She shouldn’t smoke. The cigarette pack tells her so in big raw black letters. It’s bad for you, one can read there; it causes cancer, kills embryos and brings on emphysema. If you take the other dangers into account — planes, chemicals, late payments, rape, wars and maraschino cherries — there is nobody who can hope to die normally.
Suzanne lights up, presses her lips to the filter, inhales, nervous, coughs. What else? There’s stress in its slyest forms, cars, drinking and driving, that’s criminal, staircases, icicles on the roofs, flesh-eating bacteria, dog mess on the sidewalks, careless cyclists, cholesterol, aerosols, decibels, hereditary diseases, venereal ones, AIDS, nausea, heartbreak!
She swallows a mouthful of smoke the wrong way, too hot. Her lungs are furious. She coughs until her spine folds over, tries to find her air again and her calm. She grabs blindly at a tissue and brings it to her mouth; her vision blurs. She takes off her glasses, wipes her eyes, wheezes a little more, clears her throat. She should never have started smoking, more than sixty years ago now. It’s too late. She lowers her eyes. Too late for everything?
Once the coughing is contained, she leans back against the arm of the sofa and lifts the cigarette proudly back to her mouth, inhaling this time more easily. This or die of something else. The count will come out the same either way: a big fat zero. Before Suzanne and after Suzanne. Zero.
Toxic constituents (Average) / Substances toxiques (Moyenne) “Tar/Goudron” 13 mg, Nicotine 1.1 mg, Carbon monoxide / Oxyde de carbone 13 mg
She can read the ingredients as much as she likes; she can’t make out any diabolical engine in there. Such small quantities. Poison as fine as time passing.
Nicotine 1.1 mg. Do we need to know it to a tenth of a milligram? Nic-o-o-o-tine. The harsh taste of the drug clogs her taste buds. Soon there’ll be nothing but her, this invisible substance with a child-character’s name. She blows the smoke out. The storm, and then the fog forms in the room. Draws in, breathes out, smiles in the half-light, amuses herself: ni-co-tine-tine, ni-co-ni-co-tine. She coughs again, brings her hand to her mouth to smother the noise, then tells herself she’s being stupid. Her husband can’t hear her, drowned as he is in his ocean of morphine. He is technically dead. After a brief inward silence she repeats the word to herself, under her breath: “dead.” Then louder: “DEAD.” Quick, a little more nicotine in the throat.
She tries to relax. Outside, the wind is blowing timid gusts. The weathermen have predicted the storm of the century. Nico-nico-co-tine. Her thoughts want to be more mischievous than the circumstances warrant. She is tired; she pulls the smoke in with the firm intention of driving it deep into her lungs. The dog is lying near his master. Perhaps he’ll give the signal… come and fetch his mistress, push her towards the obligatory sadness. The lungs absorb the poison. The heart speeds up. Suzanne breathes out. The smoke joins the bluish mass that hangs, an announcing stratus of torments, halfway between the floor and the ceiling. She dares to smoke in the living room, and doesn’t even have an ashtray. A month ago she would have gone outside so as not to bother Henri. Or to get away from him? She doesn’t know, doesn’t want to know. She takes a good dose of nicotine. Henri is going to die tonight. She relaxes, thinks better of it, feels guilty at glimpsing her freedom this way, then thinks better of that too. Her happiness is stamping its feet, she knows, but she doesn’t want to open the door to it just yet.
She watches the window. The weathermen must be wrong; there is so little wind out there. It won’t be the first time Mother Nature has played that trick on them. Her son told her, though, with the fresh science of a popular book, that “chaos can’t be calculated, it can only be probabilized.” And weather is chaos, one mathematical variable among others, one more uncertainty, he had concluded, thoughtful. She shrugs. She should have called him, him and the others.
And then no. You don’t say things like that; you keep silent and the others understand. Or you wait until it’s too late to call and say, “It’s now or never if you want to see your father alive.” She shakes her head. Too sentimental. “It’s over, he won’t last the night.” That isn’t it either; they’ll come rushing and pace up and down the house, anxious to meet her face to face for the first time, kneaded full of good intentions. She calculates their behaviour. Too complicated. Better to leave them in ignorance. She doesn’t want to see anyone. And, probable as it is, Henri’s death isn’t guaranteed. He has a hard bark. She has decided. She will not call her children. They’ll certainly hold it against her, but they’ll excuse her right away; they’ll have to understand, she tells herself, taking her dead cigarette butt as her witness. She smokes too fast, makes herself dizzy too fast, hopes too fast for Henri’s end.
The ashtray is in the kitchen. She looks at the carpet. The temptation to drop the butt is strong. She sighs; she’s past the age for that kind of folly. She gets up. It’s difficult — the bones jolt, the muscles grind. It’s the nicotine’s fault, it’s the cholesterol’s fault, it’s her life’s fault, and it’s the fault of the young doctor who made a courtesy call. He’s new in the neighbourhood, trying to change the course of medicine. She finds him likeable, even if she keeps her distance. He was pitiful to see, with that slightly empty look of men who have to deliver the final diagnosis and follow it with the customary sympathies. She had interrupted him just as he was about to mumble something: “You don’t like losing, do you?” Surprised, he had seemed relieved all the same. She had held out Henri’s health-insurance card and he had refused it obsequiously. She had insisted. So as not to cross her, he had taken his machine out of his bag, slid the card in with a slip, pressed a button. The device let out an ungracious noise. Embarrassed, he had handed the card back.
“Are you alone?” He wanted to help; she had smiled, amused, had nearly said “is that an offer?”, and had patted his shoulder instead. “I’ve got her.” With her head she pointed towards Annie’s room. He had smiled back, knowing all the same that Annie could be of no use whatever. Suzanne already had a cigarette in her hands. He had pointed at it, meaning by that that he didn’t approve of her smoking. It’s bad for everybody, and by everybody one must understand her, her husband, the neighbours, society, the planet. Smokers are witches who cast spells on every lung on earth. “It’s bad,” was all he said. Suzanne’s silence could pass for suffering, and he had fallen quiet.
He had picked up his coat and left without saying goodbye, then thought better of it, opened the door again and threw out “you’ll call me…”, without finishing his sentence, because he still couldn’t manage to say “when he’s dead.” She had nodded. That was the moment the countdown began. She had looked at the clock, gave Henri until six in the morning, then looked at the doctor. “Go home, the storm is rising.”
All of it was slightly grotesque. It wasn’t the young man’s fault, though. He wasn’t used to it, that’s all; he hadn’t that pure gift of cold detachment the professionals have nowadays; he still wanted to do well. And doing well is so rare. She already resented herself for being what she has become, a suffering old woman turned mean from wanting happiness. She was tempted to call him back and apologize. He certainly wouldn’t have understood, and with age he still won’t understand; he will shut himself up inside his own sufferings while probably taking up smoking.
She reads again what is printed on the cigarette pack, pulls one out, lights it. The nicotine makes her dizzy, makes her mean perhaps, or sad. A long hooting crosses the walls. She looks out of the window as though she might see there some tangible trace of the wind. The storm is arriving; it has just asserted its possession of the city.
The doctor had slipped in, all the same, before shutting the door: “Yeah, won’t be pretty tonight.” It was his way of saying that one had to go on living, and of hoping too that Henri wouldn’t die during the storm. The ambulances would be slow in coming; she would be obliged to endure the corpse longer than expected.
After the doctor left, she had called the parish priest to “reserve.” There was no answer at the presbytery. The secretary or the priest was perhaps in the toilet — each in turn, naturally. She smiles. Perhaps not. Henri wanted, wants a Christian funeral. She sighs. The doctor is the one who is right: she is suffering. Of course. The stress shows around her lips when she presses them to the cigarette. The filter is slightly crushed, forming yellow streaks that are almost pretty. The fingers come and go, imprison the cigarette skilfully, straighten it, lay it down, rid it of its ash with one sharp tap. The far end of the cigarette lights up like a warning light for the stress accumulated over the hours of waiting. That’s all there is, the years of waiting. Of course she’s suffering. She is seventy-seven years old and has brought five boys and a girl into the world. The first became an engineer, the second a pharmacist, the third is a speleologist, another is a murderer, the second-to-last is a playwright. The last one has never had a name for what she is. Suzanne suffers like everybody else. The priests say so: one must suffer. She amuses herself with the idea. So if one must suffer, she may smoke. The ways of the good Lord are impenetrable. She juggles gently with this idea of destiny, doesn’t quite know what to do with it.
Of course she’s suffering. Maybe it’s the stress, maybe it’s the cigarette, the ashtray she felt obliged to go and fetch from the kitchen. Maybe it’s the many anxieties of a whole life pushing into her thinking; the fact remains that she feels dangerous, somewhere between the edge of tears and a fit of nerves, between one misfortune and another. She bites a nail that has no chance, in any case, of ever taking polish again, since that would give its surface the look of a lunar crust. Suzanne’s pride died long ago, no doubt the first corpse of her memories and the last of her worries. You have to amuse yourself with words, she tells herself.
She bites another nail, sucks the finger while she’s at it; the other two hold the cigarette, a pinkish smoke nosing about now and then near her nostrils. The little finger does nothing, up in the air like an antenna. Nico-co-tine. Seventy-seven years old and she still sings herself nursery rhymes. The cells of the upper cortex are the only ones that don’t age, her son once explained to her. Suzanne would like, tonight, to put on the little dress with the plastic lace she wore in her youth. She’d look like Franfreluche, off to tell “a nicotine-y story…” Annie liked that programme, even if nothing in her ever let that happiness show. Suzanne knew, because Annie would breathe very softly then, regularly. To the rhythm of her purity? That depends.
The storm of the century is taking a ridiculous time to rise. The house is sometimes shaken by clumsy gusts, sometimes left behind in the anonymous cold of a city winter. Suzanne sits up straight, with the sagging shoulders of a woman who has seen it all, who has crossed her life — hers, nothing but the thin trickle of water that is her existence, already ready to dry up and die. A single r in that word, the opposite of nourishing. One letter between dying and dining.
Her years of teaching have got the better of her brain. When she “goes out” in her turn, when she stops trading with the oxygen, her body will be burned until it becomes chalk to be thrown into illiterate nature. When she dies, nobody will be left to remember that she had once been a free woman.
She listens to the silence. She feels sick, listens again, tries to listen, because the silence is going to ground, weakened by the many assaults of the ordinary noises of a sleeping house and of the storm of the century. Henri is dying. He is dying all alone. That’s what he deserves. The crackle of burning tobacco is like glass being gently crushed. Anguish. The crushed glass transmits the wounds of anguish to her lungs.
