“I believe I wasn’t found out, those police weren’t capable of finding anything out,” she’d say occasionally. “I was turned in. But who did it? Who? Sometimes I think it was Fukuda himself. But why would he have done that? It doesn’t make any sense, does it?”
“It doesn’t matter now. It’s over. Forget about it, bury it. It’s not good for you to torture yourself with those memories. The only thing that matters is that you survived and soon you’ll be completely well. And never get involved again in the kinds of entanglements that have consumed half your life.”
On the fourth day, a Thursday, Elena told us that Dr. Zilacxy, director of the clinic in Petit Clamart, would see us on Monday at noon. Professor Bourrichon had spoken with him by phone and given him all the results of the bad girl’s medical examination, as well as his prescriptions and advice. On Friday I went to speak to Señor Charnés, who had asked the secretary of the translators’ and interpreters’ agency he headed to call me. He offered me a well-paid contract for two weeks in Helsinki. I accepted. When I returned home, I heard voices and giggles in the bedroom as soon as I opened the door. I stood still with the door half open, listening. They were speaking in French, and one of the voices belonged to the bad girl. The other, thin, high-pitched, a little hesitant, could only be Yilal’s. Suddenly my hands were sweating. I was ecstatic. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but they were playing something, perhaps checkers, perhaps JanKenPo, and, to judge by the giggles, having a very good time. They hadn’t heard me come in. I closed the door slowly and walked toward the bedroom, exclaiming in a loud voice, in French, “I bet you’re playing checkers and the bad girl is winning.”
There was an immediate silence, and when I took another step and went into the bedroom I saw that they had the checkerboard open in the middle of the bed and were sitting on either side, both of them leaning over the pieces. Yilal looked at me, his eyes flashing with pride. And then, opening his mouth very wide, he said in French, “Yilal wins!”
“He always wins, it’s not fair.” The bad girl applauded. “This kid is a champion.”
“Let’s see, let’s see, I want to referee this match,” I said, dropping onto a corner of the bed and examining the board. I tried to feign absolute naturalness, as if nothing extraordinary were happening, but I could hardly breathe.
Leaning over the pieces, Yilal was studying the next move. For an instant the bad girl’s eyes met mine. She smiled and winked.
“He wins again!” Yilal exclaimed, applauding.
“Well, of course, mon vieux, she has no place to move. You won. Give me five!”
I shook his hand, and the bad girl gave him a kiss.
“I’m not playing checkers with you again, I’m sick of being beaten,” she said.
“I’ve thought of a game that’s even more fun, Yilal,” I improvised. “Why don’t we give Elena and Simon the surprise of their lives? Let’s put on a show for them that your parents will remember for the rest of their days. Would you like to do that?”
The boy’s expression had turned wary and he waited, motionless, for me to continue, not committing himself. As I laid out the plan I was inventing as I described it to him, he listened, intrigued and somewhat intimidated, not daring to reject it, attracted and repelled at the same time by my proposal. When I finished, he was motionless and silent for a long time, looking first at the bad girl and then at me.
“What do you think, Yilal?” I insisted, still speaking French. “Shall we give Simon and Elena a surprise? I promise you they won’t forget it for the rest of their lives.”
“All right,” said Yilal’s thin voice, his head nodding assent. “We’ll give them a surprise.”
We did just what I had improvised, caught up in the emotion and confusion that hearing Yilal had thrown me into. When Elena came to pick him up, the bad girl and I asked if she, Simon, and the boy would come back after supper because we had a delicious dessert we wanted to share with them. Somewhat surprised, Elena said all right, just for a little while, because otherwise it would be very hard for Yilal the sleepyhead to wake up the next day. I ran as if the devil were pursuing me to the corner of École Militaire, to the bakery with the croissants on the Avenue de la Bourdonnais. Fortunately, it was open. I bought a cake with a lot of cream and fat, red strawberries on top. We were so excited we barely tasted the meal of vegetables and fish I shared with the convalescent.
