During the journey, Rico had a nightmare. He was strangling Sophie. It was the day after she’d announced her decision to leave him. “I’ve really thought long and hard about it.”
Rico’s nightmare began in the morning, very early. He was standing in the doorway. He couldn’t bring himself to leave, just like that, without a word. As if they’d said everything that had to be said. After a slight hesitation, he walked back into the bedroom. He wanted to talk to Sophie again, tell her how much he loved her. But also to ask her to spend the week giving it some more thought. Not to rush into things. To take her time. What had happened between Alain and her didn’t matter. All that mattered was them. Her, Julien and him. Their little family. Such a nice family. All these words were in Rico’s mouth as he opened the bedroom door.
Sophie was sleeping peacefully, with a smile on her lips. She seemed so calm, so remote from all the drama. The proposed separation. The end of their marriage. The end of that life he had wanted, that life he had sacrificed everything for.
Then he was sitting on the edge of the bed, smoking a cigarette and watching her sleep. He liked watching her sleep. He often did that, especially when he woke in the middle of the night, anxious about something. He always felt the same emotion as he had when they were first together. The same love. The years of marriage hadn’t changed anything. But this morning, seeing her sleeping like that, peaceful and smiling, blew a hole in all his certainties. Why was she smiling like that? What was she dreaming?
So he stubbed out his cigarette, and started shaking Sophie angrily. The humiliation of knowing he’d been deceived, knowing she’d cheated on him, had turned to rage.
“You were dreaming about him, weren’t you, you bitch?” he screamed, spitting out the words
The first thing he saw in her eyes was fear. She wanted to scream. But she couldn’t, because Rico’s fingers were around her throat.
“Let go of me,” she breathed.
He was sitting astride her now, pressing down with all his weight on her hips. She was struggling, throwing back the sheet and trying to push him off. He was strangling her, filled with hate but also enjoying it. There was terror now in Sophie’s eyes. Her heavy, wonderfully white breasts jiggled from side to side under her pajama top. He wanted to rip it off her. To rip the sheet too. And to make violent love to her naked body. To fuck her to death.
Rico was still squeezing. He was becoming breathless. It was himself he was strangling. The more he squeezed Sophie’s neck, the more he choked. Then it was as if he could see himself in a mirror. His eyes rolled upwards, his tongue hanging out. Dead, or almost dead. And in a corner of the mirror he could see Julien, crying and demanding his breakfast. But still he squeezed. With all his strength. Until he choked to death.
His mouth opened wide. Desperate for oxygen.
“Hey, Rico! That’s enough!”
Dédé was shaking him.
“Fuck it, Rico!”
Gasping, he extricated himself from his nightmare. For some reason he didn’t understand at that point, he didn’t like the way Dédé was looking at him. Didn’t like what he saw in his eyes. Like a nightmare version of himself.
“Here, have a drink,” Dédé said, opening a can of beer.
They’d bought a twelve-pack at the station before getting on the train.
“Where are we?” Rico asked, taking a swig of the beer.
“How the fuck do I know? Fucking train’s hardly moving.”
Rico lit a cigarette.
“Bad dream, huh?” Dédé said.
Rico nodded. He didn’t want to talk. He wanted to dismiss those terrible images from his mind.
“We all have bad dreams,” Dédé went on. “It’s because of the way we live.”
“Yeah.”
Did our bad dreams, lodged deep inside our heads, or our hearts, catch up with us eventually? Rico wondered, without being able to answer, every time he had this nightmare. He didn’t have it often—fortunately, because each time he choked himself more, and there wasn’t always someone around to wake him, like Dédé on the train, or me, later, in Marseilles. All the same—and Rico was categorical about this—however much Sophie had hurt him, he’d never wanted to kill her. Not that evening, not later. Besides, things hadn’t exactly happened the way they did in his nightmare.
