Raymond Barthelme was sitting on a straight-backed chair in the middle of his bedroom reading The Age of Reason. The only light in the room came from the anglepoise lamp on the desk by the window. Aside from the bed, there was a worn velvet sofa, but Raymond preferred the wooden chair. If he tried to read somewhere more comfortable, he found his attention drifting from the words on the page. Besides, his friend Stéphane had told him that Sartre himself always sat on a straight-backed chair to read. He had returned to the chapter in which Ivich and Mathieu slash their hands at the Sumatra nightclub. Raymond was enthralled by the idea of a woman who would, for no apparent reason, draw a knife across the palm of her hand. He read for the umpteenth time: The flesh was laid open from the ball of the thumb to the root of the little finger, and the blood was oozing slowly from the wound. And her friend’s reaction was not to rush to her aid, but instead to take the knife and impale his own hand to the table. What was most striking about the scene, however, was not the bloodletting itself, but the sentence that followed it:
The waiter had seen many such incidents.
Afterwards, when the couple went to the restroom, the attendant simply bandaged their hands and sent them on their way. So what if they had mutilated themselves? Raymond longed to be in a place like the Sumatra, among the sort of people who impaled their hands to the table. Such an establishment could certainly not be found in a backwater like Saint-Louis, with its respectable cafés where you were served by middle-aged women who asked after your parents, and to whom Raymond always behaved with perfect courtesy. Raymond was not sure what to make of the scene. He had discussed it at length with Yvette and Stéphane in their booth at the Café des Vosges. Stéphane had been matter-of-fact (he had an answer for everything): ‘It’s an acte gratuit, old man,’ he had said with a shrug. ‘It’s meaningless. That’s the point.’ Yvette had disagreed: it wasn’t meaningless. It was an act of rebellion against the bourgeois manners represented by the woman in the fur coat at the next table. Raymond had nodded earnestly, not wishing to contradict his friends, but neither interpretation satisfied him. Neither explained the frisson he got from reading the scene, a frisson not dissimilar to that which he experienced when he passed close enough to certain girls in the school corridors to inhale their scent. Perhaps the point was not to reduce the scene to a meaning—to explain it—but simply to experience it as a kind of spectacle.
Raymond wore his hair to his shoulders. He had a pronounced Roman nose, inherited from his father, and his mother’s long-lashed grey-blue eyes. His lips were thin and his mouth wide, so that when he smiled (which was not often) he looked quite charming. His skin was smooth, and if he had started shaving it was for form’s sake only. The growth he removed was no more than an embarrassing soft down. His body was slim and lithe. His mother liked to tell him that he looked like a girl. Sometimes in the evening when he visited her room, she would have him sit on the edge of the bed and brush his hair. Raymond did not take exception to his mother’s feminine view of him and even cultivated a certain girlishness in his mannerisms, if only to aggravate his father.
He had recently removed all the posters from the walls of his room and thrown away a good deal of his possessions. He had painted the walls white, so that the room now resembled a well-appointed cell. Against the wall to the right of the door was a bookcase, culled of its more childish volumes, and now home to a record player with forty or fifty LPs, these carefully selected to create the right impression on anyone entering his room. He was seventeen years old.
For the last fifteen minutes or so, Raymond’s mind had not been on his book. An hour ago, he had heard the tyres of a car on the gravel of the drive, before the front door opened and he heard his mother ascend the stairs. Even without the sound of her heels on the floorboards, her steps were easily distinguished from the heavy tread of his father. Since then the house had been silent. Normally by this hour, Raymond would have expected to hear his father returning home and briefly look in on his wife, before retiring to his study to read or look over some papers. Raymond’s father always kept the door of his study ajar. This was less as an invitation to drop in than a way of monitoring the movements of the other members of the household. Raymond’s room was next to the study and if he needed to use the bathroom or wanted to go downstairs to the kitchen to get a bite to eat, he could not do so without passing his father’s door. Raymond often moved around the house in stocking-feet to avoid detection, but he always had the feeling that his father knew exactly where he was and what he was doing. Every night, when the housekeeper retired to her quarters on the second floor, Raymond would hear his father say in a stage whisper: ‘Is that you, Madame Thérèse?’
The house was so quiet there was no need to shout.
‘Yes, Maître,’ she would reply from the landing. ‘Do you need anything?’
Maître Barthelme would reply that he did not, and they would wish each other goodnight. The exchange never ceased to irritate Raymond.
The fact that Maître Barthelme had not returned home was unusual in itself. But when Raymond heard the doorbell at 23:47 (he had checked the time on the digital clock his mother had given him for his sixteenth birthday), he knew something out of the ordinary had occurred. People rarely called at the house at any time of day. The only conceivable visitor at such an hour was a policeman. And the only reason for a policeman to call was to deliver bad news. The arrival of a policeman and his father’s failure to return could not, Raymond surmised, be unconnected. At the very least there must have been an accident. But would a mere accident bring a policeman to the house at this hour? Surely a telephone call would have sufficed.
