I HAD A LONG CONVERSATION this morning with Clarisse. She’s worried about Bé and Jeanne’s health.
“They’re getting old, both of them, Mika,” she tells me, her voice quavering. “I can feel them falling away a little bit more each day, a little bit faster. Bé is fading, lost in the silence she’s gathered around herself. Now…I wonder if it could be dementia. We can’t pretend not to see it. And Jeanne, who’s buried in her grief. I try to spend time with Jeanne every day, but it’s so depressing, Mimi, the way she’s just letting herself slip away. When she has company, she comes out of it a little, but every day, after I see her, I go home thinking tomorrow she’ll be gone. Her sorrow is enormous.”
“What we have to understand, Clarisse, darling, is that they’re both really old, as you’ve just said yourself, and that they’ve been through more than a lifetime’s worth of grief this past year. Jeanne will never recover from Richard’s disappearance.”
On Sunday, at noon, we all get together, the whole family. “Picking up where life left off,” Clarisse says. We’re at Jeanne’s house for lunch with the children. Sonia and Maria seem worried. Félix, who’s always taciturn, didn’t stick around to chat, he just ate and then went off by himself to read his book. I was having coffee, sitting between Jeanne and Bé, when he came back toward us. I could tell he was flustered; he’s never been clingy. For the first time since this all started, he asked me what was going on at the newspaper, why I kept going. I don’t see the DKWs as much up near the house, I answer him, and I hardly ever go in to the office anymore. In any case, I’m so preoccupied with so many things that I can’t write. My latest article on the Ganthier murders, and the other one, on land reform, which I finally finished, are still waiting to be published.
Clarisse sings as she tends to Jeanne’s plants, which are dying too. Her gravelly voice has always annoyed Félix. When’s our life going to go back to normal, he asks me. He’s fifteen, he obviously needs to be at home. For a second I doubt myself, I feel guilty: what should I be doing for my children?
“I would so much like to be able to answer you properly, Félix. You just have to be patient.”
Here, like this, around the children, I feel like I’ve lost control. For the past few months, my life has been limited to this insane back and forth between Jeanne and Bé. Once more, here I am, sitting between two old women who are riffling through their troubles. When I’m with them, I try to read to pass the time, especially old classics. I always read the same books, probably because it requires less effort. And I have the stubborn impression—it must come from Bé, her obsession for knowledge and the written word, which she passed on to us—that I’m going to discover something significant in these books, some timeless truth allowing me to better understand the unfathomable events unfolding around me.
I’ve grabbed a battered copy of Marivaux’s Slave Island, and I flip through the book as we talk. I’m sure Clarisse will make fun of me, as she does, for what she calls my archaic reading material. Marivaux wrote his utopia in 1725, she will snipe. Just look at the state of the world, and draw your own conclusions!
I watch Jeanne, small and wrinkled in her armchair. Her eyes are glued to Félix, who must remind her of Richard. She is shivering despite the heat, draped in shawls and blankets as if the folds of the familiar cloth might hold some comfort that’s not really there. I take her hands in mine. They’re cold. I can feel her bones, as if the flesh is getting thinner every day. Jeanne hardly eats anymore. I understand: Bé suffers so much, watching her sister let herself go, gently—locked up inside her cry, as she says. Although, when you listen closely, you realize that Jeanne is occasionally completely rational. She turns to me suddenly. “Why don’t we get to have a normal life? Aren’t we entitled to live far and free from all this sadness?”
On the sidewalk, a young girl hurries by. The clacking of her heels catches Jeanne’s attention. She lifts her head and glances at the girl with something akin to compassion, as if remembering that another world exists, ailing outside these walls. Jeanne leans toward me and pulls my arm to bring me closer.
“See that girl, there?” she whispers. “Look at the way she walks, all bent over, she’s almost a hunchback. That’s Marie Nina, Ismène’s daughter. She was born in the neighbourhood, we knew her growing up, remember? Look at her now, how crooked she is. Everything is too heavy for us now. They say her boss forces her to sell herself to keep her job. Can you believe that?”
Her eyes well up.
