The List of My Desires (12 page)

Throwing myself under a train. Cutting my wrists.

Throwing myself off a railway bridge as a train was passing. You couldn’t miss. Your body would explode, be torn to pieces, scattered over several kilometres. There wouldn’t be any pain. Only the sound of your body falling through the air, and the terrifying screech of the train, then the
whoomph
of the former hitting the latter.

Cutting the veins in my wrists. Because there was something romantic about that. The bath, the candles, the wine. A kind of amorous ceremonial. Like the baths taken by Ariane Deume, preparing herself for her Seigneur. Because the pain of the blade on my wrist would be tiny, and aesthetically pleasing. Because the warm blood would spurt out, a comforting sight, drawing red flowers that would blossom in the water, tracing perfumed trails. Because it wouldn’t really be like dying, more like going to sleep. My body would slip down, my face would sink and I would drown in dense, comfortable liquid red velvet; like a womb.

The nurses at the Centre taught me to kill only what had killed me.

S
o here we have our runaway.

He’s shrunk, he’s shrivelled up. His forehead is pressed to the window of the moving train, its speed creating virtuoso Impressionist pictures of the fields. He turns his back to the other passengers, like a child sulking, although his problem is not a fit of the sulks but treachery, a stab wound inflicted with a knife.

He had found the cheque. He had waited for her to tell him about it. He had taken her to Le Touquet for that; for nothing. Then, given her craving for calm, her love of things that last, he had guessed what Jocelyne had in mind. He had taken the money because she was going to burn it. Or give it away. To drooling sufferers from muscular dystrophy, bright little kids with cancer. It was more money than he could earn with Häagen-Dazs in six hundred years. Now he utters a sob as he feels his disgust at himself rising to terrifying fruition. The woman next to him asks in a whisper, ‘Are you all right, monsieur?’ He reassures her with a weary gesture. The train window is cold against his forehead. He remembers Jocelyne’s cool, gentle hand when he was almost carried off by that bad attack of flu. Pretty images always come to the surface when you’d like to drown them.

When the train reaches Brussels Midi he waits for all the other passengers to get out before leaving the carriage himself. His eyes are red, like the eyes of men not properly awake, half closed to keep warm in the draughty bars of railway stations, men who dunk Belgian speculoos biscuits or rolls in their strong coffee. It is the first coffee of his new life, and it is not a good one.

He has chosen Belgium because they speak French there, and it is the only language he knows. Although he didn’t know all the words in it, as he had told Jocelyne when he was courting her. She had laughed and tried the word
symbiosis
on him, and when he shook his head she had said it was what she expected of love, and their hearts had raced together.

He walks through the drizzling rain that stings his skin. See, he is making faces, he looks ugly. He was handsome when Jocelyne looked at him. He looked like Venantino Venantini. On some days he was the most handsome man in the world. He crosses the Boulevard du Midi, goes along the Boulevard de Waterloo, up the Avenue Louise and the Rue de la Régence to the Place du Grand Sablon and the house he has rented there. He wonders why he chose such a big one. Perhaps he believes he’ll be forgiven. Perhaps he thinks that Jocelyne will come and join him there one day, that one day the things that can’t be explained will be understood. That one day they will all be reunited, even angels and dead little girls. He thinks he ought to have looked up the definition of
symbiosis
in the dictionary at the time. But for the moment, excitement carries him away. He is a rich man. The world is his to command.

