Three Women in a Mirror (37 page)

The pastor celebrated the memory of Tabata Kerr. What was there to say? What she herself had prepared, since she had sculpted her statue her whole life long.

Anny suspected that Tabata Kerr had never been anyone other than the character she herself had created. Nothing more. Nothing less. The recurrent heroine of her own life. Her character had devoured her person.

We were so different
, she thought.
She was full, and I am like a sieve, my life leaking out of me. Vuitton Bag faced the world as Vuitton Bag. I spill over, I hide, I run away, I don't know where I am or who I am.
For the first time, Anny did not disown herself; she wondered whether she weren't right. Her malleability was a source of anxiety, to be sure, but it made her life rich, interesting, surprising, and unexpected.

People stared at her a bit too often during the ceremony. Everyone was trying to work out what she was feeling behind her black scarf and sunglasses. Her spell in detox had attracted a lot of viewers; its sudden interruption had been the source of excessive commentary. Some people said the clinic was hiding a botched treatment; others mentioned Anny's unmanageable temperament, which, be it in a hospital room or on a film set, was capriciousness personified; finally, the Web surfers who had followed the continual nonstop rebroadcast suspected a spark between her and the nurse, an affair that Anny was hiding.

The truth was somewhere equidistant from all these hypotheses. Ethan had been arrested, caught red-handed stealing from the hospital pharmacy; a short investigation revealed that he had been taking various items for his personal use for a long time already, and he had been sentenced to five months in prison. Once Anny emerged from her drugged torpor she found out what had really happened and demanded to leave the clinic. The moment she began making accusations, the production company screened the images they had filmed over the previous days. Her professional meetings were stormy. Johanna encountered a new combative Anny, who was determined not to let herself be manipulated anymore. When Anny threatened to denounce the agreement Johanna had signed with the clinic and the television channel in her absence, the shark panicked, and immediately arranged to have her client discharged.

Restored to a more normal way of life, Anny went home. Although she did agree to have medical assistance to help her go on with the detox, she refused any other contact.

Vuitton Bag's death had pulled her out of her burrow.

By organizing this outing, Johanna was trying to reassert her role with Anny. Not only was she busy officiating as press attaché—everyone knew that, although Anny had signed with a famous agency of impresarios—in fact it was Johanna who decided on her projects.

The pastor finished his tribute.

A man in a black suit stepped forward from among the mourners to read a text. Anny could not believe her eyes: it was David, even cuter than usual, squirming with emotion. Under the pretext that he had played her grandson in
The Girl with the Red Glasses,
he was now addressing Vuitton Bag as if she were his real grandmother.

However—and Anny could testify as much—he and Vuitton Bag had not exactly been friendly on set.

“Bastard,” she murmured.

Johanna replied in a low voice, “This should have been your contribution to the ceremony, darling, but as usual you turned it down.”

“David didn't know her. And she thought he was sugary and insipid. She even said as much: ‘With my diabetes I cannot get near that boy.'”

“Peter Murphy wrote his text. One of the best writers in Hollywood.”

Anny listened closer. It was true, the little speech was full of wit, humor, and pathos. A regular little masterpiece.

Anny was disgusted.

Not even trying to be discreet, she turned around and walked away, striding toward her car. Everyone who was anyone in Hollywood watched her leave, surprised. David realized he had just lost their attention, looked up from the text, tried to figure out what was going on, and saw Anny just as she was slamming the door to her limousine in fury.

Pretending to be puzzled, he wrinkled his brow just like James Dean in
East of Eden
then, puffing out his cherubic lips, went on reading.

 

They had been driving for forty-five minutes and neither Johanna nor Anny had said a word.

Anny had given the driver an address; Johanna hadn't caught the name of the street.

Anny was lost in thought; her agent wondered how she could reconnect with her. Knowing how she had truly loved the deceased woman, she ventured onto that terrain: “What a staggering career she had, that Tabata Kerr. All the media were there to cover her funeral. She had become a Hollywood institution.”

Although she didn't react, Johanna could sense that Anny was listening.

So she went on: “What matters in this job is to stay in there. Twenty years ago you could never have made me believe that Tabata Kerr would receive so many tributes on her death.”

