“Are you going to tell me what you’re up to?”
Chloe was standing in front of Juliette’s desk, her arms folded. Her entire attitude announced that she wouldn’t move until she’d been given an explanation.
“What are you talking about?”
A pathetic ploy to gain time—Juliette knew it. A few seconds. Not even, because her colleague was off again: “With those wretched books you’re cramming into your drawer. With all the bits of torn cardboard I keep finding in the wastepaper baskets.”
Again, Juliette sidestepped the question: “I thought they were emptied every evening…”
With a sharp swipe, the side of her hand cutting through the air, Chloe made it clear that that wasn’t the issue.
“I’m waiting.”
And, since Juliette still refused to say anything, she snapped: “You want to make more sales than me, is that it? You’ve perfected the trick?”
“What trick?” asked Juliette, who knew very well what Chloe was talking about.
“The home staging. The trick with the book on the side of the bath. Let me remind you that was my idea. You’re not allowed to use it.”
She was unrecognizable, her nostrils pinched, pale, with two bright stains on her cheekbones as if she’d hastily applied a blusher in the dark. Her fingers dug into the flabby flesh on her arms, her carefully manicured nails making little prawn-colored half-moons. Juliette stared at her as if she were a stranger, her mask of prettiness suddenly obliterated by anxiety and resentment, and thought she glimpsed her as she would be in thirty years’ time, her features indelibly furrowed with bitterness and worry. Ugly. Gloomy.
Pathetic.
“Oh, Chloe!”
She felt like crying. Like getting up and putting her arms around her, cradling her, to cleanse her of a sorrow about which she knew nothing—and which Chloe probably didn’t understand either.
“You’ve been warned.”
Chloe turned on her heel and marched over to her desk, toward the garlands of Post-its stuck to the base of her desk light, toward her computer screen with its pink rabbit ears—a present from a customer who had designs on her, she claimed when she put them on, new and stiff, candy-floss pink. The pink had lost its color; the fabric was dusty now, and the fluffy ears had flopped down over the screen like faded iris leaves, projecting a long shadow.
Chloe marched like a frontline soldier in a 1950s war film, thought Juliette, with great strides and a forced determination, a spirit invigorated by danger and the prospect of failure. She believed in a purely imaginary rivalry, saw it as a battle that she had to win at all costs.
Juliette looked down at the file open in front of her, a lump in her throat. For some time, she’d had the feeling that life was passing her by, eluding her, thousands of grains of sand running through an almost invisible crack, taking with them thousands of images, colors, smells, scratches, and caresses, a hundred tiny disappointments and perhaps as many consolations … The fact was, she’d never liked her life very much, progressing from a boring childhood to a sullen adolescence before discovering at the age of nineteen, in the gazes she attracted, that she was beautiful—maybe. Some days. That there was inside her, as her first lover had whispered to her one night when they’d both had a little too much to drink, a gracefulness, something dancing, ethereal, something that allowed you to believe in the lightness of time, outside the dramas and the increasing misery of present-day reality.
But Juliette didn’t feel equal to taking on that persona. She had proved it by leaving Gabriel, who had carried on alone, drinking too much and going from bar to bar seeking a woman, or rather, a myth, whose otherworldly virtues would make his life bearable. She had proved it by collecting the depressed, the aggressive, the bad-tempered, and the indecisive. She had sought, then fled, those willing victims; she had watched them wallowing in their despair in the same way she watched the spiders she drowned, reluctantly, in her shower.
Dancing, ethereal—her? Well, maybe in the way that ballerinas were, twirling on their tortured feet, their toes bleeding, a smile on their lips? And she found even that comparison smug: all those first-world problems, as she sometimes said to herself, comparing her limited but comfortable life to the real distress she glimpsed only fleetingly on TV.
But then, she reminded herself, there were also the little joys. Those of routine: when the coffee was good in the morning; when the rain forecasted for the week only fell at night. When the TV news wasn’t a litany of deaths and atrocities, when she managed to remove from her favorite blouse the red pesto stain that Chloe had told her would never come out, when the latest Woody Allen film was really good …
And then there were books. Crammed into two rows on the living-room bookcase, in piles on either side of the bed, beneath the legs of the two little tables inherited from her grandmother, the firefly grandmother, the one who had lived her entire life in a little village clinging to the mountainside, in a house whose walls were as black as frozen lava; books in the bathroom cabinet, too, between the toiletries and the spare toilet paper; books on a shelf in the toilet and in a huge laundry basket whose handles had broken ages ago; books in the kitchen, next to the single pile of plates; a column of books in the hallway behind the coatrack. Juliette passively watched the gradual invasion of her space. She didn’t put up a fight, simply moved a few volumes to her desk drawer when she’d tripped three times over the same one that had fallen from its pile or shelf, which meant, to her mind, that the book wanted to leave her, or at least, that it had taken a dislike to the apartment.
On Sundays, Juliette went to every garage sale because she ached at the sight of those boxes where old books had been chucked carelessly, almost with disdain, and which no one bought. People came for secondhand clothes, seventies bric-a-brac, and household appliances that were still in working order. They hadn’t the slightest interest in books. So she bought them, filled her shopping basket with odd books, recipe or DIY books, sexy crime fiction, which she didn’t like, just to hold them in her hand, give them a little TLC.