When he heard Mme Thérèse make her way down the stairs and open the front door, Raymond strained to hear the conversation. He was unable to make out more than a murmur of voices. It was at the point when Thérèse climbed the stairs and knocked lightly on the door of his mother’s room that Raymond got up from his chair and stood with his ear pressed to his own door. If any confirmation that the caller was a policeman was required, this was it. Thérèse was by nature suspicious and mistrustful and would never have left any other person unsupervised in the hallway. She assumed that all tradesmen were thieves who had to be watched over at all times and constantly claimed that shopkeepers had diddled her. When she returned from her marketing, she routinely weighed out the items she had bought to check that she had not been sold short.
A few inaudible words were spoken in the hallway, before two sets of footsteps ascended the stairs and made their way towards his mother’s room. The door must have remained open for a short time, because Raymond was able to catch a few words of the conversation before Thérèse was dismissed and the door was closed. In the intervening minutes, Raymond reflected that he had been wrong to assume a connection between his father’s non-return and the policeman’s visit. Perhaps there had merely been a burglary in the vicinity and the cop had called to ask if anyone had seen or heard anything unusual. In this case, he would certainly want to speak to Raymond as well. Perhaps the cop would ask him about his own movements, and having no alibi—he had not left his room all evening—he would himself fall under suspicion.
Until this point, Raymond’s day had been unremarkable. Around eight o’clock in the morning, he had drunk a cup of tea and eaten some bread and butter at the counter in the kitchen. He could feel the heat of the range at his back. The house was cold in winter—his father being generally ill disposed towards heating—but the kitchen was always oppressively warm. Mme Thérèse was preparing his mother’s breakfast tray with her usual put-upon air. His father had already left.
Raymond, as he always did, called on Yvette, who lived on Rue des Trois Rois. They then ran into Stéphane at the corner of Avenue de Bâle and Avenue Général de Gaulle. As the three of them walked to school, Stéphane talked enthusiastically about a book he was reading, but Raymond had paid little attention. Little of note occurred during the day. Mlle Delarue, the French mistress, was absent, as she often was, and her place was filled by the deputy head, who had merely set the class a task and then left the room. Raymond spent the lesson staring out of the window at a pair of wood pigeons strutting stiffly around the schoolyard. At lunchtime, he ate a slice of onion tart with potato salad in the canteen. As he had no class in the final period he had walked home alone. He made himself a pot of tea, took it to his room and listened to some records. As his father dined out on Tuesdays, it was always a relief not to have to sit through the evening meal in his presence. His mother’s mood was lighter and she even seemed to acquire a little colour in her cheeks. She would enquire about Raymond’s day and he would amuse her with anecdotes about trivial incidents at school, sometimes impersonating his teachers or classmates. When he aped one of his teachers in a particularly cruel fashion she would chastise him, but so half-heartedly that it was clear she did not really disapprove. Even Mme Thérèse went about her business with a less sombre air and, on occasion, if there was some household business to discuss, she would join them at the table during dessert. Once, when Raymond’s father returned unexpectedly, she had leapt from her chair as if she had sat on a tack and busied herself with the dishes on the sideboard. When Maître Barthelme entered, he gave no sign of having registered this breach of protocol, but to Raymond’s amusement, Thérèse’s cheeks had reddened like a schoolgirl’s.
Five minutes passed before Raymond heard the door to his mother’s room click open. He listened to the cop’s footsteps approach, then pass, the head of the stairs. Raymond stepped back from the door. He grabbed his book from the floor and threw himself on the bed. This would look odd, however, as the straight-backed chair remained in the middle of the floor as if set out for an interrogation. But there was no time to rearrange things and Raymond did not want the cop to hear him scurrying around in the manner of someone concealing evidence. There was a knock on the door. Raymond did not know what to do. It would seem rude to call out Who is it? That would imply that admission to his room was somehow dependent on the identity of the person knocking. In any case, the question would be disingenuous: he already knew who was at the door. It was not a dilemma Raymond had ever faced. His mother never entered his room, and Thérèse only did so when he was out at school. His father refused to knock, a source of great annoyance to Raymond, as it meant that he could never fully relax in his own domain; he might at any moment be subject to inspection. He was not even sure why his father called in on him. Their conversations were brief and strained and it was difficult not to conclude that the only purpose of these paternal visits was to keep tabs on him; to remind him of the fact he was not yet old enough to warrant a degree of privacy.
In the end, Raymond got up from the bed, book in hand, and opened the door himself. The man on the landing did not look like a policeman. He was of medium height with greying hair, cut short in almost military fashion. He had a pleasant face, with mild enquiring eyes and thick black eyebrows. He was dressed in a dark brown suit with a slight sheen to the fabric. His tie was loosened and the top button of his shirt unfastened. He did not have the imposing presence Raymond would have expected of a detective.
