Lullaby - Leila Slimani Page 0,44

to her feet, as relieved as a prisoner freed from her cell. She stuffs the cash in her pocket and runs to the door, mobile in hand. Later Myriam finds a dozen hand-rolled cigarette stubs on the balcony and, on the blue chest of drawers in the children’s bedroom, some chocolate ice cream that has melted, damaging the paintwork.

For three days Louise has nightmares. She doesn’t sink into sleep but into a sort of perverse lethargy, where her thoughts become scrambled and her unease is intensified. At night she is inhabited by a silent screaming inside her that tears at her guts. Her blouse stuck to her chest, her teeth grinding, she hollows out a furrow in the sofa bed’s mattress. She feels as if her face is being crushed under a boot heel, as if her mouth is full of dirt. Her hips twitch like a tadpole’s tail. She is totally exhausted. She wakes up to drink and go to the toilet, then returns to her nest.

She emerges from sleep the way you might rise up from the depths after you have swum too far, when you are oxygen-deprived, the water is a black sticky magma, and you are praying that you still have enough air, enough strength to reach the surface and breathe in, greedily, at last.

In her little notebook with the flower-patterned cover, she noted the term used by a doctor at the Henri-Mondor hospital. ‘Delirious melancholia’. Louise had thought that was beautiful; it seemed to bestow a touch of poetry and escape on her sadness. She wrote it down in her strange handwriting, all twisted, slanting capital letters. On the pages of that little notebook, the words resemble those shaky wooden constructions that Adam builds with blocks purely for the pleasure of watching them collapse.

For the first time, she thinks about old age. About her body, which is starting to malfunction; about the movements that make her ache deep in her bones. About her growing medical expenses. And then the fear of growing old and sick, bedridden, terminal, in this apartment with its dirty windows. It has become an obsession. She hates this place. She can’t stop thinking about the smell of damp coming from the shower cubicle. She can taste it in her mouth. All the joints, all the cracks are filled with a greenish mould, and no matter how furiously she scrubs at them, they grow back during the night, thicker than ever.

Hate rises up inside her. A hate that clashes with her servile urges, her childlike optimism. A hate that muddies everything. She is absorbed by a sad, confused dream. Haunted by the feeling that she has seen too much, heard too much of other people’s privacy, a privacy she has never enjoyed herself. She has never had her own bedroom.

*

After two nights of anguish, she feels ready to start work again. She has lost weight and her girlish face, pale and gaunt, looks as if it’s been beaten into a narrower shape. She does her hair and make-up. She calms herself with layers of mauve eyeshadow.

At 7.30 a.m., she opens the front door of the apartment on Rue d’Hauteville. Mila, in her blue pyjamas, runs at the nanny and jumps into her arms. She says: ‘Louise, it’s you! You came back!’

In his mother’s arms, Adam struggles. He has heard Louise’s voice, he has recognised her smell of talc, the light sound of her footsteps on the wooden floor. With his little hands, he pushes himself away from his mother’s chest. Smiling, Myriam hands her child into Louise’s loving arms.

In Myriam’s refrigerator, there are boxes. Very small boxes, piled neatly on top of one another. There are bowls, covered in aluminium foil. On the plastic shelves are little slices of lemon, a stale cucumber end, a quarter of an onion whose smell pervades the kitchen as soon as you open the fridge door. A piece of cheese with nothing but the rind remaining. In the boxes Myriam finds a few peas that are no longer round or bright green. Three bits of ravioli. A spoonful of broth. A shred of turkey that wouldn’t feed a sparrow, but which Louise carefully kept anyway.

Paul and Myriam joke about this. This mania of Louise’s, this phobia of throwing away food, makes them laugh at first. The nanny scrapes out the last morsels from jam jars; she makes the children lick out their pots of yoghurt. Her employers find this ludicrous and touching.

Paul makes fun of Myriam