Why did she have to mention Félicie at that very moment? She was very red in the face. In the evening, she always had a touch of fever and her head seemed larger. He gazed at the mole on her cheek, like an animal’s fur.
‘I don’t know what I would do, but …’
Jean’s figure cast a huge shadow on the wall, reaching almost to the ceiling. And in the wallpaper, the holes were visible where he had taken down the shelves for the fruit.
‘You’re not fed up?’
‘No.’
‘Do you think you’ll be able to stay here much longer?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘That’s what I don’t understand. When I saw you come back down the road that day, I was kind of expecting it, because I thought you were foreign, a Yugo perhaps, and those people far from home, they need to find a place.’
She stopped talking, but he did not notice.
‘You’re not listening to me, are you?’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘What was I saying?’
‘You were talking about a Yugo.’
And with an angelic smile, he bade her goodnight, felt his way up the ladder to his attic, and threw himself on to the mattress, fully dressed.
9
One second … another two seconds, and he began to suspect vaguely that it must be a dream. He tried to see it through to the end, and not to hear the liquid drops falling from the cheese in its bag that looked like a wineskin. In spite of himself, he opened his eyes to the two rectangular slate-blue panes in the skylight above his bed.
He lay for a long while, as if dazed and aching, both ill-tempered and still shivering with ecstasy. The strangest thing about it had been Tati’s presence. She was watching them as they clung together, just as she would watch her chickens or rabbits, with a contented and encouraging smile, and she was saying to them:
‘Go ahead, love each other, my dears!’
It was hard to say where this was taking place. It wasn’t in a bedroom. Or in the barn. The scene was so brightly lit that it might have been up in the sky, and his pulse was beating to the sound of invisible music, as if a hundred violins were there to celebrate the lovers.
He wondered whether, in his dream, Tati had still had the hairy mole on her cheek, but he couldn’t remember, nor could he recall what she was wearing, except that there was something shocking pink showing, like her petticoat. As for Félicie, she was clinging to him with such passion …
His eyelids stung as if a tear was swelling them. Suddenly, he felt that it was starting again, that the distress was flowing in to fill his chest with a wave of pain.
‘Oh God, please …’
He sometimes found himself speaking out loud like that, praying half-heartedly, when he felt too much like a small child in bed.
‘Let me go back to sleep! No more nightmares …’
It was too late, he knew that.
Every person condemned to death will …
No! It wasn’t going to frighten him. It had already faded away. With each moment, he became more wide awake, and could lie down no longer. He sat up, eyes open.
What would have happened, back there in the barn with Félicie, if her father had come in? Or if Tati, despite her sickness and her sores, had managed to creep downstairs in her felt slippers?
What would he say to Félicie when he next saw her? Who knows? Perhaps she would come back other evenings? He could not do without her already … So, one day or another, it was bound to happen.
He remembered a moment from his past, a moment that was full of joie de vivre, like the day he left prison. It was in summer, exams were looming. The classroom windows were open. The English teacher looked like an evil puppet.
Jean had put his hand up to go to the cloakroom. The English teacher had just shrugged his shoulders. Jean had clicked his fingers.
‘Well? What do you want? You don’t need my permission to leave the room, since I do not consider that you are here.’
‘I want to go home. I feel sick.’
He wasn’t yet sure of that, but he had decided to be ill. He walked alone across the large school yard where the voices of pupils and teachers could be heard, coming out of the dozens of open windows. A tram passed close by him in the street. Before making his way home, he had gone to eat ice-cream at Pitigrilli’s, three ice-creams one after another, in spite of his fever.
He could almost have left his schoolbooks on the pavement. They didn’t matter. He wasn’t likely to learn anything more. He wouldn’t sit the exams.
When he had walked free from prison, the first thing he had done, then too, was eat ice-cream. The authorities had provided him with some money: two hundred francs or so, he couldn’t remember exactly why. He had caught a bus. Then he had spent a night first in one town, then another, and he was committed to nothing, nothing he did now could have any weight or importance.
Tati’s house was like a child’s construction toy. He looked at the old calendar with its gilded edges as if it was a schoolroom print. He sniffed the agreeable familiar smells, the kitchen, the cowshed. He did this and that, in no hurry, lighting the fire, grinding the coffee, milking the cows and making up the chicken feed.
And then, at eight in the evening, in the darkness of the barn …
Alone in his bed, he smiled bitterly. It was going to start again, real life, complications, and as usual, fate would come down heavily on him. He was sure of that.
Just as sure as when in Paris he had met Zézette and first entered her apartment.
