My son and this woman, this Wilma whose age, poise, and beauty affect me more than I dare admit (I have no hold over her, no possible sway, I can’t even imagine having any, nor could I try to win her over as I did Lanton, who was young and as it happened had no mother of his own, since that woman had so many times remade her life and replaced her husbands, so many times diverted her affection onto new children, that the paltry share left to Lanton had in his eyes long since gone stale), live in a vast stone house built on the mountainside, in the village of San Augusto.
I have to describe all this with the deepest detachment, since there’s nothing I can change. But this is not, not at all, what I was expecting to find.
I’d so dreaded having to face my granddaughter’s name, having no further pretext, however tenuous, to protect my mouth from it, so to speak. And perhaps even more than that, I dreaded how can I say this, how can I admit to this having to realize, as I looked at the child’s face, at her eyes, the darker or lighter irises contrasting starkly or not with the whites, at her skin, creamy or otherwise, that my son had perpetuated the indignity of our bloodline.
I couldn’t bring myself to ask my ex-husband, that innocent, good-hearted, ignorant man, what our granddaughter looked like in that way, which was in all honesty the only thing I cared about. He wouldn’t have understood if I had.
I never watch television, I tell him. My mind isn’t like yours, it’s not clouded by all that foolishness. I learn a lot from television, says that simple man. He could say to me, he would have every right to say to me: Nadia, you know far more about evil than I do, you’re far closer to evil than I am; abstaining from TV hasn’t protected or purified you, no, by forgoing TV you haven’t leaped into some great cleansing fire; you might have, I don’t know, dived into a fetid swamp. Myself, I’m the same man I always was, deep down, however fond I am of television, he might tell me, that upright ex-husband of mine.
But I haven’t had to examine Souhar’s little face, whatever it looks like.
“Where’s your daughter?” I asked Ralph almost as soon as we reached his house.
Everything was spinning; I had to lean on the car not to fall. All those twists and turns had left me dizzy. My stomach was churning. My son grumbled a few unintelligible words, scowling with a rage that might at any moment erupt to smite his poor mother in her mire of ignorance and incomprehension.
Once it was I who could terrify him with one frown; I could bring him to tears with the tiniest hint that I might lose my temper—when was it, how old was my son, when the fear moved from one side to the other? My loving little boy was so afraid of angering me, couldn’t bear to see me upset with him for any reason at all, and then the young man he turned into was so nebulously oversensitive that I took to weighing every word I dared speak to him, even then never quite sure I wouldn’t incur his wrath, and at such times I was like some of my students, whom I see taking a desperate leap into the void when I ask them a question, no doubt praying that their fall will be as lazy and endless as a fall in a dream, and that my face too will go on hovering unchanged, ever patient and gentle before their own tortured faces, until the end of time.
I found the courage to ask, “She’s not here?”
“No,” said my son, very sharply.
The house that my son and this Wilma now live in looks over the valley, its back turned to the road, and it’s such a tall, austere house, of solid gray stone, that you can see it from far down the mountain, even from miles away.
“I’m so disappointed,” I said. “I was hoping to meet my granddaughter at last.”
“Well, you’re not going to,” said my son.
And I’d so steeled myself for the sight of the child that I was sincerely unhappy and even distraught that she wasn’t here, not simply relieved, as I would have expected.
Raising a questioning, surprised eyebrow, I tried to attract Wilma’s attention. But she looked away, like a discreet wife who knows how to mind her own business, and so I learned beyond all doubt that she wasn’t the child’s mother Yasmine. Because in the car it had occurred to me that this Wilma might be Yasmine, that Ange and I might have misremembered his marrying a Yasmine, or that she might have changed her name, decided to go by something else, as I myself would most certainly have done if my name were Yasmine.
So maybe it’s all very simple, I’d told myself, so reassured by that idea that I almost laughed out loud.
I’d never seen a picture of this Yasmine. My son had hurriedly informed me of his marriage, one day when I ran into him on Rue Sainte-Catherine, refusing to tell me anything more of his wife than her first name, Yasmine (or did he say Wilma?).
My son wouldn’t tell me about his wife because I had, in his words, appropriated Lanton when he was still with him—I’d stolen Lanton away from him, even cuckolded him with Lanton, he’d said. “Symbolically, which is worse,” he’d added, seeing the disbelief on my face. Now he wanted to be sure I left his wife Yasmine in peace.
“But,” I’d protested, “what on earth could I do to your wife, what are you afraid of?”
He was afraid I… How can I say this without trembling? He was afraid I might teach his wife shame and self-loathing, under the cover of affection and interest.
“But when have I ever done such a thing to anyone?” I’d cried, desperate tears spilling from my eyes. “When have I ever done such a thing?”
