Lovers on All Saints' Day

The Solitude of the Magician

I

What happened inside his pocket struck Léopold as one of the most extraordinary things he’d ever seen — the interaction of a wedding band, a key ring, and a hand’s magical gesture — and he could not think it was a mistake, as everyone insisted at the time, to have publicly questioned a magician’s skills, even just an amateur magician, a mere weekend apprentice. The magician’s face (Léopold remembered the moment when he’d heard his name, Chopin, and hadn’t been able to ask whether it was a vulgar nickname or a coincidence) emerged from a thick turtleneck, and the smooth skin under his chin wrinkled when the man nodded or worried, and also wrinkled when Léopold approached the tallest lamp with the evidence of magic in his hand and his right heel searched out the switch on the parquet floor; the light came on and Léopold’s eyes stared at that miracle, a wedding band linked onto a key ring. Selma, his wife, saw him walk toward her, take her left hand, and slip the band, a single diamond set in the gleaming surface, back onto her finger, as if marrying her again, and she couldn’t help wondering, given that her marriage still seemed new to her the way shoes you don’t wear very often still seem new for quite a while, if this would continue to happen in the future: if small acts or banal circumstances would seem to belong belatedly to the same, now long-ago liturgy.

They had been married in a Catholic ceremony in which her cream-colored, rather than white, bridal gown had caught on the armrests of the seats, because she, willful girl that she was, had insisted the service be held outdoors beside the little stone chapel on the hill that faced Hamoir, in spite of the strong kite-flying wind at that time of year, and all just because it terrified her in the middle of July to be stuck inside the humid and sinister darkness of the Cathedral of Saint Paul, in Liège, with stained-glass windows, grimy with urban grime, that allowed no light through, and a door that on weekends appeared clogged with chocolate and cream gaufre stalls and diners’ cars and the diners themselves, families of clumsy children with clumsy hands who Selma could already envisage sullying her dress’s shimmering train with sweet sticky caramel, apple, or wild blackberry sauces. So Father Malaurie, of Xhoris, used a safety pin to tame his soutane, and blessed the couple without keeping the rice-paper pages of his Bible from fluttering like a caged bird, without ever finding out that the bride was pregnant, and without knowing, of course, to what extent the pregnancy was one of the most pertinent reasons for her being there that day, holding her veil with her hand so Léopold could kiss her and turning to face the wind so her hair wouldn’t tickle the groom’s face and make him sneeze at such a solemn moment or get in her eyes. Léopold’s kiss tasted of champagne cocktail; the shoulder of his formal suit gave off a whiff of mothballs that Selma reluctantly inhaled. That night she cried a little: she would have liked her father to still be alive to give her away in matrimony. Charles, her father, dead of throat cancer before she learned to speak; her daughter — Selma was magically sure it would be a girl — was fortunate because she’d have a living father, because she wouldn’t grow up as lonely as Selma had.

The dream of having a daughter had changed Selma’s way of moving, her way of touching Léopold (with whom she’d gone to bed barely a dozen times before a bout of morning sickness had hit her in the middle of Place Saint-Lambert), and later, when they were living together in the house on Rue de Lognoul, near Ferrières, she used to get up in the middle of the night, close the bathroom door so the white light wouldn’t wake up her husband, undress in front of the mirror, and lose herself in the contemplation of her body and the changes to her body, because attending to the details of her belly in profile, through the third, fourth, fifth, sixth months, was like watching the phases of a fleshy moon, a fantastic moon with protruding navel against the sky of aquamarine tiles. Her breasts grew until it was possible, by crouching a little in certain positions, to feel her skin resting on her skin, and that sensation, extravagant and at once monstrous, excited her; and her small aureoles darkened and the skin of her nipples hardened and turned porous, two sawdust beauty spots on the pale, round fullness. It was during that time that Léopold offered to host the first hunt of the season, in part for the small honor involved in his group of hunters — men associated with the industrial cleaning company that had maintained his family since 1959—in part for the delicate pride of socially introducing his wife and unborn daughter, one inside the other, a Russian doll. The features of Selma’s face were still those that had obsessed Léopold, but the puffy cheeks, the circles under the eyes revealing a certain exhaustion, and her forced smile confounded him, and at the moment of gathering the hunters in a circle for the maître de chasse to deliver instructions and lay down the rules, the moment Léopold had planned to bring Selma into the center of the circle and say some calculatedly amusing phrase such as No shooting any juvenile boars or aiming inside the encirclement, and this, gentlemen, is my wife, at that moment, dressed in green and gray and with his rifle slung over his shoulder, Léopold only managed to point to her with his gloved hand (it was cold), and in the hush that fell over the cobblestone yard all that could be heard was the hunters’ bewildered breaths, the dogs’ claws clicking against the cobbles, and the echoes of a piano sonata that someone had left on in the living room filtering through the glass. Then the hunters left, the doors of their four-by-fours banged shut and the dogs barked, and Selma was left alone in the yard. She whistled a few bars of the Pathétique: she remembered it because she’d practiced it as a young girl and failed at it. She never managed to understand what her teacher meant when she spoke of the exposition as something that should swirl, or of the transition between the grave and the allegro as the conversion of a caterpillar into a butterfly. She never liked butterflies; they didn’t disgust her, but frightened her absurdly: everyone around her knew this, except Léopold.

