The Most Beautiful Book in the World (7 page)

“But that's just it, to help you get better, don't you think that a convalescent home . . .”

“These days, Doctor, people are dying in convalescent homes. Because they aren't air-conditioned. Here, it's air-conditioned. Don't you watch the news? There is a heat wave. More devastating than a cyclone. Convalescent home? Despondency home, more like it. Old people's hospice. A house full of dead people. Did he send you here to kill me?”

“Come now, Odile, that's nonsense. And if we find you a nice convalescent home with air-conditioning . . .”

“Yes, where you'll drug me, and turn me into a vegetable, and my husband will take advantage of the situation to confiscate my apartment and come and live here with his old bag! Never! That Arab and her children? Never! Did you have any inkling that he has two children with her?”

“You're really on the verge, Odile . . . a time will come when no one will ask your opinion anymore and you'll have to be taken away by force.”

“Well then, you know exactly what I mean, they'll have to take me away by force. Nothing will happen before then. Now go away and don't come back. From now on I shall have a new doctor.”

That evening, in a rage, Odile thought of putting an end to her life, and the only thing which stopped her was the idea that that was precisely what her husband and that horrid Yasmine were hoping for.

No, Odile, pull yourself together. After all, you're young . . . how old? Thirty-two or thirty-three . . . oh, I'm always forgetting . . . you have your life ahead of you, you'll meet another man and you'll start a family. That Charles didn't deserve you, so it's better that you found out right away. Just imagine if you'd stubbornly stuck with him all the way to menopause . . .

She suddenly felt an urge to chat with Fanny, her best friend. How long had it been since she'd called her? With this heat wave of a summer, she'd lost her sense of time somewhat. Like everyone else in the country, no doubt she was suffering more than she realized from the sweltering heat, despite the refuge of her shady apartment. She reached for her address book and then flung it aside.

“I don't need to check Fanny's number. If there is one that I do know by heart, it's that one.”

She dialed the number and a sleepy voice answered.

“Yes?”

“Excuse me for disturbing you, I'd like to speak to Fanny.”

“Fanny?”

“Fanny Desprées. Have I got the wrong number?”

“Fanny is dead, Madam.”

“Fanny! When?”

“Ten days ago. Dehydration.”

The heat wave! All this time here she'd been sitting there in front of her television adding up the dead and never once had it occurred to her that a friend might be a victim of the carnage. She hung up without adding a word or asking for any details.

Fanny, her sweet Fanny, her old school friend, Fanny who already had two children . . . Two little infants . . . What a tragedy! To die so young, and they'd been born the same year . . . So it wasn't just old people and infants who were succumbing, but also adults in the prime of life . . . Who had answered the phone? She couldn't place that rasping voice . . . an old uncle, someone in the family, no doubt.

Traumatized, Odile swallowed down a bottle of water before going into her room to weep.

 

“Fifteen thousand dead,” announced the anchorman, his face square as an iron door.

“Soon it'll be fifteen thousand and one,” sighed Odile, swallowing her cigarette smoke, “for I don't know if I feel much like sticking around in this ugly world.”

No sign of temperatures cooling, no storms on the horizon, added the reporter. The earth was cracking with pain.

Nor did there seem to be any way out for Odile. The intruder had been coming several times a day now, up to her clever tricks, mixing up Odile's belongings so that she couldn't find a thing.

Once her concierge had left for Portugal—it is absolutely incredible, the number of concierges there must be in Portugal in August—Odile's shopping and her ready-made meals were brought up to her by the concierge's niece, an insolent girl with a slouch who chewed gum and changed her belt from morning to night, a silly cow you couldn't exchange three coherent sentences with.

Charles had not come around again. No doubt he was the one who was calling when Odile would just say, “No,” and immediately hang up. What's more, he was no longer on her mind so much. Hardly at all, in fact. Soon it would be ancient history. Or rather, it was as if it had never happened. Odile's main concern at present was to renew her enrollment at the university but, no doubt because they had people filling in for the summer, she was unable to reach the right person for her re-enrollment. This was extremely irritating.

She really wanted to devote herself to her studies, now. When she wasn't resting in front of the twenty-four-hour news channel, she spent hours at work, reading books about the Middle East, working on her languages, and she seriously intended to finish her dissertation; she'd already started the introduction.

