The Elegance of the Hedgehog (23 page)

A
nd now we are Sunday.

At three in the afternoon I make my way to the fourth floor. The plum-colored dress is slightly too big—a godsend on a
gloutof
day—and my heart feels as tight as a kitten rolled into a ball.

Between the third and fourth floor I find myself face to face with Sabine Pallières. Over the last few days whenever she has run into me she has openly and disapprovingly scrutinized my puffy hair. Might I mention that I have abandoned the idea of hiding my new appearance from the world. But such determination puts me ill at ease, however liberated I might be. Our Sunday encounter is no exception to the rule.

“Good afternoon, Madame Pallières,” I say, carrying on up the steps.

She answers with a stern nod as she considers my sconce and then, noticing how I am dressed, she stops short on the step. A wave of panic assails me, deregulating my sudatory glands and threatening my stolen gown with the infamy of underarm rings.

“As you are headed that way, would you water the flowers on the landing?” she asks in an exasperated tone of voice.

Must I remind her? It is Sunday . . .

“Are those cakes?” she asks suddenly.

On a tray I am carrying Manuela’s masterworks wrapped in navy blue tissue paper, and I realize that in Madame Pallières’s eyes this far surpasses my dress and that it is hardly my pretension to elegance which is arousing Madame’s condemnation, but some wastrel’s greedy appetite.

“Yes, an unexpected delivery,” I say.

“Well then, take advantage of it to water the flowers at the same time,” she says and resumes her irritated descent.

I arrive at the fourth floor and find it somewhat awkward to ring the bell, as I am also carrying the video cassette, but Kakuro opens diligently for me and immediately relieves me of my cumbersome tray.

“Oh my goodness,” he says, “you don’t mess around, my mouth is watering already.”

“You’ll have to thank Manuela,” I say, and follow him into the kitchen.

“Really?” He removes the
gloutof
from the mass of blue tissue paper. “It’s an absolute gem.”

I suddenly realize that there is music in the background.

It isn’t very loud, and it is coming from some hidden speakers that diffuse the sound throughout the kitchen.

Thy hand, Belinda, darkness shades me,
On thy bosom let me rest,
More I would, but Death invades me;
Death is now a welcome guest.
When I am laid, am laid in earth,
May my wrongs create
No trouble, no trouble in thy breast;
Remember me, but ah! forget my fate,
Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate.

This is the death of Dido, from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. In my opinion, the most beautiful music for the human voice on earth. It is beyond beautiful, it is sublime, because of the incredibly dense succession of sounds, as if each were linked to the next by an invisible force and, while each one remains distinct, they all melt into one another, at the edge of the human voice, verging on an animal cry. But there is a beauty in these sounds that no animal cry can ever attain, a beauty born of the subversion of phonetic articulation and the transgression of the careful verbal language that ordinarily creates distinct sounds.

Broken steps, melting sounds.

Art is life, playing to other rhythms.

“Let’s go,” says Kakuro, who has set cups, tea pot, sugar and little paper napkins onto a big black tray.

I precede him down the corridor and, following his instructions, open the third door on the left.

“Do you have a VCR?” That had been my question for Kakuro Ozu.

And he had replied, “Yes,” with a cryptic smile.

The third door on the left opens onto a miniature movie theater. A large white screen, a host of mysterious shiny devices, three rows of real seats covered in deep blue velvet, a long low table opposite the front row, and walls and ceiling covered in dark silk.

“Actually, it was my profession,” says Kakuro.

“Your profession?”

“For over thirty years, I imported high-end audio equipment to Europe, for luxury establishments. It was a very lucrative business, but above all marvelously entertaining for someone like me who is enchanted by the least little electronic gadget.”

I settle into a wonderfully plush seat and the show begins.

How to describe such moments of bliss? To be watching
The Munekata Sisters
on a giant screen, in gentle darkness, nestled against a soft backrest, nibbling
gloutof
, and drinking scalding tea in contented little sips. From time to time Kakuro pauses the film and we both begin to talk about this and that, camellias on the moss of the temple and how people cope when life becomes too hard. Twice I go off to greet my friend the
Confutatis
and return to the screening room as if to a warm cozy bed.

This pause in time, within time . . . When did I first experience the exquisite sense of surrender that is possible only with another person? The peace of mind one experiences on one’s own, one’s certainty of self in the serenity of solitude, are nothing in comparison to the release and openness and fluency one shares with another, in close companionship . . . When did I first feel so blissfully relaxed in the presence of a man?

