Victor moved his eyes away from his forearm and took a more thorough look around the room. Since he was a child, he had seen so many places like this one, painted in bright colors, lit by fluorescent lights, furnished with white closets and cork noticeboards with cheerful postcards from patients to the medical staff pinned to them. Paradoxically he felt at home in these dens of treatment because they had been the only points of stability in his life during the years when he had followed his father from one misbegotten venture to another. He found hospitals reassuring. He loved the smooth linoleum floors, the waiting rooms with their vases of plastic flowers, the low tables covered in ancient magazines, the smell of disinfectant, the sound of wooden-soled shoes. He was particularly fond of the all-pervading femaleness of the place. Deprived of his mother at an early age, he had seen the nurses, auxiliaries, psychologists, and social workers as the women in his life.
“That’s done,” the nurse said, pressing a cotton wool pad to the vein. “You can see Dr. Morin now.”
He thanked the two women and headed for the cubicles where the medical consultations took place.
Professor Morin, a little man with coal-black eyebrows and a permanent smile on his garnet-colored lips, asked him to sit down. “Good news, Victor: your results are excellent. Although the virus is still present, it’s stopped reproducing. We’ve managed to trap it in spite of its many mutations. It may not have disappeared, but we’ve attacked it so much, it’s stunned.” The doctor was as excited as if he was playing a video game. “This diminution of the virus in your body is more important to me than your immune defenses, which are stable anyway, and at a sufficient level. Your triglyceride level is good. Your liver’s perfect. No cholesterol.” He was rubbing his hands.
Victor knew that the doctor was a good, brilliant man, devoted to treating people, but he couldn’t resist a dig. “So you’re telling me that I’m a sick man in perfect health?”
The doctor gave him a kindly look. “For as long as we’re unable to eliminate the AIDS virus, we’ll make every effort to allow you to live with it. It’s not a total victory, only half a victory, but it’ll ensure that you can lead a more or less normal life.”
“It’s the ‘more or less’ bit I’m tired of.”
“What is it you’re feeling? Are you getting side effects? Are you unable to tolerate the treatment anymore?”
“No, I can tolerate it.”
“You just can’t stand taking it anymore?”
“No, that’s not it either.”
“Then tell me what it is.”
How could you explain something obvious? Infected with AIDS in his mother’s womb, Victor had been an HIV-positive baby, an HIV-positive child, and an HIV-positive teenager. Although, thanks to medical progress, he had become an HIV-positive adult, the earlier training hadn’t helped: whenever he approached a woman, he suffered worse than ever. Of course, he did make love using condoms, but he had discovered that lovers are quick to forget all about caution and start flirting with danger. As soon as that kind of passionate intimacy arose, Victor was horrified. He was too honest to lie, or conceal his condition, so he would disclose his illness, which was tantamount to saying, “I’m not your future. We’ll never be able to do without a rubber barrier between us. You’ll be constantly afraid and so will I. And I’ll never be the father of your children.” He had put a stop to so many relationships that had begun well that he had ended up pushing girls away before the affair even started. Anything possible became impossible. At the age of twenty, he had shut himself off from love.
“I’m rotten inside, so my life is rotten. I can’t commit anymore.”
“Are you in love?”
Victor looked up, surprised by the relevance of the question. Yes, he was in love with Oxana, he hadn’t been able to resist that feeling, and they had been having sex for the last few days. “I keep wondering when I’ll have the courage to leave her.”
“Before you get to that point, tell her you’re HIV-positive.”
“What’s the point? She’ll leave. I’d rather get in first.”
“Is it a matter of pride?”
“It’s so as not to be hurt. And I don’t want to be seen that way.”
“What way?”
“As a sick person.”
“There’s no dishonor in being sick. Just as there’s no merit in having good health. If your mother was still alive, would you make her ashamed of having caught a virus?”
“No.”
“Do you think your girlfriend will blame you for having caught the same virus while you were just an embryo?”
“All right, so ‘shame’ isn’t the right word. But she’ll dump me.”
“How do you know that?”
“From experience.”
“You’re talking about the past. This is the future.”
“Same thing.”
“Prove it to me.”
Victor sat there open mouthed. Dr. Morin had never before ventured beyond clinical results.
“I insist. Prove to me she’s unable to value you for what you are. Prove to me that your chronic condition will suddenly make her think of you as ugly, stupid, nasty, a pariah. Prove to me that love doesn’t exist.”
Victor stood up and slammed his fist on the desk. “Do you enjoy this? Coming out with all these beautiful words and noble feelings? Great fun, isn’t it?” He turned to the wall, kicked it, and struck it with the flat of his hands, over and over, ever more violently, unable to calm down. Then, exhausted, his lips quivering with anger, he repeated the doctor’s words, “Prove to me that love doesn’t exist! Bullshit! Easy to say when you aren’t sick!”
“How do you know?”
“What?”
“That I’m not sick.”
The answer stopped Victor in his tracks. He hesitated, his hand raised in midair, swayed, tried to keep his balance, moaned, and fell on the consultation couch.
“What a fool!”
