In the instance I’m going to describe, my ability to pinpoint the origin of my feelings is, on the contrary, rather more tenuous.
The years following our reunion were also the years in which my mother overcame her reserve and began telling me about my father, about his adventures and misadventures. I mean that these were the years in which she did so systematically rather than when forced to do so by the urgent need to explain some undesirable fragment from the past that had suddenly sprung to life again. It’s true that she did not speak of these things spontaneously and that I was nearly always the instigator, but when I did ask her questions, she would reply quite openly and without any apparent embarrassment. Then she would talk freely, letting herself be guided by my demands, illuminating key aspects of my father’s personality, the important events in his life, telling me about his family, with whom he had severed all contact shortly after I was born, and about the early years of their relationship. Sometimes she would be overcome by the emotion of the moment and say more than I had asked her to, but that rarely happened, and generally she said only what was necessary. As I have said elsewhere, she never touched on feelings, never explained how she had felt or how she thought my father had felt. She gave the facts with a kind of aseptic coolness, without becoming emotionally involved or drifting into sentimentality. She never mentioned the dreams or nightmares that had accompanied her misfortune, never mentioned any arguments or hopes, or what had happened between them, never spoke of the qualities in my father that had presumably provided her with some compensation, with moments of happiness or feelings of confidence in the future, which, despite everything, she must also have experienced. I don’t think there was anything premeditated about this approach. She behaved as she did out of modesty, to protect herself, and not out of rancor or resentment, but it is equally true that she never judged my father, never said a bad word about him. There was, therefore, nothing deliberate about her reserve, but at the same time, it was inevitable that in presenting the facts so plainly, so bleakly, her account of events infected me with that same bleakness. She was harsh without meaning to be, and the resulting portrait of my father was even less favorable, even less flattering than she doubtless intended. Since she gave me no glimpse of their daily life together, no clues to help me understand what had fueled her ever-renewed confidence in my father’s ability to change, it was completely impossible to forgive or understand. This wasn’t the worst of it, though. The worst thing, given the circumstances, was that I found it as hard to understand her as I did my father. Why did she insist on remaining bound to him? Why was she so patient with a person who had, again and again, betrayed her trust, who, right from the start, had been heading for that point of no return where someone becomes a caricature of the person they might have been? I didn’t understand why the thread connecting her to my father had remained intact for so long or why the split had taken place when it did, why she had decided to be no longer available. What had been so different about my father’s last departure? She had put up with him until that moment, so what made her decide that enough was enough? What happened then that had not happened before? It wasn’t that I disapproved of their separation or that I regretted her previous willingness to try again, over and over. My father was not the solution I was seeking to our wearisome solitude, to our extreme dependence on each other. It was just that the mist covering everything to do with my father was beginning, in part, to spread over her. Gradually, unnoticed, something unexpected had happened, something I did not even dare to confess but that was there, gaining ground: slowly, timidly, I had begun to distrust her. I suppose that to begin with, it was simply a sublimated desire to feel that I had been deceived, to offload some of my guilt by pretending that my mother was not as infallible as I thought. But if that were so, I was completely unaware of it. I told myself quite sincerely that there must be something, that there must be more to it than met the eye.
What I did realize was that my suspicions lay neither in the present nor in the future, that I had no doubts about the life we were living then. And although my father had not reappeared or phoned since his final, furtive departure and my mother’s determination had not yet been put to the test, it was clear that she was not expecting him, that she didn’t care where he was, where he slept, or what he ate. On those occasions when I asked her questions and we spoke about him, she didn’t speak with guarded prudence about the future, she made no provisos or predictions, and even in delicate, unexpected circumstances, like when she would tell me about the phone calls from those anxious, worried, or bewildered people asking for my father, there was not a trace of melancholy in her voice or face; she merely told me about them, just as I told her when I was the one who answered the phone, and that was that — no pregnant silences, no evasions, no revealing anxieties. My father had been expelled from our lives, he was not needed or expected. I had no doubts about that. It wasn’t the present or the future that worried me. It was the past. I felt somehow that there must be something in the past that I did not know about, and incidents like the visit by those two men who had come looking for my father only confirmed me in that belief. It cannot have been weariness alone that had finally driven my mother and my father apart, it could not simply have been a case of the straw breaking the camel’s back, my mother could not possibly be so perfect in her goodness nor my father so alone in his guilt.
XXIV
You could say that suspicion settled inside me without my having anything on which to base it. It was a confusion, a futile delirium that would doubtless have faded away beneath the weight of my bad conscience; however, even if that were the case, and even though I’m the one saying it, that doesn’t take away from the significance of the moment when I found something real to be suspicious about. Especially since I did not seek it out but came upon it accidentally.
It occurred some time after the visit of those two men who came looking for my father, but not so long afterward that I had completely forgotten it, a few months or a year, perhaps, and two or three years after the end of my mother’s time in Paris. That afternoon, it was pure chance that guided my steps toward the place where it happened, an area and a street where I never normally went. There were no warnings, none of those signs or symbols that we always look for after any significant event, in the ingenuous belief that the things that affect us most deeply never happen singly or unannounced. It wasn’t even during one of those periods when we were getting a lot of calls from people asking for my father, which were usually an indication that he was somewhere near at hand. As far as I recall, no one had mentioned my father to us recently, and we had no idea where he was; or at least my mother hadn’t said anything to me in that regard. It’s that absence of related events, along with the coincidence of my being there, that confuses my memory and, on this occasion, covers it with a thin membrane of incredulity, which I find it hard not to feel even when I think about it now.
I no longer went to school on the school bus but traveled there and back alone, with a change on the subway and a bus ride. I didn’t always go straight home but hung around with a school friend, making secret forays into the city, which I was just beginning to get to know. Sometimes I didn’t bother going to class in the afternoon, and after a hurried lunch — eaten at a local café rather than in the school dining hall — I’d go to a movie theater with continuous showings and get home at more or less my normal time, as if I’d come straight from school. I don’t know if it was on one of those days when, after eating lunch, I decided to skip the last part of the day or if it was one afternoon, after five o’clock, when I took longer than usual on my journey home. The only lasting image I have is of the already fading light and of me sitting at a bus stop reading a book. It was one of those glazed bus shelters with advertising posters on the end panels. Sitting on the narrow metal bench that ran along the inside wall of the shelter, I could see only what was directly in front of me on the other side of the quiet, narrow, one-way street: a green door, a mailbox, a shop selling household appliances, and a café whose windows were slightly steamed up, at least those I could see from my rather limited viewpoint. A light drizzle had been falling for some time, and the passers-by were walking along with heads down and shoulders hunched against the fine rain. My reading, which had been very focused to begin with, had gradually become more distracted and fragmented, and I spent more and more time watching the hurried footsteps of the people a yard or so away on the other side of the gray asphalt and the swift, fleeting mist of passing cars. Apart from occasional sideways glances to see if the bus was coming, I observed their comings and goings, whether to the right, where the last thing I could see was a store selling dried fruit and nuts, or to the left, where my visual boundary was provided by the corner of a building at the intersection with the next street.