Lullaby - Leila Slimani Page 0,46

had scratched away at the bones. The meat was dry and Louise let them drink big glasses of Fanta as they ate, so they wouldn’t choke. She was very careful not to damage the skeleton and she never took her eyes off the creature. She told them that it was a game and that she would reward them if they followed the rules exactly. And when it was over, they were allowed to eat two acid drops as a special treat.

Hector Rowier

It’s been ten years, but Hector Rouvier vividly remembers Louise’s hands. That was what he touched most often, her hands. They smelled like crushed petals and her nails were always varnished. Hector squeezed those hands, held them against him; he felt them on the back of his neck when he watched a film on television. Louise’s hands plunged into hot water and rubbed Hector’s skinny body. They massaged soap bubbles in his hair, slid under his armpits, washed his penis, his belly, his bottom.

Lying on the bed, face buried in his pillow, he would lift up his pyjama top to let Louise know that he was waiting for her to caress him. She would run her fingernails down his back and his skin would get goosebumps, and he’d shiver, and fall asleep, soothed and slightly ashamed, with a vague understanding of the strange excitation into which Louise’s fingers had sent him.

On the way to school, Hector would hold very tight to the nanny’s hands. As he got older and his palms grew bigger, he felt increasingly worried that he might crush Louise’s bones, her biscuit-like, porcelain bones. The nanny’s knuckles would crack inside the child’s palm, and sometimes Hector thought that he was the one holding Louise’s hand, helping her to cross the road.

No, Louise was never harsh. He doesn’t remember ever seeing her get angry. He’s sure of that; she never lifted a hand to him. Despite all the years he spent with her, his memories are vague, blurry. Louise’s face seems distant to him; he isn’t sure he would recognise her today if he happened to pass her in the street. But the feel of her cheek, soft and smooth; the smell of her powder, which she put on every morning and evening; the sensation of her beige tights on his child’s face; the strange way she had of kissing him, sometimes using her teeth, biting him as if to signify the sudden savagery of her love, her desire to completely possess him. Yes, all this he remembers.

He hasn’t forgotten her culinary talents either. The cakes she would bring with her when she met him at the school gates and the way she would rejoice in the little boy’s gluttony. The taste of her tomato sauce; the way she would pepper the steaks that she hardly cooked at all; her creamy mushroom sauce … these are memories that he often evokes. A mythology linked to his childhood, of the world before frozen meals eaten in front of his computer screen.

He also remembers – or, rather, he thinks he remembers – that she was infinitely patient with him. With his parents, the ceremony of bedtime often went wrong. Anne Rouvier, his mother, would lose patience when Hector cried, begged her to leave the door open, asked for another story, a glass of water, swore that he’d seen a monster, that he was still hungry.

‘I’m the same,’ Louise had confessed to him. ‘I’m afraid of falling asleep too.’ She indulged him when he had nightmares and sometimes she would stroke his temples for hours, her long, rose-scented fingers accompanying him on his journey towards sleep. She had persuaded her boss to leave a light on in the child’s bedroom. ‘There’s no point in terrifying him like that.’

Yes, her departure had been a wrench. He missed her terribly, and he hated the young woman who replaced her, a student who would pick him up from school, who spoke English to him, who – in his mother’s words – ‘stimulated him intellectually’. He blamed Louise for abandoning him, for not keeping the impassioned promises she had made, for betraying those solemn oaths of everlasting love, after swearing to him that he was the only one and that no one could ever take his place. One day she wasn’t there any more and Hector didn’t dare ask any questions. He wasn’t able to mourn the woman who had left him because, even though he was only eight, he intuitively knew that this