Sunday October 6, 1996
So you never saw a thing, Mom?
Well, yes. Once, she had seen. That way they had of avoiding each other. Eugénie just thought that Armand wasn’t too keen on Annette, or rather, couldn’t care less about her. He was more welcoming to Sandrine. And then, two years ago, shortly before Jules’s birth, she’d caught Armand and Annette deep in conversation. Eugénie had been astonished by this sudden closeness. This complicity. The sort between those who know each other so well, they barely look at each other. A bit like her and Fatiha, when they’d drink tea at the doctor’s. Except that Armand seemed to be lapping it up, savoring the moment. Eugénie had never seen her husband’s face look like that. As if he had spotlights on him. Like on the stage where she’d seen Salvatore Adamo singing “Laisse tes mains sur mes hanches,” under a canopy in Mâcon. Armand’s usually hard, inscrutable features seemed to have been swept away by Annette’s proximity. She had discovered the handsome, smiling face of a man under her own roof, a stranger. And it was her husband.
Eugénie hadn’t dared disturb them. She’d gone back to see if the oven was the right temperature for her apple tart.
Eugénie, Alain, and Annette are sitting around the kitchen table. Sandrine and Christian aren’t yet down for breakfast.
Eugénie doesn’t look at Annette. Alain doesn’t look at Annette. Eugénie and her son keep looking at each other.
Alain insists on taking Jules to the baptism. But Eugénie sticks to her guns, Jules will stay at the house, with her. The child is feverish, he must be kept in the warm. In any case, they’ll be back late afternoon, won’t they?
Alain is still in his pajamas. Annette is wearing a black silk dressing gown. Her fingers nervously stroke the tablecloth. Eugénie is already dressed. She has never undressed in front of her children, or appeared in her pajamas.
Christian turns up in the kitchen. Alain moves over to make room for his brother. Alain gazes at Annette’s cup of milk, her spoon scraping off the skin and placing it on the plastic-coated tablecloth. This morning, thinks Eugénie, my sons don’t look alike anymore. Alain is scarily pale. He keeps repeating that they’re taking Jules with them. Annette is silent, and almost as pale as Alain.
“I will not let you take Jules.”
It’s final. Eugénie, who’s never been domineering, never imposed a thing on her men, won’t change her mind. Surprised, Christian stares at her. He’s never heard his mother raise her voice, but this time, her statement was pronounced like a verdict. Alain leaves the table and goes back up to his room. Annette follows him.
Christian dunks his bread into his milky coffee and asks his mother if she’s OK.
“Make sure Alain doesn’t put Jules in the car.”
Christian senses that’s something’s wrong. The tension is almost palpable. His father can be moody when annoyed, but his mother has always been even-tempered.
Armand is hiding in the garden shed. He wanted to leave, get away from the house, but his tire’s flat. A gash at least two centimeters long. Did Alain want to take revenge by doing in his tire instead of doing him in? That’s all he deserves. His son bumping him off.
This afternoon, Armand will hang himself. He’ll kick the bucket. Eugénie will get a widow’s pension—he gets good life assurance from the factory—and Alain will go live in Sweden with Annette and Jules. Nothing else will exist anymore. He feels nothing anymore, since Eugénie insulted him this morning. She’d done so in a whisper. He didn’t know you could whisper the word scum. He thought it was inevitably shouted. She told him that she’d never forgive him, or let him leave. That he was her husband and would remain so. The way she’d said it, with that hatred that disfigured her, it was like a gob of spit full of love. Yes, it was as if she’d spat in his face while saying I love you.
When Armand passed Alain on the stairs earlier on, he received a virtual punch in the face. Alain had merely glanced at his father’s shoes. Armand had seen the look in his eye.
When Alain was small, he had a habit of pinching his father’s shoes. He’d get home from school and slip a pair on. There weren’t many pairs. One for winter, one for summer. And the shoes often lasted several years. Alain would parade around for hours, impersonating his father. He even did his homework in his father’s shoes. How often had Armand searched for them when leaving for work at four in the morning, and then found them beside the bed of his sleeping son?
The shoes had long been far too big for Alain. But at around fourteen, he’d started having to squeeze his feet into them. At fifteen, it was all over, no more messing around. His father’s shoes had become too small. He’d gone up two sizes in a year, but from then on, Alain was more interested in his friends, and in girls. As for Armand, it came as quite a blow. That was all he could think of: My son can’t get into my shoes anymore. It was the end of something, a sad end.
