The Cracks in Our Armor Read online

  Silence.

  “Am I boring you?” You were worried.

  “No, not at all.”

  “Then help me. Because I’m not really sure I want to go on, to be honest . . . ”

  “Do you or don’t you?”

  Silence.

  “I do. And I want a smoke. Do you have any nibbles?”

  “You can smoke if you want.”

  “No. I’m trying to stop. Have you got any walnuts? Or almonds? Or sunflower seeds or something that is long and annoying to pick at?”

  “Uh . . . no. I have some cereal, if you want. Honey Pops or Chocapic.”

  “Perfect. I’ll go for the Chocapic.”

  “No milk, though!” you called, when I was already in the kitchenette, wondering whether I dared come back with another bottle.

  I didn’t dare.

  Right. Two bowls of Chocapic without milk. Milk-free diet for the war wounded of the Panthéon. Change the pediment on that noble building so it reads, “To the great ladies, from the grateful psychiatric profession.”

  I sat back down across from you, we nibbled in silence, and then I helped you.

  “Go on, then. Tell me why you’re unhappy.”

  7

  So, so . . . why am I unhappy? Let’s see, then . . . ”

  And as you still couldn’t go on with the next part of the story, I put some water on to boil, and placed a cup of herbal tea at your feet, by Oum-Popotte’s paws.

  “Thanks.”

  And as you seemed to have so many reasons to be unhappy that you didn’t even know where to begin, I pulled on another strand of yarn for you.

  “You text a lot in the morning, don’t you?”

  “That’s it,” you said with a smile, “yes, you got it.”

  “Are you in love?”

  “Yes. No. Yes. Why are you smiling?”

  “Because that’s a good start!”

  “Say, do you have any cigarettes?”

  “I do. I don’t smoke, but I have some. They were here when I moved in, they might not be any good.”

  “No problem. I’ll have one.”

  I handed you the old packet of Marlboros which had been drying out under my stuffed piranha.

  “Great. Thanks.”

  “Hey, do you mind if I pour the last of the whisky into my tea?”

  “Go right ahead. Make yourself at home.”

  “Thanks.”

  You gave a sigh of wonder and relief as you let out a long puff of stale nicotine, while I swapped one hot drink for another; where there’s a will, there’s a way.

  So then I started laughing. And I knew you were becoming my friend. Because smiling was one thing, but laughing . . . Laughing was so unexpected, as activities went, at this time of my life. So unexpected.

  “I’ll tell you. I’m unhappy because I’m weak, and I’m weak because I’m . . . I don’t know . . . other than ‘dumb’ I don’t know what to call it . . . This contempt I feel for my youth, those years of garrison and barracks and fucking standing around waiting, yes, all those hollow years, it’s not just that I can’t move beyond them, I’ve gone and put myself back in there. Listen, it’s worse than that: I’m now living in the hollowness of those hollow years. Such a shitty, stupid thing, downright degrading. Yes, that’s it, degrading. I’ve just realized what it means, dishonorable. Damn, what a horrible thing to realize. I’ve lost everything and I don’t even have my honor anymore. But how did I manage to do such a thing, I wonder . . . ”

  Silence.

  “Can you tell me?”

  Silence.

  “Because I don’t know. I’m a bad soldier.”

  “Is he married?”

  “Ah, you see,” you winced, “on top of being dishonorable, it’s banal. It’s banal, conventional, vulgar. The whole nine yards. Total debacle. I’ll tell you one thing, Saint Georgie and Saint Mickey must not be very proud of their little recruit. That’s all there is to it: he’s married. What more can I say? Nothing. Don’t you have a deck of cards or some board game so we can finish this lovely little evening in a nice quiet way? Monopoly, or Pay Day?”

  “I’ve got Uno.”

  “Oh, no, that’s way too hard. I’ll never manage.”

  Smiles.

  “You know,” I went on, “I think you’re beautiful. No, wait, I don’t think you’re beautiful, you are beautiful. To me you don’t look at all like a woman who’s lost her honor. When I see you chatting with him in the morning, I see a woman who is loved, that much is completely obvious.”

  “Thank you. That’s sweet. Sweet, and true. Or at least I think it’s true. And that’s the worst thing about it. I may have lost my honor, but I’ve still got love. Well . . . love . . . A little bit of love. What’s left of it, anyway. Skewed, utterly vague, stolen text messages. It used to be I couldn’t wait for the weekend and now it’s the other way around. Now I dread it. Hate it, even. It’s a sort of extinction, a little death. I die, and then I’m reborn, every five days. It’s exhausting. It’s exhausting and above all utterly pointless. I told you, what I’m going through is as negative as it gets. In the old days I used to start breathing again on Friday afternoon, and now by Thursday evening I start to fade. And over the weekend I sleep as much as possible so it will go by faster. It’s cruel, isn’t it? It is. Cruel. Mean. I hear God sniggering and saying, You weren’t kind to the nuns? You didn’t hold the rosary for the dying? You didn’t finish your soy lecithin chocolates? Well here. Take this. Expiate. Go ahead and cry. Spend the Lord’s day in tears and the rest of your life in the visiting room, my girl. Let that be a lesson to you.