The waiting would have been different if Henri hadn’t dug in his heels about dying at home. Even in great pain, he couldn’t tolerate other people’s pain. His decision had made the nurses sigh with relief, because he was far too irascible for the hospital staff to endure him much longer, short of increasing the dose of tranquillizers on the quiet…
Suzanne would have liked it that way: a small death without incident, protected by his machines, both feet already in the tomb of the hospital statistics, gagged by drugs so that he could neither raise his voice nor say goodbye, nor rage, nor cling to her to beg her pardon. He would have died in the night while the nurses yawned like great insensible birds observing the evanescent souls. They would have found his corpse in the morning. They would have telephoned Suzanne, who would have said: “I’m on my way.” She would have hurried over to get it done as fast as possible. On arriving, she would have seen under the hospital sheet a distant thing, a blue body, transfigured by the last brutal attempts at resuscitation, soulless and harmless. She would have signed a paper and the body would have gone straight into the hands of science. Henri wanted to donate his body. “Nobody wants it,” she had thrown at him. He had looked at her and spat on the floor. That was a year ago, at the point when he thought he could get the better of his illness. He said all sorts of stupid things and everybody listened to him. He had finally changed his mind and wanted to be cremated. You’d have thought he was managing to take cold administrative decisions, but Suzanne wasn’t fooled by it. A man’s balls are very small things in the face of the female of Hades. Suzanne herself had become a kind of hierophant, protecting her heart by casting mute spells, no more initiated into the mysteries of Eleusis than some New Age huckster, but steeped in the vengeance and the sorcery of adults. In her own courage, she did not believe.
She smokes, she fumes, she smokes: setting yourself examinations of conscience and never passing them — she knows all about that. She breathes deeply, is short of air. There’s too much smoke in the living room; she makes a useless gesture to push the fog aside.
The storm has launched its cavalry against the houses of the city. She absently imagines the combat of the trees against the wind. Two weeks ago now, the friends and neighbours came to pay Henri either a last visit or a contrite homage — the neighbours, who lose in him a proud homeowner; the friends, fewer and fewer of them, falling themselves too into the sleep of souls; and above all the children, who don’t know what to think, whether to kiss the pater’s hand or attempt a timid pardon. Henri did things in style; he had announced his death and people were obliged to come and salute him. He was admired for it. Suzanne did as much. Henri was too young to die, people said. Suzanne lowered her eyes in silent protest.
At the beginning he cut quite a figure in his bed. Propped up by many pillows, he sat enthroned, gave his orders to his wife, constantly demanded those little nothings that end up weighing on you because there are so many of them. Henri was rarely alone, which spared Suzanne the obligation of being present to him at every moment. If they found themselves without witnesses, she didn’t start a conversation; she arranged his bed, put the pillows back. He generally kept his eyes shut, because he was in pain, and was recovering that way before the next visit.
Their mutism was part of their routine, their circus, their marriage, that long rosary of tricks and pranks. The magic of love had flown away, taking with it those illusions that delight naive lovers. The applause was rather rare, the smiles rarer still, the conventions numerous, and the aged hours flapped about like clowns overwhelmed by the task. She was too old now, too old for these things, for the manipulations of the heart and the political caresses — perhaps too old to live again, to change her life. The one certainty? Tomorrow.
A long cry pulls her out of her reverie. She opens her eyes, listens. There’s only the storm. Is Annie going to call her again? The cry is repeated. Is she having a nightmare? Or is it a ruse? Is she even capable of one? Suzanne stubs out her cigarette, gets up reluctantly, drags rather than lifts her feet towards the room of the daughter she had brought back for a few days. It was she who asked the care home for it. She has not tried to find out why. Suzanne opens the door without making a sound, stays in the gap. Her eyes are neither astonished nor really trying to explore the room.
Annie is pretending to be a corpse, lying on her back, her mouth sewn shut.
What’s wrong, Annie?
No answer, obviously. The scenario repeats itself. Annie calls, one comes running, Annie isn’t there. She is a ghost, Suzanne tells herself. Annie breathes hard, a big girl with a foetus’s brain, the menstrual blood turning up on schedule but the soul — the one that writes beautiful books and wounds hearts — that, she doesn’t have. Perhaps it’s better that way. Annie is a kind of machine, a vegetable that swells with the moon and throws out cries like an automaton Cassandra. All you have to do is wash her, feed her, and wait for her to wake up or to die. It’s money wasted. “That’s not it,” she tells herself, “it’s more complicated than that, it’s simply more complicated.”
She repeats her question.
What’s wrong, Annie?
Annie repeats her silence.
Why did you cry out, Annie?
You always have to say the name again.
…
A nightmare, Annie?
Repeat, repeat, repeat. She must know perfectly well what her name is.
…
Suzanne leans her head against the wall. She can see the three little dots of suspension in their dialogue quite clearly. They make regular stains on her mother’s conscience. Her daughter probably resents her for having abandoned her. So she protests through this silence that already governed her days. Silence upon silence, zero upon zero. A life that never began.
Suzanne shuts the door. How many times has she made that gesture? She goes back to the living room, avoids looking into her husband’s room. Zero. She sits down, lights a cigarette. It’s her third in a row. Her heart races.
The noises. Too many noises and not enough atmosphere. Or is it the other way round? Doing nothing is dangerous. The smoke is dense when it comes out of her lungs; life is ugly, it sticks to the fog. “Do something.” She gives herself orders. A voice gives her orders. The distance is there all right, between what she lives and what she would like to be.
She gets up, goes to the window. A gust tries to dissuade her by throwing a handful of snow at her. But Suzanne, like the other humans, is a witch, and the snow stops suddenly, falls shattered against an invisible wall. The storm roars.
The noises. There must certainly be a great many noises outside. The city hasn’t changed. Always the same and never the same. The house is well situated, nestled in a curve, allowing a privileged view over the city. The neighbourhood isn’t what it was. When they bought, at the beginning of their marriage, only a small secondary road linked them to the city. Now it’s another matter. The well-off, protected by trees as rich as they are, have left the crown of the mountain to invade its flanks and its plateau. The neighbourhood has become a motley mixture of well-heeled houses and thin, barely bourgeois cottages.
Few passers-by. The street loses itself in the organized belly of the city. A string of neon pulses close to the horizon, downtown. The activity there certainly hasn’t diminished. Suzanne doesn’t go often, is afraid after three in the afternoon. The traffic is too dense, the people too many, the prices too high, the laughter too nervous, life too fast. And the eyes of the down-and-outs — she cannot bear them, wet, the sorrow and the misfortune oiling their vision, made inadequate by malnutrition and by animal pleasure. Perhaps that’s what frightens her most, the animal pleasure, that dog’s ease they have of taking out their penis and coming in broad daylight. Too much misery, too much storm. Her suburb is quieter, a sort of cemetery where the dramas cross the thresholds of the houses only feet first, garnished with a few discreet flashing lights.
She tires quickly, can’t stay standing long. Her legs have always betrayed her; she doesn’t remember running once in her whole existence. Hurrying, yes, but running — she has always done it at a trot, like a Japanese woman. And now she is nothing but an old North American surrounded by her furniture. Watching the snow arrive from the far heights of the clouds, she tells herself she hasn’t travelled much; Henri didn’t want to. Henri didn’t want anything, kept her from living, put spokes in her wheels. She let him do it, had her children. Fell asleep. Made no attempt to run. Frozen, cemented, blinded. She resents herself so much. She dreads the answer that is beginning to show in her head, drives it off with the wind of the storm. Is it really too late to start again?
The window is cold; the snow lifts like so many rays of the sea working their way out of their ocean hiding place. Out of the tumult a staggering silhouette suddenly detaches itself, disappearing from time to time under veils of snow. A vagrant, perhaps. No — it’s a woman. Suzanne narrows her eyes, can’t quite make out the shades. She’ll have to change her glasses; make an appointment with the optometrist tomorrow. Idiot, your husband is dying. Make the appointment with the optometrist anyway. Outside, the woman leans against a wall. She goes into the little café, at the foot of the mountain, the very place where Suzanne fled to this afternoon, before the doctor came. She had needed air, needed to escape the vice her house has become. She knows the regulars at the café, people a little young for her, but polite all the same, intellectuals with concrete smiles, smiles for the occasion, the sort that say don’t disturb me in my little bubble. And in the shadows, close to the walls, they keep their tinted glasses, their hair bleached with peroxide, and think they could do as much with their own smallness — make it shine like a rare pearl, though one forgotten at the bottom of the sea.
What matters is that they are polite and distant. That suits her. She would have liked to be an intellectual, after all; she was one before she knew Henri, read things that gave her hope, had fallen in love with Sartre and wanted to sleep with him, thought you had to want it in order to believe it, or the other way round — believe in order to obtain every right — smoked cigarettes to defy the proprieties, didn’t yet know that she would become one more propriety herself, someone who has aged, who got caught by the puppeteers of tobacco.
And then today there had been that policeman who worked at the prison where her son is locked up… She has no news of him. He doesn’t want to talk to anyone. He is mad. She flinches. At least a kind of madness, an obsession. It’s a long time since Henri banished him from his life… after what he did… She herself can’t manage to understand, but she has stopped trying to grasp it; she can only do what other mothers do — go on loving their murderer sons. She says his name, very low. Camille. Such a gentle name, though, harmless as camomile. She rests her forehead against the frozen pane. That innocence of the name which, like nicotine, hides a child-hell. So she will have given birth to monsters? She catches herself, bites her lips. Why do herself so much harm; she cannot be responsible for chaos, whether or not it came out of her own belly. She did what she could, gave all the love she was capable of.
The woman comes out of the café. She didn’t stay long, unless it’s Suzanne who has lost, once again, all sense of time. What is she doing? She is still very far away, walking slowly, turning round often, protecting herself as best she can from the cold — so she isn’t dressed for the storm. Does she at least have boots, Suzanne wonders. Yes, and her clothes aren’t rags. She hasn’t done up her buttons! She goes into the neighbourhood bookshop, only to come out again almost at once. Now she seems determined to climb. It’s madness. Suzanne’s house is a good hundred metres from there. The slope, already steep, is full of slippery traps. Where is she going? Should she be intercepted? Suzanne thinks better of it. The woman may be on drugs, would make too much of a scene. But it’s so dangerous past that curve. There are still a few houses, each more indifferent than the last to what happens in the street, and then it’s the forest, the rapists. You have to wait until the summit to find some semblance of civilization, and even then the houses cower far back from the road, showing off their undulating fenced-in lawns. There’s only the old lookout, open to everyone.
The woman stops in front of the house. Suzanne moves back from the window. The woman is out of breath. Crying? She pulls her coat closed again, that coat she doesn’t seem able to bring herself to button. Yes, she does. God, she’s shaking. Suzanne is worried. The woman looks behind her, seems to think very hard, then looks at the mountain. A motorist passes close by her and honks. She doesn’t flinch. She looks one last time at the city and begins the ascent, disappears quickly into the dark. Suzanne shrugs. There are too many madmen in this city, she thinks. There are too many people who suffer.
The street, deserted now, offers nothing more of interest; the lights and the neon pitch to the rhythm of the wind and, from the window, look entirely voiceless. Cars cross streets, disappear never to return; the herds of cowboys freely lay down the law again — not a cat, not a passer-by, only the spectres and the shadows dancing, not like Spaniards but like Hindus, the footsteps of time.
The clock on the wall strikes the hour. Suzanne jumps. Eight o’clock. Time is probably playing with her. Hadn’t she looked at her watch five minutes ago? Where has the hour gone? Perhaps Suzanne dreamed it. It’s no doubt age, she thinks; telling herself that has become a mania. The clock finishes resounding in the room. A good many things will change when Henri is no longer there, beginning with that damned pendulum that howls, every sixty minutes, that the world is going to die and that the hours are numbered.