Anny emerged from her silence: “But that isn't what matters.”

“What isn't?”

“Fame. People seem to think nowadays that glory is the best salary.”

“When you're famous, you get different contracts than if you stay rotting in the shadow.”

“At what price, Johanna? At what price? The price is too high. Maybe you see yourself in a mirror but you belong to them. Vuitton Bag sacrificed Tabata Kerr to her fame. Everything was a pretext for a show to her: her multiple facelifts, her clever repartee, her outrageous clothing, her craggy cowboy cynicism, all her time eaten up by her career. She had nothing left. She's even given her death to posterity. Ridiculous.”

Johanna looked sincerely astonished. “I thought you loved her.”

Anny sighed.

“So did I. I admired her. I envied her. I thought she had found the way not to suffer.”

“And she had!”

“What I liked about her was the kid who didn't think she had it in her so she made up the funny character. From time to time you could see that little girl under her mask: she was laughing at her act. But she would have loved to smash the bars of her prison. And speaking of prison . . . ”

The limousine had just reached Lancaster, and stopped outside the penitentiary where Ethan was serving his sentence.

At the far end of the parking lot two buses had just arrived, filled with children coming to visit their fathers.

Anny got out of the limo. When she stepped onto the asphalt, the teenagers recognized her and, delighted, they applauded: it made them feel less abnormal to be sharing their situation with a Hollywood star.

She gave them a friendly wave then leaned over to Johanna.

“You take the car home. I'll get a taxi.”

“Thank you . . . we have to take a look at your projects, at the scripts I brought you . . . ”

“Ethan is waiting.”

Anny strode off, removing her mourning veil, and went through the blue metal gate.

Just before she went in, she emptied the contents of her handbag into the garbage can. Boxes of pills fell among the litter. She and Ethan they had sworn to make the most of his “stay” to wean themselves off all their substances, to get rid of drugs and medication.

“In prison, okay, but no chemical straitjackets,” Anny had decreed.

Fifteen minutes later, when she saw Ethan come dragging his feet up to the window of the visiting room, pale and trembling, with red eyelids and a gaunt expression and looking ten years older, Anny realized that she was managing better than he was.

Anne rushed over, placed a chair on the chest, and tried to release Ida from the rope.
To no avail.

The rope was too tight, the weight of her body hampered Anne's efforts. Calling out for help, Anne lifted her cousin in her arms to try and relieve the pressure of the hemp against her neck.

On hearing her cries, Braindor came running. Thanks to his enormous size, he was able to deliver Ida from the slipknot.

She was choking, but still breathing.

They laid her on the floor, keeping her head in line with her back.

A young beguine ran off to fetch the doctor; before she left the enclosure Anne called to her to ask for Sébastien Meus, the man from the hospice of Saint-Côme, rather than the any of the lazy doctors from the Saint-Jean hospital.

Very weak, practically unconscious, Ida silently and sadly gazed at her rescuers with her solitary eye. “Why have you done this?” said her staring eyeball. “I am so unhappy that I would have preferred to die.”

In the face of such despair, so far from the insults and rebuffs and usual ranting and raving, Anne was greatly upset, overflowing with a helpless love, and she could not hold back her tears.

“Why, Ida, why?”

 

That evening the doctor from the hospice considered Ida to be out of danger: for her pains she would have a few bruises and scratches due to the rough texture of the rope, some discomfort in her throat, difficulty swallowing, and a hoarse voice. With a piece of leather moistened so that the cowskin would take the shape of her shoulders and neck, he adroitly fabricated a sort of rigid collar, which he then dried and reinforced with wicker; she should wear it for the next two weeks.

That night, Anne took her cousin back to their little house. In the light of a solitary candle, Ida—downcast, mournful, calmer than she had ever seen her, emptied of all her venom—told her cousin what had happened.

