Low Heights Read online

  Thérèse cleared away the leftovers, put the cork back in the bottle, gathered up the melon skins and the ham and cheese rinds and put them into a plastic bag, scattered the crumbs for the birds and lay down in her turn – but only once she’d given a satisfied glance at her hat. There are days like that.

  The day was at its hottest when Monsieur Lavenant opened his eyes. He stretched, yawning like a lion. If his right arm obeyed orders, the left remained stubbornly bent, like an iron hook. He had had this disability for a year now and was relatively used to it but it still astonished him sometimes when he woke up. He lay flat again. The play of sunlight through the lime ’s foliage marbled his skin blue and gold. If Cécile had still been alive and there next to him, he would probably have made love to her. She would have feigned sleep and put up with it, with a groan. But Cécile had died suddenly of cancer almost ten years ago. He had never accepted being left behind, just as certain blind people will never get used to sightlessness. He had been angry with her and, out of spite, had thrown himself into his business with the merciless efficiency of the most ruthless predator. It wasn’t for the money, as he was more than comfortably off, but in order to anaesthetise himself, wear himself out, cause himself pain as others do pleasure, until that evening in September when an episode in a grand Lyon restaurant had forced him to pack it all in. He had felt a rush of hot air to his face, his legs gave way beneath him and his reflection disappeared from the spotless tiles above the urinals. His last thought was of his flies, which he hadn’t had time to do up.

  After his stay in hospital, and on his doctor’s advice, he had decided to leave his apartment and office in Lyon and to move into the house at Rémuzat which had been in his wife’s family and where he had set foot only once or twice. That was as good as anywhere else. Since his state of health made nursing care necessary he had recruited Thérèse through a specialist agency. In two months’ time this odd couple would have been together for a year and he had no idea how long this might last, the future not being on his agenda any more.

  A lime blossom, a tiny helicopter, came to land on his chest. He hadn’t drunk much but his mouth was as ‘caramelised’ as after a heavy night. Propping himself up on one elbow, he downed what was left in the bottle of Evian, which a ray of sun had heated almost to boiling point.

  Thérèse was sleeping with her mouth open and her red hair (white in places) plastered to her forehead. Her hat had left a red mark on her skin. A few drops of sweat were visible under her arms. Her dress was rucked up in the brazenness of sleep, exposing soft, white calves lined with blue veins which made him think of certain artisan sausages he had a taste for. She was neither beautiful nor ugly, simply robust. Aside from her professional references he knew nothing about her except that she was Alsatian, from Colmar. It was as if he were seeing her for the first time, seeing her as something more than a medical aid, and it disturbed him. One of Thérèse’s knees was marked by a crescent-shaped scar, some childhood accident, a fall from a bicycle perhaps … Without thinking he went to stroke it, but at that moment Thérèse opened one eye and he put his hand down again, turning red.

  ‘I’m sorry, I think I fell asleep …’

  She sat up, tugging her dress down over her knees and tidying her hair. A few blades of grass were sticking out of it, like pins. Once again she was smiling. The low neckline of her dress revealed a beige bra strap, more suggestive of a hernia bandage than of sexy underwear.

  ‘Perhaps we ought to be thinking of getting back, it’s nearly four o’clock.’

  ‘We ought to, yes.’

  ‘What a lovely place, though … Imagine, some people actually live here …’

  A quarter of an hour later, the car started bumping gently along the track. Before they came to the road, Monsieur Lavenant met Thérèse’s gaze in the rear-view mirror. A tear hung on her eyelashes.

  ‘Thérèse, are you crying?’

  She sniffed, wiped the corner of her eye with the back of her hand, and shifted into first gear.

  ‘No, it’s nothing, Monsieur.’

  ‘Yes, you are, you’re crying. What’s wrong?’

  ‘I’m fifty-two today, Monsieur. It’s my birthday. Silly, isn’t it?’

  FOR FARMHOUSE RESTORATION, Apt area, seek couple as caretakers, no family ties, motivated, stable, gd health. M 40–55 gen. builder for outside work, F to look after well-appointed house, no visitors allowed. Furnished accommodation + salary, to start 08/01. Send CV + salary expectations.