Annie lets out another of those cries she has the recipe for. A small hard cry, followed by a kind of lament, a whistle of inward bile. Yes, a good many things will change. She has to lean against the edge of the window. It will have taken fifty-eight years. Fifty-eight years made of happinesses and of just as many miseries. For better, without forgetting the worse — the suffocation of the last years above all, the sick husband, Henri’s irascibility, his daily meannesses, the tiredness too, the weight of the years, a little heavier with each hour marked by the clock, the bones weaker, the chalk erasing itself all by itself on the blackboard of her memory, the innumerable chaos that can perhaps be probabilized but that certainly knocks you out. She concentrates on the silence. The ghosts are there. Hers, of course. One gets so used to oneself: the shadows of sufferings hovering over the valleys of happiness, the words that wounded, all through those long years, and that slowly weave the web of the end; the happy words, the happy gestures, the necessary sufferings, the children. So many ghosts.
She has to sit down. There’s no point in doing herself so much harm. She only hopes the years left to her will be happier. She will not pray to God for it. She’ll wait a little longer, as she knows so well how to do; she’ll wait for the right moment. She looks at her cigarette, has hardly smoked it. An accented e followed by a mute one, because the past participle must agree. An accented e, Henri, followed by a mute one — her.
The flakes are falling thick now. The temperature inside has dropped slightly. The house breathes badly, doesn’t adapt easily to changes in atmospheric pressure. Suzanne takes hold of the cardigan she’d taken care to bring with her. She hasn’t slept for days. Henri’s death throes are too long, she thinks. He oughtn’t to hold out like this. He is barely capable of breathing. He ought to understand that he has to go, leave everyone in peace. But a dying man doesn’t reason, she tells herself; he clings on, drugged with love for life, unwilling to fall into oblivion.
She will certainly do the same. Henri, too, smoked too much for too long. He is paying for it now, but Suzanne tells herself he is paying for something else, all the other things he made those around him suffer. Such a handsome man at the start, a force of nature, the blue eyes of life, the energy of athletes, the promises of a happy marriage, many children, happy gestures, endless caresses. Suzanne pulls a little hard on her cigarette. The rest of the story is dangerously classic: boredom, the assurance of comfort, the first failures, Annie, Camille, alcohol, adultery.
The wind seems to enjoin her to be quiet. She listens to the storm, has always loved the sound of the wind on the windows, the warmth sheltering, fearful, between the walls of the house, the snow that little by little turns the windows into postcards, the moving shadows, so many ghosts and elves, so many mysteries impossible to grasp, a solitary music, sad, heavy, nobody’s music, the music of the immense universe turning and striking against the house, the snow and its billions of kamikaze flakes that feet will destroy still further, and pack down into a seasonal névé.
Suzanne coughs; she really ought to stop smoking. It’s impossible, of course; the nico-nicotine has become a starving wolf, has paved the lungs with tar so that the evil can travel at speed towards the final destruction. Annie throws out another small cry. Annie, Annie, the forty-five-year-old child who always keeps silent. She repeats to herself, “Annie, Annie, Annie, Annie.” She coughs again; her eyes fill with water. It’s hard to stay calm. Henri is there, waiting for death. His room is painfully silent. She would have preferred him to die yelling, or to be in enough pain to stop the others breathing. His death is mute. Suzanne has no purchase on it. She doesn’t like herself for thinking all this, but she can’t help it.
Obese flakes are flung in every direction; the house creaks, will hold, of course. Suzanne looks at her watch. Only ten minutes gone. A while ago it was going so fast. She doesn’t know what to do any more, settles herself comfortably, takes a breath, then another, listens to it the way she listens to the storm, the way she has gone out to meet, for many years, the smallest gestures of every one of them.
She tells herself she has fulfilled her role as a mother and, to convince herself, looks at her hands. They are mountainous; they have done everything except perhaps travel. They were fine and white in those days, without scales, having struck no reef. The nails were long, pointed, garnished with a fashionable red that matched the red of her lips. Her hands are round now, armour-plated, with the softness of grandmothers; they give sweets and lavish caresses on the grandchildren and stop themselves from warning them of the dangers that await them all. They have become very skilful — a knitted thing here, a quilt there, a little dish, a good sauce, the sheets always without a crease. They have curved; the muscles are formed to the task, the skin substantial, apt at absorbing tears, at correcting pain.
Suzanne has become all that: expert, slow hands. She has become what age has given her, the certainty and the wisdom that time hands as a gift to those who are going to die one day or another. She goes on with her observation. Her hands have never been violent; they have scratched, certainly, but out of love. They have never put fists on the table, always dots on the is. That makes her smile, and then it makes her nervous. The only freedom she ever possessed was her years as a schoolteacher. She tells herself she oughtn’t to have given it up so early. She’s biting her fingers about it now. Yes, she felt free, even if it obliged her to a perilous organizational gymnastics. In that, she was modern for a long time, even if nobody knew the word yet.
She stretches her arms out in front of her. They aren’t as straight as they used to be. Nothing is. It certainly isn’t she who is going to be surprised by that. She swings them lightly like an old tree bored with the wind. She feels ridiculous, lowers them, sighs, extracts a fourth cigarette from the pack.
Inside her head, inside that wretched skull-box, her thoughts get muddled, as adolescent as ever. She brings the lighter to the cigarette, works the flint; the flame springs up and burns the first fibres of tobacco. She draws in; the smoke is hot and harsh. Nico-co-tine. She trembles a little, sets the lighter down on the coffee table, breathes out hard. The slow fog of the beginning has given way to the atmosphere of an industrial city. What is left inside her head? Everything? Nothing? Her body is quietly abandoning her: a bone hurts here, an ear buzzes now and then, the bladder heats up over nothing, the head gets tired of turning too fast.
Her free hand caresses the sofa. Things, they wear out without weeping — only a few creakings that will make them likeable. Among living beings, wear happens in silence, in the tightenings of the heart, in the memory of youth and the sweetness of knowing, in that sugared mixture of maturity and ruined hopes.
A book lies flat at the end of the sofa. She takes it, looks at the cover, opens it where she folded down the top corner of the page, switches on the lamp beside her. Something seems to move in the darkness of Henri’s room. Suzanne jumps. Yoki, the dog, hurries out of the room. Suzanne freezes, stares at the black hole of the doorway. She closes her eyes. Is it the pain? The guilt? Is he dead? The dog rests his head on her knees; he wags his tail, imploring. She smiles. The dog will have thought, on hearing the lamp click on, that he might perhaps be allowed outside. Suzanne doesn’t need to be asked twice.
The moment the door is ajar, Yoki hurls himself into the snow, makes a few bounds, sniffs at various places before lifting his leg, his muzzle held well horizontal, trying to detect some novelty to explore. Suzanne shuts the door and leans against it. There’s no need to watch the dog; a fence keeps him from going past the edge of the property. But she has nothing else to do. One has to wait. And watching the dog soothes her. She smiles to see him play with the snow, drive his head into it and stay there a good minute until the muzzle can no longer smell the innumerable odours of the world. He rolls, drowns in the snow whatever travelling ticks there may be, and then the frantic search for a spot, tail high, anus arched, always the same corner of the yard, though — what is that search for, exactly? to make sure no other dog has come to leave something there? — the usual gymnastics, the back grotesquely curved, and the droppings falling one by one, a push for each, as though it were some meticulous little faecal dance.
Suzanne puts on her coat and her boots, takes a plastic bag and goes out. The dog is happy to see her; he lays down his front paws to tell her he wants to play with her. “Good dog!” She slips the bag over her hand, gathers up the droppings, turns the bag inside out with her other hand, knots it, carries it to the bin. The storm is strong; the dog has trouble keeping his almond eyes open, but he is pleased. A dog is always pleased, except for the rare fits of temper provoked by a fear that is quickly forgotten. He circles round Suzanne, throws snow at her with his muzzle. She does the same with her foot. The dog yaps, sets off in a mad race around the yard, braking sharply now and then to analyse a suspicious smell — a cat, perhaps, another dog whose signature must be drowned at once beneath his own.
Suzanne lifts her head to the sky. Her coat doesn’t protect her much. The first thought that comes to her is her age. Seventy-seven. What is her life expectancy? She takes an inventory of the dead in her family. Grandmother, ninety; grandfather, sixty-five; mother, ninety-six; father, eighty. She may have another twenty years left. That’s a lot; one can certainly make a life over again, even if the children already see her as helpless and useless. That warmth, though, in the hollow of the legs, that liquid that hasn’t flowed often… What is left to an old woman?
The dog yaps, doesn’t like seeing her stand still, would like her to move, to throw him more snow. She only smiles at him and repeats, “good dog, come on, we’re going back inside.” The dog hesitates, thrown by the brevity of the pleasure. He lowers his ears, wags his tail all the same, because another pleasure awaits. After the droppings, the biscuit. They go in; she takes off her coat; he sits, watches Suzanne’s gestures, hunting for the right one, salivates, lets out a small whistle. She takes the box that is always kept in the same place, on the shelf with the hats and the gloves. The dog stamps, seems to want to sit down further into the floor, presses his backside down, then shifts it a little to the right, forward a centimetre, back two. His eyes are round, the hazel eyes of a child before happiness. “Give me your paw.” That isn’t enough; he gives her both. She loves him for that, because he always overdoes it. She throws him the biscuit, which lands between his teeth, quickly crushed, his eyes still riveted on Suzanne’s hand in the hope that she’ll go and fetch another, his tongue scouring the rim of his mouth again and again to make sure no crumb has escaped his appetite. The dog is happy, licks Suzanne’s hand; she pats his head.
The dog follows her with his eyes as she goes towards the living room. When she sits down, he does the same at the edge of the doorway — he has been taught to stay there until he’s dry — lies down, rolls himself up, drives his muzzle into his tail, looks here and there, lifting one eyebrow, then the other, starts the routine over, his eyelids heavier each time, the effort harder, falls asleep in no time in a sleep broken by light wakings whenever a suspect noise occurs. But at last, after a few unsteady minutes, the dog returns, hypnotized, to the universe of his images.
She lights herself another cigarette, no longer takes the trouble to read what is so horrible about smoking. The atmosphere of the house comes back to calm. The contrast is striking between the outside, where the storm rages, and the inside, governed by waiting and by the bad smells of death.
Distress hypnotizes Suzanne. She feels herself sinking into a viscous lethargy. Indolent, starving for hope, or only tired? The clock strikes nine. She jumps again. It’s too soon; she is losing control of time. Her heart — she hunts for her heart; her grandmother’s chest hides her heart under thick glandular masses. It’s there all the same, old, pumping the vinegar of her life. Because her blood has turned to bitterness. It isn’t so much that she no longer knows how to laugh, but Henri’s approaching death is like a low tide, an ocean withdrawing and leaving on the sand molluscs, starfish, fish, lungs, haggard gills, a hatred of oxygen and of truth. So she has to smoke; she has to remake the sea.
