19. We’ll probably never see each other again

I spend the last night with Ange, in our bed. Although his wound seems to have stopped oozing, it’s badly infected, and the infection is beginning to spread all around. Not one inch of Ange’s flesh seems untouched. His body is deep red, his face pale, faintly gray. A painful bedsore was forming, so I helped him onto his side, and he now stays that way at all times, which complicates his eating and drinking. He doesn’t care. As a bedpan, Noget brings him a little bowl from his apartment downstairs, but Ange rarely urinates or defecates.

“He’s only had one bowel movement this week,” Noget told me.

Nonetheless, Ange feels obliged to eat everything Noget puts before him, and the portions are huge for someone who never gets out of bed. But he’s still as thin as ever, if not thinner. He almost never speaks anymore. The air in the room is unbreathable. Noget comes and goes, ever cheerier, youthfully carefree. He’s shaved that old beard of his, and he now seems so different, so renewed, that my feelings toward him have little by little gone from hostile mistrust to a sort of reluctant affection. He really is a different man. I have no parting instructions for him. Whatever has to be done he will do, and he’ll do it better than me.

It’s true, he’ll liquidate Ange better than I ever could.

I only tell him how to go about sending Ange to come join me as soon as he’s fit to travel. After extensive calculations, I leave him three thousand euros in cash.

“Keep trying to convince Ange to let Doctor Charre have a look at him,” I say.

“Ange is exactly right not to want that dangerous old cretin anywhere near him,” he answers, with an inappropriate twinkle in his eye.

I immediately ask, “What do you know about Doctor Charre?”

“Only what I have to know,” says Noget. “That he hates people like you.”

With a sort of puzzled curiosity, he adds: “Do you even try to keep up with things?”

“No,” I say. “Ange and I don’t read the paper. We do listen to the radio, but only the music stations, jazz and classical.”

“Which is why you don’t know anything about anything or anyone,” says Noget reproachfully.

“Our society is too well informed as it is,” I say.

Noget reaches out and pats my belly.

“So, is there a baby in there?”

“I told you, it’s menopause! You’re such an idiot.”

Noget bursts into a loud, heartfelt laugh.

“I don’t believe a word of it,” he says.

Suddenly he turns serious.

“In any case, don’t go see your Doctor Charre, he’d get rid of the fetus and never even tell you.”

When I wake up by Ange’s side early the next morning, he’s still asleep. Noget is already there, standing at the foot of the bed in the dark. He tells me my breakfast is waiting.

I kiss Ange’s hollow cheeks, his hot, dry lips. I dissolve into tears, to my great embarrassment, since Noget’s still in the room.

“We’ve never been apart before,” I say quietly.

All of a sudden Ange opens his eyes wide, gives me a vacant stare, then closes them again, as if exhausted from this close study of me.

“Farewell, Nadia,” he murmurs. “Whatever you do, don’t come back.”

“You’ll be coming away, my love,” I say, racked by guilt.

Ange would never abandon me—or would he? Hand me over to a stranger, even though I was ailing, leave me deep in the slow suffocations and insidious, inexorable constrictions of a city gone bad, contracting to cut us to bits? So I should have stayed back in Les Aubiers, close by those two old people and the rest of the family? Is that where I’m supposed to be? Far from the murderous heart of the city?

“If only you’d let yourself be treated,” I whisper in his ear, suddenly almost hopeless. “Oh, darling, then we’d be going off together…”

He wearily shakes his head on the pillow. Then he struggles to raise his lips to my cheek.

“So you’re going to have a baby, Nadia?”

“No, no,” I hurry to say, “what a ridiculous idea! My period has stopped, but that’s normal at my age.”

“Glad to hear it,” says Ange.

He’s far too weak, I can see, to say anything more. A tear trickles from his right eye, soaks into the pillow. His skin is so hot that the damp trail immediately dries.

I stand up and ask Noget to leave the room so I can get dressed.

“Be quick about it,” he says. “The toast will get cold.”

Clenched all night in the squalid warmth of the bedroom, my lungs relax and dilate painfully when I step through the doorway. I give Ange one last look. He’s drowsing, frowning severely, his lips moving slightly, as if he were scolding someone in a dream.

“This is much too much, I can’t possibly eat all this,” I say when I walk into the kitchen.

I see that Noget’s so-called toast is actually scones glistening with melted butter, accompanied by little fried sausages and scrambled eggs. There’s also a salad of fresh fruit crowned with whipped cream and the madeleines Noget bakes himself, deliberately letting the edges darken just a little.

“For the road,” he says, with a benevolence so expertly feigned that I feel forced to choke down everything he’s laid out for me, and it’s all so good, despite the queasiness filling me.

When I’m done, I feel listless and bleak. I dread going out onto the cold street. I ask Noget for a second cup of coffee, then a third. Finally I pull on my cardigan, now too tight to button.

But where my son lives it’s hot, so unendingly hot that once I get there I’ll just roll up that cardigan, stick it in my suitcase, and forget about it.

“Are you taking the tram?” asks Noget, very amiably.

“Yes, it’s the only way,” I say.

A rush of heat turns my face bright red. I can feel the sweat trickling between my breasts, beneath my undershirt. I busy myself to hide my fear.

“It’s the only way, right?” I say again, with a little laugh, as I fasten my purse and put on a dab of pink lipstick.

“Yes, you certainly mustn’t take a taxi,” says Noget.

“I’m not in the habit of splurging on taxis,” I say.

But Noget can see through me. He knows it’s simply out of caution that I’m not calling a taxi; he knows I’m afraid I’ll end up with a driver who immediately throws me out of the car or drives me into the depths of mysterious neighborhoods, where I would be lost forever.

I take my suitcase out to the landing. I extend a hand to Noget, my fingers slightly stiff, slightly cold.

“Well, goodbye.”

“Goodbye,” says Noget.

Just as his hand touches mine, my chest quakes with one single sob, dry and violent.

“Save him,” I say. “I’m begging you, Monsieur Noget…”

“It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?” cries Noget, suddenly angry. “If you hadn’t looked down on me so…”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I say, very quickly. “I do regret it, you know.”

We stare at each other, awkwardly. I pick up my suitcase and start trundling down the stairs. Noget doesn’t offer to help. I hear him close the door behind me almost as soon as I’ve turned around.