The Most Beautiful Book in the World (10 page)

It seemed like I really was not doing anything normally.

No doubt that is why this story had to happen in the first place . . .

 

It took me hours to find my way back. In fact, I must have been stumbling my way along, unaware of anything, until night fell and a taxi rank reminded me that I had to go home. Fortunately Samuel was busy with a conference that evening: I did not have to give him any explanations, nor was I able to ask him for any.

 

In the days that followed, to hide my devastation, I pretended I had a migraine; Samuel was very worried. I looked on him with new eyes as he took care of me: did he know that I knew? Surely not. If he had a double life, how did he manage to show such devotion?

Concerned about my condition, he lightened his workload so that he could take the time to come home and have lunch with me every day. Anyone who had not seen what I had seen would never have suspected my husband. He behaved perfectly. If he were play-acting, he was the greatest actor in the world. His tenderness seemed genuine: his perspiring anxiety could not be faked, nor could he mime the relief he felt whenever I could invent some improvement for myself.

I began to have doubts. Not that I had seen his son, but that Samuel could still be seeing this woman. Did he even know? Did he know she had given him a son? Perhaps it was just some old affair, a little fling from before; perhaps this Nathalie, disappointed to hear about his marriage to me, had hidden her pregnancy, and kept the boy for herself. How old was he? Eighteen . . . So it would have been just before he and I fell in love . . . I managed to convince myself that that must be what had happened. She'd been abandoned, so she had a child behind his back. That was clearly the reason for her fear whenever she saw me: she was filled with remorse. Besides, she did not look at all like a bad woman, but rather like one who has been eroded by melancholy.

After a week of so-called migraines, I decided that I felt better. I delivered Samuel, and myself, from our worries, and begged him to make up for his lost time at work; in exchange, he made me swear to call him if I had the slightest concern.

I stayed hardly more than an hour at the Foundation, just long enough to make sure that everything was running smoothly without me. Without telling anyone, I went deep into the bowels of Paris and took the metro for the Place d'Italie, as if there were no other way to reach that strange and threatening place other than subterraneously.

I had no real plan, no pre-established strategy, but I had to corroborate my hypothesis. It was fairly easy to find the cheerless street where the boy lived with his mother, and I sat on the first bench I found that would allow me to keep an eye on the gate.

What did I hope to do? Go up to neighbors. Chat with the residents. Find something out, one way or another.

After two hours of waiting in vain, I felt like a cigarette. Strange for a woman who does not smoke? Yes. It amused me. In fact, for a while now I had been acting in a very unusual way—trailing strangers, taking public transportation, discovering my husband's past, waiting on a bench, buying cigarettes. I set off, therefore, to look for a
bureau de tabac.

What brand should I buy? I had no experience of cigarettes.

“I'll have the same,” I said to the tobacconist, who had just served a neighborhood regular.

He handed me a pack, and waited for me to give him the exact change like any good addict familiar with the price of her pleasure. I gave him a note that I hoped would suffice, in exchange for which he gave me a grumble and more notes and a lot of coins.

As I turned around, there he was.

Samuel.

Well, Samuel the younger. Samuel's son.

He laughed when he saw my surprise.

“Excuse me, I startled you.”

“No, I'm the clumsy one, I failed to notice there was anyone behind me.”

He moved aside to let me by, and bought some mints. As pleasant and well brought up as his father, I could not help but think. I felt an immense liking for him; even more than that, something inexpressible . . . As if, intoxicated with his smell, his animal proximity, I could not resolve myself to see him walk away.

I ran out after him into the street and called out, “Sir, excuse me . . .”

Taken aback at being called Sir by a woman older than himself—how old must he have thought I was?—he looked around quickly to make sure I was really talking to him, then waited for me on the opposite sidewalk.

I quickly dreamt up a lie.

“Excuse me for disturbing you, I'm a journalist and I'm doing a story on today's young people. Would it be taking up too much of your time to ask you a few questions?”

“What—you mean now, here?”

“Well, we could go for a drink, in the café where you frightened me.”

He smiled, intrigued by the idea.

“Which newspaper?”

“
Le Monde.”

An approving flick of his eyelashes showed that he was flattered to collaborate with such a prestigious newspaper.

“I'd be glad to. But I don't know if I'm really representative of today's young people. Sometimes I really feel out of synch.”

“I don't want you to be representative of modern youth, I want you to be representative of yourself.”

My phrase convinced him, and he followed me.

We ordered two coffees, and began to talk.

“Aren't you going to take notes?”

“I'll start taking them when I've lost my memory.”

He sent me a glance full of praise, never for a moment suspecting that everything that came out of my mouth thereafter was pure bluffing.

“How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

Right off the bat, my main hypothesis was shattered to pieces. Fifteen years ago, Samuel and I had been married for two years . . .

I used the pretext that I needed more sugar to move, get up, walk around for a few seconds and sit back down.

“What are you hoping for in life?”

“I love the cinema. I'd like to become a filmmaker.”

“Who are your favorite directors?”

Now that he was off on a subject he was passionate about, the young man could have talked forever, and this gave me time to think about my next question.

“Is this passion for the cinema something that comes from your family?”

He burst out laughing.

“I really doubt it!”

He suddenly seemed to be proud of having acquired rather than inherited his tastes.

“What about your mother?”

“My mother is more the TV series type, you know, that crap that lasts for weeks with family secrets and illegitimate kids and crimes of passion and so on and so forth . . .”

“What does she do for a living?”

“Odd jobs. For a long time she worked taking care of old people in their homes. Now she's working at a beauty salon.”

“And your father?”

He grew reticent.

“Is all this part of your story?”

