The Cracks in Our Armor Read online

Often, a thousand times, even, I wanted to take her in my arms and squeeze her, or shake her like a doll and beg her to stop all that cleaning. Beg her. Tell her I was here, too, and that I was just as miserable as she was. But it just wasn’t going to happen: there was always a vacuum cleaner or a basket of dirty laundry in the way.

  There were times I didn’t feel like going to bed all alone. Sometimes I’d hang around, drinking, and fall asleep in front of the box.

  I was waiting for her to come and get me.

  But she never came. And eventually I accepted it. I’d put the cushions back where they belonged and go down to my basement, almost breaking my neck on the stairs.

  When everything was so clean that she couldn’t find even the tiniest speck of dust, she went and bought a Kärcher and started on all the masonry and outside walls. Even when the neighbor who works in construction warned her that she’d ruin the mortar, she kept on cleaning.

  On Sundays, she leaves her house alone. On Sundays she takes her rags and all her cleaning stuff and goes to the cemetery.

  She didn’t used to be like that. I fell in love with her because she put me in a good mood. My papa always said: Oh Nanni, tua moglie è une usignolo. Your wife is a little songbird.

  In the beginning when we were together, if you can believe it, she didn’t bother too much with housekeeping. Not at all.

  I was driving way too fast when I saw my dog for the first time. Thing is, back then the tachographs were not as precise as they are now. And there were not as many speed checks. And I didn’t give a damn anyway. I was driving a Scania 360. One of the last ones we had, I remember. It must’ve been around two o’clock in the morning and I was so tired I left the radio on full blast to keep me awake.

  At first I only saw his eyes. Two yellow dots in the beam of the headlights. He was crossing the road and I had to swerve hard to avoid him.

  I was madder than hell. Mad at him because he’d frightened me, and also mad at myself for driving like an idiot. First, I had no business going so fast, and second, it was a miracle there was nothing along the shoulder, otherwise I would have crushed everything in the way. I wasn’t proud of myself. I went on cursing myself like that for a few hundred yards, swearing like some lousy truck driver, and then I wondered what the hell that mutt was doing there on the highway at two o’clock in the morning in the middle of August.

  Another poor critter who wouldn’t be going to the seaside with his owners . . .

  I’d seen entire colonies of miserable dogs since I’d been on the road. Some of them were hurt, some dead, tied up, crazy, lost, limping, others running after vehicles, but I’d never stopped before. So? Why that one?

  I don’t know.

  In the time it took for me to decide, I’d already gone a long ways on. I drove a little further looking for a place to turn around, but because the road was narrow, I made the stupidest maneuver of my entire career: I stopped my wagon right there, in the middle of the road. I turned on my hazards and went looking for that critter.

  Death can’t always win.

  That was the first time I’d gotten an idea in my head since the boy passed. The first time I was making a decision that actually concerned me. I didn’t really believe it.

  I walked in the dark for a long time, behind the guardrail when there was one, through tall grasses and all the crap people throw out into nature. Beer cans, cigarette packs, plastic wrappers, and bottles of piss courtesy of my coworkers who are too lazy or in too much of a hurry to pull over for five minutes. I looked up at the moon behind the clouds and I heard an owl or something like that shrieking in the distance. I was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and I was beginning to feel cold. I thought, if he’s still there, I’ll take him, but if I can’t see him from the road, forget it. Leaving the truck stopped back there with the high beams on was not a good idea. And when I reached the bend in the road that had almost brought the pair of us to grief, I saw him.

  He was sitting by the side of the road, looking my way.

  “Okay,” I went, “you coming?”

  He has trouble breathing. You can tell he’s in pain. I say kind things to him, stroking the white line between his eyes. Before the needle even comes back out, I feel the weight of his head roll onto my arm and his dry nose come to land in my palm. The vet asks me if I’d rather have him cremated or send him to the slaughterhouse. I’ll take him with me, I say.

  “Careful, there are regulations to be followed, you know—”

  I raise my hand. He says nothing more.

  I have a really hard time filling out the check. The lines are dancing before my eyes and I can’t remember the date.

  I bundle him up in my jacket and lay him on his blanket, in his usual spot.

  My wife and I wanted a second child so the little boy wouldn’t be on his own, but we couldn’t seem to manage.

  No matter how hard we tried, all the laughs and evenings out for dinner or drinks, no matter how we counted the days and made a game of it and all the rest, every month she got her aching tummy and every month I saw she was losing a bit more confidence in us. Her sister told her to go and see a doctor and get some treatment, but I was against it. I reminded her of what she already knew, that the boy had come along fine on his own, and why would she go mess with her health taking hormones and shots all the way to kingdom come.

  But with everything you hear nowadays, nuclear disasters, GMOs, mad cow disease, and all the crap they make us eat, I’m sorry I said all that to her, I’m sorry. Her organism would have been no more messed with than the next person’s.

  Anyway, by the time we decided, Ludovic was having his first bad spells, and from that day on we put aside any thoughts about having another kid.

  From that day on, we stopped making plans.

  He wasn’t even two years old when he started coughing. Day and night, standing, sitting, at the dinner table, lying down, or watching his cartoons, he coughed. He coughed and couldn’t breathe.

