Albane!”
His cry had the sharp, nasal quality of the parrots and parakeets bustling about in the trees.
“Albane!”
He couldn’t help it. Emotion made his voice ugly, quite apart from the fact that it had recently broken and he had consequently lost all control over it.
“Albane!”
The fear of not being heard made his cries even shriller, so that they blended with the screeching of the parrots and were lost in the middle of all that cacophony. It was like one of those nightmares in which the dreamer, in spite of running as fast as he can, is caught by a monstrous giant moving in slow motion. Quentin realized that, even though he was shouting at the top of his lungs, Albane wouldn’t hear him.
So he leaped off the bench and waved his arms.
Dragged abruptly from her daydream, Albane saw him, gave a start, took fright at first, then recognized him and smiled slightly.
Hesitantly, she decided to cross the street and go to him.
As if it was the most natural thing in the world, he returned to the bench to welcome her.
“So you still come here?” she asked.
Her disconcerted tone suggested that she was surprised Quentin hadn’t noticed the changes in the world: a war had broken out.
“Of course. Every day. I’ve been waiting for you because you stopped answering my notes.”
Albane remembered that she hadn’t answered his messages. It wasn’t that she didn’t care—on the contrary, whenever his name came up, it warmed her heart—but she kept telling herself that she would call him as soon as she felt better. Had she really been down for so long?
“What happened?”
She looked at him. He looked worried, sensibly worried. He had no idea what she had gone through . . . Luckily!
Seeing those clear blue eyes, which knew nothing about her ordeal, she felt lighter. At home, neither her mother nor Hippolyte nor Dr. Gemayel nor Marie-Jeanne Simon, the psychiatrist specializing in trauma, could ever look at her innocently.
“I’ve been ill,” she said.
“Seriously ill?” Now he did look alarmed.
She had better reassure him as quickly as possible, she didn’t want him to feel sorry for her. “No, it wasn’t a physical problem.”
“What, then?”
“It was a girl thing. Not important. It’s fine now.”
She was astonished by what she was saying. This urge to spare Quentin—or spare herself in his eyes—sounded a new note that seemed at once shocking and comforting.
At the mention of a “girl thing,” Quentin lowered his eyes. He wouldn’t investigate further: he was a young male and knew that women belonged not just to a different sex than men, but to a different species. Boys had to respect a “girl thing.” In recent years, he had realized that their bodies contained very special equipment, organs that bothered them, hurt them, stopped them from going swimming, and exempted them from classes without anyone objecting. As far as Quentin was concerned, there was no need to veil women: even naked, they remained shrouded in mystery.
He sighed and rubbed his hands. “Phew! At least it wasn’t something I did to upset you!”
Albane looked at him tenderly. He was so harmless, so delicate. How could he ever do anything to upset her? True, he related everything to himself, and yet she found his attentive, devoted egocentricity touching. In a parallel life, she could have loved him.
In relation to him, Albane had two lives that were difficult to reconcile, the old and the new. In the old, arguing with Quentin, annoying him, picking on him, flirting with him had been really important to her; in the new one, which had started with the assault, she found herself confronted with a childlike, inexperienced boy.
Would she manage to find a third life, in which, although hardened by the rape, she would still find within herself a fresh inclination to listen to such a boy and look at him?
“You know,” he said, “you can be honest. It’s better that way. If you don’t give a damn about me, then just tell me.”
“What’s gotten into you?”
“I’ve been waiting for you all these days, while you—”
“Hey, let me remind you that in the past it was always me waiting for you!”
The argument hit home, and he bowed his head. “Precisely. When you wait, you have time to think. And I need to know if . . . if I’m right to wait, if you care about me a little.”
She quivered with pleasure. “Of course I do.”
He looked up, delighted. “Do you really?”
“Yes, really.” Albane smiled. This endless, pointless chatter felt so good! She felt alive again.
Quentin grabbed her hand. She was surprised that his palms should be so warm and soft; she felt that her own hands were still cold and clammy, no more pleasant to touch than a goldfish. Well, as long as he didn’t notice . . .
“I’m going away, Albane,” he announced in a measured, serious voice. “I’m going to London.”
It took Albane’s breath away.
“I leave Brussels at the end of June,” he went on. “For two years.”
“Why?”
He looked at her, saw how defeated she looked, how she trembled, and he wavered. Should he tell her the reason? Admit that it was because of her? He chose instead to serve up the official version, the one that had convinced his family. “I want to complete my studies at the International Lycée in London, and get a European Baccalaureate, which is recognized everywhere. And I also need to practice my English.”
“Oh?”
“Plus, I’m finding it harder and harder to get along with my father.”
A few weeks earlier, Albane would have joined in with a sarcastic tirade against parents and said some disparaging things about her own mother, but she remained silent.
“He can’t see what I’m becoming. He insists on treating me like a child.”
Albane glanced at him. His father must not be paying attention, because Quentin, in a way that was both sudden and obvious, had become a man: his body was so much stronger, his eyes were filled with confidence, and his voice had at last broken. She found him quite impressive.
As for Quentin, he was concealing his true motive. He was taking refuge in London because she’d said she wouldn’t make love until she was sixteen and a half. He wouldn’t have the patience to mope around, waiting for her; if he stayed, he would turn hysterical, obnoxious, even violent maybe . . . From a distance, he would be able to bear the situation. It wouldn’t matter if he amused himself with superficial girls or women to assuage his impatience. Only she mattered. He would return when she was ready.
Albane shook her head, staring into space. Why was life snatching away from her the only person who made her glow with happiness?
The parrots were fluttering about energetically, busy taking grains and seeds to their babies, who were opening their eyes to life.
