A Nail, a Rose Read online

  ‘I ought to be getting back,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll come with you for a bit,’ he said. ‘The roads aren’t safe.’

  He was still cleaning her up.

  ‘All this blood,’ he said. ‘What are you going to tell them at home?’

  ‘I’ll say I slipped on some ice. I’ll say I fell backwards, and that my head hit the pavement hard.’

  ‘You came up with that one quickly – you’re a pretty good liar, aren’t you?’

  ‘About my things, is there anything else that interests you?’

  ‘No. Here, take your cigarettes.’

  ‘No, you keep them.’

  ‘I insist, take them back.’

  ‘Aren’t we polite to each other…’

  ‘Tell me, where do you live?’

  ‘Very near here. I’ll be fine on my own now.’

  ‘Who do you live with?’

  ‘With my brother, my father, my father’s four brothers and their six sons. If my brother saw you, he’d take hold of you and turn your body into a knot in one second flat. Have you seen that Charlie Chaplin film where the policeman bends street-lamps? He’s a bit like him, my brother.’

  ‘Are you teasing me?’

  ‘I’m teasing you.’

  ‘But seriously, where do you live?’

  ‘Very near here. You’ll be able to see me going in. Just stay where you are and let me go now. Goodbye…’

  ‘Goodbye. What’s your name?’

  ‘Irene. And yours?’

  ‘Jean.’

  ‘Cheers, Jean.’

  ‘Cheers, Irene.’

  She went in without making the slightest sound. Half-opening the door of the bedroom she could see that Dan was asleep and so was Maggy, the kid who looked after him. She gently closed the door behind her and picked up a hand mirror. Standing in front of the looking-glass above the fireplace and holding the mirror behind her head, she tried to take stock. The lights were blacked out, which made it hard to see, so she struck a match and held it close to her head. That was no good because she had the mirror in one hand and the match in the other, and besides, she was too far from the looking-glass. Her hair was all stuck together at the roots: she really ought to wash it, and her scalp ought to have some stitches.

  She called a doctor, but he lived too far away to come on foot, and didn’t dare venture out by car because of the ice. Too bad – she hated having stitches anyway. She lay down on the bare floorboards, on her stomach, so as not to lean her head on the ground, and tucked her face inside her folded arms: that was the way to do it. Maggy had washed the floor, and it gave off the smell of damp wood. Inside her folded arms, she closed her eyes.

  A nail from a horse’s hoof… in bedrooms, too… in Lorraine, in the country I was chased from by the war. But the war is everywhere. In Lorraine there are towns covered with gold. It was in Lorraine, leaning against some flowers on a wall, that I said to you: ‘If one day you no longer love me, you must tell me so.’ Why did you swirl the beer in the bottom of your glass without saying anything? Why didn’t you say anything when I said to you, ‘Speak to me, speak to me,’ whilst I was going slowly mad? In heather, in orchards, in ferns, in fields of cut corn… My too faithful memory has no future: it’s closed to today, affirming and consuming itself at once. I live in the memory of a flower without a name. Oh my love, why did you abandon me? I live in the memory of a lost flower, I live in my devastated kingdom. And here I am inside my folded arms, hands clasped in anguish, while a vast mould spreads all over the world.

  Next morning, the man came back, and stood waiting by the garden fence. Irene went down to the gate and opened it.

  ‘I’m not coming in,’ he said. ‘I’ve just come to find out how you are.’

  ‘I’m better. It wasn’t very serious.’

  ‘I’ve brought you a bottle of milk and some porridge oats.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘but you shouldn’t deprive yourself. What you took from me isn’t going to put you back on your feet.’

  ‘It’s OK… since then, I’ve found what I was looking for.’

  He reached out and felt her hair.

  ‘Show me your head… Your hair is still all red.’

  ‘It’s not easy to wash out. Would you like a cig or two?’

  ‘I sure would.’

  He stayed by the gate while she went back into the house and came back with some cigarettes.

