The List of My Desires (2 page)

In September, customers come to order nametapes to be sewn or ironed on to school uniforms, and they buy a few zip fasteners and needles and thread when they want to mend last year’s clothes instead of buying new ones.

Christmas is fancy-dress time. The princess costume remains top of the pops, followed by the strawberry and pumpkin costumes. For boys, pirates are a good bet, and last year saw a craze for sumo wrestlers.

Then everything calms down until spring. I sell a few workboxes, two or three sewing machines and fabric by the metre. While I wait for a miracle, I knit. The items I knit sell quite well, especially the blankets for newborn babies, and the scarves and pullovers made of cotton crochet thread.

I close the shop between twelve and two and go home to have lunch on my own. Or sometimes, if it’s fine, Danièle and Françoise and I have a sandwich at a table outside L’Estaminet or Café Leffe on the Place des Héros.

The twins are pretty. Of course I know they exploit me to set off their small waists, long legs and clear, doe-like, deliciously startled eyes. They smile at men lunching on their own or with their partners, they simper, they sometimes coo. Their bodies cast out messages, their sighs are bottles thrown into the sea, and sometimes a man picks up one of those bottles and there’s just time for a cup of coffee, a whispered promise, disillusionment – men have so little imagination. After that, we go back to reopen our shops. It’s always then, on the way back, that our lies rise to the surface once more. I’m sick and tired of this town, I feel like I’m living inside a tourist leaflet, oh, I’m suffocating! says Danièle. This time next year I’ll be far away in the sun, I’ll have a breast job. If I had money, adds Françoise, I’d give up all this overnight, just like that.

What would you do, Jo?

I’d be beautiful and slender and no one would lie to me, I wouldn’t even lie to myself. But I don’t say anything, I simply smile at the pretty twins. I simply lie.

When none of us has any customers, they’re always offering me a manicure or a blow-dry or a facial or a nice chat, as they call it. Meanwhile I knit them berets and gloves that they never wear. Thanks to them, I may be plump but I’m also well groomed and manicured; I’m up to date with who’s sleeping with whom, the problems Denise from the Maison du Tablier is having with her consumption of that treacherous substance Loos gin, 49° proof, and the various problems of the girl who does the retouching at Charlet-Fournie and who has put on twenty kilos since her husband fell for the shampoo girl at Chez Jean-Jac, and all three of us have the impression that we are the most important people in the world.

Well, in Arras.

In our street, anyway.

S
o there it is. I’m forty-seven years old.

Our children have left home. Romain is in Grenoble, in his second year on a business studies course. Nadine is in England, babysitting for people and making camcorder films. One of her films was screened at a festival where she won a prize, and after that we lost her.

The last time we saw her was at Christmas.

When her father asked what she was doing, she took a little camera out of her bag and connected it up to the Radiola TV set. Nadine doesn’t like words. She’s said very little ever since she learnt to talk. She never said: Maman, I feel hungry, for instance. She just got up and helped herself to something to eat. She never said: Get me to recite my poem, my lesson, my multiplication tables. She kept words safe inside her, as if they were a rare commodity. We conjugated silence, she and I: glances, gestures, sighs instead of subjects, verbs, complements.

Black and white pictures came up on the screen: trains, railway tracks, points. At first it was all very slow, then it gradually speeded up, images were superimposed on each other, the rhythm of it all was spellbinding, fascinating; Jo got up to fetch a non-alcoholic beer from the fridge, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. I took my daughter’s hand,
subject
, waves went through my body,
verb
, Nadine smiled,
complement.
Jo was yawning. I was crying.

When the film was over Jo said: In colour on a flat screen and with sound, your film wouldn’t be at all bad, my girl, and I said, Thank you, Nadine, thank you, I don’t know what you were saying in your film but I
really
did feel something. She disconnected the little camera from the Radiola and whispered, looking at me: I was writing Ravel’s
Bolero
in pictures, Maman, so that deaf people could hear it.

Then I hugged my daughter, I hugged her to my flabby flesh and I let my tears flow, because even if I didn’t entirely understand, I guessed that she was living in a world where there were no lies.

And while that hug lasted I was a happy mother.

Romain arrived later in the day, in time for the Yule log and the presents. He had a
girlfriend
with him. He drank low-alcohol Tourtel beers with his father and complained about them. This stuff is gnat’s piss, he said, and Jo shut him up by saying nastily: Oh yeah? You go and ask Nadège what cheap plonk does to you, she’ll tell you, you bloody idiot. The
girlfriend
yawned, and Christmas was spoilt. Nadine didn’t say goodbye, she just went off into the cold, vanished into thin air. Romain finished the Yule log; he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, he licked his fingers and I wondered what was the point of all those years spent teaching him how to behave, to keep his elbows off the table, say thank you: all those lies. Before he left, he told us he was dropping out of his studies and going to work as a waiter, along with the
girlfriend
, at the Palais Breton, a crêperie in Uriage, the spa town ten minutes from Grenoble. I looked at my Jo; my eyes were telling him to do something, stop him, don’t let him do this, but he just waved his bottle at our son the way men sometimes do in American films, wished him luck and that was that.

