16. So many things changing and vanishing

I haven’t had my period for several months now.

I know I could blame it on stress, but I have a feeling it will never come back, that my fertile days are behind me. Given my age, it seems a safe bet. Doctor Charre could tell me for sure, but I don’t dare go see him, fearing that some of Ange’s suspicions might turn out to be founded, or at least that the atmosphere I’d find in his office, assuming he consented to see me, might force me to concede that Ange has good reason to be wary of him, even if he’s been our doctor for years.

I’ve stopped going out. I keep to the apartment, half-heartedly packing my bags. The fact is, I’m afraid I’ll lose my way again out in Bordeaux, where every day the shape of things is erased by a fog as thick as the day before. I’m afraid Bordeaux wants me lost, and next time Noget won’t be there to find me.

Not knowing how to fill the time, I stare at myself in the mirror, trying to make out who that woman might be, that woman who seems to be me, but whose image I can’t quite reconcile with my sense of myself. Not that I think I’m more alluring than my reflection. It’s not a question of beauty or charm or youth. It’s just that my lazy mind never adjusted to the changes taking place in my body, never registered the thick veins slowly rising up from deep inside my fat or muscle to just beneath my skin’s surface, never took note of the humble dull-brown excrescences, like tiny petals of flesh, sprouting under my arms and between my breasts, whose nipples are now more rumpled and grainy than they used to be; my lofty mind never deigned to acknowledge that the jiggling flesh on my arms and thighs will now jiggle like that for all time, just as I’ve now been excused for all time from the modest chore of containing my menstrual blood. Oh, none of these metamorphoses matter that much to me. I look at my naked body as it little by little takes on the thousand attributes of decline; I order my mind to see and remember the details of that dereliction, but I feel myself dismissing that sad, insignificant body, I feel a secret admiration for my mind’s arrogant unwillingness to dwell on my body’s banal changes.

I feel as if those two, my body and my mind, are two children of mine, and one bores and disappoints me, and the other makes me proud. Isn’t that just what I used to feel about the two very different young men who were my son and his lover Lanton? Didn’t I discreetly prefer Lanton’s company to my son’s, and of those two, wasn’t it Lanton I couldn’t imagine never seeing again?

A call to my bank confirms that Ange and I are still being paid, even though we haven’t gone back to the school. Either the principal never reported our unexcused absence to the ministry, I tell myself, or they’re trying to say that this is exactly what they want from us: they want us to stay well away, because our isolation or disappearance is worth far more to them than the money we’re costing them.

Then, two days before I’m scheduled to leave, Noget comes up from the lobby with a letter. He says: “Your son’s written you.”

“How indiscreet you are, and how rude!”

I brusquely stand up from the table where I was eating what Noget calls “breakfast,” in English: a bounteous array of goose rillettes, ham, thick slices of buttered bread, and little sugared brioches, all washed down with milky coffee. I snatch the letter from his hand and scurry to the shelter of the study, feeling myself waddle, feeling the blubbery jiggle of my hips beneath my nightgown.

I sit down on the bed. I stare at the envelope for some time before I can even think of opening it. It’s been so long since he wrote me!

The stamp shows a chalk cliff plunging into the Mediterranean. My son’s handwriting is still careful and clear, with pretty curls on the capitals, just as I taught him twenty-five years ago. This immediately fills me with pride. What if he asks me or orders me not to come?

I stand up and pace around the room, clutching the envelope to my breast, begging the letter to be kind. My emotion is so deep that my breakfast of charcuterie surges up in my throat. I stand still. The apartment is perfectly silent, as is the whole building. Outside the window, as always now, the thick fog with its sweet scent of silt.