Her dissertation advisor could not be reached. It seemed as if this climatic catastrophe was annihilating the entire country. Nothing functioned normally anymore. Her parents did not answer the phone, either. Everyone must have fled to find a cool spot somewhere.

Well, let's make the most of it and get down to essentials, thought Odile, who spent diligent hours perfecting the structure of her paragraphs or the flow of her sentences. I'll give myself a week to finish this introduction.

She found it so fascinating that she forgot to drink as much as she should. Moreover, her air-conditioning was beginning to malfunction: although she would set the thermostat on 20 degrees, later, after suffering for several hours, she would find it on 30 degrees or 32 or even 15! After a disagreeable search, she located the operating instructions and the warranty, and sent for the technician to come and repair it. He spent half a day working on it and said he didn't understand, maybe there was a bad connection, in any event all the parts had been carefully checked and now it should all work perfectly. And yet the very next morning the meter in each room showed a complete and utterly absurd range of temperatures.

There was no need to call the repairman again because Odile had figured out the origin of the malfunctioning thermostat: the intruder. No doubt the old woman found it delightfully entertaining to modify Odile's settings behind her back.

It did not take long for Odile to begin to feel exhausted—the work, the heat, the way she would forget to drink—so she decided to keep a watch out for the intruder, to catch her red-handed and settle the score once and for all.

When she was certain that she was alone, she huddled in the broom closet, switched off the light, and waited in ambush.

How long was she on watch? Impossible to say. You'd have thought the old woman had guessed Odile was waiting for her . . . After a few hours, with a raging thirst, she emerged from the closet and went back to the living room. There, God knows why, she had a sudden urge for a glass of pastis, so she opened the bar, poured herself a drink and, after one swallow, something very odd caught her eye.

There was a book on the shelf that bore her name: Odile Versini, inscribed on the spine. After she pulled it from the shelf, she stood there completely baffled by the cover: this was her dissertation, the dissertation she was in the process of writing. And here it was in full—finished, printed on four hundred pages, published by a prestigious house she could never have dreamed of approaching.

Who was playing these practical jokes on her?

She leafed through the opening pages and went pale. Here were the premises of her introduction—the one she'd been slaving over for days—but it was finished, better written, with far greater mastery.

What was going on?

On raising her eyes, she saw the intruder. The old lady was looking her up and down, quite calmly.

No. This time, enough was enough.

She hurried back the way she had come, to the broom closet, grabbed the golf club she'd already singled out as a weapon, and came back to have it out with her intruder once and for all.

 

By the window which overlooked the gardens of the Trocadéro, Yasmine was contemplating the rain which had come to reconcile the earth with the sky and put an end to the epidemic of death.

Behind her, the room was unchanged; it was still overflowing with books, a precious collection for anyone interested in the Middle East. Neither she nor her husband had had time to change the décor or the furniture. They would start the renovations later on; they had not hesitated to leave their tiny apartment on the ring road, where they had been living in cramped quarters with their two children, in order to move in here.

And there they were, Jérôme and Hugo, right behind her, discovering the pleasures of satellite television; they could not stop channel-surfing.

“It's great, Mom, they have Arabic channels!”

They never stopped to watch one program; what intoxicated them was the idea of having so many programs, rather than being tempted by just one of them.

Her husband came in and slipped behind her, kissing the base of her neck. Yasmine turned around, pressed against him. They put their arms around each other.

“Do you know I had a look through your family album: it's incredible how much you look like your father.”

“Don't say that.”

“Why? Because he died in Egypt when you were only six? I understand that it makes you sad—”

“No, it's not that. I'm sorry because it makes me think of Mother. She often mistook me for him, she called me Charles.”

“Don't think about it anymore. Remember your mother as she was when she was in good health—a brilliant intellectual, full of wit and clever conversation—she always made a great impression on me. Forget these last two years.”

“You're right. Alone in this place, with the disease, she didn't even recognize her own self. With her memory fading like that, she grew younger; she thought the old woman she saw in the mirror was an intruder. The way they found her with her golf club by the broken mirror. I guess she wanted to threaten the intruder, to defend herself when she thought the other woman was about to strike her.”

