Following the Summer (4 page)

Six

A
L DAY LONG A GENTLE RAINFALL
muddied the path around the future water tower, Summer mud snakes between scales of dried earth. Marie invents for herself an appetite for rain. Moves through it alone, though the sun, the extravagant sun, yesterday made her surrender.

Everything is so simple. The wound already closing, mauve under the bandage, the only oozing inside her body, in her private wetness, in a secret that is unimportant now. Everything so simple, inside a white raincoat.

Soon new titles on a bookstore shelf will offer a kind of deliverance. There are enough to last much longer than the week of night shift, which she always fills with American novels. Sentences that flow more slowly, words to be learned when they occur in the text, just as in the past, here in this part of the world, French was learned by force, from Péguy's essays or the meditations of Claudel. As for the American writers, Marie confines herself to easy reading, the only kind of novels that come here in any case, but they sometimes offer images that please her: lonely bars, death that leaves no trace, love in the afternoon.

The thirty-year-old bookseller has chin-length sideburns, an intellectual's bony frame, and spectacles worn over unfocused eyes. In the year that she has been seeing him, for the two are always alone, he has never moved from his safe place behind an old tailor's counter. He barely greets her, lets her make her choice in silence, and knows that soon she will consent to listen to his slow monologues, in a language in which she dares only to assent. “Why don't you try something else?” he begins, never waiting for her reply. He won't wrap up the yellow-covered books until he has plucked from his piles of paper the latest issue of a gloomy magazine, already dog-eared.

He reads slowly, one pale finger following the line, paragraphs too weighty for her. He looks up: “Dreiser, I say, Theodore Dreiser is what you should be reading these days. I'll order a book for you, just one.” She hears the name, knows that he dreams of entering, through her, the circuit that his other customers refuse him, only murmurs neutrally, “From Europe?” Impatient or triumphant, he purses his lips, bites into his reply with a small sucking sound. She is his quarry for another fifteen minutes, during which she offers only gestures, echoes.

Perhaps next week, she thinks, in the humid bookstore, hypnotized by his voice that is at once plaintive and arrogant. Next week, perhaps, she'll give in. Warmth encounters warmth and the window fogs over. On ceiling-high shelves books lose their titles and spines. The dark line of true reading. Take the yellow novels in their paper bag and go. It is time.

She walks past shops that are closing one by one, the rain a mere veil now, but the greyness has won. There is the Europe of great literature, perhaps far away. But there is Ervant's Europe, too, and it sometimes humiliates her, drives her away. Last week, for instance, a day that she hates to remember, when he arrived just after noon, agitated, but with a look of triumph. With a package all tied with string, something rendered shapeless by the mail. Under stamps with foreign faces, Ervant's name was capped with accents. The package had been opened, then tied up again. “It's for you, from my mother,” he said, excited. Did she remember that he had written his mother to tell about his life here and his future? Had he told her, or had she heard him? Until now, the mother had been just a shadow in a kerchief, left behind in Odensk, a setting of icons, embroideries, a circle of forests, once dark with murders, now with superstitions. He mentioned it only to mark the distance once more, to leave it again, break with it.

Marie saw Odensk differently, inaccessible to her. It must resemble Montbrun, with its one road only slightly wider at the church, then arriving at once at the woods. Silent villagers, whose lives repeat themselves very early every day, with pauses only for fatigue. Its women are bent and always in skirts, and they make old things like wax or soap, they beat rugs. There were no young girls, and the reason for the men's exile was in that absence, even though Ervant had never said such a thing.

The package contained red slippers of imitation suede lined with plush, pointed like the footgear worn by ladies in hennins or by comic-book elves. The falseness of the fabric was obvious at once — the women there no longer wove, then, as they shivered by the fireplace — and these ridiculous slippers could be bought in the market.

Ervant smiled. And Marie liked only thin sandals or bare feet on carpets. She carefully folded the paper, uncertain whether to lie but already trapped. Pretend. Diminish. Dissemble. She questioned him about what he had written to his mother, to apologize for having become a daughter-in-law because those people knew only women who are cold. She must show this present to her mother, tolerate the murmuring, get through the sarcasm, hear herself whisper to Ervant how much she appreciates the peasant woman's kindness. And Marie was sure that he would smile again, shedding the discomfort of the man who had come here in ignorance.

