When night fell, that same Sunday, Anne-Marie found herself alone again. Visits stopped after seven o’clock. There was not a sound. A nurse’s aide had come to remove her dinner tray, a West Indian woman with a deep voice. Then the night nurse went by to make sure her patient didn’t need anything. She placed two fingers on Anne-Marie’s forehead. Anne-Marie had immediately recognized her perfume, Ô by Lancôme, a dream.
“Shall I close your jalousies?” suggested the nurse, using an old-fashioned word for some very contemporary plastic blinds.
“Not right away,” requested Anne-Marie.
It had been a lovely day, one of those autumn days when the blue of the sky seems smoky, and the brown earth is bluish. Anne-Marie wanted to watch as daylight faded and night gradually came on. She loved this moment of twilight turning.
Checking for the hundredth time that her sensors were still intact had become an obsession. It was more or less the only weapon she had against the terrors of the night. Her heart heavy, she thought of how she had enjoyed solitude, under normal circumstances—before.
Night was coming, and with it, inseparable, the two fears that had been haunting her since the accident.
The first stemmed from the very nature of the aggression she had suffered.
That they had targeted her while she was in her car was a torment beyond measure. For it was in her car that she did her writing. No one knew this, but it was the only place she wrote—so she would confess to Francesca at a later point, or Van, I can’t remember which. Until the time of her accident, she had told no one. It was her business. But afterwards, it seemed to her that it was important for the investigation. It was proof of the stupefying degree of information that the brutes had in their possession. (As if they had consulted each other—which could not be the case—Paul, Anne-Marie, and Armel, all three, referred to them to Van—or to Francesca—as “brutes.” And Ivan thought it was the best term to use, and both he and Francesca called their enemy by that name.)
Anne-Marie explained that she had not had much time to write in the twelve years she’d been married. To be more precise—because time was not the only issue, space was also a considerable factor—the attention she had to devote to the children she loved, and her home, in the broadest sense of the word, and everything that is commonly included under the vast heading of life—meals, homework, garden, vacation, sorrows, fevers, relations with loved ones, friends passing through, lifelong friendships—all these thoughts and obligations required her undivided attention when she was at home. The moment she was alone in the car, everything changed. She had discovered this through experience: the moment she climbed in behind the wheel, provided she was alone, and did not have any children to pick up at the other end of the ride, she broke off with life, with its obligations, its ties. Ideas came to her. She had an urgent desire to write. Nothing else mattered but that desire. Anne-Marie parked her car wherever she could—anywhere at all, off to the side, on the shoulder, beneath a tree, at the edge of a cornfield. She’d made it a habit. The moment she switched off the engine, all she had to do was jot down the words, words that asked for nothing more.
And she had made it her method. She was not allowed to be even a minute late as she drove the children to and fro. Anne-Marie met her deadlines with perfect punctuality. But in the intervals, her time was her own. If there was a passage she had to locate in a book, or a spice that was missing for the evening cake, off she would go in her car, on the least little pretext. Because she knew she’d find everything she needed, as if the sound of the engine brought it all to the surface: sentences—images, ideas—were knocking on her brain to be let in. She would hunt for a place where she could pull over and not be seen. It hardly mattered whether it was a street in town or at the crossing of the horse trails in the woods: there she would write, with her spiral notebook on her lap, for a quarter of an hour. Then off she’d go again. For several years that was how she’d been filling two or three pages a day.
No one knew her secret. How had the brutes managed to find out? Anne-Marie always chose isolated spots. What sort of surveillance had they devised in order to find out the only place where she could write?
And there was something else that was worrying her. If they knew that she sat in her car to write, it meant they knew she was a writer, and they knew what she wrote, and under what name, and that she had a life other than the one she led on the surface. And the clandestine, secret nature of her undertaking was the very wellspring of her inspiration.
Anne-Marie had only ever written for one person and one alone. She only wrote about him. She liked to think that, in fact, she was writing to him. It came about as simply as could be, necessitated no discipline, no effort. Inspiration and an awareness of joy were the two sides of a same excitement that came in waves, imperiously. And she wanted nothing more than to surrender to that excitement, to find shelter, at last, in her customary asylum.
But if her secret had been discovered, all would be lost. Anne-Marie didn’t know how to explain it—can you explain what it is that compels you to write?—but she was sure of one thing: she would write no more.
Her throat was tight, she said, on that Sunday evening in late November, in her little hospital room that was as dark, now, as the night outside her window.