Viviane (11 page)

Julien will arrive from the northeast. Getting off the No. 86 bus in front of the Institut du Monde Arabe, he'll walk past the Faculté des Sciences, slalom among the poorly parked vehicles and the perpetual work in progress along that stretch of the sidewalk, then at the intersection with Rue des Écoles, take Rue Linné toward the Jardin des Plantes. After the small supermarket, he'll turn onto Rue des Arènes to reach Rue Monge.

With your back to the arena, you walk toward the circular barred fence that surrounds the enclosure, following the curve of the street. There is one place, at the junction with Rue de Navarre, where one can observe the path of an eventual passerby—because for the moment there are none—from Rue Linné to Rue Monge. You are standing at that spot. Across the street are apartment buildings of noble discretion, stylish without excessive complications. Now and then a window opens to allow the shaking out of a tablecloth. A shadow passes a curtain; a cat behind a window demands the opening of his aquarium but by the time someone complies it's too late, he has lost interest.

After half an hour you can definitely see your
husband down the street. Julien seems to be carrying the world on his shoulders, which for an instant you again see naked against yours, enveloping you to perfection. You drive away that image. You replace it with the one of everything he owes you, the knives in your purse, your flyaway daughter, your runaway mother. You draw close to the barred fence but of course he doesn't see you. Muffled by the snow, silent, invisible, you run toward the exit of the amphitheater and by the time you reach the sidewalk, he's already turning onto Rue Monge. It's too late to call to him discreetly, to lead him over to the métro entrance no one ever uses because it has a hundred steps whereas the main entrance over on Place Monge has an escalator.

Julien is striding along but you have no trouble matching his fleeing pace. Nothing happens along the way to Place Saint-Médard, where you're careful to stay back, skirting the church garden while he's busy with the keypad lock a few yards ahead of you. He vanishes into your mother's building—the one that was yours as well for twenty-eight years, yes, that's how long you lived there, but no one forced you to stay, you liked the place.

On the square there is a brasserie where the first
floor offers an excellent view of the surrounding neighborhood. You choose a table near the window and order a hot toddy, never taking your eyes off the door through which Julien has disappeared, where he reappears a few minutes later, only to stop at the intercom. He taps on his cell phone and correlatively yours begins to vibrate in your pocket. You observe that three messages have already been recorded. You do not open the phone; you do not listen to the messages. The object continues to vibrate on the table and Julien's name appears on the screen, calling and calling again in the void.

Then he walks around the square, enters the bookstore. Your husband strolls among the tables of new arrivals, picking up and immediately putting back books, checking the titles lined up on the shelves without in all likelihood remembering any of them, finally leaving the store to use his phone but you still don't answer. You order a second hot toddy.

Julien enters the bookstore again. This time he goes to the back, chooses something from a rack of graphic novels, and methodically turns the pages until the end. When he has finished the book he comes out again and night is falling on the square. Julien makes one last call but this time your phone doesn't vibrate, and the
person he's now calling seems more approachable because he's talking on the phone—you can clearly see his lips move, quickly then slowing down as the conversation progresses—until having definitively given up on you, he retraces his steps and leaves the square.

Is it the effect of that soppy expression on your husband's face or the toddies multiplying as you found the time dragging?—anyway your balance isn't as solidly grounded as before. You start tailing him again, preparing to hail him and lead him over to that lonely métro entrance you'd thought of earlier, in the rocking chair, as a suitable sign-off place for your crime. But now Julien is walking right past Rue des Arènes. He's leading you toward another neighborhood you know well, Rue des Carmes and its police station. Your husband is walking some fifteen yards ahead of you, passing the florist's, the hardware store, the wine shop, the bakery you pass in turn without hearing the name called out behind you.

Nor do you recognize the voice of Gabrielle, the doctor's wife who, having just completed a little inventory at the Rue du Pot-de-Fer apartment, had been on her way back to the one she shares with her lover. Refusing to hear this name chasing after you, it's impossible for you to know that she's right on your heels, hopping
in the snow, grabbing her cell and calling Inspector Philippot, then Angèle, to whom the police have recently introduced her. In the end, the two of them didn't hit it off too badly, sharing as they do many experiences and opinions regarding the deceased.

So Gabrielle verifies some of the givens in the problem and resumes trotting several paces behind you, as you pursue your husband through cobblestoned streets where tourists buy souvenirs of Notre Dame and where he at last stops short, as if undecided. Fearing he might spot you, you duck into an entrance to a movie theater where you don't spot Gabrielle, who has taken refuge there a moment earlier through the other entrance for the same reason. No, you don't see anything around you, too preoccupied by the form you are shadowing ahead of you, which soon sets off through the crowd.

You rush after him, the widow tagging along. She's becoming less and less cautious in her pursuit: glued to her phone, she's now transmitting geographic coordinates, precisely following your movements. At last Julien enters a jewelry store, comes out again carrying a pretty package. You'd love to tear it from his hands but with an effort you breathe in, breathe out. It's painful for air to circulate through your lungs compressed by
nervous tension and that slight nausea you've been experiencing constantly since a little while ago. You keep following him, though, on to the Seine where you're soon crossing the Saint-Michel bridge.

Which leads to the Île de la Cité, police headquarters, the Palais de Justice. To the Conciergerie and its towers of evil memory: cold jails, final judgments, gleaming guillotines. You carry the icy weight of those stone walls on your drooping shoulders as you press on through the snow. But your steps begin to falter on their own and you think that if Julien were to turn around in that instant, the black water beneath the bridge would become the only way out. Perhaps it's this image that heightens your nausea as you reach the island. Or hunger. You think back to your last meal. It was the day before, and besides, just two small tins of sardines eaten straight from the can, they don't really count. That's bad, alcohol on an empty stomach, anyone could tell you so.

