Le Divorce

37

WE HAD LEFT about eight-thirty in the morning, Roxy, relishing the quiet day, had taken her time getting dressed. Having concluded she was not going into labor, and with a cheerful sense of relief to be rid of the rest of us, she decided to treat herself to hot chocolate at the Brasserie Espoir. She put on her coat and went downstairs. On the stairs she could hear a murmur of voices below her, and when she came into the front hall, she found it crowded with gendarmes, and little, violet-clad Madame Florian, hysterical, being seen to by a strange nurselike policewoman. Drawn to the drama, Roxy peered where the others were looking. The door to the poubelles in the utility room under the stairs was braced open with a trash can, and she could see the inert legs of an apparently lifeless corpse visible behind or perhaps in the trash bins.

For a second her head rang with horror and excitement. She had heard the sirens but had not imagined them coming to this quiet building, where the only noise is the occasional shouting of Mr. Moabi, an Algerian oil dealer on the fourth floor who screams at business associates over the phone. Then came the odd idea that the lifeless body was Charles-Henri, struck down by divine justice. She was both afraid and certain that this was so. A new throng of gendarmes packed into the dim hallway. Madame Florian, wearing her coat, was sitting on the steps recounting the discovery in her high, childlike cadences to a person with a notebook. She had seen only the legs, she had been afraid to go in.

Roxy too was afraid to look again into the gloom of the utility room, but could not avoid seeing the form being covered with a cloth, some centimeters of a denim leg and foot protruding from the bin. Now she was filled with the opposing certitude that one is never to be delivered by magic from the untenable or unbearable but must go through it to the end. Charles-Henri would not be struck by death in order to deliver Roxy from the moral disadvantages of being a deserted wife in a strange land, no. And she loved Charles-Henri and did not really want him dead. All the same, a scary feeling, almost of happiness, gnawed in her, not that it was Charles-Henri, for of course it couldn’t be, but she was somehow happy that at least this bolt from God, a body in the poubelles, would divert all attention, especially her own, bringing days and days of animated inquiry and gossip and the exchange of rumor in the Place Maubert, and she would not be able to think about Charles-Henri all the time.

Next, with sickened certitude, it came to her that the body must be Tommy Smithers, an American boy who had lived in my room in the garret before me, always drunk and waiting for money from home, perhaps slightly schizophrenic, somebody’s unbearable son out of sight out of mind, pathetic Tommy who tried to borrow money from her again last week and whom she heard weeping on the stairs.

She had believed there were such things as murder mainly in America, or so they were always saying here: it is so violent, your country—people carrying guns as in a cowboy movie, the streets clotted with fous, with madmen, as in Taxi Driver or with gangsters as in Bonnie and Clyde—these were historical personages, no?

It was like the American procedure, she supposed, watching a policeman who took fingerprints from the trash door and the front door. Another policeman stood at attention outside while it was going on, as bland and friendly as the young men who guard President Mitterrand, in the next street.

When she told the police her name they looked at her long and speculatively: une américaine. Did she know the dead individual? Had she heard nothing? What had she been doing last night around eleven? But they did not make her feel that they suspected her, they were courteous and dispassionate, nor did they tell her who he was, how old, how he had died. To their questions, she recited the names of the others in the building—her sister Isabel, the African family, Mademoiselle Lavois on the third floor, Mr. Moabi, and Madame Florian, whom they had met. Isabel, her sister, lived in the attic room, and an American, Tommy Smithers, had lived there before that. The officers nodded and wrote these things down. Then she wondered if the dead man could be Mr. Moabi, always so combative and apoplectic on the phone, surely inciting people to kill him.

“The body must have been left there by someone who knew the code to the street door, and who had a key to the trash room,” said the detective.

“Not necessarily, sometimes we leave the little door open at the side,” Roxy said. “The men can then take the poubelles directly out into the street without entering the building.”

“Ah,” he said, writing this down.

“Are you sure it isn’t Mr. Smithers? He lived in the chambre d’étudiant.”

“Excuse us now, madame, we will call on you a little later.”

“I will go to the Brasserie Espoir,” Roxy said.

Outside in the Place Maubert, all was normality. Still stunned and excited, she went to sit at one of the little terrace tables at the Brasserie Espoir, the brasserie dog underfoot, the waiters in clean morning aprons, a smell of coffee, of croissants, an aroma of the smug consensus that this was a morning arranged as mornings should be arranged, in a society that has grasped the meaning of morning, watching the mothers in their sensible shoes pushing the strollers, trailing dachshunds.

“Bonjour,” said Anne-Chantal Lartigue, kissing her quickly and sitting down beside her. “I am glad to see you. The men are repairing the electrical minuterie, so the code to my building will not operate, and I am not allowed to enter for another half hour. Isn’t that stupid?”

“Someone was found dead in our building, disposed of in the trash,” Roxy told her in a wondering voice.

“Really? Who on earth?”

“They didn’t tell. Madame Florian found him.”

Anne-Chantal laughed merrily to think of Madame Florian and a corpse. Only then did Roxy begin to feel how unnatural was this gaiety that seemed to attend the death of a stranger, or perhaps even someone known to them, in her own hallway. But it is a way that French have, too, of dealing with grave things, the way the Chinese are said to laugh when you fall down in an embarrassing way and may have hurt yourself.

“I must smoke,” said Anne-Chantal. “You don’t mind? I received the most terrible news this morning, that Jérôme—this is unbelievable—plans to spend the summer in Paris! At first I was hysterical, now I am calm. How can the man dare?”

