Little Jewel

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I GOT OFF the metro at Porte Maillot and followed the path that runs along the Jardin d’Acclimatation. It was cold but the sun was shining, and the sky was cloudless and blue, as it is perhaps in Morocco. All the shutters on the windows in the Valadier house were closed. Just as I was about to ring the doorbell, I noticed a letter stuck under the door. I picked it up. It was the letter I had sent on Wednesday, from the post office on Place des Abbesses. I rang the bell. No one answered.

I waited a while, sitting on the doorstep. The sun was blinding. I stood up and rang again. Then I told myself that it wasn’t worth waiting any longer. They had left. The wax seals had probably been fastened to the doors. When I was there last, I had a hunch that would happen.

I held the letter in my hand. And I felt the vertigo coming back. It had been with me since I was young, since Fossombronne, when I used to try to cross the bridge. The first time, I ran; the second time, I walked fast; the third time, I made myself walk as slowly as possible to the middle. And now, once again, I had to try to walk slowly, away from the edge, saying comforting words to myself, over and over. Bar-sur-Aube. The pharmacist. There’s a forest near the house where we can go for some lovely walks. I was walking down the path that runs along the Jardin d’Acclimatation; I was heading away from the house with the closed shutters. The feeling of vertigo was getting stronger and stronger. It was all because of the letter that had been stuck under the door for nothing and that no one would ever open. And yet I had sent it from the post office on Place des Abbesses, a post office like any other, in Paris, in France. The letters sent to me from Morocco must have stayed unopened like this one. A wrong address on the envelope, or a small spelling mistake, that’s all it would have taken for them to go astray, one after the other, and end up in some unknown post office. Unless they’d been sent back to Morocco, but even then there was already no one there anymore. They’d gone missing, like the dog.

When I got out of the metro, the sun was still shining, the blue Moroccan sky. I went to the Monoprix in Rue Fontaine and bought a bottle of mineral water and a block of hazelnut milk chocolate. I crossed Place Blanche and took the shortcut down Rue Puget.

Back in my room, I sat on the edge of the bed, facing the window. I put the bottle of mineral water on the ground and the block of chocolate on the bed. I opened one of the bottles the pharmacist had given me and poured some of the pills into the palm of my hand. Little white pills. I put them in my mouth and swallowed them, along with a mouthful straight out of the bottle. Then I munched on a piece of chocolate. And repeated the procedure a few times. They went down better with the chocolate.

At first, I had no idea where I was. White walls and an electric light. I was lying on a bed that was not my bed from Rue Coustou. There was no pillow. My head was flat on the sheet. A nurse, a brunette, brought me some yoghurt. She placed it a little way back, behind my head, on the sheet. She stood there, watching me. I said to her, ‘I can’t reach it.’ She said, ‘Give it a go. You need to make an effort.’ She left. I burst into tears.

I was in a big glass cage. I looked around. There were aquariums in other glass cages. The pharmacist must have brought me here. We had arranged to meet at six o’clock in the evening to leave for Bar-sur-Aube. Inside the aquariums, I thought I could see shadows moving: fish, perhaps. I heard the noise of waterfalls, getting louder and louder. I had been trapped in icefields a long time ago, and now there was the gushing sound of them melting. I wondered what the shadows in the aquariums could possibly be. They told me later that there had been no more room, so they put me in the ward for premature babies. For a long time to come, I heard the noise of waterfalls, a sign that for me, too, from that day on, life was beginning.