Fragments of Place Read online

  But not a living soul.

  Not even a cat from some dark alley.

  Yet there was the sound of footsteps, always, in the distance, scattered inside her.

  BEYOND REPROACH

  Didier opened the door to his studio furnished with the bare essentials. The minimum was enough for him.

  For the last year and a half, he had been coming here to recharge his batteries after returning from working abroad for months at a time.

  But today, this place was no longer a refuge; it was a prison.

  This time he returned much sooner than planned, and for good. The problem was his hands. He could not execute the expert, precision moves his work demanded. His hands shook, especially the right one. Not very much, but too much to perform surgery. Sometimes, one of them would jump suddenly. And his condition would not be getting better.

  Didier stepped inside and closed the door with his foot. He dropped his bags on the floor. Without taking off his coat, he walked across the room and stood in front of the large map of the world hanging on the wall.

  Red thumbtacks marked locations in Africa, South America, and Asia.

  Over the last fifteen years, Didier replaced his map three times because too many borders had moved and some countries had changed names. He worked in two countries that had since disappeared off the map. And in others that were born from fractures, and that did not exist when he was there. He treated people exiled by violence into the countries surrounding theirs. Like in that refugee camp, supposedly temporary, that ended up taking hold in a neighbouring country, where people lived and waited, they had no idea for what, for more than twenty years.

  Countries tear themselves apart, turn into cannibals, and wipe themselves out of existence. Others ride one over the other, swell up, and explode. Still others implode.

  Didier travelled to those spots marked in red to graft bits of skin onto open flesh, reset and fix shattered bones, amputate limbs, pull out bullets, and extract shards of shrapnel from land mines scattered through human bodies.

  He also removed tumours in the intestinal tract, lungs, and other parts; he performed many types of surgery. Along with social and political chaos, even when war and natural catastrophe devastate everything they touch, illness and accidents still occur. In those countries, too, children play and fall, stones go on obstructing kidneys, and babies sometimes refuse to leave their mother’s bellies.

  Didier stood in front of that world where his missions would no longer leave their mark.

  He opened his arms wide, stretched them high, and grabbed the top of the map. Then he ripped it off the wall. The little nails went flying and scattered across the floor with a metallic sound.

  Didier wasn’t sure he’d be able to live without travelling and doing his work.

  An irrepressible urge had always sent him to places where the needs were enormous and the means nearly non-existent. He had been invested with a noble mission. A drop of water in the ocean, and he knew it. No more, no less. But a drop that made a difference. He believed that.

  Julianne, his ex-wife, put it another way: his case was a complex and sophisticated form of megalomania.

  In countries ravaged by war or cataclysm, Didier could set himself up as a saviour, or even God. Something he didn’t neglect to do at times.

  Before he got involved in his life without borders, Didier was just another surgeon, and despite his efforts, nothing about him set him apart from the rest.

  At home, he tried to build the perfect family. To achieve that, everyone needed to submit to any number of rules and precepts. There was the right way to speak, and hold oneself, and be together, and, above all, the need to maintain a playful attitude at all times.

  Julianne liked that at the beginning. Even if his work was demanding, Didier participated actively in family life.

  But soon Julianne realized that there was nothing spontaneous about Didier, and she began to see his stereotyped vision of the family unit. Not only did they have to follow an invisible model of the perfect little family, they had to convince themselves that they were better than other parents.

  Didier filmed birthdays and special events, but also recorded moments in their daily life. In these videos, everything looked the same, and in the background was a constant malaise, barely camouflaged by bursts of laughter often performed for the camera, and Didier behind it.

  Theirs was a cardboard universe behind which everything was going haywire. That became more obvious by the day.

  To prop up the illusion of the ideal family, Didier deployed an extraordinary and constant energy. He resented Julianne, Mélina, and Benjamin enormously for being unable to play their roles correctly, and not corresponding to the idyllic image he had in his head.

  After a few years, Didier was so disappointed that all he could think about was how to escape the trap that had imprisoned him. The possibility of working overseas was the perfect excuse.

  When he returned from his first mission, Didier wasn’t the same man. In just five months, he had succeeded in pulling himself out of the chaotic situation in which Julianne and the children remained stuck like flies to flypaper.

  The change was radical.

  Everything that used to interest and concern Didier now left him indifferent, or irritated him.

  He often experienced utter boredom when he was with his wife and children. Rage would overwhelm him suddenly, and he couldn’t always contain it.

  It was clear that Didier had an unfulfilled need. At home, he couldn’t get the high doses of adrenaline to boost him to the point where he liked to be. Everything seemed dull and lacking in challenge, even his work, compared to the exalting and dangerous experiences he’d had overseas.

  One evening, Julianne tried to talk to him about how much he had changed. Not only was he not the least interested in his family anymore, he didn’t seem to want to be part of it. Didier didn’t answer. He walked out of the room.

  The next time, he turned around and looked her in the eye and told her through clenched teeth, “I’m here, aren’t I? I don’t see what you’ve got to complain about! You’ve got everything! Isn’t that enough?”

