17. In the clutches of Rue Fondaudège

I scurry along to Rue Fondaudège. I can’t help muttering to myself, half aloud. My fury won’t stay bottled up in my skull.

The fog is still there, as it is every day, and I’ve come to think it will never lift again, that it’s become a part of Bordeaux’s character, its very essence, that this fog is the city’s breath, in a sense, as if, I tell myself, some deep-seated, stubborn, perhaps incurable illness were rotting my beloved city’s entrails, and that’s why its breath has become so unwholesome.

There’s no danger if I follow Fondaudège, I tell myself through my gritted teeth, I can always turn around and go on till I cross Place de Tourny, and then I’ll be back on Rue Esprit-des-Lois.… But, oh, how dare he, how can he be so…so brazen, he who was always so…timid, so polite. How can he…imply I’m a thief, his own mother…and a thief who can’t be reasoned with, who refuses to talk things through…to understand, when I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to understand others…my son most of all… And then this talk of that stranger, that Wilma, and the insinuation that I was in love with Lanton… What a despicable joke, how idiotic! Like saying I’d fallen in love with my own son, yes, that would be every bit as stupid and offensive. And yet he’s willing to let me come see him, out of the goodness of his heart; he’s on his way to full-fledged sainthood, apparently… What a joke! So my son is a pure soul, but not a word about the baby, about…Souhar; what does it mean, this silence about my granddaughter, as if there’d never been a baby at all, or she can’t be spoken of anymore—but to protect whom? to protect what? Or maybe I’m not worthy of being told about my own granddaughter? Is there some danger of befouling the baby, or of bringing misery down on her fragile newborn head, that would come with simply writing her name in a letter to Grandmamma Nadia?

I stalk down the street, furiously stretching my cardigan over my stomach. Soon I’m gasping for breath, unused as I am to exercise, but I keep walking down the interminable, unchanging Rue Fondaudège, not wanting to go home until I’ve walked off my agitation. Eventually I look at my watch and find I’ve been walking for almost an hour. A fear comes over me. Fondaudège is a very long street, but not so long that I can briskly follow it for an hour without it making a turn and taking on a new name. As I recall, Fondaudège becomes Rue Croix-de-Seguey; it stops being Fondaudège after maybe a little less than a mile. And yet here I am still walking down Rue Fondaudège, not as fast as before, wondering if I’ve already come too far from home.

The cafés and shops have all disappeared. There’s nothing but modest houses, soot-stained apartment buildings. I’m not going to turn around, I resolutely tell myself, until I reach the end of the street. Bordeaux is my town, and haven’t I walked this Rue Fondaudège hundreds of times since I was a child?

I can feel my rage at my son (“my little heart,” I so long called him, and now here he is forsaking his mother’s old heart) waning as my anxiety swells, because this street is very visibly not coming to an end. I feel I’ve gone too far to simply turn back, because that would be showing an ominous acceptance of this aberration, granting that Rue Fondaudège is no longer the Fondaudège I’ve always known, which is impossible, which simply cannot be possible.

Once I’ve carefully studied her face, I ask a woman coming toward me, “Excuse me, what’s the name of this street, please?”

“Fondaudège,” she shrugs, pointing to the sign above our heads on the wall. “Rue Fondaudège.”

“And how long before I reach the end of it?”

“It’s a very long street, you know,” the woman says as she walks away.

With tiny, cautious steps, I keep going.

The street has begun to feel familiar—tiny storefronts with graying plaster, long-closed repair shops, doctors’ and dentists’ offices with dusty windows and dingy curtains—though I don’t recognize anything in particular, as is so often the case in my city nowadays, now that the fog has settled in, but all at once I stop short, or rather I realize my feet have stopped short, at an apartment building half masked by scaffolding, in mid-renovation. My throat tightens in foreboding.

Oh, yes, I reluctantly tell myself, that’s right, it was here.

And although I don’t want to, I push open the door, which puts up the same resistance it always did, and I automatically brace myself and lean forward to force it open wider, just as I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of times, because I lived here for many years with my ex-husband, before I met Ange. What mystifies me is that we lived at the very start of Rue Fondaudège, not an hour’s walk down the street. Or, I ask myself, does it merely seem farther because I’ve grown older? No, that’s no explanation, I’ve been walking at a very good clip.

