Adam Haberberg Page 5

  her tone and the word baby.

  “Yes.”

  “For what reason?”

  “They don't know. Often there's no reason.”

  “You didn't try again?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn't hear that.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And you didn't try with other men?”

  “Yes…”

  What's the point of all this mawkishness, these hushed tones, what's the point of all this miserliness with words? Life is cruel, OK, no point in laying it on thick with a tremulous voice, thinks Adam.

  “That didn't work either?”

  “No …”

  First find your man who wants to give Marie-Thérèse Lyoc a child, Adam says to himself. But no, he thinks at once, at the school gates you can see dozens of Serge Gautherons and Marie-Thérèse Lyocs, the truth is that Lyocs and Gautherons proliferate, you can even, he tells himself, regard Lyocs and Gautherons as prototypical parents, nonentities who marry one another, leaving the school benches behind only to congregate outside the gates, the sidewalks seethe with Lyocs and Gautherons, these modern folk, energetic, jocular, ultra-concerned. Marie-Thérèse is my age, thinks Adam. At forty-seven, Marie-Thérèse Lyoc can say good-bye to that child. Good-bye to that child, thinks Adam, just as I'm saying good-bye to fame, sooner or later, he thinks, we say good-bye to the future, we embark on the time when life no longer makes any demands on us, when we'll no longer be called upon to be fathers, mothers, lovers, writers, beautiful, positively blooming, happy. We sit down on a bench and find ourselves in the poorhouse position. One fine day you sit down and that's it, you couldn't give a damn about being Adam Haberberg or Marie-Thérèse Lyoc, you know very well that it's all the same in the end, like being Alice Canella, what good did it do her to be Alice Canella only to end up obese and broken on the ground. Marie-Thérèse has switched the windshield wipers on to full speed. And what's the purpose, my God, he asks himself, of this expedition in this absurd Jeep, behind zigzags of water and light, toward this Viry-Châtillon, whose very name oppresses me. I see a lot of my godson, says Marie-Thérèse, maybe she's said other things in the meantime that Adam missed, but at least she's resumed a normal tone of voice, he notes. He lives in Soisy-sur-Seine, it's farther away, more to the south, with his mother, who's my best friend, she's an instructor at the control tower at Orly. He's eleven, my little godson, he's called Andreas. Guess what he wants to be later on?

  “Pilot?”

  “Notatali.”

  “Terrorist?”

  “Dentist.”

  “So is he a bit odd, this child?”

  “He's mad about teeth. He's been mad about teeth for years. Now he has bands on his teeth he wants to be an orthodontist. For his birthday we had to find him an articulated skull. But he wanted a real one with uneven teeth. The trouble with the plastic skull is that it has perfect teeth. He wants to do experiments, he wants to take impressions, he wants to make a dental plate. I've done some research, you can get skulls from the cemetery at Montrouge, the grave diggers there sell them on the quiet, you just have to pass yourself off as a student. I don't know if I ought to buy him a real skull. It's a problem. What do you think? Is it healthy for him to have a skeleton in his room at the age of eleven? Especially as he reads books only about vampires and the living dead.”

  “It's healthier than wanting to be a dentist.”

  “I don't think it's good for him to be able to regard the human body as a toy. And I think he should be taught respect for death. It's important for children to have a notion of what's sacred. Speaking personally, I wouldn't want someone to violate my skull so it could end up on a shelf beside a Game Boy, along with a set of dentures. On the other hand, I understand his curiosity, he's a child drawn to the sciences, he wants to handle the material, he wants to study the real thing. He's not satisfied with the plastic skull. Now just look at that, it's terrible, isn't it, as soon as it rains we get into traffic jams. The plastic skull is ideal man, the model. It isn't man. What interests you at the moment, I say to Andreas, is the mechanism, the way things are put together. Man is something you'll have all your life to explore, Andreas. Man's imperfections, you'll have your whole life to correct them. You want to study a jaw that's been used, you want teeth that have chewed—he wants teeth that have chewed— you want mandibles that have moved up and down, but I tell him you forget that behind all that there's someone who's traveled through life. Inside that box, my dear, I tell him, there were dreams and agonies and we don't know where those dreams and agonies have passed on to, what's become of the ferment that was within. When we went to Versailles and Chambord, which you loved—he loves castles, especially Chambord, he loved Chambord on account of the staircases—I tell him, you went into the bedrooms and corridors and great halls and all these rooms were empty, and it could have been boring for a little boy, that succession of empty spaces, without any human trace, but you said to yourself that's where the king slept, that's where he looked out the window and saw that forest, how many times did he walk up these steps, and likewise the courtiers and the soldiers, and you respect these spaces, Andreas, because they've seen what you'll never see, because they housed worlds you'll never know. A real skull, I tell him, is the same, it's not a tool, my dear, it's an abandoned room, it's an enigma.”