When she went into the living room to warm up a little, thinking the cold must not be good for the little girl in her belly, she was surprised to find a stranger sitting in the yellow easy chair, not wearing rubber boots, or hunting gear, or a beater’s orange fluorescent jacket, but a wool sweater the collar of which seemed to be folded four times and gave the man the look of a storybook sailor, but a strange sailor, a sailor without a sailor’s beard, fond of Alfred Brendel’s piano playing and owner of an expression of cynicism or indifferent aversion that had to have been cultivated on dry land. He looked up when he saw her, the woman of the house, come in, and in a display of rudeness that seemed improbable limited his greeting to a nod of the head, not as a sign of welcome, but as if congratulating himself for doing so well what he was doing with his busy hands. And what was that, what were his hands busy with? Selma took a little while to realize that the trail of white linen the man was manipulating was in fact a deck of cards, moving with such speed and such skill, passed from one hand to the other with such dexterity, that from afar and in the gloom of the living room (it was early and no fire had been lit yet) what Selma’s eyes managed to see was just a colorless rainbow, and then, when she asked the man to do it more slowly, a succession of pink or gray squares, a blend of white background, and the alternating tones of the figures. It was eight-thirty in the morning; when Léopold came back, just after twelve, he found that his wife had arranged one of the kitchen chairs in front of the corner table from the trophy room and moved Léopold’s cast-iron ashtray, Léopold’s bifocals, and the Genevoix book that Léopold was reading so that this Chopin, whom he’d invited simply out of courtesy — since word of the Saturday get-together had gotten out around the office — could not just refuse to go hunting and in passing suggest contempt for the tradition, but also devote himself during the absence of the rest to impressing the hostess with the cheap tricks of an alcoholic gambler or a fairground clown.

Selma, excited and wide-eyed, asked Chopin to repeat two or three of the tricks that had filled the morning’s boredom (for him; for her, he’d made time and the heaviness of her belly and the cold and the gray sky of the Ardennes all disappear); he put the deck faceup on the table and asked the youngest beater to think of a card and he turned the deck over and moved the cards from one hand to the other, shuffled twice, put the deck back down on the table, cut the cards, and asked the beater to say what card he’d thought of at the same time as he turned over the top card of the deck. Seven of clubs, said the young man as he picked up the seven of clubs. There was a murmur of voices. Léopold walked across the parquet floor clicking the heels of his waterproof boots and asked if the magician could do something truly bold. Chopin rolled his eyes, perhaps because the same thing had happened to him before and the situation made him uncomfortable; he cut the cards again and asked Léopold to turn over the top card: it was the king of spades, a figure posing in profile with his eye wide open, looking at Léopold with a mocking grimace on his face. Chopin asked the beater to look at his card again: the seven of clubs had turned into the queen of spades and a few people timidly applauded. Then Léopold dared him (maybe he would later wish he hadn’t); his voice tried to intimidate, required a real trick, demanded they be impressed.

The magician did not refuse. He asked Selma to take off her wedding ring, and she obeyed; he asked Léopold to show everyone his key chain, a copper stag’s head from whose right antler dangled a double metal hoop and the key to his jeep (which flashed when someone lit a match); he walked over to Léopold and, one at a time, dropped both objects into his green corduroy pocket, and then went to stand like a caryatid on the opposite side of the room. From his corner, in front of a bucolic landscape painted in oils by Selma’s late father, beneath the head of the first boar Léopold had ever shot — it was in Modave, in 1973, six days before the first snowfall — Chopin pressed his palms together at waist height, said a couple of magic words that sounded atavistic and sardonic at the same time, and his right hand turned over in the air like a dead salamander on the pavement. Léopold felt for the key ring in his pocket: he moved his hand anxiously, almost in fear, among the coins and bullets that fell to the floor when he yanked the copper stag out and showed everyone the tiny frightening miracle: linked on the aluminum hoop, like one more key, was Selma’s ring. The guests began to leave. The table was not even set for lunch.

