The List of My Desires (14 page)

When we said goodbye at St Pancras, we didn’t shed any tears. Nadine told me that her father had been to see her some time ago; he looked lost, she said, but I wasn’t listening. Then she whispered maternal words in my ear: You deserve a good life, Maman. Try to be happy with him.

Him. My Vittorio Gassman; I’ve been living at his side for over a year and a half now. He’s as good-looking as he was on the day when we kissed in the Hôtel Negresco, his lips still taste of orange pekoe tea, but when they kiss mine now my heart doesn’t race, my skin doesn’t shiver.

He was the only island in my sorrow.

I had called him just after Jo’s foreman confirmed that he was taking a week’s holiday. On the day when I knew I had been deceived. I had phoned, not for a moment believing that he would remember me; perhaps he was only a predator who duped faithful wives with a cup of tea at the bar of the Hôtel Negresco, with its delicious temptation of dozens of empty rooms. He knew who I was at once. I was hoping to hear from you, he said. His voice was grave and calm. He listened to me. He understood my anger and the mutilation I had suffered. And he said those four respectful words:
Let me help you
.

They were an open sesame. They lanced the boil. Made me the ethereal
Belle
, Ariane Deume on the edge of the void in Geneva, one Friday afternoon in September 1937.

I let him help me. I gave myself up to him.

We go down to the beach every day, and every day we sit on the uncomfortable pebbles. I didn’t want little canvas chairs or cushions. I want everything to be the way it was on our first day, the day when I dreamed of perhaps becoming his lover; the day when I decided that neither Jo’s harsh words nor my loneliness was a good enough reason for that. I don’t regret any of it. I gave myself to Jo. I loved him without reservation or afterthought. I have ended up treasuring the memory of his moist hand on mine during our first date at the newsagent’s in the Arcades; I could still weep for joy when I close my eyes and hear those first words of his:
You’re the miracle.
I’d accustomed myself to his acrid, animal body odour. I had forgiven him a great deal, because love calls for a great deal of forgiveness. I had been prepared to grow old with him although he never said pretty things to me, no flowery phrases – oh, you know, those silly things that win girls’ hearts and make them remain faithful for ever.

I tried to lose weight, not so that he would think me more beautiful but so that he could be proud of me.

You’re beautiful, says the man who is now reaping the benefit of it, although I wanted to be beautiful for someone else. But I would like to see you smile sometimes, Jo. He’s a good man; he has never known betrayal. His love is patient.

I sometimes do smile in the evenings, when we go home to the huge, beautiful villa in Villefranche-sur-Mer that I bought, signing the sales agreement
casually
and the cheque
without a moment’s thought
; when I see Papa sitting on the terrace with his nurse beside him, while Papa looks at the sea and, with his child’s eyes, searches the clouds for images: bears, maps of a Promised Land, Maman’s drawings.

I smile for six minutes as I invent a new life for him in the cool of the evening.

You’re a famous doctor, Papa, you’ve done outstanding research; you were made Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur at the prompting of Hubert Curien when he was Minister of Research. You perfected a treatment to counteract ruptured aneurisms. It’s based on the enzyme 5-lipoxygenase, and you were on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize. You’d even written a speech in Swedish: you came to my room every evening to rehearse it, and I laughed at your guttural accent. But Sharp and Roberts won the prize that year for their discovery of split genes.

That was yesterday, and Papa had liked the sound of his life.

This evening: You’re a fabulous countertenor. You’re so handsome that you have the women shrieking and their hearts beating faster. You studied at the Schola Cantorum in Basle, and your performance in Handel’s
Giulio Cesare in Egitto
made your name. Oh yes, and that was how you met Maman. She went to the dressing room to congratulate you after you sang from it in a recital, carrying a bouquet of thornless roses. She was crying. You fell in love with her, and she took you in her arms.

Tears of happiness rise to his shining eyes.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you that you were the most wonderful of fathers. I’ll remind you how Maman made you take a shower when you came home, because she was afraid that didecyl chloride would turn us all into monsters out of the comedy film
La Soupe aux Choux
. I’ll tell you about our games of Monopoly, I’ll tell you you used to cheat so that I could win, and I’ll admit that you once told me I was beautiful, and I believed you, and it made me cry.