Then Julien slows down as well, looking around, seeking something or someone. And in fact there does seem to be a feminine form at the corner of police headquarters. Your husband hesitates long enough to confirm that this is indeed the person he's been hurrying to
join; his pace quickens as he heads for the woman who now moves away from the wall to meet him, and it just so happens to be Héloïse. Your stomach heaves.

And again that name is called out behind you. You pretend you don't hear, but it keeps coming back, three, ten, twenty times, the astonishment growing with each call, as if this name had to be endlessly repeated to make sure that it is indeed you at the end of the bridge, Élisabeth.

Veiled by the snow clinging to your lashes, your eyelids open with difficulty, but you still recognize Angèle arriving to your right. In a panic, you whip around only to run into Gabrielle and the inspector with his subordinate, closing on you fast while Julien and Héloïse finally notice your presence and he says Viviane, Viviane, what are you doing here?

You need to react, to fight, but suddenly something much more urgent happens. No matter how hard you concentrate, how deeply you breathe, air is no longer reaching your lungs. Declining to be sucked in, it simply ebbs away. You find it provoking that the mechanism is breaking down like this. You devote all your energy to forcing stubborn air into your pharynx but in vain, and you cannot remember having ever experienced anything
this unpleasant. You look in supplication toward your husband but can no longer see him, then toward the inspector but cannot find him, either. You glimpse only car headlights on the ground and streetlights in the sky, which quickly meld together. You no longer know which is which, where up is or down, if it's yourself out here, someone else, or if it's simply a dream—or if you'll ever wake up. You stop breathing altogether. You fall.

17

They take you to the oldest hospital in Paris, the Hôtel-Dieu, a stone's throw from the Palais de Justice. Your first days there go so badly that they ply you with pills, like the ones the doctor used to prescribe for you only much more effective ones. Soon you are basically a vegetable. Staring at the walls absorbs all your attention. You never tire of studying the variations in their angles when you tip your head to the right, the left, up, then down. A large smile graces your countenance; a dribble of saliva escapes your lips. It takes you several minutes to notice this, and another few to consider taking action, deciding whether it's all right to let it run down to your chin. Sometimes you correct the situation with aquatic languor; sometimes you don't give a damn.

Now and then someone in a white coat appears to evaluate your condition, eventually wipe off your lips,
and give you your medicine. After a few days (you'd be hard put to say how many) they decide to try diminishing the dosage, see how that works. Very bad idea. As soon as the last round has worn off, you're so beside yourself that you frighten the chief physician, who says get her back on meds, she's not ready, not by a long shot. The inspector cooling his heels outside in the corridor goes back to the police station.

Still, in due course your body gets used to these substances circulating through your arteries, visiting your synapses to numb them nicely. A few objects now stand out from the walls. Which won't get you very far because once anything sharp, pointed, or blunt has been eliminated, not much remains to provide entertainment. That leaves a bedside table on wheels with some plastic cups. They are empty. If there was any water in them, you drank it, but you don't remember that or anything else. Wait, your daughter. You rather think that you have a daughter. Which then means that you also have a mother. You do remember those two.

You notice that you're wearing some very uncomfortable pajamas, of an indeterminate material between cloth and paper. And the sheets on your bed—very strange, these sheets. They seem like plastic. At any rate, they're
impossible to rip up. You're also beginning to hear noise out in the corridor, brief exchanges between the hospital personnel and the police, the examining magistrates and the lawyers, interspersed with loony ululations followed by long silences. That's it, you get the picture.

Then one morning, suddenly, you see things quite clearly. You are also quite scared. When the nurse brings breakfast—four pieces of melba toast with a bowl of brown liquid supposed to be tea—you sit on the edge of your bed and say calmly that this cannot continue, I do not want to stay here, and you have to give me back my child. The nurse studies you inscrutably and goes to inform the chief physician.

A large square person with a reddish-brown mustache, the latter questions you without listening to the answers, observing your reactions. When you say that you are scared, he says that isn't important. You say yes it is, I'm really very scared, you have to do something, prescribe me some other pills, I can give you their names, I have to have them or I'll go crazy. He replies you're not in a supermarket and leaves.

Left alone with your fear, you sweat profusely. The pajamas stick to your limbs. Soon your breathing goes awry the way it did the other day on the Saint-Michel
bridge; thousands of flies take off inside your skull, hammering your ears, and your strength abruptly returns. You raise a fist against the reinforced door, on which you pound, hitting until your arm turns blue with bruising, until the pain moves from your head into your body and they come and give you your pills.

That lasts another three days; then they must have set up something with the inspector because as soon as the antipsychotics wear off, he turns up with his subordinate, the one whose face you can never remember. You demand a lawyer. The inspector says listen, Madame Hermant, we're not in a movie, this isn't how it works in real life, you have to answer some questions first. He then lets you stew until the cows come home, asking easy questions to keep from being bored, along the lines of tell me what happened back there on the Saint-Michel bridge. But it's easy to see he doesn't care, he's just waiting for you to go off your nut while he watches and the subordinate picks his teeth with his nails.

After an hour you're ready for anything and it all comes out, but the story is so confused that he asks you to slow down, try to be more specific with the chronology, Madame Hermant, because all this isn't really very clear. Gradually your narrative builds up, and you
recount in detail your day on November 15. How you got the knives from your husband's apartment, made an appointment with the doctor and left the child to the care of no one while you went to Rue de la Clef. How the doctor provoked that inexplicable explosive reaction in you. How you committed that act you ought never to have carried out—just look at how your mother brought you up, a model of perfection.