Once they had exhausted their whole stock of petty comments, each of them retreated into a stubborn silence which only increased their sense of unease. They paced around the flat like clockwork figures, brushing past each other in the corridors, avoiding looking at each other, ashamed, aware of the ridiculousness of the situation but unable to act normally. It was as if they had been replaced by grotesque doubles. It was a very difficult day, damp with sorrow, clouded by doubt, with that panicky fear of a child who has let go of its mother’s hand. In the evening, when the storm finally broke, they fell into each other’s arms. It had happened only once in ten years of marriage and yet this was the day he now found himself missing. How he would have loved to relive it, ten, a hundred, a thousand times!
Rolled up in his filthy sleeping bag on the creaky camp bed, amid the horrendous tip the garage had become, Brice felt like a boxer alone in the ring, up against himself. He needed to hit something, it didn’t matter what. In spite of his swollen ankle he grabbed the five-kilo sledgehammer and headed for the kitchen. Emma had intended knocking down the wall between it and the dining room to make a kitchen-diner – far more sociable, she thought.
With the first blow, he felt as if the whole house were buckling at the knees and groaning, like an ox under the slaughterman’s hammer. The impact reverberated through the shaft of the sledgehammer before spreading through him from head to foot. The vibrations went on for a good ten seconds. In the sink, a stack of plates collapsed. Horrified, he took in the terrible wound he had inflicted on the wall. Beneath the fragments of plaster, the pink flesh of the brick was visible and a long fissure ran from ceiling to floor. He had struck as hard as he could but the poor old wall was still standing. He had to finish it off. He gritted his teeth, closed his eyes and began pounding with all his might like a madman until, having hit empty space, carried along by the momentum of the tool, he circled on the spot like a hammer-thrower before collapsing on to the heap of rubble, wild-eyed and dazed. His ankle was swollen to twice its size. Plaster dust was gathering in his nose, making him want to throw up like after the first line of heroin. Without meaning to, he had created an almost perfectly circular hole through which the dining-room table and chairs could be seen, stock still and startled, like a flock whose rumination has been interrupted by a passing tourist. It was the first time he had knocked down a wall. His first wall … He didn’t know whether he should feel proud or sorry. He was tempted to turn himself in to the police. The house was sulking. Not one window would look him in the face.
It took him some time to clear up the rubble, and then he didn’t know how to dispose of it. He filled ten bin bags and dotted them around the place like Easter eggs. Then he tried out the hole by going several times from kitchen to dining room and vice versa. It worked perfectly in both directions. Already he felt less guilty. With a little bit of tidying up, it would be a very decent hole. The church clock struck four. Brice had a shower and ripped open a box marked ‘Clothes’ in order to extract something halfway suitable in which to visit Blanche Montéléger.
Never could Brice have imagined that the walking stick he had borrowed from the pharmacist would afford him so many pleasures. It was a perfectly ordinary one, however, with an ergonomic handle at one end and a rubber tip at the other. It helped him in his limping gait, of course, but in addition to this primary function it lent him the solemn elegance of a monarch who, by pointing the stick this way or that, kept the world at arm’s length. It protected him from being too close to other people. He felt important. With a simple twirl of his stick he consigned this cruel, pathetic world to its humble fate, a billiard ball ricocheting around at the mercy of the void. Even as a child he had been fascinated by prosthetics. He would have liked to wear glasses or false teeth but unfortunately neither his eyes nor his gums had need of them. To make up for such tragic good health he had improvised glass-less frames and stuck chewing gum over his teeth. As he neared thirty he really had needed glasses, and the dissolute life he led, consuming all sorts of illegal substances, got the better of his molars, canines and incisors. They had been replaced by metal, porcelain and resin. His wishes had been granted. Today, just as one is promoted to a higher rank, he had reached the age of the stick, the one before the apogee, the wheelchair. He aspired to this as might a candidate for a seat in the Académie française, a symbol of eternal rest and, heck, glory.
Even as he asked himself what his motive was for visiting Blanche Montéléger (curiosity? Nothing else to do?), he was amusing himself by trailing the end of his stick along the gates of people’s houses in order to enrage the Alsatians, which would press their noses to the bars, causing a sort of riot as he went by. He loathed dogs, all dogs, for the good reason that they were man’s best friend. In their dark cavernous mouths, foaming, and bristling with yellow fangs, and their eyes, which bulged from the pull of their chains, there was everything he hated in their masters.
The Montéléger house stood out dark against the sky like a regret. According to the pharmacist, it was the oldest in the village, the one from which all the rest had grown, developing like secondary tumours. It was completely surrounded by a wall built of Rhone pebbles in a chevron design. No light was coming from it. Beside a heavy grey wooden gate there was a battered letter box, above which there hung a sort of lavatory chain which gave a shrill sound when he pulled it. Once, twice, three times. He was about to turn on his heel when he heard footsteps on the other side of the oak panel.
The gate opened reluctantly, groaning for all it was worth, and Blanche appeared, wrapped in a blanket of indeterminate shade, throwing fearful glances over her shoulder.
‘Are you alone?’
‘Why … yes.’
‘Come in, quickly.’
She didn’t so much walk as hop like a little mouse across the paved courtyard where a wreck of an ancient Citroën was rusting away. Brice had difficulty keeping up. As he moved forward, the front of the house seemed to lean over him, ready to crush him with the full weight of its shadow. A flight of steps took him to a door which Blanche asked him to come through swiftly. It was even darker and colder inside than out.
‘I’m not putting the lights on because of the neighbours. People would talk. Give me your coat. Follow me.’
She was whispering so quietly he could barely hear her, and yet the slightest squeak of his shoe echoed round the vast hall like a gunshot. He followed her up a stone staircase and found himself in a huge room lit by one miserable bedside lamp on a stool, beside an armchair with a book left lying on it. A portable heater struggled valiantly to warm the atmosphere in front of an immense fireplace as cold as the mouth of a corpse. Contrary to what the splendid moulded ceiling might suggest, the room had the bare minimum of furnishings: a table, four chairs and a nondescript sideboard. No ornaments, no carpet, no paintings, not so much as a humble postcard pinned to the wall. Not a hint of imagination, not an ounce of femininity. Heavy curtains veiled the windows. The idiot of a blacksmith living in the church tower struck his anvil five times.
‘You’re on time. That’s good.’
‘It’s difficult not to be, here. I admit I’m finding it hard to get used to that bell.’
‘The church no longer has a priest; we need at least a bell to replace him. Do sit down.’
The tea was lukewarm and bitter, served in Duralex glasses, and the muffins that went with it were frankly disgusting.
‘Do you like them? I baked them myself.’
‘They’re delicious.’
Blanche never stopped nervously intertwining her fingers. On close inspection she could be no more than thirty-five to forty. It was the way she expressed herself, choosing her words carefully, and the hesitation accompanying her every gesture which made her seem much older or much younger.
‘A little more tea?’
‘Please.’
Blanche seized objects as if they might escape her, and gripped them so tightly that her fingers turned white.
‘How time passes. Do you think I’ve aged?’
‘Er,