And what a surprise, later in the evening, to find the cleaning lady sitting on my bunk, her back slumped in sorrow, the woman in the navy blue uniform with little gilded buttons who readies the cabins for the night, turns down the beds, checks the supply of soap and towels in the bathrooms.
Right now she’s not doing any of that. Overpowering grief is rocking her shoulders back and forth, and beneath the dark fabric of her jacket I can see the very sharp, protruding line of her vertebrae, and it’s as if she feels so profoundly sad and lost that she doesn’t care that in that bony ridge she’s baring a fragile and intimate part of herself.
“Here now, here now,” I say.
She looks up, her face crumpled in despair.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” I say, slightly uncomfortable and afraid.
“It’s nothing,” she says, “it’s not me.”
“What do you mean, it’s not you?” I say.
This woman and I are about the same age. I sit down close by her on the bunk, unsure what to do.
“There’s this lady,” she says.
A tragic grimace deforms her mouth.
“Oh,” she says, “it’s so horrible, I can’t stop thinking about it.”
A shiver runs down my back as, from the brief description she gives me, I realize she’s talking about Nathalie, whose cabin she’s just seen to.
“What was she like?” I say. “Was she…” (I choke back a nervous titter) “normal?”
“Normal? Well, of course she was, but,” says the woman, “how normal can you be when you’ve been through such a tragedy—you don’t know what happened to her?”
“No, I don’t,” I say firmly.
I try to stand up, but an inertia holds me down, something resigned and defeated inside me, something remorseful and weary, and I lower my head, trembling, my nape exposed, accepting the blow and the awful weight of the axe, the fearsome jolt of the inevitable end.
“Her husband,” says the woman, wringing her hands on her clenched thighs, “and her two little children, she showed me their pictures, a boy and a girl and the husband, all wearing big smiles, a beautiful family, you know, and he took the children away on vacation to a house they’d rented, and she wasn’t there because she was going to come join them later, she had work, and the house caught fire in the middle of the night and the little boy was burned but he got out, and then the husband tried to get the little girl from her room and it was too late and they both burned, the father and the child, can you imagine? Burned to death, you understand. The boy’s in the hospital, third-degree burns, that’s why she’s going there, to see him. There were four of them and now there’s just the two, the little boy in such terrible pain under his bandages and her, the mother, all alone. She told me all about it but she never cried, and I don’t know why, I’m the one crying…I don’t know why…”
So devastated that my whole face is frozen, my jaw locked, I feel obligated to mumble, “It’ll be all right…”
My voice is breathy, inaudible. The woman collapses into my arms, her head on my breast, overcome with emotion. Through the graying roots of her red-dyed hair I can see the ice-blue skin of her scalp. I see my own tremulous hand clumsily smoothing that two-toned hair, clumsily massaging that exposed, shining skull, cold as a polished gem. The woman sobs gently, submissively. No doubt she can hear my pounding heart, I tell myself, my shamed, sorry heart, she can hear it, and what does she think of it?
Now patting that stranger’s damp brow, my hand has taken on the regular rhythm of the ferry’s rocking. It’s been a long time since I last held someone in sympathy, with no disgust getting in the way, as it did after Ange was attacked. Wasn’t it my father and mother I last pressed to my shoulder, the day I left Les Aubiers, with all the compassion that came with my certainty that I’d never come back, and their having no idea, such that even then, even as I was lying to them, telling myself I would never come visit them and they’d never dare, with their hesitant faces and imprecise, jagged speech, never dare venture into the city in hopes of seeing me, even then I felt infinitely sad for them?