She looks at her watch. She wouldn’t know how to talk if someone were keeping her company in her waiting. Her solitude is worth gold. She takes off her watch, sets it on the table.
She carries the cigarette quietly to her mouth, trying to control, in vain, the trembling of her hand. Earthquakes announce themselves this way. First a rumour in the ground that one easily takes for a heavy vehicle going past. Then a slight wobbling, an ephemeral vertigo, a breath of menopausal heat. The peace coming back, the carelessness of walking on ground gone firm again… The sweetness of her sadness. It isn’t anger, no, no (she shakes her head).
She is not like the storm. Her heart is neither hot nor cold, neither dry nor full of tears; it is only disappointed. Even to the point of tears. She puts her hand on her forehead, tries to hold back the reservoir of tears. But the forehead is already beading with sweat. Disappointed at the wickedness of life, she who suffered to give it, who accepted her condition as a procreator like a sin, who once loved a man with broad and sensual shoulders and a savage beard. Disappointed by the daily life of a marriage without incident at first, then of a certain violence in love, because the husband was disappointed himself, frustrated by the failures piling one after another on his shoulders, the sudden impotence, then the timid return of his capacities, the premature ejaculations he had never known before, the forced couplings when he woke her in the night or early in the morning while she was dreaming, the pain it caused, the pain she took to hide it, the pain of being in pain, the pain of looking after the children — and then the last one, the silent child, conceived in one of those violated sleeps.
What was she dreaming of at that moment? The desert? She had woken while he was already on her, his sex hard; he had mounted her in a few seconds; she had cried out; he had put his hand over her mouth, had ejaculated at once, then withdrawn, leaving her to curl up like a flower wilting because it has been given too much water. Disappointed again by the husband who took to drink, the blows she never received but that flew close to her, the happinesses all the same with him, because he stayed handsome, the swagger the neighbour women envied. She takes a long draw of nico-co-tine. Disappointed because she let herself be treated that way in the end, because she may deserve everything that has happened to her.
Annie throws out a cry. Suzanne sighs. Let Henri die, let him die right now. The storm seems to prove her wrong, hurls the snow violently against the window, as though to warn her not to play too much with death, that she is too small in the universe to grant herself that right.
Yoki is dreaming. She hears him whimper, let out whistles of desire. His limbs are seized by light convulsions. “Yoki,” she says softly. The dog doesn’t answer. She whistles a short note. This time the dog’s head comes up. She whistles an invitation again. He gets willingly to his feet, stretches — first the back legs, then lowers his chest to stretch the front ones better. She whistles again; the tail begins to wag; he sets off at a trot, buries his head shamelessly between Suzanne’s legs, breathes hard. It’s an intense moment for him, she knows, she knows him too well. She strokes the back of his neck, slides her fingers to the base of his ears. The dog breathes harder. She leans down to him and plunges her head into his coat. She listens to the animal’s body, so foreign after all, so tender all the same. He breathes; she lets her head follow the movement as though it were a matter of soft waves, breathes in her turn the same way; the dog presses himself closer to her. It ought to have been that her life was made of nothing but this breathing. So many things ought to have been. The dog doesn’t move, still breathing very hard; Annie lets out a cry; the dog isn’t surprised by it; Suzanne presses her lips together.
Come on, Yoki, we’re going to see Annie.
She has to pass in front of Henri’s room. How black it is; she doesn’t want to think about it. Not yet. But it’s for soon. It will surely be horrible.
She opens the door. Lying on her back, Annie, hands joined like a dead woman, is looking at the ceiling. Suzanne doesn’t really look at her. If Annie cries out, it’s because she doesn’t want to be left alone in the storm. Suzanne could have ignored her and refused the blackmail. She has nothing else to do, she keeps telling herself. She has nothing else to do, nothing, nothing. She goes to the window. The storm in her head, the storm outside, the storm inside Annie. The dog has let himself slide down against the mattress laid on the floor. She lights her umpteenth cigarette. It invades every room. She smokes too much for her age. It’s not good for anyone. It’s especially bad for Annie, who is asthmatic. It’s worse for Henri. It will be terrible for her one day, though she isn’t sure of it. Her sister Rose, eighty-five, smokes like a chimney and doesn’t hesitate to display her white teeth to anyone who cares to look.
“Ma, Cuntie Rose is pissed again!” Her boys have always called her that. Rose is the one who’ll be pleased to hear that Henri is dead. “He made a pass at me, the pig!” Suzanne clenches her fists. She had kept silent and Rose had bawled her out for doing nothing. “You’ve never been married, Rose, you can’t know” were her only protests, but it was like throwing oil on a fire that was already well fed. Her anger only stopped the moment Henri came into the house. Rose instantly recovered her calm. Women… as secret as the harem they are shut up in. Henri had certainly smelled the odour of anger, but had decided to ignore it. “Evening.” The two women had kissed and Rose had gone. “What’s the matter with Rose?” Suzanne had looked at him. Henri had gone straight out again. Women are as secret as they are vengeful. There’s no fighting them with men’s hands.
Suzanne turns towards her daughter. There is nothing to say about Annie, she thinks. She’s there, worse than a dog, waiting for someone to open the door for her so she can go to the toilet, doing nothing without someone’s approval, gambolling when she’s allowed to, sometimes smiling at angels, grunting most of the time with no hope of being understood. Suzanne’s lips press hard on the cigarette filter while she watches the storm again. Her eyes half close and her blood turns over, one long burning pilgrimage into the past. She puts a hand to her mouth. As though it were yesterday, she sees the scene again. Henri, his trousers down, and Annie, hands joined like a corpse laid out, her legs apart, Henri the ox, his testicles knocking on the floor, Annie soulless, white and hot, Suzanne’s rage, the lamp she brings down on Henri’s head, Henri collapsing onto Annie, the child letting out a cry — the same small cry ever since — Henri bleeding, getting up, Henri’s roar, then the shame, the sudden tears, the threats, the end of their marriage.
How could she forget? If there is nothing to say about Annie, it’s because what happened must be kept quiet. She leans her head against the edge of the window. A few centimetres from her face, outside, the storm turns round the house, furious. Suzanne had immediately begun the procedures to place Annie in an institution. Henri had certainly attempted an explanation; Suzanne had said, “It’s my fault.” He had only half understood. They had slept in separate rooms ever since.
Ten years ago, she remembers. They had, to be sure, discussed it a great deal, had perhaps been reconciled, had glued the pieces back together, and their marriage had been nothing but that: a patched-up piece of pottery. Suzanne couldn’t get out of her head the image of the testicles striking the floor, the heavy gonads of Henri the bison. All men are bastards, they say. She shakes her head to refuse the thought. All men are bastards, the voice in her head insists. And the women? All stupid bitches? She has never been able to find satisfactory answers. She hears her mother, her grandmother, her great-grandmothers, the long line of bearers, complaining and yet doing nothing — a matter of strategy? All women are sluts, she tries to convince herself. But that doesn’t work either. Nobody is anybody’s bastard. All the rats go to heaven.
“Why do you do that, Annie?”
The question came out on its own and rang in the room, without tone. The dog raised his head. Annie doesn’t answer, keeps her fingers crossed over her belly, as she does every time she comes to visit her parents. Is she taking revenge — can she take revenge? Suzanne looks at her. Annie has put on weight.
“You’ve put on weight.”
Her clothes are unstitched and creased.
“I’ll mend your dress tomorrow.”
If Henri doesn’t die tonight.
“Your father is going to die, Annie.”
Her hair is greasy.
“Your hair is greasy.”
She probably refuses to be touched.
“You should let them wash your hair.”
Her skin is milky, as though the sun couldn’t reach her inner world, as though other men passed over it, down there, in her prison, and polished her thin skin by rubbing it with their rough bodies.
“Tell me — do they touch you, down there?”
That doesn’t provoke the reaction she wanted. Did the little finger move? She resents herself for it.
“I’m sorry.” She goes back to the spectacle of the storm. If Annie had spoken, Suzanne would probably have lost the power of speech herself; her hair would have gone white. Annie must not speak.
“Stay where you are, Annie, stay where you are. There’s no use in living.”
She sighs.
“I taught all my life.”
Why does she say that? She wonders, doesn’t go on, repeats: “I taught all my life.”
The cigarette at her mouth, the lungs inhaling, the poison that calms and warms, the smoke thrown against the pane, the grey wreaths fleeing the cold, the lungs absorbing again, the breath held, the tiny desire to stop breathing right there, the dictatorship of the body that contracts the thoracic muscles and the diaphragm all by itself, the mouth that naturally forms an o so the smoke can be projected with more class, the whole routine beginning again. Annie sleeps on a makeshift mattress now when she comes to visit them, since Suzanne turned her room into a sewing room. What could Henri have said about all that? She screws her eyes tighter, no longer sees the storm; he doubtless found himself other Annies, whores just as motionless, lying against the wall of an alley or a squalid room, hands joined over the day’s wad of bills. The cigarette at her mouth, the smoke that masks for a moment the features of her face, the eyes closing a little to avoid the sting, the piercing gaze of a person who has nothing to do and nothing to say to the universe, the cosmos that goes on exploding all the same, the media storm of a war, the brutal silence of Annie’s makeshift room.
Suzanne sits at the foot of the bed, shoves aside the dog, who doesn’t stir, all four legs in the air, happy to go on sleeping. Suzanne strokes her daughter’s cold feet. According to a certain tradition, the feet contain the road of the body. With her fingers Suzanne digs into the valleys and hillocks of Annie’s foot. There the stomach, the kidneys, the womb. Annie seems to relax, spreads her toes. There the imaginary hips, the chest, the viscera. Where is one to find consciousness in this virtual tangle — where must one press to provoke a reaction? Where are Annie’s secrets to be found? Are there any? Annie moans. Suzanne takes the other foot, attempts a vain search for her daughter’s soul. It’s a long time since she touched her this way — Annie become a stranger, the only woman in the family after her, useless ovaries. Annie’s left foot is as secret as the right. Mother and daughter could have been inseparable; there again, a disappointment. Suzanne’s anger falls away, for want of any purchase on reality.
Annie already had her hands crossed; it isn’t Henri’s fault, she is mixing everything up. He took advantage of a dead woman. Men are made that way. They take advantage of women’s mutism. She rubs her face with both hands as though she wanted to drive the tiredness out of it, to take off the make-up of the years. She is disappointed, invents explanations for herself, excuses.
It’s time to put Annie to bed.
“Beddy-byes, Annie.”
The child-woman moans. Suzanne translates: “Yes.” She lifts her daughter’s torso; the girl reacts at last, wags her head, props herself on her arms. Suzanne unbuttons the shirt, slides it down Annie’s arms, lifts one, then the other. She unhooks the bra. Annie’s chest is generous. How many male or female nurses have caressed these free breasts?
“Lie down, Annie.” Suzanne takes off her dress, her underpants, her socks.
And what if Annie got pregnant, as has happened to other girls at the institution? She would look like a mushroom slowly extracting itself from the dark humus of the forest. Her child would be venomous.
“Get up.” She turns down the bed.
“Lie down.” She puts the sheets back.
“Good night, Annie.” She switches off the light in the room.