“We'll go to see her on Sunday.”

Yasmine stroked François's cheeks and added, drawing closer with her lips, “It's not so hard now that she's gone back to the period before your father. She doesn't mix us up anymore. How old do you suppose she thinks she is?”

He let his head fall against Yasmine's shoulder.

“There are times when I wish that the day my mother becomes a newborn baby would arrive soon, so I can take her in my arms. At last I'll be able to tell her how much I love her. For me, a kiss farewell. For her, a welcome . . .”

 

 

 

 

 

Y
ou might say that there were two Aimée Favarts. Aimée before the separation. And Aimée afterwards.When Georges told her that he was leaving her, it took Aimée several minutes before she could be sure that this was neither a nightmare nor a joke. Was this truly Georges speaking? And was it really her that he was speaking to? Once she was forced to admit that reality was indeed dealing her this blow, she took the trouble to make sure she was still alive. This diagnosis took somewhat longer to establish: her heart had stopped beating, her blood had stopped flowing, a silence cold as marble had petrified her organs, a stiffness prevented her eyelids from blinking . . . But Georges was still perfectly audible (“You understand, my darling, I can't go on any longer, everything has to come to an end sometime”) and visible (rings of sweat dampened his shirt around his armpits), and she could smell him, that scent that made her head spin, a male smell of soap and fresh lavender-scented laundry . . . Astonished, almost disappointed, she concluded that she had survived.

Gentle, urgent, cordial, Georges said one thing after another in order to fulfill two contradictory requirements: announce that he was leaving her, and make it seem as if it were not such a serious thing.

“We've been happy together. I owe my moments of greatest happiness to you. I am sure that when I die I'll be thinking of you. But I am the head of the household. Could you have loved me if I'd been one of those men who sneak off, who shirk their responsibilities—wife, home, children, grandchildren—with a snap of the fingers?”

She felt like screaming, Yes, I would have loved you, it's even what I've wanted from the very first day, and yet, as usual, she did not say a thing. Not to hurt him. Above all, not to hurt him. To Aimée, Georges's happiness seemed so much more important than her own: this is how she had loved him for twenty-five years, forgetting herself.

Georges went on: “My wife has always assumed we would spend the rest of our lives in the South of France. Since I'll be taking my retirement two months from now, we've bought a villa in Cannes. We move this summer.”

More than the departure itself, it was the expression “spend the rest of our lives” which Aimée found shocking. While to his mistress he had always portrayed his family life as nothing less than a prison, she was now discovering with this “spend the rest of our lives” that Georges, in another world to which he had never given her access, had continued to feel like a husband to his wife and a father to his children.

“Our lives!” Aimée had been nothing more than an interlude. “Our lives!” No matter how often he had whispered words of love to her, or how often his body had called out for hers, she remained a passing fancy. “Our lives!” In the end, the other woman—the rival, so feared, despised—had won! Did she even know? Was she aware, as she settled with her husband in Cannes, that in her wake she was leaving a woman—stunned, battered—who for twenty-five years had dreamt of taking her place, and who had still been dreaming of it not even five minutes ago?

“Answer me, darling, say something, at least . . .”

She stared at him and her eyes got bigger and bigger. What? He's on his knees? He's rubbing my hand? What is he up to now? No doubt he's going to start crying any minute . . . He always sobs before I do . . . It's irritating, I've never been able to make him yield to my tenderness because I've always had to console him first. A very useful trick, this behaving like a man when it's called for, and like a woman when the mood takes him.

She looked closely at the sixty-something man who was there at her feet, and suddenly felt that he was a total stranger. If the rational part of her brain hadn't whispered to her that this was Georges, the man she'd been worshipping for twenty-five years, she would have got to her feet with a shout: “Who are you? What are you doing in my house? And who gave you permission to touch me?”

It was at that moment, the very moment when she believed he had changed, that she changed. Looking down at that maggot with his dyed hair sobbing like a baby and drooling all over her knees and her hands, Aimée Favart was transformed into a new Aimée Favart. The one from afterwards. The one who no longer believed in love.