  Why me, thinks Adam, why does she tell me all this? The wretched child has plunged into dentistry prior to embarking on full-scale perversion, it's perfectly plain that sooner or later that boy will end up first dismembering his victims and then freezing them, a boy who wants to be an orthodontist at the age of eleven, who wants a skeleton for his birthday and on top of all this, he tells himself, has to endure this flood of moralizing (which is enough to drive anyone insane).

  “Marie-Paule,” he hears, picking up the thread of the argument God knows where (who is Marie-Paule?), “considers the whole thing is between him and me, she has no qualms about a real skull, for her death is death, she couldn't care less about it, she wants to be cremated, if people dig up bones, even to sell them, it doesn't shock her, it's a trade like any other, she says. What is it they're selling, a carcass that would have disintegrated over time, there's no longer any human element in it. You do as you like, she tells me, you're the one Andreas asked for a skull, you gave him a plastic skull that's already cost you a lot, if you have scruples there's no need for you to go any further, Marie-Paule, I tell her, I want to do what's best for him. All the same I find it a bit odd for a mother not to have any scruples about such a delicate matter.

  No?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what is what's best for a child, do we know what's best for a child?”

  “No.”

  “No! But, even so, you do have a slight idea I hope!” she says in consternation.

  “Yes, of course,” Adam laughs stupidly, for he no longer knows what it is he's just said no to. I should have jumped out of the car on the Boulevard Kellermann, he thinks, even at Sceaux or Antony, taken advantage of buying the Veinamitol and escaped before being trapped on the throughway. A succession of mistakes, thoughtless moments of inertia, he thinks, all contributing to predestination. It was written that I should go to Viry-Châtillon, Alexander to Persia, me to Viry. There's not a single person in the world, he tells himself, who knows I'm in this car at this spot. And there's not a single person it would interest, who might say, where's Adam, what's he doing right now, is he happy, sad, alone? Irene has lost interest in me, the children are busy, my friends … have I any? There's no one in the world, he thinks, who might feel a pang at my absence. Irene wants to be cremated, too. So does Goncharki. When the undertakers were laying out his father in the coffin, he'd remained glued to the door. He'd heard a series of alarming and gruesome noises and had found his father in the casket reduced by a good quarter. Being claustrophobic, Goncharki wanted none of that for himself. Compression, imprisonment, vermin to boot. Such was the prospect, so: cremation. Meyer Lansky had ended his day
s in a tiny apartment with no view. A man who'd prided himself on being more powerful than U.S. Steel. What good had being Meyer Lansky done him? Only to end up wandering through the torrid streets, lonely and sick. Whether he was buried in Miami or in Jerusalem, in accordance with his unfulfilled wishes, what difference would it make? So whether he's cremated or his skull ends up amid the toys in a child's bedroom, does that change the color of his life? For years Goncharki had been writing Meyer Lansky's Tomb. A secret celebration, a secret ode to men who don't know how to be loved. Do you still have your parents? Marie-Thérèse asks suddenly.

  “Yes. I still have my parents.”

  “Are they well?”

  Does she know my parents? thinks Adam.

  “Yes, they're well,” he lies.

  “Do you see them?”

  “Not very often. They live in the provinces.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “InLibourne.”

  “Where's that?”