“This morning, after you had left with Braindor and the Grande Demoiselle, I didn't heed your advice, and I decided I would go into Bruges. You see, it has been so long since I could walk somewhere and breathe in the smells of my own town. Oh, I was so happy. It seemed to me, as I crossed the bridge, that I was erasing everything, that I was canceling out the fire, healing my wounds, and I felt just like before. Alas, no sooner was I on the quayside than I noticed the way the passersby were looking at me: some were staring, stupefied, and others turned away; in the beginning, I looked around to see what sort of spectacle, what Shrovetide reveler was causing them to react in this way. Unfortunately, it was me and me alone. Then I saw Wilfried, one of my fiancés. I went running over to him, calling out his name, I was so happy to see him. Not only did he not remember me, but he ran off as if he had the devil at his heels. Like a fool, I went on calling, running after him through the streets: “Wilfried! Wilfried?” On Saint Christopher's square he met his friends—Rubben, Mathys, Faber, Pieter, Babtiste, and Aalbrecht. To be honest, I had slept with half of them and flirted with the others. When they saw their comrade come running toward them with a screaming madwoman at his heels, they burst out laughing; when I stood before them and said their names, they changed. It wasn't just disgust, Anne, it was hatred I could see in their eyes. Their pitiless gazes. Gazes that said that I was hideous and repulsive. ‘Get out of here, you witch, we don't know you.' I said my name again, ‘It's me, Ida.' They retorted with a sneer that they didn't sleep with ghouls or succubi, and they advised me to go back to Hell where I belonged. I wept. I imagine I was even more terrible with my closed eye streaming with tears. They moved away, shouting, ‘Begone, witch!' Then the children started up: ‘Witch!' As I was in too much of a state of shock to move, the six boys went off and dozens of kids gathered around me shouting, ‘Witch, witch, witch!' They started to dance around me. Demonic midgets. When I finally had the strength to move, they followed me. I walked faster. They kept coming. Then I began to run, but they caught up with me, all those snotty-nosed kids from Bruges bragging about hunting the witch. Finally I found refuge in the béguinage and I rushed to the Grande Demoiselle's house.”

“But—”

“Yes, I knew she wasn't there. I went to her house because I thought she might have one.”

“One what?”

“A mirror.”

Ida fell silent, as did Anne: what came next seemed so obvious, it was pointless to tell the story.

Silently, her lips trembling, Ida thought back to the discovery of her crippled face. What had upset her the most was to see that she had the marks of the devil on her: a toad's paw branded on the white of her eye, spots on her skin, parts of her body that had become insensitive, and her terrible thinness—in short, all signs which identified a witch and justified the children's reaction.

“That's all. I just had time to steal the rope from the tool shed and then . . . ”

“What will you do, Ida? Will you try again?”

Ida moaned.

“I am no good at dying. Every time, I survive. Flames, rope, nothing can get rid of me.”

“So, you intend to live?”

“How?”

“I will help you, I swear.”

Drugged, stunned by the revelation of her disgrace as much as by the consequences of her hanging, Ida received her cousin's kindness with gratitude. They embraced as they had not done since earliest childhood.

That night the two young women wept together for a long time. Their sobs gave them some peace and brought them closer. For the first time, Anne felt she might soon be able to enjoy happy days in Ida's company.

 

As for the Grande Demoiselle, fifty
toises
from there, she was not terribly interested in Ida's destiny, for it was Anne who greatly preoccupied her. After the interview with the archdeacon she had detected a stumbling block: the people of Bruges were incapable of hearing Anne. The time was not ripe; worse still, their prejudices induced them to hear something Anne did not actually say. “She is not the one who is far from us. We are far from her.”

If the Grande Demoiselle could see into this discrepancy so clearly, it was because in her reading and studies she had lived through many eras. In her body she belonged to her century; but in her mind she belonged to many others. The discord of the restless 16th century was not her only reference. The Greeks—Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus—above all Plotinus—Origenes, and the Latins—essentially Saint Augustin—provided food for thought, as did the Rhineland mystics, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Meister Eckart, or the enlightened mystics of Flanders, John of Ruysbroeck and Jan Van Leeuwen. But she preferred Anne's pure heart to the scholarly treatises. Because she had spent her life in books, she no longer had any illusions about them, and she knew that books could lie and shout and contradict each other; their mouths were filthy, they were a disgusting regurgitation of lubricious excess. Now when she opened a heavy tome she found the smell nauseating.