He’s left the big sweater he got for Christmas at his father’s, the one his mother asked him not to take there. She didn’t realize at first, but today, now that it’s gotten colder, she’s surprised he isn’t wearing it. She’s horribly angry, that’s obvious. She’s struggling to mask the signs of irritation that Théo knows well. She says several times: “We’re not likely to see that again.” The sweater is in danger, absorbed into the depths of the void. She’s alluding to the enemy territory that she will not name. A place governed by unknown laws, where clothes can take weeks to be washed and where objects get lost and never reappear.
Théo promises he’ll bring it next time. No, he won’t forget.
She’s finding it hard to let it go, he can see.
When he was younger, up until the end of elementary school, she packed his bag for him before he went to his father’s. She chose his least nice, most worn clothes on the grounds that they took ages to come back and sometimes never came back at all. On Friday evening she took him there on the metro and left him outside the building. In the beginning, when Théo was too young to take the elevator on his own, his father would come down and be watching from the other side of the glass doors. Like a hostage exchanged for some unknown commodity, Théo would go down the hall and cross the neutral zone, hardly daring to press the light switch. A week later, at the same time on Friday, on a different street, his father would switch off his engine and wait in the car for Théo to go into the building and start the whole thing again. In another stairwell, his mother would hug him tight. Between kisses, she’d stroke his face and hair, looking him over with relief, as though he had returned miraculously alive from some unfathomable disaster.
He remembers one day a long time ago—he must have been seven or eight—when his mother was checking the contents of his bag after he came back from his father’s, and she didn’t find the pants she’d bought him a few weeks earlier. She began taking all the clothes out one by one, as though it were a matter of life and death, tossing them angrily in the air. And then, having confirmed that the garment was missing, she began to cry. Théo watched her, stunned. His mother was kneeling in front of a duffel bag, her body wracked with sobs. He could see her pain, it struck him in jolts, but there was something that escaped him: why was it so serious?
His mother had begun complaining that his father couldn’t give a shit about getting his things together (every time she said something bad about his father, this wrenching feeling of discomfort agitated his stomach and the sharp sound made his ears buzz) and he had to admit that he’d packed his bag himself. He’d done his best to collect up his clothes, but he hadn’t found his pants, which were probably in the wash. And then suddenly his mother had shouted, “Doesn’t that slut know how to turn on a washing machine?”
When his parents divorced, his father moved in to a new apartment, where he still lives. He put up an extra partition at the back of the living room so that Théo could have a room of his own. In the months after the separation, his father was seeing another woman whom his mother called “the bitch” or “the slut.” The bitch came to his father’s some evenings but never slept over. She worked in the same company as him. They must have gotten to know each other in the elevator or the cafeteria; that was how Théo imagined them meeting, a scene he tried to reconstruct several times, despite his difficulty picturing the setting. He found it impossible to imagine what “the office,” the place his father went each day on the other side of the beltway, looked like.
He remembers a spring day at the amusement park in the botanical gardens with his father and this woman. He must have been six or seven. He’d been on the trampoline and the go-carts, had a go at the tin can alley game. Later in the afternoon, all three of them got lost in the maze of mirrors, then they climbed into a boat and, for what seemed like a deliciously long time to him, they allowed themselves to be carried along by the current of the enchanted river. Later they had cotton candy. The bitch was nice. It was thanks to her that they’d discovered this marvelous world, protected by gates and fences, a world where children were kings. The woman must have had some connection to this place, she knew every corner. She was the one who had guided them along its paths and handed out the tickets, and his father looked at her with such devotion that Théo came to the conclusion that the whole amusement park must belong to her.
But the next day when he went back to his mother, he had a stomachache. He felt sad. Guilty. He’d had fun with this woman, accepted her gifts.
Something sweet and sticky still clung to his hands.
In the beginning, when he got back from his father’s, his mother would ask him questions. While pretending not to get involved, as though he couldn’t spot her ploy, she would fish for information by means of digressions and circumlocutions that he saw through immediately.
To say as little as possible, Théo pretended not to understand the questions, or else he replied evasively.
Back then, his mother would suddenly begin crying without warning, because she couldn’t open a jam jar or find something that had disappeared or because the television had stopped working or because she was tired. Sometimes it was like an electric shock, sometimes a cut or a punch, but his body always connected with her pain and absorbed its share.
In the beginning, every time he came back from his father’s, she asked him, “Did you have fun? You didn’t cry? Did you think about Mommy?” He couldn’t have explained why, but he instantly felt this was a trap. He never knew whether he was supposed to reassure his mother by telling her it had all gone well or claim that he’d been bored and had missed her. One day, when Théo had probably struck her as too happy after his week on the other side, his mother’s face took on a horribly sad expression. She became silent and he was afraid she’d start crying again. But after a few minutes, she said in a small voice, “All that matters is that you’re happy. If you don’t need me, I’ll go, you know. Go traveling, maybe. Have a rest.”
Théo learned very quickly to play the role expected of him. To offer words sparingly, expressionlessly, eyes lowered. Not to expose himself. On both sides of the frontier, silence was clearly the best policy, the least dangerous.
After a time, he couldn’t say when, the bitch disappeared. According to what he managed to glean at the time from scraps of phone conversations caught on one side or the other, the woman had children, who couldn’t have appreciated her having fun at the amusement park without them, and a husband she didn’t want to leave.
Gradually, his mother stopped crying. She sold the furniture and bought newer, nicer furniture, then she repainted the apartment. Théo chose the colors for his room and the kitchen.
She stopped questioning him when he came back from a week with his father. She no longer asked what he’d done or with whom. If he’d had fun. In fact, she started avoiding the subject. She didn’t want to know anything anymore.
Today, the time he spends away from her has ceased to exist. One evening she explained to Théo that she had drawn a line under all that and no longer wanted to hear it mentioned.
His father does not exist. She has stopped uttering his name.