  ‘Tell me, did you tell the police about me?’

  ‘Are you daft or something?’

  ‘Sorry. Look, here’s my address.’

  He held out a bit of paper.

  ‘What could I do for you?’ he asked. ‘If there’s anything you need doing around the house, you must drop me a line – if you’ve any wood that needs chopping, for instance, that sort of thing.’

  ‘I like to chop my own wood. You mustn’t take my little pleasures away from me.’

  ‘All right. I’d like to give you a present. What would you like?’

  ‘I don’t like presents much…’

  ‘Is there really nothing you want?’

  ‘Oh I don’t know… it’s difficult to say.’

  When he had gone, Irene stayed by the gate. What a strange episode, this man who’d not been afraid to return. Neither perfection nor eternity; some good, some evil. And while she waited, the mould was rising in layers, on the world and in her heart. Because of Danny. Why is it that we don’t see each other any more, why do we no longer come together, like the two hands we once were? I’ll never understand. ‘I’d like to give you a present – what would you like?’ A present for Irene…

  The man had gone and she could answer now, since it was not him that she was answering.

  ‘I’d like a rose of Jericho.’

  ANNA

  ‘COME ON,’ he said, ‘get some change…’

  ‘All right,’ Anna said.

  She went in and returned with the notes. She watched Nicolas as he hung the hose back on the petrol pump and handed over the change; she watched the car as it pulled out, re-entered the right lane, and disappeared in the direction of Maisons-Alfort. At the garage over the way another car pulled in. The woman who worked there was tall, gaunt, older than Anna, and she wore an old-fashioned chignon on the crown of her head, fastened not with hairpins but with four or five criss-crossing nails, which formed a rosette around the chignon: a real curiosity.

  Anna watched the woman as she served the petrol and hung the hose back on the pump. She watched the car as it pulled into the right lane and drove off in the other direction along the Maisons-Alfort road.

  ‘How much longer are you going to stand around like that? What about some grub?’ Nicolas shouted from the open window.

  ‘Coming,’ Anna said, ‘coming.’

  Anna leaned over the gas stove, holding two veal chops above the frying-pan without dropping them in. The meat beneath her fingers was as white and insipid as the cars that went by on the road to Maisons-Alfort. She chopped two onions and put them in the pan, then minced two cloves of garlic and added them with a sprig of thyme. As she waited for it to brown, she looked at the meat that she’d dropped on the paper. It was as insipid as the cars, or the smell of petrol that rose up around her the whole day long.

  It’s odd, Anna thought, how often you see garages at the cinema: there’s been one in all the recent films I’ve seen. There was that garage where a man and a woman loved each other to distraction: then there was the one where a horrendous crime was being plotted, the one where an amazingly handsome man got stranded and then stayed on… and the garage that was started by a group of young people, where they all had a hell of a time…

  It’s not only what happens in a garage – there’s something about the place itself, even about the quite simple objects that I see every day of my life. Somehow the pump, the garage sign and the end of the road all seem to be splashed with sun, and even when it’s raining they glow, they glow so strangely. Oh yes, garages make a good setting f
or great crimes and great passions, all right… You can tell that these film producers don’t live in a garage; if they came to visit they’d soon find out what goes on: absolutely nothing.

  Anna walked into the glass porch holding the frying-pan.

  ‘Shit, there’s a customer,’ Nicolas said.

  He went out. Anna put the pan on the table and sat down. She could hear the noise of the pump and then a monkey-wrench being thrown on to the pavement. The meat was getting cold in the pan. Anna breathed a deep sigh, her white linen top stretching across the bosom, and lowered her head. Her bosom was beautiful, high and firm. She folded back the lapels of her top as far as her cleavage.

  Anna’s breasts were marked with white and blue lines: veins, she thought, pipes full of blood. For her, a breast could only be truly beautiful if it was made of marble, or of stone. It wasn’t that blood frightened her – she didn’t at all mind blood when it was red and flowing… Anna’s thoughts always ran on ahead, and straight away she could see blood that was coagulated and blackened, blood that was decomposing, blood that surged back to the heart.

