the face of an honest, ageing woman, the face of a good mother, shocked to find out that her daughter Colette let another man into her house when her husband was away, into that idyllic MoulinNeuf. But what did you do? She takes after you, your daughter. And the other one too, she takes after the two of us. They are both utterly alive, while we have been dead for twenty years; yes, dead, because we don't love anything any more and that's the truth. Because you're not going to try to tell me, are you, that you love Francois? Of course, he's your friend, your husband, you're used t o b eing together. You could live together as brother and sister. In fact, you surely have lived together as brother and sister since Loulou was born, but you never loved him, you loved me, me.
Come here, listen, sit down next to me, think back. Have you really become a hypocrite? Of course not, it's as I thought, you've simply become someone else. How did you put it . . . You were right: at twenty someone bursts into our life. Yes, some winged stranger, leaping, radiant, who sets ablaze our blood, ravages our lives, then disappears. Well, I want to bring that stranger back to life. Listen to him. Look at him. Do you recognise him? Do you remember that long, cold, white corridor and your elderly husband (not Francois, but your first husband, the one who died so long ago, the one who nobody ever talks about), your husband in his bed with the door left ajar, for he was jealous and suspicious, and how we kissed, you and I, and how the lamp cast that great shadow across the ceiling, the shadow that was you and me, or so we thought? In reality it was neither of us, it was the face of the stranger, like us but different from us, the stranger who disappeared so very long ago.
Helene, my darling, do you remember the day we met? You were merely a girl when Francois first saw you. He talked about your past that evening you all came to drink punch with me, when Colette got engaged. I'm not interested in that. You were no child when I met you. No, you were a woman, a woman tied to an old man, waiting for him to di e s o you could marry Francois. He was gone, living abroad. He had a job teaching French at a university in Bohemia. As for me, I'd just returned from a long journey. You . . . you were young and beautiful, and you were bored. But wait. Let's start from the beginning...
HELENE'S FIRST HUSBAND was a Montrifaut, one of my mother's cousins. I was living in Africa whe n t hey married. It was before the 1914 war. Helene had been a child when I left. Yet I remember that when my mother told me about her marriage-my dear mother wrote to me every week, a kind of diary in which she told me about everyone and everything in the region, in order, no doubt, to make me feel nostalgic so I'd want to come home-I remember that I thought for a long time about that young girl I barely knew. I remember the stifling hot night, the hut, the hurricane lamp in a corner, the lizards chasing flies up the white walls, my black mistress, Fife, with her green turban. I daydreamed as I read my letter; I pictured the ill-matched couple and found myself saying out loud, "What a shame."
It might be impossible to predict the future, but I believe that certain powerful emotions make themselves felt months, even years, in advance, through a strange quiver i n t he heart. For example, I only understood the gloomy sadness I had always felt in train stations at dusk when, years later during my time as a soldier in the war, I suddenly recognised it as I waited on a platform for the train that would take me back to the front. In the same way, years before love came into my life, it swept over my heart like a gentle breeze. That night in Africa I was hot, thirsty, feverish. At first I dozed, then I fell into a deep sleep where I dreamt I was with a woman, a Frenchwoman, a young girl from back home. But every time I got close to her she slipped away. I stretched out my arms and, for a second,
Come here, listen, sit down next to me, think back. Have you really become a hypocrite? Of course not, it's as I thought, you've simply become someone else. How did you put it . . . You were right: at twenty someone bursts into our life. Yes, some winged stranger, leaping, radiant, who sets ablaze our blood, ravages our lives, then disappears. Well, I want to bring that stranger back to life. Listen to him. Look at him. Do you recognise him? Do you remember that long, cold, white corridor and your elderly husband (not Francois, but your first husband, the one who died so long ago, the one who nobody ever talks about), your husband in his bed with the door left ajar, for he was jealous and suspicious, and how we kissed, you and I, and how the lamp cast that great shadow across the ceiling, the shadow that was you and me, or so we thought? In reality it was neither of us, it was the face of the stranger, like us but different from us, the stranger who disappeared so very long ago.
Helene, my darling, do you remember the day we met? You were merely a girl when Francois first saw you. He talked about your past that evening you all came to drink punch with me, when Colette got engaged. I'm not interested in that. You were no child when I met you. No, you were a woman, a woman tied to an old man, waiting for him to di e s o you could marry Francois. He was gone, living abroad. He had a job teaching French at a university in Bohemia. As for me, I'd just returned from a long journey. You . . . you were young and beautiful, and you were bored. But wait. Let's start from the beginning...
HELENE'S FIRST HUSBAND was a Montrifaut, one of my mother's cousins. I was living in Africa whe n t hey married. It was before the 1914 war. Helene had been a child when I left. Yet I remember that when my mother told me about her marriage-my dear mother wrote to me every week, a kind of diary in which she told me about everyone and everything in the region, in order, no doubt, to make me feel nostalgic so I'd want to come home-I remember that I thought for a long time about that young girl I barely knew. I remember the stifling hot night, the hut, the hurricane lamp in a corner, the lizards chasing flies up the white walls, my black mistress, Fife, with her green turban. I daydreamed as I read my letter; I pictured the ill-matched couple and found myself saying out loud, "What a shame."
It might be impossible to predict the future, but I believe that certain powerful emotions make themselves felt months, even years, in advance, through a strange quiver i n t he heart. For example, I only understood the gloomy sadness I had always felt in train stations at dusk when, years later during my time as a soldier in the war, I suddenly recognised it as I waited on a platform for the train that would take me back to the front. In the same way, years before love came into my life, it swept over my heart like a gentle breeze. That night in Africa I was hot, thirsty, feverish. At first I dozed, then I fell into a deep sleep where I dreamt I was with a woman, a Frenchwoman, a young girl from back home. But every time I got close to her she slipped away. I stretched out my arms and, for a second,
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