Yves had insisted Sylvie postpone an appointment with another client to spend the afternoon with him. He dreaded some sort of unpleasant disruption but nothing came to disturb their delightful encounter, a ritual they had perfected over the months, and which obtained the desired results. After they made love, Sylvie wrapped her hips in a beige silk shawl, like a loincloth, which emphasized her swaying curves as she walked by. She wandered around the apartment looking to see what had changed, then came back and lay down in a pose worthy of one of Maillol’s models and held her hand out toward a plate of plump pears, which she then savored, allowing the juice to pearl at the corner of her lips. Typically, she interrupted their long silences to say something out of the blue: What a pity you can’t find any of those winter pears after April. Or: I really wish I liked reading. But that Saturday, once she had assumed her odalisque pose, Sylvie asked, “Would you still fancy me if I were thin?”
Yves joined her on the bed to knead her body and reassure her of her beauty. Then he stretched out next to her and closed his eyes, nestling peacefully against her curves. She roused him from his reverie by grabbing hold of his cock, wanking him with great delicacy, and starting up a conversation to see how long he would be able to stay with her.
“What will you do when you run out of money to pay for girls?”
“ . . . I don’t know. That day is drawing near . . . ”
“It won’t take you long to find yourself a wife.”
“I’ve become . . . become . . . hard . . . to please.”
“You’d be the perfect little hubby!”
Sylvie did not know that her client had come very near to fulfilling that destiny. Yves almost muttered a few words about his former life, but it was too late by then to mutter anything.
“You’d treat her well, you’d surprise her all the time, and I’m sure you’d never cheat on her.”
“I . . . I . . . uh . . . ”
As the desired effect of her hand movement was imminent, she stopped; he tore the wrapper off a condom with his teeth, then penetrated her urgently, which caused her to burst out laughing.
At the end of the afternoon, fresh and dressed again from head to toe, she left the apartment, saying, “If one day you find your sweetheart, try to stay in touch all the same. We’ll go to tearooms together.”
He went back to bed and buried himself in the sheets to prolong the languor for a moment. That evening he would go have dinner at Denis’s brasserie, the guy had invited him so often. Between Agnieszka’s tears and Céline’s ramblings, Yves had not attended the previous Thursday session, and the ludicrous idea that he might have missed out on a testimony of major significance did cross his mind. He owed it to himself to respect his commitment to the Thursday meeting for as long as his journey through the land of streetwalkers lasted. On that day in the future that Sylvie had just mentioned, he would once again be a man like any other, but he’d be reconciled with himself, enriched by everything these women had brought to him.
He slung his leather jacket over his shoulders, and with his helmet in his hand he left his apartment, then went through the glass door into the hall, failing to notice a figure seated on the three steps leading down into the garage.
Suddenly he felt someone grab him by the collar, pull him backwards and fling him to the ground.
The aggressor knelt with all his weight on Yves’s torso, taking his breath away. With a violent burst of threats and insults he hammered his face until the blood was spurting from his mouth.
Then he stood up, spat on Yves, kicked him one last time in the ribs and, before leaving the premises, forbade him ever to see his wife again.
They were sleeping in the same bed, sharing their sustenance, communing in good faith. And yet nothing enabled Denis to penetrate the eternal mystery of an intruder who was determined to remain an intruder, nor that of her imminent departure. Tired of resisting, he had to resume his exhausting labors of speculation, now tinged with fear: Marie-Jeanne was no angel from heaven, but most certainly the exact opposite: a succubus assigned to the forces of evil.
Denis had been tempted to believe there was a magnanimous God who would reward his creatures after he’d subjected them to a trial. If someone like Marie-Jeanne Pereyres had been sent to him, then no doubt it was so that she would be taken from him again, sooner or later.
And only the devil in person was known to give human beings the very thing they were most in need of, only to confiscate it so that they could buy their souls for next to nothing.