           Dear Mama, my dear little mama, what will you think of that beginning? I imagine you reading those first words and feeling a sort of shock at that unexpected pleasure, your son Ralph addressing you with every sign of affection when there’s no reason you should feel any affection at all from poor Ralph, as you well know, and so I imagine you on the verge of tears and pleased deep inside to find that the love of a son always wins out in the end, that duty always wins out, that the mother always wins out! You know how to cry, even if your real eye stays dry, by which I mean the eye you never show. All the same, you know how to cry like any normal person. My dear mama, let me get to the point. First of all, I forbid you to rebuke or criticize me in any way. You’re raising an eyebrow, pretending not to understand what I mean. You understand perfectly well. Even when you’re not saying a word, you’re questioning, judging, accusing. That I will no longer accept. I will accept it no longer because I am a man. But are you capable of grasping that incontrovertible fact? Second, you must accept that changes can take place independent of your will or knowledge. In a general sense, I can’t live in this world. You never knew that, did you? People like you can imagine only what they themselves feel, nothing else exists. I look around me and I see two houses and a tree and a sheet-metal hut and one single cloud against the blue sky. That’s all I see. I tell myself that my dog, here beside me, might see other elements of this reality, or elements of a different reality, parallel to this one, that I can’t even imagine. That’s how you are: nothing can be real except what you see. But I’m still stuck in argumentation and recrimination, and that’s not what I wanted. All I have to do is say things to you and I find myself dragged into the realm of combat and conflict, which I’ve come to hate more than anything. That I will no longer accept. I can’t live in this world, as I told you. But I’ve grown used to it. I find a certain pleasure in my new existence. I like my work. I’m a new man. Just this morning I delivered a woman, and the baby was stillborn, which isn’t a bad thing, since in that woman’s arms the child’s life would quickly and inevitably have become a living hell: she’s an alcoholic, half numb to the world, unreachable. I looked after her well. I comforted her. I filled out all sorts of papers on her behalf. As you see, I am a determined man. So you were driven out of your school? Now you understand that, even for you, school was not a safe haven. Do you understand that? Your beloved school! How you must have suffered! For a long time I was jealous of your school and your students, but won’t you be jealous of my patients? I believe I’ve forgiven you everything, because I am a new man. For that I owe a great debt to Wilma. It matters little to me or to her if you like Wilma or not, it’s not at all certain you’ll be taken with Wilma as you were with Lanton, so taken it made me jealous and angry. Wilma will be less your type. Who knows? Maybe you’ll even fall in love with my dear Wilma, and I won’t be able to compete, and I’ll have to pack my bags! I’m joking, you understand. I am a new man. I have a whole long list of grievances against you. I’ve decided to keep them to myself, I don’t want my grievances dragging me down. Nonetheless, when I think you were planning to show up here unannounced, I feel rage gnawing away at me little by little. For goodness’ sake, why can’t you be sincere and straightforward with me? My father is sincere and straightforward, and I think I’m a man who inspires people to treat him in that same way, a NEW MAN. But you? I’m stating my case, I’m doing my best to convince you, and all the while I know there’s no point. Among all the other aspects of my new—and, I hope, I hope, definitive—personality, there is kindness. I’ve become kind. And so I will be happy to welcome you, dear Mama, like the KIND NEW MAN I am. As a doctor, I see abominations every day. As a man, as the man I am now, I transfigure that ugliness, and so come almost to love it, and then I forget it. That’s my process. The woman this morning, the one I helped bring the dead child into the world, deserves to be called a Madonna every bit as much as the one true Madonna, of whom we actually know nothing, isn’t that so? Can you guarantee that the Virgin Mary wasn’t a drunk? You can’t! I love everyone around me, I love the poor human race. It wouldn’t be right to envelop the whole world in my love and compassion and not include you, Mama, and so I envelop you in my love and my pity. I’ll see you soon, then. I can’t yet pull the thorn of resentment from my heart—my heart isn’t perfect, and that thorn has been there for so long—but we’ll see. Incidentally, you absolutely must repay my father the money you took from him. He needs it more than you do, the poor man. You probably don’t know it, but he’s in deep financial trouble, if not outright broke. You robbed him blind. You have to repay him. They drove you out of school, fine. But for what? I can’t get a clear picture from here. Was it undeserved? Isn’t there anything you did wrong? It seems a little much to claim that they fired you for no reason. I’m counting on you to explain all this. Think of my father, try to be ashamed: he’s destitute!

Your son, Ralph

Anger submerges me in a cold numbness.