That evening, the last one before the week of night work, she had escaped with him to the movies so she wouldn't be obliged to do anything more, to have a break before drawing out their time at the Paris Café, as usual. They had laughed, and she had let herself recover over brackish coffee because he knew a different way of talking. About the brass, the brown-gold Turkish coffee served there by every woman from the engraved pot she is given in the days of her beauty. They grow old in silence, in the presence of men, he says, and if he wants nothing of those women it is because they
end up chattering among themselves, hating the daytime. He wants Marie with him in the light.

She doesn't know if she prefers this possessiveness, but it causes less pain than does affection in the guise of red imitation suede. She doesn't want his child: she simply wants him to close the door on her, to leave her frozen there and then awaken her. In settings they will devise together: sheets of satiny raw silk perhaps, a bed of unvarnished wood, a diamond-shaped vase on a low table, lamps that only faintly illuminate walls painted grey, walls painted blue.

Magazine images, which she confuses with intensity. She knows when it is five o'clock, as it is now, when the town goes home for supper, to kitchens that smell of vegetables and grease.

At a construction site, workmen are busy dropping canvas sheets over slabs of fresh cement, and one of them is whistling. He doesn't look at her. She hesitates where the two towns meet, near the hospital she has never been inside, hesitates between the road that follows the lake and the main street, at this unsettled hour when the street is emptying before its new activity begins, between the movie houses and the hotels. In this unaccustomed light of day the store fronts look greenish, and she feels unable to move, as in those dreams in which you're paralysed and objects are cast far away. Between the beauty parlour and Sally's Fashion, a distorting mirror makes her head longer, languid. She shakes herself, she's not one of those women who will push a baby carriage from street to street, from sale to sale, from season to season.

Of that she is certain. The bus-truck arrives from the north, by chance, and she is about to board it when she sees a woman come out the constantly swinging door of the Radio Grill, then knee her way into the restaurant next door. Under a red plastic raincoat the shoulders are square, it is she. And it's like listening to her talk. Marie tries for a closer look through the grease-streaked window that hides her now, but the bus driver, impatient, has started up.

She turns her back, sits on the long seat in front with two old women who will get off soon, at the old folks' home — it is already late — and she pulls her collar tighter. She is as cold as these old women probably are, who go from shelter to shelter. She has chosen to go home and that reminds her of the past when she would retch on her way home from Mass, moving from incense to the smell of roasting meat, having had nothing to drink but a long gulp of sun. Her nail polish is flaking onto her paper bag; the old ladies clutch their purses. Marie will disembark after they do, three stops later.

Seven

T
HE TREMOY ROAD IS FULL OF CARS
draped with garlands, and on the only steps that cross the low wall a bride descends into the middle of the park. She is thin and glaucous, the hem of her gown droops around her ankles, stops at white stockings in low-cut ivory shoes. Rayon over nylon over satin, thinks Marie, an inventory of poverty; she looks for the bridegroom and finds behind the crinolines a little man squeezed into a powder-blue suit, with pleated lapels. She wishes them naked, against the ash tree where they'll be photographed, the girl lying on the mangy midsummer grass, her belly offered to the pigeons seeking company, the boy adding cigarette butts to those already lying around her satin shoes. The bodies of both would remain cold.

The dog salivates in his sleep, and grinds his teeth. Marie knows why she has brought him back here, why she sits in the same place, knows what she has been waiting for since the sun passed noon. The same warmth, the same understanding of things. The bridal couple will leave again, after exchanging fish-kisses, and it will be three o'clock, the hour when the day begins to wane.

In her black slacks again, and a flowered blouse with a halter neckline, Corrine has come along the Tremoy Road, too, and she is laughing. She bends over the drinking fountain, which is stained like a latrine, source of disease and forbidden to children, and the water that gushes up is almost silver. “Want some?” She presses the lever and it's an order. Marie hardly dares to hold back her hair as she slips beneath the other woman's shadow. Her throat is still dry, she has barely drunk, she all but trembles. Corrine laughs. “I've got something to tell you.” As if she knew her. The dog follows. It's their first date.

They cross the park, leave its few patches of shadow, and go to sit on one of the sharp-edged rocks by the side of the lake, rippled today by an inner wind. They see seaweed swaying in a channel. Corrine asks how long she went to school and if she knows anything about depression. Marie says whatever comes into her head, it will do.