Yves spent the evening in the emergency room, knocked out by powerful analgesics. As soon as she got his message Sylvie came to see him, her face swollen with shame and sadness.
“Some little fucker went berserk and told me not to see you anymore.”
“It was a mistake.”
“You mean I got my face smashed in by mistake?”
“He thought you were Grégoire.”
“ . . . Who thought I was who?”
“The one who hit you was my guy. He may be a filthy bastard, a miserable wretch, a tool, and the cause of all my woe, but he’s mine.”
Yves just looked at her.
“He went through my diary and saw, 2:00 p.m. Grégoire, his place. But in the meantime you called and I postponed my appointment. The bastard followed me to your place thinking it was Grégoire’s.”
Yves was then treated to the detailed account of a modern tragedy which, although it had its charge of intensity, was far less tangible than the pain in his ribs that made it impossible to breathe.
“Grégoire is my dietician client who’s ashamed he fell madly in love with the only woman who isn’t begging him to show her how to lose weight. My Greg goes crazy at the thought I’m seeing other clients. He wants me all to himself, but up until now he’s always been afraid everyone will laugh at him.”
Yves hesitated to let her go on; he refused to get caught, even fortuitously, between a small-time pimp and a guy who was building a global business on the back of a medical practice. Yves’s only crime in the story had been to buy an assortment of frosted cream puffs to keep Sylvie happy.
“And just lately Grégoire made a decision . . . ”
To live his love for her out in the open, in spite of his fear of being seen arm-in-arm with a living counter-publicity. Even if it meant he’d become the prey of living room psychoanalysts.
“A sort of coming out, basically. Display in public his penchant for voluptuous women. I’m sleeping with a Rubens and you can just lump it.”
Dazed with pain, Yves tried to feel sorry for the man’s inner turmoil. While the pimp might be a real piece of shit, he nevertheless belonged to a well-known prototype and, in spite of his boundless scorn, Yves could easily imagine the guy’s pathetic thought process. Grégoire, on the other hand, who dreaded being seen with a woman not because she was a prostitute but because she was fat, seemed to be the exemplar of a decadent era where it was not morality that decreed what was taboo or forbidden, but the imperatives of profit and the universal fear of media derision.
“And my pimp found out. He’s such a coward but he wanted to play tough guy. And it landed on you.”
Yves closed his eyes for a moment, just long enough to wonder what perverse God was hounding him like this. He had a sudden urge to scream and only just stopped himself, then felt tears of fatigue welling up. At around one o’clock in the morning they let him leave, with bandages on his face and a strap around his thorax. Sylvie had waited until the last minute to beg him not to file a complaint.
“He’s terrified that he might get called in. He’s been carrying this little suspended sentence, and if they send him down they’ll give him a harder time than anyone, his nerves won’t take it. What would become of him without me? He’s too dumb. I’ll do whatever you like, I’ll come as soon as you call. I’ll obey.”
Yves went home in a cab, then wit
h one hand on his ribs he walked painfully across the hall of his building, like the little old man he would be someday. He lay down but could not sleep, hindered by the pain that was just waiting to flare up, and by the memory of the attack, which would haunt him for several days to come. To dodge these thoughts he dreamt about that other Lehaleur, the one he might have become if, once upon a time, his betrothed had not cheated on him. For the very first time he wondered if he wouldn’t have been better off had he stayed on that clearly marked path. How far along would he be by now, with his beautiful future?
In all likelihood, he’d be in that house in the suburbs, sitting outside on this summer night.
The baby, upstairs, would be sound asleep, and he and Pauline would be enjoying peace and quiet at last, after a day or errands, housework, and diapers.
They’d treat themselves to a little after dinner drink and discuss their next vacation.
Then they would go to bed, and maybe caress each other.
When they woke up it would be Sunday.
