The next day, Juliette stayed away from the books and kept the office locked. From the gallery, she saw a passeur walk through the gate and attempt to open the glazed door, then press her nose to it, one hand shading her eyes, but Juliette didn’t show herself. Zaide was still unwell, a little feverish and drowsy; she had left her with a whole family of rag dolls, clearly made by hand, to which the little girl told unintelligible stories, holding them one by one against her cheek on the pillow.
Looking at the dolls had made Juliette wonder about Zaide’s mother. Was she dead? Did the little girl miss her? Was it possible to make up for the absence of a mother? That was a terrifying question given that the only answer that appeared self-evident was no. Juliette made herself some tea, an entire potful, poured out a cup, and sat down to drink it as far as possible from the windows and the courtyard walls, far away from the slightest glimpse of the outside. She needed a soft, calm, peaceful cocoon.
Because that was how she’d always lived. Nestling in the smallest nook she could find. First at her parents’ house, in a peaceful suburb where residents considered the noise of a passing scooter an intolerable nuisance; then the little neighborhood primary school, the secondary school two streets away, the vocational college where she’d gained a diploma in commerce, neither enjoying it nor rebelling, then an advanced vocational certificate. She could have gone further, geographically in any case, could have at least moved to the other side of the ring road, not been content with the careers suggested by the little college where her mother had worked for many years as the principal’s efficient and discreet secretary. She hadn’t dared. No, actually, she hadn’t even wanted to.
She had never been aware that she was afraid, that she feared the world’s vastness and diversity, its violence, too. Home, primary school, secondary school, college, and, finally, the agency. The agency located twelve Métro stops from the studio apartment she’d bought with the money her grandmother had left her.
“You won’t even have to change platforms,” her mother had said approvingly. “That’ll make things simple for you, darling.”
Juliette’s life couldn’t have been much simpler. She got up every morning at half past seven, had a shower, sat at the counter of her galley kitchen and ate four crispbreads spread with cream cheese, never any more, drank a glass of apple juice and a cup of tea, and left for work. At midday, she sometimes had lunch with Chloe at the Vietnamese restaurant on the corner—that happened a couple of times a month, except when they’d concluded a juicy sale, in which case they splashed out—otherwise she ate the salad she’d made the previous evening, at the last minute pouring over the dressing from a thoroughly washed little caper jar. She always had an apple on her desk and a packet of Petit Beurre biscuits for tea break. In the evening, she went home, did a little housework, and had dinner in front of the TV. On Friday evenings, she went to the cinema, on Saturdays to the swimming pool, and on Sundays, she had lunch at her parents’ and then helped them with the gardening, which filled the time and gave them something to talk about.
Men had occasionally disrupted this routine. But not for long. These men were like running water: they slipped through her fingers; she didn’t know what to say to them; her caresses were clumsy; she could tell they were bored beneath her striped duvet, once the shudder of pleasure was over.
When they ditched her, she cried for a few days, buried her nose in her grandmother’s scarf, the blue scarf, which she liked to think carried a lingering, even infinitesimal trace of the perfume of the woman who’d knitted it. Of course it didn’t. The scarf smelled of synthetic lavender, from the detergent, because it had to be washed from time to time; there was also a whiff of chili, the only dish Juliette occasionally ventured to cook, and the eucalyptus that permeated the tissues of the brand her mother had always bought.
Her mother had died two years earlier, one fine spring evening, as she straightened up triumphantly after weeding a flower bed. The basket containing the wild grasses had been knocked over as she fell, her eyes open, staring at the sky. She hadn’t even had time to call her husband, who was thinning out the carrot seedlings close by.
And Juliette missed her. Oh, how she missed her. She had always tried to smooth the ground beneath her daughter’s feet, guiding her toward the safest paths, where she would meet neither obstacles nor difficulties. Nor adventures. Nor any other kind of unforeseen event. Nothing that could hurt her deeply, nor anything that could stir her passions, elevate her above herself, above her cautious certainties, her almost cloistered, gentle, humdrum existence.
Why had Juliette allowed herself to be pushed around? Where she came from, almost everyone had let themselves be pushed around—there weren’t many rebels. Oh, of course, some of them smoked dope at parties or committed petty offenses, like stealing a CD from the shopping mall or scrawling clumsy graffiti on the wall of a house—but that wasn’t rebellion. They all lacked anger. And enthusiasm.
They lacked youth.
Her grandmother, on the other hand, had fought for the right to abortion, for gender equality, for African American civil rights, against nuclear power stations, forced relocations, the massacres in Vietnam, and the war in Iraq. All her life she’d distributed leaflets, gone on demos, signed petitions, and engaged in passionate debate on the ways they could change the world, men, life. Juliette’s mother would say with a smile: “Mother is a real cliché.” And it was true, she could have come straight out of a film about the seventies, this woman who lived in a little renovated farmhouse in a tiny village in the Pyrenees, wore only natural fibers, had become vegetarian long before the Parisian bohos, read Marx (who on earth read Marx?) and grew cannabis beneath her bedroom window.
And knitted very long scarves for her loved ones.
Juliette’s cup was empty. She refilled it and sipped the lukewarm liquid. Soliman’s tea had quickly become her favorite. Inhaling the gentle steam, she thought of orange groves, the caress of sea mist, broken white columns, the Italy she’d never seen, apart from in the books she’d read.
Should you, she pondered, staring at a spider that was spinning an almost invisible web in a corner of the ceiling, travel to the countries you’d loved in books? Did those countries exist in reality? Virginia Woolf’s England had vanished as surely as the Orient of the One Thousand and One Nights or the Norway of Sigrid Undset. Thomas Mann’s Venice had only survived thanks to Luchino Visconti’s sumptuous film. And Russia … from the fairy-tale sleigh racing relentlessly across the steppe, you saw wolves, Baba Yaga’s cabin on chicken legs, vast snowy plains, dark forests full of danger, enchanted palaces. You danced before the tsar beneath crystal chandeliers, you drank tea from golden bowls, you wore fur hats (how horrid!) made from silver fox pelts.
How much would she find of all that if she took a plane and flew to one of those parts of the world—chaotic regions with shifting borders, where she had covered in a flash almost inconceivable distances, where she had let the centuries roll over her, flitted around among the constellations, spoken to animals and the gods, drunk tea with a rabbit, and tasted hemlock and ambrosia? Where were her companions hiding—Count Pierre from War and Peace, the mischievous Alice, Pippi Longstocking, strong enough to lift a horse, Aladdin and Crazy Horse, Cyrano de Bergerac, and all those women she’d dreamed about and whose destinies and passions she’d lived vicariously, at the same time avoiding feeling such emotions herself? Where were Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, Antigone and Phaedra, Julie and Jane Eyre, Scarlett O’Hara and Lisbeth Salander?
Deep down, she understood Soliman. He at least made no pretense of leading a “normal” life. He had chosen to hide away in a fortress built of books, fragments of which he regularly sent out into the world, like sending messages in bottles across the sea, offerings and gestures of affection destined for kindred spirits, those who, outside the walls, were confronted with real life.
If those words meant anything.
She had a headache at present. Perhaps she’d caught Zaide’s cold. Or it was the dust, the kilos of dust she’d inhaled these past few days.
And the Dust Remains. That was the title of a brand-new book she’d seen on top of one of the piles, next to Soliman’s worktable. A thriller, judging by the cover. For a rainy day, a cold, when she was feeling a bit down, that was perhaps the best medicine.
It was also a lovely concluding sentence for thoughts and dreams as disjointed as hers.