So there it is. I’m forty-seven years old.

Our children are living their own lives now. Jo hasn’t left me for a younger, thinner, more beautiful woman yet. He works hard at the factory; they gave him a bonus last month, and if he does a training course, he’s been told, he could be a foreman one day; being a foreman would bring him closer to his dreams.

His Cayenne, his flat-screen TV, his watch.

My own dreams have fled.

W
hen I was ten and in Class CM2 at middle school, I dreamed of kissing Fabien Derôme, but it was Juliette Bocquet he kissed.

When I was thirteen, I danced to ‘Indian Summer’, and I prayed that my partner would put his hand on my brand-new breasts, but he didn’t dare. After we finished the slow dance, I saw him laughing with his mates.

On my seventeenth birthday I dreamed that my mother would get up from the pavement where she’d fallen down all of a sudden, opening her mouth to utter a cry that never came. I dreamed that it wasn’t true, not true, not true; that there wasn’t a wet place between her legs all of a sudden, leaving a shameful damp patch on her dress. At seventeen I dreamed that my mother was immortal, would be able to help me make my wedding dress some day, advise me on the choice of my bouquet, the flavour of the wedding cake, the pale colour of the sugared almonds.

At twenty I dreamed of being a fashion designer, of going to Paris to train at the Studio Berçot or Esmod, but my father was already ill, so I took the job at Madame Pillard’s haberdashery shop. At that age I dreamed in secret of Solal, of Prince Charming, of Johnny Depp and Kevin Costner before he had hair implants, but it was Jocelyn Guerbette, my stout Venantino Venantini, comfortably chubby and a charmer, who came along.

We first met in the haberdashery shop when he came in to buy something for his mother, thirty centimetres of Valenciennes lace, a bobbin lace made with continuous thread, very fine, with motifs worked into it: a miracle. You’re the miracle, he told me. I blushed. My heart rose. He smiled. Men know the damage a few words can do to girls’ hearts, and, idiots that we are, we swoon away and fall into the trap, excited because at last a man has set one for us.

He asked me out for a coffee after closing time. I’d dreamed a hundred times, a thousand times of the moment when a man would ask me out, pay court to me, want me. I’d dreamed of being abducted, carried away in a fast, purring car, forced on board a plane flying to islands. I’d dreamed of red cocktails, white fish, paprika and jasmine, not of a coffee at the newsagent and tobacconist’s shop in the Arcades. Or a damp hand on mine. Or those clumsy words, unctuous phrases, already telling lies.

So that evening, after Jocelyn Guerbette had kissed me, starving and impatient as he was, after I had delicately fended him off and he had gone away promising to be back to see me next day, I opened my heart and let my dreams fly free.

I
am happy with Jo.

He never forgets any of our anniversaries. He likes doing DIY in the garage at weekends. He makes small items of furniture that we sell at the flea market. Three months ago he installed WiFi for us because I’d decided to write a blog about my knitting. Sometimes, after a meal, he pinches my cheek and says, you’re a good girl, Jo, you’re a sweet girl. Yes, I know; he may sound a bit macho, but what he says comes from the heart. That’s Jo for you. He doesn’t know much about delicacy, the light touch, the subtlety of words. He hasn’t read many books; he’d rather have a quick rundown on a subject than a reasoned argument; he likes pictures better than writing. He loved the
Columbo
TV series because you knew who the killer was from the start.

I love words. I love long sentences, sighs that go on for ever. I love it when words sometimes hide what they’re saying, or say it in a new way.

When I was young I kept a diary. I gave it up the day my mother died. When she collapsed my pen collapsed as well, and a lot of other things were broken.

So when we discuss something, Jo and I, I do most of the talking. He listens while he drinks his imitation beer; sometimes he nods to let me know that he understands and he’s interested in my stories, and even if that’s not true it’s kind of him.

For my fortieth birthday he took a week’s holiday from the factory, drove the children over to stay with his mother and we went to Étretat. We stayed half board at the Aiguille Creuse hotel, where we spent four wonderful days, and it seemed to me for the first time in my life that this was what being in love meant. We went for long walks on the cliffs, holding hands; sometimes, when there was no one else about, he pushed me up against the rocks, kissed me on the mouth and lost his hand down inside my panties. He used simple words to describe his desire. Called a spade a spade.
You make me hard. You excite me.
One evening at twilight on the Aval cliff I thanked him, I said, take me now, and he made love to me out of doors, fast and roughly; it was good. When we went back to the hotel our cheeks were flushed and our mouths dry, like a couple of tipsy teenagers, and it was a nice memory.

On Saturdays, Jo likes to go out with the guys from the factory. They play cards at the Café Georget, they talk man talk, sharing their dreams, sometimes whistling at girls the age of their own daughters, but they’re nice guys; it’s
all talk and no action
, as we say; that’s our menfolk for you.