  “Near Bordeaux,” thinking, what's it to her? And also thinking I ought to question her in return, but I don't give a good goddamn about her parents, just as I don't give a damn about her whole life.

  “And you, how about your parents?” he says.

  “My father's still alive. He still lives in Suresnes.”

  “And your mother?”

  “My mother died when I was ten.”

  “Excuse me.”

  “Do your children see them?” Marie-Thérèse resumes.

  “Who?”

  “Your parents.”

  “Not a great deal.”

  “That's a pity.”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because my parents aren't interested.”

  “It's mean to say that.”

  “No.”

  “It's a shame for children not to know their grandparents.”

  “They do know one another.”

  “Not to really know them.”

  “Excuse me, Marie-Thérèse, but what do you know about it? Why all these clichés? What if the grandparents are utter jerks?”

  Marie-Thérèse considers. Then she says, you're exaggerating.

  “Will we be there soon?”

  “Very soon. We'd have got there by now if it hadn't been for those trafficjams. What'd you like to eat? I've got a little piece of beef in the freezer. I could do a little roast of beef with carrots. Or a gratin dish. Or, this is simple but it's my specialty, I could make you a good potato omelette.”

  “An omelette, yes.”

  He says, an omelette, yes, and a little farther on the sign reading VIRY-CHATILLON-FLEURY-MéROGIShangs there. I'm going to eat an omelette in Viry-Châtillon with Marie-Thérèse Lyoc, he thinks. He looks at his hands resting on the box of Veinamitol, hands aged more than the rest of his body, a little swollen, a little inert, but inoffensive hands, hands no one misses, he says to himself. He thinks about his children sprawled in front of the television and feels a faintness coming on, as if he were immensely far away, as if he'd lost times beyond retrieval. He thinks about the boys in their pajamas, beached on the carpet, among overturned toys, fragments of cake, candy wrappings, yogurt cartons, two animals tangled together, watching videos, commercials, and all kinds of hideous, yelling images, pell-mell, totally alone in their own way, he tells himself. And he tells himself the older boy hasn't learned his homework, he tells himself the older boy doesn't take school seriously, and the little one ought to be in bed, he tells himself Maria would do better to tuck him in and tell him a story instead of leaving him to rot in front of the television, which she's watching herself, chewing gum, her ear glued to her cell phone, he tells himself the older boy doesn't use the electric toothbrush he ordered, that the book The Conquest of the New World remains unopened, that the older boy couldn't give a damn about the conquest of the New World, and all these things of the most trivial importance that wreck his life as a man night after night, he thinks, these absurd concerns that in normal times he regards as evidence of his failure, now here, in the Wrangler Jeep, as it plunges down the ramp leading off the throughway, seem to him to constitute the heartrending substance of life itself. I must go back to Paris, he thinks, just as the Belgian brasserie, Leon de Bruxelles, appears out of the middle of nowhere, I must go back at once, Marie-Thérèse, please do a U-turn, go back onto the throughway, I must go back home, I must put my boys to bed, I must wait for my wife Irene, I must make the best of my children and my wife, I'm forty-seven, in a few years' time all that will have gone up in smoke, I haven't time to eat an omelette in Viry-Châtillon, the best is over for me, as it is for you, and the best, you see, soon comes down to nothing, take me home quickly, I'll put on my pajamas, I'll roll into a ball with the children in the double bed, we'll wait for Irene, laughing under the covers, all three of us in the dark, and we'll give her a surprise when she gets home.

  The Jeep runs down a little slope. At the bottom, on a billboard, can be read YOUR APARTMENT IN VIRY.

