39
Pantin, Romainville and Bagnolet are neighboring towns of the Les Lilas commune, which was created on 24 July 1867 and comprised some of their land. There were plans to call the new commune Napoléon-le-Bois or Commune-de-Padoue, in reference to the Duke of Padua who once lived there. In the end the commune’s name was chosen for the flower-filled gardens that covered the hill during the Second Empire. Until the law of 10 July 1964, Les Lilas was part of the Seine region. It now comes under Seine-Saint-Denis after an administrative transfer that came into effect on 1 January 1968.
The town is close to Porte des Lilas station on the Paris Métro, and is served by Mairie des Lilas station on Line 11. It has a population of 22,762. Its postal code is 93260. Its inhabitants are called Lilasiens. Sarah lives on rue de la Liberté.
The town’s motto is: “I was a flower, I am a city.”
40
In the mornings she just can’t let me go to work. Once my daughter’s been dropped off at school, she gets on the bus next to me, with her violin on her back. She walks in step with me down the street that runs along the front of the Fifteenth Arrondissement’s Mairie. She’s lighthearted, talking nonsense, laughing about everything. She dips into a brown paper bag for fistfuls of cherries and gobbles them uninhibitedly. She thinks it’s funny that I get embarrassed when she comes too close to me, when her hand tries to catch hold of mine. She says oh it’s fine who gives a damn about your students, we’re educating them, that’s a good thing, isn’t it. She eats her cherries as she walks along and spits the pips out onto the street. She says oh it’s fine do you really think your colleagues haven’t seen lesbians before. She pushes me into the lobby of a building. She presses the button for the lift, she pulls me by the arm when it arrives. She smacks her mouth against mine when I say this isn’t very responsible, I’m going to be late and we can’t do this. She says seeing as you don’t want me to kiss you outside your school, I’ve got to find somewhere. She chooses the top floor, the eleventh. There’s wall-to-wall carpeting, neatly lined-up doors, slightly muffled bursts of conversation coming from around us. She pushes me up against the wall, strokes my teeth with her tongue, bruises my breasts with her fingers. She smells of blue leather and thundering desire.
During a dinner, when it’s raining outside, a soft summer rain, she tells some friends what con fuoco means in a score. She waves her arms around as she speaks. She herself becomes the fire, the soul-spinning impetuosity. She looks like a demon. She’s drop-dead beautiful, to-die-for hot.
She drinks a lot. She smokes, one cigarette after another. She’s got a way of looking me in the eye when she’s smoking that sends an agonizing thunderbolt through my body. It hurts that I want her so much, that I so long to tip her back onto a bed, undo the button on her trousers and bring my mouth to the source of my wonderment. She puts a hand on the back of my neck when I caress her snatch with my tongue, she instills a movement in me, it starts with her hips and makes me dizzy, it obliterates everything around us.
41
She’s six and a half years old, she’s waiting for me outside the school with a pain au chocolat and a little girl’s grin. She drags me along to concerts and to dinners on restaurant terraces with her friends. She follows me everywhere, takes me everywhere, she doesn’t leave my side, won’t let me out of her sight. She wakes me with fingers in the very depths of me, the first signs of long sun-filled days. She never tires of having her body against mine. Her audacity borders on irreverence. She asks for more salmon with her chirashi in a Japanese restaurant on the rue Monsieur-le-Prince. She uses a completely different voice to say for God’s sake I ordered a salmon chirashi, and I’ve basically got just rice, can you explain that. She pretends not to notice that I’m sitting there opposite her, flushed scarlet with shame. She winks at me when the waiter comes back with a plate full of magnificent slices of fresh salmon. She clinks her glass against mine to toast this free feast. She says here’s to you, my love, and to this orgy of salmon. She roars with laughter at the Comédie-Française, in the upper circle, far too loudly for such a beautiful setting. She couldn’t care less about decorum, or good manners. She’s alive.
Passion. From the Latin patior, to experience, endure, suffer. Feminine noun. With the notion of protracted or successive suffering: the action of suffering. With the notion of excess, exaggeration, intensity: love as an irresistible and violent inclination toward a single object, sometimes descending into obsession, entailing a loss of moral compass and of critical faculties, and liable to compromise mental stability. In Scholasticism, what is experienced by an individual, the thing with which he or she is associated or to which he or she is subjugated.
42
She offers me a ticket, in the upper circle at the Comédie-Française. The play is A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
43
She hung up on me, furious, with tears in her voice. A few hours later she manages to get into the school, I don’t really know how. She comes to find me in the room where I’m working, sitting at a table, covering books, concentrating to be sure I do it well and the adhesive paper doesn’t leave any air pockets on the covers. She has a paper bag full of apricots. She glances round the room. She sits down next to me, she doesn’t say a word. She settles for diving her hand into the bag periodically, taking out an apricot and opening it between her nails, with a deft, precise, almost irritable flick. She brings the fruit to her mouth and doesn’t offer me any, not once. She piles the stones on top of each other in a funny lopsided construction that nearly collapses every time we move. She doesn’t say a thing. She looks pigheaded. Later, when nearly an hour has elapsed in silence and she has fruit juice over her wrists, she whispers almost inaudibly I think I love you too much.
44
She has nits because my daughter caught them at school. She takes things in hand, laughs at me because I’m horrified, she buys nit lotion, does machine after machine full of washing, with the sheets from my place and the sheets from her place, she says don’t worry, it’s nothing, they’ll go. When she’s with me I don’t worry.
She sets out from my apartment at about eight in the evening to meet up with friends. When she leaves them, at three-ish in the morning, she calls me to pick up one or other of the conversations we left dangling. She doesn’t realize that she’s exhausting herself, and exhausting me.
William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an unclassifiable play, which features a combination of comedy and magic from start to finish. The text reflects on the power of imagination in the face of arbitrary laws, particularly the rigors of family law. Night – a time of disorder, dreams and fantasies – is balanced with day – a time of reality, order and discipline.