II

Only later, when the accident that was seeded that morning had already taken up its time and its space, when Selma and Chopin had passed through desire and love and shipwreck, would Selma recognize the nature of solitude in the magician’s hands. Chopin’s hands, small but capable of palming a card — an ace, a queen: yes, especially a hidden queen — lost Selma. The tip of each thumb was covered by a thin, almost invisible callus; on his right hand, another callus bent the first phalange of his middle finger, made it lean slightly out, an elegant hump. Selma would fall in love with his rough fingers, his concealing palms, his wrists so thin that the glass face of watches slipped around to the underside and forced Chopin to look at the time as ladies once did. That very night she asked a couple of questions about Chopin: where was he from — he was from Liège — what was his position in the business — a mere assistant to the underwriter, his office didn’t even have a window. This pair of details served to sate her curiosity, but most of all they were useful because she felt that Chopin’s name was a raspberry seed stuck in her teeth, something pleasant and annoying at the same time, and talking about him at night, casually from the bathroom, while rubbing stretch-mark-prevention cream into her thighs and buttocks and the moon of rosy skin, was to spit out the seed and sleep in peace. Meanwhile, Léopold reproached her for getting into bed before the cream had dried. It was incredible that she could sleep in sticky, smeared sheets that smelled of laboratory algae.

On Monday, Selma woke up sure that something was burning. While her husband went down to the kitchen to make sure everything was in order, Selma exchanged the intense smell for a ball of nausea the size of a horse’s eye, stuck in some part of her trachea that would give no respite. She spent the morning throwing up, the horse’s eye refused the most innocent glass of warm milk with honey as she’d always liked it, until her vomit came out yellow and translucent and the heaving finally stopped. For two days it was impossible to stand up without the carpet at the end of the bed beginning to wrinkle and the waves threatening to throw her to the ground if she dared to take a step across it. When the dizziness passed, Selma decided what she needed was air and trees, so on Thursday morning, wrapped in a cotton housecoat over her flannel nightdress and all that covered by a red windbreaker that she hadn’t been able to do up over her belly for quite a while, she was giving Heredero the horse his first meal of the day (she was unable to bend over even a little, and had to pour the concentrate from on high as if it were water for the plants), when she heard her husband coming back. He must have forgotten something; he would have realized as he reached the turning onto the highway. Angry with himself, he would have turned around at the traffic lights, on the blind curve that descended toward the valley, swearing and speeding up more than was prudent at such a dangerous point in the Ardennes route. His routine was so rigid that it struck Selma as laughable, so ridiculous to watch him change gears as he pulled onto the highway, first, second, between second and third he would locate the foil package beside the hand brake, between third and fourth, unfold the wrapping and find the Gouda sandwich still steaming; this was his breakfast every day, weekends included, and before getting to Liège he would already have finished it, folded the tinfoil evenly, placed it on the dashboard, covering the speedometer, and he would use it again the next day, and the next, and sometimes for five days in a row. The first time Selma witnessed the routine, Léopold explained it came from his father, a man who’d lived through the war and poverty and after whose death they found fifty cans of preserves, mushrooms, peaches in syrup, plain and pickled herring, forgotten in the back of the cupboard, camouflaged by boxes of contracts and policies and testamentary minutes, which his father had accumulated in case of another war, another German attack. Selma remembered all this as she heard him walking (a careless way of stepping in leather-soled shoes on gravel), breathing as if he were smoking (but the cold air didn’t transmit smells very well, or was it that she was monopolized by Heredero’s breath), saying hello with a different voice. The fright was momentary but intense: Selma crossed her arms over her inflamed body, protecting her pregnancy. Standing before her, wearing a business suit but no tie — two shirt buttons undone, a hairless chest, the shiny diagonal of a small gold chain — was Chopin. On his face, which was not that of a sailor, was the expression of someone kneeling down before a child to disinfect a graze.

