“Oxana! Why?”
She went limp, as if she no longer cared what she looked like. She bit her lip and scratched at the chair she was sitting on. Victor looked straight ahead and waited: it was better to be patient than to insist.
Japanese tourists passed at a measured pace, followed by a noisy Italian couple. A guard warned some small children not to touch the petals of the azaleas.
Oxana broke her silence. “I’m going to tell you the truth.”
“Why didn’t you tell me the truth before?”
“I still hoped . . . Because once I tell you, it’ll be over between us.”
Victor wavered. Oxana was expressing herself with such sad resolution, such firmness, that he feared the worst. He wished he could turn the clock back. What if she was right?
She sensed that he was hesitating. “Are you sure you want to hear this?”
At that moment, what he most wanted was to run away, to flee the Laeken greenhouses, to avoid facing up to reality. But he sensed that Oxana, now that she had made up her mind to speak, would have been disappointed by his change of heart. For her sake, rather than for his, he urged her to continue.
She sighed. “I am a bad woman, a failure.”
“I don’t believe a word of it.”
“I left because I’ll never be able to give you what you have a right to hope for.”
“I’m sorry? All I want is to love you. And for you to love me a little.”
“Yes, it always starts like that . . . But then . . . ”
“Then?”
“Then you make plans for the future, you decide to live together, to get married—”
“Are you already married?” he cut in, convinced that he had guessed the reason for the departure.
In spite of the gravity of the situation, she let out a brief laugh. “Oh, no! No danger of that. I don’t run the risk of big—bigamy . . . No, bigamy means two wives for one man . . . How do you say two husbands for one woman?”
“Biandry, logically, but that doesn’t exist. The reality is even more male chauvinist than the vocabulary.”
They smiled at each other; for a split second, the complicity between them had been reborn.
Frightened by this renewal, Oxana turned her head away to avoid looking at Victor, stared down at the gravel path, and frowned “You get married,” she continued, “and you start dreaming about a family. That’s why I’m leaving, Victor.”
“You can’t have children?”
“I can’t have children.”
Victor didn’t react.
Oxana turned to him and said, “I can’t.”
He still didn’t react.
“I’m sterile.” Tears welled in Oxana’s eyes. “Victor, do you understand what I’m saying? I have a malformation of the uterus that prevents me from keeping a fetus. On top of that, there’s an infection that I got when I was about fifteen that . . . No, it’s too disgusting! Why should I humiliate myself by telling you all this? I don’t have to give you my medical record or justify myself. I want you, you want me, so I have to leave. I’m not a gift for a man.”
Openmouthed with emotion, Victor slowly turned his head toward her and exclaimed, “That’s wonderful!”
Startled, Oxana raised her head.
“It’s wonderful,” he repeated, and burst out laughing.
Oxana leaped out of her chair. “In addition to everything else, you’re making fun of me?”
Anger had turned her face pale: stamping her feet, jaw tensed, fists clenched, she looked at this boy she had the misfortune to love and blamed herself for not having grasped before now that he was a monster. Without thinking, she slapped him. Once. Twice. Three times.
Victor stood up, pulled Oxana to him to stop her getting away, entwined his hands with hers, moved his lips forward, and stifled her anger with a kiss. When he broke away, he said in a low voice, “Now it’s my turn to tell you the truth.” His sensual mouth brushing against Oxana’s right ear, he admitted, “I’m no gift for a woman either.”
“You, Victor?”
“Just listen.”
Without shilly-shallying or beating about the bush, in simple words and short sentences, he told her what he had been hiding from everybody: how his mother had been infected with the AIDS virus at the age of twenty and died five years later, how he was born HIV-positive, how he survived thanks to drugs that had gradually brought the disease under control. In full flow now, he told her about his bitter adolescence, when he had realized that he could never get close to anyone without endangering that person. He told her that he was in mourning, not only for his mother, but for the dream of getting married and starting a family.
“Collège Saint-Michel, don’t scatter, stay together, and don’t disturb other people!”
A sonorous voice had interrupted his confession. Victor and Oxana saw some thirty schoolchildren come into the greenhouse and move in their direction in a disorderly formation, trampling the gravel, as noisy as a herd of buffalo. Behind them came a female teacher, who was shouting herself hoarse but whose instructions were inversely proportionate to their effectiveness: the more she yelled, the less the children obeyed her.
“Collège Saint-Michel! Discipline, please! Don’t make me regret organizing this study trip! Collège Saint-Michel, quiet please!”
Some pupils trod on Oxana and Victor’s feet, others came to a halt in front of them and looked them up and down as if they were part of the attractions.
Prudently, Oxana sat down again and Victor joined her. In order not to attract comments, they sat three feet apart, silent, frozen, like two hikers waiting for a rain shower to end.
When the group had finally gone, Victor, without looking at Oxana or touching her, continued his story.
But something had broken. Trust perhaps, or the feeling of urgency. How could he have allowed himself to be carried away by that surge of optimism? The farther he got with his confidences, the more Oxana escaped him. Each word pushed her away, each word increased the distance. Soon what had always happened would happen again: the truth would kill his relationship. How could he ever have imagined that he would escape his curse?
