Lullaby - Leila Slimani Page 0,32

a park on a winter afternoon. He’ll follow the sun. He’ll go on holiday. Perhaps one day he’ll sleep in one of the rooms of the Grand Hotel, where she used to massage men. This boy she raised will be serviced by one of her sisters or her cousins, on the terrace with its yellow and blue tiles.

‘You see? Everything turns around and upside down. His childhood and my old age. My youth and his life as a man. Fate is vicious as a reptile. It always ends up pushing us to the wrong side of the handrail.’

The rain starts to fall. Time to leave.

For Paul and Myriam, the winter flies past. During those few weeks, they see very little of each other. They meet in bed, one joining the other in sleep. Their feet touch under the sheets; one kisses the other’s neck and laughs at hearing the other mumble like an animal disturbed in its sleep. They call each other during the day, leave messages. Myriam writes loving Post-it notes that she sticks to the bathroom mirror. In the middle of the night, Paul sends her videos of his rehearsals.

Life has become a succession of tasks, commitments to honour, appointments to keep. Myriam and Paul are snowed under with work. They like to repeat this as if their exhaustion was a portent of success. Their life is full to bursting; there’s hardly even time for sleep, never mind thinking. They rush from one place to another, change shoes in taxis, have drinks with people who are important for their careers. The two of them have become the heads of a booming business, a business with clear objectives, an income stream, expenses.

All over the apartment, there are lists that Myriam has written – on a paper napkin, on a Post-it, on the last page of a book. She spends her time looking for them. She is afraid to throw them away as if this might make her lose track of all the tasks she has to accomplish. She has kept some really old ones and, rereading them, she feels a nostalgia that is only intensified when she can no longer remember to what those obscure notes refer.

Chemist

Tell Mila Nils’s story

Reservations for Greece

Call M.

Reread all my notes

Go back to that shop. Buy the dress?

Reread Maupassant

Get him a surprise?

Paul is happy. His life, for once, seems to be living up to his appetite for it, his insane energy levels, his joie de vivre. The boy who grew up in the great wide open is finally able to spread out. In a few months, his career has changed beyond all recognition, and for the first time in his life he is doing exactly what he wants. He no longer spends his days serving others, obeying and keeping silent, confronted with a hysterical producer, a group of infantile singers. Gone are his days of waiting for artists who turn up six hours late without bothering to warn him. Gone those recording sessions with ageing MOR singers or the ones who need litres of alcohol and dozens of lines before they can play a note. Paul spends his nights at the studio, avid for music, new ideas, hysterical laughter. He doesn’t leave anything to chance, spends hours correcting the sound of a snare drum, a drum arrangement. ‘Louise is there!’ he always tells his wife when she worries about their absences.

When Myriam first got pregnant he was thrilled, but he told his friends that he didn’t want his life to change. Myriam thought he was right, and she looked at her man – so sporty, so handsome, so independent – with even more admiration. He had promised her he would make sure that their life remained luminous and full of surprises. ‘We’ll travel and we’ll take the kid with us. You’ll become a great lawyer, I’ll produce records by acclaimed artists, and nothing will change.’ They pretended; they tried.

In the months that followed Mila’s birth, life turned into a rather sad act. Myriam concealed the rings round her eyes and her melancholy. She was afraid of admitting to herself that she was sleepy all the time. Around that period, Paul started asking her: ‘What are you thinking about?’ and each time she felt like crying. They invited friends to their apartment and Myriam had to force herself not to throw them out, not to knock the table over, not to lock herself in her bedroom. Their friends laughed; they raised their glasses and Paul