Room 19.
The blue-eyed ghost is there. Sitting beside Hélène. He closes the book he was just reading to her.
“Sorry about last time, I thought you were Lucien.”
“I’ve been known to mix people up myself.”
It doesn’t seem odd to him that I could mistake him for a man who would be almost a hundred-and-twenty years old. He runs his hand through his hair. It’s the first time I see him doing what I presume is a habit.
“How do you know whether it’s day or night on her beach? Because today, she hasn’t said a word to me. I’m convinced she’s asleep.”
“There’s no morning at Hélène’s beach. It’s always daytime.”
“Has she been there for long? I mean, on . . .”
“Vacation? For as long as I’ve known her. I believe it’s the beach she went to with Lucien, in 1936.”
He gazes at her for a long time. Then turns his blueness on me. I’d stake my life on the blue of Hélène’s sea being exactly the blue of his eyes, and that’s why she’ll never come back.
“How do you know that?”
“She talks a good deal to me.”
“What else has she told you?”
“On her beach . . . fathers chase after balls and mothers sip cool drinks. Older kids press their ears to the pop charts, or rewind cassettes . . . Sometimes she stubs her toes on pebbles and I hear her murmuring: ‘Ouch, the pebbles are hot today.’ Or then: ‘Oh no, I’ve just swallowed some sand.’ Sometimes she talks out loud with passers by, the ice-cream seller, or a woman spreading a towel near hers. Hélène says, ‘Do you come here often?’ She does the questions, but rarely the answers.”
The ghost remains silent for a long time while I fill the carafe with fresh water.
“It shouldn’t be us reading novels to her, but the other way around,” he says.
His remark makes me want to laugh. But I don’t. Because of his blueness. Its effect on me is intensifying. Usually, you’d get used to it. But with him, it’s different: the more he turns it on me, the more disturbed I feel.
“But . . . what does she do, on this beach?”
“She reads love stories while waiting for Lucien and the little girl; they went off for a swim earlier.”
He looks stunned by my reply. He wasn’t actually expecting me to give him one. I think he just asked in an offhand way, as if thinking aloud.
“The little girl?”
“Rose. Your mother. I mean, Rose, she is your mother?”
“Yes.”
I make Hélène drink little sips of water. I think to myself that he must see us as two crazy women.
“Which love stories?”
“The ones your mother reads her at every visit.”
“It’s as if you’ve just read me a poetic instruction manual.”
Him saying that to me means he’s from the same world as us, the one in which you don’t believe only what you can see. The world of idiots, the naive, optimists.