Yes, I do smile in the evening; sometimes.

T
he house is silent.

Papa is asleep in his cool ground-floor room. The nurse has gone to meet her fiancé, a tall young man with a nice smile who dreams of Africa, and of schools and wells there (a candidate for my million?).

We were drinking a tisane just now, my Vittorio Gassman and I, on the shady terrace; his hand was trembling in mine, I know that I’m not sure, it could be the wind, a branch moving, maybe; I’m so uneasy about men these days, I can’t help it.

He rose in silence, dropping a kiss on my forehead. Don’t be too late, Jo. I’ll be waiting for you. And before he goes to our room, in the hope of a cure for me that won’t come this evening, he puts on the CD of that Mozart aria I love so much, just loud enough for it to fill the terrace with sound but not to wake up the fabulous countertenor, the Monopoly cheat and the man who almost won the Nobel Prize.

And this evening, as they do every evening, my lips in perfect synchronisation echo those of Kiri Te Kanawa, articulating Countess Almaviva’s moving aria:
Dove sono i bei momenti / Di dolcezza e di piacer? / Dove andaro i giuramenti / Di quel labbro menzogner? / Perché mai se in pianti e in pene / Per me tutto si cangio / La memoria di quel bene / Dal mio sen non trapasso?
^*

I sing for myself, in silence, my face turned to the dark sea.

I am loved. But I no longer love.

*
Where are those beautiful moments / of tenderness and pleasure? / Where are the vows / of those lying lips? / Why has everything changed / into tears and pain for me? / Why has the memory / not left my heart?
(
The Marriage of Figaro, Act III
).

From:  [email protected]

To:  [email protected]

Hello Jo. I’ve been a faithful reader of your blog from the start. It was a comfort at a time when things weren’t going very well in my life, and I clung to your tacking thread and Azurite yarns so that I wouldn’t fall . . . Thanks to you and your lovely words, I didn’t. Thank you with all my heart. Now it’s my turn to be there for you if you would like, if you need someone. I just wanted you to know. Mariane.

From:  [email protected]

To:  [email protected]

I love your blog, but why aren’t you writing it any more? Sylvie Poisson, from Jenlain.

PS I don’t mean that what Mado and Thérèse are writing isn’t good, but it’s not the same thing J.

From:  [email protected]

To:  [email protected]

Hello Jo. Do you member me? You replide to me so nicely when I sent you good wishes for your husband with flu. You seemd so in love it would do anyone good. My husband died at work resently, a concrete making machine fell on his head on a building cite, and in your note that I read at the semetary you say we all have just one love and for me it was my Jeannot. I miss him and you too. No more now cause I’m gonna cry.

From:  françoise-et-daniele@coiffesthetique_arras.fr

To:  [email protected]

Jo, you’re totally nuts! You’re crazy!!! Crazy, crazier, craziest! They’re wonderful. And with the Onion Jacques
^*
painted on the roof and the chrome rear-view mirrors they’re lovely, lovely, lovely like in Cloclo’s song! They’re the cutest Minis anyone ever saw. The people around here think it was us who won a big prize, imagine that! We have lots of guys chasing us now, we get sent flowers, poems, chocolates, we’ll end up as fat as a couple of pigs!!!! There’s even a boy of fifteen who’s in love with us both and wants to run away with us. He waits for us every evening behind the belfry with his suitcase, would you believe it? One evening we hid to see what he looks like, he’s really cute!!! Fifteen years old, imagine that! And he wants us both, ha ha! In his last letter he said he was going to kill himself if we didn’t turn up, talk about irresistible! The salon is full all the time, we had to take on two girls, one of them is Juliette Bocquet, you may remember her, she used to go out with Fabien Derôme and it ended badly because her parents thought he’d made her pregnant, oh well, that’s all in the past. With your Minis we’re the belles of Arras now, and soon we’ll come down and see you even if you say no, it will be a surprise! Well, we suppose you know what happened to Jo, how the neighbours called the police because of the smell; it was a shock for everyone here, particularly because he was smiling, but we don’t talk about it any more.