up?”
“He wakes up. You can pick him up. Or let him cry.”
Her mother regarded her daughter’s broad rump with satisfaction. Simone was no longer a slim-hipped wraith floating through life. Her thickened hips were ballast, weighing her down, steadying her passage.
Her mother blamed her daughter’s restlessness on the scirocco, the hot wind that began in the heart of Africa, swept across the Sahara and the Mediterranean, bending the heads of the royal palms along the Boulevard du Littoral in Cap d’Antibes so they resembled a line of giraffes with necks curved downwards to munch on low leaves.
Simone had to shove hard against the wind to open the door. A determined foe, the wind caught her skirts of pale blue, threatening to lift them up over her head. Simone, grabbing her skirt, let go of the door, which slammed with a resounding crack, echoing throughout the house.
Later, there will be a row:
—Just because you got up on the wrong side of the bed, you needn’t slam the door and give us all headaches.
—I didn’t slam it. Why must you always think the worst of me?
The cat, lurking at the corner of the house, startled by the sound, leapt. The cat was in love with Simone, with her smell of breast milk and yeast, with her disregard for the gifts of sparrows and field mice left for her on the stone doorstep every morning. The cat was not a pet, it had simply taken up residence in the barn. A good mouser, as its belly gave evidence.
Simone’s frock was not just out of fashion but ungainly. Sick of the maternity chemise in which she’d lumbered through the last months of pregnancy, the months since Marcel’s birth, but unable to fit into her regular clothes, she’d rummaged through the closet of her old bedroom, and pulled out this dress, which had belonged to her dead sister Elise, moving the buttons over on the sleeves, hitching up the excess fabric with its belt. The sleeves flopped about her arms like deflated balloons, the skirts worked their way free of the sash, threatening to trip her up, so her locomotion was almost Chaplinesque: she took a few steps, then hitched the skirt up on the left side, a few more steps, then gave a yank to the right. It was so hot she had dispensed with undergarments, save for the fortified nursing brassiere.
Marcel, cast out of the nirvana of sleep by the door’s bang, mewled twice and then drew in a deep breath, preparing to let loose with a wail.
Simone, pausing at the back door, scanned the road for the bicycle of the postman, M. duPont. He was a kilometer distant, pausing at the crest of a hill, ready to savor the moment when gravity would reverse its effects, no longer a force to be struggled against but one which would send him gliding down.
He will have a letter for me, Simone told herself. She had finally, after laboring over many drafts, told her husband, Luc, how the birth of their son had shaken the foundations of her being. She could not bring herself to write, My cunt throbs when Marcel nurses, while my mind is filled with unwholesome fantasies. I have come close to stimulating myself for relief while nursing. I am becoming a monster. You must come to me. Or let me come back to you, even if there are fevers in Turkey that put our child’s life at risk. Instead, she had written: “I fear for my emotional balance. I cannot tell you how desperately I long for you, need to be with you.”
Jacques Melville—along with his companion Albert—was trudging along the cobblestone streets of Juan-les-Pins, both men with heads bent down against the wind, their trousers flapping against the rails of their bones, Albert describing the charms of his boyhood summers chez Vidal. They did not look at the recently erected cenotaph listing the names of the Great War dead, those whose bones lay jumbled with the remains of friend and foe in the mass graves of Verdun and Ypres.
“Just promise me,” Jacques raised his head, “that we won’t sing troubadour ballads in the parlor after dinner.”
“Afraid so, old chap,” the last two words in English.
Marcel wailed. M. duPont leaned back as he coasted downhill and allowed the wind to dry his sweaty brow and neck. Marcel’s cry roused Simone from her reverie. She lifted her skirt in her hand, pretending—to no one save herself—not to have heard her son’s wail, and walked down the path. Jacques shrugged his rucksack more firmly onto his back, a soldier headed into battle.
Jacques had been gadding about France with his university chum Albert for nearly a month. The two of them were bound for the penultimate stop on their journey. They were sick of living out of their rucksacks, of drinking weak coffee served by frugal landladies, of the musty scent from their socks, never quite clean after having been washed in cold water sinks of hostels, of their aching feet. Jacques, for his part, was also sick of Albert. (Albert will never grow tired of Jacques. Forty years later he will still be dining out on tales of this ramble: Ah, let me tell you a story about living off the fat of the land. It was years ago, decades, I was traveling with my friend Jacques—Jacques Melville—and here he will pause to let that name sink in—and we came upon a lemon tree, unfortunately surrounded by a stone wall some three meters high…) Albert, aware that Jacques—never lighthearted—was becoming more and more phlegmatic, kept attempting to josh him out of his mood, although as Albert grew more antic, Jacques became more taciturn. Albert was whistling snatches from tunes—It’s a Long Way to Tipperary, The Internationale—holding up his hand to show the fur of sand adhering to his sweaty palm, saying, “Just think, yesterday these grains of sand might have been under the heel of a Bedouin’s camel in the Sahara.” He rabbited on about the effects of the scirocco on the psyche: “Those teetering on the brink of insanity”—illustrating by pretending to walk a tightrope, spreading his arms, then staggering—“may fall over the edge, while for those like you and me,” Albert continued, “it merely heats up the brain a bit, as a glass of absinthe might, bringing a pleasurable touch of insanity—”
“Those like myself, at any rate.” Jacques winked. “After dinner, I shall plead a headache, and excuse myself from the forced after-supper gaiety.”
“You’re such an old stick.”
“I can’t help it,” Jacques said, smiling for the first time since they disembarked from the train. “I was born this way. Most infants wail at birth. My mother says I stared at her as if to say, ‘Why have you brought me here?’”
The hot wind had whipped up Albert’s already curly hair, making it look like spun sugar. When they started on this journey, Albert had a cap in his possession, but it had long since disappeared. He resembled a whirling dervish, but instead of being surrounded by vast skirts, he was surrounded by the ghosts of lost objects: undershorts left to dry on the railings of balconies in pensiones and forgotten there, books left behind on the seats of second-class compartments of railway cars, combs, socks.
M. Dupont, rolling down the hill, his mail bag slung across his chest, saw the tiny figure of Simone starting down the path, and thought: What a devoted wife! M. Dupont didn’t trumpet about his opinions regarding Simone’s faithfulness, as he later kept to himself the fact that she was receiving, in addition to the twice-weekly letters in her husband’s ornate hand, other letters, also written in a masculine hand, with the name J. MELVILLE in the upper corner and a Paris return address. M. Dupont hoarded his secrets with a sense that he had a pile of riches locked within him. A secret told is one no more, and he did not want
