she could no longer see him.”

A customer came in, scarcely noticed them, and leaned on the bar.

“I think I must have screamed something like that once, yes, when I had the child.”

“They met by chance in a café, perhaps even here, they both used to come here. And they began to talk to each other about this and that. But I don’t know. Was it very painful when you had your child?”

“I screamed . . . You have no idea.”

She smiled as she remembered, leaned back in her chair, suddenly completely free of her fear. He moved closer and said dryly:

“Talk to me.”

She tried to find something to say.

“I live in the last house on the Boulevard de la Mer, the last one as you leave town. Just before the dunes.”

“The magnolia tree in the left-hand corner of the garden is in bloom.”

“Yes, there are so many flowers at this time of year that you can dream about them and be ill all the next day because of them. You shut your window, it’s unbearable.”

“It was in that house that you were married, some ten years ago?”

“Yes. My room is on the second floor, to the left, overlooking the sea. You told me last time that he had killed her because she had asked him to, to please her in fact?”

He waited before answering her, at last able to see the outline of her shoulders.

“If you shut your window at this time of year,” he said, “you must be too hot to sleep.”

Anne Desbaresdes became more serious than his remark seemed to call for.”

“The scent of magnolias is overpowering, you know.”

“I know.”

He raised his eyes from the line of her shoulders and looked away.

“Isn’t there a long hallway on the second floor, a very long hallway into which your and everyone else’s room opens, so that you’re together and separated at the same time?”

“There’s a hallway,” Anne Desbaresdes said, “just as you say. But please tell me, how did she come to realize that that was what she wanted from him, how did she know so clearly what she wanted him to do?”

His eyes returned to hers, and he stared at her wearily.

“I imagine that one day,” he said, “one morning at dawn she suddenly knew what she wanted him to do. Everything became so clear for her that she told him what she wanted. I don’t think there’s any explanation for that sort of discovery.”

Outside the children were playing quietly. The second tug had reached the dock. In the silence after its motors had stopped, the patronne pointedly rattled some objects under the bar, reminding them that it was getting late.

“You were saying that it’s necessary to go through this hallway to get to your room?”

“Yes, through the hallway.”

The child ran in and laid his head on his mother’s shoulder. She paid no attention to him.

“Oh, I’m having a lot of fun,” he said, and raced out again.

“I forgot to tell you how much I wish he were already grown up,” Anne Desbaresdes said.

He poured her some wine, handed her her glass, and she immediately drank it.

“You know,” he said, “I suspect that he would have done it of his own accord one day, even without her asking. That she wasn’t the only one to discover what she wanted from him.”

She returned from her daydreams to her insistent, methodical questions.

“I’d like you to tell me about the very beginning, how they began to talk to each other. It was in a café, you said . . .”

The two children were running in circles, still playing at the end of the dock.

“We don’t have much time,” he said. “The factories close in a quarter of an hour. Yes, I’m almost sure it was in a café that they began to talk to each other, although it might have been somewhere else. Maybe they talked about the political situation, or the chances of war, or maybe something totally different from anything we can imagine, about everything and nothing. Perhaps we could drink one more glass of wine before you go back to the Boulevard de la Mer.”

The patronne served them, still without a word, perhaps a trifle hastily. They paid no attention to her.

“At the end of this long hallway”—Anne Desbaresdes chose her words carefully—“there’s a large bay window overlooking the boulevard. The wind lashes it like a whip. Last year, during a storm, the windows were smashed. It was at night.”

She leaned back in her chair and laughed.

“To think that it happened here in this town . . . Really, it’s hard to believe.”

“Yes, it’s a small town. Hardly enough people for the three factories.”

The wall at the far end of the room was lighted by the setting sun. In the middle their two shadows were fused in black.

“And so they talked,” said Anne Desbaresdes, “they talked for a long time, a very long time, before it happened.”

“Yes, I think they must have spent a lot of time together to reach that stage. Talk to me.”

“I don’t know what else to say,” she admitted.

He gave her an encouraging smile.

“What difference does it make?”

She began again, very slowly, with obvious effort and concentration.

“It seems to me that this house we were talking about was built somewhat arbitrarily, if you see what I mean, but nevertheless in such a way that it’s convenient for everybody.”

“On the ground floor there are rooms where receptions are given every year at the end of May for the people who work in the foundries.”

The siren blasted unmercifully. The patronne got up, put her red
sweater away, and rinsed the glasses that squeaked under the cold water.

“You were wearing a black dress with a very low neck. You were looking at us pleasantly, indifferently. It was hot.”

This did not surprise her, and she cheated.

“It’s an exceptionally lovely spring,” Anne Desbaresdes said, “everybody’s talking about it. You think it was she who first brought it up, who first dared mention it, and that then they talked about it together as they talked about other things?”

“I don’t know any more about it than you do. Maybe they only talked about it once, maybe every day. How will we ever know? But somehow they both reached exactly the same stage, three days ago, where they no longer knew what they were doing.”