  ICE-CREAM SELLER WANTED, Male, Ruoms area, for summer season.

  The other advertisements disappeared under the salad leaves Thérèse was rinsing. Even if these household tasks – cooking, washing, cleaning – were not high on her list of duties, they were nevertheless the ones she liked best. She had her nursing diploma, of course, but very early on, after two or three years of hospital work, she had chosen to practise her profession in a way that let her move around. Maybe it was the result of her childhood as an orphan, hopping from foster family to hostel as if over stepping stones, until in the end the only place she felt at home was in other people’s houses. Twenty-five years of spending weeks, months, even years with her ‘clients’ had given her a quite remarkable capacity to adapt. A split second in the kitchen and she would know where the vegetable peeler was, what sort of coffee maker they used and whether or not they skimped on cleaning products, or, in the living room, what wasn’t to be moved in any circumstances, ornaments, rugs, the way the curtains hung or, in the bedroom, a very specific manner of arranging the pillows, all these little habits which mean that no interior is anything like another, although they may at first sight appear to be identical.

  She loved living like a chameleon, an actor, even, absorbing other people’s lives to the point that she adopted their smells, their tics, their expressions and their accents, and then, overnight, wiping all that away to begin again elsewhere, as a hermit crab changes shells. Alone in a place of her own, she would have self-destructed within five seconds, vanished into thin air, to be remembered as vaguely as the date of a battle in a history book. It had already happened to her once, between two jobs, and it had left her with the painful apprehension an insomniac feels at nightfall. So she had travelled a lot but only within metropolitan France. Naturally, at the start of her career the idea of joining a humanitarian mission had crossed her mind. Reading It is Midnight, Dr Schweitzer, about a fellow Alsatian, had something to do with it. But the far away was really too far and the infinite too much of a prison. She felt freer within stable, well-defined borders. Moreover, for her, exoticism was less a matter of geography than of human nature, and she knew that even if she lived to be a hundred she would never manage to see all of it.

  Before Monsieur Lavenant she had only agreed to look after women. It wasn’t that she feared for her virtue, she could take care of herself, but, never having attracted the attention of men, she no longer paid them any heed. They had always ignored her, except one drunk, once, at the end of a dance. It had been over with as quickly as you remove a bottle top with your teeth. She hadn’t been hurt, physically, but the disappointment she had felt, lying on a bale of straw with the man vomiting at her back, had extinguished her most ardent dreams for good.

  And so she had spent her whole life among women, usually widows and a few elderly spinsters, from the sweetest to the most cantankerous. Many of them had died in her arms.

  If she had accepted the job at Monsieur Lavenant’s it was because, although she felt much more vigorous than many a man in his fifties, her age was becoming a handicap, as if old age demanded that its final moments be attended by a grace which she cruelly lacked. At all events, Thérèse was no longer really concerned about human gender, male or female. In her eyes they all belonged to the same company of the infirm, of angels almost.

  Nonetheless she was a little discomfited on meeting Monsieur Lavenant for the first time. Instead of the doddering old man described to her by the agency, she found herself confronted by a good
-looking, upright man, one with a crippled arm it was true, but tall, slim and elegant. In spite of his coldness and peremptory tone she had immediately perceived his weak spot, a secret wound inside, where he had taken refuge like a hunted animal. She had accepted the conditions of the contract – modest salary, remote house in a small village in the Provencal Drôme region, almost no days off – and recalled how he had seemed surprised, even disappointed at not having to wrangle with her, certainly hoping for a refusal. That had been in Lyon, in a cold, austere panelled office, one, however, which he visibly had no desire to leave.

  Since they had been sharing this house, no more cheerful than the Lyon office, he had done all he could to make himself disagreeable, but the more he persisted in this attitude, the more Thérèse took a malicious pleasure in receiving the blows with the unshakable indifference of a padded wall. This was neither sadism nor masochism on her part; she was simply convinced that one of these days she would succeed in bringing him out of his hole. Thérèse was as pugnacious as a pike fisherman and this was a catch she was not going to let go. Yesterday after the picnic she had scored a point.