Back in his bed, after projecting himself into a future he would never know, Yves felt his physical pain taking on an entirely new meaning. It reminded him of yet another, purely psychological, pain that was just as violent and unfair, the one Pauline had inflicted upon him. And that pain had not been overcome in vain: it had made him stronger, and put him back on the right path. The pain that was shooting through him at present would take far less time to heal, and it was already delivering its message: every time a body or a soul felt pain, it marked the end of one cycle and the beginning of a new one.
Night drawing to a close, the suffocating heat mingling with the fever of bad dreams. The faraway rumbling seemed to signal the end of a dark voyage in limbo; in fact it was merely the very real echo of a nightmare still to come. The congested bowels of the earth had split open to eject their surplus into the ocean. Woken by the hoarse cries of a cloud of birds, Philippe glimpsed a murky, dirty sky, deserted by the sun. He got to his knees, lifted his hands to his temples to try and banish hideous visions, then looked up: a gray wall was rolling toward him, obstructing the horizon, crashing against the hill. Below him the beach was receding in a black ebb of sheet metal and hemp, bamboo and plastic, then was quickly covered again by another enormous wave. Mia groaned, her eyelids shut tight, refusing to confront the threat her body could already perceive, but she went to stand beside Philippe who was watching, unbelieving, as the island was destroyed. Another groundswell, more monstrous still, snapped the palm trees. Yielding to panic, Mia scrambled down the path toward the shore. Momentarily stunned by her absurd reflex, Philippe rushed after her. A wave rolled over the roof of the hotel and almost dragged Mia away in its wake. Philippe grabbed her arm, hoisted her forcefully before the following wave tore away the teak steps, leaving behind a shapeless muddy slope littered with upended deck chairs. When they reached the top of the hill they stood huddled together for an instant.
Below them the hotel had disappeared, the surging breakers seemed to want to swallow the entire earth. Mia refused point blank to believe what she was going through: no one abandoned Mia, this was unacceptable! Where had all the people gone? And the emergency services? When she sensed that Philippe was incapable of reassuring her, she pushed him away in a rage and rushed to her cell phone, forgotten on the corner of the bed. Beside himself with this new display of absurdity, Philippe went back out onto the terrace, where a wave crashed at his feet with incredible violence. Mia was desperately fiddling with her cell phone, the object that answered all her desires, all her concerns, all her questions; it was her only true connection to the world, to her family, to her agency; it provided her with the most intimate sensations and dispelled her secret fears. Always within reach, it also guaranteed her independence, her freedom: it would not let her down, not now. Philippe could hear her screaming again, helplessly this time, and he grabbed the phone from her, then slapped her to shock her out of her panic. We are safe here! he shouted, over the crashing of a giant roller. He held her close, and without really believing his own words, described the natural phenomenon that had been unleashed upon them, its violence only equaled by its brevity. Sleeping on top of the hill had been their misfortune, but from now on it would be their only chance of survival: at dawn, not long after the first earth tremor, the unusually strong waves had alarmed the guests and staff of the hotel, and they had all fled before the coast was devastated—two or three minutes had been enough to reach the beach, go around the hill, and take refuge inland. They were surely calling at that very moment to send rescue to those who were missing. Tempted by hopefulness, she held back her tears, but a wave that was higher than the hill crashed against the guardrail around the villa, smashing it to bits, ruining Philippe’s fine words of hope at the same time. When he saw the water rushing in toward their bed, Philippe fell silent for good. What did he know, anyway, about natural phenomena and disasters? He had a few archival images in his mind, he vaguely remembered the testimony of a survivor, he had heard scientists on the news explaining the causes of earthquakes, cataclysms, typhoons, and cyclones, with supporting graphics, but he remembered nothing beyond the spectacle of absolute desolation, the hand of fate, planet Earth gleefully reminding man that she was all-powerful.
