Underground Time (11 page)

‘I’ll . . . I’ll take care of it. We’ll find a solution. I’m going to start by calling IT so that they send someone as soon as possible to install a computer for you.’

Patricia Lethu has gone. As she went out the door, she turned back to Mathilde and repeated, ‘I’ll take care of it.’ Her voice was tremulous, her blow-dry had lost some of its volume and movement. From behind she looked tired too.

‘Our cause is to fight swiftly and mercilessly against any element of evil that surfaces in Azeroth.’ For the moment he’s dozing, resting, gathering his strength. Mathilde looks at the card. She wonders if Patricia Lethu saw it. She brings it closer, strokes it with her fingertips.

Then she looks beyond the card somewhere within her thoughts, which is none the less in front of her, a transparent space to which nothing sticks, on to which nothing can be projected.

The woman is wearing an old pair of jeans and a shapeless pullover whose sleeves hide her hands. The circles around her eyes are verging on violet. Her hair is unbrushed.

They are sitting in the living room. Thibault has asked her a series of questions about her husband’s condition. He’s on the other side of the door. They can hear him coughing. She told him that someone was coming. He called her a bitch and is now refusing to answer.

It began a few days earlier. He threw out the entire contents of the fridge on the grounds that it was poisoned, and kept checking over and over again that the gas was turned off. He refuses to turn on the light, or to sit or lie down. He spent the night standing in the hall. In the morning, after explaining to his wife that the forces of evil were infiltrating their home through the telephone cables and the ventilation ducts, he locked himself in the bathroom. He’s been hospitalised several times before for severe bouts of depression, but until now he hasn’t had delirious episodes. He’s told her that he is going to do away with himself to protect her and the child. He wants her to leave the apartment, to go far away, as far away as possible, so that she’s not contaminated by his blood. He’s waiting for her to go.

The woman moves her chair.

That’s when Thibault discovers a little girl behind her. He hadn’t seen her come in. A tiny silhouette, nestling against her mother, staring at him, her eyes wide with fear.

In ten years of medical emergencies, he’s seen his fair share of anguish, distress and madness in close-up. He knows suffering, its accents of terror; he knows how it floods in, how things go awry and get lost. He knows the violence of it, he has grown accustomed to it.

But not to this.

The child is watching him. She can’t even be six.

‘Aren’t you at school?’

She shakes her head and hides behind her mother again.

‘I couldn’t take her. I didn’t want my husband to be left alone.’

Thibault gets up and goes over to the girl. She looks at his left hand. He smiles. Children are always quicker to notice his disability.

‘I’d like you to go and play in your room for a bit because I have things to say to your mother.’

Thibault explained to the woman that he would try to persuade her husband to be hospitalised. But if he failed, he’d have to call the police and get her to sign the request for committal herself. Because her husband presented a danger to himself and perhaps also to his family.

He went over to the door and crouched down so that he was at the same level as the man whose breathing he could hear. He talked to him for half an hour. In the end the man opened the door and Thibault went into the bathroom. The man was calm. He let Thibault listen to his chest. He took his pulse. He told the man that his blood pressure was much too high, a trick he often uses to convince a patient that hospitalisation is necessary. The man agreed to an injection. They talked for another ten minutes and then he gave in.

Even in the depths of delirium, even in the most acute manic episodes, there is a crack. A tiny chink of lucidity through which you have to intervene.

The ambulance arrived. Thibault stayed with the man until he got into the vehicle. Once the doors had closed, he instinctively looked up. Behind the glass the little girl was watching him.

What will she remember of these images, of this time in suspension, of these days when things slid out of control?

What kind of adult do you become if you have discovered at such an early age that life can collapse? What kind of person? What does it equip you with? What are you missing?

The questions returned as they did every time. The questions come when it’s all over. When he’s finished work and left behind people who’ve been destroyed whom he’ll never see again.

Thibault got back in his car. Lila’s perfume hung in the air, an invisible trace which tore at his throat.

He turned his mobile back on. Two new addresses were waiting for him. The first of them wasn’t too far. He turned the key in the ignition. He was assailed at once by her absence. In compact form.

As soon as he’s in the car, her absence presents its challenge.

At a red light, he’s thinking of her. When his foot presses on the accelerator, he’s thinking of her. When he changes gear, he’s thinking of her.

It’s half past twelve and he isn’t hungry. There’s a hole where his stomach was. A rough pain. Something oppressive, burning, which doesn’t call for any food or any comfort.

He met Lila one autumn night in the Bar des Oies, in that part of the street that climbs towards the sky. Before then, they had bumped into each other several times near where he lived, outside the swimming pool or near the baker’s. This time they were so close it was impossible to miss each other. Leaning on the bar, he looked at the bracelet on her wrist, which didn’t go with the rest of her outfit, it contradicted it. And then her thin legs and her too high heels, and such fine ankles that he wanted to hold them between his fingers. He had just finished a twelve-hour shift. She had come up to him or the other way round; he couldn’t say, he doesn’t remember. She wasn’t like the women he went for, but they had several drinks and then their tongues met. On the bar Lila had caught hold of his left hand and stroked his scar with the tips of her fingers. There was chemistry between them – foreign bodies sometimes mix, go well together, merge. Between them it had been a physical thing without any doubt. And as he hadn’t entirely given up on his childhood experiments, he had wanted to see if this mixing of skins was capable of transformation, and of completion.

