57
She’s surprised by my instant obsession with this octet, by the way I want to listen to it the whole time, on repeat if need be, to listen to every available recording. She doesn’t know that seeing her play the fourth movement was one of the most beautiful things in my life. She has no idea about my feverish palms, my palpitating pulse, voices around me growing hazy. And then sudden silence, the bright light onstage, the harsh heartless light. The momentary pause, all at once dark, all at once silent. And nothing. For a few moments nothing. Except for my palpitating pulse. And then. And then she comes onstage. Everyone, all around me, everyone claps. I don’t hear a thing. I look at her. Her long dress. The glint of her earrings. The gleam of her front teeth. My vampire. Her violin. Her bun. Her faraway look. My dispossessed breathing. The score she opens. Her eyelashes when she sits down. In that deafening silence. Mendelssohn’s octet, and her right there. As first violin. Eight bodies, thirty-two strings, everything motionless. Nothing moving. Life frozen. It’ll go on for a hundred years, like in fairy tales. But no. A tilt of her chin and everything bubbles over. She’s a flame surging into life throughout the allegro. She jumps, my wild child does, she leaps and hops and flares. Con fuoco, and I’m not the one saying that. It’s not her violin trilling now, it’s Sarah herself. I wish it could go on for a hundred years, like in fairy tales, I wish it would never stop. And then during the presto she puffs out her chest, my little soldier does, she goes off to war and I’m her captive, my feet and wrists bound. It’s the closing bars, she looms taller, arches her back, becomes a titan. Everything quivers, everything explodes. There with her proud breasts, she postures and triumphs. She looks like someone setting off on a journey. She’s going off to war. Doesn’t know when she’ll be back.
She doesn’t know that her mother, who was there at the abbey, saw me leaning against the pillar in the cloister, with eyes only for her daughter, burning from the inside with admiration and desire, and that her mother, who didn’t know me, thought to herself that the world as she knew it had just changed for ever.
58
She often takes off her sandals, with a flick of her ankles, to drive barefoot. Afterward the soles of her feet are black from the pedals. She prefers showering in the morning to the evening. She played badminton for many years. When she’s ill she finds it difficult swallowing pills, she pulls faces and shakes her head to get them down her throat. She uses outdated expressions, improbable and ridiculously uncool words. She can’t really dance, she dances very badly even.
59
She says don’t give a fuck, I’ll tell them, I’m so happy with you that I want to shout it to the whole world from the rooftops. She says they’re my parents, they love me so they’ll be happy that I’m happy, that’s what being a parent means, isn’t it. She says look, your parents reacted so well. She says and anyway everyone knows now, your daughter, my brothers, our friends, I can’t keep hiding it from them. Off she goes without a care to have supper with her parents, leaving me with a strange foreboding in my heart. She calls me a few hours later, she can’t get her words out she’s crying so violently down the phone, she begs me can I come over to your place, she falls into my arms when I open the door to my apartment, she says my darling it was horrendous it was the worst day of my life they were foul my father doesn’t want to see me again. It’s all about that, the fact we can’t love, drink and sing in peace, and if we want to live happily we have to live in hiding.
The Four Seasons are the four concertos for violin, composed by Antonio Vivaldi, that open the collection called Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’invenzione. The contest between harmony and invention. L’estate, summer, has an allegro, an adagio, and a presto that abruptly interrupts the adagio. Vivaldi’s note as a directive for this last movement is tempo impetuoso.
60
Autumn comes with no warning. She turns up with masses of pastries, she says come on, my darlings, we’re off to the market. She kisses me, she offers to make a big salad, she wants to make love all the time, absolutely all the time. The only time she lets me sleep is when I’m ill. She dreams up picnics for the three of us in the park near my apartment. She looks at her diary, she says I’m going away on tour a lot, we’re hardly going to see each other before Christmas. She looks devastated. When I come out of my new school she’s waiting for me with a rose in her hand or a pain au chocolat or a book wrapped in pretty paper with words of love written on it. She comes to my friends’ parties with me. She arranges dinners with her friends at Les Lilas. She drops by to have lunch with me, she brings sandwiches and a brown paper bag full to bursting with very ripe plums, we sit down on the pavement in a slightly hidden street in the suburb where I work to gobble down our royal feast. She kisses me with plum juice still in the corners of her mouth. She’s alive. She doesn’t realize that nothing matters to me now except the time I spend with her, that I’m feeling depressed, that I don’t like my work anymore, that I’ll get my doctor to give me a sicknote as soon as I can.
61
In Brussels she falls asleep on the grass and I watch her sleep for a long time, relieved that her love for me is on pause for a moment, relieved that she’s stopped talking at last, that she’s stopped dashing about. In Helsinki she buys herself a long gray cashmere coat, she walks all around the twilit city like a little gray riding hood, I walk behind her thinking it’s actually me who’s the little girl and she’s the wolf, yes, that’s it, she’ll end up devouring me.
62
One Sunday she’s playing at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. She’s terrified, for the first time since I’ve known her. The concert is sublime and she is exquisitely graceful. She doesn’t even catch my eye at the end because I’m in such a hurry to avoid meeting her parents. She doesn’t know how furiously happy it makes me when later in the day, after her mandatory social lunch, she joins me at my parents’ house in the suburbs at siesta time. She huddles up to me in the spare-room bed. I struggle to believe I’m hugging the girl who was up on that prestigious stage a few hours earlier.
She’s moved by Niki de Saint Phalle. Her lips taste of wasabi when I kiss her as we come out of a Japanese restaurant on the boulevard de Rochechouart. She asks me to wait for her at the Palais-Royal, I spot a restaurant called the Entracte, the interval, I wait a long time for her, I’m worried she won’t come, that it’s over, I panic for no reason. When she finally arrives, she finds me in tears.
She devours me. She wants to make love all the time. She instigates arguments, increasingly violent ones. She bites me. Straight afterward she suggests watching a François Truffaut film. She chooses Bed and Board.