Why has my period stopped?

My mood has turned sullen and sour. I can’t help feeling that, for bad reasons and in an act of covert blackmail, my son is forcing me to do something I don’t want to do, something there is in fact no reason why I should do. And I have no obligation to obey my son in this or in anything else.

And yet here I am on the stairs I’ve climbed so many times, clutching the sticky banister—here I am slightly breathless at the door to what was once my apartment, and if I say “was once,” it’s because I don’t live here anymore, but for the sake of the truth and my own sense of dignity I must make it clear that I still own this apartment on Rue Fondaudège. In the divorce settlement, my lawyer (he came to the little party I threw to welcome Souhar’s birth, and then, as if by some deliberate choice, we never spoke again, even though we’d become almost friends, and come to think of it haven’t all that evening’s guests inexplicably disappeared from our life, from the building, the street?) managed to have me awarded full ownership of the apartment my ex-husband and I bought together, yes, it’s true, it’s true. I’ve been renting it to my son’s father, for a modest sum, ever since.

What you don’t know, I’d like to shriek at my son, is that your father hasn’t paid his rent in months, and I haven’t asked him and I never will, over Ange’s objections, Ange who thinks your father is taking advantage of me, but I don’t care that that man might be cheating me, I don’t care, precisely because he’s your father and my ex-husband and I once loved him boundlessly.

The little brass plate that announced that my ex-husband was an electrician is now gone from beneath the buzzer, I see.

He had a good reputation, he had to turn away customers, he worked for people with big houses in the Bourse and Grand-Théâtre neighborhoods. Is it my fault if that smart, capable, highly sought-after man couldn’t endure the sorrow of our separation or get over the upheaval of the divorce? That was the problem, I wish I could tell my son; it was his weakness of character, his excessive attachment to the status quo, that was what set off his decline, that and nothing else. Not, as you insinuate, because I’d reduced him to poverty, and it’s true that I did well by the settlement, but there was plenty of money left over for him to lead a perfectly fine life, if only he hadn’t chosen the path of self-pity, defeat, and disinterest.

There’s no reason why I should be here, I tell myself, deeply angry.

He’ll help me escape from Fondaudège before it saps my last ounce of strength or suddenly coils around me and chokes the life out of me; I’ll never get away on my own, now it’s Fondaudège’s turn to wreak its vengeance for whatever it is I’ve done!

I summon my courage and press the buzzer, just as I used to do when I came home late from school, for the pleasure of hearing my little heart’s feet slapping the floor. He would undo the latch, leap into my arms, and nestle against me, even though he was already a big boy by then. My son must have tried hard to forget that, and yet, I tell myself, almost triumphant, his soul today is built on the unbridled love he felt for me back then, which kept him clasped to my breast for so long that I had to detach him, gently push him aside so I could come in—the soul he has today, so cold to me, is made of that too!

That was what I loved about Lanton, my son’s lover. He wasn’t ashamed to hold me in his arms for many long minutes when I went to see him in his office at the police station, he felt no need to hide his deep fondness—that was what I so loved about Lanton, the innocence of his displays of affection.

Was that childish of him, was it sappy? Was it ridiculous? How stiff my son seemed next to him, how preposterously sarcastic and distant.

A second press of the buzzer, and, just when I’m about to be off, at once relieved to have been spared a meeting with my ex-husband and dreading the thought of going back to my struggles with Rue Fondaudège, the door cracks open.

“What is it?” he anxiously whispers.

“Don’t be afraid, it’s only me,” I say, showing my face through the opening to reassure him.

He recoils, as if he’s seen some terrifying apparition.

“What do you want from me now?”

His voice is hoarse and unsteady, but even now, even ravaged by anxiety and disillusion, it vibrates in my ear in an intimate, familiar way, immediately calling to mind all the many times it spoke to me sweetly and freely. Although I have no wish to revisit the site of the life we lived together, us and our son, I hear myself asking, “Can I come in for a minute?”

Weren’t those the best years of my life? All three of us together on Rue Fondaudège? My ex-husband grudgingly opens the door all the way and lets me into what is in reality my own apartment.