He stopped.
Above them, the sharp cry of a bird reached them through the big panels of glass.
Victor shivered. His skin was hot, but his heart was getting colder. He knew now how the scene was going to play out: because she was a good person, Oxana would thank him, sympathize, urge him to open up even more, promise that she would keep this friendship between them and help him as much as she could—in other words, she would flee.
He sat there, head bowed, ears burning, hands shaking although he still managed to hide it. Why doesn’t she hurry up about it? Why doesn’t she just dump me? There’s no point waiting too long.
He looked up, turned to her, and saw that her face was streaming with tears. His first reaction was to console her, but he held back, conscious that she was mourning their lost love. So he remained stiff and dignified, even though the emotion was wearing him down.
Oxana took a handkerchief from her bag and wiped her eyes.
What a grotesque existence! Victor thought. We talk about our failed lives, our dying feelings, and it all boils down to noses full of mucus, eyes running, convulsive shakes. We’re merely bodies that shake until death delivers us. Overcome with sadness, he thought about his mother—something he usually avoided—her grave in Père-Lachaise, and what her body must have become. His mother, at least, was delivered from suffering. Rest in peace. Maybe her corpse was smiling, happy to feel nothing anymore. Rest in peace. What a salutary program! To die, yes, to die quickly. He felt an acid taste fill his mouth, provoking a spasm. He coughed. Oh, yes, to fall, to collapse here once and for all and have done with it. Just as the weight of his head was drawing him down to the ground, he became aware that Oxana was holding him back. Ye
s, nurse . . . Women are all a bit like nurses, aren’t they? Flooded as he was with a desperate self-contempt, he nevertheless let her pull him up.
She raised his head and forced him to look at her. “I love you, Victor, and I don’t want any other man but you.”
Half an hour later, outside the city of glass, the biology teacher was summing up for her class from the Collège Saint- Michel what they had learned during the morning.
“Thanks to science and technology, favorable environments, individuals, forms, even new species are created. Today, in plants, animals, or humans, life is served as never before. The more we know, the more we can do. So what’s the lesson of today? Have the botanists gotten in ahead of the geneticists? Today we have in vitro fertilization, but maybe that’s because we already knew about grafting plants.”
“All the same, mademoiselle, basically it’s disgusting.”
“What’s disgusting, my boy?”
“Well . . . how plants are fertilized . . . How children are made . . . ”
The group laughed, as much with embarrassment and mockery as with approval.
“That’s right,” the teenager with the round glasses insisted. “It’s disgusting. Basically.”
The children again let out a big mocking laugh.
The teacher took the boy’s side. “Your friend is right. All flowers grow on manure; only, a lot of people forget that.”
At that moment, the children from Saint-Michel, busy gathering up their notes from where they had scattered them over the lawn, saw the couple they had disturbed in the greenhouse pass by. Victor and Oxana advanced calmly, majestically, arms entwined, looking supple, beautiful, radiant.
For the girls, who were thirteen and already thinking about boys, they presented a dazzling picture of the ideal. Seeing them, they nudged each other and fell silent, out of respect, as they came closer. Who would ever have suspected that these two physically superb individuals considered themselves handicapped? The girls thought they saw swans; Victor and Oxana thought of themselves as ugly ducklings, failures, inadequates. Only their awareness of their own misery had made them strong. Devoid of arrogance, they knew they were vulnerable, wounded, infinitely mortal, and it was in the idea of death, together with the difficulty of living, that their love had been sealed.
12
Oh, no, I hate the countryside.”
The customer couldn’t believe her ears: a florist who hated fields and meadows?
“The countryside is repulsive!” Xavière went on. “There’s earth everywhere, and earth, apart from being ugly, becomes dust when it’s hot, and mud if it rains. What a gift! And then the smells . . . Mold and animal droppings! Nothing but filth decomposing, just like that, in the open air, ready to attack your nostrils. I tell you, you just have to set me down in front of a ‘magnificent’ view and all I want to do is scream, ‘Flush the toilet!’ Not to mention the wind, the mosquitoes, the wasps, the bats, the spiders, the horseflies. An American soldier gets more peace among the Taliban in Afghanistan than I do in the country: it’s war!”
“But nature, Xavière, the flora . . . ”
“There, you said it: the flora! Here in my shop, I have flowers; in the countryside, they have flora. What does that mean, flora? It means things springing up just anywhere. Does it satisfy your critical sense, seeing dandelions scattered all over a field? Do you find poppies growing in a ditch a pleasant sight? Have you ever managed to make a bouquet out of wildflowers? Any pleasure you get from them lasts about twenty minutes. Even before you’ve put them in water, they’re weary, they droop, they lose their color. The fact is, they’ve come to your home to die. It’s false advertising. ‘Wildflowers’: it sounds so sturdy, so robust, ‘a product of the soil.’ It’s marketing, madame, because wildflowers are worthless, they’re like nothing else, they only survive in a field! Even calling a wildflower a flower is a lie. It’s just a measly little petal with a stalk and a few leaves, all the parts you don’t want. It’s as if I gave you the trunk and branches of an apple tree to eat instead of the fruit. You’d get upset, and you’d be right!”