The doctor went to him and patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, I’m used to people speaking to me as if I were behind the counter at the Social Security office, as if I wasn’t human anymore. Be brave, Victor. Tell the woman you love what you have.”
For a whole week after this conversation, although Victor didn’t follow the doctor’s advice, he did try, whenever he was with Oxana, to accustom himself to the thought that he would eventually. At times, the truth felt like a death sentence, at others, a prelude to happiness.
Since they had fallen in love at first sight on Place Brugmann, Oxana and Victor had made rapid progress. Although she had kept a suite in a hotel, she never left his apartment, indulging in all the delights of discovery. As well as pleasure, what she felt was surprise: it was the first time she hadn’t resisted a man’s advances but had given herself to him that same night. Usually, she would waver and procrastinate, out of a mixture of caution and dignity, but above all to test her own desire. With Victor, she had had a strange premonition that if she didn’t agree to his holding her in his arms a few hours after they had met, it would never happen. There was a kind of tension in him, filled with urgency and impatience, a nervous voracity that had nothing to do with the usual male selfishness or lust.
Never had she been as happy as she was in his small attic room that reminded her of her grandparents’ attic in Lviv, where she had felt protected, sheltered from the sky by its roof, from people by its height, and from reality by dreams. Sitting cross-legged on the bed, carefree and relaxed, she read novels she found on the shelf. What better way to enter a stranger’s world than through his library? Jules Verne, whom she had never read, rubbed shoulders with Conrad, Stevenson, Monier, and Hemingway. These titles struck her as a boy’s choices, echoes of the globe trotting Victor she could see in the various photographs placed here and there, such manly choices that when she opened the books, she felt as though she was breathing in
her lover’s smell, a blend of leather and freshly-cut grass.
Victor was delighted that Oxana had moved in of her own free will. Watching her sitting happily on the bed, engrossed in a book, her soft hair held in place by a tortoiseshell clasp, filled him with joy. He hadn’t experienced such a feeling of fulfillment since he was eight years old and had watched the kitten Baptiste had bought him offer its downy, innocently white belly to the light.
Victor thought of Oxana as a barbarian goddess with the power to consume time. When he was with her, the past no longer existed, nor did the future: intense and radiant, she focused everything on the present. Because he couldn’t detach himself from her, or take a critical distance, he forgot about his previous affairs and didn’t think about tomorrow. At most, it was the next half hour that concerned him, as he wondered what he would cook or which movie they would go to see.
Sharing a student’s life made Oxana discover that she was young. She was the same age as Victor: twenty. But having been a model for many years, and being accustomed to earning money and navigating a tough profession, she had lost her freshness, and not only because she collected much older lovers. Often, when faced with the difficulties of her job, she felt worn and discouraged. And, even worse, when, at casting sessions, she saw fifteen-year-olds in whose eyes she was old, she thought about retiring. Victor had given her back her freshness with his passion, his admiration, his brotherly simplicity, and especially because he was taking a long course, certain that once he had qualified, the world would be his oyster. So that’s what youth was: waiting at the start of the track, ready to run.
“What could I do after modeling?” she asked him one day.
“You’re asking a question only you know the answer to. What do you love?”
“Besides you?”
“Besides me.”
“You.”
“And?”
“You.”
He leaped out of his chair onto the bed—which wasn’t much of a leap—and smothered her in kisses. “I want an answer, Oxana.”
“Let’s see, what skills do I have? I speak several languages. Translator?”
“Would you like that?”
“I could do it.”
“Oxana, you’re dodging the question: what do you want to do? Do you think I study law because I can? No, I do it in order to be involved in humanitarian actions or in international criminal justice. What matters is to want to do something; then you try to live up to it.”
Until now, Oxana had always believed that you lived by your wits. Right now, she was making a living by selling her beauty, tomorrow she would get by by marketing her linguistic abilities. Living was about surviving, nothing else. Listening to Victor describing his ambition to be a lawyer in the service of noble causes, she realized that you could give your life a meaning.
Victor still hadn’t been able to tell Oxana the truth, but it struck him that introducing her to his uncle might help him get there. The more involved he became, the more he would be forced to be truthful.
He told Oxana what he concealed from his fellow students, that he was related to Baptiste Monier, the famous writer. As she had just read several of his novels, she was very impressed and got him to repeat it several times.
“I mean, honestly, Oxana, do you think I’m a liar?”
“No, I’m sorry. I just realized I’d always thought a great writer was a dead writer.”
“As far as I’m concerned, Baptiste is first and foremost my uncle. When I was a teenager, I even refused to read his books. Because everyone had access to his books, I felt he belonged to me more if I didn’t read them.”
Victor arrived at Baptiste’s house without warning. A blonde woman with a radiant smile opened the door, which threw him. “Er . . . hello, I’m Victor, Baptiste’s—”
“Victor, the famous Victor Baptiste so often talks about?”
“Er . . . ”
Joséphine appeared, looking cheerful, kissed him, and put her arm around the blonde woman’s waist. “This is Isabelle. And she isn’t our new housekeeper.”