  Thérèse took a salad shaker out of the cupboard, one of those previously used for collecting snails, made out of woven metal wire. Everything was old here, a family house where nothing had been changed except for the washing machine and central heating. She heaped the leaves in the shaker and went to drain them on the doorstep. The drops raining from the salad made dark galaxies on the already warm stone flags. Above the Rocher du Caire, whose outline resembling an Indian chief was silhouetted against the washed-out sky, a dozen wild vultures were circling before swooping down further into the valley. Shepherds must have put out a ewe’s carcass for them. She came back to the sink, put the fresh curly lettuce leaves into a salad bowl and, before starting on anything else, touched her earrings with a smile, two little green stones which a blushing Monsieur Lavenant had given her for her birthday the evening before.

  Monsieur Lavenant drank the lukewarm dregs of his bowl of coffee, used the side of his hand to sweep the scattered breadcrumbs into a little heap on the table, and then gazed at it. The noise of the motorised cultivator starting up came in through the open window and made him jump. He hurried to close it, railing against his idiot of a neighbour. The farting noises from the countless pieces of machinery the man used every day of the week, including Sunday, were becoming intolerable. People in the country spend their time in strange ways. They dig holes, fill in others, put up walls made of very heavy stones, lug enormous beams about in order to build the frames of sizeable buildings which they never finish, divert watercourses, sand, saw, twist and untwist pieces of scrap metal, cut down trees, knock in posts, heap their gardens with the carcasses of old Renault 4s, sometimes turning them into henhouses, with the result that their properties look like rubbish tips, breakers’ yards. The more arduous and risky the work, the happier they are. They can’t stop wearing themselves out, baking their skin in the sun, as if the way to save their souls is by the total exhaustion of their bodies. Everything they build is ugly, as are the materials they use: corrugated iron, asbestos cement, plastic sheeting, old tyres. They don’t give a stuff about the birdsong or the sunsets. Nature, for them, is merely a source of income from which they scarcely profit. All this was going to end badly. One day Monsieur Lavenant was going to kill his neighbour.

  This murderous prospect livened him up. He had slept badly and since waking had felt listless, caught up in an uncharacteristic melancholy. One half of him resisted this mood but the other would gladly have given in to it, like his whim of the evening before. What had got into him that he had given Cécile ’s earrings to Thérèse? Two little emeralds set in gold, which he had brought back from Bangkok for her in … Just like in films, to symbolise the passing of time, he saw the pages of a calendar flying off, but couldn’t keep hold of a single one. They lay scattered in his memory, just so many days he had passed by without noticing. The feeling of emptiness made him suddenly dizzy and he had to sit down in his armchair, almost winded. ‘Bloody hell! I know I’ve been to Bangkok! I’d swear it on my life.’ Not that that was much of a guarantee any more. The more he tried to bolster himself with his memories, the more they dissolved into a pallid watercolour, drained of all significance. ‘Silom Road, Chao Phraya River, Sathon Tai Road …’ Names, just names, which in being spoken were stripped of their meaning and only increased his doubt. He gave up on Thailand to concentrate on more elementary things. Once he had recited all his times tables he felt a degree of reassurance. His doctor had warned him about possible temporary after-effects of the stroke which should, however, not cause him alarm. It must be one of those.

  Right, he had given Cécile ’s earrings to Thérèse because … because he had felt sorry for her with her fifty-two years and her little straw hat, that was it, he’d felt sorry. And yet, deep down, he didn’t think that was the right word. Unless … unless it was himself he’d felt sorry for. Never had he been so acutely aware of the immense solitude in which he’d been steeped for years as he had yesterday outside the little chapel, beneath the lime tree. Without Thérèse there he might perhaps have died of it. By giving her this modest jewellery he had wanted to thank her, it was as silly as that. But how had she construed his gesture? As a cheap come-on? A weakness on his part? And why had he insisted on grilling the chops in the fireplace, preparing the fire himself with his one hand, opening a bottle of champagne and talking nonsense about his life and his travels … He was drunk, that was it. He was drunk and had let himself get swept up in the stupidest sentimentalities. Until they’d parted, almost reluctantly, in front of the dying fire. He’d all but kissed her before going up to bed. He was angry with himself now, yes, he was angry all right! That morning he’d done everything he could to avoid her, just a grumpy ‘good morning’ before having his breakfast. He hadn’t looked at her but was sure she was smiling as she brought his coffee.