Almost instantly her hands flew to her cheeks and touched her nose, numbed by the cold, and her nose was still in its place, and the same bits of skin on her chapped lips. (Perhaps to confirm that her body still existed, that machine able to feel desire.) Selma went into the stable and turned over the hay at the back, reached inside her jacket, and took out a small white paper rectangle, which she opened with her teeth and emptied onto her glove, held her glove up to Heredero’s lips, and wished the horse’s tongue would erase her from the world as it erased the sugar from her glove. Nothing happened: nothing wanted to save her. Then Selma must have accepted it, because she began to cross the gravel path (her heavy ankles, thighs full of water, hips asleep under the weight of the baby) and went inside her house through the kitchen and double-locked the door, climbed the carpeted stairs, and only as she reached the last step did she notice the magician’s hand was in her hand, not accompanying her, but holding up the unpredictable and oscillating mass of her figure. And at the end of a long gallery of doors, dark because all the rooms were closed so the warm air wouldn’t escape, at the end of this strange domestic tunnel in which Selma remembered the trick of the deck expelled from the hand and the chosen card landing in a brandy glass, at the end of the corridor, their passive, concealing accomplice, was the master bedroom that Selma walked into and the matrimonial bed, unmade and still smelling of matrimonial sleep, on which Selma lay down, on her side in the fetal position, perhaps imitating the one she carried inside her. She was already naked when she did so; the naked man came to her from behind, and she discovered almost in a panic that she didn’t know what to do with her own arms, perhaps because in this position she’d always put them where her belly now was. Selma felt the heat of another waist against her back, the pubic hair that tickled her buttocks, and felt him penetrate her at the same time she saw the magic hand come over the moon of skin and caress her full breasts, and his index finger, able to shuffle at a vertiginous speed and to feel a card of a fractionally different size in the deck of a cheating magician, played with her protruding belly button. Then the hand clung to the headboard, the magician’s open mouth fell onto Selma’s shoulder, and she, if she concentrated a little, could feel a thin stream of saliva trickling down her back that might even reach the pillowcase, which she’d have to wash and hang over the bathroom radiators to dry before Léopold came home from work for lunch and afterward felt he’d earned a nap.

III

Very little was known about that man and his reasons for taking a shine to Selma. Years earlier, when he decided to get a degree in Romance languages at the University of Liège, sure that the study of Latin declensions (those miniature spells) would save him from tedium, the professors who interviewed him wanted Chopin to tell them about his childhood, and he summed it up saying he was born in the Esneux hospital and at the age of twelve he’d first managed to throw a card more than thirty meters in an open space, the Quai de Jemmapes, for example, as long as a seagull didn’t take it thinking it was food. Between his birth and the flying card it was as if he hadn’t existed, he avoided the subject, his face emptied of all presence, and he became mute if someone insisted. He could not bear questions about his parents or when he’d stopped living with them or the way they’d injured him or the qualities, more or less physical, of those injuries, and on the stairways of the main university building, on those worn steps like those of the neon-lit medieval constructions of the amphitheater, he crossed paths with people who mentioned his name and pointed him out and were still talking about him several steps farther down, not the way people talk about a celebrity or a sports star, but expressing surprise, vague admiration, and much pity. Some said that he’d inherited a small fortune, that he lived alone at number 53 Rue de la Loi, and that as a child he’d been an altar boy; others attributed daily visits to Maastricht, the nearest Dutch city on the other side of the border, to buy marijuana where marijuana was legal and cheap, and where he had once put up with threats from a couple of frustrated buyers who refused to understand why Chopin didn’t want to sell, especially not to them, a small bag, and who ended up punching him in the stomach. (Before that, the only time anyone hit him outside his home was the afternoon when he guessed, over and over again for more than half an hour, which shell the marble was under on the cardboard table.) When these rumors reached his ears, Chopin slipped into the university projection room and, without turning on any lights, lay down on the floor, between two rows of folding chairs, and lowered the seat board over his head, so the world at that moment became black, blacker than natural black, but also so that over him, near his face, was a surface his breath would bounce off and he could smell it, feel it, breathe it back in again. That made him feel less cold — the smooth brick floor always seemed to be damp — and less afraid, or at least he summoned up the hope, never fulfilled, that later he would go out into a luminous and lived-in world and the simple contrast would determine, by a sort of sorcery, that the other students would forget his existence, or in the worst case would confuse it with one of their own.

