> Sketches indicating the before and after locations of objects that had shifted position in the house. The list included things like the car keys on the table and winter boots in the hall, and I had to stop myself from telling Julie that I knew the cleaning woman was a ghost.
> Entries dated, but with no time, such as I felt a presence in the TV room, or as if to enrage me even more, Mama says she was pushed by a force and almost fell downstairs. That was dated the Saturday before, when the poltergeist had been able to capitalize on the fact that Danièle was drunk as a skunk after Alain Laganière and his wife had come to have dinner and play cards.
And so on and so forth. For pages and pages.
Most of the entries gave the dates and hours when doors had slammed in the middle of the night. I remember being afraid for her and feeling sorry for her. Poor Julie. Poor us. I remember taking her in my arms like when she was little, and rocking her for a long time. Perhaps I should have come clean then and there, but I decided to let things go.
There were so many slammed doors in those days that it couldn’t hurt to blame two or three of them on ghosts.
After that things were better, things were worse, but they were never good any more. My wife and her friend Louise hired some clown with a moustache to purify the house: he walked all over mumbling in some bizarre language, and burning cheap incense. My daughter kept on adding to her notebook, but she didn’t have any more night sweats, and I suspected her of having begun to draw attention to herself at school with all that stuff. My wife, as she did with anything and everything, used the negative energy on the loose in our household as a pretext to spend money. She had to regain control of the house, she said, and to do so for the family. In practice that meant unloading vast sums onto her decorator friend, buying mountains of knick-knacks and trinkets every day, ordering lamps and furniture from the ends of the earth, then spending almost fifteen thousand bucks to have a made-to-measure feng shui bed built for our room, wide as two king beds, so wide in fact that there was no way we could come into contact except by making a special effort.
The little one thought the house had destroyed our marriage. Danièle must have thought so too because she never disputed anyone who had a stupid idea. But the truth was that it was all over long before we got here. I’ll never tell her, but we were done as soon as Julie was born. Everything that wasn’t working between us got even worse after that. Danièle was crazy and I was drinking. She liked to take a nip herself, mind you, and I wasn’t totally sane either. I suppose we’d be able to admit as much separately today, but certainly not face to face.
After the little one was born, sleeping with my wife became a long-term project. One that never cost me less than a couple of hundred bucks. Danièle began to fear for everything, for herself and for the little one, all the time. Nothing I did made any sense to her. We also had a different way of dealing with the fact that the business was doing well and I was making money. She came from a small village where she’d always held her own because of her beauty, and now she loved playing the parvenu, looking down her nose at her brothers and sisters, all of whom hated me because I’d turned her into a snob. But I came from the lower town, where you can get hammered for lots of reasons, but never harder than for a swelled head. I like paying for a round and buying big cars, but never in a hundred years would I go on about it, talking with my mouth all puckered up as did my wife, who came off as a real turkey, articulating like a countess with her three-hundred-word vocabulary.
I suppose it was partly my fault, because I spoiled her. I always liked letting her spend money so people could see what I had without my needing to make a big deal of it myself. When Julie was born, I had the same reflex as lots of workers’ sons: I wanted to close the floodgates so my daughter wouldn’t be the most coddled baby in the world. So she wouldn’t turn into a rich kid I couldn’t even talk to. I don’t know. All I know is that there was no way I could raise my daughter old-style with her mother taking herself for Empress Sisi right alongside. But there, at least, things worked out. She’s tough today, my daughter. She earns her own money and she’s not scared of anyone, but I’m not liar enough to say it’s thanks to me.
By the time we moved into the house, things had already gone sour. We made love about ten times a year. I tried to reconcile myself to that because we’d almost divorced in 1987 after my affair with a secretary. So I drank a lot, and yes, I was in a foul humour most of the time. Since Danièle was afraid of everything, and refused to go for counselling and said it was me who was crazy and irresponsible, the only place to spend our money was at the shopping centre. We didn’t travel any more because every country in the world was too dangerous for the little one — except for the States and Walt Disney World, which a normal guy soon gets tired of visiting. It was a real problem going to a restaurant because my wife ate nothing and was always scared that the people in the kitchen had left the chicken on the counter more than five minutes, or touched the meat with their bare hands. I tried to start a wine collection but she said it was stupid to pay fifty bucks for bottles that really aren’t any better than those you can get for ten, and anyway it was just another reason to get drunk.
Danièle babied our daughter and you couldn’t talk to her about it without her jumping all over you. She overprotected her and spoiled her and at the same time overexposed her by telling her all sorts of nonsense about men in general and me in particular. At one point she was reading another one of her ladies’ books: The Manipulators Are Among Us. She made a point of leaving it all over the house with a big bookmark sticking out of it. One afternoon I picked it up and opened it to the page she’d marked. It was the list of “what makes a manipulator”:
He makes other people feel guilty in the name of family ties, friendship, love, professionalism;
He holds others responsible, and not himself;
He does not clearly communicate his demands, his needs, his feelings and opinions;
He often gives vague answers;
He alters his opinions, his behaviour, his feelings, to suit different people and situations;
He draws on logic to disguise his own demands;
He makes others believe they must be perfect, must never change their minds, must know about everything, and must respond instantly to his demands and queries;
He calls into question the qualities, competence, character of others: he criticizes without appearing to, puts people down and judges them;
He sends messages via other individuals;
He sows discord and creates suspicion, divides to conquer;
He knows how to portray himself as a victim in order to attract sympathy;
He ignores requests even if he claims to be dealing with them;
He enlists the moral principles of others to satisfy his own needs;
He uses veiled threats, or overt blackmail;
He abruptly changes the subject in the midst of a conversation;
He avoids or walks out on conversations and meetings;
He claims others are ignorant, and proclaims his own superiority;
He lies;
He makes false statements in order to worm out the truth;
He’s egocentric;
He can be jealous;
He cannot tolerate criticism and denies evidence;
He doesn’t take into consideration the rights, needs, and desires of others;
He often waits until the last minute to give orders to others or to have them act;
His reasoning seems logical or coherent, while his attitudes do not;