Lullaby - Leila Slimani Page 0,53
recently, Myriam has been speaking more quietly. She closes the door behind her when she talks on the phone. She whispers, her lips just above Paul’s shoulder. They look as if they are keeping secrets.
Louise talks to Wafa about this child that will soon be born. About the joy it will bring, and the extra work. ‘With three children, they won’t be able to do without me.’ Louise has moments of euphoria. She has the vague, fleeting sense of a life that will grow bigger, of wider open spaces, a purer love, voracious appetites. She thinks about the summer, which is so close, and their family holidays. She imagines the smell of ploughed soil and olive pits rotting by a roadside. The vault of fruit trees under a moonbeam and nothing to carry, nothing to cover up, nothing to hide.
She starts cooking properly again; in the past few weeks her meals have become almost inedible. For Myriam, she makes cinnamon rice pudding, spicy soups and all sorts of dishes reputed to increase fertility. She observes the young woman’s body as attentively as a jealous husband. She examines the fairness of her complexion, the weight of her breasts, the shine of her hair: all, she believes, signs of pregnancy.
She takes care of the laundry with the concentration of a witch, a voodoo priestess. As always, she empties the washing machine. She stretches Paul’s boxer shorts. She washes Myriam’s lingerie by hand; in the kitchen sink, she runs cold water over the lace and silk of her bras and knickers. She recites prayers.
But Louise is always disappointed. She doesn’t need to rip open the bin bags. Nothing escapes her. She saw the stain on the pyjama bottoms left by Myriam’s side of the bed. On the bathroom floor this morning, she noticed the tiny drop of blood. A drop so small that Myriam didn’t clean it, and which was left to dry on the green-and-white tiles.
The blood returns ceaselessly; she knows its odour, this blood that Myriam cannot hide from her and that, each month, announces the death of a child.
Euphoria gives way to days of dejection. The world seems to shrink, to retract, to weigh down on her body, to crush it. Paul and Myriam close doors on her and she wants to smash them down. She has only one desire: to create a world with them, to find her place and live there, to dig herself a niche, a burrow, a warm hiding place. Sometimes she feels ready to claim her portion of earth and then the urge wanes, she is overcome by sorrow, and she feels ashamed even to have believed in something.
One Thursday evening, around 8 p.m., Louise goes back to her studio flat. The landlord is waiting in the dark corridor. He stands beneath the bulb that no longer works. ‘Ah, there you are.’ Bertrand Alizard practically pounces on her. He aims the light from his phone screen at Louise’s face and she covers her eyes with her hands. ‘I was waiting for you. I’ve come here several times, in the evenings and afternoons. I never found you.’ He speaks smoothly, his upper body leaning towards Louise, as if he is about to touch her, take her arm, whisper in her ear. He stares at her with his gummed-up eyes, his lashless eyes that he rubs after taking off his glasses, which are attached to a string around his neck.
She opens the door to her flat and lets him in. Bertrand Alizard is wearing a pair of beige trousers that are too big for him. Observing him from behind, Louise notices that the belt has missed two loops and that his trousers hang loose at his waist and beneath his backside. He looks like an old man, stooped and frail, who has stolen a giant’s clothing. Everything about him seems harmless: his balding head, his wrinkled cheeks covered in freckles, his trembling shoulders … everything except his huge, dry hands, with their thick nails like fossils; his butcher’s hands, which he rubs together to warm up.
He enters the apartment in silence, slowly and carefully, as if he were discovering the place for the first time. He inspects the walls, runs his finger over the spotless skirting boards. He touches everything with his calloused hands, caresses the sofa’s slipcover, strokes the surface of the Formica table. To him, the apartment appears empty, uninhabited. He would have liked to make a few remarks to his tenant, to tell her