They sat on the bench like two castaways. Sex was tossing them around like corks borne on the swell, and they moved to its rhythm, not according to their own strengths or desires. For Albane, it had gone wrong; for Quentin, it had gone right. Still, they were aspiring to something else, hoping for a different relationship than the one they had had. Even though they had some trouble formulating this hope, they nevertheless felt it deeply and already knew who to place it in: what Quentin was expecting from Albane was that love could merge with pleasure; what Albane was expecting from Quentin was that love should be a consensual encounter.
“Do you have to go away?” she asked in a low voice.
She was revealing a great deal of herself with these words, and Quentin realized it.
“If I leave, Albane, it doesn’t mean we won’t be friends anymore. On the contrary. You’re my best pal. I have every intention of talking to you every day and writing to you every day.”
“Is that true?”
“I can’t see how I could forget you. You’re the only thing I’m going to miss about this place.”
Albane was tempted to run away. So much kindness, so much passion disconcerted her after these bitter days when she had shriveled at the thought that she would never love anybody again, and would never allow anybody to love her. She had imagined that she could protect herself behind a thick wall of indifference, but Quentin had just made two breaches in it, first by making her sad at his departure, and, second, by showing her how much he cared for her. What should she do? Continue to feel, to let her heart beat faster? Or shut herself away from emotion?
He pointed skyward. “Look at those two birds, Albane, there on the edge of the nest, above the street lamp. Can you see them? They’re lovebirds. They’re called that because the male and female get together when they’re young and form a couple that lasts till the end of their lives.”
“Is that possible?”
“Among birds, yes.”
She sighed. So did he.
“Among humans, the love of children and teenagers is downplayed. Adults always put on that clever, superior air, hear you without listening, and look without seeing. ‘It won’t last,’ they say.”
“So?”
“So the parents of lovebirds aren’t like that. Which is why lovebirds form lasting couples.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“That my mother and father aren’t lovebirds. My father has been cheating on my mother forever, my mother has been cheating on my father for a little while, after being hurt by him. What’s stopping them from splitting up is the children and their commonly held property. If I told them . . . ” He broke off. He had turned red, and his heart was pounding. He hesitated to continue: his words committed him so much, they risked making him ridiculous. “If one of their children were to say that he’s met the love of his life, they’d shrug. Because they no longer believe in love. And yet it seems to me that sometimes, being in love isn’t a state but an insight, an intuition about what is going to happen. Even if you’re young, you’re old when you love, because you’ve seen the future, you’ve already experienced it.”
Albane looked at him without understanding. He rummaged through his bag, pulled out a book, and waved it. “Here, look, I found a passage in this book by Baptiste Monier, you know, the local writer?”
“Local writer? You’re joking! According to my teacher, he’s translated all over the world.”
“‘Love at first sight is as mysterious in art as it is in love. It has nothing to do with a first time, because what you find often proves to have been there already. It is not so much a discovery as a revelation. A revelation of what? Neither of the past nor of the present. A revelation of the future . . . Love at first sight is a kind of premonition . . . Time folds and twists, and in a split second the future appears. We travel through time. We access not the memory of yesterday but the memory of tomorrow. “Here’s the great love of my years to come.” That’s love at first sight: discovering that we have something powerful, intense, and wonderful to share with someone. When you sent me your letter, I received the assurance that we would have a long and happy relationship, that for my whole life you would be with me, following me, guiding me, confiding in me, entertaining me, comforting me. Did I get it right? I’m counting on you.’”
Quentin put the book down on his lap. Albane looked at his endlessly long hands respectfully stroking the pages.
There was a moment of hesitation between them. Every word in the text triggered strange echoes. The letter mentioned in the text could have been the unsigned message Quentin thought he had received from Albane. The delayed love at first sight could have been this thunderbolt that had struck these two children who had known each other since infancy. The assurance of a joint destiny could have been Albane’s stubbornness, or Quentin’s new decision. They let their thoughts murmur and fell silent, charged with emotion.
Quentin gently closed the book and put it back into his backpack. He started speaking again as if Albane wasn’t there, addressing the tree trunks bursting out of the soil. “Imagine that I’m in love with you . . . That would mean I’ve seen from the start that we’re meant to spend our lives together, that I’ve already seen the children we’ll have, that I’ve guessed what you’ll be like when you’re a bit older, even when you’re elderly, and that I was attracted by that.”
Albane quivered. “You’ve imagined me when I’m older?” She liked the idea because, in the past few days, she had thought a hundred times that she was going to die.
“Yes.”
“And what’s your conclusion?”
“That you’ll always be attractive.”
“Not if I look like my mother.”
“Your mother’s very attractive.”
“She’s fat!”
“It suits her.”
Albane was dumbfounded. Was he another one who thought her mother was presentable? Men were strange!
At that moment, Victor and Oxana crossed the square, their arms around each other. Victor was talking animatedly and Oxana, with joy in her eyes, seemed to be drinking in his every word like nectar. Albane sighed. To be like that one day, maybe . . . You fall in love the way you become a painter or a musician, by imitation. If you see a Renoir, you buy brushes; if you hear Mozart, you learn music; if you glimpse the splendor of love, you want to embody it yourself.
Quentin gave a start. “My bus!”
“Already?”
“Yes, I’m going to miss it.”
He jumped down, closed his bag, and put it on his back. He smiled at Albane, waved at her, and set off at a quick pace. After ten steps, he ran back, looking anxious. “You did say you wouldn’t make love until you’re sixteen and a half, right?”
Sixteen and a half felt too soon to Albane, but she didn’t want to contradict herself. “Yes,” she confirmed, bowing her head.
“So that’s in a year and a half?”
Will I manage it in a year and a half? she thought. Oh, I hope I can. I’ll probably have healed by then.
“Yes, a year and a half.”
“In that case,” he said gently, “will you wait for me?”