hung onto it. Balance: zero. I could have spent my life next to him without anything ever happening to us. I would have had an eventless life, a lifeless event. Sometimes sadness, sly and insidious, would creep into my chest, like a needle probing my ribs. I wasn’t happy and yet I wasn’t looking for happiness.
“How does the idea of aging strike you?”
“That’s in the survey?” She is surprised.
“No.”
“I’m scared of it, of course.”
“And death?”
“I don’t think about it.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to die.”
“I think about it all the time,” I say.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to die.”
“We can’t escape it.”
“That’s why I think about it.”
“It doesn’t help.”
“I don’t think of why, but of how. I worry about the way I’ll die. I think of suffering.”
“I’d like to go quickly,” she declares. “I hope to feel nothing.”
“I’m mostly scared of violence. I’m scared I’ll be murdered.”
“Oh. But why? Do you lead such a dangerous life?” “All lives are dangerous. I’m scared of the violence of life.”
“And you travel alone!”
“Violence is everywhere. Who can protect us?”
“Stop! I’ll start to get scared too!”
“I want to die in a bed all in white, old and venerable, surrounded by love. I want my children and grandchildren to bend over to capture my last words.”
“I don’t want to die of AIDS,” she says.
“Or burn to death.”
“Or drown.”
“Or die in an earthquake or an explosion. Or buried under rubble.”
“Nor of hunger or thirst,” she continues.
“Not in war. Not in a concentration camp.”
“Not of cold.”
“Not in a plane crash.”
“Don’t even mention it! You’re asking for trouble.”
“Not devoured by a lion, or squeezed to death and swallowed by a boa.”
“How awful!”
“Not tortured, mutilated, my body hacked to pieces, buried in the woods, thrown in a green plastic bag at the end of a dead-end street.”
These images would come to me when I watched the news on television. Philippe said: “You’re obsessed with morbidity, poor darling.” I protested: “What do you think? I do it on purpose? You heard the news, the same as I, you read the newspaper, right? You spend your life reading the newspaper. Does it leave you indifferent?” He exploded: “What’s gotten into you? I’m not the one assassinating children!” He explained: “Whether I’m indifferent, as you say, or whether I cry doesn’t change the facts.” He went on: “It’s as if you’re making me responsible.” And I answered yes, we are all responsible. But I didn’t know in what way.
When he’d see me get depressed as I read about atrocities, he’d shake his head, dejected. He’d put his arm around my shoulders. To console me, he also told me it’s always like that, as well you know, always the same thing, in every century, in every country of the world, no one is safe, it’s always war in the twisted brains of some people. You just have to go on living. “As if nothing happened?” No, his words didn’t console me. He continued: “You’re too sensitive, poor darling. You have to take care of yourself.” “To shield me, you mean?” “I mean don’t let yourself get dragged down by morbidity.” But I kept falling into it like mad, losing my footing, sliding downward. He turned off the television, took the paper out of my hands. “Come now, come to bed. You’re falling over in exhaustion. Your nerves are shot.” The next morning, bouquet in hand, and that apologetic smile. He felt he had caused me pain. More than anything he wanted to avoid making me suffer. My despair spilled onto him. He took me to a vegetarian restaurant. I put flowers on the table. We stopped talking about it.
In the days, I would spend long hours walking through the streets; I’d slink into the metro, emerge somewhere in the city and walk again, repeating to myself that no, I couldn’t go on like this, translating sentimental novels, when life is so dark and children are being murdered, could not go on holding up a macho man ideal, smiling sardonically to readers while macho men beat and strangle their women, stab and shoot them, abandon their tortured bodies in the underbrush. It’s there, in the newspaper every day an item appears that journalists call another family drama, the thirteenth of the year in the urban community. In describing macho men, I became an accomplice; this was how I became responsible. I passed in front of anonymous dwellings, tall apartment buildings that rose, all alike, along the sidewalks, and told myself it was perhaps behind one of those innocuous-looking facades that the horror was hidden. The city is full of those places that appear to be oases and are really pockets of despair.
“Why talk about it?” Claudine asks in an alarmed voice.
“You’re right, why? Let’s talk about love instead. Let’s talk about Spain. About the sea.”
“I’ve only been to the Atlantic,” she says. “The eastern coast of the United States, the Maritimes. And the Caribbean.”
“So turquoise, the Caribbean. The Mediterranean is mostly blue. It suggests something more… maternal. It always moves me. It’s so old.”
“I thought all seas were the same age.”
“The age of the planet. But it’s as if the Mediterranean has cradled humanity for a longer time than the others. Spain is old, too.”
“Even the name makes me dream.”
“The music, the matadors, the flamboyant colours. As a child I liked to imagine myself as Spanish.”
“I was more ordinary. I dreamed I’d meet Prince Charming, that we’d get married and have a flock of children.”
“And?”
“And no prince, I had to reconcile myself. But a part of my dream came true: I have a daughter.”
I avert my eyes. They are filled with tears. Too much gin.
“She’s twenty-one,” she continues. “I would have liked her to come with me. But she couldn’t miss three weeks of university classes… She’s doing her Master’s in psychology. Had we been able to predict Florent’s accident,