  Nicolas came back and sat down again.

  ‘Aren’t you going to help yourself?’ he said.

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  Nicolas shrugged and took a veal chop.

  ‘It’s nice and tasty,’ he said.

  Anna cut herself a small piece of meat from the pan and chewed it, but it stuck in her throat.

  ‘Nicolas,’ she said, ‘turn the radio off for a moment…’

  ‘Why? It’s a cheerful song.’

  It was a cheerful song. Anna imagined a man on a motorbike. He was going fast, he hit a pole, his head hit the pole. She saw liquid, red blood surging back to the heart. The man was quite dead.

  Anna was sitting slightly away from the table, but her hands were on it. ‘Nicolas…’ she said, in the way that people do when they mean, ‘Help me…’

  ‘Well, what is it?’ Nicolas said, busy eating his meat.

  ‘Oh, nothing.’

  She walked over to the sink and swallowed a glass of water, then came back to the table and helped herself to some food. She ate her meat, just like Nicolas, just like everyone else.

  ‘Is that all there is?’ Nicolas said.

  ‘There’s some salad,’ Anna said.

  When they had eaten their salad, she cleared away and began to wash up. Nicolas had dozed off right there in his chair, his head cradled in his arms. He was tired; he had been late getting to bed the night before, because he had had to finish repair work on two cars that were being picked up early.

  They heard a car hooting, repeatedly, outside the house.

  ‘Go and see what it is, love,’ Nicolas said in a sleepy voice.

  ‘All right,’ Anna said.

  After pumping ten litres, Anna hung up the hose, took the money and watched the car leave. Car drivers were never interesting. They called out how many litres they wanted, paid, said thank you. Most of them didn’t even get out of their cars: they left it to you to unscrew the cap and screw it back on again. Even when there was a repair to be done, the driver and his family stayed in their cars. When a vehicle had to be cranked up, they all got out and went off for a walk along the road, coming back when it was finished, saying thank you and driving off quickly so as to make up for lost time. With cyclists it was different: they had charm. The cyclist did the work himself and asked you to give him a hand, to hold the bike this way or that, and he talked to you while he was doing the job. When he’d finished, he’d mop his brow and say:

  ‘It’s hot, is there a café around here?’

  ‘No,’ Anna would say, ‘but I can get you a glass of lemonade if you like.’

  She’d go and get the bottle. By way of thanks, the cyclist would talk for a moment, tell her where he came from and where he was going. And when he left, Anna might gaze after him for a long time, still imagining him even when he had disappeared way up the road. Only very rarely did cyclists come to the garage.

  Anna went back in to finish the washing up. The phone rang. It was in the glass porch, on the table which served as a desk. Anna heard Nicolas saying, ‘Hello… Hello!’ several times, and then: ‘No one there.’ He stretched out on the small sofa and went back to sleep while Anna put the cutlery and plates away and ran a cloth over the kitchen tiles. The phone rang again.

  ‘Hello,’ Nicolas said. ‘Hello!’ he yelled. He hung up, furious. ‘Impossible to get back to sleep now…’

  He went out, brought a wheel on to the pavement and started to repair it. Anna heard the thud of a tyre on the paving stones as the phone rang for the third time.

  ‘Hello?’ Anna said.

  ‘It’s Bobby. Would you like to come out with me in a bit?’

  ‘Yes… yes,’ Anna said.

  ‘Come and pick me up, we’ll go dancing.’

  ‘Yes… yes.’

  She hung up, took out her handkerchief and passed it over her lips, which were slightly moist. Nicolas climbed up the wooden stairs and came in.

  ‘Who was that on the phone?’

  ‘Bobby,’ Anna said.

  ‘Must have been that shithead who woke me up twice, then. He wants to take you out, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Yes…’ Anna said.

  Nicolas was holding a monkey-wrench in his hand and he slammed it down violently on the little table by the phone, turned his back on her and made for the door.