One day she’d gone into a tiny secondhand bookshop, sandwiched between a pharmacy and a church, in a square in Brussels. It was a dreary, wet weekend, and the tourists were staying away from the city after the terrorist attacks. She had been almost the only visitor at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts, where a superb collection of Flemish Old Masters slumbered beneath high glass roofs from which a wan light fell. Afterward she’d felt the need to warm herself up. She’d walked past several cafés, fantasizing about a hot chocolate, and then she’d found herself in front of three steps, worn down in the center from use. What had attracted her had been a box of books on sale outside, sitting on a garden chair under a huge red umbrella tied to the back of it. But the books were all in Flemish. She’d gone up the steps, jerked the old-fashioned handle, and opened the door. She found herself on familiar ground, among the piles of books, the paper dust, the smell of old bindings. At the back of the shop, a man sitting at a small table had barely looked up from the book he was reading when the little bell had jingled. Juliette wandered among the shelves for a long time, leafed through a nineteenth-century medical treatise, a home economics manual, a method for learning Latin like a living language, several old novels by Paul Bourget, an author who seemed vehemently opposed to divorce, an album on the butterflies of Brazil and, finally, a slim volume with a white cover, entitled Vertical Poetry, Thirteenth Volume, the bilingual edition. Vertical—I wonder why, she’d thought as she’d opened it. Aren’t the lines of the poems horizontal like in any other poetry book? Yes, but the layout … you could say that …
The poet was called Roberto Juarroz. The collection had fallen open at here, and here she read:
We have not been taught
… to sustain ourselves on a shadow.
Juliette read and reread the poem, oblivious of the time. She stood rooted to the spot, the open book in her hands, while outside the drizzle turned into a downpour and rain lashed the glass door, making it shake and shudder. At the back of the shop, the bookseller was merely a hunched, silent shadow, his back covered with grayish dust. Perhaps he hadn’t moved for centuries, since the establishment had been built, in 1758 according to the carved inscription on its stone pediment, so white against the dark red brickwork.
At last, he said, “Your umbrella.”
Juliette jumped. “My umbrella?”
“It’s dripping on the books in the box by your feet and making them wet. Put it by the door—it will be more convenient for you.”
It was more of an invitation than a reprimand, but she closed the book and went over to him, a little too hastily.
“I’ll take it,” she mumbled, holding out the anthology.
“Juarroz.”
He took the book in both hands and raised the spine to his face, closing his eyes and smiling, like a sommelier inhaling a great vintage just uncorked.
“Dear old Juarroz…”
He slid his thumb inside the book, moving it slowly up to the top of the page, a gesture in which the disconcerted Juliette saw sensuality and even love; then he pinched the page between two fingers, turning it with the same careful slowness, while his lips moved. At last, he looked up, offering Juliette, for the first time, the gaze of his gentle eyes, huge behind the pebble lenses of his glasses.
“I always find it a little painful to let go of them,” he admitted. “I have to say goodbye … do you understand?”
“Yes,” breathed Juliette.
“Take good care of it.”
“I promise,” she replied, gobsmacked.
On leaving the shop, she took three steps, then swung around abruptly and looked back at the shop front with the peeling paintwork enclosing its treasures. A gust of wind caught the red umbrella, bending it like a farewell wave.
A farewell wave. Juliette looked about her. The ill-lit office, the windows overlooking the back courtyard, gray with grime, the faded posters on the wall, and Chloe, who had just turned her screen so that her colleague couldn’t see her expression; Chloe and her wild hair, her short, frilly skirts, her everyday cheeriness that rang so false. Chloe and her laugh that had just turned into a scowl. Chloe and her ambitions, Chloe and her calculations, Chloe and her profound, bitter inadequacy.
Behind Juliette was the wall of files, that toe-curlingly hideous urine-colored wall. And on the other side of the door, Monsieur Bernard, who sipped a hot drink from the cup that had been his mother’s. Farther still, beyond the agency front, was the street, the cars driving past on the wet road with gentle squeals, more shops and hundreds, no thousands of boxes called apartments, which were bought and sold, and which contained thousands of strangers also ground down by ambitions, inhabited perhaps by blind rage; but also dreamers, lovers, blind mad folk who saw perhaps more clearly than others (where had she read that?). Yes, thousands and thousands of strangers existed out there, while she sat here, unmoving, surrounded by this constant tide. She was going to stay here, trying to calm Chloe’s anger, knowing very well that she would never entirely succeed; she was going to stay here watching life go by, filling in forms and estimating the possible discount on the commission for a 140-square-meter apartment at Bir-Hakeim. She was going to stay here, and she was going to die.
Everyone was going to die. And she would never know them, never approach them, never speak to them, and all those stories walking past on the street inside the people carrying them—she would never know anything of them.
Without thinking, she slid out the left-hand drawer of her desk, the one where the books had been piling up since her arrival at the agency; one jammed in the groove and the drawer got stuck. She leaned over and took it by the corner to free it. Then she turned it over to read the title: The End of Ordinary Times by Florence Delay.