The List of My Desires by Gregoire Delacourt

Author:Gregoire Delacourt
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780297868378
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Published: 2013-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

I almost had a lover once.

It was not long after the birth of Nadège’s dead body. When Jo was breaking things around the house and had stopped drinking eight or nine beers in the evening, slumped in front of the Radiola.

That was when he turned nasty.

Drunk, he just thought he was a big vegetable. A wimp; everything a woman hates in a man: vulgarity, egotism, thoughtlessness. But he stayed calm. A wimp, set in his ways, in fact congealed in them.

No, it was sobriety that turned Jo cruel. At first I put it down to coming off the booze. He’d replaced up to a dozen full-strength beers an evening by twice the number of low-alcohol Tourtels. You might have thought he wanted to drink them all to get at the 1% of alcohol each is supposed to contain, according to the tiny wording on the label, and be back in his inebriated comfort zone. But there was nothing at the bottom of those bottles, or himself, except sheer nastiness. The hateful things he said: it was your big body that suffocated Nadège. Every time you sat down you were strangling her. My baby’s dead because you didn’t take care of yourself. Poor Jo, your body is a dustbin, a great fat disgusting dustbin. You’re a sow. A slag and a sow.

I took it all.

I didn’t reply. I told myself that he must be suffering horribly. That the death of our little girl was sending him mad, and he was turning that madness on me. It was a black year, everything about it was dark. I used to get up in the night to go and cry in Nadine’s room as she slept with her fists closed. I didn’t want him to hear me and see how much he was hurting me. I didn’t want the shame of that. I thought again and again of running away with the children, and then I told myself all this would pass. His grief would lift in the end, would simply leave us and go away. Some kinds of misery weigh so heavily that you have to let them go. You can’t keep everything inside you. I stretched out my arms in the dark; I opened them hoping that Maman would walk into them. I prayed to feel her warmth around me; I didn’t want the darkness to carry me away. But women are always alone in the face of men’s ill-will.

If I didn’t die then, it was first because of an ordinary little remark. Then because of the voice that spoke it. And then because of the mouth that voice came out of, and then the attractive face in which that mouth was smiling.

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