  Tensions continued to mount in the house.

  Mélina, Benjamin, and even Julianne increasingly felt that the floors of every room in their house were mined. Constant vigilance was called for. Didier exploded over every little thing and the children ended up in tears.

  The situation became untenable. Julianne gathered up her courage and decided to bring up the subject with Didier again and, this time, take things to their logical conclusion.

  She hadn’t even finished her first sentence when he interrupted to inform her that he had signed a new contract for a second mission overseas, longer than the first. If he wasn’t needed here, he would go elsewhere, where people wanted him.

  The question was settled.

  Didier left a week later.

  His abrupt departure and everything that was left unsaid between them filled Julianne with such anger that she couldn’t sleep for nights on end. Her jaw was clenched so tight it was painful, and her nails left marks in the palms of her cramped hands.

  Mélina and Benjamin were so upset they didn’t know whether they should mourn their father’s departure, as they had the first time, or be happy he had disappeared, since they didn’t recognize him anymore. He turned his attention to them only when he was in the mood to criticize them, or teach them some moral lesson.

  Before he left the first time, they had to act like perfect little children to live up to his expectations, and they hadn’t always liked doing that, but at least their father seemed to love them back then. He spent a lot of time with them and looked after their needs.

  But now Didier had left them to save the lives of people far away, as his family was breaking up. He didn’t seem to notice they were slipping into chaos.

  When he went away the first time, Didier left empty places everywhere that let the life leach out of the house. The bed that was too
big where Julianne slept. The chess set that Benjamin played sometimes, in the evening, in his room, pretending his father was there. He talked to him in a low voice. Mélina, who was only thirteen, tried to seduce one of her teachers, a man of thirty-four who had a certain resemblance to Didier.

  Julianne tried to patch up the cracks, but they kept getting wider. Despite all she did, the walls of their house were growing ever more unstable. In certain spots they were cracking and falling into dust like the walls of cities under bombardment full of rubble and debris under which people no one could find or reach were dying every day.

  The years went by and Didier continued to come and go.

  Each time he returned, instead of noticing that his wife and children were fighting to keep their head above water, Didier considered that they were wallowing in a universe of luxury, and that their life was both abject and indecent.

  Some evenings, when the four of them were seated at the table, Didier found the conversations so insipid, the problems thought to be the day’s drama so insignificant, the abundance in his plate, on the table, and everywhere else so excessive that he jumped up, often abruptly, knocking over his chair. He rushed outside for a brisk walk to keep from screaming out his disgust.

  Julianne and the children lost their appetite. They felt inadequate and uninteresting. They were ashamed of being healthy, and having enough to eat, and living in their beautiful big house. Ashamed of almost being happy when they were together, without Didier.

  When he was there, it was automatic: they lived in a stifling atmosphere of insecurity and guilt.

  He made it his business to remind them how lucky they were to be in a country where peace and abundance reigned. Overabundance, he pointed out, superfluous wealth and waste. Hatefully, he attacked their indifference and lack of awareness, their insatiability and their frantic individualism.

  Didier took pleasure in telling them stories, especially over Sunday supper, about the horrors he witnessed in the countries he had visited during his missions.

  He put so much emphasis and added so many realistic details that Mélina started having nightmares.

  She even began refusing to eat because children were starving to death elsewhere in the world, they were sick and often orphaned, and many times suffered from all those ordeals at once.

  But later, as soon as her father launched into one of his lessons or horror stories, Mélina would slip away. When Didier saw her moving for the door, he would call after her, “That’s right, stay in your cute little cocoon! Your crass ignorance. Close your eyes and your ears! You’re just a coward, Mélina!”

  Julianne joined the fray as Benjamin took advantage of the uproar to disappear, too.

  In the end, Didier stopped his moralizing lessons and stories of atrocities. He lost all hope of saving his family. In any case, Mélina and Benjamin deserted the house whenever their father wasn’t overseas.

  The day after Didier returned from one of his trips, Julianne announced she was filing for divorce. Didier seemed relieved. A week later, he was living in his little studio.

  Julianne wanted a divorce long before then, but she had put it off because of Benjamin.

  From Didier’s first trip, and over the following years, Benjamin did everything in his power to win his father’s love and attention. His efforts were in vain. And his last attempt was a miserable failure.

  After high school, where he had an undistinguished record, Benjamin signed up for social sciences at a college. His father told him he wasn’t surprised. Only losers and lazy kids chose the social sciences, especially when no math was involved.

  Benjamin was deeply hurt, but instead of pitying himself, he decided to prove to his father that he was neither lazy nor a loser. He worked very hard and got excellent grades.

  At the beginning of his fourth session, he knew what he wanted to do, not only for a living, but with his life. He waited eagerly for his father to return so he could tell him.

  The day Didier came back, Benjamin announced he’d been accepted at the university of his choice in the department of social work. He was going to build a career working with street people.

  Benjamin had pictured his father’s reaction several times. First he imagined his surprise. Then, his pride. Following his footsteps, his son would get involved in humanitarian aid.