He buys a very powerful, very expensive red car, an Audi A6 RS. He buys a Patek Philippe watch that displays the date as well as the time, and an Omega Speedmaster Moonwatch. A Loewe flat-screen television set and the collector’s edition of the Jason Bourne trilogy. He is catching up with his dreams. He buys a dozen Lacoste shirts. A pair of Berluti ankle boots. A pair of Weston shoes, a pair of Bikkembergs. He has a suit made to measure by Dormeuil. Another by Dior, but he doesn’t like it. He throws it out. He gets a cleaning lady for the big house. He lunches in the cafés around the Grand-Place. El Greco, Le Paon. In the evening he sends out for a pizza or some sushi. He goes back to drinking real beer, the kind drunk by lost men with blurred vision. He likes Bornem Triple, loves the giddiness you get from Kasteelbier with its 11º alcohol content. His features are thickening. He is slowly putting on weight. He spends his afternoons on café terraces trying to make friends. Conversations are few and far between. People are alone with their mobiles, sending thousands of words out into the void of their lives. At the tourism office in the Rue Royale, they recommend a cruise for bachelors along the canals of Brussels, two women on it among twenty-one starving men; it’s like a bad film. At the weekend he goes to the seaside. In Knokke-le-Zoute he stays at the Manoir du Dragon or the Rose de Chopin. He lends money and never sees it again. Sometimes he goes out in the evenings. He goes to nightclubs, exchanges a few dismal kisses, tries to seduce a few girls. They laugh at him. Things are not going very well. He pays for a lot of champagne and is sometimes allowed to touch a breast, a dry, purplish cunt. His nights are gloomy and cold and disenchanted. He goes home alone. He drinks alone. He laughs alone. He watches films alone. Sometimes he thinks of Arras, and then he opens another beer to drive the thought away, to blur everything again.

And sometimes he picks a girl on the Internet, as you might choose a dessert from a restaurant trolley. The girl comes to give herself to him in the darkness of his big house, she swallows up his banknotes and hardly even has to suck him off because he can’t get a hard-on. Look at him when she slams the door behind her: he slips to the cold, tiled floor, a pathetically sad figure, hunched up like an old dog; he sobs, he slobbers out his fears with the snot from his nose, and no kindly woman holds out her arms to him in the shadows of his night.

It is six months after Jocelyn Guerbette left Arras that the cold takes possession of him.

He has a hot shower, but the cold is still there. His skin gives off steam, but he is still shivering. The flesh of his fingers is blue and wrinkled, and seems about to peel away. He wants to go home. He is falling to pieces. Money doesn’t buy you love. He misses Jocelyne. He thinks of her laugh, the smell of her skin. He loves their partnership, their two living children. He loves the fear he sometimes felt that she might become too beautiful, too intelligent for him. (And he loved the idea that he might lose her; it made him a better husband.) He loves it when she raises her eyes from a book to smile at him. He loves her steady hands, her forgotten dreams of being a dress designer. He loves her love and her warmth, and suddenly understands his present icy chill. Being loved warms the blood, heats desire. He emerges from the shower still trembling. He doesn’t hit the wall as he was still doing not so long ago. He has succeeded in taming his sorrow for Nadège, he doesn’t talk about it any more; he won’t hurt Jocelyne like that again.

He doesn’t open his bottle of beer. His lips are shaking. His mouth is dry. He looks at the big sitting room around him, the emptiness. He doesn’t like that white sofa. That low, gilded table. The magazines that no one reads, arranged on it to look pretty. This evening he doesn’t like the red Audi, the Patek watch, the girls you can buy who don’t take you in their arms; his thickened body, his swollen fingers, and this icy chill.

He doesn’t open the bottle of beer. He gets to his feet, leaves the light on in the hall, just in case Jocelyne were to track him down tonight, just in case leniency were to knock at the door, and he goes upstairs. It is a large staircase; images of falling surface in his mind.
Vertigo. Gone With the Wind. Battleship Potemkin
. Blood flowing out of your ears. Bones breaking.

His fingers clutch the banister; the idea of forgiveness comes only after you have picked yourself up.

He leaves for London. Two hours in the train; his hands are moist for those two hours. As if he were going on a first date. Forty metres under the sea, he is afraid. He is going to see Nadine. She refused at first. He persisted, he almost begged her. A matter of life and death. She thought that expression extremely melodramatic, but it made her smile, and he took advantage of that smile.

They are going to meet in the Caffè Florian, on the third floor of Harrods, the famous department store. He is early. He wants to be able to choose a good table, a good chair. He wants to see her arrive. Have time to recognise her. He knows that sorrow rearranges faces, changes eye colour. A waitress comes over. With a gesture, he lets her know that he doesn’t want anything. He is ashamed of himself for not even being able to say, in English: I’m waiting for my daughter, I don’t feel very well, mademoiselle, I’m frightened, I’ve done something very stupid.