  ‘Nicolas…’ Anna cried, ‘you know I won’t do anything bad…’

  ‘Do whatever you like, you really are a pain,’ Nicolas said, banging the door.

  Anna sat on the edge of the sofa, hands clasped tightly between her knees. Nicolas was livid; he didn’t want her to go out with Bobby.

  Anna’s body was there on the sofa too – her hands, her knees, her arms. You couldn’t say that her body was opposite her, because Anna was inside her own body, she actually was this body full of veins, these veins full of blood. And yet these veins and this blood nauseated her, made her sick at heart.

  Was she really nothing but this body that made her so uneasy? And what function did it serve? If, for example, Anna thought, a woman carrying a pail full of rubbish were to get a little graze on her hand, and the dirt from the rubbish were to penetrate the graze and mingle with the dirt in her body, the scratch would swell up and redden, the body would become diseased and gangrenous, and the woman would die.

  Anne could see the woman from the garage over the way, the woman with nails in her hair. She saw her pumping petrol – why? – with the hand that might have that graze on it. Not worth fussing about, she thinks, but then she catches cold, a bad dose of flu, and that’s enough. It’s no great loss: of what use was her old and ugly body? She might as well die straight away, get it over with. It was different for Anna: she was pretty, and younger. Several years younger, in fact.

  What did they stand for, those years? Take a span of ten years, for instance. Ten years ago, she was pregnant with Paul; but time had passed so quickly since then that it seemed like yesterday. Anna could see herself as she was then, belly enormous and face puffy. There had been a time, then, when her body had not disgusted her. She used to run her hand over her swollen belly, her stretched skin; her body was distorted but she accepted it, because all of a sudden it had a clearly defined purpose, a real function. She had cared for Paul and suckled him, without thinking of anything else. Time had passed. It was a good time: she’d been creating Paul.

  Now she wondered: what had been the point of it? She didn’t know. It was Paul’s business; let him fend for himself now. Anyway, she had enjoyed creating him. Paul wasn’t there at the moment: he was nine now, and it was the holidays, so he was at his aunt’s little farm near Chevreuse. He could manage without her now.

  Anna sat there on the sofa, contemplating herself, her body. It wasn’t that she had nothing to do all day, what with helping Nicolas – serving customers, preparing meals, doing the shopping, washing up, polishing, brushing, washing clothes, men
ding linen, cleaning Nicolas’s suits. But all these things were done and then undone one by one. Washing up wasn’t at all the same thing as creating Paul. She sat there on the sofa, next to the radio and the two tables – the one where they ate and the one which served as a desk – and in the midst of chairs, vases and other objects. Anna heard the cars passing by on the road to Maisons-Alfort, she heard the noise of the pump, the tyres and the monkey-wrenches on the paving stones, and she smelled the petrol. Objects, smells and noises into which her thoughts escaped, leaping over and ahead of them, beyond objects, hours, and days.

  Through the window-pane – this place is all windowpanes, she thought – Anna saw the woman from over the way, and a man who always turned up at this time and stopped either on the pavement opposite or on this one, according to the position of the sun and his desire for heat or shade. The man parked himself there because of the cars that pulled in. His cap would shake as he held it out, because he had a nervous disease. When he stopped walking, the tips of his toes stayed on the ground but his heels came and went, shaking his whole body. His left hand shook his outstretched cap and his right arm was bent back towards his shoulder, so that it seemed as if his open hand was forever in the act of greeting someone.

  It was not good luck for Anna to have someone like that before her eyes: the road was saturated with the sun, heating the man’s body and making the nails in the woman’s hair glisten, while cars and motorbikes spun past, forever buzzing the silence. She closed her eyes and saw, just as if she really was seeing it, a motorbike coming at full speed, mounting the pavement over the way, flattening the woman with the chignon. Blood squirted all over the place, in streams and in showers, spilling out and coating everything: the pumps, the paving stones, the walls, the beggar, the entire road.