He lifted his hand, let it fall close to hers on the table, and left it there. For the first time she noticed these two hands side by side.

“I’ve drunk too much wine again,” she complained.

“Sometimes there’s a light on till late at night in the hallway you mentioned.”

“Sometimes I can’t fall asleep.”

“Why do you also keep the hall light on and not just a light in your room?”

“A habit of mine. I really don’t know.”

“Nothing happens there, nothing at night.”

“Yes, behind one of the doors my child is sleeping.”

She brought her arms back towards the table and, as if she were cold, pulled her coat around her shoulders.

“Perhaps I ought to be getting back. See how late it is.”

He raised his hand as if asking her to stay. She stayed.

“The first thing in the morning, you go and look out of the big bay window.”

“In summer the workers at the dockyards begin passing about six o’clock. In the winter most of them take the bus because of the wind and cold. It only lasts a quarter of an hour.”

“At night, no one ever goes by—ever?”

“Yes, sometimes a bicycle, one wonders where it came from. Is it the grief of having killed her, of her being dead, that drove him mad, or something else from his past added to that grief, something no one knows about?”

“I suspect there was indeed something else, something we don’t know about yet.”

She straightened up, slowly, as if she were being raised, and adjusted her coat again. He didn’t help her. She still sat facing him, saying nothing. The first men came in, were surprised, gave the patronne a questioning look. The patronne gave a barely perceptible shrug, indicating that she herself didn’t much understand what was going on.

“Perhaps you won’t come back again.”

When he in turn stood up, Anne Desbaresdes must have noticed that he was still young, that the setting sun was reflected in his eyes as clearly as in a child’s. She looked past his gaze into his blue eyes.

“I hadn’t thought that I might never come back here.”

He detained her one last time.

“You often watch those men on their way to the dockyards, especially in summer, and at night, when you have trouble sleeping, they come back to you.”

“When I wake up early enough,” Anne Desbaresdes admitted, “I watch them. And you’re right, sometimes at night the memory of some of them comes back to me.”

As they left, some other workers emerged onto the docks. They were probable workers from the Fonderies de la Côte, which was farther from town than the dockyards. It was lighter out than it had been three days before. There were some seagulls in the sky, which was now blue again.

“I had fun playing,” the child said.

She let him talk about his games till they had passed the first breakwater, from which the Boulevard de la Mer stretched straight as far as the dunes, where it ended.

The child grew impatient.

“What’s the matter?”

As twilight fell the wind began to rise. She was cold.

“I don’t know. I’m cold.”

The child took his mother’s hand, opened it and clasped it implacably, resolutely in his. She was overwhelmed by the gesture, and almost shouted:

“Oh, my love!”

“But you’re going again.”

“I expect so.”

They passed some people on their way home who were carrying folding chairs. The wind lashed them in the face.

“What are you going to buy me?”

“A red motorboat. Would you like that?”

The child weighed the thought in silence, then sighed happily.

“Yes, a big red motorboat. How did you think of it?”

She took him by the shoulders, and held him as he tried to squirm loose to run on ahead.

“You’re growing up, oh, you’re getting so big, and I think it’s wonderful.”

Four

A
GAIN THE NEXT DAY
Anne Desbaresdes took her child to the port. The lovely weather persisted, only a little cooler than the day before. The sky was increasingly clear, overcast only at rare intervals. The whole town was talking about the unseasonably good weather. Some voiced the fear that it would end the next day, it had already lasted so unusually long. Others felt sure that the brisk wind sweeping the town would keep the sky clear, and prevent any clouds from forming for a while yet.

Anne Desbaresdes braved this weather, this wind, and reached the port after having passed the first breakwater and anchorage where the sand barges were moored, where the industrial section of the city began. She stopped again at the bar; the man was already in the room waiting for her, no doubt still bound by the ritual of the first meetings, which she instinctively adhered to. She ordered some wine, still terribly afraid. The patronne, who was behind the bar knitting her red wool, noticed they did not acknowledge each other’s presence for a long time after she had come in, a sham that lasted longer than on the previous day. It lasted even after the child had joined his new-found friend outside.

“I’d like another glass of wine,” Anne Desbaresdes said.

She was served with obvious disapproval. And yet, when the man got up, went over to her, and took her back into the semi-darkness of the back room, her hands had already stopped shaking, the color had returned to her face.

“I’m not used to going so far away from home,” she explained. “But it’s not because I’m afraid. I think it’s more surprise, or something like it.”

“It could be fear. People will get to know about this in town, like they get to know everything,” the man added with a smile.

Outside the child shouted happily, because two tugboats were coming in side by side towards the anchorage. Anne Desbaresdes smiled.

“That I drink wine with you,” she finished, suddenly exploding into a laugh. “Now why do I keep wanting to laugh today?”

He moved his face close to hers, placed his hands against hers on the table, and stopped laughing when she stopped.