“Come, Yoki.” The dog obeys briskly. Another biscuit?
It used to be Jean, the second-to-last of the family, who looked after Annie. He would close the door saying: “good night, Annie-night.” Suzanne looks at her daughter. She has kept her eyes open, is perhaps spying on a spider lost in the desert of the ceiling. Suzanne glances up, sees nothing.
“Good night, Annie-night.”
She shuts the door.
The corridor is in half-darkness. She doesn’t want to turn anything on. What time is it? She wonders without trying to find out the answer. The corridor is black, the door of Henri’s room is black, black, black. As she approaches it the opacity seems to increase. She is afraid; she will never get used to death, even after burying father, mother, uncles and aunts. She stops in front of the door, sees Henri’s feet under the sheets. Is he cold? The storm in her head. The suitcase! She thinks instantly of the suitcase, of that cursed suitcase. Another of Henri’s horrors, another battle lost for her, because she didn’t fight it.
She goes back to the living room. How far back does that story go? Everything happened at the same time anyway — Annie, that woman whose name she never knew, the suitcase in the corridor, packed, ready to carry Henri off into the arms of his mistress. It lasted six months. A suitcase in the corridor that she had to dust like the other furniture. “How stupid you can be,” she says out loud. When Henri finally made up his mind to unpack that suitcase, she quietly filed the episode away in the drawer of her false magnanimity. Henri sank into alcohol. The ox had no balls left, and ejaculating would surely have brought on a stabbing in the heart. This time there had been no possible reconciliation; barely a pardon after much weeping, a one-way confession and a tactical absolution. She should have left him, has resented herself for a long time for not having done it and for having proved Henri right — he who knew that one couldn’t do without him. She had grown fragile with age, less sure of her step in the face of the unknown.
Quick, another of those appalling cigarettes.
She shouldn’t smoke; the cigarette pack tells her so again. It’s so blatant that it stops meaning anything.
The smoke rushes into her lungs. The recipe isn’t perfect. It manages both to calm and to kill. The storm has grown. The city is subdued, has seen worse, like all the women of the earth, thinks Suzanne, like all the insecure females of the earth, riveted to their food and to their fear of not bringing their children through to adulthood. The females of the earth, ambitious for their offspring and who, by that very fact, keep quiet and accept without flinching the shadow of the males. The dog rolls at Suzanne’s feet. The clock strikes ten. Suzanne picks up the remote to distract herself with the murderous news of men at war.
The noise comes flooding into the room; a transvestite is praising the merits of a telephone service. The dog hasn’t moved; Suzanne does what everyone does, loses awareness of her immediate surroundings to concentrate on the mad images of the commercials. After a short politically correct pause, the news begins. Men are throwing bombs, a minister resigns, an opposition MP is angry, companies are going bankrupt. Small fry. The announcer is serious, must certainly believe what he is saying; we’ve known him for so long. The Earth is complicated. There will be a tax increase. Happiness, none in the news, except for the very last item, to make the viewers smile. The storm manages to cover the noise of the television. Suzanne jumps; the dog growls. Did someone knock at the door? The dog gets up, the hair on his back standing. Suzanne turns off the television, watches the door, waits for another knock. Nothing. Probably something that couldn’t hold out against the storm.
“Down, Yoki.” But the dog goes on growling. She is about to scold him again when she notices that he isn’t looking at the door, but towards Henri’s room.
“What is it, Yoki?” The dog whistles, frightened. A rising tide of tears tries to invade Suzanne’s eyes. She sits down again; she can’t get air, squeezes herself into the sofa; the air still won’t come in. The dog presses himself against his mistress, naturally offers her his neck; she takes hold of it and buries her face in it. One has to breathe; the dog, at least, is breathing. Another noise in the room. Dull, regular sounds. “What’s the matter with me?” But the answer is slow in coming. The dog growls. What does he see? Where is Henri? She is tired of struggling. The horizon is blue, the sun smiles at her. She leaves her eyes plunged in the dog’s coat. She sees birds, hears their cries, tries to guess the route they are taking. Is Henri dead? Is that death making that noise? Her tears taste of happiness. The salt is good. The dog yaps. That noise again. Knock, knock. She lifts her head. The birds scatter. It is indeed coming from the room — but from outside. Knock, knock, knock. Yoki growls along with the storm, trying to frighten the mysterious intruder. She sighs, pats the dog’s back, gets up. Knock. She goes into the room, turns on the light. If there were ghosts, they are driven out by the brightness. She casts her first look at Henri; a shiver runs down her spine. The eyes are half closed, the mouth is half open, a thin thread of yellow drool at the corner of his lips. She watches his chest. He is still alive. Knock, knock, knock.
Something is striking the window outside. Looking closely, she makes out a piece of sheet metal. The storm will have managed to tear off another bit of this house, dilapidated since Henri has no longer had the strength to keep it up.
She ought to go out; the noise is lugubrious. She hasn’t the courage for it, hesitates a moment before sitting down on the chair by the bed. A woman — this is where she must be, she tells herself, defeated, next to her dying husband. She tries to understand without understanding. It’s a bit like the cigarettes. Has the storm gone quiet? Suzanne raises her eyes to Henri. No, it’s out there, scorning the subtleties of misfortune, kept at the periphery of Suzanne’s consciousness while she brings her head slowly closer to Henri. She knows this man’s body far too well, having felt it, loved it, fed it, washed it. She strains to hear. The mouth lets through a strange sound, a kind of slow, greasy scraping. She fights her repulsion. It’s death, Suzanne knows, it’s the rake of death ploughing Henri’s body. Rrhrhrhrhsss. The lungs have turned into putrescent caves where ambassador bats scream that this man is dying. Henri’s skin is grey. The streams beneath his skin are drying up. The Nile is dying. The ground is petrifying.
Suzanne straightens up. She didn’t change the bed this morning. It isn’t worth it any more. She’ll have to burn all of it after his death. The bottle of serum, hung on a metal rod, lets nutrients drip into Henri’s tired arm. She thinks it’s a waste, would like to close the tap. She thinks again about what she has just told herself, gets up, goes round to the other side of the bed and shuts the clamp that controls the flow. She sits down again. Looks at Henri. Nothing happens. He has reserves, but the rake of death will soon have scattered all of it. Did he move? She’s afraid he’ll suddenly start ranting, seized by his last convulsions; she dreads his vomiting his own excrement. She doesn’t want to see anything; death is ugly, it splashes the living, dirties the sheets that must afterwards be thrown away, so afraid is one of laying one’s own dreams on them. And what if Henri opened his eyes? What if he suddenly gasped for air? What if he flung out an arm, if the Devil rose slowly out of the bed, his eyes fixed on Suzanne the better to terrify her? She has a child’s fears. She feels guilty, and her own demons are making a feast of her blood.
She finds herself ridiculous. The torn-off piece of guttering is still knocking at the window. The dog growls. She gets up, turns off the light, goes back to the living room, the dog following faithfully; she turns on the television.
People are still killing each other; a foreign correspondent explains it exclusively. She has just closed the tap that was feeding Henri. She changes channel. A rachitic dietician is lecturing a fat host who won’t stop making dirty jokes.
I don’t give a damn about your celery…
The host is, all things considered, the most serious man in the world. She doesn’t care, changes the channel. A glandular Valentino is drenching a nymphet with religious eyes in his words. Zap. Sport. At this hour?! Zap. That’s not the nymphet from before?! She grimaces; she has never got used to these remote gadgets. Zap. The dietician has given way to a young actor on the rise. The host is going to stay fat. Zap. The news again… Things are going from bad to worse in the world. A commercial break. It is loudly proclaimed there that things are going from better to better since we started washing with Supra. Back to the drama. Zap. A psychologist explains his growth technique. Television is the only thing that will know immortality. Suzanne turns it off.
Flashing lights illuminate the room, then disappear as fast as they came. Other flashing lights appear; the noise of frantic sirens manages to cross the walls of the house. Suzanne goes to the window. An ambulance is trying to get up the mountain. What on earth can be happening up there? The vehicle is too heavy; its rear wheels slip in the slush. And yet the street is reasonably well cleared. The driver finally manages to free himself from the grip of the ice. The darkness comes back to the neighbourhood.
She is nervous, realizes that she is agitating and dozing by turns. She sits down again, has a first reflex to light a cigarette, a second that enjoins her to calm down. Yoki has followed her, has lain down at her feet, his head brought up onto his mistress’s knees, his eyes riveted on her, begging for a caress or an approval. Suzanne is grateful to him for being no more than that: a soothing silence that asks nothing, really, that doesn’t really beg. She has nothing to do, she tells herself. Her dishes are done, Annie is in bed, Henri is dying. She has to wait; she could read, but will she really have the courage? She could telephone her children. What time is it? Doesn’t she ask herself that too often? It’s too late for the children. They’ll think Henri has come to the worst — she wants to be alone. She could go to bed, but she doesn’t want to; she could… She can do nothing, closes her eyes, could die right there; it would be easier. Because the worst is still to come. When Henri is dead, she’ll have to call everyone, weep with them. Then will come the negotiations with the undertakers, the priests, the notary, the banks. Henri asked to be laid out; that requires embalming (cleaning of the viscera, powdering, filling), the purchase of the casket (they left her a catalogue last week), the death papers to be signed, and the wait through the traditional two and a half days at the funeral home, the casket open, the dead man made up like an eighteenth-century aristocrat, more lead on his head than in it, the rosary crossed between his fingers — he who will have addressed God only to insult him — the last surviving aunts, the neighbours and the former colleagues, the friends, all of them grieved… And then the black on the lips, the kiss of death. It will be time to close the casket, to take him to the furnace so that never again will he touch anyone, his balls well and truly dried out and turned to ash.
“I married your master fifty-eight years ago, Yoki.” The dog looks at her with sleepy eyes. “I was…” (she does the calculation) “nineteen. I was already pregnant with Janvier.” She smiles. She no longer hears the storm, resents herself for remembering, tries to think of something else. It’s too easy, she tells herself; everybody does that, remembers; somebody only has to die for the rosary of remembrances to come out. “I was modern.” She makes a long pause; the dog ends by falling asleep, snores. “Now…” The dog doesn’t wake. She stays prostrate on her sofa, her hands flat on her knees; the dog’s head has slid to her feet; the animal’s warmth does her good. Nothing at all chills her now. Nothing at all tires her, nothing at all isolates her. It can snow all the snow in the world, it can blow all the madnesses of the earth; she is warm, a dog at her feet, and she is dying gently along with her husband. She isn’t dying forever; she is measuring her boredom, she is measuring nothing, immobilized by the zen of misfortune. It grows indifferent inside her — now life, now something else, not quite death, not quite deliverance. The clock strikes eleven and Henri is still alive.
There must be a film starting somewhere on television. Let’s see. Sport, zap, the weather, yes, we know, storm of the century, zap, the Namur will have you flying down the roads, zap, not tonight anyway, zap, a sugary music adorns a set of credits. There we are. The film is unfortunately in black and white — another Cocteau! Zap. Sport, then the shrill ads. She sighs. Starts the routine again, zap, zap, zap, Cocteau, zap-zap, bang. This looks interesting. A western.