“She can’t be more than eighteen years old, you know,” Jeanne continues. “Barely eighteen! What a tragedy this is, Mimi. But she can’t do anything, poor girl, they’re too powerful. Ismène, the mother, doesn’t work anymore. She can’t work. It was so hard for her to set up her business when she was selling sewing notions; it was blood, sweat, and tears, truly. When she got sick, she lost everything. It was serious; she had a heart attack, just like that. She was forced to close down, and she went bankrupt. Now Ismène’s husband, André—he was a mason or a painter, I don’t remember—disappeared, after an altercation at the seaside with a man called Éloïs Maître. That’s what people say. That Éloïs Maître fellow, who was a baker, closed his bakery to join the assassins. Now he shares the same trough as the monster who’s president. What times we live in! Poor thing,” Jeanne sighs. “Now she has to take care of the whole family. She has a whole pile of little brothers and sisters.”
Jeanne closes her eyes for a moment, relaxes, and opens them again. She looks at me as if she were waiting for a word to come, for some light. I don’t say anything. She presses herself against me, her nails, her bony fingers clasping my skin, a reminder of her despair. The shawls are thick. Her heart is beating, fighting for her.
I look at her closely. Time is passing much more quickly for her than for me. Has she already crossed over? I still see a sparkle in her eyes that reminds me of my mother. Could it be that, as we stand together, our breath mingling, she’s thinking of her too—her sister, a part of her, the woman I look almost exactly like, who was gone so young, too soon? Jeanne is closer now to Maman than I am. Although—given the cannibalistic wind blowing relentlessly, how can we guess what each day holds? Tears run silently down Jeanne’s furrowed cheeks. A moment later, she leans over to me.
“When I don’t have the strength to scream, I weep.” Her voice is like a child’s. “I have to scream, Mimi, do you understand? Silence is much worse than what I’ve suffered. Ever since they took him away from me, I’ve been screaming every day. I have nights and days full of screaming in my guts. Screaming is the only way I can go on. I would never have thought that at the end of my life I would have become nothing but screaming—the cry of a woman without a name, a decaying carcass. Bé scolds me when I say this, but what else am I? My name, my child, my innards have been fed to the pigs. I am a woman in ruins. I am nothing. I am nothing,” Jeanne repeats. “But every night, I dream the same dream: the one where fear has crossed over to the other shore, the face of fear has changed.”
Bé always gets up early in the morning. Back when she still lived with me, she would get up before dawn and head down to the garden. Eventually, the children would go find her, disturbing her peace and quiet and her endless soliloquies, but in the morning, barefoot, her hair down, she walked in the garden, one hand holding the hem of her nightgown, already soaked by dew. She rubbed dew on her face too; she said it was good for the skin. She doesn’t go down to the garden any more. Now she stands on the porch stairs. I understand why she’s afraid. After all, they threw that stone under my window. I’m still shaken. Every day since Bé came back, I find her on the stoop, motionless, frozen in time. She can spend hours looking out, without seeing the mass of people pouring down to the bottom of the hill, on the path that is always the same, though now the light is joyless, even at dawn.
Her eyes are distant and she rubs at her fingers, small circular motions, as if she were giving herself a massage. But I know that she’s counting too, like Jeanne, counting the weeks, the months, the days spent under siege, and the sleepless nights since Richard was taken. She’s sworn that she’ll still be counting in her coffin if he hasn’t come back by the time she’s gone.
This morning, as she peers at the lines of her dry hands, following a trail of veins, she turns around, staring at me with her grey eyes.
“Look!
I turn my head but I don’t see anything. There’s nothing but the path down the hill and the anonymous silhouettes.
“Look,” she says again.
She blinks rapidly, as if she has a tic.
“The children used to play there in the morning. Do you remember? In the garden. In the morning. Richard, Soledad and the others. Look. They’re not there anymore, are they? There’s nothing left but tears. In my head, everywhere, sobbing. You can hear them, can’t you? This town is going to vanish, they’re going to devour everyone down to the last sob.”
From the pocket of her bathrobe, she takes out a small metal box, its green paint peeling. She opens the tin carefully, as if she were afraid that the contents might evaporate. Her trembling fingers awkwardly shape two greyish cotton-wool plugs. Mumbling, she wedges them into her ears as best she can. “I don’t want to hear any more…No more.”
At the edge of nothingness, in the deepest part of all that is intolerable, through Bé the demented world resounds.