LITMIR.BIZ

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appearance he’d had before the cortisone, and the mental capacity to pass a whole day without looking up at the ceiling of every room planning where to attach the sheets he intended to hang himself with. But just as he had kept a bit of a paunch, he had retained a vague sensation of unease. And a solid addiction to vitamin B6. And then, four weeks after the publication of the novel from which she knew he was expecting so much, his daughter Valentine had disappeared.

      Valentine. The gap left by her absence. The guilty feeling of relief that followed from it. Valentine has never been easy. He has no illusions about that. It doesn’t stop him from loving her, knowing that she’s the woman of his life, the only one he has truly cherished and protected, the only one who’s truly made him laugh. But it’s never been easy. Children are women’s work really. He can see that with Claire and her two daughters, quite different. It’s all so upfront. Claire’s perfectly happy to see to the older girl’s dental braces, to check in on the younger girl’s dancing classes, their school grades interest her, she gets along well with their teachers. Even what they have to eat for tea can be a subject of conversation. He loves his daughter. But the high maintenance he’s had to do alone really pisses him off. It gets in the way of writing, going out, listening to a record in peace, reading a book in the morning, having some private time with Claire. Constant annoyance. Children are a rope around your neck, anything else is manageable. And even so, when Valentine was little, it was quite sweet, the Aristocats slippers, showing her Buster Keaton films, getting her a Cosette costume for the school party. There’d been hassle, but there’d been fun as well. But these last years she’s exhausted all the concern of which he was capable. And she knows it. He’s had enough of Valentine’s escapades. The phone calls from school, when she was caught “up to no good” with boys in the bathrooms. What kind of “no good,” how many boys, he had taken good care not to find out. Five schools in two years. The same scenario every time. An astronomical sum spent on psychologists who hadn’t the slightest idea what was the matter with her. It wasn’t rocket science, she just wanted to make as much trouble for him as possible. She wanted him to ditch Claire, like he’d ditched his other women. Valentine’s unlucky, she’s turned out to look like him. He recognizes himself in her face, her figure. She might have inherited her mother’s looks, but the older she gets, the clearer it is that she takes after him. Okay in a man. But for a woman . . . He understands why she’s unhappy. When she wears short little dresses like other girls her age, she looks like a rugby player. But that’s hardly enough reason to make him suffer as she does. She’s full of energy. Naturally, in their teens, they don’t tire easily. And she employs it full time to get on his nerves. It’s never been easy. When her mother walked out, the little girl was like a poisoned souvenir of how things had been between them. Vanessa. Vanessa had been called Louisa when he met her. She’d decided to change her name one day. Vanessa liked change. The clear memory of the years spent with her. Fourteen years later, and it seems like yesterday. The cruel illusion, when he wakes up, that she’s beside him, still tortures him with piercing sharpness. And Valentine is the living proof of that failure, of his great love story. Having been abandoned by the same woman, they were tied together forever, and by the same token separated. And Valentine had become the ideal pretext for his mother to invade their lives. Just what he needed. His mother, every day or almost, in the house. His mother who never says anything openly pejorative, never asks indiscreet questions, but who looks disparagingly on everything he does. His mother is too fond of him to admit that he’s a failure, living off her money. But at heart that’s what she thinks. A silent comparison between his father and himself. The businessman and the writer. For example, his mother cuts out every article she can find about the digital future of the book, brings it to him, and if he doesn’t read it at once, summarizes it for him. This is her way of letting him understand he’s made a mess of everything in his life. A life dedicated to books, when books will soon have vanished from the face of the earth. The same way she has just hired a private detective to find the child. The point of this is to make him see he hasn’t stirred himself enough. As if it isn’t obvious where the kid is. What’s he supposed to do? Go down there and beg her to come back? What’s the point? As if he didn’t beg hard enough fourteen years ago?

      From the other end of the corridor, the cleaning woman calls that she’s finished the ironing and is going home. He glances at his watch, twenty to twelve. Of course, she’ll count it as a full hour. The timid treasure who came to work for them two years ago has changed a lot. The Italian journalist is late. And already he’s not that bothered to meet her. But his books haven’t been translated into Italian for a good while now, and a favorable interview for La Repubblica might bring him into the public eye. She’s developing a project on the French literary landscape, he’s flattered that she has contacted him. But it’s annoying that she’s late. He wonders whether she’ll be pretty, her voice on the phone sounded nice, slightly husky. And then there was the Italian accent. Because Italian women don’t just know how to dress. Anna used to slide her finger up his ass every time she gave him a blow job, just the end of her finger and slide it. Without ever referring to it when the sheets were back in place. As soon as he hears that accent, he gets a hard-on. Her sophisticated Italian look when he took her out, her way of wrapping herself up so that you could only see her dark eyes, the curve of a shapely lip. The nonchalant way she let him open doors, or would give him a package to carry. Her regal manner, but without the irritating arrogance of Parisian women. Never trying to be a brilliant conversationalist when they were out for the evening, too beautiful for that. And when they broke up, a fury. Magnificently feminine, when she was shouting insults at him and throwing his clothes out of the door. Then she had hammered him with a series of rapid and vicious little blows with her clenched fists, fists so delicate he would have sworn they could do no damage, but when used like that in repeated, regular fashion, they had left a constellation of bruises on his chest and back. He had had to resort to various subterfuges for two weeks so as not to undress in front of Clothilde, his official wife at the time, with whom he was still living. That was his second marriage. Two divorces, three marriages, a respectable average as he approached fifty. Clothilde had never wished to acknowledge that he was cheating on her. He hadn’t bothered to hide it from her anymore than from the others. But she chose not to know about it. She had invented an extremely flattering portrait of him, as being not the kind of man to cheat on his wife. She maintained it, come hell or high water. So he could say he was returning home after playing poker with his friends all night, that he was doing research in bars for his novel, that he’d had a late-night discussion with his publisher. He had only to take the trouble to invent an excuse for her to choose to believe it. Her trust had at first bothered him with remorse. A woman so affectionate and upright that she couldn’t even imagine he would lie to her. He felt guilty, but unable to stop himself being turned on by a new acquaintance, a presence, a way of moving, of standing in a room, a smile, or a voice. He couldn’t not do it. He had felt guilty for months, before he realized that Clothilde’s lack of jealousy was entirely founded on the deeply condescending idea she had of him. She put up with him because his small-scale fame gave her some kudos, but at heart she found him insignificant, lacking breeding or sophistication, slow-witted and uncharismatic. She viewed him as so far below her that he was reassuring: a little frog like him could only adore a princess like her, and be grateful that she had raised him to her level. It had taken him a while to work out how this functioned, but once he had decoded it, he began to hate her. She had come into his life only a short while after Vanessa had left him. The wound was still too raw for him to forgive Clothilde for making him feel useless and unimportant all over again. He had left her in the lousiest way possible, taking care to make plans for a holiday with friends before walking out one July morning without a word of explanation, to join another woman. Clothilde had wept for months, telling all their friends about it, exhibiting her pain as proof of his ingratitude and dangerous nature. By so doing, she had rendered him extremely desirable to all her female acquaintances. What a stroke of luck. Clothilde hadn’t made him happy, but thanks to her he had felt good, being labeled as a bastard, a seducer, and a breaker of hearts. Anything was better than the taste in his mouth of the humiliation that Vanessa had forced on him. A little boy, abused and at risk.

      “So sorry to be late, it was hard to find a parking place.”

      Slight disappointment: she must be in her forties. But the excitement comes back once she takes off her coat: she’s taken care with her outfit,

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