Finally, Alfred’s wife left the room, slowly, backing away, more undulatingly, more desperately generous with her smiles than ever. No one was watching her, only Herman, out of the corner of his eye. They were mulling various strategies to get next summer’s Parisians to consume more than ever before.
5 – Knowing that Charlotte’s mother thought highly of him, Herman resolved to ask her a favor. He wanted, once—just once—to visit the shoe sellers’ house, and he told her in all sincerity that he would never know peace in the village until he could. It was an indelicate thing to do, possibly harmful to his own interests, and he knew it.
“But after that I’ll never ask for anything again,” he promised, “and whatever I can do to be helpful, I’ll do it.”
He simply had to see with his own eyes how Rose and the boy were lodged in their immortal village existence.
Charlotte’s mother asked no questions. She went to see the shoe sellers, and they came to an agreement: On a certain afternoon of a certain day Herman would have a half hour to explore the house as he pleased. In gratitude, Herman bought the most expensive pair of rubber boots in the shop, along with slippers and espadrilles, and simultaneously he abandoned his intention of haggling with Charlotte’s mother when she handed him his bill at the end of the month.
When the day came he entered the shop and headed straight upstairs, as agreed. The owners had gone out so he could look around at his leisure. The house was silent, dark, exceedingly proper and drab. Many doors opening onto little low-ceilinged rooms cluttered with the usual rustic furniture. Numb, trembling with dread, Herman softly called to Rose and the child. To his irritation he saw that his pant cuffs were dripping onto the wood floors. Two flights up, at the end of a hallway, he found a sort of storage room, dusty, furnished with two old straw-seat chairs. The little oval window looked out the back of the house, toward the hills atomized by the mist and the rain.
“This must be the place,” thought Herman, looking at the two chairs side by side before the window.
This room seemed different from the others, with a very particular sort of silence—fuller, thicker—you could almost see it, could almost touch it. Rose’s perfume, the pleasing scent of fresh soap that always emanated from the child’s body, Herman breathed deep and was crushed to find that he couldn’t smell a trace of either one. Another wave of irrational terror ran through him. He wanted to run. But just then they walked in, hand in hand, and sat down in the chairs, never letting go of each other. They’d walked silently straight past Herman in their soaked summer clothes. Rose had smiled at him, very formally, just as she’d done the last time. And now they were looking out at the almost invisible hilltops, sitting very straight in their chairs, motionless, and at the television relay tower whose top sometimes poked through the immovable mass of black clouds.
“So this is what they look at every day,” murmured Herman, his fear subsiding.
He timidly called out to them. But he didn’t dare try to touch them. He felt overwhelmed by a feeling of aloneness, along with a renewed conviction that Rose’s choice to settle forever among these hills would never bring her or him anything like happiness.
“But still, yes, we’ll be glad we exist,” he told himself. “There will be that, though nothing more.”
Then he stopped calling out, realizing they couldn’t hear. Fat drops of water rolled off their hair and onto the floor. The boy looked thinner than he remembered, his neck stiff, still, and cold. They joylessly stared out at the hills, remote and indifferent, and with a twinge of anger Herman found himself thinking he’d often seen them visibly happier than this in Paris. He sighed and walked out. Just then the telephone rang, downstairs. Herman reflexively hurried to answer it. He recognized the principal’s voice.
“I called your hotel, you weren’t there, and they gave me this number, so…”
He must have been calling from the teachers’ lounge, because Herman heard adult voices, laughter, rustling papers, locker doors slamming shut. Here in the shoe sellers’ dark living room, amid the stout, sturdy furniture, the silence was heavy, thick with the village’s wintertime peacefulness. Herman shivered. He found it hard to speak in the same tone as before.
“You’ve been replaced, Monsieur Herman,” the principal was saying, “starting today, that’s what I have to tell you. I believe we gave you as much time as we could, I think you’ll agree, but it’s clear your relocation is now complete. That said, Monsieur Herman, you have all our sympathy, and all our understanding.”
Herman stammered, unable to come up with the words and the phrasing to be used with a superior. He found nothing in his mind but slightly over-colloquial expressions about the rain or the temperature, or “You said it,” or “Well, gotta get going,” which he used freely with Charlotte, but which were no good to him here. He decided to say nothing, punctuating the principal’s explanations with only a few noncommittal mumbles. The restless, garrulous life he could hear going on through the phone had become alien to him, almost frightening. What could he possibly have to say, here in the numbing silence of the shoe sellers’ living room?
“Well, good-bye,” he said when he sensed the principal was finished.
“Good-bye, good-bye, Monsieur Herman, good-bye…”
Now no one had any reason to call him from Paris, he thought as he hung up. He was alone, all alone. The intangible forms upstairs didn’t seem to care that he was here in the village. Deep inside, Herman was hurt that Rose hadn’t chosen a house where she could gaze at him day and night, like Alfred’s wife, that she’d opted for the view of the misty, rain-shrouded hills. It’s true that she would then have seen him in bed with Charlotte or Métilde or perhaps someone else (if that ever came to pass), but still, Herman would have felt less profoundly alone.
6 – Eventually Herman could stall Gilbert no longer. When he came to see Herman one morning and announced that the tennis match with his friend Lemaître was scheduled for that day in L., there was nothing to do but hurry to get ready and climb into the passenger seat of Gilbert’s car. Gilbert was keyed up, anxious and fidgety. He smelled strongly of cologne. Herman thought he’d even put on a touch of makeup: his pale eyes highlighted by a black line, like an actor’s, his colorless lips discreetly pinker now. He drove out of the village at an excessive speed, then raced along the little road to L., thirty kilometers away, the pavement almost invisible in the murk. Herman couldn’t see the fields or trees on either side of them. They sped through a tunnel of mist now and then pierced by the headlights of the few oncoming, strangely silent cars. Gilbert’s fervor, his odd appearance, the slightly feminine scent he’d doused himself with, all that heightened Herman’s unease, his suspicion that he was running a risk by leaving the village.
“Still, I really do have to take out some money,” he thought to convince himself this trip was necessary.
Alfred had loaned him a sweater and hunting jacket, but he felt as damp as ever. And once they’d passed by the village’s last house, Herman thought himself a man condemned. He’d never been to L., which Gilbert and Métilde inevitably described as the very antithesis of the dreary, pathetic village. But Herman couldn’t help but think that he too was a lost soul now, and lost souls never leave the place they choose or end up in. He tried to laugh all that off, to tell himself he was being stupid, but in his mounting anxiety he was starting to find it hard to breathe. Gilbert wasn’t saying a word, so Herman asked him about his friend Lemaître—and just why was it so vital that Herman partner with Gilbert in this doubles match?