Léon and Louise (11 page)

Even so, Léon was loath to equate one of his wife's main characteristics with a chronic disease. Wasn't it his duty to take her troubles seriously? Having sworn before the altar to love and honour her to the end of his days, should he belittle her agony of mind as a mere echo of whale songs?

With his nose full of the warm, sweetish wind propelled ahead of it by the incoming train, Léon joined the tide of humanity making for the edge of the platform. A few years ago, when he was still single and living in a little attic room in the Batignolles, he had travelled to work daily by Métro and come to hate the screech of steel wheels, the heat and stench inside the carriages, the stained upholstery, the damp, slippery lathwork floors and the greasy grab handles.

In those days he had acquired the agility indispensable to the survival of the regular commuter, who can thread his way through the densest crowd of people without pushing and shoving and will always politely let the persons beside him go first without betraying that he has even noticed them. Léon knew that he could expect the same introverted consideration from his fellow passengers, and that pushing and shoving and insults occurred only when substantial numbers of tourists or elderly folk were in the vicinity.

He let the man on his right go first and moved into the space that opened up behind him, gave way to a woman with a pram and made it to the sliding doors in her wake. Then, in two or three quick strides, he reached the corner beside the opposite sliding doors, where there was ample standing room. He unbuttoned his overcoat and tipped his hat back, wedged himself in the corner so as not to have to hold on to a grab handle, and buried his hands in his coat pockets. While the open space in front of him was rapidly filling up, he scanned his surroundings commuter fashion, avoiding all eye contact, to satisfy himself that no potential source of annoyance lay in any direction.

Looking out of the window when the doors closed and the train pulled out, Léon watched the passengers waiting on the opposite platform, then the power cables snaking along the brownish-black tunnel wall, the red and white signal lights flashing past, and the yawning mouths of side tunnels. At the next station it became light again, then dark, and when it became light again he got out and ascended into daylight, bought his strawberry tartlets, and dived straight back below ground, where a train in the Porte de Clignancourt direction was just pulling in.

Léon allowed the tide of humanity to carry him across the platform and into a carriage as far as the same corner beside the opposite doors in which he had stood on the outward journey. When a train pulled into the opposite platform he looked at its cargo of passengers gliding by: men with newspapers,
mutilés de guerre
on crutches, women with shopping baskets. At first they were only vague, blurred figures flitting past him; then they slowed down and became more clearly defined, and when the train finally stopped he noticed, barely a metre or a metre-and-a-half from him, a young woman standing in the equivalent corner beside the sliding doors.

Wearing a black coat, a black skirt and a pale-blue blouse, she had green eyes, freckles and thick, dark hair bobbed at the back from one earlobe to the other, and she had a generous mouth and a dainty chin, and she was smoking a cigarette which she held between her thumb and forefinger like a street urchin, and she was beyond doubt, of that Léon felt instantly convinced, his Louise.

She had of course changed in the intervening ten years. The young girl's childishly soft features had developed into the firmer, more angular features of a grown woman. The eyes that looked out from beneath her fine, straight eyebrows were alert and unerringly watchful, and the corners of her mouth conveyed a look of determination that was new to him. And when she brushed a strand of hair behind her ear with her fingertips, he caught a flash of nail varnish.

Léon shook off his inertia at last. He raised his hand and waved, stepped forward into her field of view and – nonsensically – tapped on the window pane. But she, separated from him by only one metre of air and a few millimetres of window glass, pulled at her cigarette and blew the smoke downwards, flicked off the ash and stared into space. He rattled the closed doors that separated him from Louise's closed doors and tried to estimate how long it would take him to reach the other platform via the stairs. Then the open doors rumbled shut and put paid to his deliberations. He took off his hat and waved it in the air, and then, at last, she turned towards him.

Then, at last, their eyes met and his last remaining doubts vanished when the look of enquiry in her green eyes gave way successively to incredulous surprise and a smile of joyful recognition that revealed the little gap between her teeth. But then the two trains started to pull out in opposite directions, rendering the distance between them greater and the angle of view more acute, and they lost sight of each other once more.

As he plunged into the tunnel Léon desperately wondered what to do and arrived at three possible alternatives, all of which seemed to him equally sensible. He could take the next train back to Saint-Sulpice and hope that she would do the same; or he could get out one stop beyond Saint-Sulpice on the assumption that she had also got out there and was waiting for him; or he himself could wait at the next station in the hope that she would follow.