  His mother went silent: she was watching. That was all she did, like an animal, just listening carefully, observing his breathing, showing her fangs.

  She did the rounds of waiting rooms with her kid under her arm. She took days off. She went up to Paris. She got lost in the métro. She spent all her savings on taxi drivers, and saw a heap of specialists who made her wait longer and longer, and who got more and more expensive.

  The worst of it was that she went on making herself pretty, every time. She never knew when she might happen upon the person who was going to save her little kiddywink.

  He missed a lot of school. And she lost a lot in the process, too. She had a good job, they liked her at work and she got along well with her coworkers, but after a while they sent for her all the same.

  They sent for her to have her sign her own walking papers.

  She said she was relieved, but that night, she couldn’t eat a thing. It was unfair, she said, again and again, all of it, so unfair.

  She went looking for reasons for the allergy. She changed the carpet, the bedding, the curtains; no more stuffed animals, or going to the park, or sledding, or having little friends over, or petting animals, or drinking milk, or eating hazelnuts, nothing. All the things kids like best.

  At first that’s all she did: give him a hard time. A hard time, to save him. During the day she watched him, and at night she listened to his breathing.

  Asthma.

  I remember, one evening in the bathroom.

  I was brushing my teeth while she was removing her makeup.

  “Look at all these wrinkles,” she moaned, “all this gray hair. Every day I’m older than the day before. Every night I’m getting older faster than all the other women my age. I’m tired. So, so tired.”

  I couldn’t answer because of the toothpaste. I just shrugged my shoulders to say that was bullshit. Women’s bullshit. You’re beautiful. Yet it was
true. She’d lost weight. Her face had changed. That softness she used to have, gone.

  We made love less often, but we left the door open.

  I’m driving. I don’t know where I’m going to bury my dog.

  This ratter, this loudmouth, this little mongrel. This pal of mine, who kept me alive so long, and was such good company. Who loved hearing Dalida sing, who was afraid of storms, who could spot a rabbit a hundred yards away, and who always slept with his head on my thigh. Yup, I don’t know yet where to bury the rascal.

  Thanks to him I’ve practically stopped smoking. Fact is, he had started sneezing too, the bastard. I know he was making fun of me, because he didn’t always wait for me to light up to start his act, but anyway, it brought back too many bad memories. So I waited until I could stop for a break.

  I stopped getting annoyed because the stores were about to close, or because I was having trouble parking, or because it was costing me a fortune, or because I needed change and all that. I started putting on weight, and now it was the diesel smell on my hands that bothered me, or the scent of the fields of rape we drove past, but quitting did me a lot of good. Really, really a lot. Suddenly here was the proof that I could still be a little freer than I thought.

  Last thing I expected.

  Thanks to my dog, I began talking again, and meeting people. I never knew so many of my fellow drivers had dogs. I learned new words, found out about new pedigrees, spouted all kinds of bullshit myself and shared bags of kibble from Pamplona to The Hague. Even when I couldn’t understand a word they said I made friends with guys, I just looked at their license plates to figure out where they were from, but they were like me, they weren’t as alone as they seemed.

  Other drivers have their truck, their cargo, their schedule, and their stress. We have all that, but a dog to boot.

  And he made friends, too. I even have a photograph of one of his puppies in the glove compartment. In Moldova, is where he is. With his owner we swore we’d recognize each other if one day we stopped in the same place to let the dogs go off to piss, but it never happened. Oh well.

  Through him I met Bernard, who had lost a son, same age as ours. And Bernard, his wife left him on top of it all. Twice he tried to do himself in, but then in the end he remarried. Like he says, it’s more or less the same as before except he’s got more hassles to deal with now.

  When we find each other at night on the radio, we talk. Well, he does most of the talking. He’s a real blabber. He knows how to go about it, mixing jokes in with all the rest. And he has a nice accent, he’s from the Béarn. We talk and then afterwards, with all he’s told me, it keeps me awake for a long time.

  Nanar64.

  A friend.

  Thanks to my dog, I stopped clenching my jaw and started enjoying being on the road again. Since I have to stop to take a leak every now and again, I’ve even seen places here and there where it would be real nice to settle down.

  Thanks to this abandoned dog who waited for me like a good boy that first night, who never doubted for a moment that I would come back for him, and who could count on me ever after for his well-being, I got better. I won’t say happier, but better.

  My wife should have had something or someone like that.

  I’m still driving. I have to find him a good spot.

  In the sun. And with a view.

  I don’t know if this is a good memory or a bad one . . . Ludovic must have been eleven or twelve years old, skinny, white as an aspirin, tied to his mother’s apron strings, whining whenever he had to make the slightest effort, missing school, excused from gym, glued to his cartoons and video games. Not a well-rounded kid, in other words.

  On an evening that was different from the rest I blew a fuse.

  I grabbed my wife’s wrist and forced her to turn and look at her puny little boy:

  “No way, Nadine! No way!” I yelled. “Is he just gonna sit there until the day we die, is that it? He has to become a man, for Chrissake! I’m not asking him to run a marathon, but come on! Is he gonna spend the rest of his life reading crap and piling up bricks on a TV screen, is that it? Shit!”