My son simply gave a cruel laugh and raced off, merciless and hateful. How anyone could possibly inspire such hatred in a son, an only son, once so loving, I couldn’t begin to understand. I later learned that my son had gone off to live and work in San Augusto, taking his brand-new bride Yasmine with him, and then the little girl was born.
“You see,” Ange had told me when we got the birth announcement, “he’s not holding a grudge, since he’s telling you you’re a grandmother.”
“Yes,” I’d said, happy at first.
But then the baby’s name leaped out at me, and I found myself thinking my son had sent me the announcement for that reason alone: so the six letters of the name “Souhar” would make a point that would pierce straight through my heart.
Now that I’m here in my son’s dour house, I’ve stopped caring about that awful name. My nerves are on edge. Where are the child and her mother? Before, I dreaded the prospect of seeing them (even as I was hurt that my son had never introduced them to me), but now I’m deeply afraid for them.
My son and this Wilma live in what seems the biggest house in the village, which is otherwise only a handful of modest gray dwellings huddled around the plain little church. Set away from the others, but close enough for the inhabitants of those shabby houses to know everything that goes on in it, my son’s enormous abode displays three rows of narrow windows on the other side of the road, and completely hides the valley from its neighbors, unless it’s shielding them from that melancholy view, in whose depths the gaze soon grows lost—the woods ravaged by recurrent fires, the motionless river, the cold shadow draped over it all.
The fearsome sun only strikes the other slope, facing the sea. There’s no trace of that blazing heat here, but it gives off an invisible vapor that makes the air shimmer all the way to San Augusto. That faint vibration of the atmosphere can cause mirages, Wilma told me. Sometimes, she said, an expanse of water seems to be floating over the village, and if that happened to me, if I thought I could even see a reflection of palm trees in that illusory lake, then I should simply close my eyes, and the vision would be erased.
My son had helped the dog out of the luggage compartment. He was about to let go of the collar, to set the dog free, because neither of them likes to keep it tied up or on a leash, my son and this Wilma had told me.
“Arno’s a sweetheart,” my son had said in a slightly menacing voice, as if he expected me to openly dispute it or provoke the dog simply to prove it was vicious.
Doesn’t he know I don’t care about dogs? That for me dogs don’t exist? That any word spoken about a dog bores me to tears? But just when he was about to let the dog go, my son suddenly pulled it back with an angry, surprised jerk. Arno was about to lunge at me.
“That’s odd,” said my son. “Do you have a dog back home?”
“Certainly not,” I said, still trembling at such hostility.
“Well, he must be smelling a male dog on your clothes,” said my son, musingly.
“There’s no other explanation,” Wilma insisted.
“I’m not hiding anything,” I said.
All three equally irritated, we dropped the question of the dog and its feelings toward me. My son and this Wilma seemed irked, almost saddened, at not understanding the reasons for Arno’s behavior. That wounded pride and affection showed me the depth of their love for that dog.
Don’t they have a child they should be loving like this, or is that little girl not enough for them, is she a disappointment, is she ugly, or is there too much that’s troublesome about her appearance?
Wilma stroked the dog’s broad reddish flanks, as if seeking its forgiveness for something. She kneeled down before it, her magnificent face touching the dog’s muzzle, and said, “Go on, boy, go on.”
And the dog licked this woman’s cheeks, nose, and mouth, this Wilma who lives with my son and who so painstakingly made herself up to come meet me this morning. The dog’s long tongue wiped away her base, her blush, her lipstick, even her mascara, and she laughed with what seemed a slightly overplayed joy.
Then my son wanted the dog to lick his face in turn. They playfully struggled for a place before the dog’s mouth, competing for that benediction. Wilma stood up, proud and fulfilled, her face bare, white, and downy. And there was a kind of challenge in that display of her naked face, still glistening with the dog’s saliva (I could smell it, strong and sour, I could imagine the stickiness of her skin), as if this primped and preened woman were daring me to find her any less alluring like this.
I turned away. I walked toward my son’s front door. I had no wish to see my son my little boy who was once so madly in love with me, has anyone ever loved me like that stand up covered in his dog’s spittle, displaying that same repugnant delight. My God, how lonely they must be, I told myself, to be so humbly offering themselves for Arno’s affections, even if it means having to beg.
The cold was mild and dry. A vast shimmering blue sky encircled my son’s house and, across the road behind us, the little houses clustered around the church, silent houses that I might have sworn were deserted had I not seen, at the windows, their impeccable white curtains.
On the doorstep, Wilma reached into her purse for a big key ring and waved me aside. My son took the dog in first, pulling it by its collar. Knowing I was behind it, the dog insistently looked back, growling, refusing to go on. A furious foam covered its pendulous black jowls.