  “I don’t live with a man, I live with my phone. My entire life revolves around this little slab of plastic. A sort of capricious, sadistic Aladdin’s lamp that governs my mood depending on whether I rub it and it fulfills my wishes or I respect it and it abandons me. An Aladdin’s lamp made in China and containing a good genie, no, a bad one, a good-for-nothing genie, a sort of bureaucrat who’s only there during business hours and for whom you don’t even exist under your true identity. When I say ‘I love you’ it’s not me saying it, it’s some fraudulent identity I’m going around under these days . . . it changes so often . . . and I can’t even write ‘I love you’ because everything is coded, as if I were his secretary doing his filing. I love you is ‘Confirmed,’ ‘I’m thinking about you’ is ‘Pending,’ and ‘I want you’ is ‘Urgent.’ Pretty pathetic, huh?

  “Pathetic. It’s not a love affair I’m having, I spend my life filing. What was the point of all those years I spent studying, anyway . . . ”

  “What did you study?”

  “Urban planning. I have a degree from the École nationale supérieure in Paris, with honors, and why did I go through all that? To set my heart on a man with whom I’ll never be able to build anything. Hey, you have to admit I’m really pretty stupid, when it comes down to it . . . ”

  “Why are you so categorical? Maybe he will . . . I don’t know . . . change his life.”

  “No. Do you know of any men who leave their wives for their mistresses? When they have small children? And a loan? And an Audi? And a dog? And a dwarf bunny? And guilt? And a family home in La Trinité? No, of course you don’t. I may not be clever, but I’m lucid. And besides, he’s never promised me a thing. In that respect I cannot fault him. And anyway I don’t fault him, for anything, when I found him he was married, and I went ahead, knowing full well what I was getting into. He has never promised me anything but never hidden anything, either. He’s been honest, and that’s it. But would he ever take his custom elsewhere, no, I don’t believe he would. Or I no longer believe. Women are the ones who will take that kind of risk, men, never. Why? I don’t know. Maybe women have more imagination . . . Or maybe they are more willing to gamble . . . Or they’re on better terms with life. It’s surely wrong of me to make these swee
ping statements but when I look around me, that’s what I see. That we are not at all equal in our dealings with life. With death, even. Women are not as afraid of death. Is that because they give life—is that the reason? I don’t know. It all sounds like such a cliché but I can’t think of any other explanation. Whatever they do, whatever they decide, whatever they destroy and toss to the ground, I get the impression that life is still on the side of women. Like some sort of huge house pet that always stays with the hand that feeds it even if it’s the most brutal, uncaring hand. You know, it’s like those old soldiers in the days of empire, like Napoleon’s old guard, following him into the depths of winter and of his madness without ever questioning a single order for even one second. The Memoirs of Sergeant Bourgogne, have you ever read that? My godfather gave it to me when I was fifteen. It’s terrific . . . Yes, men have it rough, but that’s the way it is. And my lover is no more—I was going to say, ‘courageous,’ but that’s not it, he is courageous, in his way—he’s just no more robust than anyone else because he doesn’t want . . . doesn’t want to go against life, rub it the wrong way, displease it, be deprived of it and die one night all alone, with his mouth open. And the thing that is really twisted about all this is that if I stay with him, the age I am now, I may never have any children. That would be a shame, after all, wouldn’t it? Even if I often deny it, I would like to have children. Yes, I would. Sometimes I stop thinking about it, but when I saw your kids at the café last month, it really hit me. Besides, I don’t know if you noticed, but on the days that followed I didn’t go to the café. I didn’t want to see you again, you or the kids, I was too envious. Yes, that’s it: envious. And envy is a luxury I can ill afford if I want to go on getting up in the morning. You see, I’m unhappy because everything I’m going through right now reminds me of my childhood, of how helpless I was and . . . ”

  You fell silent, looked up, and asked me, staring me straight in the eye:

  “Can I go on?”

  “You can go on.”

  “I feel like I’m taking advantage. Using you. Lying here on your sofa and dumping my cartload of shit on your head.”

  “You think you’re on a sofa?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Come on, Mathilde . . . you can see for yourself it’s not a sofa. It’s Oum-Popotte’s belly.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Oum-Popotte, the invisible dog’s friend. The children will introduce you to him someday, you’ll see . . . ”

  Smiles.

