I TRIED TO FIND RAPHAËL. I CALLED HIS DOCTOR at the hospital, the one who had given Raphaël the job as an orderly. The doctor had no idea where he was. I called Rosalie’s ex-girlfriend, whom I’d gone to high school with. She said that Raphaël would turn up eventually.
I didn’t even know if I wanted him back. What would happen if I did find him? He would be back in the apartment, installing locks on the doors and wanting to change our name every morning. Our kid would come and say, “There’s a monster under the bed.” And Raphaël would say, “You’re probably right, my son.” And the house would be so full of night lights that it would seem like we were lost in the Milky Way.
Maybe I should have just considered my escape from the country a lucky break. I could be out there taking the damn lion for a walk. Imagine having to scoop that poop?
I had to go on with life regardless of the men in my life. I went the next morning to the university to talk to an adviser. I had never been inside the big building on the other side of the small mountain that is in the middle of the city. I stood in front of it, looking at its sprawling wings. There were hundreds of bicycles locked up outside the building. There were kids of all different races—Asian, black, Arab—hurrying down the hallways with their books and their school bags. The adviser was wearing a brown suit and had her hair swept up into the tidiest bun in the world.
“You were out of school for a while?”
“I had an unstable upbringing. I wasn’t really encouraged to stay in school.”
“Hmm,” she said.
Then she just smiled as if it wasn’t a big deal and we got down to the practicalities of me going to university. She told me that there was a good daycare at the school and there were loans and scholarships that were available to me as a single mother. She made me an appointment with a financial adviser. As she explained these very basic things to me, I realized that there was so much about society at large that I didn’t know anything about.
I asked for an application and took away a huge book with all the courses in the French Literature Department. I didn’t need Étienne to tell me I was a writer. My own sense of who I was had begun to speak up lately, even though it didn’t speak that loudly. I was listening to it as best I could. I was not going to define myself by the traits that men found adorable in me. I was pushing myself to get on with life and to not chicken out. I warned myself not to be afraid of people who lived off of Boulevard Saint-Laurent.
As I read through the great big book of course descriptions on the metro back downtown, I was overwhelmed by excitement.
Jules Verne: Why bad science makes for wonderful fiction. Arthur Rimbaud: Why a sordid teenager is still being read today. Guy de Maupassant: A classic, but still dirty. Molière: Comedy in an age of very big wigs. Colette: A lady in a top hat turns Paris upside down.
A parade of motorcycles passed by me as I waited for the green light outside the school. For a moment, Lord oh Lord, I missed Raphaël.
What sort of strange malevolent plots were the bikers up to? Maybe they were going to terrorize a kid who was selling his ADHD medication at school without giving them a cut. Or perhaps they were trying to get a corner on the bingo market. When they were done, they would head home, where they would go down on some long-haired, underage nymphet.
I felt the rumble of the motorcycles in my groin. I just wanted to throw my life away. I wanted to get my thighs covered in rose tattoos. I wanted to be making love to Raphaël. I suddenly pictured myself on top, riding him violently as he held my hips in both his hands, lifting me up and then slamming me back down.
They would know where Raphaël was. If I called out to them, they could take me to him. Even if I decided that I didn’t want to get back together with him, I was still worried about him. I thought about going to see Véronique. But I realized that it was useless to ask her advice. She didn’t even know how to talk about what had happened to him when he was a little boy. I felt like getting a bullhorn and going into the middle of the street and stopping the traffic and letting everybody know. If not for him, then for me. I didn’t know how he managed to keep the weight of his secret when the burden of it was crushing me.
One of the reasons that I wanted to study literature was because it exposed everything. Writers looked for secrets that had never been mined. Every writer has to invent their own magical language, in order to describe the indescribable. They might seem to be writing in French, English or Spanish, but really they were writing in the language of butterflies, crows and hanged men.