Reality (but what reality, if what seemed real to the rest of them was variable and horribly uncertain to him) had undoubtedly played a dirty trick on him. He had never pinpointed exactly how old he’d been when he found, stuck in a train ashtray between Liège and Brussels, a plastic box that his father told him not to touch, saying it was filthy with cigarette butts and slime and maybe bits of rotten food, and which Chopin imagined full of glass marbles or little nails, things that had always helped him pass the time agreeably. The two of them were traveling alone and his father was distracted; with luck he’d forget about the dirty box in the ashtray as soon as the conductor came by to check their tickets — which his father tucked into his shirt cuff so he wouldn’t have to go through all his pockets looking for them, mumbling excuses and poking around with nervous hands while the blood invaded the skin between his eyes and beard. But before getting off at Guillemins station, his father picked up the edge of the box with the tips of his immaculate fingers and handed it to the conductor, who looked at it, opened it, and put the transparent lid under the black box and laughed crudely, because inside the box there were no nails or glass marbles but photographs of women (they weren’t just photographs, they were something more; but Chopin could not recognize that yet). His father took him by the forearm and they walked together along the platform and down the stairs and through the frenetic tunnel out to the street, the large hand closed around the wool sleeve of his coat, his fingertips scraping the buttons of the cuff as if they were guitar strings. Something happened at that moment, the intuition of a loss: Chopin wriggled out of his father’s grip and ran back down the corridor. As he ran up the stairs, his eyes fixed on the sharp edge of each step, he bumped into the man he was looking for, who earned his eternal gratitude and unconditional loyalty by winking at him and sliding into the collar of his sweater the cold rectangle that promised all the excitement in the world and wouldn’t just enable him to put up with his father’s shouts and the pressure on his sleeve, renewed and more painful than ever, but also provoked true convulsions of emotion when he could at last lock himself in his room, kneel on his bed, untuck his shirt from his trousers to let the new object fall blandly onto one of the red diamonds of his quilt, and it turned out that those diamonds, exquisitely symmetrical and intensely red, were exactly the same as those behind some of the photos, or was it perhaps that the photos were behind the diamonds, not all of them, fortunately. Twenty days later, Chopin had learned how to shuffle; four months would go by before he exchanged his deck for one not adorned with indecent images.

What he did not tell the interviewers, what he never told any other human being, he recounted in detail to the woman he was to save, the woman who was described or prefigured in every movement of his life: his decision not to go to Louvain but to stay in Liège, the idea of putting his name on the municipal youth employment register, accepting the first offer he received after doing so, from an industrial cleaning company. Could anyone think his meeting with the woman feeding horses was not written? Was it possible, if not for the intervention of the good offices of a higher destiny, that a socially inept man like him, with mediocre aspirations and hardly any talent for life, might be allowed to enter the life of such a creature, not to mention be loved by her, touched by her? If anyone had ever told him that one day he would know this kind of lightness in his own body (a cold wind inside his head, behind his eyes), this momentary oblivion of the leaden mass of skull on neck, he would have refused to believe it. That was denied him, had to be denied him; if not, why had he so feared that he would never find her, why had he cried in the mornings, while the kettle boiled, and why had he enjoyed punishing himself by placing the childish whimpering of his eyelids in the path of the steam when he opened the teapot? This woman had arrived so that would no longer happen. He knew it from the first time he heard her speak — it was a question about the cards, but he had never thought the cards and their movements could interest anyone — because her voice was nothing like his mother’s and yet also seemed to have been speaking to him in secret or by stealth since he was a boy. That night, returning to Liège in his van, twice he thought he saw her driving the cars that overtook him, thought he saw her long, black hair like a Bedouin’s djellaba, saw on a finger of the hands on the steering wheel of each car a ring identical to the one he’d used to perform in public the oldest trick in the world. And the next morning, while reading in bed after breakfast the last pages of David Copperfield, he realized that Mrs. Micawber was no longer gray-haired and fifty, but appeared suddenly young again, carrying a riding whip all the time and keeping her throat wrapped up in a scarf with two embroidered stirrups. The exchange was like an order: Chopin knew that he had to go and see her. Distracted by the emotion of the image, he put the book down on top of the plate stained with egg yolk and began to practice in front of the mirror, as the only way to kill time, the way to make a queen of hearts be replaced by the king in spite of the entire deck separating them. It was a trick he’d been practicing for thirteen days and which would spring to mind a few months later, at the very moment of the accident, as if it were also written that he’d never iron out the final details and that Selma would never be allowed to see it executed perfectly. But he knew none of this that morning, nor the following Thursday, when he went home after making love for the first time with a real woman (so real that she was expecting another man’s child), a woman he would protect forever, a woman different from those prostitutes on Rue des Guillemins he’d unburdened himself with before and who now, according to a decision by the municipality of Liège, had begun to pose in illuminated display windows instead of putting on their coats and strolling around the neighborhood, so the puritanical or timid pedestrian who passed by without looking at them, the hand shielding the eyes like a horse’s blinders, was forced to step on these suggestive shadows: a torso and a pair of shoulders and the line of a garter belt projected onto the paving stones of the sidewalk, or in the case of a woman as tall as Selma, as far as the curb.