But it was hopeless in any case to try to locate someone on the crowded trains, platforms and stairs in rush hour, especially when you didn't even know whether they were waiting for you somewhere or hurriedly scouring the Métro themselves. The first thing Léon did was travel back to Saint-Sulpice, where he climbed on a bench beneath a poster depicting a bright red Citroën cabriolet 10cv B14 crossing some sand dunes and tried to get an overhead view of both platforms. Since all he could see were grey hats and strange women's hairdos, he rode the next train one station further to St.-Placide, just in case Louise had got out there and stayed put, then returned to Saint-Germain-des-Près to see if Louise was looking for him there, then went back to Saint-Sulpice and from there paid a second visit to St.-Placide.

After sixteen such journeys Léon realized he would never find Louise that way. He was perspiring and exhausted, his suit was too tight, and pink strawberry juice and pale-yellow custard were oozing from the carton containing the
tartes aux fraises,
which had suffered appreciably from the crush on their hours-long odyssey between the same three Métro stations. He walked slowly up the Boulevard Saint-Michel beneath the autumnally golden plane trees, blinking in the glare of headlights reflected by wet cobblestones.

Feeling as if he had awakened from a chaotic dream after a restless night's sleep, he was amazed that he could have spent half the evening down in the Métro chasing after a girl whom he hadn't seen for ten years, and who was in all probability long dead. The young woman had certainly borne a remarkable resemblance to Louise, and she had undoubtedly smiled as if she recognized him. But how many green-eyed young women were there in Paris – a hundred thousand? If one in every ten had a gap between her front teeth, and if one in every fifty of those cut her own hair, wasn't it possible that one or another out of those two hundred, while travelling home in the Métro after an enjoyable day's work, would smile out of mere friendliness at a strange man waving his hat at her like a buffoon?

Léon now felt sure that he'd been chasing after a ghost, albeit a ghost that had faithfully accompanied him for ten long years. It was his secret sin that he often, while getting up in the mornings, pictured Louise leaning against a plane tree, waiting for him, and in the afternoons, when his hours in the laboratory were dragging, he amused himself by remembering that one weekend at Le Tréport. Finally, when he lay on his own, solitary side of the marriage bed, he helped himself off to sleep by thinking of his first encounter with Louise and her squeaking bicycle.

He cautiously turned the key in the street door and closed it softly behind him. It was seldom that he managed to slip unnoticed past the concierge, who had taken him to her heart years ago, when her two daughters were still little, because he had made them Christmas presents of miniature lions, giraffes and hippos out of wood shavings and scraps of material. The curtain behind the glass was drawn, but issuing from the door of her lodge, which was open a crack, came the sound of frying fat and the smell of braised onions. He tiptoed past, reached the foot of the stairs, and thought he was safe when Madame Rossetos emerged in her widow's weeds, her black widow's bonnet, and her blue floral apron.

‘Why, Monsieur Le Gall, you startled me! Fancy creeping into the building like a burglar at this hour!'

‘Forgive me, Madame Rossetos.'

‘You're late tonight, I hope there's nothing wrong?' The concierge aimed the tip of her nose at him as if taking scent.

‘No, no. What should be wrong?'

‘You're pale, monsieur, you look a positive fright. And what's that awful thing in your hand? Give it here. No, no arguments, give it here. I'll deal with it.'

She darted forwards and snatched the carton out of his hand. Then, never taking her eyes off him, she backed into her glassed-in den like moray eel withdrawing into a coral reef with its prey. Léon had no choice but to follow her in. He made his way into the onion fumes and watched as she deposited the carton on the kitchen table, removed the battered strawberry tartlets, put them on a floral plate, moulded them into shape with her swollen fingers, and replaced the dislodged strawberries on the custard. He smelt the aroma of onions in her trog-lodytic abode and the cloying smell of stale sweat that clung to the bombazine dress on her ample form, eyed the red of the lipstick that had seeped into the wrinkles around her mouth, the garish Madonna on the little family altar, the lighted candle in front of the hand-coloured portrait photograph of her late husband in his sergeant's uniform, the lace antimacassar on the armchair, the sooty grey of the wall above the stove, and he listened to the crackle of the stove and the heavy, concentrated breathing from Madame Rossetos' flared nostrils.

A heavy curtain divided the living room from the bedroom in which her two young daughters were slumbering their way to next morning under dark-red blankets and growing a quarter of a millimetre each night in the serene certainty that they would, in the not too far distant future, blossom into young ladies and, at the first opportunity, escape from their mother's clutches for ever. They would elope with some boyfriend who bought them silk lingerie or enter the service of some lady who would bear them off to Neuilly as chambermaids. But Madame Rossetos would remain behind on her own, vegetate in her lair for a while longer and wait for her daughters' ever rarer visits until one day she would fall ill, drag herself off to hospital, and soon afterwards, after a last look at the water stains on the ceiling, die a meek and submissive death.

The concierge sprinkled the tartlets with icing sugar to hide the worst of the ravages, wiped her hands on her apron, and looked up at Léon with an expression eloquent of all the guileless vulnerability of her tormented soul.