Her Father's Daughter (10 page)

These separations, it turns out, have a name: divorce. The child learns this word. And its derivatives. The father and mother are divorced. The mother is a divorcee. What about me, am I a divorcee? asks the child. No, she's told, not at all, what a thought! That child really is a fool, says the grandmother. And yet the child herself feels very divorced.

But she doesn't cry, not her. It's just that, despite her new and extensive understanding of things, she's become a little deaf, a little blind to the world around her. It's as if, with her degree of understanding, she's lost some of her curiosity about it.

She understands perfectly that her father has become the husband of another woman, the blonde lady whose name is Agnès.

She understands that they live in their own apartment, where she's invited to spend the day on a Sunday from time to time.

She understands that this couple soon have a baby – a real one this time, which won't be dismissed as a dream. A baby her father will hold in his big freckled hands, whose smell and warmth the child is gradually forgetting.

She understands that this little boy will call her father Daddy.

She'll even understand that one day this little boy will be astonished to hear her calling his father Daddy.

She understands everything, and this everything, she believes, means nothing to her.

That's how one day you stop being a child and you end up calling yourself France, like everyone else.

Over the years of apprenticeship, when the child and her father see each other, they will each keep to their roles and they'll play them as they should be played, as they're both expected to play them. And yet they will sometimes recognize each other, the father and the child, for a moment, just like that, a stolen moment, in the middle of other people's conversations, cutting across the presence of others. They'll find each other.

They look at each other, and it's no longer France that he sees, but his child. And for her, it's not the husband of the blonde lady, but her father, her own father. The man who was her father for a short time. Such a short time.

And in that eye contact there is a lot of sadness, and a bit of happiness. But this, well, this is their secret.

Images from the past, so distant, so fragmentary, that they seem rather laughable.

The child has become a grown-up. She's a woman. It's a long time now since she laid bare her parents' secrets. Found out about it all, analysed, understood and swept it aside.

She has hushed the child she once was. Has reduced her to silence, to an indulgent oblivion, a smile.

France has wrung the child's neck. Has made her forget the furious love she once felt for a second-hand father.

The father and daughter live in different cities, far apart. They both lead full lives. See each other once a year, perhaps. Sometimes less. There are telephone calls. Conversations about this and that, family events, work, health. Glossing lightly over things.

About nothing. These conversations are about nothing.

No proper conversations were ever had.

Nothing was ever said.

She still likes calling her father, though. It's always him who picks up. Hello. She hears his voice. The voice from before. The voice from the old days. ‘Hello, Daddy?' she says, and then, just for a second, it's as if anything could happen. One second. But nothing happens. She says only the expected things. He does the same probably. Never anything real. Never anything that matters. Nothing of what matters to her. In fact she only ever calls when everything's going well, when she can give a positive image of herself. Of his life, she never asks anything. She doesn't actually know anything. She's never known anything. She'll never know anything. Perhaps she doesn't want to know anything.

But every now and then, lurking beneath particular words, beneath an inflection in a voice, on one end of the line or the other, there's something more, the beginnings of something, a sort of complicity. Nothing is said, though. Ever.

One evening, it's not him who answers the telephone. She's told that her father has just died. Then she realizes it's too late. That they'll never talk.

No emotion. She doesn't cry. It doesn't feel real.

So, she thinks simply, I didn't see him again. She didn't have time. Which doesn't mean anything.

She attends the funeral as if in a dream, without a tear.

This death, the reality of this death, will hit her a few weeks later.

It is when she comes home from a dinner, she's had a little too much to drink, she feels good, happy, she suddenly feels like calling her father and telling him so, just like that. She has, monstrously, forgotten he's dead. But in the time it takes to start reaching for the telephone she remembers, and her hand drops back.

She remembers, and it is only then that she realizes her father is dead. That she understands it.

She understands she'll never be able to call him again. She'll never talk to him again. Never hear him again. Never again hear that voice.

And it's now too late to understand each other.

As for his giraffe-hands, he'll never know.

That's when her grief begins.

And then one day, much later, something strange happens.

She's travelling back to Paris after a long trip, the train's packed. She's tired, a bit sad. Alone. She knows there's no one waiting for her.

They're approaching Gare de l'Est and she's got up from her seat to stand by the door, wanting to get onto the platform as quickly as possible, to avoid the crush. She's standing in that cramped space where there are several other impatient passengers facing away from each other, motionless, their eyes pinned on the windows in the door, looking for signs of the station in the darkness, switched off from anything else, indifferent to each other. She too is switched off, indifferent, filled with the boredom and weariness of this homeward journey.

When all at once something catches her eye, draws all her attention, something surprising and yet familiar, an isolated image which gives her an incomprehensible, violent blast of emotion: right in front of her, on a level with her eyes, is another passenger's hand, just his hand, in a raincoat; she can't see the rest of him.
A hand clasping the rail to the right of the door. This hand is quite old, quite rough, big, with very white skin, covered with rusty freckles, a hand she would recognize in a thousand. A hand which must smell of tobacco and eau de cologne, she knows that, a hand which is both strong and gentle.

And then and there, the child, miraculously herself once more, remembers so exactly the smell of that hand, its gentleness, and the furious intensity of her child's love that her heart beats very hard. She suddenly has such a desperate longing to touch that hand, she could almost cry, to touch it, kiss it, take refuge in it.

A vertiginous wave of tenderness which lasts only a moment.

They've arrived. The man in the raincoat drops his hand, turns round before stepping onto the platform: the false likeness of her father evaporates.

But the true one now lives on in the child. For good.

No one will notice the young woman's eyes are full of tears. Of happiness. Of sheer gratitude.

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