And yet, they look like they love each other.”
Jo hands me back the photo of Alain and Annette taken a few months after Jules’s birth. I put it away in my bag.
This evening, I’m having supper at hers. I like her husband. Patrick is a tall guy whose face is pockmarked from past acne. To conceal it, he has UV treatment every week. He has three tattoos on his body, including a huge mermaid right up his arm. Jo says that, sometimes, she hears her singing. And Patrick says to Jo that she should leave off the meds she’s supposed to give to her old folk. Patrick’s a real sweetheart who looks like a real bad guy. The kind who rides a Harley-Davidson and stops at pedestrian crosswalks.
I like eating at their place because they touch each other all the time without touching. Like people who love each other do. The exact opposite of my grandparents.
They have two daughters of around my age. I don’t know them. Like everyone, they left Milly after the bac. Jo read a great future for them in the lines on their palms.
“Maybe Jules’s mother was raped . . .” says Patrick, in his gravelly voice, while looking for something in the fridge.
Jo and I are dumbfounded by that.
“There are plenty of women who get raped and don’t dare to say so. Maybe the Swedish girl had told her parents but not her husband.”
Jules the product of a rape—that really is crazy.
“You know, Jules was little when his grandparents said those things; maybe he didn’t quite grasp what they meant,” Jo says to me, while putting taramosalata on bread.
Despite the pink Jo’s spreading, I see everything as black. It’s at such times that Jo says to me: “Come and eat with us tonight.” And puts color into her dishes.
“Jules has always understood everything. It was as if he even spoke languages that don’t exist.”
“Where is he this evening?”
“At home, pretending to revise.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Go to the cemetery and ask Annette, when she cheated on Uncle Alain, who it was with.”