The List of My Desires by Grégoire Delacourt

silence and sobbing. He wonders if he shouldn’t just go back, arrive this evening at the peaceful dinner hour, put the key in the lock, open the door. Believe in miracles. Believe in Reggiani’s song, with words by Dabadie. Is there anybody there? / Anyone I can see? / I can hear the dog from here. / So if you are not dead / Open the door to me. / I know that I’m late home. But suppose she has changed the locks? Suppose she isn’t there? He decides to write a letter.
    Later, weeks later, when he has finished the letter, he takes it to the post office in the Place Poelaert near the Palais de Justice. He is worried. He wonders, several times, if he has put enough postage on it. It is an important letter. He watches the hand throwing his letter full of hopes and new beginnings into the basket; other letters soon fall in with it, covering his, suffocating it, hiding it. He feels lost. He is lost.
    He goes back to the big, empty house. There is nothing left in it but the white sofa. He has sold or given away everything else. The car, the TV set, The Bourne Trilogy , the Omega watch, he couldn’t find the Patek, but he doesn’t care.
    He waits on the white sofa. He waits for a reply to slide under his door. He waits a long, long time, but no reply comes. He trembles, and over the following days, when nothing happens, his cold body goes numb. He no longer eats or moves. He drinks a few mouthfuls of water every day, and when all the bottles are empty he stops drinking anything. Sometimes he sheds tears. Sometimes he talks to himself. He says both their names. That was the symbiosis, only he didn’t see it.
    When his death throes begin, he is happy.

T he sea is grey in Nice.
    There’s a heavy swell far out. Lacy crests of foam. A few sails moving in the wind, like hands calling for help, but no one can catch hold of them.
    It is winter.
    Most of the shutters in the apartment buildings on the Promenade des Anglais are down. They are like medical dressings on the well-worn façades. The old people are shut up at home, watching the news and the bad weather forecast on TV. They chew for a long time before swallowing. They are suddenly making things last. Then they go to sleep on the sofa with a little woolly rug over their knees and the TV still on. They must hold out until spring or they’ll be found dead; with the rising temperature of the first fine days, disgusting smells will seep out from under doors, up chimneys, nightmarish. Their children are far away. They won’t come back until the first warm days, when they can take advantage of the sea, the sun, Grandpa’s apartment. They’ll come back when they can take measurements, draw up plans: enlarge the sitting room, give the bedrooms and the bathroom a makeover, fit a new fireplace, put an olive tree in a pot on the balcony so that they can eat their own olives some day.
    It’s almost a year and a half ago that I was sitting here on my own, in the same place, at the same time of year. I was cold, and I was waiting.
    I had just left the nurses at the Centre, alive, appeased. In those few weeks I had killed something in me.
    A terrible thing called kindness.
    I had drained myself of it like pus, like a dead baby; a present someone has given you only to take it back immediately.
    An atrocity.
    It’s nearly eighteen months since I let myself die and be born again as someone else. Colder, more angular. Grief always refashions you in a strange form.
    And then Jo’s letter had arrived, a small highlight in the mourning of the woman I was then. An envelope sent from Belgium; on the back, a Brussels address in the Place du Grand Sablon. Inside, four pages of his untidy handwriting. Surprising phrases, new words that might have been taken straight from a book. Jo, I know now that love can stand up to death better than to betrayal. * His writing was full of fear. The gist of it was that he wanted to come back. Just like that. Back home. Back to our house. The factory. The