Now I’m trying to spot Nathalie in the crowd of passengers, posted by the top of the gangplank, the sunlight still pale and opaque but already almost blazing, the early morning air vibrating with the threat of an infernal heat to come.
I who so yearned to see my son again, now I find myself hoping he’ll be late, or maybe even have forgotten or neglected to come meet me at the boat, so desperate am I to see Nathalie first.
How I’d like her to drive me to my son’s house in a rented car, and this time I wouldn’t be afraid I might suddenly see her face change before my eyes, I wouldn’t be afraid of anything she might say or do, and I could unambiguously redeem myself and at the same time ask her what it is she thinks—or knows?—I am. And then beg her to forgive me, I who took care not to hear a word that she said, and promise her I’ll find some way to be a better person than I’ve been.
But, she might say with a charming and generous smile, no one expects any sort of humanity from you.
No, she’d never say such a thing. What she’d say is:
“Go see your poor parents in Les Aubiers; let these newfound aspirations to goodness take that form for a start, with a well-deserved visit to those people who’ve done you no wrong.”
“No wrong?” I’d say roughly. “But wasn’t it wrong, and very gravely wrong, to try to bind me up in the mediocrity of an existence completely enclosed in the boundaries of a neighborhood and austere rituals and incomprehensible, unyielding mistrusts of anything that wasn’t in our ways? I’d rather die than see those faces again—faces mine must look a little like now that I’ve aged some—I’d rather die than feel the pity the sight of abandoned, rejected old people always inspires, a pity mixed with remorse and nostalgia, because don’t all old people, quiet and unassuming all their lives, have a bereft or pleading look that can make your heart ache even when they’ve never done one thing to deserve your indulgence?”
But the flow of passengers slowly thins, and Nathalie isn’t among them.
Half numb with despair, I walk down the gangplank myself. I’m already hot in my black clothes, and my scalp stings and itches.
In just the few minutes since the boat docked, the intense paleness of the sky has succumbed to the invasion of an azure so elemental that the paving stones on the dock and yellow-and-white façades beyond the port seem tinted blue by it, as if no surface could resist absorbing such vigor.
Perhaps because my eyes are burning as well, I violently collide with a man at the bottom of the gangplank. My head crashes into his shoulder, my glasses fall to the ground. He lets out a little cry of pain, my teeth having jabbed him in the collarbone. I shout, “Careful, don’t step on my glasses!”
I bend down to retrieve them, and as I’m standing up again—my gaze climbing from the white-espadrilled feet up the long, hairless, oddly slender tan legs of this man in his wide-legged khaki shorts, a pair of pink-and-white striped briefs very visible inside them, as is even, I believe to my deep discomfort, the soft, shiny hair of the loins (and I think I detect a warm, intimate smell, clean, soaped, perfumed)—a long-ago memory of two little legs, skinny but powerful, clasping my hips and encircling my waist with such stubborn force that I had to put on an angry face to get him to loosen his grip and drop to the ground, back when I came home to the Fondaudège apartment at the end of the day and my son leaped on me like an anxious little monkey, the brutally precise memory of those limbs, warm and strong but so slight, leaves me speechless and trembling. Oh, I recognize those grown-man legs, I made them myself.
With one hand I push my glasses back on, with the other I touch my son’s thigh. He leaps back.
“Ralph, it’s me,” I say, standing up all the way.
But when I do my son’s beauty grabs me by the throat. Gasping, I put one hand to my chest. He was a very appealing young man before, but in a slightly slovenly, almost moony way. And now I see that boy with his diffuse charms, his ever-presumed but rarely displayed gifts, transformed into the archetype of glorious manhood, even more incredibly handsome than his father, my ex-husband, and I know Ange and I would once have sneered at such splendor, automatically associating it with a kind of idiocy, but, either because this is my son or because Ange’s jeering influence is waning now that I’m far away from him, Ralph’s newfound beauty awes me, intimidates me, and also saddens me terribly.
Frowning, he peers at me. He’s taken off his sunglasses to examine me more minutely. A shy, surprised smile bares his teeth.
“Mama? Is that you?”
“You don’t recognize me?” I say, feigning levity.
He can’t help looking me up and down, as if in search of some piece of me that might prove I’m the mother he remembers. It’s been so long since we last saw each other, so long. And I look back at him, not hiding my admiration or the twinge of melancholy I feel forcing my mouth into an ugly, stiff smile.
I take an awkward step forward to embrace him. And he steps toward me, a tiny reluctant step, and bows his head to let my lips graze his cheek, but he doesn’t touch me or return my kiss. Certainly, this man who turns out to be my son is a figure of stunning physical perfection, but…
A shapeless unease enfolds me, clinging, subtle, ungraspable, as if when I stepped toward my son I’d ensnared myself in a gigantic spiderweb.
What is it about him, I ask myself, that isn’t quite right?