Today is the first time.

A
t seven o’clock, after much conversation and drinking of tea, I am ready to take my leave, and as we are passing through the living room I notice, on a low table next to a sofa, the framed photograph of a very beautiful woman.

“She was my wife,” says Kakuro quietly, seeing that I am looking at the picture. “She died ten years ago, from cancer. Her name was Sanae.”

“I am sorry. She was . . . a very beautiful woman.”

“Yes,” he replies, “very beautiful.”

There is a brief silence.

“I have a daughter, who lives in Hong Kong,” he adds, “and already two grandchildren.”

“You must miss them.”

“I go there fairly often. I love them very much. My grandson, who is called Jack—his father is English—and who’s seven, told me on the phone this morning that yesterday he caught his first fish. It’s the event of the week, you can be sure!”

Another silence.

“I believe you are a widow,” says Kakuro, escorting me to the front door.

“Yes, I’ve been a widow for over fifteen years.”

There is a catch in my throat.

“My husband was called Lucien. It was cancer, too . . . ”

We stand by the door, and look at each other with sadness.

“Good night, Renée,” says Kakuro.

And with a trace of our earlier light-heartedness:

“This has been a fantastic day.”

Melancholy overwhelms me, at supersonic speed.

Y
ou are a sorry idiot, I say to myself as I remove my plum-colored dress and discover some whiskey frosting on a buttonhole. What were you thinking? You’re only a penniless concierge. Friendship across class lines is impossible. And anyway, what have you been thinking, you poor fool?

What have you been thinking, poor fool? I say it over and over as I proceed with my evening ablutions then slide between the sheets, after a short battle with Leo, who does not want to yield any terrain.

The lovely face of Sanae Ozu is dancing before my closed eyes, and I see myself as a sad old thing, abruptly reminded of a joyless reality.

My heart restless, I nod off.

The next morning, I feel something not unlike a hangover.

Nevertheless, the week goes by like a charm. Kakuro puts in a few spontaneous appearances to solicit my talents as an arbiter of taste (ice cream or sorbet? Atlantic or Mediterranean?) and I find the pleasure of his refreshing company unchanged, despite the dark clouds passing silently above my heart. Manuela has a good laugh when she sees the plum-colored dress, and Paloma has taken over Leo’s armchair.

“I’m going to be a concierge someday,” she informs her mother, and Madame Josse herself looks at me with a fresh gaze mingled with caution when she comes to drop off her progeny at the loge.

“May God preserve you from such a fate,” I reply with an amiable smile in Madame’s direction. “You’re going to be a princess.”

Paloma is displaying in equal measure: a candy pink T-shirt that matches her new glasses; the pugnacious air of girl-who-will-be-a-concierge-someday-in-the-face-of-everything-especially-my-mother.

“What’s that smell?” she asks.

There’s a problem with the sewage in my bathroom and it stinks like a barracks full of soldiers. I called the plumber six days ago, but he did not seem especially interested in coming.

“The drains,” I reply, not terribly inclined to pursue the matter.

“Failure of liberalism,” says Paloma, as if I had not said a thing.

“No, it’s a blocked drain.”

“That’s what I mean,” says Paloma. “Why hasn’t the plumber come yet?”

“Because he’s busy with other clients?”

“Not at all,” she retorts. “The correct answer is: because he doesn’t have to. And why doesn’t he have to?”

“Because he doesn’t have enough competition.”

“Exactly,” says Paloma triumphantly, “there is not enough regulation. Too many rail workers, not enough plumbers. Personally, I would prefer the kolkhoz.”

Woe is me, a knock on the windowpane interrupts this captivating discussion.

It is Kakuro, with an indescribably solemn air about him.

He comes in and sees Paloma.

“Good morning, young lady,” he says. “Well, Renée, shall I stop by later?”

“If you like. How are you?”

“Fine, fine,” he replies.

Then, suddenly resolved, he takes the plunge, “Would you like to have dinner with me tomorrow evening?”

“Uh . . . ” I feel panic sweeping over me. “It’s just that . . . ”

It is as if my vague intuitions of the last few days are suddenly taking shape.

“I would like to take you to a restaurant that I’m particularly fond of,” he continues, with the air of a dog hoping for a bone.

“Restaurant?” I say, feeling the full force of panic.

On my left, Paloma makes a little squeaking sound.