  But Didier didn’t react the way Benjamin had hoped, not at all. He burst out laughing and, getting up from his chair, told Benjamin, “You need a university diploma to do that?” He left the room in a peal of self-satisfied laughter.

  Benjamin didn’t go to university even though he’d been accepted. He retreated to his room and for months did nothing but play video games. Then he left home and went to live with some friends.

  Since the divorce, Benjamin stopped seeing his father and never spoke another word to him.

  Mélina turned fifteen. She dressed completely in black and lost so much weight she put her life in danger.

  For the last three months, she has been living in a special home for anorexics. Her father refuses to see her. He pointed out to her that people were actually dying of hunger because they actually had nothing to eat. Whereas she, Mélina, was playing at being sick. He would not allow her to manipulate him. He would not stand by, powerless, as she let herself die slowly but surely. He had better things to do: help people who really were dying of hunger.

  Julianne is still there for Mélina and Benjamin, but that doesn’t seem to be enough.

  A DROWNING

  Floating on the surface of the water: her goldfish. With a net, she retrieved it carefully from the aquarium. She placed it on a paper towel, not knowing what to do with it. She couldn’t just throw it in the garbage, or down the toilet.

  Just as she had never known what to do, over the last thirty-five years, with her dead cats, her birds, her turtles, her dwarf rabbit, and her two dogs.

  She ended up burying them, all of them.

  The way she’d buried the women and men in her life.

  Standing by the counter, she cried silently. Her tears dropped onto the paper towel.

  Ever since she was a little girl, death had put an end to every bond.

  A RECURRING PATTERN

  Catherine extended her hand toward her computer and touched the screen with the tip of her index finger. A little off to the right was a small circle where she saw nothing. Part of her finger and the text disappeared, swallowed by a black hole. As if someone had cut out and thrown away a teardrop of reality.

  Six months ago, Catherine developed an extra blind spot in her field of vision. The small white speck on the surface of one eye was a souvenir of Pittapat, her old tiger-striped cat. There was nothing ferocious about him, but the day she placed him on the veterinarian’s table for the last time because he was too sick, the cat suddenly sensed his life was in danger, and he leapt at Catherine in an attempt to escape. He had never reacted that way before. The claw to her eye put an abrupt end to sixteen years of friendship. Catherine didn’t scream. She felt an intense burning pain and a thick fog passed over her. She woke up in emergency. Pittapat was dead. It was a total disaster.

  She went back to writing her text.

  Pittapat was not replaced and never would be. When she worked, he always perched on her desk, and he followed her everywhere. She missed him.

  Before, she never felt like she lived alone. Now she had that feeling all the time, and it was more painful than a corneal lesion.

  Sometimes she felt a pain in her heart, especially when she came home to her apartment where no one was waiting for her, not even an old cat. She would put on music, but that wasn’t enough. The emptiness was so dense she could reach out and touch it, like a wall of ice.

  She couldn’t even lose herself in her work anymore.

  In the morning when she woke, the prospect of living through another day overwhelmed her. She had to gather her courage just to get out of bed. Sometimes she would start to cry. She left her bedroom and gazed at the large painting w
ith the poppies, but its magic didn’t work anymore. Coffee had lost its taste and so had the pieces of bread she used to dunk into her soft-boiled egg.

  Her blue suitcase sat in the hallway. Last night she brought it upstairs from her locker in the basement of the building. A trip used to serve as an escape, an anesthetic. She wasn’t sure she wanted that kind of flight this time.

  She kept a box of violet-flavoured candies in her desk drawer, and she slipped one into her mouth. Her work was going nowhere. She might miss her deadline. That had never happened before.

  Something had broken inside her.

  She got up and looked out the window at the parking lot. No one was coming to visit. She always broke off with the people she loved. And it wasn’t because she didn’t need anyone – on the contrary.

  It was like a mistake in her technique, a recurring pattern that, ever since she was a child, had taken hold in her and kept repeating itself in the mural of her life. She would have liked to act differently, but every time she tried to change, a moment always came when she feared everything would collapse and sweep her away as it fell. Against her will, she would return to the old pattern recreated with the obsession of minutia.

  She turned on the television. A documentary about mites held her attention for a moment. She learned that millions of these tiny beings shared her bed. On another channel, a leopard had just captured a deer, and was devouring it even before it was dead. Catherine switched off the set.

  In the hallway, her hands against the wall, she cried silently. She went into the kitchen and drank a glass of water. She had stopped sitting at the table for her meals. She ate less and less and when she did, she gobbled her food in the living room, in front of the TV. She wished she could forget there was no one, but she couldn’t.

  The phone rang. Catherine quickly dried her tears on her sleeve, cleared her throat, and picked up the receiver.

  Her voice betrayed none of her distress. She laughed and talked in a calm, detached tone. André was offering her another contract. Over the last two years, she’d had no worries, the money was coming in. But she’d just about stopped buying records and books the way she used to. She hardly went out at all. Fatigue had entered her and weighed her down. Her arms and legs were heavy and everything was an effort.