  Closed window notwithstanding, the vroom of the motor grated on his nerves like a dentist’s drill. He’d go and give him a piece of his mind, that moron! Couldn’t you even have peace and quiet on a Sunday? But was it in fact Sunday?

  *

  ‘You shouldn’t have lost your temper like that. It’s not good for you and it achieves nothing.’

  ‘Nothing? Can you still hear it? No, well, you see!’

  ‘At this time he ’ll be having his lunch, like us.’

  ‘That’s something. Sometimes those louts forget to eat. Have you tipped the saltcellar into the salad or something?’

  Monsieur Lavenant pushed his plate away, pulling a face. He was pale, and his right hand shook as he wiped his lips with his napkin. It wouldn’t have taken much for him to burst into tears. He wasn’t hungry. The altercation with his neighbour had spoilt his appetite. Naturally he hadn’t been slow to tell him what was what, but the other man had retorted that, for one thing, he was at liberty to do what he liked in his own home and, for another, it wasn’t Sunday but Wednesday and, during the week, not having the luxury of twiddling his thumbs like some people, he had every right to work.

  Stuck on the other side of the low stone wall, Monsieur Lavenant had felt betrayed. He stood stock-still, open-mouthed, until the hulk disappeared, pushing a wheelbarrow filled with rubble. It wasn’t Sunday … Time no longer belonged to him and he no longer belonged to time. A stream of bewildered protestations wedged in his throat like dead branches in the river Aygues in spate. He put his hand to his forehead, closing his eyes. A word was blinking in his head like a hazard light: SENILE. His knees started trembling as they had in front of the urinals just before his stroke. He went back up the steps to his house holding onto the rail, as stiff as a wooden puppet.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me it wasn’t Sunday?’

  ‘Well, you never asked me. We went to the market yesterday, that’s always a Tuesday.’

  ‘Tuesday …’

  Thérèse saw his expression darken, begin to turn nasty. Embarrassed
, she got up and began clearing the table.

  ‘Tuesday, Wednesday, Sunday, what does it matter? One day’s as good as another. It’s true my salad was too salty.’

  Monsieur Lavenant had his coffee in the sitting room. The closed shutters cast stripes of light and shade around the room. The house suited him well, really; the internal walls were plastered and the sun was kept out. But the house, at least, had a memory. He grabbed the remote control and began playing with the buttons the way others play Russian roulette. Except that in this case there was a bullet in every chamber of the barrel. Each of the advertisements streaming by seemed to be addressed specially to him by some diabolical means: Norwich Union, life assurance, home lifts, denture fixative, and featured actors he remembered when they were young and famous. This distressing danse macabre persisted after he had switched off the TV. On the convex screen was a reflection of his own image, a desiccated mummy huddled in an armchair streaked with light like an old negative. This was the last thing he saw before letting his chin drop onto his chest, overcome by a pitiless fatigue.

  He woke up in the grip of a strong sensation, somewhere between pleasure and pain. He had the most enormous erection. A dark stain formed a sort of island shape on his left thigh.

  ‘What the f—’

  He stood up, legs apart like a child caught wetting his pants. It was the first time this had happened to him. Red-faced, he made a rush for the bathroom. On the stairs he ran into Thérèse, who was forced to press herself against the wall to let him go past.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing, absolutely nothing.’

  Bolting the door, he took off his trousers, switched on the hot tap and looked for the nail brush. With only one hand and in his febrile state, every action became hazardous. As he was preparing to scrub the fabric, he realised he was dealing not with urine but with sperm. A readily identifiable thin white film was drying on the borders of the stain. He had to sit down on the edge of the bath tub, torn between pride that he still had it in him and shame at having lost control. The touch of the icy enamel beneath his thighs made his hairs stand on end and again his penis grew hard.