Hippolyte was concerned. You seldom saw that kind of aggressive character in this neighborhood. What did he have against him?
He bent over again, puzzled, more used to being transparent than to being eyed venomously. He knew he didn’t exist for most of the people who lived on this square—those two teenagers, for example, who’d been sitting on a bench and squabbling for the last fifteen minutes. But he didn’t resent those who were indifferent to him: why on earth would they be interested in a municipal employee—and not a very clever municipal employee at that? It was an indifference he felt was justified, but that passerby’s furious glare had thrown him.
Just then, he became aware of yet more disapproval on his left. The aristocrat from Number 4, the one with perfect children, an SUV, the particle “de” in front of his surname, and a double-barreled first name, was also staring at him, looking fierce and sullen.
Worried, Hippolyte checked there was no trace of dirt or blood to provoke criticism or make his appearance indecent . . . No. What, then?
The mixed-race lawyer who had gotten so much TV coverage during the Mehdi Martin case crossed the square at a nimble pace. He didn’t notice either Germain or Hippolyte.
This reassured Hippolyte. He decided that he had done nothing wrong and calmly started raking the paths.
A yellow envelope lay beneath the largest tree. He picked it up. His first name was written on it: Hippolyte.
Who’s been thinking of me? His first thought was that one of the local residents had slipped him a note as a thank you, as sometimes happened.
He opened it and read the message:
Just a note to tell you I love you. Signed: You know who.
Hippolyte turned scarlet.
He knew who the letter was from. No doubt whatsoever. He looked up and caught the woman looking at him, partly hidden behind the curtain. The fact that she withdrew into the shadows when she noticed he had seen her was proof.
Hippolyte blushed a second time and took a deep breath of the spring air.
He had never hoped that such a thing might be possible, never believed that his feelings would be returned by her. What a wonderful morning! Life was really spoiling him.
“Germain, I have an errand to run, I’ll be back.”
The dwarf nodded.
Hippolyte grabbed a towel from his bag, wiped the sweat off his torso, then covered it with a spotlessly white T-shirt.
He walked resolutely to the florist’s, bought a bunch of plump, pink peonies from Orion, then went into Number 13 and resolutely climbed the stairs until he reached the door of the woman he desired.
PART TWO
MAGNIFICAT
PRELUDE
The presence of parrots on Place d’Arezzo was puzzling.
How did these birds from hot countries come to be on our cold continent? Why had this tropical jungle taken root in the heart of the city? By what strange madness were savage cries, rutting screams, wild debaucheries, raw, honest, barbaric colors stirring the gloomy calm of the capital of Europe?
Only the children here thought the presence of parrots and parakeets was normal, but as is well known, the weakness—and strength—of young minds is that they accept everything.
Adults tried to explain this incongruity with a legend.
Five decades earlier, at Number 9, the town house then occupied by the Brazilian consul, a telegram informed the diplomat that he was to return to Rio urgently. Forced to travel by air rather than by sea, he had had to keep his baggage to a minimum and realized that it was impossible to take his bird collection. Unable to find someone to take in his precious specimens, he had therefore, with a heavy heart, on the morning of his departure, opened the cages and restored the birds to the sky from the high windows of his living room. Unaccustomed to long flights, the multicolored mass of parrots, cockatoos, conures, macaws, parakeets, lorikeets, cockatiels, and kakarikis had seen it as wasted effort to venture beyond the nearest trees, and had set up home on Place d’Arezzo.
And so as they trod the sidewalks, visitors felt as if they were entering some kind of crazy movie, in which, through a bizarre superimposition, the images came from civilization, the soundtrack from nature.
1
When Patricia had opened the door and seen Hippolyte standing on the landing, tall and broad and smiling happily, a spray of peonies in his arms, she had been speechless.
He had proffered the bouquet. “For you.”
She had looked at the flowers, unable to accept them, using them as a wall between them.
Seeing her reticence, he had suddenly turned shy. “Don’t you want them?”
Guessing from the anxiety on his regular, handsome features that he might leave, Patricia had surprised herself by taking the gift. Touched, he had sighed, a little calmer now.
“Why?”
Patricia hadn’t recognized her own voice in that stifled question.
“Because I love you,” he had said, as if it was a self-evident fact.
Patricia had flailed her arms in the air and opened her eyes and mouth wide, wanting to run away . . . and yet to stay.
“I’ve loved you for three years,” he had stammered.
Looking around her for help, Patricia had wondered when her daughter would be back, if she should call the police, why she was wearing this hostess gown that made her hips look wider, and when she would slam the door shut. In a panic, she had felt her legs give way.
But before she could swoon, she had heard a thump: the colossus had fainted and fallen to the floor, and was now lying at her feet.
Ever since that day, Patricia had changed. Unable to stop thinking about Hippolyte, she led a triple life.
First, she regularly met him at five o’clock in a café in the Marolles, a working-class neighborhood where nobody would recognize her. They would chat, she would let herself be warmed by his caressing gaze, and their hands would sometimes brush against each other; she was ecstatic with happiness.
