it impossible to breathe, with each passing day the illness was overwhelming our life. When I came in from running chores outside, it was like entering a dark cellar where I was constantly cold, with a chill that nothing could remedy, so much so towards the end that when I slept alongside Lucien, it seemed as if his body were sucking up all the heat my body might have managed to purloin elsewhere.
His illness was first diagnosed in the spring of 1988; it ate away at him for seventeen months and carried him off just before Christmas. The elder Madame Meurisse organised a collection from among the inhabitants of the building, and a fine wreath of flowers was delivered to my lodge, bound with a ribbon that bore no text. She alone came to the funeral. She was a cold, stiff, pious woman, but there was something sincere about her austere and rather abrupt manners, and when she died, a year after Lucien, I said to myself that she had been a good woman and that I would miss her, although we had scarcely exchanged two words in fifteen years.
‘She made her daughter-in-law miserable right up to the end. May she rest in peace, she was a saintly woman,’ said Manuela – who professes a truly epic hatred for the younger Madame Meurisse – by way of a funeral oration.
Thus with the exception of Cornélia Meurisse, with her little veils and rosaries, Lucien’s illness did not strike anyone as being worthy of interest. To rich people it must seem that the ordinary little people – perhaps because their lives are more impoverished, deprived of the oxygen of money and savoir-faire – experience human emotions with less intensity and greater indifference. Since we were concierges, it was a given that death, for us, must be a matter of course, whereas for our privileged neighbours it carried all the weight of injustice and drama. The death of a concierge leaves a slight indentation on everyday life, belongs to a biological certainty that has nothing tragic about it and, for the apartment owners who encountered him every day on the stairs or at the door to our lodge, Lucien was a nonentity who was merely returning to a nothingness from which he had never fully emerged, a creature who, because he had lived only half a life, with neither luxury nor artifice, must at the moment of his death have felt no more than half a shudder of revolt. The fact that we might be going through hell like any other human being, or that our hearts might be filling with rage as Lucien’s suffering ravaged our lives, or that we might be slowly going to pieces inside, in the torment of fear and horror that death inspires in everyone, did not cross the mind of anyone on these premises.
One morning three weeks before that Christmas, I had just come in from shopping with a bag filled with turnips and lung for the cat, and there was Lucien dressed and ready to go out. He had even knotted his scarf and was standing there waiting for me. After weeks of witnessing my husband’s agony as, drained of all strength and enveloped in a terrifying pallor, he would hobble from the bedroom to the kitchen; after weeks of seeing him wear nothing other than a pair of pyjamas that looked the very uniform of demise, and now to find him with his eyes shining and a mischievous expression on his face, the collar of his winter coat turned right up to his peculiarly pink cheeks: I very nearly collapsed.
‘Lucien!’ I exclaimed, and I was about to go to hold him up, sit him down, undress him and I don’t know what else, everything that the illness had taught me in the way of unfamiliar gestures, which had become of late the only ones I knew how to make. I was about to put my bag down and embrace him, hold him close to me, carry him, all those things once more, when, breathless and feeling a strange flutter of expansion in my heart, I stopped in my tracks.
‘We’ll just make it,’ said Lucien, ‘the next showing is at one.’
In the heat of the cinema, on the verge of tears, happier than I had ever been, I was holding the faint warmth of his hand for the first time in months. I knew that an unexpected surge of energy had roused him from his bed, given him the strength to get dressed and the urge to go out, the desire for us to share a conjugal pleasure one more time – and I knew, too, that this was the sign that there was not much time left, a state of grace before the end. But that did not matter to me, I just wanted to make the most of it, of these moments stolen from the burden of illness, moments with his warm hand in mine and a shudder of pleasure going through both of us because, thank heavens, it was a film we could share and delight in equally.
I think he died right after that. His body held on for three more weeks, but his mind departed at the end of the film, because he knew it was better that way, because he had said farewell to me in the darkened cinema. There were no poignant regrets, because he had found peace this way; he had placed his trust in what we had said to each other without any need for words, while we watched, together, the bright screen where a story was being told.
And I accepted it.
The Hunt for Red October is the film of our last embrace. For anyone who wants to understand the art of storytelling, this film should suffice; one wonders why universities persist in teaching narrative principles on the basis of Propp, Greimas or other such punishing curricula, instead of investing in a projection room. Premise, plot, protagonists, adventures, quest, heroes and other stimulants: all you need is Sean Connery in the uniform of a Russian submarine officer and a few well-placed aircraft carriers.
As I was saying, this morning on France Inter Radio I learned that this contamination of my aspiration to high culture by my penchant for lower forms of culture does not necessarily represent the indelible mark of my lowly origins or of my solitary striving for enlightenment but is, rather, a contemporary characteristic of the dominant intellectual class. How did I come to know this? From the mouth of a sociologist, and I would have loved to have known if he himself would have loved to have known that a concierge in Scholl clogs had just made him into a holy icon. As part of a study on the evolution of the cultural practices of intellectuals who had once been immersed in highbrow culture from dawn to dusk but who were now mainstays of syncretism in whom the boundaries between high and low culture were irreversibly blurred, my sociologist described a classics professor who, once upon a time, would have listened to Bach, read Mauriac, and watched art-house films, but nowadays listened to Handel and MC Solaar, read Flaubert and John Le Carré, went to see Visconti and the latest Die Hard, and ate hamburgers at lunch and sashimi in the evening.
How distressing to stumble on a dominant social habitus, just when one was convinced of one’s own uniqueness in the matter! Distressing, and perhaps even a bit annoying. The fact that, in spite of my confinement in a lodge that conforms in every way to what is expected, in spite of an isolation that should have protected me from the imperfections of the masses, in spite of those shameful years in my forties when I was utterly ignorant of the changes in the vast world to which I am confined; the fact that I, Renée, fifty-four years old, concierge and autodidact, am witness to the same changes that are animating the present-day elite – the little Pallières in their exclusive schools who read Marx then go off in gangs to watch Terminator, or the little Badoises who study law at Assas and sob into their Kleenex at Notting Hill – is a shock from which I can scarcely recover. And it is patently clear, for those who pay attention to chronology, that I am not the one who is aping these youngsters but, rather, in my eclectic practices, I am well ahead of them.
Renée, prophet of the contemporary elite.
‘And well, why not,’ I thought, removing the cat’s slice of calves’ liver from my shopping bag, and from beneath that, carefully wrapped in an unmarked sheet of plastic, two little fillets of red mullet which I intend to marinate then cook in lemon juice and coriander.
And this is when it all started.
Care
For plants
For children
There’s