IV

Caroline meant strong and brave, and was also the feminine version of Charles, Selma’s father’s name; and for a combination of both reasons she insisted on this name, in spite of its vaguely Germanic sounds not being much to her husband’s taste. The baby girl was born near the beginning of February, on the tenth, which that year fell on a Sunday and immediately after a heavy snowfall. On the way home, Selma tilted her seat back until all she could see were the electricity cables (at first), the crowns of the oak trees (later), and the woven new wool that was the winter sky (always), and she was grateful that her eyelids closed on their own from the exhaustion of giving birth in spite of three whole days of doing nothing but sleeping and swallowing salted biscuits, a total of four bottles of milk with honey, and all the green apples from the fruit baskets that kept arriving in the room, with bows and cards, while her little girl recovered in a glass case, not crying very much according to the nurse — who did like the name because it was also that of the princess of Monaco — crying nonstop according to that nervous husband who paced back and forth in front of the cribs like a hungry vulture. When she was little, Selma had played a game of lying down on the backseat of her parents’ old Studebaker and guessing, from glimpses of treetops or chimney features, which part of the journey they were on, how much longer until they’d be home. This time, however, her fingers were moving, counting: a closed fist and her fingers coming up in turn, one, two, three, because Selma was trying to figure out how long it had been since she’d seen Chopin, how many days it would be prudent to let pass before going to find him. Something palpitated in her womb, and between her legs was a disarray of muscles, a sort of phantom contraction, like the way soldiers (her husband had told her) felt pain in a leg after it had been amputated. But it must be an effect of the delivery, not desire, never of headstrong desire.

Since that autumnal Thursday that Selma had received the magician and taken him to bed, until the day her contractions started, she and Chopin had met every Saturday at nine in the morning, taking advantage of the hunting season and the invitations Léopold received (to Modave, to somewhere near Spa, some farther afield, almost to the French border) to go and kill boars or small deer that would sometimes be cooked in the host’s kitchen and served at his house the same night, events Selma would attend with good spirits and better appetite, letting her husband make her comfortable in a nice wicker chair, put his hand on her hair as if she were a sick child, and bring her plates of food and glasses of lemonade, without her having to move even to clean off a little cherry sauce she’d dripped onto her dress. They had decided, as coldly as if it were a judicial concession or a signature on a mortgage, that Chopin would continue coming to see her, he would be the one to drive the twenty minutes (a bit less on empty Saturday roads) from Liège to Ferrières, because the full moon of flesh and skin prevented Selma from getting into a driver’s seat without her belly button coming into contact with the padded steering wheel. So it was the magician, whose supernatural sense of time enabled him to do without watches without ever being late, who arrived at the house in the Ardennes when barely forty minutes had passed since Léopold’s departure, parked on the other side of the road — in front of the abandoned caravan where a family of Albanian gypsies had lived for a few months — came through the gate looking straight at the dry rectangle left on the gravel, the white space the husband’s four-by-four had occupied during the rainy night, and entered the house through the French doors of the kitchen, which Selma unlocked when she came down, just after dawn to put the coffee on the stove. The smell of fresh coffee in the air worked as a secret code on Chopin and at the same time as an arousing drug, and so he climbed the stairs, hands in his pockets (a key ring, a deck of cards), his gaze fixed on the last step like that of a missing person returning, but without hunger or shock, simply wanting to slip into a warm bed and feel protected. Selma, for her part, knew that she had time for a shower after seeing Léopold off, but instead of taking one she undressed under the covers, opened her legs as if she were already in labor, and began to touch herself, her fingers barely caressing her pubic hair and then her inflamed vulva, fondling with fascination all the changes in her vagina. Chopin rapped twice on the door frame before going into the bedroom and immediately hung his jacket on the doorknob, and when he got into bed with Selma he had a curious impression of the fluidity of his body, as if the lover didn’t even have to lift the bedclothes to find himself beside her, nuzzling her underarm with his head like a newly hatched baby bird and searching out her lips, the earthen rings of her nipples. Unlike Léopold, he did not fall asleep after ejaculating inside her with his mouth open on her back, salivating, his hips shaking; instead he lay on his side, his head resting on his right hand, and looked at her, but in his gaze there was no realization but a sort of diaphanous blank, as if the orgasm had emptied him also of the ability to identify where he was, the name of the woman whose bed he was sharing. After sex, she filled her bathtub with hot water and delighted in entering that rudimentary void; it was a pleasure to lose the sensation of weight, feel light although round as a bottle, free of the unfriendly gravity that made her ankles ache all day long. Then she called Chopin and asked him to sit on the lid of the toilet and explain how he did one of his tricks, and thus, floating in bathwater up to her neck, breathing in the steam and the delicate scent of the oatmeal soap, facing a magician doing what magicians never do (facing a telltale magician, a traitor to his breed), she felt full and contented, thought there would never be any reason to modify this routine.