When Simon, Elena, and Yilal—already in slippers and robe—arrived, we were waiting for them, the coffee ready and the cake cut into slices. I saw immediately that Elena suspected something. Simon, on the other hand, preoccupied with an article by a dissident Soviet scientist he had read that afternoon, was over the moon and told us, while the cream from the overly sweet dessert dirtied his beard, that not long ago the Soviet scientist visited the Pasteur Institute and all the researchers and scientists had been struck by his modesty and intellectual accomplishments. Then, following the nonsensical script I had devised, the bad girl asked in Spanish, “How many languages do all of you think Yilal speaks?”
I saw that Simon and Elena froze immediately and widened their eyes slightly, as if asking: “What’s going on here?”
“I think two,” I declared. “French and Spanish. And you two, what do you think? How many languages does Yilal speak, Elena? Simon, how many do you think?”
Yilal’s eyes moved from his parents to me, from me to the bad girl, and back to his parents again. He was very serious.
“He doesn’t speak any,” Elena stammered, looking at us and not turning her head toward the boy. “At least, not yet.”
“I think…,” said Simon, and then fell silent, overwhelmed, begging us with his eyes to tell him what he should say.
“In reality, it doesn’t matter what we think,” the bad girl interjected. “It only matters what Yilal says. What do you say, Yilal? How many do you speak?”
“He speaks French,” said the thin, high-pitched voice. And, after a very brief pause, changing languages, “Yilal speaks Spanish.”
Elena and Simon sat staring at him, struck dumb. The slice of cake Simon was holding slid off the plate and landed on his trousers. The boy burst into laughter, raising his hand to his mouth, and pointing at Simon’s leg, he exclaimed in French, “You dirty trousers.”
Elena rose to her feet and now, standing beside the boy, looking at him ecstatically, she caressed his hair with one hand and passed the other along his lips, over and over again, the way a pious old woman caresses the image of her patron saint. But, of the two, the more moved was Simon. Incapable of saying anything, he looked at his son, at his wife, at us, stupefied, as if asking us not to wake him but to let him go on dreaming.
Yilal said nothing else that night. His parents took him home a short while later, and the bad girl, acting as mistress of the house, wrapped up the rest of the cake and insisted the Gravoskis take it. I shook Yilal’s hand when we said good night.
“It turned out very well, didn’t it, Yilal? I owe you a present because of how well you did. Another six toy soldiers for your collection?”
He made affirmative movements with his head. When we closed the door behind them, the bad girl exclaimed, “Right now they’re the happiest couple on earth.”
Much later, when I was beginning to fall asleep, I saw a silhouette slip into the living room and silently approach the sofa bed. She took me by the hand.
“Come, come with me,” she ordered.
“I can’t, I mustn’t,” I said, getting up and following her. “Dr. Pineau has forbidden it. For two months at least I can’t even touch you, let alone make love to you. And I won’t touch you, or make love to you, until you’re well again. Understood?”
We got into bed, she curled up against me and leaned her head on my shoulder. I felt her body, nothing but skin and bone, and her small, icy feet rubbing against my legs, and a shudder ran from my head down to my heels.
“I don’t want you to make love to me,” she whispered, kissing me on the
neck. “I want you to hold me, keep me warm, take away my fear, I’m dying of terror.”
Her body, a form full of angles, trembled like a leaf. I embraced her, rubbed her back, her arms, her waist, and for a long time whispered sweet things in her ear. I would never let anybody hurt her again, she had to do everything she could to get better soon and get back her strength, her desire to live and be happy. So she could be attractive again. She listened in silence, clinging to me, attacked at intervals by terrors that made her moan and writhe. Much later, I sensed she was sleeping. But throughout the night, as I dozed, I felt her shudder and groan, seized by recurrent attacks of panic. When I saw her like this, so helpless, images of what had happened in Lagos came into my mind, and I felt sadness, rage, and a fierce desire for vengeance against her torturers.