“My husband's in the hospital,” Corrine says, as if talking about the seasons. She tells the story with no digressions, a composition in the style of advice to the lovelorn, and all that's missing is the solution. He's not really her husband, Pietro, an Italian, withdrawn but charming, she's been living with him for five years now, or a little less. They had a mobile home on the outskirts of one of those new towns up north where they first met, she was working in a bar, he on the completion of a road. The camps aren't what they once were, she explains, as if she'd known them all back in the days of the first workers' settlements, but she won't say anything about them. The men go down regularly to towns like this one, to join their wives and children and to putter around while awaiting their real return. Pietro was on his own, and they had agreed to make a life together by simple addition.

The small town had shut down, it happens, cobalt had been mined there and the market was bad. Corrine had persuaded him to move south, where she could find better-paying work, where they wouldn't be so isolated because the distance stifled her, sometimes. They'd moved into the second floor of the Union Hotel at a special monthly rate and hadn't budged. Every night Corrine went down to the main floor, behind the bar, and Pietro stayed upstairs, brooding and listening to the radio. He'd become strange, she said, a stranger, and so suddenly. He refused to look for work, he went out only at night when the noises down there had dissipated, he spoke only to her, to grumble about this place or to promise her another life, one that she did not care for, that would take them to the ocean, where he would play the harmonica in the sun.

Corrine was laughing again. “He's crazy, I know he is, but he's so good-looking.” She was sure she could persuade him to stay here once he understood, and she sometimes thought they might buy the little movie theatre next door, where he could rule over all the dreams he wanted. She'd be the cashier and hostess, and they'd go on living late into the night.

But now he was smoking his nights away, one by one, while he waited for her to come upstairs.

Last Saturday, at the hour of waifs and strays, he had burst into the bar through the inner door. He saw that she knew them all, all these gaunt young men who were still funny and self-destructive, who would be reborn at noon, who kept Corrine hopping between the tables. She echoed them, she understood them, and they amused her. He left, walking past her, and she found him at dawn, two streets away, stock-still on the parapet of the old hydroplane dock. The lake was oily in the last heat of July. There wasn't room enough between them for the lapping of a wave or the death of a cicada. Yet he went on talking, piling up plans. They would go to the real south, to where the Gulf of Mexico resembles the area around Civitavecchia, there were plenty of places he'd know without a map, by instinct. He would build houses or repair the plaster of the haciendas, he would grow roses resistant to the scorching heat, he would plant fountains in schoolyards, all year he would drink fresh wine that she alone would serve only to him, he'd teach her how to roast sweet peppers, afternoons she would rest, to swell with child.

“I shut him up then. I said if I had a child I'd kill it.” Pietro didn't say a word until the next night, he had swallowed a bottle of cheap sleeping pills, he was in no danger but she'd taken him to the hospital, to other stiflers of dreams, who would perhaps teach him resignation. She goes every day to see him, laughs at the white nightshirt that bares his hairy legs, she brings him cigarettes and he takes them as if she were clinging to him. He'll be discharged tomorrow. No one has asked what's wrong with him, only stammered prescriptions for rest to the plain-spoken woman he waits for and receives. In this country suicides hide in the woods, or succeed with a rifle. There is no contrition for refugees, for Italians who long for the sun, who cannot get used to shadows and beer. To warmth that is stored for the winter.

Corrine doesn't know what she wants from him. She says again that he's handsome, taller than his countrymen but more worn down, he is thin now, and dry like the tobacco he taught her to roll. Marie has never been inside the hospital but she can see the white before a boy's eyes, of the morning porridge, midday fish, evening stew, and the night that falls without music.

But Corrine is the one she understands, you don't make a child with a man whose plexus is elsewhere. You take them and you taste them. Marie has never known another hand between her legs than Ervant's, but she knows that strangers have a different way of touching, that they violate with reverence. Ervant tells her he once rubbed the clitoris of a woman who had stood off by herself, weeping, at a village fair, and that she came against his leg and offered him nothing in return. She knows that it is possible and that this woman's Pietro will lose her if he tries to unite their lives further. But it's not up to her to say so. The summer isn't over, she will come back to hear this story while protecting her own.

She wonders why Corrine never wears a dress, her black slacks are wrinkled at the knee and crotch, she looks like a waitress again.