Sophie had been distant toward him for months. Their marriage, Rico realized, was in a bad way. They never talked, except when everyday problems, often quite trivial, led to arguments. Most of the time, Rico would end up falling in with Sophie’s point of view, and they would make up as best they could. Usually in bed. In spite of all the years that had passed, Rico desired her as much as ever. He loved her body. A luscious body, which had ripened with time, and which she kept in shape by going for long runs on the beach. When she made love, Sophie was not at all the well-behaved, slightly strait-laced middle-class woman she liked to appear in company. She was a wonderful lover, so greedy for pleasure that Rico was always surprised.
“Ah, those convent girls!” Titi had said once. “Trust me, they’re incredibly hot!”
They were on their bench on Square des Batignolles, both very drunk.
“The more they go to church, the more they love fucking. Teresa’s syndrome, I call it. Ever hear of Teresa of Avila and her ecstasies? A saint and a fucking sex maniac!”
Rico had started to giggle.
“You may well laugh . . . Ever since then, they’ve preferred their little Jesus in the nude! . . . It’s like American women, you know, they’re supposed to be such Puritans . . . Take their panties down, you’ll soon see the other America. Two, three times a night, they want it . . . And the things they do . . .!”
“Stop!”
“Stop!” he’d yelled at Sophie.
They were arguing again. This time because he was adamant about not getting a housekeeper.
“You don’t do anything all day.”
She’d looked at him with contempt. “That’s just like you.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean, I’ve always known it. That’s all women are for you, cooking, housework . . . and sex.”
It was obvious Sophie was being disingenuous. This quarrel, like all the others, was just a pretext to distance herself from him. To get used to the idea that everything was over. Maybe—although Rico always refused to believe it—Sophie even enjoyed being cruel to him at this time. At least until her affair with Alain. That other love, she wrote to him one day, which has calmed me down.
“Bullshit!” he had replied, raising his voice. “You want everything, Sophie, everything. But I can’t afford everything. Not now. For fuck’s sake, do you know how much in debt we are?”
She had smiled. With that surprising smile of hers, her lips curled, which she sometimes had when she was reaching an orgasm. A carnivorous smile. “I thought you’d landed a new contract.”
Rico had become a sales representative for a number of ready-to-wear manufacturers. It was a job he hadn’t really chosen and didn’t like much, but doggedly continued with.
“It’s not settled yet. And even if I do . . . I don’t know how I’m going to manage with all that work . . .”
“Well, don’t think I’m going to iron your shirts for you. I’ve had enough of all that!”
And Sophie had walked out of the living room, slamming the door. When Rico had gone to bed, calmer now, he hadn’t made any move toward her. He’d had enough of always giving in to her.
“Sophie,” he had murmured.
It was nearly a month since they’d last made love. Nearly a month since that quarrel. He had won the new contract, but it had meant going on the road every week. Nantes, Brest, Caen. The route never changed. His Bermuda triangle.
Sophie’s body had stiffened when he touched her.
“Leave me alone.”
“What’s going on?”
She had lit the bedside lamp and sat up in bed.
“I’m in love with someone else.”
She had drawn up her knees under her chin, then had turned her face to him. Her angelic face, gentle and luminous. Rico couldn’t have said if what he saw in her eyes was sadness or pity.
“I’m in love with someone else,” she had repeated gently. “I didn’t know how to tell you. I didn’t know how to tell myself. It’s all happened so quickly . . . But we . . . we’re finished, you understand? I’m in love with someone else.”
“You don’t love me anymore.”
It wasn’t a question. Just a desperate statement of fact.
Rico had gotten to his feet and without another word, without even looking at her, had walked out of the bedroom. In the living room, he had poured himself a whiskey. To help him think. Images and words had passed through his mind. In slow motion. The gestures she had made. The words she had said. Her hesitations too. Their silences. And sometimes, their tear-filled eyes.
Drinking one whisky after another, he had tried to convince himself that all was not lost, that everything was still possible. Sophie, his Sophie, loved him too, whatever she said. He had sensed it in the way she’d told him things, the way she’d put her hand on his. “You’re such a good man, I know . . .”