The visit to the Petit Clamart clinic of Dr. André Zilacxy, a Frenchman of Hungarian descent, turned out to be a country excursion. A brilliant sun that day made the tall poplars and plane trees in the woods shine. The clinic was at the far end of a park that had chipped statues and a pond with swans. We arrived at midday, and Dr. Zilacxy had us come into his office immediately. The old building was a nineteenth-century, two-story seigneurial house that had a marble staircase and balconies with grillwork but was modernized in the interior. A new pavilion that had large floor-to-ceiling windows had been added—perhaps it was a solarium or a gym with a swimming pool. Through the windows in Dr. Zilacxy’s office, people could be seen in the distance moving about under the trees, among them the white coats of nurses or doctors. Zilacxy also seemed to come from the nineteenth century, with his square-cut beard framing a thin face and a gleaming bald head. He wore black, with a gray vest, a stiff collar that looked false, and instead of a tie, a four-in-hand held by a vermilion pin. He had a pocket watch with a gold chain.
“I’ve spoken with my colleague Bourrichon, and read the report from the Hôpital Cochin,” he said, coming to the point right away, as if he couldn’t allow himself to waste time in banalities. “You’re fortunate, the clinic is always full and there are people who wait a long time to be admitted. But, as the lady is a special case because she comes recommended by an old friend, we can make a place for her.”
He had a very well-modulated voice, and an elegant, somewhat theatrical way of moving and displaying his hands. He said the “patient” would follow a special diet planned by a dietician so she could regain the weight she had lost, and a personal trainer would monitor her physical exercise. Her head physician would be Dr. Roullin, a specialist in traumas of the kind the lady had suffered. She could have visitors twice a week, between five and seven in the evening. In addition to her treatment with Dr. Roullin, she would take part in group therapy sessions that he led. Unless there was some objection on her part, hypnosis might be used in her treatment, under his direction. And—here he paused so we would know an important statement was coming—if the patient at any point in her treatment felt “disappointed,” she could stop immediately.
“It never has happened to us,” he added, clicking his tongue. “But the possibility is there in case it ever does.”
He said that after talking to Professor Bourrichon, they both had agreed in principle that the patient should remain at the clinic a minimum of four weeks. Then they would see if it was advisable for her to prolong her stay or if she could continue her convalescence at home.
He responded to all of Elena’s questions and mine—the bad girl didn’t open her mouth, she did no more than listen as if the matter had nothing to do with her—regarding the functioning of the clinic, his colleagues, and after a joke about Lacan and his fantastic combinations of structuralism and Freud, which, he pointed out with a smile in order to set our minds at ease, “we don’t offer on our menu,” he had a nurse take the bad girl to the office of Dr. Roullin, who was waiting to talk to her and show her around the establishment.
When we were alone with Dr. Zilacxy, Elena cautiously brought up the delicate matter of how much the month of treatment would cost. And she quickly indicated that “the lady” had no insurance or personal funds and the friend who was here now would assume the cost of her cure.
“One hundred thousand francs, approximately, not counting the medicines that—well, it is difficult to know ahead of time—probably would amount to twenty or thirty percent more, in the worst-case scenario.” He paused for a moment and coughed before he added: “This is a special price, since the lady comes recommended by Professor Bourrichon.”
He looked at his watch, rose to his feet, and said that if we had decided, we should stop by administration to fill out forms.
Three-quarters of an hour later, the bad girl reappeared. She was pleased by her conversation with Dr. Roullin, who seemed very sensible and amiable, and by the visit to the clinic. The room she would occupy was small, comfortable, very pretty, with views of the park, and all the facilities, the dining room, the gym, the warm-water pool, the small auditorium where they gave talks and showed documentaries and feature films, were extremely modern. Without further discussion, we went to administration. I signed a document stating that I agreed to be responsible for all expenses and wrote a check for ten thousand francs as a deposit. The bad girl handed a French passport to the administrator, a very thin woman who wore her hair in a bun and had an inquisitorial eye, and she asked for her identification card instead. Elena and I looked at each other uneasily, expecting a catastrophe.