There she is. She is beautiful and slender, and he sees Jocelyne’s grace and touching pallor in Madame Pillard’s haberdashery shop, back when he could never have imagined becoming a thief, a murderer. He gets up. She smiles. She’s a woman now; how quickly time passes. His hands are shaking. He doesn’t know what to do. But she holds her face up to his. Kisses him. Hello, Papa.
Papa
; that was a thousand years ago. He has to sit down, he’s not feeling very well, he needs air. She asks if he is all right. He says, Yes, yes, it’s just the emotion, I’m so happy to see you. You’re so beautiful.

He has dared to say that to his daughter. She doesn’t blush, indeed, she is rather pale. She says, It’s the first time in my life you’ve said anything like that to me, Papa, something so personal. She might cry, but she is strong. He is the one who cries, an old man. He is the one who appeals to her. Listen to him. You’re so beautiful, my little girl, like your mother. Like your mother.

The waitress comes over again, gliding silently like a swan. Gently, Nadine says
Just a few minutes, please
, and Jocelyn realises from the music of his daughter’s voice that he has only one chance to talk to her, and that chance is now. So he plunges in desperately. I stole from your mother. I betrayed her. I ran away. I’m ashamed, and I know that my shame comes too late. I . . . I . . . He is searching for words. I. The words won’t come. This is difficult. Tell me how I can get her to forgive me. Help me.

Nadine raises her hand. It’s over already. The waitress is back.
Two large coffees, two pieces of fruit cake
.
Yes, madam.
The thief doesn’t understand a word of it, but he likes the sound of his daughter’s voice. They look at each other. Sorrow has changed the colour of Nadine’s eyes. They used to be blue in Arras. They are grey now, a rainy grey; a street drying off. She looks at her father. She is searching for what her mother loved in that sad, flabby face. She is trying to discover the features of the Italian actor with his clear laughter and white teeth. She remembers the attractive face that used to kiss her goodnight when she went to bed in the evening; her father’s kisses that tasted of ice cream – vanilla, cookies, praline, banana or caramel ice cream. Does what you experienced as beautiful turn ugly because the person who made your life better has let you down? I don’t know how you can get her to forgive you, Papa, says Nadine. All I know is that Maman is unhappy; her whole world has crumbled.

And when she adds, five seconds later, so has mine, he knows that it’s all over.

He puts out his hand to his daughter’s face; he would like to touch it, caress it one last time, warm himself on it, but his hand is frozen. It is a strange, sad farewell. Finally Nadine lowers her eyes. He understands that she is letting him go without watching him, without the insult of watching a coward take to his heels. It is her present to him, in return for being told that she is beautiful.

In the train going back, he remembers what his own mother had said when she was told that her husband had just died of a heart attack at the office. He’s abandoned me, your father has deserted us! The bastard, what a bastard! And later, after the funeral, when she was told that his heart had given out while he was having leisurely sex with the woman in charge of office equipment, a divorcée with a taste for good living, she had killed herself. That was it. She had taken the words back into herself, sealed her lips and Jocelyn, still a child, had seen the cancer of the evil that men implant in women’s hearts.

Back in Brussels, he goes to the Tropismes bookshop in the Galeries des Princes shopping arcade. He remembers the book from which she sometimes looked up to smile at him. She was beautiful when she was reading. She seemed happy. He asks for
Belle du Seigneur
, chooses the large-format edition, the one she used to read. He also buys a dictionary. Then he spends his days reading. He looks up the definitions of words he doesn’t understand. He wants to find out what made her dream, what made her beautiful, what made her look up at him sometimes. Perhaps she saw him as Adrien Deume, and perhaps that was why she loved him. Men think they are lovable as lordly
seigneurs
like Solal, when they may just be frightening. He hears the sighs of Ariane, the
belle
; the private thoughts of the woman whose religion is love. The length of the monologues is sometimes tedious. He wonders why there isn’t more punctuation for several pages; then he reads the text aloud, and in the echo of the large sitting room his breathing changes, speeds up; he suddenly feels dizzy, as one might in the midst of rapture; there is something feminine, gracious about it, and he understands Jocelyne’s happiness.