We’re the only two left on the dock. The sunlight rebounding off the white paving stones forces my eyes into a tight little squint, and I can feel my flesh recoiling from the relentless assault of the suffocating heat. My breath is quick and unsteady.
What is it about my son’s appearance that’s not right?
“You’ve gotten so fat,” he says bluntly.
“And that bothers you?”
“As a doctor, yes,” he says.
“And as my son Ralph?” I say.
“A little, there too,” he says with a quick, flustered laugh.
“I’m going through menopause,” I say, “although some people refuse to believe it and insist on thinking I’m pregnant, how ridiculous.”
“It’s not hard to find out,” says my son.
He looks away, likely troubled by the intimate turn our conversation has taken.
He’s wearing a white linen short-sleeve shirt, strangely tight, so stretched over his broad, flat torso that the little metal buttons seem about to pop off. All that—the trim, muscular figure, the narrow waist, the thin, chiseled face, the lush, curly black hair, the brown eyes rimmed with long, thick lashes—I remembered all that before, and I recognize it now. But what about the rest? The thing I can’t put my finger on, can’t yet put a name to, but whose strange source is somewhere in my son’s gaze, what is that? He’s Ralph and not Ralph at the same time, he’s my son, but my son as if with someone else’s eyes. And that someone else seems a coldly righteous man, animated by an unyielding fervor, a hermetic passion that overflows, just a little, through a discreetly but implacably dogmatic stare.
Oh, it’s mystifying, because what once defined my son’s personality—to the point, often, of obnoxiousness—was the very opposite of what I see here today: it was an unremitting, tedious irony applied to everything indiscriminately, a limp, disdainful distance he inevitably put between himself and anything that happened. I remember, for instance, the remote, vaguely sardonic look on his face as he told me he was leaving Lanton, the way he watched me, waiting to pounce at my first sign of distress (because I was so fond of Lanton, so fond) and viciously mock it, as if it were unseemly and grotesque, rather than exceptional and praiseworthy, for a mother to dote on her son’s lover instead of her son himself.
And now there’s no trace of ridicule left in the eyes of this man poised on his shaved legs, boldly offering his face to the merciless sun—there’s only something severe and intransigent, almost brutal.
I open my purse and take out Lanton’s letter.
“Here,” I say, “I don’t want to forget this, it’s from Lanton.”
He takes it from me with a steady hand. He crumples the letter into a ball, looks around as if in search of a trash can. Evidently failing to spot one, he stuffs the letter into the pocket of his shorts.
“You have to answer him,” I say anxiously, “or he’ll think I didn’t give it to you.”
“Who cares?” says my son.
“But if he thinks I didn’t obey him, he’ll avenge himself on Ange,” I say softly.
“Don’t believe everything he tells you,” says my son.
And his hard, categorical tone is meant to announce that the question is closed.
He picks up my suitcase. With that, his lips begin to tremble. He stammers, “Oh, Mama…”
A moment later he gets hold of himself. He purses his lips, turns his back to me, and starts toward the parking lot with my suitcase in his hand. And I watch him walk off, resolute, ever so slightly solemn, my son who used to shamble aimlessly in tennis shoes, slouching and slump-shouldered, along the sidewalks of Bordeaux, adrift on his own boredom. How straight and tall he stands now! How this arid land has hardened him!
I walk after him, feeling the fiery paving stones through the soles of my ankle boots.
A tall man whose face seems familiar, wearing a baseball cap with a transparent visor, comes walking toward us. He passes by my son without a glance, but he stops when he reaches me. The faint shadow of his visor tints his cheeks and forehead violet. Seeing me keep walking, he leaps straight in front of me. Now I have no choice but to stop. My legs are rubbery with fear. In a shrill little voice, I call out: “Ralph!”
The man lets out a contemptuous laugh. I can’t help thinking I should know who he is—should and would, if I weren’t such a coward.
“Ralph!”
But my son is already far ahead, and doesn’t hear.
“Ralph!”
Isn’t that anger I now hear in my voice, the same blinding, dizzying anger, feeding on its own energy, that used to take hold of me, and afterward leave me deeply troubled, when my son was slow to loosen the little legs firmly clamped around my waist after he’d bounded into my arms, and that anger made me forget my strength and not see the excessiveness of my reaction, because sometimes I pushed him off so roughly that he fell backward in the entryway of the apartment. And one day his skull must have struck the floor in a worrisome way, that must have happened at least once, immediately snuffing out my senseless rage, throwing me to the floor beside him to take him in my arms and rock him, wretched, silently praying that he might forget this scene and tell no one of it, and never hold this one memory of his mother in his mind.
The man spits at my feet, a dry, unproductive hack. He blurts out a word I don’t understand, hearing only the end: “yer.” I shout in terror. He walks around me and stalks off, jumps over a chain barring access to the boats, and disappears behind a freight container.