He had fallen asleep on the couch, the bottle of whisky empty at his feet, and had woken with a start at about four in the morning. His mind was still turning over, like a machine. “I’m in love with someone else.” Alain. She hadn’t said his name, but he knew it was him. The only bachelor in their group. “You don’t love me anymore.” Her only response had been silence. Her face hidden by her mass of blond hair. Tired, his tongue coated, he’d had to face the truth. He had lost Sophie forever. He had dressed and left the house. He had driven like a madman. All the way to Nantes.
That was what had really happened that night. In the first bar he found open, Rico began his day with a cognac. By the third one, he knew his life had been turned upside down.
Rico was still silent, drinking his beer in small sips. Dédé was sitting opposite him. He wasn’t saying anything either. Occasionally, they’d look at each other, then look away and stare out the window of the compartment, into the blackness of a night in which no one gave a damn about them.
As arranged, they had met at the Gare de Lyon. At the brasserie, below the Train Bleu restaurant. Dédé was sitting at a table, looking weary, a double espresso in front of him. When Rico had sat down opposite him, he had slid a handful of bills across the table.
“Your share,” he had said.
It had been great to feel the money in his hand. For ten or twelve days, he had thought, he wouldn’t have to beg.
His share.
Neither of them mentioned what had happened a few hours earlier. Rico did not want to think about it. It was against his deepest principles. You didn’t steal. Even when things had been really bad on the street, it had never crossed his mind. But if Dédé suggested doing it again one of these days, he wasn’t at all sure he’d say no. His outlook had changed. When Titi had died, he admitted, he’d gone over the edge.
In the lobby of the station, Rico had been surprised to see so many guys like him hanging around, alone or in groups. At the usual places. Tobacco shops, newspaper vendors, ticket machines . . . Rico had felt distant from them. Different. His nice parka made him look like a normal person, like any of the other travelers coming and going along the platforms.
It’s incredible, he thought, how easy it is to fool people. A new parka, and you could melt into the crowd. Dressed like that, he didn’t jar on anyone. As long as they didn’t look at his feet, of course. Shoes always gave you away. When he was begging at the post office, he could always tell the unemployed from those who had jobs. He just had to glance at their feet.
“When I came to Paris as a student,” Titi had said, “I was almost penniless for the first month. I had a garret on Rue de Luynes, on the corner of Boulevard Raspail. Every morning, I’d put on a tie and the jacket of my only suit and go out to buy bread. The woman in the bakery would make small talk with me, just the way she did with her other customers. Because of my appearance. She never imagined that once I got home I’d eat that loaf of bread on its own without anything else.”
Everyone judges by appearances, whatever they say. If, right now, he went and sat down on the ground in front of the snack bar, Rico had thought, they’d immediately see him for what he was: a down-and-out. That was the way things were. And they’d start looking at him in the same old way. With pity, contempt, condescension, disgust, fear . . . Especially fear. Poverty scares people. The unemployed guys who came into the post office never looked at him, never said hello or goodbye. Most of them knew it was only a matter of time before they ended up on the street. It might happen a year, six months, a week from now. But it would happen, sooner or later.
He had walked across the lobby with the confidence of a man who has a train to catch. A place to go. His wanderings were over. He had nowhere to come back to. Nothing to hope for. Not even a glance from Julien. When the train started, these thoughts soothed him to the depths of his soul.
In spite of the parka, he felt cold all of a sudden. Cold inside. The way Titi had so often felt in those last months. Even in the sun, on their bench on Square des Batignolles.
The train was slowing down.
Rico yawned. “I think we’re there,”
It was 1:55 in the morning. They were the only passengers getting off at Chalon-sur-Saône.
“Fucking one-horse town!” Dédé cursed, realizing that nothing was open in the station, and the bistros in the vicinity were closed too.
Outside, it had been snowing heavily. The first weather reports of the morning would inform the inhabitants that the temperature had dropped during the night to 12°F.