  My wife began to panic and the boy sat up straight, putting down his joystick.

  “Ludo, I’m not saying this to pester you, but at your age, you’re supposed to go out. To make us mad at you! You have to start fiddling with a moped and looking at girls. I don’t know . . . but you’re not gonna learn anything about life sitting around here. Switch that thing off, son. Unplug it, right now.”

  “I do look at girls,” he responded, with a smile.

  “But just looking, that’s not enough, dammit! You have to talk to them, too!”

  “Calm down, Jean,” my wife begged, “calm down.”

  “I am calm!”

  “No, you’re not. But you’re going to stop this right away or you’re going to make him have a fit.”

  “A fit? Now what sort of bullshit is that? Am I foaming at the mouth or something?”

  “Stop. It’s the stress, you know that—”

  “Stress, my ass! You’re making him like this, pampering him all the time. You’re the one who’s keeping him from growing up, just so you can keep your little doll!”

  His mother burst into tears.

  With her, tears used to come easily.

  During the night he coughed and had to use his inhaler four times. I sleep next to the wall, I couldn’t help hearing.

  The next day was Sunday. She came to get me in the shed:

  “He’s got an appointment on Wednesday at the Necker children’s hospital. You can take him this month. That way you can ask Robestier yourself when the boy can go back to training and hanging around in cafés, okay?”

  “I have work on Wednesday.”

  “No,” she went, “you don’t, because your kid has to go to the hospital and you are going with him.”

  The look she gave me, I didn’t protest. And it was true, I didn’t have work on Wednesday. It was the first day of fishing season and I knew that she knew that, too.

  Hey, up there, not bad . . . That little hill, there.

  My dog wasn’t a dog. He was a gossip, always watching what was going on. Always sitting perfectly straight, his forepaws neat and even on the dashboard, eyes on the road. Sometimes he would start to howl, God knows why. There was something in the distance he didn’t like the looks of, and he controlled it all from his observation post.

  Christ he could really give me an earful when I think of it . . .

  People asked me: Is that a coyote you’ve got there for the speed checks? Yeah, sure, I’d say, a great one. On a suction cup, no less. So a hill, hell yeah . . . the least I can do.

  So of course I didn’t dare make a fuss. I was in awe of the other kids in the waiting room, and then of all the exams they put my Ludo through. At one point I even felt like saying, Hey, look. That’s enough, now. You can see he can’t take any more. Is this to humiliate him, or what? In the end they put him in this sort of glass cabin and asked him to blow into these twisted tubes until he felt dizzy. It was so they could read his breathing on a computer graph.

  Like for heartbeats.

  I was sitting on a stool, holding his jacket.

  While the nurse was changing the tubes, I sent him little signs of encouragement. It wasn’t really a competition, but he was being brave all the same.

  Then he started doing what they said all over again, while I looked at all those screens trying to understand something.

  An explanation for what our life had turned into. All the sleepless nights—why? All the anxiety? Why was my son always the smallest one in the class and why didn’t his mother love me the way she used to? Huh? Why? Why us? But all those numbers jumping around all over the place, I couldn’t understand a damn thing.

  I found out she’d spoken to the doctor before the appointment because at
one point he turned to me and said, with this priestly little smile:

  “So, Monsieur Monati, it would seem that you are a bit . . . ” (He acted as if he was hunting for the right word) “ . . . a bit put out by your son’s behavior in his day-to-day life, am I right?”

  I was speechless.

  “You think he’s too soft?” said the doctor.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Abulic? Indolent? Apathetic?”

  I was getting hot. I didn’t understand any of the things he was saying.

  “His mother’s been talking to you, hasn’t she? Look, Doctor, I don’t know exactly what she told you, but all I want is for my kid to have a normal life. A normal life, you understand? I don’t think it’s doing him any favors, the way she’s always waiting on him hand and foot. I know he’s not a healthy boy, but I wonder if leaving him shut in at home all day long, like he’s in some sort of sterilizer, isn’t just making him weaker.”

  “I see, Monsieur Monati, I see. I understand your concerns and, I fear I am at pains to reassure you. However, I would like to suggest that you undergo a sort of little test, as well. Would you agree to that?”

  Worse than a priest, an archbishop.

  Ludovic was looking at me.

  “Of course,” I replied.

  He asked me to take off my jacket. He stood up and went to get a pair of scissors from behind his computers, and he cut a wide strip of adhesive and stuck it over my mouth. I didn’t like that one bit. Good thing I didn’t have a cold that day. Then he went out of the room for a long time and Ludo and I found ourselves sitting there all alone like a pair of morons.

  “Mhmm . . . Mhmm . . . ” I went, walking like a penguin.

  He laughed. When he narrowed his eyes like that, I could see his mother. Nadine, when she was younger. The same lovable little face. The same pointed little nose.

  The doctor came back in with a yellow plastic straw. A kid’s straw, like for drinking milkshakes. With the blade of a scalpel he made a tiny hole in front of my mouth and slid the straw through the adhesive and asked me if I could breathe. I nodded.