Selma and Chopin were able to see each other again on March 28, one month and two weeks after she came back from the hospital to her house in the Ardennes, the time she considered sufficient for the small incision to scar over — the obstetrician had prescribed three months but was undoubtedly taking extra care. Léopold had stopped hunting during that time, and took such zealous care of his wife, and such stoic care of his newborn daughter (he got up at four in the morning and went out into the murderous cold to feed the dog, Sido, distract him, and thus postpone his barking), that Selma was occasionally tinged with guilt and almost pity. To what point did that innocent man know that his consideration was at the same time vigilance, that the care he was lavishing on her was most of all taking care of himself. Selma thought of this on the Friday when, after lying to Léopold about some yellow flowers that she needed to buy in the Place de la Cathédrale (not to be the last to celebrate spring), she dropped him off at his office in Mont-Saint-Martin and crossed Liège heading for Guillemins station, driving slowly because the thaw had made the streets slippery. The hoteliers’ lack of imagination struck her as incredible, squandering the opportunity to baptize their businesses with bold or attractive names — were they not, after all, places where bold men and attractive women went to make love? — and preferring to make use of the neighborhood or a cliché, and so a hotel on the banks of the Oise was called Hôtel de l’Oise, and one on the other side of the river was called Hôtel Simenon, in spite of the fact that the writer had never set foot in its premises, and had even died before its construction. And so the Hôtel Guillemins took its name from the nearby station, so nearby that the room rate doubled if the windows did not overlook the incessant rattling and jolting of the trains; but Selma didn’t know if the station was named after the prostitutes’ street, or the prostitutes’ street after the station. She wanted to ask Chopin, but when she found him beside the counter, amusing himself with a telephone book — seeing how many surnames he could memorize before she arrived — all her mouth would do was fall open into a kiss, and the novelty of Chopin’s hands closing around her waist and spanning it made her laugh out loud and also made the blood rush up to her cheeks, because she recognized that she’d become indispensable to the man, or at least had been continuously imagined by him during all that time, and the other novelty, the one she’d foreseen in silence, gave her shivers, because once upstairs, after being almost pushed by those avid hands up against the bathroom wall (the neon lights came on and went out and the lovers laughed), after those hands, as nimble and precise as those of a surgeon, showed so much evidence of clumsiness in undressing her and even popped a mother-of-pearl button off the red blouse she’d chosen so carefully, after all that, then, lying down faceup with legs open to the sweaty body and erect member assailing her, showing herself to Chopin as she’d never done before that instant, was something both as shameful and as wild as losing her virginity all over again, and the space between her breasts that smelled of milk and perfume filled with color and her eyes opened and her stretched belly felt contact with the other skin, and Selma knew she’d never forget the way the cold light from the street was changing on this new belly, on these hips widened by the effort of the delivery, on the bright white stretch marks like slimy trails of a cemetery snail.

After the sex, Selma stared at herself perplexed. The light coming in the window had lowered as if the cheap blind were a workman’s ladder, and the long, horizontal shadows in the room made her feel even more changed and she wondered when the transformation had actually taken place, where the other half of her life was, because Chopin, now getting dressed on the other side of the bed (his back to her, the hem of his shirt barely revealing his skinny buttocks), suddenly seemed like a place where she could lose herself, the man who had deflowered her and demanded to possess her. For the first time, she had seen his face as he penetrated her, his mouth seeking her nipples, which in the semidarkness looked violet, and that image was the one that threatened to colonize her imagination until all that happened again. That’s what she was thinking as she went through the terrible steps that would return her to the real world; however, she did not know, could not know, what was going on inside the magician’s head, because Chopin still remained, in spite of everything, as inscrutable as the day he made her wedding band end up on her husband’s key ring. And so she was not surprised, as they descended the dark stairs and saw the blurry silhouette of a man framed in the etched glass, when her lover identified him immediately, certain that they were facing Léopold and how futile and perhaps childish it would be to turn around — go back to the room, hide in a closet, slip out the fire escape. What shook her first was a shudder of loss, or anticipation of loss, as looking at Léopold’s face she already had her daughter’s image in her mind, and knew that she could renounce the magician but not her little girl’s chance to grow up in the company of her father.

