You are the collateral victim of a sensational incident and you cannot get over it. As far as you’re concerned, the world fell apart Tuesday morning when you discovered the inanimate body of the doctor lying in his office to which you happened to have the key. Since then you have been wandering in a field of ruins, waiting for an equally supernatural phenomenon to put everything back to rights.
You are twenty-six. Born in the département des Hautes-Alpes, you still live there officially, with your parents, but have been living in Paris since getting your baccalaureate. You move from one room to another as your university years go by, paying the rent with your stipend (your family is a large one with only modest resources) and what you can earn from odd seasonal jobs. You are now a doctoral student. Before his brutal death, you were very close to your thesis director.
Meaning what? asks Élisabeth, fishing for details.
You don’t avoid the issue; you would like your audience to fully understand the situation and thus guide you, perhaps, toward an angle from which you might otherwise never have viewed things, and from which the image would recompose itself as if in an anamorphosis.
Five years ago you set out to seduce a professor whose old-fashioned, even faded air had somehow touched you. You’ve always had strange tastes. Your peers ignored him in favor of more obvious specimens, the university stars who played nonchalantly on their prestige, shining in the brilliance of their thoughts and dramatically flinging out their arms to wave their eyeglasses in the air for emphasis. You’d been the only one to bet on Professor Sergent, never hearing a word of the lectures he delivered so doggedly because you were too busy admiring him through half-closed eyes. And your imagination began running away with you so much that you soon had to stifle your daydreams: in the silence of the auditorium, you were afraid of letting slip too eloquent a sigh.
For months you waited at the foot of the dais to ask insignificant questions, leaving more and more pregnant pauses until he suggested continuing the conversation at a café, where the discussion mainly featured throat-clearing and eyelash-batting. It took a complete campaign to prompt an invitation to a restaurant and months more of effort to wangle an appointment at the doctor’s office, after consultation hours.
Neglected by his wife, Jacques had precious little experience of love. You have tender memories of his chubby fingers probing the openings in your clothes, hardly daring to venture further. No, the doctor was not really at ease with women, aside from a few flings with patients at the end of their cure, when through sheer boredom doctor and patient had thrown themselves at each other just for something to do. He had observed that this technique significantly accelerated the resolution of transference. After three weeks they would be seeing each other less and less and after two months, not at all. But whenever you came up with some objection, armed with the convictions of your age and the principles inculcated by the university, he would wax ironic about the fanaticism of youth to disparage your arguments. And you, busy shedding your clothes on the chaise to foster a more direct approach to the subject, had come away rather disappointed. Disappointed and pregnant, which you now illustrate by pointing a finger at your belly jammed against the table on which your frankfurters and fries have just been placed, while your neighbor, sitting with her now cold steak and ratatouille, considers you with the stunned amazement of someone who has never before encountered the victim of a sensational incident.
You’re off and running now, you spare her nothing. You describe how the doctor took the news (up on his high horse, as if he’d never gotten anywhere near her), how he made fun of young Angèle Trognon (that’s your name), announcing point-blank that he wasn’t going to leave his wife for a student.
It’s a girl? asks Élisabeth suddenly.
It is a girl. How did you know that?
Just a thought.
You observe your neighbor, who still hasn’t touched her food. You could take an interest in her now, ask if she has children, inquire about her situation. You couldn’t care less about all that. And since you’ve finished the saga of your misadventures, you tackle your present experience, the relentless harassment that leaves you no time to bemoan your fate. The authorities are pressing you about your intentions, about questions of money and inheritance. Bank statements must be produced, expenses justified—you have no idea, you tell Élisabeth, what questions you get asked after a crime.
Well, replies Élisabeth, who is languidly picking the eggplant out of her ratatouille with the tip of her knife, I think I should be going.
You have worn out your audience. There she is putting on her gray coat, dropping a bill on the table without waiting for her change or saying good-bye. The coat sails across the room—sweeping the tables, destroying in its wake any forks and breadbaskets in precarious equilibrium at their tables’ edges—and out of the café, bound for its mysterious destination. You will learn nothing more about the woman who listened to you. Her face is already dwindling in your memory and you have even forgotten her name.
This woman is now walking back along Boulevard de Sébastopol toward the taxi stand at Châtelet. There she takes a Mercedes that reaches Rue des Écoles in eight minutes. Without bothering to whip up an explanation for the young reception clerk, she goes up to room 17 and walks in at 11:09 p.m.: it has been exactly a hundred and twenty minutes since she left the baby, who is just waking up. Viviane carries her away in the taxi still waiting downstairs.