‘Good evening, Raymond,’ he said, ‘I am Georges Gorski of the Saint-Louis police.’
He did not offer any identification. Raymond wondered if he should have feigned surprise, but the moment passed. Instead he just nodded.
‘May I?’ The policeman gestured towards the room. Raymond stepped back to allow him in. The room remained almost in darkness. The cop took a few steps inside the room. He looked at the chair in the centre of the floor with a puzzled expression. He glanced around the bare walls. Raymond stood awkwardly by the bed. It was 23:53.
Gorski turned the chair around to face him, but he did not sit down, merely letting his right hand rest on it. With a matter-of-fact air he said: ‘Your father has been killed in a car accident.’
Raymond did not know what to say. His first thought was: How should I react? He glanced at the floor to buy time. Then he sat on the bed. That was good. That was what people did in such circumstances: they sat down, as if the shock had drained all the strength from their legs. But Raymond was not shocked. As soon as he had heard the doorbell ring, he had assumed that this was what had occurred. He wondered for a moment if this had been by way of a premonition, but he dismissed the idea. What was significant was not that he had assumed his father was dead, but that—without admitting it to himself—it was what he had wanted. If he felt anything on hearing the news, it was a kind of excitement, a feeling of liberation. He glanced up at the policeman to see if he had read his thoughts. But Gorski was looking at him with disinterest.
‘You mother thought it best that I break the news to you,’ he said in the same business-like tone.
Raymond nodded slowly. ‘Thank you.’
He felt he should say something further. What sort of person has nothing to say on hearing of the death of their father?
‘A car accident?’ he said.
‘Yes, on the A35. He was killed instantly.’
Gorski then touched his left wrist with his right hand and Raymond understood that he was concerned about the time. He turned towards the door. ‘Perhaps you should look in on your mother.’
‘Yes, yes, of course,’ said Raymond.
The cop nodded, satisfied that his obligations had been fulfilled. ‘If you don’t have any questions, then that’s all for now. There will be a formal identification in the morning. You might want to accompany your mother.’
Gorski left. Raymond followed him to the door of his room and watched him make his way down the stairs. Thérèse was hovering on the landing with her hand over her mouth.
Raymond instinctively retreated. He had the feeling that when he left his room, everything would be different; that he would be required in some way to assume responsibility. He looked at himself in the mirror on the inside of the wardrobe door. He did not look any different. He pushed his hair back from his forehead with his fingertips. He adopted a solemn expression, lowering his eyebrows and tensing his mouth. The effect was quite comic and he stifled a laugh.
He entered his mother’s room without knocking and closed the door behind him. Lucette was sitting up in bed. She did not appear to have been crying. It would have seemed odd to remain standing or to sit on the chaise longue, which was in any case strewn with undergarments, so he sat on the edge of the divan. Lucette held out a hand and Raymond took it. He kept his eyes fixed on the wall above the bed. His mother’s nightdress was loosely fastened and the curve of her breast was clearly visible. He wondered if she had received the policeman in the same state of undress.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
She smiled listlessly. With her free hand she gathered her nightdress together. ‘It’s quite a shock.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
Raymond had not expected to find his mother weeping hysterically. He had never discerned any great affection between his parents. Since he had begun to spend time in his friends’ homes he had realised that the stiff formality that characterised his parents’ relationship was not usual. Yvette’s parents laughed and joked with each other. When M. Arnaud arrived home, he kissed his wife on the mouth and she arched her body towards him in a manner that suggested she felt some fondness for him. When Raymond was invited to stay for dinner, the atmosphere around the table was convivial. The various members of the family—Yvette had two younger brothers—chatted to each other as if they were actually interested in the details of each other’s lives. Raymond felt quite warmly towards his mother, but the atmosphere of the Barthelme household was entirely determined by his father. The only topic of conversation which animated Maître Barthelme at mealtimes was that of household expenditure. When Thérèse brought in the dishes, he would interrogate her about the cost of the various items and whether she had recently compared prices in other shops. There’s no shame in thrift, was his favourite maxim, and one to which Mme Thérèse was a staunch devotee.
That his father was the root of the frosty atmosphere in the house was borne out by the more cheerful mood at the dinner table when he was not in attendance. Even in his absence, however, when Raymond and his mother shared a light-hearted moment, they would restrain themselves, as if their deeds might be reported to the authorities. Raymond wondered if his mother was now feeling—as he was—a certain lightness; a feeling similar to that which he experienced when the school year ended for summer, or when spring arrived and it became possible to leave the house without a winter coat.
Raymond kept these thoughts to himself. Instead he said: ‘The policeman said that the body would have to be identified.’
It was odd to hear himself refer to his father as ‘the body’.
‘Yes,’ his mother replied. ‘They’re going to send a car in the morning.’
It was a relief to turn to these practical matters. Raymond asked if she would like him to accompany her. She squeezed his hand and said that that would be helpful. They looked at each other for a moment and then, because there was nothing further to say, Raymond got up and left the room.