Both women laughed. Victor felt as if he was with two teenage girls out for a good time. Sensing his embarrassment, and vaguely ashamed of their own superficiality, Joséphine and Isabelle called Baptiste to their rescue.
He appeared, looking very relaxed. His face lit up when he saw his nephew. “A surprise visit! The kind the writer hates but the uncle loves. Come in, Victor, I have lots of news.”
“Me too,” Victor replied, infected by the reigning good mood.
They went to Baptiste’s study, and he cried out to no one in particular, “Go to the market without me, girls, I’m staying with Victor.”
Victor raised an eyebrow at the word “girls,” which he had never before heard from his uncle’s mouth. What was going on in this household?
Baptiste cheerfully described to his nephew the sentimental revolution he and Joséphine were living through with Isabelle. It was the first time he had told the story, and he was delighted that it should be his nephew he was telling it to. Victor’s amused and delighted reaction brought confirmation of his own happiness.
His heart pounding, Victor was discovering new aspects of his uncle—his vigor, his imagination, his sensuality—which pleased him because he had tended to see Baptiste as an intimidating statue, an effigy of intelligence, talent, and authority. Glimpsing beneath the marble the bashful lover of Joséphine and the new lover of Isabelle made him seem more approachable.
All of a sudden, he had no difficulty telling him that he loved Oxana, and wanted to introduce her.
Nothing could have thrilled Baptiste more, and he declared that they would wait no longer. “I’m taking you all out to dinner tonight. All right?”
“All right.”
This innocence and enthusiasm overwhelmed Victor who, not daring to disturb his routine, tended to exclude from his daily life anything improvised, any immediate pleasure, any spontaneous plans. Hugging his uncle, he felt that, now that he was in his stride, he would hesitate no longer to tell Oxana about being HIV-positive.
It was a lovely evening. Exceptional, in fact. For everyone involved, it marked a first time: the first time Victor and Oxana were introduced as a couple, the first time Baptiste, Joséphine, and Isabelle paraded their threesome. Each enjoyed being there, in the company of the others. Affection, the only reason to get together, circulated between them, like a strong wind of love bearing confidences, emotions, deep sighs, hysterical laughter.
Overwhelmed by the fact that these people were offering to be her new family, Oxana had constant tears in her eyes. She had no idea it was possible to feel so comfortable, so close to others. At times, she was stung by a touch of nostalgia, remembering her Ukrainian childhood with her loving grandparents, before there were money worries and her parents forced her to live with them in their tiny Khrushchev-era apartment on the outskirts of Kiev.
As for Isabelle, she was overcome by the way the two young people looked at her: they accepted her, didn’t judge her, didn’t treat her like a dangerous parasite. Since, for now, within her own family she met with nothing but hostility, this conviviality encouraged and soothed her.
At the end of the meal, they chatted so much that it took them a while to notice that the restaurant was empty, that the waiters had cleared the tables, and that the owner was yawning behind the till.
Baptiste paid the check. They went for a stroll, with the threesome walking the couple back to Place d’Arezzo.
Over the blue-tinted square, amid the phlox and the purple rhododendrons, hung a soft, liquid silence filled with a sweet scent given off by the jasmine a street vendor had put down on the bench beside her as she gazed up at the moon. You could only hear tiny, fluid movements from the parrots and parakeets, the fluttering of wings, the caress of feathers, as if the peace of the stars had also spread to the wild fauna.
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“Will you believe me,” Baptiste said in a low voice, “if I tell you that in the tree facing my window there are two male cockatiels who look after a female?”
They smiled and tried—in vain—to see them. Nature, they all thought, was definitely a lot more imaginative than human society.
They parted happily.
The following day, Victor had an international law exam at the university, so he left Oxana early, spent the morning revising in the library, had a sandwich, then took the exam in the afternoon in a windowless auditorium lit with fluorescent lights and smelling of tangerines and old, damp carpet.
At last, at seven in the evening, he returned to Place d’Arezzo and went up to the attic apartment. This time, he was going to admit his state of health to Oxana. Since the night before, he had felt ready, certain that their relationship would not only survive the truth but be strengthened by it.
When he walked in, he saw that the apartment was empty. All trace of Oxana—clothes, bags, suitcases—had vanished.
A yellow sheet of paper was waiting for him on the bed.
I’m sorry, I’ve never loved anybody as much as you. I’m leaving.
He couldn’t believe what he was reading, and looked around for proof that he was having a bad dream.
Without thinking straight, he went downstairs four steps at a time, ran through the streets to his uncle’s, and rang the bell impatiently.
Pale-faced, Baptiste opened the door. Victor rushed in. “Help me, Oxana’s gone!”
Baptiste’s eyebrows lifted. He seemed to be looking for something on the floor.
Victor waved the yellow letter, and Baptiste read it.
So far, he hadn’t said a word, but now he raised his head and hesitantly placed a hand on Victor’s shoulder. “Joséphine has gone too.”
5
Oh, shit, not that idiot again!”
“Who is he?”
“Patrick Breton-Mollignon, editor of the newspaper Le Matin. He’s been coming on to me for years.”