“You must smell like dog, there’s nothing else it can be,” my son exclaimed with a sort of rage in his voice.
“Arno is very dominant,” said Wilma.
“Maybe he senses you’re not entirely happy to have me here,” I said, as a joke.
“That could be,” said my son, perfectly serious, even grave, with no sign of cruelty or malice.
It was a shock to see that my son had apparently lost his sense of irony, once so highly developed that he could often be tiresome, not to mention difficult to understand, since at times it wasn’t quite clear if he was deliberately saying the opposite of what he was thinking or if he should be taken at his word.
Today, in San Augusto, on my son’s territory, I no longer doubt the meaning of what he says. The rigorous intensity that sets his every word in a clasp of absolute literalness distances him from the son I remember more than plastic surgery ever could. Having thought that, I look at my son’s face and I’m not sure I recognize it after all. I’d be happier to hear him speaking with the strong, harsh San Augusto accent, I tell myself, than with this high-minded solemnity and earnestness he once systematically mocked, when he thought he’d heard it in some pedagogical pronouncement from Ange’s mouth or mine. He accused me of always taking everything literally, derided what he called my cluelessness at any sly provocation.
How did my little boy, my gentle, sensitive, tender little boy, ever turn into that young man I couldn’t love?
Never once, on the other hand, did he show the slightest impatience with my ex-husband, his father, even though that man was perfectly incapable of grasping our son’s sense of humor, his perverse turn of mind.
Because Ralph had sensed or realized that his father’s simple goodness inevitably implied a deafness to derision, and Ralph respected him endlessly for that, and maybe he was sorry he lacked that innocence himself, and maybe, too, he resented me for—he must have thought—infecting him with a talent for seeing things from two sides, and nonetheless I hated his taste for sarcasm, his joyless laughter, and I found myself hating him too, when his jeering went on too long.
I should be happy to find my son delivered of that maddening bent. Why am I sad, why does it trouble me? Because he’s still as pitiless as he ever was? Because in his pitilessness and inflexibility and fierceness I see something even more dangerous for me, in spite of his furious striving for goodwill? I’d like to tell him: You’ll never be like your father, it’s too late, and that’s not how you are. Oh, I wish I could also tell him, in disgust: Don’t you see where your hapless father’s trusting heart got him? Shamelessly living off Corinna Daoui, shamelessly living in an apartment that’s not his, shamelessly redecorating a ridiculous bedroom for a little girl he must see at most a few times a year, and then, still shamelessly, showing the world and Bordeaux a kind of face he can’t understand everyone hates.
My son disappeared into the house with Arno. Then he came back and told me he’d closed the dog up in his consulting room, and I remembered my son is a doctor. Never having seen him practice, I forget that now and then.
I only knew my son as a student, so long in school that I’d vaguely decided school was an end in itself for him, not a way into the medical profession, which he’d chosen on Lanton’s advice.
With a gentle shove to the small of my back, Wilma ushered me in. The entryway is cold and dark. The stone walls are hung with masks made of wood and leather, along with pelts stretched over wooden frames, and a vast collection of stuffed wild-boar heads.
“I’ve taken up hunting, with Wilma,” my son proudly told me as I stared at the heads and imagined what Ange would have said of that carnage.
There’s no breed more despicable than hunters, Ange used to say.
“So you’ve learned to shoot?” I asked weakly.
They turned their two shining faces to me.
Every hunter in this country should be executed, Ange used to say.
“Of course,” said my son, “Wilma showed me.”
Their two faces glowed palely in the dark entryway, lit from within by pride and desire as they recalled, I imagine, their hunting trips in the scrubland, armed with the powerful weapons I later saw in their bedroom, pursuing a lone male or a frantic sow hurrying her piglets before her, reeking of terror with Arno’s snout close behind, and I later wondered if that black beast’s fear was the spice in the homemade terrines my son served. Is it horror that brings out the full flavor of meat?
And how surprised I was, later, to find that my son had become an avid cook, with a fondness for red meats, and even, it can’t be denied, a certain taste for blood.
I tried to admire the masks and heads, since my son and this woman were my hosts.
“Very beautiful,” I murmured, noting that Ralph immediately beamed with joy.
He couldn’t repress a smile, a smile like the old days, at once broad and hesitant, happy and anxious, the smile he had as a little boy.
Didn’t he smile exactly like that when he submitted a piece of homework for my verdict, or a drawing, or even a present he’d hand-made just for me, didn’t he smile just like that when it turned out his mama approved, when, for example, he introduced dear Lanton?
Then his face hardened into ardent austerity again.
“I’ll show you around,” Wilma said to me.
“Yes,” said my son, “show her around.”
And then he asked Wilma to examine me at the earliest opportunity.