I reread the letter, that dishonest, underhanded letter written to me by my own son, my only child—how did he ever come to this? To these heights of mendacity, of grotesque lyricism? Oh, I say to myself, my son’s become a mystic, how could it be that in the very prime of his life he turned into exactly the kind of person I, his own mother, most loathe, by what subtle intuition, what mysterious perceptiveness did he understand me so well that he could remake himself as a mystic, knowing my deep loathing for that turn of mind, that posturing, self-important approach to life? And then there’s this Wilma—who is he talking about?

I hurry out of the study and into the bedroom. I shake Ange from his open-mouthed slumber. He wakes with a start, reflexively covering his wasted face with his forearm as if to fend off a blow. This is just how Ange’s students used to defend themselves, much to Ange’s irritation, when on occasion he tried to give them a smack in the face—no, not a smack, just a swat, nothing more—but the students in question were hard kids, long used to being hit and practiced in the art of warding off blows with their skinny arms, their bony elbows, and so it was on those arms or those elbows that Ange’s hand landed, sometimes painfully, which only fueled his rage and led him to strike all the harder, to avenge himself on that insolent limb. Afterward, he was always sorry he’d lost his temper, he thought he’d let himself down. He strove to incarnate pedagogical perfection, and he saw any trace of violence as a personal failing.

All trace of fleshiness is gone from Ange’s face. I can distinctly see the outline of his bones beneath the skin on his cheeks, his jaw.

Is someone here mistreating Ange?

In urgent agitation, I ask, “What’s my son’s wife’s name again?”

“Your son’s wife?”

His gaze darts nervously around the room, and it’s true that I’ve just wrenched him awake, but he still gives me the troubling sense that he’s stalling for time.

I give him a severe stare.

“What’s Ralph’s wife’s name, Ange? My granddaughter’s mother?”

“You don’t remember?” he mumbles.

Then, after a few minutes’ silence, pretending, I’m sure, to search through his memories: “Yasmine.”

“Yes, that’s right,” I say, troubled, “her name is Yasmine.”

“So why ask, if you already know?”

Ange’s eyes seem slightly shifty. This daily accumulation of suspicions, silences, and irksome questions, when it’s always been not our rule but our way to hide nothing, to tell each other everything about everything, this mounting pile of hard, hurtful secrets makes me deeply sad. Never, I tell myself, whatever happens, never will we be able to claw our way out of such a deep pit of mistrust and ignoble suppositions.

Noget knees open the door and comes in. Along with the jar of rillettes (his mother raises poultry in the Landes, he says; she makes these superb rillettes herself, he says, jam-packed with long, melting fibers of goose flesh) and the inevitable Bayonne ham, I see a steaming little bowl filled with something gelatinous and orange-tinged, whose powerful odor nonetheless makes me immediately secrete the yearning saliva I’m now slightly ashamed of. Ange turns his head away in apparent disgust. He can’t smell the stench of his own infection, but he’s repelled by the aroma of fine food!

Noget quickly explains that he’s brought us a bowl of tripoux, a typical dish of the Auvergne, made with tripe, sheep’s feet, and calf’s ruffle.

“Not from my own kitchen,” he says, apologetically.

All of a sudden I remember my period has stopped. Lost in that thought, I distractedly lay my hand on my stomach.

“You’re not pregnant, are you?” Noget asks.

“No! Far from it.”

My forehead is hot and damp with a sort of radiant happiness, an intense relief. I realize that the end of my period is the first normal thing that’s happened in months, the only one I can explain rationally, without having to weigh a whole range of hypotheses.

As Noget goes on looking at me, scrutinizing me, the tray still in his hands, I tell him, “I’m the right age for menopause, you know.”

“You must be mistaken,” Noget says quietly, after a pause.

He adds, “Your son is a doctor, he’ll tell you what’s going on.”

And once again rage washes over me.

I storm out, leaving Noget to feed Ange (are you sure you’re not making this fuss simply to spare yourself that sight, Ange mutely begging to be left in peace and Noget filling his dry-lipped mouth with that heavy, questionable food?), quickly get dressed, and leave the apartment with my son’s letter crumpled in my cardigan pocket. My sweater is so tight around my waist and breasts that I can’t fasten the buttons.

I rush out the front door, unthinking, gravely oppressed by indignation and the sense of a terrible injustice.