17

“I didn’t picture you the way you are,” Gerfaut said to Alphonsine Raguse.

“How did you picture me?”

She was sitting in the main room, in the old man’s easy chair. She wore pearl-gray corduroy slacks, brown ankle boots, an ecru sweater, and a brown leather coat. Her hair was very black, thick, healthy, and cut simply in the form of a German soldier’s helmet by a hairdresser, the merest snip of whose scissors must have cost a packet of money. Her skin was perfectly smooth and tan, her eyes pale, her eyebrows set high, her cheekbones prominent, her nose of modest size, and her jaw determined. When she smiled, her red lips parted horizontally to reveal teeth as perfect and gleaming as one could wish. She resembled a very good ad for a vacation club (though ads for vacation clubs never actually look like that; they make you want to stay at home if at all possible). She was drinking vodka. She had brought the vodka along with her in her Ford Capri. She had also brought along a guy by the name of Max. At this moment, the guy had gone off again in the Capri to do some shopping about twenty-five kilometers away.

“Well, I don’t really know,” replied Gerfaut. “I suppose I imagined a woman about forty-five but looking older, with hands red from washing dishes and doing heavy work, and eyes red, too, from all the sad things that had happened to her. She would have got here by taxi and bus, wearing a moth-eaten black coat. But, my God—how old are you anyway? Oh, excuse me.”

“Twenty-eight. No need to apologize.”

“You can’t be Raguse’s daughter?”

“No, his granddaughter.”

“Sometimes he used to mention a daughter who sent him money....”

“That was me.”

“I see,” said Gerfaut. “Forgive me. I don’t know why I’m asking you all these questions. I have no right to. I’ll be going now. Thank you for the drink.”

He rose from his stool to put the mustard glass from which he had been drinking vodka in the basalt sink.

“You are not from around here,” she said. “You’re a Parisian.”

“Originally, yes,” said Gerfaut. He was amused by the question, and he smiled beneath his blond beard. “You would never believe it if I told you how I ended up here.”

“You could give it a try.”

Gerfaut chuckled. He felt like a kid.

“It’s quite simple, really. Until last summer I was a middle manager in a company in Paris. I went on vacation, and two men tried to kill me, twice, for reasons unknown to me. Two complete strangers. At which point I left my wife and children and, instead of informing the police, I fled. I found myself in a freight car crossing the Alps. A drifter knocked me down with a hammer and threw me off the train. I injured my foot, which is why I limp now. Your father, or rather your grandfather, found me and cared for me. That’s it.”

In the easy chair the young woman was laughing uproariously.

“That’s the simple truth,” said Gerfaut. He was having trouble keeping a straight face.

“Have another drink,” said Alphonsine Raguse, waving vaguely toward the bottle of vodka. There was still a trace of irrepressible laughter in her voice, and her gray eyes were still watering. She wiped them and sighed. Gerfaut retrieved his mustard glass from the sink, wiped its base on his sleeve, and poured himself a little more vodka. He ran two fingers lightly through his hair.

“Suppose I told you that this is the mark of a bullet wound—this white tuft here?”

“Yes, sure,” answered Alphonsine. “You are quite the adventurer.”

“No, not at all. You don’t understand. I’m just the opposite.”

“What does that mean, the opposite?”

“Someone who doesn’t remotely want adventures.”

She was still smiling. Ironically—but not in a mean way.

“I wouldn’t mind an adventure with you, though,” Gerfaut blurted. “Oh, I’m so sorry. That’s not what I meant to say. How embarrassing.”

She fell silent for quite some time. A worried look came over her face. Gerfaut found no way of breaking the silence, and he didn’t dare look at the woman. He felt dumb.

“How was the funeral?” she asked suddenly. “I didn’t want to come. I’m not upset that my grandfather is dead. I don’t like funerals. To like funerals you have to like death, and I don’t see how anyone can like death. But no,” she went on nervously, “that’s stupid, what I just said. Lots of people love death. Actually, I don’t know....”

She said no more, as though out of breath. She looked down at the floor. Under the suntan the skin of her face pinkened and then turned the color of a boiled lobster. She gave Gerfaut a hard look. She got to her feet, and Gerfaut politely followed suit. Then she slapped him viciously across the face—once, then again. Gerfaut failed to grab her wrist; he covered his face with his forearm and backed toward the wall.

“Forgive me, please forgive me,” he said. He giggled slightly as his back bumped the wall. “It’s because I’ve been for eight or ten months—the whole winter—in a sort of sexual stasis. Can you see what I mean?” He was mumbling—not even trying to make himself clear.

“Not me, though!” She was shouting; she stamped her foot, then kicked Gerfaut in the shin, hard. “Not me! I didn’t spend the winter in a sort of sexual stasis, as you put it so snottily, Monsieur Sorel!”

They heard the Capri pull up in front of the house. Alphonsine turned her back on Gerfaut and went to the door, banging her heels as hard as she possibly could on the wooden floor as if she wanted to send shock waves to his brain. Gerfaut leaned against the wall and tried to relax by inhaling deeply (without overdoing it).

Alphonsine’s boyfriend Max came in. He, too, banged his heels loudly on the floor, but in his case it was to get warm.

“Monsieur Sorel will be staying tonight,” said Alphonsine in a placid, musical tone. “He’ll be able to give us more information about the place.”

“Fine, that’s fine,” said Max. He was about thirty-five or so, with dark hair and green eyes, and a triangular upper body—a good-looking guy, the sort to whom certain things come easily; he had on plaid pants and an elegantly grimy three-quarter-length suede coat over a white pullover. “But they’ve got a place to eat down there that doesn’t seem too shitty. I really don’t see why we have to go through all the hassle of cooking here.”

“You have to inhabit a place, really live in it, if you want to know what it’s like, what it—well, never mind.” Alphonsine kissed Max on the mouth and rubbed briefly up against him in a provocative manner; and for the next few minutes she manifested submissiveness toward him in a host of ways. She did the cooking, barely giving Gerfaut the chance to explain a few things about the drain or how to manage without a stove. Only on sufferance were the two men permitted to feed the fire in the hearth and lay the table.

They ate dinner and chatted. Alphonsine allowed that she had decided to keep the house and make major improvements to it.

“Yes, yes,” Max agreed enthusiastically. “What a fabulous place to come to—cut off from everything like this.”

“My sweetheart.” She caressed his elbow and nuzzled at his shoulder through the white pullover.

All the same, sitting across from the loving couple with his nose in his glass, Gerfaut caught the young woman looking at him in a way that was bright, ardent, unseemly, even slightly crazy.

Yet it would be quite some time before Alphonsine and Gerfaut fell upon each other and sought to possess each other. For the moment, the three spent the night at the house, Gerfaut alone in his room, where he slept badly, and the couple in the old man’s room. The next morning Alphonsine asked Gerfaut rather imperiously to be the house’s caretaker. She planned to go back to Paris, find an architect, and begin major alterations that would call for local construction people and craftsmen. And Gerfaut would oversee the work, which would be finished by summer. She would pay Gerfaut. She thought he would refuse the offer of payment, but he accepted it. Sure enough, she left the same day with her guy Max. But she came back well before the summer, and she came alone. Gerfaut was still there, caretaker-ing, seemingly without a care in the world. Still, the day after the couple’s departure he had lit the fire with a copy of the evening France-Soir from the day before, which the pair had left behind. By chance, as he scrunched the newspaper up into loose airy balls, his eye had fallen upon a very short article—no more than filler—headed “Possible New Light Thrown on Disappearance of Paris Executive Georges Gerfaut After Massacre of Last Summer,” which was a very long title for such a brief item.