Lullaby - Leila Slimani Page 0,40
the women; she is particularly struck by their broad faces, their thick hands, their wide hips accentuated by belts tied too tight. They speak loudly, they laugh, they call across the room at one another. They surround Wafa, who is sitting at the table of honour and who, Louise gathers, is not allowed to move.
Louise has been seated at the end of the room, far from the window that overlooks the street, next to a man whom Wafa had introduced her to this morning. ‘I told you about Hervé. He did some work in my bedsit. He works quite nearby.’ Wafa deliberately seated her next to him. He is the kind of man she deserves. A man no one wants but who Louise will take, the way she takes old clothes, second-hand magazines with pages missing, even waffles half-eaten by the children.
She is not attracted to Hervé. She is embarrassed by Wafa’s knowing looks. She hates this sensation of being spied on, trapped. And besides, this man is so ordinary. There is so little about him to like. For a start, he is barely any taller than Louise. His legs are muscular but short and his hips are narrow. Hardly any neck. When he speaks, he sometimes pulls his head back into his shoulders, like a shy turtle. Louise keeps staring at his hands as they rest on the table: they are a working man’s hands, a poor man’s hands, a smoker’s hands. She has noticed that he has teeth missing. He is not distinguished. He smells of cucumber and wine. The first thing she thinks is that she would be ashamed to introduce him to Myriam and Paul. They would be disappointed. She is sure that they would think this man isn’t good enough for her.
Hervé, on the other hand, stares at Louise with the eagerness of an old man for a young woman who has shown a bit of interest in him. He finds her so elegant, so delicate. He notes the slenderness of her neck, the lightness of her earrings. He observes her hands as they writhe in her lap, her little white hands with pink fingernails, her hands that look as if they have not suffered, not been worked to the bone. Louise reminds him of those porcelain dolls he’s seen sitting on shelves in the apartments of old ladies where he has gone to do a favour or do some work. Like those dolls, Louise’s features are almost motionless; sometimes her frozen expression is absolutely beautiful. She has a way of staring into space that makes Hervé want to remind her of his existence.
He tells her about his job. He’s a delivery driver, but not full-time. He also does odd jobs, repairs things, helps people move house. Three days a week he works as a security guard in the car park of a bank, on Boulevard Haussmann. ‘It gives me time to read,’ he says. ‘Thrillers mostly, but not always.’ She doesn’t know what to say when he asks her what she reads.
‘What about music, then? Do you like music?’
He is mad about it and, with his little purple fingers, he pretends to pluck the strings of a guitar. He talks about life before, in the old days, when people listened to music all the time, when singers were idols. He used to have long hair and worship Jimi Hendrix. ‘I’ll show you a photo,’ he says. Louise realises that she has never listened to music. She never got a taste for it. All she knows are nursery rhymes, simple rhyming songs passed on from mother to daughter. One evening, Myriam heard her humming a tune with the children. She told her she had a very nice voice. ‘It’s a shame, you could have been a singer.’
Louise has not noticed that most of the guests are not drinking alcohol. In the centre of each table there is a bottle of soda and a large carafe of water. Hervé has hidden a bottle of wine on the floor, to his right, and he pours more into Louise’s glass whenever it’s empty. She drinks slowly. She ends up getting used to the deafening music, the yelling of the guests, the incomprehensible speeches of the young men who talk with their lips too close to the microphone. She even smiles as she watches Wafa and she forgets that all of this is nothing but a masquerade, a fool’s game, a hoax.
She drinks and the discomfort of living, the