Lullaby - Leila Slimani Page 0,29

baby doesn’t cry. He glares at Paul coldly, suspiciously, as if to make it clear that he is on Louise’s side. The nanny listens to Paul. She does not lower her eyes or apologise.

Stéphanie could be dead. Louise thinks about this sometimes. She could have prevented her from ever living. No one would have known. No one would have blamed her. If Louise had eliminated her, society would perhaps even have been grateful to her today. She would have proved herself clear-headed, a good citizen.

Louise was twenty-five years old and she woke up one morning with heavy, painful breasts. A new sadness had come between her and the world. She felt certain that there was something wrong. Back then, she was working for Mr Franck, an artist who lived with his mother in a mansion in the fourteenth arrondissement. Louise did not really understand Mr Franck’s paintings. In the living room, on the walls of the corridor and the bedrooms, she would stand in front of the immense portraits of disfigured women – bodies crippled with pain or paralysed in ecstasy – that had made the artist famous. Louise wasn’t sure they were beautiful, but she liked them.

Geneviève, Mr Franck’s mother, had fractured the neck of her femur getting down from a train. Unable to walk, she had lost her mind on the platform. She spent her life lying down – naked, most of the time – in a light-filled ground-floor bedroom. It was so difficult to dress her – she fought with such ferocity – that they just laid her on an open nappy, her breasts and genitals exposed. The sight of that abandoned body was appalling.

Mr Franck had begun by hiring qualified, very expensive nurses. But they complained about the old woman’s tantrums. They stuffed her full of tranquillisers. The son found these nurses cold and brutal. What he wanted for his mother was a friend, a nanny, a tender-hearted woman who would listen to her ravings without rolling her eyes, without sighing. Louise was young, admittedly, but she had impressed him with her physical strength. On the first day, she had come into the bedroom and, by herself, had managed to lift that body, as heavy as a concrete slab. She had cleaned the old woman, talking constantly, and for once Geneviève had not screamed.

Louise slept with Geneviève. She washed her. She listened to her rant all night. Like a baby, the old woman dreaded dusk. The fading light, the shadows, the silences made her scream with fear. She begged her own mother – who’d been dead for forty years – to come and fetch her. Louise, who slept next to the medical bed, tried to calm her down. The old woman spat insults at her, called her a whore, a bitch, a peasant. Sometimes she would try to hit her.

Louise started sleeping more deeply than ever. Geneviève’s cries didn’t disturb her any more. Soon she was no longer capable of turning the old woman over or putting her in her wheelchair. It was as if her arms had atrophied, and she had terrible backache. One afternoon, when darkness had already fallen and Geneviève was mumbling heartrending prayers, Louise went up to Mr Franck’s attic to explain the situation to him. To Louise’s surprise, the artist became enraged. He banged the door shut and walked over to her, his grey eyes boring into hers. For an instant, she thought he was going to hurt her. And he started laughing.

‘Louise, women like you – single women who hardly earn enough money to live – do not have children. To be perfectly honest with you, I think you’re completely irresponsible. You turn up here with your big round eyes and your stupid smile, to tell me that. What do you expect me to do? Open a bottle of champagne?’ He was pacing around the large room, hands behind his back, surrounded by unfinished paintings. ‘You think it’s good news? Don’t you have any common sense at all? I’ll tell you one thing: you’re lucky you have an employer like me, who’s willing to try to help you improve your situation. I know plenty who would kick you out the door, quick as a flash. Listen, I entrust you with my mother, who is the most important person in the world for me, and I can tell that you’re completely brainless, incapable of making a good decision. I couldn’t care less what you do with your free evenings. Your light