No good pointing out that the man was a Parisian, after all, and could not leave that fact behind when he ran off.

“Seriously, though, how awful for you, a dead man, did you see him?” Anne-Chantal went on.

“I saw his foot,” Roxy said, trying still to bring herself to a sense of this event and knowing that she could not, for her heart was still numb, something she felt no power over at this moment.

“How did he die?”

“I have no idea, actually.”

She had been bad to Tommy Smithers. She had refused finally to lend him money, he was so exasperating, so pathetic, so continuously in turmoil, you couldn’t help him out every time. Her imaginings became dreadful. Tommy had gone hustling somewhere, pickpocketing or picking up men, had been murdered by a vengeful client who knew where he once lived. Or drug overdose, that was possible too. Or suicide.

They looked over at the police inspector hurrying toward them.

“We’ll be interviewed,” Roxy said.

The policeman took off his hat. “Madame de Persand,” he said, “we are sorry to tell you, it is grave news, it is your husband.”

Roxy simply stared.

“So Madame Florian has attested. I am sorry, Madame. Could you perhaps? Could we ask you . . . ?”

Roxy felt as if she had had a spinal, a cool sensation of numbness proceeding down from her neck. Now she felt nothing. She blinked at the policeman, who blinked at her. He had small round glasses. He was wearing his hat. She rose.

“That’s impossible, my husband is gone,” she said.

“Yes, so Madame Florian has attested. That he no longer lives with the family.”

“It can’t be. I don’t think I should look,” Roxy said. “The baby. No, I cannot look.”

“Madame.”

“There is a mistake.”

“We understand. We are sorry. Perhaps you should not look.”

“I will look,” said Anne-Chantal. The officer seemed to be reassured by the presence of a native Frenchwoman. “I am sure it cannot be Monsieur de Persand. Madame de Persand should not look.”

“If you would, Madame. You are . . . ?”

“Lartigue, Anne-Chantal. Madame. Sixty-eight Boulevard Saint Germain. Take me to see the body.”

“We are obliged to ask Madame de Persand to come also,” said the policeman to Anne-Chantal, as if Roxy were not there. “But we are agreed she does not look.” They crossed the rue Lagrange. All was as usual. The retarded boy who always sat on the bench was this morning bundled warmly into a coat by his mother. He groaned and barked, and the Brasserie Metro dog barked back. The officer gallantly took Roxy’s arm.

Now police cars had blocked the rue Maître Albert. There would be sun today despite the rime of early morning frost on the bedraggled chrysanthemums in the garden of the Place Maubert. People in fur coats hurried by without looking at the commotion of police and men in plain clothes. Others stared at Roxy and Anne-Chantal as if to ask what they had done. Roxy was conscious that the policeman (strong pink face, still smelling of his shave, for it was early) slowed his steps for her sake. His touch, light on her elbow, could instantly tighten to catch her if in her unwieldy bulk she should slip. Surely they were wrong, it could not be Charles-Henri, that idea she did not take seriously.

“Madame was à côté,” said her policeman to another who was waiting. From the hall, as they entered, Roxy could see the bizarre sight unchanged, human leg in blue jeans protruding from the trash bins, an arm illumined by the flashes of men inside photographing the scene in the dark space below the stairs.

“Madame de Persand is advised not to look,” cried her policeman to the others. “She will stand here. Madame Lartigue will identify monsieur.”

Roxy, feeling nothing, stood in the hall while Anne-Chantal went a few steps into the utility room. Feeling nothing, she could not even summon a feeling of surprise at Anne-Chantal’s little cry, her little choked trill of dismay, or horror. “Oh, mon Dieu, it is he.”

Abruptly Anne-Chantal, shaken-looking and pale, pushed her way out of the utility room and embraced Roxy. “Oh, my poor dear, it is he.”

Her policeman tightened his grip on Roxy’s arm in case she should fall, as if expecting her to fall, but Roxy felt nothing. Then a slight leak began from her deadened spine into her brain, a drop of understanding, Charles-Henri in there, inexplicably dead, his legs sticking out.

“But how?” she managed finally. It made no sense at all, thus was probably not true, yet you were to proceed as if it were true, policemen expecting you to faint or cry. She looked around, confused, to read the countenances of others. Anne-Chantal took her other arm and, to the policeman, gestured with her head toward the staircase. Roxy thought of Charles-Henri smiling, his scarf blowing, standing by a cliff they had once climbed up to, and she had been afraid the wind whipping his scarf would pull him off.

Now she felt that same crawling fear. It was too late to save him. He had fallen. His body lay broken. A sob escaped when she tried to speak, like the groan of a hinge, a sound squeezed out of her by a sudden thrash of the child inside her.

“Yes,” said the inspector. “There are things we must ask madame. His whereabouts, his residence, where he was last night? But perhaps we could conduct the interview at the Commissariat de Police, it is just nearby? Madame? That will be easier?”

“Yes, just as you like,” Roxy agreed.

“Are you able to walk, madame? It is just à côté.”

This was Wednesday, not a market morning, and Roxy and the policemen walking together attracted no attention. Crossing at the light toward the rue Monge, her policeman exchanged nods with the guards at the rue de Bièvre, where President Mitterrand might be sleeping at this very moment, unaware of the shattered decorum of his neighborhood. Roxy had been inside the police station before, making an attestation when her purse was stolen. Only now did she put it to herself that her husband was dead and she was going to the police station to make an attestation, as if for some lost purse.