Three Women in a Mirror (32 page)

The bed. The room.

Better to stay here. It's not as crowded as dreams.

Anny is sweating. An unaccustomed chill comes over her, a chill that is not from outside but rather from within. She huddles under the thin sheet.

She knows her every movement is being watched. It is her actress's instinct. Gazes lingering on her. Eyes glued to her skin, lips commenting on her every attitude.

She examines her surroundings. There is no one. Some furniture. A clothes closet. A television screen. A window half concealed by linen curtains.

Absolutely no one.

Why does she sense a presence spying on her?

Again she is immersed in a boring dream she has already had a hundred times: she has to sing the role of Carmen even though she's never studied opera. Backstage, without getting flustered, while the orchestra and choir begin, she puts on a scarlet sheath dress, fastens a lotus flower to her hair, then joins the tenor in front of the audience. An incredible voice comes from her chest, a voice she doesn't know, sonorous, complex, rich, drowning out her partner's with a tessitura even deeper than his. A man's voice? On clacking her castanets, she sees she has forgotten to shave her armpits. Disaster.

Oh . . . this bed again.

Have the informers left yet? No. There's something sticky on her skin.

Who is spying on her?

She sits up on seeing a camera in the left-hand corner of the ceiling. A red light signals that the device is recording.

“I'm being filmed!”

On the other side too. And in that corner too. Slowly, she counts them. Five cameras. No fewer than five.

Johanna comes in, euphoric.

“How is my little darling?”

Anny thinks it's not normal for her agent to be so happy. She concludes she must still be dreaming.

Johanna, ordinarily so sparing of displays of affection, gives her a powerful hug.

“Oh, how we love you! You love to scare us whenever you can. You want us to know just how much we care about you! But we'd love you even if you didn't do such stupid things.”

Johanna's tone rings false. Strange. Typically in dreams the characters play their parts properly.

As a result, Anny hangs back, waiting for whatever comes next.

“Do you know why you're here?”

Anny shakes her head.

“You don't remember?”

Anny remembers very clearly shooting up in the toilets, and then the moment she lost consciousness; in that instant she even thought she was going to die. However, just to find out what Johanna will say in her dream, she feigns amnesia.

“Well, you . . . overdid it a bit. The stress, no doubt. Fear of criticism. Poor Anny . . . you really were wrong to be afraid of their reactions.”

With a sudden change of demeanor Johanna stands up and cries out, full of energy, “Darling, it was a triumph!
The Girl with the Red Glasses
has been hailed as a major film. You've stunned audiences and the media. Bravo! They're already talking about nominations for the Golden Globes and the Oscars. The distributor has increased the numbers of copies for the theaters.”

There was a sort of false energy to Johanna's behavior, which was causing her to yell; clearly it wasn't Anny she was addressing but someone standing sixty feet away.

Anny looked around her. Who was Johanna trying to convince? Who was it for, this show of a press attaché at the peak of her professional career?

“What a pity you weren't able to go up on stage. People were waiting for you, there was a standing ovation. Only Zac and Tabata Kerr managed to enjoy the moment.”

Tabata Kerr? Johanna never called her anything but Vuitton Bag. Something weird was going on.

Then something about Johanna's gaze clued her in. Johanna had just stared at a camera not far from there, and then, flustered, she had looked down. Johanna knew they were being filmed and was trying to act naturally.

“What's going on, Johanna? Why are there cameras here?”

Johanna hesitated, picked up her cell phone, and dialed a number. Forgetting her earlier unctuousness, she asked curtly, “Well, then, what do I do?”

There was a crackling reply.

Johanna went on.

“Fine.”

From then on Anny noticed a change of mood. As she looked around her she noticed that the red lights above the cameras had gone off.

Johanna sat down and adopted a less contrived attitude.

“Anny, you're in deep shit, but I've fixed it.”

“I beg your pardon? Are you a specialist in shit, too?”

