Lullaby - Leila Slimani Page 0,19

and consoles her weeping daughter. They glare at Louise, furious and disappointed. The nanny retreats, ashamed. They are about to ask her for an explanation when she whispers, slowly: ‘I didn’t tell you this before, but I can’t swim.’

Paul and Myriam remain silent. They signal Mila, who has started to giggle, to be quiet. Mila mocks her: ‘Louise is a baby. She doesn’t even know how to swim.’ Paul is embarrassed, and that makes him angry. He blames Louise for having brought her poverty, her frailties all the way here. For having poisoned their day with her martyr’s face. He takes the children swimming and Myriam dives back into her book.

The morning is spoiled by Louise’s sadness and when they eat lunch on the terrace of a little bar, no one speaks. They have not finished eating when, suddenly, Paul stands up and takes Adam in his arms. He walks to the little shop on the beach. He comes back, hopping, because the sand is burning the soles of his feet. He is holding a packet that he waves in front of Louise and Myriam. ‘Here you go,’ he says. The two women do not respond and Louise docilely holds up her arm so Paul can slide an inflatable armband past her elbow. ‘You’re so thin, you can even wear children’s armbands!’

All week long, Paul takes Louise swimming. The two of them get up early, and while Myriam and the children stay by the guesthouse swimming pool, Louise and Paul go down to the still-deserted beach. As soon as they reach the wet sand, they hold hands and walk through the water for a long time, towards the horizon. They advance until their feet gently lift up from the sand and their bodies start to float. At that instant, Louise is invariably seized by a feeling of panic that she cannot hide. She cries out and Paul knows that he has to hold her hand even more tightly.

To begin with, he is embarrassed by having to touch Louise’s skin. When he teaches her to float on her back, he puts one hand under the back of her neck and the other beneath her bottom. An idiotic thought flashes through his mind and he laughs inwardly: ‘Louise has a bottom.’ Louise has a body that trembles under Paul’s palms and fingers. A body he had not seen or even suspected before, having considered Louise as part of the world of children or the world of employees. Probably he didn’t see her at all. And yet, Louise is not unpleasant to look at. Abandoned to Paul’s hands, the nanny resembles a little doll. A few strands of blonde hair escape from the swimming cap that Myriam bought her. Her light tan has brought out tiny freckles on her cheeks and nose. For the first time, Paul notices the faint blonde down on her face, like the fur on newly hatched chicks. But there is something prudish and childlike about her, a reserve, that prevents Paul feeling anything as brazen as desire for her.

Louise looks at her feet, which sink into the sand and are licked by the sea. In the boat, Myriam told them that Sifnos owed its past prosperity to the gold and silver mines under its earth. And Louise convinces herself that the sparkles she can see through the water, on the rocks, are shards of those precious metals. The cool water covers her thighs. Now her sex organs are submerged. The sea is calm, translucent. Not a single wave surprises Louise or splashes against her chest. There are babies sitting close to the edge of the sea, watched serenely by their parents. When the water reaches her waist, Louise can’t breathe any more. She looks at the sky, dazzling, unreal. She pats the yellow-and-blue armbands on her thin arms, with drawings of a lobster and a triton-snail shell on them. She stares at Paul, imploringly. ‘There’s no risk,’ Paul promises. ‘As long as you can stand up, there’s no risk at all.’ But Louise seems petrified. She feels she’s about to tip over. That she’s going to be snatched by the currents below, her head held underwater, her legs kicking at air, until she can’t struggle any more.

She remembers how, when she was a child, one of her classmates fell in a pond during the village outing. It was a small expanse of muddy water, with a smell in the summer that sickened her. The children went there to