If the chemistry – by contagion or diffraction – could spread and turn to passion.

But very soon he had collided with her.
Collided
– that was the word. Very soon he collided with her reserve, her distance, her moments of absence. Very soon he understood that she could only love him when horizontal, or when he held her on top of him by her hips. Afterwards, he would watch her sleep on the other side of the bed, remote. From the start, he had collided with the air of indifference with which she countered anything that smacked of emotion, with her closed expression the morning after, her gloomy moods at the end of the weekend, her inability to manage the simplest goodbye.

Even after the most intense nights, in the morning she offered him this closed face, on tiptoe, without any sign of emotion. Never when they were on the point of parting did he dare to hold her to him. Likewise, when they saw each other again after a gap of several days or weeks, the impulse which always propelled him towards her seemed to offend her, to jolt her immobility. He could get no purchase. Nothing to latch on to.

She didn’t open her arms.

He had long wondered if Lila was like that because that was her nature, if this refusal to be demonstrative outside the bed was just the way she was, a given which he had to accept and about which he could do nothing. Or if conversely it was reserved for him, affected only him, a silent reminder of the way they were developing, and that all they were playing out was a physical affair, not something which from any vantage point could resemble a relationship. They weren’t
together
. They didn’t constitute anything – they had no geometry, no shape. They had met and been happy to repeat that encounter each time they saw each other – to mix one with the other and notice the fact of that fusion.

Lila was his downfall. His punishment for all the women he’d been incapable of loving, the ones he’d seen for just a few nights, the ones he’d ended up leaving – because something he couldn’t name kept coming back. It was ridiculous, but he had thought: the time had come for him to settle the account.

A love affair perhaps simply came down to this imbalance: as soon as you wanted something, expected something, you’d lost.

Chemistry could do nothing in the face of Lila’s memory and her unresolved past loves. He was utterly weightless compared to the man she was waiting for, hoping for, a smooth man who was unlike him.

And words, like liquids, had evaporated.

On rue Daviel he’s parked on a pedestrian crossing.

He doesn’t want to circle the block three times looking for a space. He’s tired.

Passers-by give him filthy looks. It doesn’t matter that he has a sign and a badge on the side of his car, he’s on their turf. In the city, you’re either a pedestrian, a cyclist or a driver. You walk, pedal or drive. You look people over, size them up, and despise them. In the city, you have to decide which side you’re on.

A little further on, Mrs L.’s waiting for him. Her baby has a fever of 102. He knows her. He sees her four times a month. She weighs, measures, watches, checks. She manufactures worry. The base is unable to refuse to send out a doctor. A matter of responsibility. Nine times out of ten, it’s Thibault who goes. Because Mrs L. knows him and he doesn’t lose patience with her. And in addition, she asks for him.

He has to pick up his bag, get out of the car and close the door.

This time he’s the loser. He loves a woman who doesn’t love him. Maybe there’s nothing more violent than the acknowledgement of this powerlessness? Maybe there’s no worse sorrow, worse malady?

No, he knows that’s not so. That’s ridiculous. It’s untrue.

Unrequited love is no more nor less than a kidney stone. The size of a grain of sand, a pea, a marble or a golf ball – a crystallised chemical substance likely to cause a sharp, indeed unbearable, pain. But which always goes in the end.

He hasn’t undone his seat belt. From behind his windscreen he looks at the city. Its never-ending ballet in spring colours. An empty plastic bag which dances in the gutter. A man bent over at the post-office entrance whom no one seems to notice. Green dustbins overturned on the pavement. Men and women going into a bank, passing each other on a crossing.

He watches the city, all these superimposed actions. This place of endless intersections where people never meet.

Mathilde has put her files on the shelves, her pens in a pot and arranged her supplies of stationery in her drawer. That has taken her the best part of an hour, by making sure she moved slowly, that each decision came after several minutes of deliberation, to put things here or there, at the edge or in the middle, above or below, destined for this or that use.

Once again she’s waiting.

Someone knocks at the door. Two technicians from IT are standing there, waiting for her to tell them to come in. She indicates that they should. She knows them. They look after the computer network for the whole site. She often passes the tall one in the corridor. The small one she sees when she has lunch in the cafeteria. He has a loud laugh, you can’t miss him.

Mathilde stands up and moves aside to make room.

They exchange pleasantries about the weather. She goes along with it, expressing pleasure on hearing that the next few days will be fine. As if that mattered. As if that could have any impact on the train of events. And then they set to work. They unpack, unroll, connect, assemble.

In no time at all they’ve installed a new computer. The tall one goes through the final steps to configure the machine.

Meanwhile the small one contemplates Mathilde’s cleavage as she sits there. She’s wearing one of those push-up bras that make your breasts look bigger. The lacey straps are the same colour as her blouse. She has never given up on her appearance. She dresses as she used to. Wears a skirt, a suit, puts on make-up. Even if sometimes she doesn’t have the energy. Even if coming in pyjamas or a tracksuit would probably make no difference.

There. The tall one starts up the computer, goes over to Mathilde and explains. By default she is linked to the printer on that floor, laser Infotec XVGH3018. If she wants to print in colour, she needs to select another printer.

Mathilde tries to work out how long it’s been since she’s had to print a document.

The tall one sees the card lying near her.

‘The Argent Defender! You’re lucky! My son would sell both his parents for that card. Is it yours?’