“I don't want to force you to have to say anything indiscreet. Rest assured that I'll use a false name for you and I won't say anything that might make it possible to recognize either you or your parents.”

“Oh, okay, great.”

“What I'm looking for is how you relate with the adult world—the way you see things, the way you position your future in that world. That's why your relationship with your father is significant. Unless he has died; if so, please forgive me.”

It had suddenly occurred to me that Nathalie might have made him believe that Samuel had died in order to justify his absence. I trembled at the thought I might have hurt this poor boy.

“No, he's not dead.”

“Oh . . . absent, then?”

He hesitated. I was suffering as much as he was from this dilemma.

“What's his name?”

“Samuel.”

I was crushed. I no longer knew how to go on, how to keep playing my role. I alleged a new desire for sugar, went to the counter and came back. Quick, quick now! Come up with something!

When I sat back down, he was the one who had changed. He was relaxed, and the smile on his face showed his willingness to open up.

“Well, I suppose because you're going to use false names, I can tell you everything.”

“Of course,” I said, trying to keep from trembling.

He settled himself more comfortably on his chair.

“My father is an amazing guy. He doesn't live with us, even though he's been crazy in love with my mother for sixteen years.”

“Why not?”

“Because he's married.”

“Does he have other children?”

“No.”

“So why doesn't he leave his wife?”

“Because she's crazy.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“She's completely out to lunch. She'd kill him, on the spot. Or worse. She's capable of anything. I think at the same time he feels sorry for her. So to make up for it he's really kind to us—Mom and my sisters and me—and he's convinced us that this is the best way.”

“Oh? You have sisters?”

“Yes, two little sisters, ten and twelve.”

Although the boy went on talking, I could no longer hear a thing: my head was whirling. I could make no sense of what he was telling me—even though it should have been of capital interest—because I kept coming up against what I had just learned: Samuel had a second home, an entire family, and he stayed with me on the pretext that I was unhinged.

How convincing was my sudden leave-taking? I have no idea. In any event, I called for a taxi, and the moment I was hidden behind the car windows I burst into tears.

 

The weeks that followed were the worst in my life.

I had lost my bearings.

Samuel seemed like a total stranger to me. Everything I thought I knew about him, all my respect for him, the trust on which my love had been founded: it had all vanished. He was leading a double life, he loved another woman in another part of Paris, a woman he'd had three children with.

It was the existence of the children, more than anything, that tormented me. Because there I was in no position to fight back. A woman was someone I could compete with, although there would always be certain issues . . . but children . . .

I wept for entire days and could not hide my tears from Samuel. After trying to talk with me, he begged me to go back to my psychiatrist.

“My psychiatrist? Why
my
psychiatrist?”

“Because you've been there before.”

“Why are you insinuating, that he's mine? Was he invented to provide care for me and me alone?”

“Sorry. I said ‘your psychiatrist' when I should have said ‘our psychiatrist,' since we went to him for years.”

“Yes! For all the good it did.”

“It was very useful, Isabelle, it helped us to accept ourselves as we are, and to live with our fate. I'll make an appointment for you.”

“Why do you want me to see a psychiatrist, I'm not crazy,” I screamed.

“No, you're not crazy. But when you have a toothache, you go to the dentist's, and when you have something hurting in your soul, you go to the psychiatrist. You're just going to have to trust me on this, I can't leave you in this state.”

“Why? You're going to leave me, is that it?”

“What are you going on about? I am saying, on the contrary, that I can't leave you like this!”

“‘Leave me.' You said ‘leave me?'”

“You're really at the end of your rope, Isabelle. And I get the feeling that I'm upsetting you when I should be making you calmer.”

“Well, at least you're right on that score!”

“Have I done something wrong? Tell me. Tell me so we can get it over with.”

“‘Get it over with!' You see, you want to leave me.”

He took me in his arms, and despite my gestures of protest, he managed to hold me tenderly against him.

“I love you, you hear me? And I don't want to leave you. If I had wanted to, I would have done it a long time ago. When . . .”

“I know. No point bringing that up.”

“It would do us good to talk about it from time to time.”

“No. Useless. Taboo. We won't go there. No one can get through. Finished.”

He sighed.

Lying against his chest, his shoulders, lulled by the warm tone of his voice, I managed to calm down. The moment he gave me the slip, I would start brooding again. Was Samuel staying with me for my money? Anyone who saw our situation from the outside would say so, because he was no more than an editorial consultant for a major publishing group, and I had inherited millions in investments and real estate; I was well acquainted with Samuel's scrupulous attitude toward my capital: the reason he had continued working after we got married was so that he would not be dependent on me, and so that he could offer me gifts with his “own money”; he had refused all my attempts to set up a trust for him, and had insisted on our drawing up a marriage contract that excluded communal property. The total opposite of an interested, avid spouse. Why did he stay with me if he had a wife and children elsewhere? Perhaps he didn't love that woman enough to share a life with her? Yes, that could be it . . . He didn't dare to tell her . . . She looked so ordinary . . . he used me as a pretext so that he wouldn't have to get stuck with a manicurist . . . Basically, he preferred my company . . . But his children? I knew Samuel: how could he resist the desire to live with his children, to do his duty by them? Something very powerful must be motivating him, enough to keep him from them . . . What could it be? Me? When I couldn't give him children? Or was it cowardice? A fundamental cowardice? That cowardice my friends consider to be men's principal characteristic . . . At the end of the afternoon, as I could not settle on any one idea, I eventually concluded that his young son was right: I must have slid into madness.

 

My condition got worse. As did Samuel's. Through some sort of strange empathy, dark circles weighed down his exhausted eyes, apprehension tightened his features, and I could hear how he huffed and puffed as he climbed the stairs of our
hôtel particulier
to join me in the room I no longer left.