  “And besides, you’re not dumping anything, you’re telling a story. You’re setting yourself free. Unburdening yourself. That’s much nicer.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. It does me good, you know. It’s the first time in months that I’ve spent the evening with someone besides myself and you have no idea how much I needed this. Go on. Tell me more, like the kids say, tell me more.”

  “I don’t know what else to say.”

  “How long have you known each other?”

  “Nearly four years.”

  “And you have no hope that the situation will, uh, evolve?”

  “Do you want to help me to bump off his wife?”

  “No,” I said with a smile, “no. Before, I had no opinion, but now I’m against death. I have discovered that it, too, is disappointing and pointless. Really pointless. But . . . ”

  “But what?”

  “Well, let’s stop talking about him and get back to you. I don’t care about him. I don’t like him. I don’t respect him. I don’t want you to talk about him. He doesn’t interest me. It’s not your situation that is vulgar, it’s him. I don’t like liars. I don’t like men who make women unhappy. I don’t like men who cheat on their wives. Careful, I’m not talking about sex, here. Sex is another compartment. I’m for physical exultation and against frustration but that’s something else. This is about four years, and four years means an affair. And the very word, ‘affair,’ is horrible. It’s like ‘mistress,’ it’s ugly. You said just now that life was more loyal to women. Life, maybe, but society, no. Society already has a connotation for everything, the bitch. And has done for centuries. On the one hand, you have Marguerite Duras’s lover, this handsome Chinese man who fucks like a god, and on the other hand you have Barbey d’Aurevilly’s old mistress, where she’s an older woman who is always breaking his balls. Hey. Great. Thanks, Andrew Marvell, thanks. Stuff you and your world enough and time. A lover is a fine thing and it remains a charming word. Lover man oh where can you be, all those Billie Holiday songs. A lover is always sexy, but a mistress . . . A mistress, just the word, it reeks already of trouble and mothballs. It’s so unfair. No, the problem isn’t him, it’s you. Why do you put up with it? Why do you go along with it? And why all that ‘preamble,’ that’s the word you used, just to start talking about him? It’s disturbing. Why did you feel you had to tell me all about your years at boarding school just so you could get to your . . . to his kid’s dwarf bunny?”

  “To establish a parallel.”

  “You think so? But you are just as responsible as he is for the situation, and surely even more so, because I expect you’ve tried to leave him already, haven’t you?”

  “Two hundred times.”

  “So you went back, two hundred times, too.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you see, you’re the one who’s calling the shots, after all. This is no parallel, it’s a circle. You said so yourself, that you ‘put yourself back in there,’ and this is where your story gets interesting. Forget the Audi and Ye Olde Hovel by the seaside, who gives a damn. You are worth so much more than that. You are absolutely lovely, and funny, and tender, you’re sensitive and intelligent, you know the difference between Wigglytuff and Jigglypuff, you’ve almost quit smoking, you are one of the most attractive women I’ve ever met and you know damn well you would have no trouble at all seducing anyone who catches your eye, so why this . . . this life ‘standing around waiting,’ to quote you once again? It must be that deep down it suits you, it really does, isn’t that it? There are loads of plus sides to standing around waiting. You don’t have to think, you don’t have to take any initiative, you obey, you can be passive . . . You’re in such a repetitive, repressive situation that there’s no room for doubt or anxiety, and I mean anxiety with a capital A, existential anxiety, and obviously that is very convenient, but it leaves no room for adventure, for meeting people, for chaos and confusion, for fate, in other words . . . For the whims and twists of fate. That’s a really practical setup you’ve got. Real cozy. You’re like a duty officer in his little shack, you don’t have to question a thing, you don’t ask yourself any questions, and often, basically, this duty officer doesn’t even give a damn about what it is he’s guarding. He could give a flying fuck. He’s just there freezing his balls off until the next bozo takes over. And so, why not? But then don’t go telling me that women are on better terms with life, because honestly, Mathilde, you . . . you have let me down, there . . . ”

  “Are you a shrink or something?”

  Your voice suddenly became more aggressive.

  “No, not at all. I’m just trying to understand. If you hadn’t started by telling me about your childhood, I might be giving you a different speech, but because you did, I find it troubling, don’t you? It’s not the fact that you spent years in . . . on your military base that decides who you are or who could make you who you are, it’s the fact that you needed to tell me about them in such detail. Listening to you I get the impression that you have deliberately chosen to live your life as a sort of perpetual Wednesday afternoon, and I would like to know why. I’m not judging you, I hope that’s clear? I’m just trying to understand.”

  “You mean I’m suffering from Stockholm syndrome or some putrid thing like that?”

  “I don’t know, it’s not like your years in boarding school can be compared to being tak
en hostage, but you have to admit it’s a tempting explanation. You tell me that for eight years you had no life, and now that you’re grown up, emancipated, and free, you go and add four more years to the bag. Hey, admit you like counting the days, don’t you? What other explanation could there be?”