Lovers on All Saints' Day Read Free

bullfighter’s pigtail) pointed out that they resembled the saffron-colored lungs of the paintings. Claire said yes, maybe, that one never knows where shapes and colors come from. But her head was elsewhere, and I was starting to understand that much more than a child’s life was at stake: for Claire, something immense and something of her own was at risk that night, as if she’d placed a bet, as if her happiness or ruin depended on a call about another person’s fate.
    Claire turned on the living room light just long enough to get to the kitchen, and the kitchen light just long enough to fill a plastic IKEA glass with water. She was turning off light switches as she walked through her house as if she were alone there. But the porch light stayed on, waiting for Philippe. We went upstairs without speaking, and on the second floor, Claire took a telephone with a long cord out of the study and left it on the stairs, against the banisters.
    “If you come downstairs, be careful not to trip.”
    “You should put a phone in your bedroom,” I said. “Like we do back home.”
    “Yes, I know. You’ve told me that before.”
    I went up to the guest room, on the fourth floor, and found that I could move around without turning on the light, because there was a skylight in the ceiling and the brightness of the street illuminated the outlines of things: the tall headboard of the wooden bed, the wardrobe filled with clean towels. The noise of a nearby party could be felt through the walls, an electronic beat of intense bass notes that echoed in my stomach. I closed my eyes, tried not to listen. The house was dark, but not asleep: it was impossible to forget my wide-awake hostess waiting in that very particular way waiting for a telephone call becomes, such a modern kind of waiting, undoubtedly more anguished than the old waits in romantic novels, because there’s nothing more sudden than a phone ringing and there are no other situations where you can go, in less than a second, from well-being to loss. Waiting for someone implies their footsteps before they arrive at the door and waiting for a letter implies the time the envelope spends in our hands before being opened, but a phone call changes the world in an instant: it’s not there, and then it is. That’s how fast things happen.
    I woke up when the phone rang. Somehow I’d fallen asleep, unaware.
    I tried to hear, unsuccessfully. The creaky wooden floors prevented me from going down the stairs and listening to the conversation without being discovered. But the silence was not total: Claire’s murmuring, thin and soft as tends to happen when we speak to someone who loves us, reached me from afar, through the rude rhythms of the neighbors’ music. Claire spoke for three, maybe four minutes. I heard her hang up; I didn’t hear her close her bedroom door. I decided to go down: the bathroom, after all, was downstairs. I would have that pretext if I needed one.
    I found her sitting on the third step, in front of the open door to her room, with the yellow light from the street barely illuminating the space her compressed body took up on the stairs. She was hugging her knees tight to her chest with her head between her arms, like a beggar in the subway. I put a hand on her shoulder: it was one of the first times I’d touched her (she was or is Belgian, and in spite of our friendship, physical contact was or is unusual and restrained), and Claire raised her head and I saw that she was crying softly, silently.
    “The boy died,” she said. “Philippe isn’t coming home tonight, he’s staying with his sister.”
    I thought of his sister’s husband, the man who, according to Monsieur Gibert, mistreated her.
    “And her husband . . .”
    “Of course, him too. Imagine that guy’s rage when he finds out his son is dead.”
    “They don’t live together?”
    “It’ll be her fault, of course, she sent the child off on the excursion. And the guy’s rage. Shit, I’d be scared