So, on the sixteenth of June I intend to refresh their peasized memories: I’m going to set fire to the apartment (with the barbecue lighter). Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a criminal: I’ll do it when there’s no one around (the sixteenth of June is a Saturday and on Saturdays Colombe goes to see Tibère, Maman is at yoga, Papa is at his club and as for me, I stay home), I’ll evacuate the cats through the window and I’ll call the fire brigade early enough so that there won’t be any victims. And then I’ll go off quietly to Grandma’s with my pills, to sleep.
With no more apartment and no more daughter, maybe they’ll give some thought to all those dead Africans, don’t you think?
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Manuela, my only friend, comes for tea with me in my lodge. Manuela is a simple woman and twenty years wasted stalking dust in other people’s homes has in no way robbed her of her elegance. Besides, stalking dust is a very euphemistic way to put it. But where the rich are concerned, things are rarely called by their true name.
‘I empty bins full of sanitary towels,’ she says, with her gentle, slightly hissing accent. ‘I wipe up dog vomit, clean the bird cage – you’d never believe the amount of poo such tiny animals can make – and I scrub the toilets. You talk about dust? Big deal!’
You must understand that when she comes down to see me at two in the afternoon, on Tuesdays after the Arthens, and on Thursdays after the de Broglies, Manuela has been polishing the toilets with a cotton bud, and though they may be gilded with gold leaf, they are just as filthy and reeking as any toilets on the planet, because if there is one thing the rich do share with the poor, however unwillingly, it is their nauseating intestines that always manage to find a place to free themselves of that which makes them stink.
So Manuela deserves our praise. Although she’s been sacrificed at the altar of a world where the most thankless tasks have been allotted to some women while others merely hold their nose without raising a finger, she nevertheless strives relentlessly to maintain a degree of refinement that goes far beyond any gold-leaf gilding, a fortiori of the sanitary variety.
‘When you eat a walnut, you must use a tablecloth,’ says Manuela, removing from her old shopping bag a little hamper made of light wood where some almond tuiles are nestled among curls of carmine tissue paper. I make coffee that we shall not drink, but its wafting aroma delights us both, and in silence we sip a cup of green tea as we nibble on our tuiles.
Just as I am a permanent traitor to my archetype, so is Manuela: to the Portuguese cleaning woman she is a criminal oblivious of her condition. This girl from Faro, born under a fig tree after seven siblings and before six more, forced in childhood to work the fields and scarcely out of it to marry a mason and take the road of exile, mother of four children who are French by birthright but whom society looks upon as thoroughly Portuguese – this girl from Faro, as I was saying, who wears the requisite black support stockings and a kerchief on her head, is an aristocrat. An authentic one, of the kind whose entitlement you cannot contest: it is etched onto her very heart, it mocks titles and people with handles to their names. What is an aristocrat? A woman who is never sullied by vulgarity, although she may be surrounded by it.
On Sundays, the vulgarity of her in-laws, who with their loud laughter muffle the pain of being born weak and without prospects; the vulgarity of an environment as bleakly desolate as the neon lights of the factory where the men go each morning, like sinners returning to hell; then, the vulgarity of her employers who, for all their money, cannot hide their own baseness and who speak to her the way they would a mangy dog covered with oozing bald patches. But you should have witnessed Manuela offering me, as if I were a queen, the fruit of her prowess in haute pâtisserie to fully appreciate the grace that inhabits this woman. Yes, as if I were a queen. When Manuela arrives, my lodge is transformed into a palace, and a picnic between two pariahs becomes the feast of two monarchs. Like a storyteller transforming life into a shimmering river where trouble and boredom vanish far below the water, Manuela metamorphoses our existence into a warm and joyful epic.
‘That little Pallières boy said hello to me on the stairs,’ she says suddenly, interrupting the silence.
I snort with disdain.
‘He’s reading Marx,’ I add, with a shrug of my shoulders.
‘Marx?’ she asks, pronouncing the x as if it were a sh, a somewhat slurping sh, as charming as a clear sky.
‘The father of communism,’ I reply.
Manuela makes a scornful noise.
‘Politics,’ she says. ‘A toy for little rich kids that they won’t let anyone else play with.’
She is thoughtful for a moment, frowning.
‘Not his typical reading material,’ she says.
The illustrated magazines that the young boys hide under the mattress cannot escape Manuela’s shrewd gaze, and the Pallières boy seemed at one point to be consuming them assiduously, however selectively, as exemplified by one particularly dogeared page with an explicit title: The Saucy Marchionesses.
We laugh and converse for a while longer about one thing or another, in the calm space of an old friendship. These are precious moments for me, and I am filled with anguish at the thought that a day will come when Manuela will fulfil her lifelong dream of returning to her country for good, and will leave me here alone and decrepit, with no companion to transform me, twice a week, into a clandestine monarch. I also wonder fearfully what will happen when the only friend I have ever had, the only one who knows everything without ever having to ask, leaves behind her this woman whom no one knows, enshrouding her in oblivion.
We can hear steps in the entrance and then, distinctly, the cryptic sound of fingers on the lift’s call button; it is an old wood-panelled lift with a black grille and double doors, the sort of place where, in the old days, if there had been room, you would have had an attendant. I recognise the footsteps, it is Pierre Arthens, the food critic who lives on the fourth floor, an oligarch of the worst sort who, from the very way he squints whenever he stands on the threshold of my dwelling, must think that I live in a dark cave – even though what he is able to see is bound to prove the contrary.
Well, I have read his brilliant restaurant reviews.
‘I don’t understand what he’s talking about,’ said Manuela; for her a good roast is a good roast and that’s all there is to it.
There is nothing to understand. It’s a pity to see such a worthy wordsmith blindly wasting his talent. To write entire pages of dazzling prose about a tomato – for Pierre Arthens reviews food as if he were telling a story, and that alone is enough to make him a genius – without ever seeing or holding the tomato is a troubling display of virtuosity. I have often wondered, as I watch him go by with his huge arrogant nose: can someone be so gifted and yet so impervious to the presence of things? It seems one can. Some people are incapable of perceiving in the object of their contemplation the very thing that gives it its intrinsic life and breath, and they spend their entire lives conversing about mankind as if they were robots, and about things as though they have no soul and must be reduced to what can be said about them – all at the whim of their own subjective inspiration.
As if on cue, the footsteps suddenly grow louder and Arthens rings at my lodge.
I stand up, careful to drag my feet: the slippers in which they are clad are so very typical that only the coalition between a baguette and a beret could possibly contend in the domain of cliché. In doing this, I know I am exasperating the Maître, for he is a living ode to the impatience of mighty predators, and this shall contribute to the diligence with which I very slowly open the door a crack to reveal