Armand hears someone pushing open the gate, walking through the garden, and ringing the doorbell.
It’s Marcel, his colleague, who’s just turned up in his van. Reluctantly, Armand leaves his lair.
“Hi, Marrcel.”
Marcel’s the guy he calls as soon as anything stops working in the house. To do odd jobs, to take stuff away. Yesterday evening, he came to mend the washing machine, and this morning he’s going to take it to the waste collection site. But first, he just wants to check a part of the motor that always clogs up, which he hadn’t thought of yesterday evening . . .
“If you knew how many machines get sent to the scrap yard because of that damn part.”
Eugénie warms up some coffee while Marcel pokes around inside the belly of the machine. Armand hovers around and responds to his colleague with appropriate grunts as he goes on about drain pumps, solenoid valves, level sensors, heating resistors . . . And he must check the “object trap,” too. Armand had no idea there were also traps in washing machines.
Christian has gone to his room to get ready. Annette returns to the kitchen with Jules in her arms. Marcel looks up; his eyes change when they fall on Annette. God, she’s beautiful.
“This machine’s really had it, nothing for it,” Marcel declares.
Armand and Marcel want to disconnect the evacuation pipe and turn off the water supply, but someone’s already done it. Armand automatically glances at Eugénie, not thinking for a second that it’s her who’s sorted everything. Together, the two men lift the machine. God almighty, it weighs a ton.
Right then, Annette hands Jules over to Eugénie. She takes the child into her arms, hugs him, but doesn’t kiss him. The two women don’t look at each other.
While he’s dragging the washing machine with Marcel, Armand hears voices coming from the bedrooms, and one of the twins coming down the stairs. Alain or Christian? Armand can’t bring himself to look up. No doubt they’ll soon be setting off for that baptism. And this evening, when they return, he’ll have hanged himself. Annette won’t forgive him, but, in the end, that won’t really matter. And life will go on, it always does. Life doesn’t need him. What on earth can it do with a guy like him?
Armand and Marcel emerge from the house puffing and blowing like old steam engines—it sure is heavy. It’s cold outside. Armand helps Marcel load the washing machine into the van and attach it with a bungee. He hears an engine starting, turns around and just catches sight of the Clio as it speeds off. The twins are in the front. Sandrine is resting her head on the back window. For a brief moment, Armand spots Annette’s blond hair, his last sunset.
She would visit three times a year. Three days at Christmas, three at Easter, and the August long weekend. It had taken just one day in October for everything to stop. He didn’t see much of her, and yet she took up all the space. He had nothing else left, not a crumb, not a minute to himself. He thought of nothing but her. Day and night.
The few times they had met up there, in the junk room, that toy graveyard, and snuggled in a corner where the ceiling light no longer worked, he had felt his life passing into hers.
Last night, neither he nor Annette heard Alain coming up the stairs. They saw the door opening. Then Alain called out to Annette. Several times. Annette gripped onto Armand. He felt her fingernails digging into his skin. They lay low, terrified and mortified at the thought of being discovered.
Alain moved closer, as if drawn by their breathing. The light from the corridor was enough to reveal them, like two creatures caught in a trap, two pathetic figures stuck to each other on the floor, between two boxes of crockery.
Paralyzed, Alain tried to say something, but not a sound came from his mouth. Then, after a seeming eternity, he backed away and closed the door behind him, soundlessly, to blank out what he had just seen.
Suddenly, Armand feels dizzy. Marcel asks him if he’s OK, tells him he’s looking a bit off-color.
“It’s nothing, must be coming down with something.”
Armand slips a few ten-franc coins into Marcel’s pocket, for all his help.
“Forr yourr kids,” he says.
Marcel bursts out laughing.
“I’ve never had any kids!”
Lucky you, thinks Armand.
With Jules in her arms, Eugénie watches them from the kitchen, hiding behind the window.
Armand thinks to himself that he must do the deed quickly. He can’t put up with that accusing look a day longer.
“See you, Marrcel, until next time.”
The morning passes smoothly; he acts like he’s going to go on living. He plants some spring cabbages and winter lettuces in his vegetable garden. An old October habit. The earth is frosty. Winter’s come early. All morning, he can feel Eugénie’s eyes on his back.