“Look,” says Kakuro, who seems somewhat ill at ease, “I really would like you to come. It’s . . . it’s my birthday tomorrow and I would be happy to have you as my dinner partner.”

“Oh,” I say, incapable of adding anything.

“I’m leaving to see my daughter on Monday, so I’ll have a party with the family there, of course, but tomorrow evening . . . if you would . . . ”

He pauses briefly, looks at me hopefully.

Is it just my impression or is Paloma experimenting with apnea?

Silence settles briefly over the room.

“Look,” I say finally, “really, I am sorry. I don’t think it would be a good idea.”

“But why ever not?” asks Kakuro, visibly disconcerted.

“It’s very kind of you,” I say, hardening my tone, for it has a tendency to go soft, “I am very grateful, but I’d rather not, thanks all the same. I am sure you have friends with whom you can celebrate the occasion.”

Kakuro is looking at me, speechless.

“I . . . ” he says eventually, “I . . . yes of course but . . . well . . . really I would very much like . . . I don’t understand.”

He frowns.

“Well, I just don’t understand.”

“It’s better this way,” I say, “believe me.”

And, walking toward him to nudge him gently in the direction of the door I add,

“We’ll have other opportunities to chat, I’m sure.”

He retreats, looking like a pedestrian who has lost his sidewalk.

“Well it’s a great pity,” he says, “I was so looking forward to it. All the same . . . ”

“Goodbye,” I say, gently closing the door in his face.

T
he worst is over, I say to myself.

But I have not reckoned with a candy pink destiny: I turn around and find myself face to face with Paloma.

Who does not look the least bit pleased.

“May I know what on earth you are playing at?” she asks, in a tone that reminds me of Madame Billot, my very last schoolteacher.

“I’m not playing at anything at all,” I say weakly, aware of how childishly I have behaved.

“Do you have anything special planned for tomorrow evening?”

“Well, no, but that’s not why . . . ”

“Then may I ask why, exactly?”

“I don’t think it would be a good thing.”

“And why not?” asks my police commissioner.

Why not?

Do I really know, to be honest?

Just then, without warning, the rain starts to fall.

A
ll that rain . . .

Where I grew up, in winter, it used to rain. I have no memories of sunny days: only rain, a weight of mud and cold, dampness sticking to our clothes and hair; even when you sat by the fire it never really went away. How often since then have I thought back on that rainy evening, how many recollections, over more than forty years, of an event that reemerges today, beneath that pouring rain?

All that rain . . .

My sister was named for an older child who’d been stillborn, who, in turn, had been named for a deceased aunt. Lisette was lovely, and even as a child I was aware of the fact, although my eyes had not yet learned to determine the shape of beauty, but only to divine its rough outline. As no one spoke in my home, nothing was ever even said; but in the neighborhood people gossiped and when my sister went by they would comment upon her beauty. “So pretty and so poor, fate is a brutish thing,” the seamstress would mumble as we passed on our way to school. As for me, ugly and ungainly in mind and body, I would hold my sister’s hand and Lisette would walk, her head held high, and as she passed she let them voice all the dire destinies predicted for her, for each of them had their own version.

At the age of sixteen she left for the town to look after some rich people’s children. For a whole year we did not see her. She came back to spend Christmas with us, bringing strange gifts (gingerbread, brightly colored ribbons, little pouches of lavender); she had the bearing of a queen. Could a rosier, livelier, more perfect face than hers exist? For the first time, someone was telling us a story, and we hung on her every word: we were avid for the mysterious awakening, and were eager to hear more from the lips of this farm girl who had become the maid of powerful people. She would tell us about a strange and richly colored and shining world, where women drove cars and went home at night to households filled with appliances that did the work of human beings, or gave them the news of the world, all you had to do was turn the knob . . .

When I think back on all that, I take the measure of how destitute we really were. We were only thirty-five miles or so from town, and there was a market town scarcely ten miles away, but we lived as people did during feudal times, without amenities or hope, so entrenched was our belief that we would always be backward peasants. No doubt even today in some remote rural backwater there are still some old people who have been cut off and have no idea of modern life, but in our case we were all relatively young and when Lisette began to describe the city streets all lit up for Christmas, we were discovering that there was a whole world out there whose existence we had never even imagined.

Lisette went off again. For a few days, as if through some sort of automatic inertia, we continued to talk a little bit. For a few evenings, at table, the father commented on his daughter’s stories. “Them’s some hard, strange stories.” Then silence and shouts rained down on us again, like a plague upon the unfortunate.