  Adam closes his eyes. At once a glittering ankle boot appears, motionless in the dark. Adam opens his eyes, reads, WITH PICTURESQUE VIEWS OF THE LAKE,and closes them again. The ankle boot is there, right in the middle, and it's green. Adam opens and closes his eyes several times. The ankle boot's still there, more or less fluorescent. Adam closes first one eye, then the other. No ankle boot. The ankle boot appears only when both eyes are closed. An ankle boot, he notes, that ultimately vanishes, but reappears at the next lowering of the lids. Maybe I'm becoming hysterical, thinks Adam. The way things are going, he thinks, shouldn't I approach Guen directly? Is it best to approach the top man directly, or continue on a semipsychoana-lytical track with the doctor who's treating me? And why should I have to grapple with this dilemma over the treatment, in addition to the illness itself? A mysterious assault has now been added to the phenomenon of dislocation, Doctor, the effects of which have not, by the way, completely disappeared, each time I close my eyes a green and highly luminous ankle boot appears. I say ankle boot, Doctor, but I could as well say sock, in truth it's a kind of medieval shoe, with a long point at the end of it, weren't they known as piked shoes, Doctor? So every time I close my eyes I see a green fluorescent piked shoe in the middle of the darkness. Is this the famous gap in the retina you and Professor Guen hinted at? Could this be the appalling macula hole you and Guen alluded to? You see, Doctor, if the ankle boot had appeared without any preliminary I might not be in this state of panic, but it appeared in the wake of the phenomenon of dislocation, which, you'll remember, had not in itself caused any change to my vision. What alarms me, Doctor, is that there's a logical sequence to this. If my retina's torn, and my feeling is that it is torn, we must admit that the dislocation was the prelude to the tear. We fear the worst and the worst happens. I don't know if you can grasp the significance of this observation. A pain occurs that we call pain or dislocation and instead of it being nothing at all, a nonevent we can take as a basis for hope, which would in some sense be God's back, it's a warning sign. Do you realize, Doctor, how serious it is that there can be no pain without a sequel? I'm circumcised, Doctor, my parents made it their duty to shield me from the laws of nature and I approve of this inheritance, symbolic though it be. So it's all the more difficult for me to concede that my body should be subject to the principle of causality. Still less the whole course of my life. Frankly speaking, the principle of causality revolts me. I put it to you, Doctor, if we suppose that my retina is not torn: what's this medieval ankle boot doing at the center of my vision? You're stumped, Doctor. Ha ha ha! I gather you've not often come across the piked shoe in your books. Ha, ha, ha! What are you laughing at? says Marie Thérèse.

  “Am I laughing?”

  “Yes. We're here.”

  They've stopped in a little parking lot. The turn she's just made into the almost empty site suggests there's a space she always homes in on.

  “Over there you have the Viry-Châtillon lake. It's very well known. People water-ski and sail there.

&n
bsp; There are ducks, swans.”

  “Do you water-ski?”

  “No. I tried one year at Banyuls, I could never get started. That's where I live.”

  Marie-Thérèse points to a low, terraced apartment block that resembles certain vacation homes. There's not much around it, apart from a crane in front of a building under construction and another block set farther back. No more rain and fog. No more floating lights. No more warmth.

  “Marie-Thérèse, take me back to Paris.”

  “Why, for goodness' sake?”

  “Please.”

  “You're going to eat first, then we'll see. Come along.”

  Marie-Thérèse gets out of the car. Adam as well. Marie-Thérèse locks the doors. She says, “That's Grigny over there.”

  “I see.”

  “That's the public housing at Grande Borne.”

  “I see.”

  They stare at an illuminated hillside in the distance. Adam takes a few steps toward the lake. Marie-Thérèse follows him. Then they stop. After a moment Marie-Thérèse says, the area on the Grigny side is not so well looked after, they don't prune the trees, there are McDonald's wrappers. Adam nods. In silence they contemplate the low trees, the little hedges, the motionless water, the birds slipping along in the half-light. They contemplate the lampposts, the low-rise housing zone, the restaurant on the far shore. Marie-Thérèse is contemplating what she sees every day and every night. She's lost her energy, thinks Adam. He sees her in the bleak light, at last he can see her face, a somewhat sunken mouth, dark veins, nothing serious, just the passing of youth. Right, shall we go in? says Marie-Thérèse.

  “So what's it like, that restaurant?”

  “It's a restaurant.”

  “Do you go there sometimes?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  Marie-Thérèse shrugs her shoulders. Adam looks at the restaurant on the far shore. A white building with a green sign, the same green as the ankle boot, he thinks, and a balcony. Suppose we go there, he says.

  “Oh no,” she laughs.