In the months which followed, there was, to be sure, some coming and going between the old Aimée and the new Aimée: after a half-hearted suicide attempt, she slept with Georges again one night; by August, however, when he had moved, the new Aimée was in full possession of the old one. Better still: she had killed her.

 

She thought back on her past with amazement.

How could I ever have believed he loved me? He just wanted a mistress who was beautiful, nice, and stupid.

Beautiful, nice, and stupid . . .

Beautiful—that, Aimée definitely was. Up until their separation, everyone had dwelled on her beauty. Except for Aimée herself. Because, like many women, Aimée had not been allotted the beauty that she admired. She was petite, and slim, with small breasts, but she envied big curvaceous women, she developed a complex because she was short and slim. After her separation she learned to appreciate herself the way she was, and she concluded that she was “far too good for just any man.”

Nice—Aimée was nice because she underestimated herself. She was the only daughter of a mother who had never revealed her father's identity to her, treating her like some sort of burdensome reproach, hence she knew nothing about the world of men. Thus, when she started work as a secretary in the firm Georges managed, she did not know how to resist an older man who, in her candid virgin's eyes, incarnated both a father and a lover. And where would the romantic element come in? It seemed more noble to her to love a man whom she could not marry . . .

Stupid? In Aimée, as in every human being, stupidity and intelligence resided in separate provinces, which made her regionally brilliant but locally stupid: while she proved to be perfectly competent in the realm of work, she was an utter ninny when it came to emotions. A hundred times or more her colleagues had advised her to break up with that man; a hundred times or more she reveled in the voluptuous delight of not listening to them. So they spoke for the voice of reason? She prided herself in speaking for the heart.

For twenty-five years, she and Georges shared the everyday routine of work, but none of the everyday routine of conjugal life. This made their escapades seem all the more beautiful, all the more precious. There were the hastily stolen caresses at work, and she only ever received him at her home under the rare pretext of an interminable board meeting. In twenty-five years, their relationship never had time to grow shopworn.

Three months after he moved to the South of France, Georges began writing to Aimée. With each passing week his letters became more ardent, more passionate. Was this the effect of absence?

She did not reply. For, while his correspondence may have been addressed to the old Aimée, it was the new Aimée who read them. Without emotion she inferred that Georges must already be feeling bored with his wife. Scornfully, she read through the pages that embellished their past together, each time a bit more.

He's gone mad in his retirement! At this rate, three months from now we'll have lived in Verona and our names will be Romeo and Juliet.

 

She stayed on at her job, found the new director to be a ridiculous man—especially when he smiled at her—and took up sports with a vengeance. She was forty-eight years old and she'd been forbidden from the start from having children, because Georges already had his own; now she was determined not to regret her lack of offspring.

“Just so that they can steal my best years, suck my heart dry and then disappear one day, leaving me even more alone? No, thanks. And besides, to go and add more people to a planet already rotten with overpopulation and human stupidity, you have to be either completely stupid or completely oblivious.”

Her firm was going through a rough time, and Monsieur Georges, the former director, was sorely missed. There was some restructuring, a redundancy scheme, and at the age of fifty, Aimée Favart, not really all that surprised, found herself unemployed.

Drifting from useless internships to infantilizing training programs, she looked half-heartedly for a new job, and in the meanwhile she ran into financial difficulties. She felt no nostalgia as she took her jewelry box to a secondhand dealer.

“How much did you hope to get for all this, Madame?”

“I've no idea . . . I'm counting on you to tell me.”

“It's just that . . . there's nothing of any value here. It's all costume jewelry, there are no precious stones, no solid gold, nothing that . . .”

“That doesn't surprise me in the least. It was he who gave them to me.”

“He, who?”

“The man who said he was the love of my life. He gave me cheap junk, just like the stuff the Spanish conquistadors gave the Indians in America. And you know what? I was such a lump that I liked it. So everything's worthless?”

“Pretty much so.”

“What a bastard, don't you think?”

“I wouldn't know, Madame. It's true that when you love a woman . . .”

“Well?”

“When you love a woman, you don't spend your money on jewelry like this.”

“Ah! You see? I was sure of it.”