Second, she assumed her usual role of mother to the surly Albane, from whom she kept her flirtation a secret.
And third, she spent her remaining hours slimming. Since she knew that she would not be able to resist Hippolyte’s advances for very long, her physical transformation had become almost an obsession: she had to do away with the obese cow she saw in the mirror. Now that a stunning man wanted her, she hated her body; if someone had opened the doors of an operating room to her, she would have rushed in to have her fat pumped out, her hip bones sawed off, and her stomach reduced to the size of a quail’s egg by having several yards of intestine removed while her belly was surgically tightened. In the absence of such a radical solution, she mistreated herself. Instead of embarking on a diet, she starved herself, making do with two green apples and half a gallon of mineral water a day. Rather than gradually taking up a sport, she forced herself to walk for miles and pulled out from under her bed exercise gadgets she had ordered over the phone, shamelessly overrunning the apartment with her bum and tum appliances, her weights, her muscle-building kits, and various other instruments of torture.
Convinced that she was the cause of this revolution, Albane hadn’t protested. She was delighted to have this power over her mother, whom she now only ever saw dressed in a sweat suit.
No sooner was she alone than Patricia would raise her pain threshold by one notch. She would plug electrodes to the parts that needed toning and give herself electric shocks, suffering until she screamed. Many times, panting with exhaustion, her eyes bloodshot, her face bathed in tears, she had gone to the bathroom and said to the mirror, which played the part of Hippolyte, “You see what I’m doing, my love, don’t you?”
But by the time she got to the café, she had removed all trace of her efforts, kept silent about her self-inflicted martyrdom, and recovered her trademark confidence and lightheartedness. Besides—and this was a true miracle—all her a
ches and pains would disappear as soon as Hippolyte was there.
She liked everything about the man: his kindness, his gentleness, his easygoing conversation. Only his physical perfection threw her into a panic. Patricia regretted that she was no longer twenty; partly because at twenty, she had actually been twenty—curvy, supple, with ideal proportions—but especially because she would not have judged herself. What is damaged by time is not the body but our confidence in it; we have discovered that other people’s feet, legs, shoulders, and buttocks can be different than ours; we have succumbed to the disease of making comparisons, and we have learned, through a series of brutal revelations, that we, too, have changed. Since the glory days of her twenties, Patricia had known nothing but failure. To now present her damaged, neglected body to the exemplary Hippolyte seemed to her an indecent aberration.
Still, a confrontation was imminent . . . Every day, he expressed his desire for her with greater fervor; every day, Patricia’s defenses crumbled a little more; soon, they would kiss, then progress to bed, a prospect both attractive and terrifying.
She was bracing herself for it with this one obsession: she had to be prepared.
One afternoon, double-locked in the bathroom, she dyed her pubic hair auburn. It made her weep to have to resort to such deception: she would forever need to correct herself, disguise herself, misrepresent herself. Poor Hippolyte would be holding an impostor in his arms.
At about six, while sipping her tea, she nearly asked, “So what is it you see in me?” This question would have led to her pouring out her complexes, listing her defects, so she desisted. Let Hippolyte build his illusions, she wouldn’t attempt to knock them down. If he likes hippos, then it’s not up to the queen of hippopotami to discourage him.
And so she kept everything vague. When her suitor spoke to her as if she was a gorgeous woman, his eyes would glow with the flame of desire, and so she would lower hers and blush, like an odalisque accustomed to having such an effect. The other thing she kept vague about was the anonymous letters: when she had realized that he had plucked up the courage to approach her only after he thought the message was from her, she neither contradicted him nor established the truth, and she neglected to mention that she had received an identical note.
Hippolyte carried the note on him, his “most precious possession,” he had admitted to her. Patricia, on the other hand, had concealed hers in Ovid’s Art of Love, of which she owned an expensive edition with artist’s prints. Some evenings, when Albane was in bed, she would look at the yellow sheet of paper, stroke it with a respect verging on the sacred, almost believing that it had been sent to her by Hippolyte. What did it matter? Whoever it came from, that message had brought them together.
She often recalled the moment when she had had to bring Hippolyte around after he had fainted on her doorstep: that scene, more than any other word or action, had conquered her. Because he lay there, inert, she had taken him in her arms, lifted his heavy head, stroked his bushy hair, felt the texture of his muscles under the T-shirt, and discovered—to her astonishment—the surprising softness of his skin. Life had given her a gift: she could touch the man she had long desired without his knowledge. For a fleeting moment, she’d had the feeling she was indulging in a forbidden act. Yet he had agreed to it, his body had abandoned itself to hers; in fact, his body had needed hers.
When he had opened his eyes again, he had smiled at first, before embarrassment had overwhelmed him.
“I’m sorry. I—”
“No problem. I’m here.”