“I transform shit into gold. In the old days we used to be called alchemists, and today we're just good agents. Listen, it's simple: since the ‘premiere' incident, we can no longer hide your addiction to drugs and alcohol, so I decided to transform you into a role model.”

“A role model for what, for Christ's sake?”

“A role model of repentance. You will get better, Anny, you will look after yourself, not only for your own sake, but for other people's, too. You're going to show them the way, demonstrate to young people and to their distraught parents that there is a way out.”

“A way out of what?”

“Drugs. Alcohol. Addiction.”

“You seem very sure of yourself.”

Johanna looked at her, hesitated, seemed to shrink, then exclaimed abruptly, “I signed.”

“You what?”

“I signed. Your disgrace was public, you redemption will be public, too. If you don't want your career to go under, we have to put on the spectacle of your rebirth. American-TV has agreed to go along with it.”

She leaned closer to Anny and whispered in her ear: “Four million dollars. And if you factor in the press play, it's worth double that amount.”

She sat up straight, proud of herself, smiling her happy shark's smile, which was so radically different from the pseudo-affectionate pity that had characterized her behavior on arrival.

Anny did not react, all the more so as she wondered whether this scene was unfolding in a dream or in reality. But the arrangement was so monstrous that she couldn't really choose: it was as immoral as a nightmare, as violent as reality.

Applying the principle “silence gives consent,” Johanna reached for her cell phone.

“Okay, we're on. Go on filming.”

Four seconds later, the red light on the cameras came back on.

Johanna filled her voice with honey again, found a way to include the film title
The Girl with the Red Glasses
three times in a row, then took her leave, openly jubilant.

What a bad actress
, thought Anny, watching her leave.

Of that much, at any rate, she was certain; the rest was chaos.

Then it was Dr. Sinead's turn to come into the room. Eager to have a strong screen presence, this time he didn't come with a cluster of assistants in his wake, only two young doctors following at a respectful distance, like bodyguards accentuating the importance of the individual they are escorting.

Anny immediately acted the shocked, dazed patient who is all docility. Hiding behind her stunned manner, she watched as Sinead performed his super-therapist role for the cameras.

The octogenarian with the stitched-up face was flawless. To start with, he was so courteously indulgent with his patient, and he acknowledged that youth was a difficult period in life—there, for a moment, he actually seemed sincere, it gave him so much satisfaction to sneer at his lost youth. Then he reopened the wound, exaggerating Anny's suffering. Thirdly, he cauterized it: calling on her self-esteem, he aroused her inner child, the future mother, mixed it all up, celebrated life, love of life, the future of life, and tried his utmost to conjure pathos, so far removed from his dry, exacting, sharp character. Anny was perfectly aware that he was hamming it up, and she didn't listen; she merely noticed that his makeup gave him orange skin, that his eyebrows would look better if they had been dyed to the same degree as his hair.

It is better to accept aging than to refuse it. Including for aesthetic reasons.

That was the only thought that came to her during the entire interview, which, it seemed, did not have anything to do with her.

“Do we agree on that, young woman? Are you prepared to trust me?”

Given his tonic insistence, she understood that this was the last line of the scene in Sinead's performance. Resorting to fleeting glimpses of her dream—she was ad-libbing Carmen, having neither memorized her lines nor rehearsed—she mumbled her consent.

Satisfied, Sinead took his leave.

As he went out the door, forgetting that he was still on camera, he gave a proud smile, the actor who is delighted the shoot has gone well. His vanity fell like a hair on soup after the scene he had performed with such rigorous restraint.

“What a novice,” sighed Anny.

She closed her eyes and went back to sleep.

 

At half past six, Ethan showed up with a meal on a tray. He was not acting. His only concern—to help Anny—was clear in his every gesture, his every intonation.

The moment he was there by her side Anny felt good. They spoke lightly, of serious things.

When she had finished her dinner, he looked at his watch.

“Seven o'clock,” he announced.

Something changed in the consistency of the air. Once again, the cameras stopped.

