Didier Van Cauwelaert by Didier Van Cauwelaert

Author:Didier Van Cauwelaert [Cauwelaert, Didier van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141966144
Publisher: Penguin Adult
Published: 2011-01-21T05:00:00+00:00

8

She opens the shutters and leans out toward the street. She stretches out her hand to see if it’s raining. She is wearing one of my shirts, as she always does when she gets up. She disappears, leaving the window open.

I pull back into the doorway where I’ve been freezing for the past hour. She always slept naked, and put on my shirt from the day before to go make breakfast. The only ritual from our early days to withstand the passage of time. My stomach tightens at the memory of the coffee aroma that rose every morning to infiltrate my dreams. I would go join her in the kitchen and we’d make love one day out of two, depending on what was on the talk show she was watching distractedly, from room to room, on the three television sets that were permanently left running. Unless the interest of the topic or the celebrity of that day’s guest kept her on the living-room couch in front of the giant screen, tray on her knees, in which case I took my coffee into the bathroom.

This morning, I had only decaffeinated green tea and soy crackers. The neuropsychiatrist’s breakfast. He was still asleep; the housekeeper was ironing underpants next to my bowl. She told me I looked better than last night. I answered that her stew was delicious.

‘Why, did the dog tell you?’

I blushed in the heat of the iron. She shrugged her shoulders, grumbled that with the doctor she was used to cooking for nothing: he ate like a bird. She was heading to the market in Rambouillet and asked what I’d like for breakfast. I asked her to drop me at the station instead. The doctor had helped me, less with his theories about my coma than with his own situation, his confidences, his resigned distress and active impotence. I left him a thank-you note on the table. In the garden that was dripping in the sunlight, Bernadette called to the dog, in vain.

‘The Doberman next door’s in heat again,’ she groused, pulling down the roadster’s convertible top.

She drove like a real myopic, constantly adjusting her steering, crossing over the white line and speeding up on turns, provoking honks and headlight signals from the cars we met. She yelled above the roar of the engine, in the howling wind: ‘My old man and I used to do road rallies when we were young. I was the one who taught the doctor how to drive.’

A blue station wagon had been following us since we entered the forest. Suddenly it passed us in the middle of a bend, cutting us off. Bernadette’s sudden yank of the wheel almost sent us into the ditch. She railed for a good five minutes against the village cops, who according to her were blotto by dawn. I didn’t say anything, but that wasn’t a police car.

Paranoia took hold of me again in the train to Paris. I felt watched from behind the newspapers, changed carriages at every station.

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