Léopold greeted Chopin with a handshake that seemed anachronistic and rather affected, something like a slap with a white glove or a message sent through seconds, and asked Selma only where she had parked the jeep and if she minded them, the three of them, discussing this matter at home, so no one would bother them, and so they, the three of them, could make the appropriate decisions, with cool heads, serenely and dispassionately. Selma, of course, could not know how mistaken she was in accepting with that kind of inertia that dragged her (since she was the one who knew where the vehicle was and who had the keys in her bag) to the driver’s seat, from which she could but did not want to look at Chopin, sitting in the backseat, and wanted to but could not look at Léopold, that cruel passenger whose eyes scrutinized her, finding and itemizing the infinite signs of adultery, the flushed blotches at her neck and on her lips, hair messed up at the nape of her neck, the veins on the back of her hand slightly welled up (and on her hand the gleaming ring, silent as a spy). By the time they left Liège it was completely dark, and the amber lights from the dashboard made Selma feel a feverish heat in her hands. On the highway, Chopin disappeared from the rearview mirror; the black waters in the frame were broken only by the headlights of the cars following them. Later Selma would try to recall that instant in general, and in particular what had happened in the backseat of the car she was driving, because it was that brief distraction (the eyes watching the road strayed from it for a moment to find those of her lover) which caused the accident. Leaving the highway, at the exact point where Léopold began to eat his cheese sandwich every morning, something moved under the wheels the way the floor used to move when Selma was pregnant. She slammed on the brakes, honked the horn, but the car kept sliding forward on the frozen drizzle and crashed into the brick wall of a pharmacy. Léopold’s head smashed through the windshield: he must have died instantly. In Chopin’s head something very different happened.

He saw a queen and a king at opposite ends of a deck of cards. He saw the space a wedding band needed to cross to link onto a key ring. He saw his teacher, Jacques Lambert, put a redheaded woman inside a black box and then turn her into a Bengal tiger. He saw an American magician put, in place of the Statue of Liberty, a void of illuminated fog. His hands moved in response to this sketch of replacements, to order the world he’d disordered, exchanged a live body for a dead one, lifted by the armpits a man whose head was broken and put him in the place of the woman who’d been driving. And only when he’d carried out the swap and knew that Selma was safe, that she wouldn’t have to take responsibility for the accident, that no judge could saddle her with negligence or guilt or involuntary manslaughter, Chopin collapsed in his seat with the sensation of having done what was expected of him for the first time in his life. He didn’t know if he lost consciousness, because he confused the imaginary audience’s applause with hurried steps on the asphalt, and only after waking up did he understand that the shouts of enthusiasm, at his magisterial sleight of hand, were not shouts but Selma crying and screaming and tearing at the painful air.

V

Those who went to the burial at the Aywaille cemetery saw him accepting responsibilities not his to assume. Chopin attended those who wished to say farewell to Léopold and even allowed some to go up to see his widow, who was quietly breaking down in an eddy of bedclothes (tears sprang from her open eyes as if from a mechanical doll) and had brought her daughter’s cradle to the side of the bed so she would not stop rocking her for an instant (in the silent icy room, her arm was the only movement). For those present, Chopin was still an employee of the company transformed, by virtue of solidarity or sympathy, into a friend of the family; it was later they learned of his secret life, of the affair, of his role in the accident. By the time the details came to light the lovers had separated, their lives had gone in different directions, one without the other: he to Namur, as an assistant in a whole-food shop and restaurant, and she embedded in her Ferrières house, where she still wakes up in the middle of the night to see her husband standing at the foot of the bed or starting down the stairs as if it’s time to get up and put the coffee on. After a few months, when Chopin visited her with the intention of recovering something, of reliving the confusing emotions that had brought him so close to happiness, she received him out of courtesy and spoke of the father, not of the lover, for the length of time it took to empty a teapot. On her lap, or on the blanket as thick as a poncho that covered her from the waist almost to her parallel feet, was a notebook with iridescent covers and a pencil sharpened with a utility blade and tied to the chair with a leather cord. Without lifting the book, Selma told him that she’d started to write down anecdotes about Léopold — his cheese sandwich, what he said before going out hunting — because she, who had grown up without a father, wished her mother had thought of doing this. It was obvious, from the crossed-out lines and an arrow that ran right over the seam of the book from one page to the other, that her ideas weren’t clear, that the memory of her dead husband was already escaping her; but to Chopin, who was beginning to glimpse the undeserved sentence of solitude, this interested him less than the detail of the hanging pencil, a leather pendulum. When he asked her about it, Selma explained that the cord allowed her to find the pencil easily, without wasting time or having to call anybody, when the spasms of fatigue paralyzed the muscles in her hand and forced her to drop it. The hand is a beautiful apparatus, she said then, but still so far from perfect, and pencils are alive and reluctant and sometimes unkind creatures: one tends to drop them, by accident or out of clumsiness or exhaustion, and they can roll for whole kilometers.