There are bad men and a few good ones. The bad men do harm to the good ones, but the good ones have the strength of their honesty; they’re going to win. The actors are hot in the desert; the storm is raising hell outside. The torn sheet metal strikes harder and harder against the window, threatening to break it. Suzanne hesitates to go out again.
A bad man is pointing his revolver under a good woman’s nose.
Will she be able to tear it away?
Will the good woman be saved? The bad man says stupid things and, thwack, a blow to the privates. The idiot, thinks Suzanne — the bad man could have pressed the trigger from the pain.
She turns off the television. Yoki doesn’t get up right away, but when he sees his mistress put on her coat, he reaches the door before she does, tail wagging.
The storm blots everything out. The icy air and the flakes, slaves of the turmoil, smother her at once. She pulls up the hood of her parka, knots it clumsily. Yoki is a little at a loss, tries to place his muzzle as aerodynamically as possible into the wind. He screws up his eyes, can’t see a thing, his nostrils alerted by too many furtive smells. He breathes hard, sneezes, on the alert, then runs off in all directions as usual.
There is already too much snow to move about comfortably. Her feet sink into the unknown. She sees the piece of sheet metal. The damage is worse than she thought. The guttering, new this autumn, hasn’t held out against the force of the wind and has been dislodged along its whole length. She’ll have to complain to the contractor who installed the lot. And it’s she who will have to do it, because Henri won’t be there. Barring a miracle. She stops still, staggered by the idea. No, she decides, there will be no miracle. Angrily she tears away the piece, which was held on by nothing but a few nails. The installation was badly done; she had said so to Henri, but he had insisted on not offending his friend the contractor. Henri didn’t care anyway, because his days were numbered. Whether it fell tomorrow or in a few months, he was going to fall himself.
Suzanne pushes the pieces against the wall, covers them with a little snow. This small unexpected job has quickly left her out of breath. Yoki yaps, wants her to play with him. She feels herself losing her balance a little. Cursed age. The dog circles round her; she smiles at him; he yaps, rolls, plunges his nose under the snow. As a child she did the same, let herself fall headfirst into the snow, unconscious of danger, of the invisible object that might have wounded her. She has forgotten what that was like. Only the memory is left, another of those memories that weave themselves beneath her to protect her from the fall towards death. She lifts her head; there is nothing to see, only the fury, the old trees of the yard that have seen worse, the mountain she can no longer make out, so much is it part of her daily life.
This is her home; she gave birth here. She can claim that fact without hesitation; nobody could dislodge her from it, except some unfeeling document of a voracious administration that will never have taken account of people’s histories. Everything here belongs to her, even the storm passing over her land. Yoki urinates all around as though to confirm her thoughts. The house comes to her by right; they are married under community of property. The rest, Henri has left to her — to her, to her alone. She survives and she inherits, will be able, come spring, to decide alone what she will do with the horrible shed Henri was so fond of; she will no longer trim the hedges, will no longer trim anything, will hire a teenager for the lawn, will buy the swimming pool she has dreamed of for years and whose very mention Henri refused to entertain.
The snow has a beneficial effect on her, freezes her thinking. But the fury of the storm also reminds her of her submission through all those years. Is she coming out of a bad dream?
“That would be too easy,” she says loudly enough for Yoki to stop for a moment and try to decipher this unknown order. “I did it for the children.”
Yoki tilts his head, as though that angle could be enough to understand Suzanne’s mysterious words better. “Liar,” says an inner voice. She lowers her head. She clenches her fists, both to warm her fingers and to keep herself from crying out. Her voice is right. Yoki has come closer. He wags his tail. “Come and play!” She’s too old to play. “Come and play!” Is she too old to start her life over? “Come and play!” The dog gambols, yaps, yaps, yaps. She’s cold. The storm passes easily through her parka, supposedly proof against arctic cold. She’ll have to complain to the salesman. The dog is out of breath, can’t contain himself, loves the chaos of the storm. She laughs, falls to her knees. The dog nearly has a stroke of happiness. He charges at her and knocks her over completely. She cries out, from happiness too, Yoki’s tongue licking her many wrinkles. Now she’s crying; she doesn’t know any more, she’s laughing or crying; it’s like the storm, it’s snowing or it’s raining icy spears. She grabs the dog by the waist and rolls him onto his back, presses herself against him. Perhaps he has done wrong, and his mistress is angry, since she is crying out so loudly. The snow? The storm? Yoki waits, tries now and then to get free. Exhausted by the fit, Suzanne finally lets go, gets heavily to her feet, dries her tears. The dog thinks he understands that he has permission to get up too, sits down beside her, asking pardon. Suzanne takes long breaths. The emotions collide; she knows it too well, it’s a sign of age, a pleasure has the same weight as a misfortune, the equation of the dead. Yoki warms her feet — how does he manage not to be cold himself? — and she contents herself with swaying a little, the storm taking her for a tree. Annie’s room lights up and goes dark, and the routine starts again.
“What’s she doing there?”
Suzanne doesn’t move, though. Her daughter’s antics have no hold on her any more. She must simply be unable to find sleep, since she dreams all the time, since there is no real day for her. Annie is good for nothing; her neurons are an inedible garden. Human females have lost the capacity to separate the wheat from the chaff, the bastards from the geniuses. Suzanne doesn’t dare think too much. She’d be called mad. You don’t say things like that. She still lets herself be tossed about at the wind’s mercy.
Annie goes on with her routine; Suzanne watches. It’s their game, or their battle. “I’m outside, Annie, I can’t see you, I can’t hear you.” “You’re outside, Mama, I don’t care, I want you to come back inside, I don’t care.” A mother knows what her children are thinking. Suzanne hums. The dog looks at her, intrigued. He is no doubt the only one who can hear it, with his antenna-ears. A lullaby, a melody coming out of the womb, resonating on its way against the Fallopian tubes, the ovaries chiming like lilies of the valley, the song of women, the song of sleep and of comfort. Annie stops her game. Suzanne knows she is listening. It’s magic and it goes through walls. The storm turns into a mother of the Andes; all of nature becomes a she-wolf with udders swollen with milk, and this dream is lived only between Suzanne and Annie.
A light suddenly floods the yard. A woman appears on the back balcony of the neighbouring house, curlers perched high on her head. In a dressing gown half open, her nightdress faded, she looks at Suzanne with apprehension.
Madame Jodoin, is that you there?
They are far from each other. The neighbour is therefore not reassured by the vague wave Suzanne gives her.
Suzanne has to shout to make herself heard.
It’s fine! Don’t worry, I’m getting some air!
She feels ridiculous, and from the neighbour’s frozen attitude she knows the woman thinks so too.
Yoki’s with me!
At these words the dog gets to his feet, ready to play with the neighbour. He yaps. The neighbour smiles. Suzanne feels obliged to move about a little, hating this not necessarily benevolent surveillance by Madame Thibault. The two women have never become friends, much to the neighbour’s regret, since she sees it as a break in her telephone network of boredom. It was Henri who did all the customary neighbouring. Suzanne preferred to go out alone, do her errands without wanting to know the dramatic labyrinth of her neighbourhood, work and come home and look after her children. There were, to be sure, and especially in summer, a few conversations exchanged over the hedge; but as the hedge gained in height every year, it certainly wasn’t the neighbour, with her metre forty, who could keep up with such growth. Suzanne passed for a snob and never wore curlers. She went to the hairdresser. She could afford it — so could the neighbour, though; but the neighbour is the neighbour. On the other side, an old couple of men were quietly ending their days. They grew flowers and trees of strange shapes. Their plantings had created a wall still more opaque than the Jodoins’ hedge.
Suzanne is called Madame Jodoin. Her “maiden” name is Loubier. Suzanne Loubier. Suzanne L. Jodoin since her marriage. The neighbours call her “Mam’ Jôdoin,” insisting on the Jo. Madame the wife of the other one, the peacock. Soon the widow Jodoin. Suzanne, always, inside her own head. A name for each stage of her life and according to the circumstances.
The neighbour has gone back into her house. She casts a shameless glance now and then in Suzanne’s direction; Suzanne doesn’t notice. The neighbour lowers her curtain whenever she fears being spotted, undertakes some activity only to come back invariably to the window.
Suzanne is still there, the dog at her feet, already covered with a thin layer of snow and shivering, unused to staying outside so long. Suzanne counts up her pregnancies. Janvier (what a name! An idea of her mother’s!), Lucien, Roland, Camille, Jean, Annie. Janvier has four children; he and his wife are a sated couple, with new fabrics and beautiful children, intelligent like their father, Henri’s pride. Lucien is on his third divorce, with a few children he gathers up on feast days for visits to the grandparents — strangers to one another despite the genetic desire to make up a single family. Roland, handsome Roland, with his mother-in-law’s blue eyes and Henri’s arrogance, who beats his wife — Suzanne knows it, will bar her door to him when the time comes, should have killed him at birth if she had known what he was going to become. She had confided as much to her mother one day, and her mother had slapped her. “You mustn’t say things like that, my girl. You’re hurting the good Lord.” Suzanne had slapped her mother in return, and her mother had immediately begun to cry. “You mustn’t say things like that to your daughter, Mother.” She had gone away, to come back a few hours later. They had wept together, understanding that they were both prisoners. Then there was Camille, the murderer, the misfit. He is handsome and takes drugs. He killed someone, by mistake, they said. He’s in prison for a good long while. He’ll find out later that his father is dead. She blinks, panics a little, notices the neighbour riveted to her window, resolutely determined to observe her. What must she be telling herself, Suzanne wonders — that the neighbour is drunk, that she’s not right in the head? She shakes herself; the dog reacts, goes to the door. He, for one, has had enough; he wasn’t asking for this much. Suzanne casts a last look at the storm. The dog yaps with impatience. “Be quiet, Yoki, you’ll wake the dead…” She was too young to get married. Yoki yaps again.
“I’m coming, Yoki.”
Yapping.
Yapping.
“Be quiet, Yoki!” She heads for the door, her feet completely frozen. It’s her bones that’ll be crying tomorrow! Cursed arthritis!
After Camille comes Jean, and after him, Annie. Henri could have been a good father with his children, but he traumatized every one of them. He was severe, little inclined to give his approval, except to Janvier, the eternal father. On the threshold, Suzanne has a turn. A cramp in the belly folds her in two. She has to sit down on the ground. The dog is worried. When she is angry or when she lies, she is punished like Pinocchio. It isn’t really Henri’s fault; it’s more complicated than that, she knows, her children know. People’s destinies are written in the stars. Suzanne wants to collapse on the floor, gets up instead, opens the door and takes refuge in the house.
The dog circles round her while she takes off her coat and boots. He wants his biscuit. He gets his biscuit. He makes crumbs everywhere, picks them up one after another with his astonishingly skilful tongue, goes to sniff his food in his bowl, hesitates, bites a piece, seems to find it good, sits, then eats, happy. Happy, conscientious, each piece crushed with energy, the pleasure of the prisoner who eats the same slop day after day. Suzanne is hungry too. Midnight strikes. She stops, listens to the clock. It may last an eternity; she doesn’t really notice, listens, submissive. She glances at Henri’s room. Perhaps he’s dead. She forgets him. She ought to go and check, but it’s too soon. She opens the refrigerator, takes out a tomato, the bread, the cheese, the mayonnaise. The dog interrupts his meal to come and smell what good thing she has to eat.