“I don’t have it yet,” said the bad girl with absolute naturalness. “I’ve lived abroad for many years and just came back to France. I know I ought to get one. I’ll do that right away.”
The administrator wrote the data from the passport into a notebook and returned it to her.
“You’ll check in tomorrow,” she said as we were leaving. “Please get here before noon.”
Taking advantage of the beautiful day, a little cold but golden and with a perfectly clear sky, we took a long walk through the woods of Petit Clamart, listening to the dead leaves of autumn rustling under our feet. We had lunch in a little bistrot at the edge of the woods, where a crackling fireplace warmed the room and reddened the faces of the patrons. Elena had to go to work, so she left us just outside Paris, at the first Métro station we came across. During the entire ride to École Militaire the bad girl was silent, her hand in mine. At times I felt her shiver. In the house on Joseph Granier, as soon as we walked in, the bad girl made me sit in the easy chair in the living room and then she sat on my knees. Her nose and ears were freezing, and she trembled so much she couldn’t articulate a word. Her teeth were chattering.
“The clinic will do you good,” I said, caressing her neck, her shoulders, warming her icy ears with my breath. “They’ll take care of you, fatten you up, put an end to these attacks of fear. They’ll make you pretty and you can turn back into the devil you’ve always been. And, if you don’t like the clinic, you’ll come back here right away. Whenever you say. It isn’t a prison, but a place to rest.”
She held me tight and didn’t say anything, but she trembled a long time before she grew calm. Then I prepared tea with lemon for the two of us. We talked while she packed her bag for the clinic. I handed her an envelope in which I had placed a thousand francs in bills for her to take with her.
“It isn’t a gift, it’s a loan,” I joked. “You’ll pay me back when you’re rich. I’ll charge you high interest.”
“How much is all this going to cost you?” she asked, not looking at me.
“Less than I thought. About a hundred thousand francs. What do I care about a hundred thousand francs if I can see you looking attractive again? I’m doing it out of sheer self-interest, Chilean girl.”
She didn’t say anything for a long time and kept packing her suitcase, looking annoyed.
“I’ve become that ugly?” she said suddenly.
“Awful,” I said. “Forgive me, but you’ve turned into a real horror of a woman.”
“That’s a lie,” she said, turning and throwing a sandal
that landed on my chest. “I can’t be that ugly when yesterday, in bed, your cock was hard the whole night. You had to put up with wanting to make love to me, hypocrite.”
She burst into laughter and from that moment on was in better spirits. As soon as she finished packing, she came to sit on my lap again so I could gently massage her back and arms. She was still there, sound asleep, when Yilal came in around six to watch his television program. Since the night of the surprise for his parents, he would speak to them and to us, but only for a few moments, because the effort tired him. And then he would go back to the slate, which he still wore around his neck, along with a couple of pieces of chalk in a little bag. That night we didn’t hear his voice until he said goodbye, in Spanish: “Good night, friends.”
After supper, we went to the Gravoskis’ for coffee, and they promised to visit her at the clinic, and asked her to call if she needed anything while I was in Finland. When we came back, she didn’t let me pull out the sofa bed.
“Why don’t you want to sleep with me?”
I embraced her and pressed her body against mine.
“You know very well why. It’s a martyrdom to have you naked beside me, desiring you as I do, when I can’t touch you.”
“You’re hopeless,” she said, as indignant as if I’d insulted her. “If you were Fukuda, you’d make love to me all night and not give a damn if I gushed blood or died.”
“I’m not Fukuda. Haven’t you realized that yet, either?”
“Of course I have,” she repeated, throwing her arms around my neck. “That’s why tonight you’re going to sleep with me. Because I don’t enjoy anything as much as making you suffer. Haven’t you realized that?”
“Hélas, yes,” I said, kissing her hair. “I realized it all too well many years ago, and the worst thing is I never learn. I even seem to like it. We’re the perfect pair: the sadist and the masochist.”