“Xavière, from what you say, the flowers you have here weren’t invented by nature.”
“Precisely! They don’t come from the country, they come from a nursery. That’s the whole difference. I don’t sell you things you can pick up from the ground, I sell you works of art, products of human genius, jewels that have been shaped and polished over the centuries by intelligent, determined, and patient craftsmen. Getting beautiful flowers takes more than bending down. Just as it takes more than gathering stalks to make a flower arrangement.”
“Of course.”
“So go fill your vases with primroses or violets, they’re just dwarves that’ll barely fill a saucer. Make sprays of thistles, why don’t you? Oh, God, it’s so tiring to preach in the wilderness! People have lost their sense of the value of things. Civilization has gone downhill. I’m going to retire, and then you can all go gathering dandelions on the square, insipid little yellow dandelions covered in parrot droppings. You don’t deserve any better, any of you!”
“Xavière, I never thought I was going to put you in this state by offering to take you to the country.”
“My state? You don’t know anything about my state.”
“Well, I know that Orion has health problems . . . Alzheimer’s, so I’ve heard?”
“Alzheimer’s is nothing, compared with . . . I’m sorry, Madame Riclouet, I’m not feeling well.”
Feeling a weight on her bladder, Xavière went into the back room, relieved herself, then, instead of going back to the shop, sat down in a sagging armchair, preferring to stay there. What a stupid profession! Throwing pearls before swine, no thanks!
The customer stood there in the middle of the shop, with nobody to look after her: Xavière had disappeared, and Orion was out making deliveries. She hesitated between waiting and leaving, looked longingly at the flowers she had been going to buy before Xavière had launched into her diatribe, and called out, “Are you all right, Xavière?”
There was no answer.
“Xavière, I really need a bouquet, I’m visiting with some friends.”
A haughty voice cried from the back room, “Come back in half an hour, Orion will be here then!”
The lady nodded, not so sure she wanted to repeat the experience: every time she came into the shop, she had the impression she was risking her life. If only a competitor would set up shop in the neighborhood!
Hearing the chime signal the customer’s departure, Xavière heaved a sigh of relief. Too bad about the money she’d lost, but she wouldn’t prostitute herself for a few euros. With any luck, Madame Riclouet would bump into Orion, who, with his constant willingness to help, would serve her and recover the sale.
“What an idiot he is too!”
Xavière was feeling better. She was getting over Séverine’s death through her anger. She might have collapsed with grief during the funeral, but that sadness hadn’t lasted.
When she had heard of the suicide, Xavière had been knocked for six. Never having imagined before that Séverine might hate her life so much, she had realized for the first time the extent of the despair eating away at the woman. Then she had wondered about her own share of responsibility: if she hadn’t rejected her that stormy night, would she have thrown herself off a high building? Her response to this question was a complex one. Even if Séverine hadn’t killed herself immediately, she would have done so later. It was inconceivable to Xavière that disappointment in love could have been the only thing driving her to suicide; if that had been the case, Séverine would have left her a message. So Xavière exonerated herself. I wasn’t the reason for her unhappiness, no, I was her balm, her remedy, with me she was fine. But even after settling things with her own conscience—like all human beings—Xavière had found it hard to cope with the emotion of it all. Was it due to hormonal change
s? The circumstances? She had felt an intense compassion for her dead friend, a terrible nostalgia, and it was when her affliction was at its height that she had fainted on the day of the funeral.
Giving in to unhappiness, though, was alien to Xavière, who had an active, enterprising temperament. So she had soon replaced tears with spite, a constant irritation that she cultivated toward everything and everybody. Nothing found favor in her eyes these days; this indignant rage erased her melancholy and reinvigorated her.
The child was growing in her. She could say “the child,” because she was certain now that there was a living being in her belly. Sometimes, in fact, when nobody was watching, she would warm it with her hands, at other times she would talk to it. When she indulged in these contacts, she didn’t feel as if she was a madwoman conversing with her own belly, but rather as if she had acquired some kind of calm wisdom. Very strange!
Officially, she hadn’t decided anything yet, since events—Séverine’s suicide, the Bidermann affair—had prevented her from worrying about herself. In the middle of this maelstrom, the legal date for abortion had passed; this deadline seemed to her merely a second stroke of fate, the first being the arrival of a fetus. Regarding this pregnancy, she continued to show real apathy. Wasn’t that what gestation was: a test of passivity?
The chime rang. Someone was coming into the shop. She didn’t react. I’m too tired. She even held her breath in order to avoid being heard.
“Is there anybody here? Hello? Is there anybody here?”
The determination in that flat voice suggested an individual capable of coming into the back room, so there was no point hiding anymore.
She sighed and went into the shop. “Yes, what can I do for you?”
The man, who was short and broad and wore a stained raincoat, looked her up and down smugly. “Hello, madame. I’m a journalist for La Gazette européenne and Le Quotidien des Ardennes. I wanted—”
“A bouquet?”
“Er . . . no . . . I wanted to ask you if—”