“Over there, Yoki!” Crestfallen, he goes back to his bowl. He must quickly have forgotten the cheese, because his food is bursting with flavours, as the advertisement says. Little ground-up entrails, fat and ash, goats and hens, perhaps cat and rat. And it’s clean.
Suzanne bites heartily into her sandwich. Chewing, she tries to listen to the storm, but the elements have taken second place. The house is holding; it’s warm inside. Suzanne avoids looking at Henri’s room, avoids hearing what is nevertheless beginning to invade the house, rrrrrrhhhhhhrrrrrrr.
The wallpaper needs redoing in the kitchen. Yellowed flowers; she’ll have all of it taken off. Something modern would do. An apple green, rrrrrrhhhhh, that sound is terrible; the dog eats greedily; she bites into the bread; they are both of them making noise; the storm knocks now and then at the windows; the clock still resounds in her head; midnight, the hour of crimes; the refrigerator shudders into motion; the motor will have to be repaired. The tap is dripping; she goes to shut it properly. She glances outside through the window above the sink; she is alone in the world; Annie is making no noise, must be asleep; she’ll have to drive her back to her centre tomorrow, but who will do it? She can’t leave Henri. She takes the time to think about that. But it’s he who is going to leave her, there, in a few hours. The dog scorns the prohibitions and comes to smell what is on the table. He will get — and he knows it — the crusts and the rest of the tomato. He knows his mistress; she always makes the same gestures. She is like him, a good dog. He sits, waits in front of the table, salivates, licks his lips, is thirsty, is torn between his desire to drink and the immediate prospect of gulping down the tomato. Suzanne isn’t there; she has gone off again. The dog notices and calculates that he has time to go to the bathroom for a good drink. The lid is down! He comes back to the kitchen, yaps. There are limits! Suzanne jumps, panics for an instant, understands — “sorry, Yoki” — goes to open the lid for him, passes in front of Henri’s room, stops, hears nothing.
Yes, she does.
But it’s the storm, the muffled blows of the wind, the long whistle in the chimney, the floor creaking under her feet — that’ll have to be repaired; everything here is going to ruin. The corridor will have to be repainted too, a livelier colour to let the light run along it; a skylight would be welcome there, that would be possible, and then she could have the wall of Henri’s room knocked down and make the living room into an immense sitting room, cut an opening in the bedroom, a patio door would give a lot of light, have a patio built and a swimming pool, install the central vacuum too — she has always dreamed of having one. So many things to do; she listens. Still nothing in Henri’s room. That isn’t normal. Or is it? Is he already dead?
rrrrrrrrrrrhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
She listens again.
Rrrrrrrrrrrrrhhhhhhhhhhhh rrrrrrrrrrrrrhhhhhhhhhhh.
It’s faster than before. The lungs are drowning, making bubbles that carry off with them the little oxygen available. She leans against the wall, hypnotized, not knowing what to do. She does as they do in the films — waits for the wicked beast to spring out and strangle her. Henri is going to die unconscious. They will not say goodbye to each other. She will not be able to spit on him. She wouldn’t have done it. It’s a way of glimpsing things to come, of anticipating so as not to be surprised any more, of stopping hoping so as not to be cut down alive by the bad days. Annie is asleep, the storm rages, Henri rattles, Suzanne breathes. Subject, verb. The complements are unnecessary. Henri has left her everything. He did it in silence, in front of her, no doubt his way of apologizing. She wasn’t really pleased. That isn’t what she was looking for, after all. Their marriage quickly became a bitter fruit that they ate quietly until death.
In the kitchen, Yoki has come back to station himself near the tomato. Suzanne sees the tip of his tail wagging a little. Is he going to defy the law? Steal the tomato? “Yoki…” she orders, amused. The dog wags his tail still harder. “Go on, Yoki.” The dog doesn’t need to be asked twice, and — hop — the tomato. Henri hated to see the dog eat off a human plate. Henri hated everything about Suzanne and about her dog. Yoki lies down by the door, satisfied. He belches heartily, licks his chops.
She goes back to the living room. Yoki barely opens his eyes, so used is he to the heaviness of Suzanne’s insomniac tread. He is old too, sees the train go past five times faster than the human race does. The storm distracts him now and then; he keeps one ear on the noises outside while his brain busies itself dreaming five times more slowly than humans. Suzanne lies down on the sofa, wraps herself in her cardigan, wedges her feet between the cushions and the back. She is tired. It’s boredom, it’s the waiting, it’s the distress, it’s life, it’s the present tense conjugated in the descriptive. She whistles. The dog gets up and presses himself against the sofa, to be nearer his mistress. He sighs. So long as there are mistresses and tomatoes. One day death will carry him off too, perhaps in his sleep, while he gambols in the black and white meadows of his vision. Suzanne thinks about all that, says sentences to herself. At her age there’s nothing else to do: sleep or die. A single letter between mourning and morning.
Peptides, serotonin, oxidase — the body goes into a trance. Vain words, hollow thoughts. The brain heats up, the breathing quickens. Tributary rivers engorge the blood. Suzanne goes down the stairways of the dream. Beta, alpha, delta — the waves lengthen, the antennae turn inward, the shadows acquire an ethereal luminosity. At the bottom of the kingdom, the dark wadding of unconsciousness. The wrinkles fade, the fingers brush reeds, perfumed memories. Suzanne settles further into her sofa; she trusts her body, that old boat. A charitable warmth envelops her. She folds herself up. The happiness of touching reeds. The storm has no hold on her, may roar as it likes and attempt a conquest through the chimney; the ghosts may well ululate; the water is peaceful all the same, covered with reeds, almost velvet, with those religious aquatic plants of the ocean chanting the good news to the rhythm of the molluscs that drain away the wickedness of the world.
A centimetre of snow, two, then four; the city is buried under icy flour; the houses look like gingerbread. Like geldings, the trees protest against the wind, furious at being asleep, at having abandoned their antlers to the autumn.
Six centimetres, the night still black, the living room in half-darkness, the incantatory reeds, the Muslim lyre of women, fifty-eight years of voracious nights, sweet but greedy. It is only at night that the worst outrages are forgiven, the most painful words smoothed away. The sleep of the just and of the unfaithful is the same; it absolves, caresses, unties the fears, lays them bare the better to breathe in their frail skin. Dreams are oases of bodies, spectres the unreal lovers with sugared mouths. Death is no longer anything but a dream, a fragile fear quickly deflowered.
All those years of sweating loins while useless words uttered heady, intoxicating lies. The illusion lasts; Suzanne believes herself at peace in her dream, forgets. But she doesn’t know that she is dreaming. Torpor and unconcern. She sleeps deeply. She is recovering. She would certainly resent herself for seeing herself thus orphaned, unconscious of what death is plotting in the other room. She sees, hears, feels only the silence, the peace of silence, the mute thought, the grain of the skin beaded with the manna of old people when they dream too much, who think themselves sheltered from a world that goes too fast and that has abandoned them to their sad fate as wise ones. What is there in that place? A stream of green water; it is spring, the crystalline sound of life escaping from the ice, the panicked larvae; trees thinned by winter, drinking, drinking the sap of the earth. There are birds, those that have watched the storms go by and the others coming back from the warm seas. It is summer on a lake, a kiss, hotter and damper than the day, the breath that betrays the effervescence of sexes, the open mouth that desires, that eats. It is autumn; they married in autumn; the leaves were already falling in profusion, mixing with the confetti like bad omens, spoilsport witches — but joy all the same, yes, the joy of lovers who were soon to shut themselves into a cosy winter, a house full of promises. The birds were leaving. It is winter. Now it is winter. It is troubling. Dreams are supposed to make one forget.
Suzanne turns over, shoves the pillow, the storm buries the house. Strange shadows pass in front of Suzanne, carrying off a naked body, arms crossed and head thrown back, the open mouth of the dead. It is Henri.
Donnnnng! Fear. The clock announces the gulf of time. The dog yaps. Suzanne sits bolt upright. The dog yaps. “Be quiet, Yoki.” How long can she have slept? Yap, yap. She wasn’t having bad dreams; she tries to take possession of herself again. “Easy, Yoki… it’s all right.” She coughs. The atmosphere of the living room is sinister; one breathes badly in it — the cigarettes, the curtains weighed down with smoke, the dog still yapping, looking at Suzanne and then behind her.
“What, what is it, Yoki?” Asking the question, she shuts her eyes for a few seconds; it’s a way of breathing, of facing the real that blocks the path. She turns round, lets out a cry of surprise. The dog yaps harder than ever.
Annie! Be quiet, Yoki! Annie!
She rushes towards her daughter, who, naked and white, frozen and speechless, is looking at her father’s dark room. Suzanne sees the shadows of her dream go far away.
Annie, don’t stand there!
Is that it? Henri is dead; Suzanne knows it, doesn’t want to announce it to herself yet, wants above all to avoid Annie having a fit; this is not the moment. Above all don’t look into the room. Not yet. Henri is dead? Suzanne is caught in her hallucinations; the dream won’t let go of her. The shadows turn back towards her, cast a severe look at her — a spell? — and go on their way. Suzanne takes off her cardigan and puts it over her daughter’s shoulders. The shadows arrive at the edge of a white, luminous lake, throw the corpse into the water. Sploshhhhhh! Almost automatically and still chilled, she takes Annie back to her room, offers gentle words, sleeping sounds, tries to find her calm again, her mastery, her strength, her silence. Henri. Isn’t she in shock? She isn’t really reacting. So she is under the sway of some drug of the brain that keeps her from roaring. Henri is dead. Annie, dog without shadows, has sensed it. Free. She is free. My God, Henri is dead. This isn’t the crisis. It’s a sea of oil. Dreams are the sea, and she goes on dreaming. Isn’t she? “It’s going to be all right, Annie, Mama’s here. Lie down again, you’ll catch cold.”
Annie obeys, a little limp, which astonishes Suzanne. Her daughter’s body is almost warm. Suzanne covers her with her sheets, sits down beside her, strokes her face, for a long time, keeps herself from crying, forbids herself even to leave the room. Death took her by surprise, made no noise, carried Henri’s soul away in its boat. Henri suffers no more. Or suffers more. Does hell exist? Suzanne’s hand on Annie’s face wants to be soft and convincing. Annie leans her head into it. She understands; she knows, is capable of weaving a web, and thereby says: “I understand, Mama.” Annie’s arm is a reed, Suzanne’s belly a vessel of love. Suzanne takes hold of her daughter’s head and pushes it against her chest. It will do them good to cry together.
The tears have to come. They rock; an old warmth settles between their bodies. Annie lets it happen, hasn’t that stiffness of the body that usually marks her behaviour in the face of intimacy. No tear comes. It happened too fast, even if Suzanne has been waiting for this moment for hours, for weeks. It simply happened too fast, because the doubt remains. Suzanne hasn’t seen Henri; perhaps it’s a bad dream after all. She could have jumped too quickly to conclusions. Free — the word engraves itself in her throat. “We’re free.” Does Annie understand? She relaxes. Suzanne cherishes the waiting in which she is holding herself. Free? It’s too unreal. She has to go and see.
