She and the child go out when I’m still asleep, they buy the first asparagus and the first strawberries. She says make a wish, my darling, when I pick up a strawberry to eat it. She has no idea that I wish this would all come to an end at last, her volatility, her tantrums, her mad excesses, her madness. She has no idea how desperately I need consolation.
72
To celebrate the first anniversary of her audacious gesture, of her admission that tore through the March air, she takes me on a trip to Venice. The night train is canceled. She says never mind, and books us two seats on a flight at the last minute. She can always find a solution. She sails over the swell of life with an energy that commands admiration. Life and the world have to work to suit her, to satisfy her all-powerful wishes. She’s alive.
On the train home from Venice, between Grenoble and Paris, she locks the door to our compartment and undresses slowly, without a word. She offers herself to me, terrifyingly beautiful, with her thighs open to reveal her moist early-morning snatch, and the window curtain drawn to reveal the moist early-morning countryside spooling past in a fog of greens.
73
She likes reading novels to me, she plays the various characters, putting on different voices and gesticulating with her arms during their conversations. She hasn’t mastered any sort of cooking in an oven, despite many attempts. She says going to the cimena, going to the pimming swool. She says squaw when she refers to her musical scores, where’s that Brahms squaw, I’ve lost my squaw of the Beethoven 132, you haven’t seen my Schubert squaw have you. She often loses things, finds them, misplaces them again.
She takes me to the Philharmonic Society to listen to Schubert sonatas, she slips her hand in mine when the emotion gets too much. She opens her eyes in the morning, stares at me intently and says we’ve got to end this, it’s going to kill her. She takes me to the Théâtre de la Ville to see a Pina Bausch performance, she claps furiously and hoots bravo at the dancers, up on her feet for a long time, shouting bravo, bravo! Next to her, I’m flushed red with a combination of shame and pride. At the cinema the lights come up and she’s a strange sort of mirror, her face swollen with tears looking back at my face swollen with tears. She says our hearts beat to the same rhythm, she says this unison is incredible, this communion is incredible. She says no one would understand it, no one.
She calls me in the middle of the night. She’s crying desperately, helplessly. She says that’s enough. She doesn’t hear me, on the other end, choked by my tears, suffocating, reeling with pain, every part of my body hurting because it’s impossible to imagine life without her. She hits me and my cheek keeps the red outline of her fingers spread over my white skin for a long time. She says she’d rather we split up, but she’s here within the hour holding the program for the next season at our favorite theater, she wants us to book tickets for lots of shows for the year ahead, she’s making plans, she’s as chirpy as a newly hatched chick.
74
She wants us to go to the cinema, she wants us to make love, then she wants us to fall asleep in each other’s arms, she wants us to stop messaging and talking to each other for a few days, she wants us to eat Japanese, she wants us to go away to the country for a weekend to rest, she wants me to stop crying, she wants to go to a party without me, she wants to have no responsibilities, she wants to be footloose, she wants to be free.
75
July comes along like a boomerang. Paris is asphyxiating, there isn’t a breath of air. She smiles when she unwraps the yellow leather bag I give her for her birthday. The same day she gives me a red rose plant, which dies in only a matter of days because the heat is too much for it. She surprises us, the child and me, by joining us on the Atlantic coast where we’ve gone for our holiday. She drives so quickly she’s stopped by the police for speeding. She hides a present in my suitcase, a starry scarf, a scarry starf. She laughs uproariously, giggles at anything, she’s a child, she’s six and a half when she builds sandcastles for hours, when she makes a boat for my daughter out of beachcombings. She leaves, and life is dreary and deathly dull once more.
She and the quartet are played on France Musique, she’s touched when I tell her over the phone that I knocked at every door in the village to beg someone to lend me a radio, that I looked for somewhere I’d get good reception and that I listened to them religiously, lying on the grass, in amongst the insects, with my ear glued to the radio.
76
She says no, I will never, do you hear me, never get on a merry-go-round ride thing like that, a ride that turns you upside down, makes your heart lurch and makes you want to throw up. She doesn’t listen when I mutter a punning Max Jacob poem, the rides derided, the rides tried and tested, I’ve lost…what’s died?…I cried, she’s narked when I make fun of her, when I call her a wimp, she says okay fine, go on then, I’ll come with you, she sits next to me in the pod and screams enough to rupture my eardrums when we start twirling in the hot dark night air. She’s grinning like a child when we get off, she says she wants another go straightaway, she says again, again, again, she’s a child, I’m in love with a child. She says it’s magical, this funfair, she smiles at me next to a stand with garish neon lights flashing “No limits,” she listens as I recite more of the poem for her, ride out your ride, outstride your stride.
“Mon manège à moi,” my own merry-go-round, is a song composed by Norbert Glanzberg in 1958, with lyrics by Jean Constantin, who mistakenly worked on a piece of music that was to be part of the soundtrack for Jacques Tati’s film Mon oncle and was not intended to be a song. It went on to become one of Edith Piaf’s greatest hits.
The song says: You make my head spin, I have my very own merry-go-round – you.
77
She’s frightened because I come home drunk one evening when she’s looked after my daughter for me, so drunk that my teeth are black from the wine, my lips stained brown. She doesn’t understand that I’m exhausted by this life she’s offering me, this life that goes far too quickly but to which she won’t completely commit, exhausted by her instability, her uncertainty, her abandoning me and her tantrums, exhausted by her princessy whims.
She can’t cope with anything anymore, she hates it when I’m tired, when I want to go to bed early, she wants us to talk all night, to make love endlessly. She says I’ve run out of love for you and the ground opens up beneath my feet. She waits for me outside my school, like she used to, with a bunch of daisies. She comes to a wedding with me and plays the violin for my friends. She laughs at my daughter’s jokes. She gets annoyed with me, she beats my chest with her balled fists, she begs for it all to end, at last. She calls me and offers to take us to the seaside, she says pack your bags and I’ll come and pick you up first thing. She kisses me as if for the first time at the motorway service station between Paris and Honfleur. It’s all about Sarah, unpredictable, temperamental, disturbing, changeable and terrifying as a moth.