Mia fell to the ground, rolled up into a ball, whimpered long and loud like a battered child that refuses to accept she has been abandoned. She deserved better treatment than the ordinary tourist, and no one had the right to leave her to her own resources: she was the divine Mia, her effigy reproduced more often than any saint’s. Mia, who was welcome among royalty, a goddess on three continents. Her whims were commands, her reproaches were death sentences. She was the center of attention, pampered like a toddler, protected to the extreme. She knew that wherever she went, someone was waiting for her; her time was worth a fortune; she took a helicopter the way others take the bus. Such cruel irony, all those helicopters she had chartered to go shopping or to show her face at a party in Monaco: not a single one would come now to save her life.
Philippe, too, was prey to the cruelest of ironies: for what obscene reason was he about to die in such a place? One week earlier, when he had first discovered the beach of Nusa Dua, he had entertained himself with a list of idealized images of the desert island: the indispensable palm trees rising above the fine sand, the turquoise waters, the lovers cast away, far from civilization, for eternity. The cliché returned now like a slap in the face, with the violence of a breaker; their villa alone was their desert island, and he and Mia were the forgotten castaways. Here was a man who never left his tiny study for fear of losing his train of thought, and now he would die from drowning in this caricature of an Eden, and because of Mia’s fame the entire world would know about it. This was not at all how he had planned to bow out, it was not a death worthy of a philosopher, it was the death of a rich man, one who has always thought he was beyond reach, who’s gone soft in his cocoon of luxury, macerating in his swimming pool. The news of his disappearance would make the headlines, in a garish, malevolent press, and he would go down in history as the man who had perished on the arm of a famous supermodel. An entire life devoted to research, note-taking, reading, writing, concepts, symposiums, and the courses he’d taken and given—and all that would remain, erasing the entire bulk of his work, would be a sensational gossip column item. So often, all through his life as a thinker, he had wondered what humanity would retain of his work: even if they went out of print and were never reprinted, his books would stay on library shelves for a long time, ready to recreate their author’s ideas. But would his books suffice to preserve his place in the history of philosophy? What would these hundreds of pages represent, compared to a single concept throwing new light on the essential questions of the human condition? Had he ever had a single true idea, since he began peddling them? He still needed a few more years for his research—four, five, less than ten in any case—if he were to deliver his message in its most limpid form. He wouldn
’t have asked for more, he would even have agreed to be shown the door on condition that he could leave feeling that he had fulfilled his task. If he were to die here and now, what would they write in his entry in the major dictionary of universal thinkers? Philippe Grosjean (aka Saint-Jean), French sociologist, author of an essay on the collective unconscious, The Mirror-Memory. Now they would have to add: Vanished in tidal wave in Southeast Asia. The thought of it seemed worse than death itself.
The ebb had lost none of its magnitude. The waves seemed to be blocking out the sky. Mia lay on the ground, unmoving, and began to envisage the impossible: a world without Mia.
Waiting for the extreme wave to swallow her at last, she wondered if she ought to resist the strength of the current or, rather, let herself be borne away to a shore that might, miraculously, have been spared.
Then she wondered how to lessen the pain of drowning.
Philippe would not let go of his anger: he had not fought against the absurdity of things just to have it all end like this.
Stronger than fear, his indignation gave him the courage to confront the onslaught of the ocean. He grabbed Mia by the shoulder, dragged her to the wooden frame of the canopy where he had learned to isolate himself from the world, and forced her to climb up on top of it to gain eight or ten feet in height: the highest point on the hill. It was here, in this final refuge, that death would come for them, if it must.
At that very instant, the face of the only woman he had ever loved appeared before him, as the finest reason not to vanish on the far side of the globe.
9
On that September morning, a fine mist veiled a brief return of summer, and already the light heralded the chilly rhythms of winter, the short days, the silence. People returned quietly to work, to school, in a long series of little sacrifices that some would call autumn. To any gentle meandering, a citydweller would now prefer the quickest route; he would no longer hesitate over which way to go, or whether to take a sweater; he would be surprised to see tourists, still, lingering at crossroads to marvel over nothing.