“The fair’s not over, the fair’s not over,” they shouted, rolling up their robes and striding briskly around the square.
Paul squeezed Anna Valois’ hand tightly. He felt her trembling.
“You want to go?”
“Yes.”
He led her away, but a few steps later, they bumped into Fred Morin, who raised his glass and said: “Let’s party! Let’s drink to happiness!” They were immediately surrounded by a group of young people.
“Let’s go, Paul,” Anna begged.
“Why? What’s the matter? The party’s just started,” Fred exclaimed.
He seemed drunk and the fun-loving smile flickering on his lips could not erase the expression of fear dilating his eyes.
Paul took Anna’s hand to leave with her but the circle of young men blocked his path.
“You’re not about to ditch your friends,” a player on his team protested. “You’ve abandoned us and here we are glad to be with you.”
There was nothing natural about their words and gestures. They looked like bad actors suddenly pushed onstage and asked to perform a difficult role.
Involuntarily, they kept turning their heads in the same direction. Paul followed their gaze. He was startled to see Rose talking to a man in a black uniform sitting in the backseat of a car, the driver impossible to make out save for a patch of hair. The man in uniform leaned over, opened the door and Rose got in next to him as the car took off. Paul wanted to run after it, but his teammates blocked his path a second time.
“Leave me alone,” he yelled.
“Don’t do anything crazy,” the youngest on the team, who was only sixteen, advised him.
His hand fell on Paul’s shoulder and his nails slowly dug into his flesh.
“Don’t tell us you didn’t know,” Fred Morin said to him, forcing an increasingly false smile.
“Didn’t know what?”
“All right,” said another. “If you don’t feel like talking about it, that’s your business. But let’s set up our next practice. You’re our best player and we want to keep you.”
“Just like that, huh!” Paul answered, staring at them angrily. “I’d give anything to know why you’ve changed your mind. Eight days ago, I got the distinct feeling I was somewhat undesirable. Is it because my sister got into that car… you think that…”
“Lucky man,” Fred Morin said to him as he wrapped an arm around his shoulders.
He freed himself with a shrug and looked at Anna. She lowered her head. So then, she agreed with them. Or did she avert her eyes to spare his feelings? He fought off the desire to lay into them with blows and curses. He looked again at Anna and took off running. For a long time, he walked aimlessly through the city and only went home at nightfall. He found everyone in the living room except for Rose. He didn’t utter a word, but when she came back an hour later, he got up to meet her:
“Harlot!” he spat in her face. “I saw you!”
She turned to him with a face that was serene, almost wooden.
“You saw me, did you, so what? Is that how you thank me for trying so hard to save this land despite being afraid?”
And she started playing out the scene.
“He says to me, ‘Get in, Mademoiselle, so glad I ran into you, I’ll take you to the lawyer myself. He’s an old nutcase who gets strange ideas in his head, refused to take the money from your father, I know, because he wanted to see you again. He lost a daughter your age and you remind him of her.’ So he really did give me a ride to the lawyer’s, who promised that everything would be settled by next month. From now on, we can consider the case resolved. No, really, they’ve been very polite, very respectful, and I swear they are a lot less frightening up close than from afar.”
“You smell bad,” the invalid said suddenly.
“Me!” she said, taken aback, arms wrapped around her own waist, legs drawn together as if soldered shut.
“You don’t smell like yourself, you smell bad, go away, go away.”
“You be quiet!” Paul said to the invalid through clenched jaws.
“I’ll be quiet if I want to. And if I could stand on two feet, I would flog her.”
The grandfather got up, took the child in his arms and walked past Rose as he made for the stairs.
She slowly went up after them and pulled the door to her room shut. She fell to her knees, doubling over, head nearly touching the ground, arms crossed on her stomach as if it ached. Then she took off her clothes, holding them using the tips of her fingers in disgust, and ran to the bathroom.
When the mother went into the bedroom, she was resting, dressed in a clean white nightgown, lying on her side, eyes closed and breathing evenly. She looked at the girl pensively for a moment and then went to her son’s room.
“She slept with that dirty dog,” he said with revulsion.
“I will never believe that.”
“That’s it, keep lying to yourself, keep seeing only what others tell you, and the rest of your life they’ll keep telling you the moon is made of green cheese.”
“No one has ever fooled me, you know that, not even your father.”
“So why do you refuse to face the truth?”
“As long as she won’t say anything about it, I won’t accuse her. What right do I have to judge my daughter when she shows more courage than I do?”
“Mama!”
“She dared to confront these wild beasts for your sake, for our sake, and we should scorn her for it?”
“I’ll kill him! I’ll kill him!”
“Calm down, Paul!”
There was barely a year’s difference between him and his sister and they had been friends since childhood. “My sister! My sister!” he kept repeating to himself, as a bitter taste filled his mouth. “Rose Normil! The lovely Rose Normil. Paul’s sister, don’t you know her?” people used to say. And he would smile without answering, smile with pride. The way she carried her head high with her nose in the air as if the whole world smelled funny to her! “I am going to kill him,” he said again, and imagined an enormous knife sticking out of the back of the little man with gorilla hands as he thrust it in to the hilt.
The next day, he went to Dr. Valois’ house and saw Anna again. He had to wait for some time as she was helping her father at his clinic, where she was a nurse. When she came out, pure and beautiful in her immaculate smock, all that weighed on his heart seemed to melt. She exists, you simply have to remind yourself that such women exist in order to reconcile yourself with life, he told himself. As for my mother, poor woman, my father has neglected her so much that she’s fallen in love with Dr. Valois. I saw it in how she looked at him. And that’s normal. Absolutely normal. Exactly like his daughter, he’s seductive in a way that’s not just a matter of looks but something deeper. And this thing that one feels in their presence is like an intoxicating per-fume. They are solid and impermeable. Their nature is like an immutable boulder planted in the earth for thousands of years. A dangerous proposition. Anna! If I should smash my forehead into her, it would open up and drain all the blood from my body. And I would die of it. Good! What do I care! Death for the sake of death!
They stayed in the living room chatting for a long time. Not once did she bring up the question of the land, and she seemed to have forgotten he had left her on the day of the fair without saying goodbye. All the better, he thought then. He had come to her for a bit of happiness and comfort. And miraculously, he felt happy and comforted. A few minutes before he left, Dr. Valois came out to shake his hand.
“I will come by your house soon,” he promised. “I’ve been very busy and neglected my little patient. How’s Claude? Still has that temper of his?”