At midday, he finds a plate, his plate, on the kitchen table. What’s left of yesterday’s over-salty couscous. He hesitates to sit down, then tells himself it’s best to carry on as normal so as not to arouse suspicion. Since being married, it’s the first time he’s eating alone on a Sunday. He gazes at the empty space left by the washing machine and thinks that when he’s no longer around, he’ll leave no such void.
There’s not a sound in the house. She must be upstairs with the children. While eating his couscous, he wonders why Eugénie had been so determined to keep Jules at home. He also wonders whether he should leave a farewell letter to Annette. No. To tell her what? I love you? She knows that. Nor to his wife. Nor to his sons.
Last night, before Alain discovered them, he’d felt the young woman’s tears trickling down his neck while she told him about the face of a Virgin Mary she’d restored near Reims. As she described the cobalt blue to him, he could feel her mouth quivering against his ear.
She cries increasingly often, for an increasingly long time. It really has to stop.
While eating his couscous, he thinks of Annette’s skin, and how the perishing cold of cathedrals and churches is harming it, of the scars she gets on her hands and forearms from handling the glass. He thinks of her wrists, fine as jewels. The image of his workman’s hands on her white skin had always seemed like a mental one, but never a reality. Jules had brought him back down to earth.
The day he was born was the most beautiful and the worst of his life. The worst until last night, that is.
When he’d leant over the cot, in the maternity clinic, to take him into his arms, Eugénie had showed him the sign hanging overhead: “This baby is fragile, only his/her daddy’s and mommy’s caresses are permitted.” Like on the evening he’d kissed Annette for the first time, Armand had felt like taking the infant and running away, kidnapping him and disappearing. But like on the evening he’d kissed Annette for the first time, he’d done nothing, had just gone home.
He washes up his plate, his cutlery, and his glass, places them on the edge of the sink. Eugénie will come after him anyhow, to rewash them. She doesn’t like his way of cleaning things. Always says it’s a botched job.
He’s decided to hang himself in the room Alain caught them in last night. The ceiling’s high, and it’s the only door in the house that locks from inside. This time, he won’t forget. Unlike last night. In addition to locking the door, he’ll stick a terse note on it, so no one enters before calling the police.
There’s a rope in the garden shed, wound around the big green ladder. He goes out to fetch it. He pretends to survey his planting first. Wanders around a bit. He’s convinced that Eugénie is watching him from an upstairs room. In the shed, he daren’t look at his bike, like when you pass someone you’ve loved too much. He unwinds the rope and slips it into a garbage bag that he conceals under his winter bomber jacket.
He opens the junk-room door. He switches on his flashlight and directs it at the roof beams. From his stepladder, he swings the rope several times until it wraps around the main beam, and then attaches it securely. He starts to tie his hangman’s noose, has to try again, a few times. As he does so, he remembers that, when the twins were children, they used to perform magic tricks and tie false knots in scarves. They never revealed to him how they did it. He only knows how to tie real knots.
He goes back downstairs, he doesn’t have much time left; Eugénie and the children have dozed off in front of the TV. Armand hears the sandman passing by. The children always want to watch the same video. He lifts up the gas cylinder that’s under the sink and looks for the lock of Annette’s hair that he hid at the back of the cupboard, inside a Treasury Department envelope. He opens the envelope and slips the lock of hair into his pocket.
He writes the warning note on the pad usually used for shopping lists: Do not enter. Call the police. He unrolls some sticky tape, tears it off with his teeth. He’s about to go back upstairs when he sees a police car parking in front of the house. Armand can’t believe his eyes. How can they already be here? Is he dreaming? He watches them pushing open the gate and entering his garden.
Shit, what the hell are they doing here? And they seem in a bad mood, too. Armand knows one of the two by sight. A guy from the village called Bonneton, a bit younger than him. The two officers are about to ring the doorbell. No. They mustn’t. If they do, it’ll wake up Eugénie and the children.
He screws up the note and puts it in his pocket, before going to open the door. He finds himself face to face with them. Officer Bonneton gives Armand a military salute and says:
“Good day. Monsieur Neige?”
Armand is surprised by the question. Bonneton knows perfectly well who he is.
“Yes.”
“Are your sons, Christian and Alain Neige, the owners of a vehicle made by Renault with the license plate 2408 ZM 69?”