Lullaby - Leila Slimani Page 0,5
could speak Arabic to them since you don’t want to.’ But Myriam steadfastly refuses this idea. She fears that a tacit complicity and familiarity would grow between her and the nanny. That the woman would start speaking to her in Arabic. Telling Myriam her life story and, soon, asking her all sorts of favours in the name of their shared language and religion. She has always been wary of what she calls immigrant solidarity.
*
Then Louise arrived. When she describes that first interview, Myriam loves to say that it was instantly obvious. Like love at first sight. She goes on about the way her daughter behaved. ‘It was Mila who chose her,’ she likes to make clear. Mila had just woken from her nap, dragged from sleep by her brother’s ear-splitting screams. Paul went to fetch the baby and came back with the little girl following close behind, hiding between his legs. Louise stood up. As Myriam describes this scene, she still sounds fascinated by the nanny’s self-assurance. Louise delicately took Adam from his father’s arms and pretended not to notice Mila. ‘Where is the princess? I thought I saw a princess, but she’s disappeared.’ Mila burst out laughing and Louise continued with her game, searching in the corners, under the table, behind the sofa for the mysteriously vanished princess.
They ask her a few questions. Louise says that her husband is dead, that her daughter, Stéphanie, is grown-up now – ‘nearly twenty, I can hardly believe it’ – and that she is always available. She gives Paul a piece of paper containing a list of her former employers. She talks about the Rouvier family, who are at the top of the list. ‘I stayed with them for a long time. They had two children too. Two boys.’ Paul and Myriam are charmed by Louise, by her smooth features, her open smile, her lips that do not tremble. She appears imperturbable. She looks like a woman able to understand and forgive everything. Her face is like a peaceful sea, its depths suspected by no one.
That evening they phoned the couple whose number Louise had given them. A woman answered, a little coldly. As soon as she heard Louise’s name, her tone changed. ‘Louise? You’re so lucky to have found her. She was like a second mother to my boys. It was heartbreaking when we had to let her go. To be perfectly honest, I even thought of having a third child at the time, just so we could keep her.’
Louise opens the shutters of her apartment. It’s just after five in the morning and, outside, the streetlamps are still lit. A man walks along the street, staying close to the walls to avoid the rain. The downpour lasted all night. The wind whistled in the pipes and invaded her dreams. The rain seems to be falling horizontally now so it can hit the building’s facade and the windows with full force. Louise likes looking outside. Just across the road, between two sinister buildings, is a little house, surrounded by a bushy garden. A young Parisian couple moved there at the start of the summer, and on Sundays their children play on the swings and help weed the vegetable garden. Louise wonders what they’re doing in this neighbourhood.
She shivers from lack of sleep. With the tip of her fingernail she scratches the corner of the window. Even though she cleans it zealously twice a week, the glass always looks murky to her, covered in dust and black smears. Sometimes she wants to clean the panes until they shatter. She scratches, harder and harder, with her index finger, and her nail breaks. She puts her finger in the shower and bites it to stop the bleeding.
The apartment consists of only one room, which Louise uses as both bedroom and living room. She takes care, every morning, to fold up the sofa bed and put the black slipcover on it. She eats her meals at the coffee table, with the television on. Against the wall are piled some cardboard boxes. They contain perhaps the few objects that might give life to this soulless studio flat. To the right of the sofa is the photograph of a red-headed teenager in a sparkly frame.
She has carefully spread out her long skirt and blouse over the sofa. She picks up the ballet pumps that she left on the floor, a pair she bought more than ten years ago but which she’s taken such good care of that they