In Hiroshima, Mon Amour:
HER: I didn’t make anything up.
HIM: You made it all up.
67
She still sometimes waits for me outside the school, a little less frequently than before. She takes the child to school with me in the mornings. She laughs at how hard I find it to get up, she says I’m a bear, her grumpy bear. She likes eating Japanese, almost every other evening. She likes eating a square of chocolate in the evenings with her herbal tea. Dark, preferably. She has an incredibly soft bum and I have trouble not touching it when we’re together. In bed, it’s even more difficult. In the morning she likes making love still half asleep.
68
Winter’s back. She says she doesn’t like this time of year. One morning when she needs to get up terribly early to go off on tour, we step outside into great big snowflakes. It’s all about that, very early one morning on a black January night, the orangey light of the street lamps, the dark streets of Les Lilas, Sarah’s silhouette, her silhouette as I know it, with her violin case on her back and her skinny little legs underneath, her suitcase dragged along by her right arm, a hood over her head. She opens her mouth slightly, to catch snowflakes on her tongue, she laughs, her nose is red, she has white on her eyelashes, she looks at me and says breathtaking isn’t it my love. To celebrate this, she insists we wait till the bakery opens, bang on six o’clock, she dives inside and emerges triumphantly with two pains au chocolat. It’s all about that, life being dazzling whatever the circumstances. We run to catch the Métro and, warm at last in the train as it pulls away, we bite into our pastries with freezing hands and running noses.
She insists on coming on holiday with my daughter and me. She doesn’t know that I’d rather go away alone, that I’m exhausted by this relationship, by having her in my life. On the night train she has the berth opposite mine, on the top bunks. She leaves her little light on. When the child goes to sleep, just underneath us on a middle bunk, she gradually peels the SNCF sheet away from her body, she looks me in the eye, and slowly fondles her breasts.
69
It’s a spring like any other, a spring to depress the best of us. A year has gone by, a year of music, a year of shudders, a year of sulfur and suffering. She says she wants to leave me, that this life we have is too tempestuous, it’s like a storm. The captain’s leaving the ship. She doesn’t know that I cry in my shower every morning, that I have stomachaches every evening, that I can’t sleep without sleeping pills now. She says I’m the love of her life, her one and only love, she says she doesn’t know what she should do, carry on with this weird complicated life or forget about it all, she says our love is the most magical and the most terrible thing that’s happened to her. She says she can’t choose, that it’s a problem, in life. She decides to keep passion at arm’s length, she says we can try seeing each other just twice a week, leaving gaps between the periods of madness, to make life less jarring, less stormy.
She can be wonderful, she runs baths for me, she massages my back, makes delicious meals for me, comes with me to important meetings, she tells me I’m her freedom, her respite, her little breath of fresh air. She can be poisonous, she’s stopped replying when I message her, she’s monosyllabic, makes sure she’s not available, she says I’m stifling her, that she needs to breathe, breathe, breathe.
She wakes up feeling very hungry, she takes a feline stretch and says we must go out for a delicious breakfast. She wants to go for a walk afterward so she opts for Angelina’s, near the Tuileries Garden. She’s quiet, almost listless in the uber-chic tea room. There might as well be a black hole between us. She eats her toast without a sound, without any thundering laughter, without an anecdote for me. She barely smiles when I clown around to amuse her. She gets up to go to the toilet, without a word, without a backward glance at me. She’s startled when she senses me behind her. In the big gilt mirror in Angelina’s ladies’ toilets – up on the first floor, with views of the garden – she finally smiles at my reflection when I press her up against the basin to make love to her in silence, a quickie, with her skirt hitched up against the immaculate white enamel. Her sighs of pleasure are no consolation.
70
She was truly passionate about cars as a teenager. She knew an incredible number of different models. She had a particular fondness for Renaults. She adored the Renault 5, but also really liked the Renault 25 and, even more so, the Renault 21, which she thought less grandiloquent and sententious than the 25, and which she deemed especially modern. Her favorite model was incontestably the Alpine A110, almost a racing car. She can count at astonishing speed, she’s incredibly good at mental arithmetic. Her spelling is pretty much perfect. But she still stubbornly insists on putting a rogue circumflex on the o of idiom. She’s not frightened of much but she has two major phobias, moths and statues, any statue. She can’t stay in a room if there’s a moth in it. She says she can’t stand how unpredictable they are, how she never knows where they’re going next, they’re temperamental, disturbing and changeable. With statues, she quakes at the thought of them suddenly coming to life. Switching from being dead to being alive.
She’s as beautiful as a Bonnard nude. She’s as pink and yellow as his pinks and yellows, as affecting as the women he painted, as delicate and as fragile. She could be my model if I could paint. She would pose for me, in all sorts of different lights, she’d always be more beautiful than in the previous painting. She’d be the ideal woman, a mysterious, glorious woman, an icon.
She looks at the scar on my body left by the cesarean. She doesn’t say anything, but runs a finger along the white line just above my thick dark hairs, and wipes away my tears with her other hand, she whispers that she thinks I’m beautiful, she doesn’t know that it doesn’t comfort me, that I wish my beauty could match hers. She’s like a character in a novel. She doesn’t see that it’s painful, for the people close to her. She’s alive.
71
She laughs with delight when she realizes that I’ve lied to her, that we’re not going to the theater but to the Gare de Lyon to catch a train to Marseille. She asks me how long I’ve been planning this surprise, she wants to know all the details, how did I arrange it, contacting the quartet, and then her family, whom she was meant to be spending Easter with. In Marseille, time stretches out indefinitely. She comes several times, that first morning. She holds my hand tight when I take her for a walk around all my favorite places, from the Vieille Charité center to the Malmousque rocks. She swims in her panties in the icy April water, with a smile all the way to her ears, and stiff nipples. On the last day she slaps me, a precise resounding slap that makes my head spin. She doesn’t notice that we’re on rue Consolat.