Lullaby - Leila Slimani Page 0,26

taking a breath between sentences. She jabbered away blandly, listing names of streets, rolling out old memories.

She felt good when her husband yelled at her. She knew that it was to shut her up that he turned up the volume on the radio. That it was to humiliate her that he opened the window and began to smoke, while humming. Her spouse’s anger scared her, but she had to admit that, sometimes, it excited her too. She enjoyed making him writhe, working him up into such a state of rage that he was capable of parking on the roadside, grabbing her by the throat and quietly threatening that he would shut her up for good.

Jacques was heavy, noisy. As he got older, he became bitter and vain. In the evenings, coming home from work, he would rant on for at least an hour about his grievances with this or that person. According to him, everyone was trying to steal from him, manipulate him, take advantage of his condition. After his first redundancy, he took his employer to an industrial tribunal. The trial cost him time and a huge amount of money, but his final victory gave him a feeling of such power that he got a taste for disputes and courtrooms. Later he thought he could make his fortune by suing his insurance company after a car accident. Next he went after the first-floor neighbours, the town hall, the building’s management company. Whole days were spent writing illegible, threatening letters. He would go through legal-aid websites in search of any article of law that might play in his favour. Jacques was irascible and utterly hypocritical. He envied the success of others, denying them any merit. Sometimes he would even spend all afternoon at the commercial court, just to binge on others’ sufferings. He enjoyed seeing people ruined, the blows of fate.

‘I’m not like you,’ he told Louise proudly. ‘I’m not a doormat, a slave content to clean up the shit and puke of little brats. Only black women do work like that now.’ He thought his wife excessively docile. And while that excited him at night, in their conjugal bed, it exasperated him the rest of the time. He was forever giving Louise advice, which she pretended to listen to. ‘You should tell them to reimburse you, and that’s it’; ‘You shouldn’t agree to work one minute more without being paid’; ‘Just call in sick – what do you think they can do about it?’

Jacques was too busy to look for a job. His legal battles took up all his time. He hardly set foot outside the apartment, spreading his case files over the coffee table and leaving the television on. During that period, the presence of children became unbearable to him and he ordered Louise to work in her employers’ apartment. He was irritated by the sound of their coughs and wails, even their laughter. Louise, most of all, revolted him. Her pathetic preoccupations, which always centred on kids, put him in a veritable rage. ‘You and your bloody women’s things,’ he would repeat. He believed that such matters should not be talked about. Just let them get on with it, somewhere out of sight; we don’t need to know anything about all this stuff with babies or old people. They were bad times, those ages of servitude, of repeating the same actions. Those ages when the body – monstrous, shameless, a cold and foul-smelling machine – took over everything. Bodies that craved love and liquid. ‘It’s enough to make you disgusted at being a man.’

During that period, he bought – on credit – a computer, a new television and an electrically powered chair that gave massages and that could be inclined when he wanted to take a nap. He would spend hours in front of the computer’s blue screen, his asthmatic wheezes filling the room. Sitting on his new chair, facing his brand-new television, he would frantically press the buttons on his remote control, like an overexcited kid.

It was probably a Saturday, since they ate lunch together. Jacques was ranting, as always, but with less vigour than usual. Under the table, Louise had put a bowl of ice water in which Jacques was soaking his feet. In her nightmares, Louise can still see Jacques’s purple legs, his swollen diabetic’s ankles, which he would constantly ask her to massage. For the past few days, Louise had noticed, his complexion had been waxy, his eyes dull. He’d been having difficulty