When I think back . . . All that rain, all those deaths . . . Lisette bore the name of two women who had died; I had been given the name of only one, my maternal grandmother, who died shortly before my birth. My brothers all had first names of cousins who had been killed in the war and my mother too had inherited her name from a cousin who had died in childbirth and whom she had never known. This was the wordless existence we were living, in a world of the dead, when one November evening Lisette came back from the city.

I remember all that rain . . . The sound of it drumming on the roof, the paths running with water, the sea of mud at the gate to the farm, the black sky, the wind, the horrible feeling of endless damp weighing upon us as our life weighed upon us: neither consciousness nor revolt. We were sitting huddled together by the fire when suddenly my mother got to her feet, throwing the rest of us off balance; we watched in surprise as, driven by some obscure impulse, she headed to the door and flung it open.

All that rain, oh, all that rain . . . Framed in the door, motionless, her hair clinging to her face, her dress soaked through, her shoes caked with mud, staring lifelessly, stood Lisette. How did my mother know? How did this woman who, while never mistreating us, never showed us that she loved us, either by deed or word—how did this coarse woman who brought her children into the world in the same way she turned over the soil or fed the hens, this illiterate woman, so exhausted by life that she never even called us by the names she had given us—to the point where I at times wondered if she even remembered them—how had she known that her daughter, half-dead, neither moving nor speaking but merely staring at the door without even thinking of knocking, was just waiting in a relentless downpour for someone to open and bring her into the warm room?

Is this a mother’s love, this intuition of disaster in one’s heart, this spark of empathy that resists even when human beings have been reduced to living like animals? That is what Lucien said: a mother who loves her children always knows when they are in trouble. Personally, I do not much care for this interpretation. Nor do I feel any resentment toward that mother who was not a mother. Poverty is a reaper: it harvests everything inside us that might have made us capable of social intercourse with others, and leaves us empty, purged of feeling, so that we may endure all the darkness of the present day. Nor do I nurture any sturdy illusions: there was nothing of a mother’s love in my mother’s intuition, merely the translation into gesture of her certainty of misfortune. A sort of native consciousness, rooted deep in the heart, which serves to remind poor wretches like us that, on a rainy night, there will always be a daughter who has lost her honor and who will come home to die.

Lisette lived just long enough to give birth to her child. The infant did what was expected of it: it died within three hours. From this tragedy, which to my parents seemed to be part of the natural order of things, so that they were no more—and no less—moved by it than if they had lost a goat, I derived two certainties: the strong live and the weak die, and their pleasure and suffering are proportionate to their position in the hierarchy. Lisette had been beautiful and poor, I was intelligent and indigent, but like her I was doomed to a similar punishment if I ever sought to make good use of my mind in defiance of my class. Finally, as I could not cease to be who I was, either, it became clear to me that my path would be one of secrecy: I had to keep silent about who I was, and never mix with that other world.

From being silent, I then became clandestine.

Quite abruptly I realize I am sitting in my kitchen, in Paris, in this other world where I have made my invisible little niche, a world with which I have been careful never to mix, and I am weeping great warm tears while a little girl with an incredibly warm gaze is holding my hand, gently caressing my knuckles. And I also realize that I have said it all, told her everything: Lisette, my mother, the rain, beauty profaned, and, at the end of it all, the iron hand of destiny giving stillborn infants to mothers who die from wanting to be reborn. I am weeping plump, hot, long, good tears, sobbing tears, and while I am troubled, I am also incomprehensibly happy to see the transfiguration of Paloma’s sad, severe gaze into a well of warmth where I can soften my sobs.

“My God,” I say, regaining my composure somewhat, “my God, Paloma, how silly I am!”

“Madame Michel,” she replies, “you know, you are giving me hope again.”

“Hope?” I say, snuffling pathetically.

“Yes,” she says, “it seems it might be possible to change one’s fate after all.”

We sit there for countless minutes holding hands, not speaking. I have become friends with a lovely twelve-year-old soul to whom I feel very grateful, and however incongruous this connection may be—asymmetrical in age, condition and circumstances—nothing can taint my emotion. When Solange Josse comes to the loge to fetch her daughter, Paloma and I look at each other with the complicity of indestructible friendship, and say goodbye with the certainty we shall meet again soon. I close the door behind them, and sit down in the armchair by the television, with my hand on my chest. And I find myself speaking out loud: maybe this, then, is what life is all about.