5. How could I not have known?

“You’ve got to come over,” I say.

Which they immediately do, practical, efficient, both of them tall and husky like Ange but animated by a vivacity that I assume must be continually refreshed by the sway of the long, tinkling Indian skirts they’ve been wearing since they were teenagers, indifferent to changing fashions. Their faces are much alike, and I often mix up their names.

They kneel down before their father, concerned and watchful but showing no shock or surprise, as if, I tell myself, bewildered, this were a situation they’ve already foreseen, already thought through, almost studied. They must have trained for this moment, I tell myself. But how can that be, when I had no idea, when I saw nothing?

In hushed tones, I tell them that Ange refuses to go to the hospital—that’s why I called.

“It’s not reasonable,” I say, with a perplexed little shrug.

“On the contrary, it’s perfectly reasonable,” says the one who must be named Gladys.

“The hospital is out of the question,” says the other, possibly Priscilla.

She gives me a surprised, very slightly offended look.

“You know,” she says, “they’ll give him all kinds of trouble at the hospital.”

“What sort of trouble?” I say reflexively.

But in truth, I’m in no hurry to know.

“So what should we do?” I hasten to ask.

Attentive, efficient, Ange’s two daughters busy themselves by the armchair as Ange sits and watches in silence. He listens to us, looks at us, not even pretending to be too weak to give his opinion. He has some other reason for keeping it to himself.

I’m standing a few steps away, and although it seems obvious that I have a part to play in the care Gladys and Priscilla are undertaking to give Ange, and essential that I play it, I don’t make a move. I clasp my hands over my stomach, fingers knotted. I simply smile at Ange whenever our eyes meet, and he gives me a clenched, tortured smile in return.

I can feel his shame as keenly as my own, like a riptide carrying both of us off together, leaving us to drift for a moment, then sweeping us up again, but never letting us touch, never embrace. Beneath my feet I hear the familiar little sounds of the neighbors.

“It’s dinnertime,” I say.

“Bring us warm water, compresses, and alcohol,” says Gladys.

“Oh God, I think we’re out of compresses,” I say.

Tears spill from my eyes.

“Run and get some from the pharmacy,” says Priscilla.

“I can ask the woman next door,” I say.

“The time when you can ask anyone for anything is long gone,” says Gladys or Priscilla. “Hurry, go buy some.”

I put on my coat and rush out into the cold, now gone dark. I jog toward the pharmacy, stumbling, muttering incoherently. I hear the bells we knew so well, the cheery seven-o’clock carillon that not long ago still announced, simply and affectionately, that it was time to stop preparing our next day’s lessons and sip a first glass of good wine (whereupon Ange would say: “Isn’t this the sweetest moment of all?” with a playfulness that I felt and understood and loved, because we both knew that our workdays were made of nothing but sweet moments, among which we couldn’t possibly choose the best), and now those friendly bells are ringing and I’m tottering on the icy sidewalk, eyes on the ground, unable to hold back a low murmur of “What’s happening to us, what’s happening to us”; now I feel myself becoming so estranged from my own existence that I couldn’t say which faces are real, our faces as Ange and I relish our daily aperitif in the serenity of our blameless conscience or our faces this evening, separated by calamity and incomprehension, so unlikely does it seem that those two situations could be contained in one single reality.

I stop to listen to the bells and catch my breath. The street is empty, swept by the north wind.

The wind roars, it drowns out the bells, and very likely they’ve stopped ringing when I think I still hear them.

I hurry onward again. I can feel my glasses’ cold, sharp frame against my petrified face. I turn onto Cours de l’Intendance, just as deserted as our street, but I keep my eyes down out of habit, a habit so quickly acquired. My glasses slip. At regular intervals, I push them up along my nose with one finger, feeling the cold of the metal frame, the faint touch of the misted lenses against my damp lashes.