They had looked at each other. At that moment, Patricia had imagined that she could love a man like this for a long time, take care of him, and that one day he would die in her arms. In a second, she had accepted all that would come from him. Why distrust a lover who was sensitive to the point of swooning from emotion, at once a colossus and a child? She was seduced by both his frailty and his strength, and more still . . . It was during that minute that their common destiny was sealed: before, she had desired him; now, she loved him.
On the Thursday, Albane announced that she was planning to go to a party in Knokke-le-Zoute with Quentin on Saturday.
“Quentin?” Patricia asked.
“Yes, Quentin, I’ve mentioned him to you a hundred times. We’ve been together for four weeks.”
She had a surly expression on her face as she reminded her of this essential truth. Much to her surprise, her mother rushed to her and kissed her.
“I’m so glad, my darling.”
Touched, Albane didn’t resist.
“Four weeks, that’s wonderful,” Patricia said. “Four weeks, that’s . . . amazing!”
Patricia went back to her exercise bike, all the while hatching a plan: if Albane didn’t come back on Saturday night, maybe she could invite Hippolyte? And maybe then . . .
Turning red, she beat her own speed record. This had to be handled carefully. The roles of mother and daughter had been reversed: the adult, like a teenager, was concealing her affairs of the heart and trying craftily to rid herself of an inhibiting presence.
“Albane,” she said that very evening, “whose house is the party in on Saturday night?”
“It’s at Zoë’s, in Knokke-le-Zoute.”
“That’s a long way. Who’ll bring you back?”
“Servane.”
“What a shame you’ll have to leave the party early. Why not sleep over at your Aunt Mathilde’s?”
“Mathilde’s?”
“Why not? You’ve done it many times before.”
“Not after a party.”
“An even better reason: you’ll be drinking and dancing and by midnight you’ll be tired. Not a good idea to sit in a car for an hour.”
Albane gave it some thought, smiled, and said, with surprise in her voice, “You’re a really cool mom . . . ”
“I trust my little girl, and I want her to be happy. Shall I call Mathilde?”
“No, Mom, no sweat, I’ll take care of it. I’ll just tell her you’re OK with it.” Still somewhat disconcerted, she added, with a puckering of her nose, “Er . . . thanks.”
So the following day, Patricia invited Hippolyte for dinner on the Saturday. He quivered, knowing where the evening might lead.
“I’m going to make a fool of myself again, Patricia.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m going to be so happy, I might pass out again.”
She grabbed his hand, not daring to say that nothing would upset her more. That day, they found it hard to continue their conversation. Their thoughts were already on that momentous evening.
It will either be the beginning or the end, Patricia kept telling herself on her way home. Either he’ll realize I’m a monster, or luck is on my side and he won’t.
At dinner, Albane was concerned by the fact that her mother wasn’t eating the food she had prepared. “Mom, if you don’t eat you’ll collapse.”
“Hmm?”
“If you don’t eat properly, you could lose your hair and your teeth.”
Patricia dismissed the remark with a loud laugh, but that night she dreamed her teeth were coming loose as she smiled at Hippolyte, a nightmare that woke her up several times.
The Saturday was exhausting. She got rid of her daughter in the morning by giving her money to buy clothes and go to the movies with her friends before setting off for Knokke-le-Zoute, then tidied up her apartment as if the police were coming to search it. She went to the trouble of taking her gym equipment down to the basement. It would have been ridiculous to leave it on display, like showing him a photograph that emphasized all her flaws.
Then she prepared a special meal. She felt a lot more confident on that front, since she knew she was a good cook.
Finally, she disappeared into the bathroom, washed several times, dried herself, put cream on, did her hair, then undid it, started again, aware she
was overdoing it yet unable to stop herself. Then she changed several times, horrified at the clothes available in her wardrobe, and decided on a crimson dress.
Red. Isn’t that a bit much?
Never mind. The advantage of a bright color was that it dazzled the eye, so that the shape underneath wouldn’t show.
In her room, she arranged three fragrant candles, and placed tulle cloths over the bedside lamps to soften the light and create a pleasant, intimate, almost clandestine atmosphere, which also had the advantage of preserving modesty.
She jumped when the doorbell rang.
Hippolyte was there at the door, holding a bunch of flowers, and looking very touching in a dark, simple but elegant suit.
“It’s my birthday!” she exclaimed, comically.
“Really?”
“No, I’m joking . . . ”
“I hope it’ll be our anniversary someday.”
He said this in such an earnest, intense tone that Patricia stood there rooted to the spot.
He slowly put the flowers on the small table in the hallway and then, without the slightest hesitation, came up to her, took her in his arms, and kissed her on the mouth.
The evening did not go quite as planned. Instead of going into the living room to chat, then eating the delicious food she had prepared, they went straight to the bedroom.
He undressed her slowly, kissing every inch of her skin as he uncovered her with his fingers. Patricia quivered, partly because his silky lips gave her pleasure, and partly because she knew that, as long as he held her so close, he couldn’t see her.
Several times, she shook so much she almost brought everything to a halt. Each time, he reassured her with a long kiss, then carried on exploring, like the devout follower of a totemic cult.