She felt triumphant. The jeweller, on the other hand, had merely resorted to a phrase he was accustomed to using in a rather different situation: when he wanted to convince a customer to buy a more expensive item.

Although she left the shop with only three meager banknotes, her heart was full of joy: a specialist had confirmed that Georges was nothing but a filthy bastard.

As soon as she got home, she opened her cupboards and started hunting down all the gifts she'd ever received from Georges. Not only did the loot turn out to be fairly insubstantial in quantity, but the quality was laughable. A rabbit-skin coat. Nylon underwear. A watch no bigger than an aspirin tablet. A leather notebook of no particular brand that still smelt of goat. Cotton underwear. A hat that you couldn't possibly wear anywhere, except perhaps at an English royal wedding. A silk scarf with the label snipped off. Black rubber underwear.

Flopping onto her bed, she didn't know whether to laugh or to cry. She made do with a cough. Here were her trophies for twenty-five years of passion! Her war booty . . .

In order to feel less wretched, she turned her scorn against him. He had always used the pretext that he could not risk arousing his wife's suspicions with regular, unjustified expenses, therefore he had not exactly been generous with her. Generous—what am I saying? Normal. Not even normal. A skinflint, that's what he was!

And here was I, basking in glory! Priding myself on the fact that I didn't love him for his money! What a dolt! I thought I was exalting the lover, I was merely flattering the miser . . .

As Aimée went into the living room to feed her parakeets and paused by the painting that hung above their cage, she nearly choked with rage.

“My Picasso! That really is the proof that he took me for a fool!”

The canvas, its forms playfully dispersed—the puzzle of a face, an eye here, the nose just above, an ear in the middle of the forehead—was supposed to represent a woman with her child. Had Georges not behaved very oddly the day he brought it to her? Pale, his lips waxy, his voice breathless, he was trembling when handed the canvas to her.

“Right, this time I've made up for all the other times. No one can dispute the fact that at least this once I have been generous with you.”

“What is it?”

“A Picasso.”

She'd removed the protective cloths, and now she contemplated the work and said again, as if to convince herself, “A Picasso?”

“Yes.”

“A real one?”

“Yes.”

Hardly daring to touch it, for fear that some clumsy gesture might cause it to disappear, she had stammered, “How is this possible? How did you manage it?”

“Oh, I beg you, don't ask me that, ever!”

At the time, she had taken his reserve for the modesty of a man who had bled himself dry in order to offer something to a woman. Later, when she thought back on his terrified behavior, she succumbed to a brief moment of delirium and wondered whether he hadn't stolen it. And yet he seemed so proud of his gift . . . And he was an honest man.

For her protection, he had advised her to assert that the painting was a forgery.

“You see, my darling, it is highly unlikely that a little secretary living in low-income housing would own a Picasso. People will make fun of you.”

“You're right.”

“Worse than that, if anyone ever did suspect the truth, you would be burgled for sure. Your best insurance, believe me, is to insist, for as long as you don't part with the painting, that it is a forgery.”

So Aimée had shown the painting to the rare visitors who came to her apartment as “My Picasso—a forgery, of course,” accentuating the joke with a burst of laughter.

With hindsight, Georges's trick seemed diabolical: to oblige her to insinuate that her Picasso was a forgery so that she, and she alone, would be convinced that it was authentic!

Still, in the weeks which followed, her feelings were ambiguous: on the one hand she was sure she'd been had, and on the other she still hoped she might be mistaken. Whatever she might learn about her canvas, she would be disappointed. Disappointed to find out she was poor, or disappointed to have to find some qualities in Georges after all.

She fell to standing there beneath the frame, and it became the ring where the old Aimée and the new Aimée would thrash it out—the former who had believed in love and the authentic Picasso, and the latter who saw everything fake there was about Georges and the painting.

As her unemployment benefits dwindled, Aimée struggled to find a new job. When she went in for job interviews, she made no effort to put her best side forward, as it was so important to her now not to be taken in: the human resources people saw before them a hard, brittle, uncommunicative woman, her lack of qualifications compounded by her age, her financial requirements, and a difficult character that was incapable of compromise, quick to suspect that she would be exploited, and so very defensive that she seemed aggressive. Without realizing it, she had disqualified herself from the race she was supposed to be running.