Taking a pill box from his pocket, Ethan administered Anny's medication.

“No more cameras after seven?” she asked.

“No. The shoot will start again in three minutes. The broadcast has two formats: twenty-four hours a day for the Internet broadcasts, and a twenty-minute edited daily summary for TV. So we can only take very short breaks. The producers and the clinic don't want to film you taking your medicine. First of all, to preserve medical confidentiality; secondly because the documentary is meant to emphasize your strength and determination.”

Anny mused over his words as she docilely swallowed the gelcaps.

The red lights on the cameras came back on the moment Ethan shoved the wrappers into the wastebasket.

“I'd like to go to the bathroom, please.”

Ethan helped her to sit up on the edge of the bed, then supported her as she walked to the tiled bathroom.

Inside, the railings along the walls enabled Anny to drag herself over to the sink.

There she stood and peered at herself. She was pale, as if she'd been through the wringer, like a woman who has just given birth. Her hair hung in anemic strands. Here and there her skin looked yellow.

She looked closer, massaging her eyelids with her fingertips.

She had a strange feeling.

Were they still looking at her?

They wouldn't do that, would they?

Turning her head slowly, she examined the tiled bathroom walls, to make sure there were no cameras or microphones on any side.

Then where was this feeling coming from?

Was she getting paranoid?

She shrugged: just because you're afraid of the situation doesn't mean it exists; she had to calm down.

She leaned closer to take a better look at herself.

Suddenly she saw something move. No, it wasn't somewhere nearby, it was there, inside the mirror. Or rather, behind its silvered layer.

What?

She went even closer and then realized, from the inconsistency of the reflection, from a suspicious translucency, that she was leaning into a two-way mirror, and behind the surface there was a whole host of cameras.

When Ida burst from the house and collapsed on the ground, she was not yet dead, but there was not much that was human about her: her flesh was charred and raging, devoured by flames, struggling against the enemy.

Without hesitating, Anne tore off her petticoats to throw them over the wounded woman, to cover her and stifle the flames that were devouring her. Her blazing body wriggled madly, she shouted, swore, and struggled, hitting Anne and insulting her, but Anne did not give up and managed to control both her cousin and the flames.

While the men from the neighborhood fought to keep the fire from spreading to the entire street, she stood up, displaying a hitherto unseen authority, and ordered that Ida be taken to the Saint-Jean hospital. In the time it took for the men to go and fetch the planks to make a stretcher, she drew water from the canal, and doused the petticoats, making sure that not a single spark remained in her cousin's hair or garments.

Two red-haired giants rolled Ida onto the stretcher, and although she went on thundering against them, they set off with her at a run.

“She's in too much pain,” said one of the men as Ida screamed with every jolt. “Let's stop at the convent of the Cordeliers. There is a very good doctor at the hospice.”

A few streets further along they knocked at a window pane.

Sébastien Meus looked out the window.

“He is the best doctor in Bruges,” murmured the strapping man to Anne.

Sébastien did not reproach them for waking him up in the middle of the night, for he had grasped the situation. He opened the reinforced door and told them there was a place in the hospice of Saint-Côme. With the help of the two giants, he placed a vat over the dying woman, and asked Anne to run to the well to fetch water to fill it. As soon as she had done this, he opened a slot that let the water drip in multiple places.

For an hour they kept running back and forth from the fountain to the vat in order to keep the water dripping onto Ida, and eventually, between two volleys of swear words, her moans subsided.

Then the doctor slowly unfastened her soaking garments, and pulled them away from her skin, careful not to pull the skin with them. Then he took a jar of a greasy cream and as gently as possible applied it to the burns.

At the height of her suffering Ida had been screaming and ranting; neither the doctor nor Anne listened to her obscenities, which were merely a shocking variation on her pain.

At lauds, as dawn was breaking, Ida fell asleep, her strength gone. Anne watched over her as if her vigilance would help her cousin to get better. She held Ida's hand, which was intact, and tried to breathe her strength and energy into her.