She is afraid, of course, since she is ashamed: she was sleeping while Henri was dying. She may have killed him; he couldn’t cling to her to keep himself alive a few moments longer, couldn’t beg for the miracle, couldn’t say sorry. Her heart quickens.
With a brief, almost brusque movement, Suzanne forces Annie to lie down. Will she have a fit? The tension is so great. No. It’s strange; it isn’t normal. But what is, now? Henri is dead. That’s normal; her heart is overturned; the blood arrives in a torrent at its gates; the locks have trouble containing it, weaken. Suzanne feels dizzy as she closes the door. Above all, don’t make things worse. She leans against the door a little all the same. She must have courage now, face the darkness of the corridor. A sea of oil. And what if Death were still at Henri’s side, devouring him?
Suzanne advances slowly. She isn’t really afraid — not of that — but of him, yes, she is afraid of Henri, of his stiffened face, of his mouth half open like a dried-out cave. There are ten steps to take between Annie’s room and Henri’s. She doesn’t take the ninth. She listens. Everything is so black that she is deafened by it. The storm no longer roars — yes, she hears it now; her heart is beating too fast, spoiling the senses. The dog’s phosphorescent eyes appear. “Here, Yoki.” She isn’t all alone. Yoki presses himself against his mistress. Suzanne strokes the back of one ear with a finger. And what if Death were tearing out Henri’s heart? She dreads seeing Henri’s sulphurous eyes appear too in the gap of the door, can’t bring herself to say that she is past the age for such fears. The dog lets out a light whistle, a sign that he wants something or that he is sad. Does he guess? What does he smell? “Is she there, Yoki?” He yaps. “Shh…” It’s absurd. She makes up her mind to advance, goes into the room, turns on the light, looks, listens. Yes. That’s it. Henri isn’t looking at anyone. Strange silence; nothing has changed. It’s terrible: nothing has changed yet. The dog has lain down in front of the room; he doesn’t go in. Suzanne approaches the bed, sits down. That’s it, she tells herself. Her heart is slower.
How many years now? The end of the story. She can’t close her eyes, can’t look in front of her. It’s done, it’s accomplished, she convinces herself. So tired. She could fall asleep again. There is nothing left to hope for. The wind of the storm sings only one note. It is high, a great torrent; Suzanne wants to pay it more attention than she needs to. It isn’t Henri in front of her, she knows. The shadows came to get him and threw him into the lake. She stays sitting like that, long minutes lost in not knowing what to do. She goes on listening, looks for a sign. The dog makes no noise; perhaps he has fallen asleep. So he has no grief?
She touches the body, takes her hand away at once. Curious silence. Like a distance. She takes hold of the arm again, this time shakes it as though she were trying to wake Henri. Lets go of the arm. Yoki watches her, lets out a sad whistle. Suzanne takes Henri’s arm again, drops it. It makes a dull sound on the mattress. She manages at last to look at her husband’s face. “He’s asleep.” She has only that thought in her head; he’s only sleeping… Then she becomes aware of the opposite. “He’s dead. He isn’t breathing.” The idea doesn’t hold, though. Is there a way to behave with the dead? She feels terribly tired, tries, in her thoughts, to say something to him. He isn’t smiling; his mouth is a little crooked. The lips she kissed for so long, loved. Henri didn’t offer his lips when he kissed; he opened his mouth, took Suzanne’s into it, and then brought his lips gently back against hers. Illness has dried them, cracked them — no more than the skeleton of the old pleasures.
Suzanne looks at the ceiling. They say the dead stay a few days around their remains, floating there, in a corner, watching the living bustle about and mourn the departed. So perhaps he is still watching her… Does she grieve? Of course, she can feel it, crouched in her entrails. It isn’t him any more; he is floating, watching her; that’s why she isn’t crying; he’s still there; the hours aren’t going fast enough; it’s the shock of the pain, or the impatience really to weep, one day, sheltered from all eyes. Her hands worry at her cardigan; she has to wait, watch, be certain. Winter — she is in the winter of her dream, the present, the storm. Henri’s brain is really dying now; he must surely be dreaming that he is floating, that he is watching Suzanne while she waits for him to wake up. He reassures himself. The neurons are vitrifying at a dazzling speed. The synapses widen, sink into the crevasses of the motionless. Fifty-eight years together. Free. From now on she’ll be able to take Henri’s new car out alone. She closes her eyes, out of anger but above all out of shame at thinking such stupid things and at clinging to them at this moment. Henri was mad, miserly and mad, a fallen king, a tyrant. She endured because she didn’t want to lose everything. She looks at Henri again and her anger melts like snow in the sun.
She wants to strike him, but she’s past the age. She’s crying now, and it’s Henri who will be reassured, there, floating at the ceiling. Suzanne grieves for him. Too bad, she tells herself, if he is mad enough to believe, even in death, that she is weeping for him.
She rocks on her straight chair. Touches Henri’s arm from time to time. The temperature of the body is falling. Without thinking, she wipes her hand each time on her cardigan. She has made the sign of the cross, then made it again backwards. She cements herself in front of him. The shock — this must be what it is to be in shock: too unfeeling to weep and too raw to stay impassive. Why all this silence around the body? Who stopped the storm? Who halted time? She opens the shutters of mourning. The landscape is magnificent.
The years of marriage file past in front of her. Happiness and misery, better and worse, life and death. Nothing original. Henri is looking at the ceiling. She corrects herself: the eyes seem to be looking at the ceiling. She hesitates, touches the eyelids, draws them down with her fingertips. The eyes are colder than all the rest. She sits back down.
The eyelids rise again. Slowly, without a sound, like water finding its level. Henri is looking at her once more. She doesn’t dare touch them again.
Suddenly a horrible noise rumbles under the dead man’s throat; the mouth opens and roars foul gases. Suzanne falls backwards; the dog barks, terrified.
“It’s nothing,” she tells herself, “it’s nothing, it’s normal, it’s death, it’s the ugly breathing, the same thing happened with Mama, calm down, Suzanne, calm down.” The nausea. She wants to vomit, rushes to the bathroom. Her mouth opens; she screams instead, trembles all over, can’t master her convulsions. He’s a corpse, Henri, he’s nothing but a corpse, the past is a corpse! And corpses are like vampires: you have to tear out their hearts or they hunt you all your life.
The dog has followed her, seems to be weeping with her. She is too old for so much emotion. Time has made her into a sponge instead. She soaks up and does not dry out, gnawed then by arthritis and by incapacity.
The fit passes. She ends by getting up, splashes water on her face, and lifting her head catches sight of herself in the mirror, thinks for an instant that she sees Henri there instead — so much osmosis between them in the end. She doesn’t linger, dries herself and goes back into Henri’s room.
She isn’t afraid now. She knows there will be no more surprises. The chest has caved inward. The cathedral has collapsed under the weight of the sky. She sits down. Motionless. Her heart goes on racing all the same. She rummages in the drawer of the bedside table. Doesn’t find what she is looking for. Probably in the kitchen. Goes there, opens a few drawers. She can’t remember where she put the candles. There we are. Under the sink. The candlesticks now. She really ought to remember all these things. They haven’t moved for years. In the sideboard in the living room. She moves nimbly in the darkness of the dying night. She is like a mole in her labyrinths, like a bat in her cave. She brings her finds back to Henri’s room, prepares the candles. Lights them. Turns off the light. There. The atmosphere is right. She can sit down again. Wait. For the sun to come up in her thinking.
The corpse seems to sink into the blankets. The cells are drowning in the dead blood. Suzanne has courage, wants to observe, to wait for the end of this night’s voyage, to touch something solid, a hospitable land. To react. The candles, placed on either side of the bed, on the night tables, thin out the dead man’s features, hollow out shadows. Henri’s hairy nostrils no longer quiver. The caverns are no longer bursting with life. That is Henri’s mouth. He will speak no more bitter words, will give no more orders, will do no more harm.
The ears look like extinguished wings, frozen in one last desire for flight. The skin is like a desert without wind. The images come back. The soft words on the cold beach of a spring of their twenties. She loved him for his shoulders, broad and slender, like a cobra’s. That’s it — Henri is a cobra. Was a cobra. One doesn’t get used straight away to speaking in the past tense. Why had he become so wicked over the years? Her question loses itself in the silence. Perhaps she abandoned him at the moment when he most needed her? Did she always listen to what he had to say? Wasn’t she too independent? In her own way? How complicated it all is. He did stupid things; he was a full-grown male, his cock stronger than his reason at times. But she? What exactly was she doing? A victim? She asks herself again. A victim? She hesitates. She takes Henri’s left hand, lays it on his abdomen. The right hand on the left. How cold he has become. She ought to call. There’s no point in keeping him here. No, no, wait a little longer; she hasn’t touched land. They had promised each other so many things. Fidelity above all. Who will have betrayed the other first? Why can’t one make that famous list of pros and cons? Henri had the habit of it. He arranged things so that the result always fell in his favour — but that is what he believed. In the end, she remains alone with an incomplete list, which for the moment has her winning.
The flame of the candles lengthens, burns the sadness. The features of Henri’s face fade little by little. Will the children be sad? Janvier most certainly. The others… They loved their father, of course, and had fled the house all the same. As for Annie, we shall see. Perhaps she should bring her back here, now that Henri is gone. She bites her lips. That would be idiotic. Who is to say that it isn’t her fault? She is hot. Her body no longer keeps its temperature as it used to. She smiles. She too will go and join the souls, one day. Requiescat in pace. Sleep in peace; I can do nothing more for you. She speaks to him without believing it. One has to say something to the dead, since one does it for oneself.
She stays sitting like that for about an hour, then leaves the room, goes into the living room, approaches the window. The clock strikes four. She frowns. Where can the third hour have gone? She doesn’t wonder about it any further. The storm, too, is now no more than the shadow of itself. The city sparkles. The road crews are already at work. It’s like the old: she has seen worse.
It may not yet be the moment to be happy, but peace comes over her like a high tide, in jolts, in warm and successive waves. She lifts the telephone receiver and calls 9-1-1. “My husband is dead.” She gives the address, explains the circumstances. She is told it may be delayed because of the storm. She understands, almost lets slip “there’s no fire.” Then she makes herself a hot chocolate, sets it on the kitchen table. She has no need to go back into Henri’s room; she isn’t listening; she is already driving him out with great blows of vengeance. The dog follows her in everything she does. She goes back to the living room, unhooks the clock, opens the front door and throws it as far as she can and slams the door. The dog flattens his ears, lies down. The mistress is strange. The mistress takes a biscuit out of the box all the same and throws it to him. Hop! No more. He’s pleased, even if the mistress is strange. Suzanne goes back to the kitchen, sits down, grips the cup. Her hands are shaking. The hot chocolate is good in her throat. Everything becomes calm again; even the dog no longer thinks about death, forgets that one of his masters is gone.
Thirty minutes later, the flashing lights of an ambulance make a promise of better days dance across the kitchen walls.