The Heart

14

Juliette is in her room. From the window, if she angles herself slightly sideways and stands on tiptoes, she can see the roof of Simon’s building. The first time Simon came here, into her girlish lair, he stared out the window and then suddenly turned back to face her: We can see each other, you know, and he had spent a long time guiding her until she spotted it, among the marquetry of gray surfaces that stretched out below, a zinc-colored patch scattered with chimneys where some seagulls were perched: Down there … Her gaze rests there softly.

* * *

They argued last night. They lay there on their sides, face-to-face, naked, holding each other tight under the warm comforter. They had just made love, and they continued tenderly caressing each other, and talking in the dark — strangely voluble, their words always more limpid in moments like that — then the sound of a text arriving had pierced the calm, and the echo of the sonar didn’t make her laugh that time; she saw it as a hostile intrusion — the surf session agreed, 6 am outside your place. She hadn’t needed to wait for him to read the message to know what it was about, and to understand that he had been waiting for this signal since the beginning of the evening. Something snapped inside her then: she jumped out of bed and got dressed, tight-lipped, panties, T-shirt, what’s the matter? he asked, sitting up and leaning on an elbow, frowning — but he knew what the matter was. Don’t pretend you don’t know, she should have said, instead of just muttering nothing, nothing, nothing’s the matter, her face concealing the bitterness she felt. Then he’d gotten dressed too and followed her to the kitchen, where it all degenerated.

* * *

Today, in the silence of the empty apartment, leaning over the three-dimensional labyrinth she has just begun making in a Plexiglas case, she thinks about it again, about what made her take on that pathetic role — of the woman who stays home while the man goes out to enjoy the world; this conjugal pose, this adult thing, this thing that old people do, when she is just eighteen — and about what made her lose control to the point where she was insisting, by turns loving and violent, stay, stay with me, speaking in a way that was foreign to her, like an actress playing a fragile, passionate character, a cliché, reminding him that she would be alone this weekend, her parents weren’t coming back till Sunday night so they could be together all that time, but Simon had dug his heels in: That’s surfing, that’s just how it is, it’s always a last-minute thing, he was also playing a role, playing the man, and they had festered, barefoot on the tiles, hard-eyed and mottle-skinned; he had tried to hug her, an urge, his hands touching her slender waist under the tank top, touching her slightly jutting hip bones, but she had pushed him away, roughly, don’t bother, go ahead, I won’t make you stay, and he had left, okay, I’ll go, had even slammed the door after telling her, on his way out, I’ll call you tomorrow, after blowing her a kiss from the doorway.

* * *

She has been steadily building her labyrinth since returning to school after the Christmas break. Students in the Art Section have to present a personal project at the end of the year. She had begun by building the Plexiglas cube — three feet by three feet by three feet, with two of the faces not being enclosed until the end — after spending a long time studying different material samples, and now she is building the interior. Diagrams in different scales are pinned to the wall above her desk; she looks at them, moving closer to the wall, then she places a sheet of white foam board on the worktable and prepares the pencils, two metal rulers, the clean erasers, a pencil sharpener and a hot glue gun. She goes to the bathroom to wash her hands before putting on transparent plastic gloves, given to her by the local hairdresser — they had been on the colorist’s cart, under the trays of dye, between the hair curlers, the multicolored clips, and the little sponges.

She begins, making a notch in the white board and cutting it with a utility knife with different-shaped blades that she notes down afterward, following the template she traced with exacting precision, and which is supposed, when the model is finished, to show this rhizomic star-shaped branching, this complex interlacing where each path will cross another, where there will be no entrance or exit or center, just an infinity of routes, connections, junctions, vanishing points, and perspectives. She is so absorbed in her work that she ends up perceiving a faint buzz, as if the silence were vibrating, saturated, and forming a protective bubble around her, situated now at the center of the world. She likes drawing, folding, cutting, gluing, sewing, designing, has always liked it; her mother and father often remember the little building projects she used to do, even before she could read, the bits of paper she used to tear up and assemble all day long, those mosaics stitched together with thick wool threads, those puzzles, those increasingly sophisticated mobiles she would balance with modeling clay. What a creative child she was, always so passionate and painstaking, an extraordinary little girl.

The first time she showed the transparent case to Simon, explaining her project to him, he had looked baffled and asked: Is it a map of the brain? She had looked at him in surprise, then, speaking quickly, self-assured, had replied: In a way, yeah, that’s what it is, it’s full of memories, coincidences, questions, it’s a random space where things come together. She didn’t know how to explain what the experience meant to her, how each time she worked on it she would feel herself coming unstuck and carried far, far away, far at least from her hands which kept moving under her eyes, her thoughts escaping ever further as the strips of board piled up on the table, then took their place inside the case, glued to the structure with a repetitive gesture — the pressure of her index finger on the glue-gun trigger applying exactly the right quantity of that hot, white substance with its smell that got her slightly high — drifting slowly toward the entrance of the labyrinth, in a mental haze where extremely precise memories mixed with spirals of desire and daydreaming, coming back always to Simon at the end of the trajectory, tracing the lines of his tattoo, the points and subtle curls in green ink, inevitably bringing his image back to her mind, because she was in love.

* * *

The hours pass in Juliette’s room and, little by little, the white labyrinth opens up a passage to that day in September, that first day, the material of the air gradually structuring itself so that, at last, they are walking together, side by side, as if invisible particles were joining together around them under the influence of a sudden acceleration, their bodies having signaled to each other as soon as she walked through the open school gates in that ancient, voiceless language of desire. And so, letting her friends go on ahead of her, she had slowed down until she was alone on the sidewalk with Simon, who had sensed her in the rearview mirror of his mind, standing on his bicycle, right foot on the left pedal, then sliding to the ground so he could escort her, pushing his bike with one hand on the handlebars — all this to talk to her, all this so they can talk to each other. Do you live far? I live up there, what about you? Really close, just around that corner. The light is insanely clear after the storm and the sidewalk is scattered with yellow leaves, torn from the trees by the rain. Simon risks a sideways glance: Juliette’s skin is very close, finely grained beneath the blush she wears, her skin is alive, her hair is alive, her mouth is alive and so is her earlobe, pierced with cheap earrings; she has drawn a line in eyeliner level with her lashes, a fawn. Do you know François Villon, the Ballade des pendus? He shakes his head, I don’t think so, she is wearing raspberry lip gloss, “Brothers and men that shall after us be, / Let not your hearts be hard to us,” you see what I mean or not? Yeah, I see, but he doesn’t see anything, he is blinded, thousands of mirrors have formed in the quivering drops of water, they lean their foreheads toward the ground and slalom between the puddles, the bike jingling in unison with the rest, each word and each gesture weighted with boldness and reserve, like two sides of the same event. They are blooming, held in a hothouse light. They walk up the avenue like princes, nervily excited but moving as slowly as possible, pianissimo, pianissimo, pianissimo, allargando, engulfed in the astonishment of what they are for each other. Their sensitivity is amazing, almost molecular, and whatever circulates between them pulses and swirls, leaving them breathless at the foot of the funicular railway, blood beating in the veins of their temples and their palms clammy, because everything is on the verge of disintegration now, and at the moment when the alarm rings, signaling the train’s departure, she kisses him on the mouth — the briefest of kisses, over in the blink of an eye — and then she is on the train, where she turns to face him, leaning against the window, forehead suckered to the dirty glass. He sees her smile and then kiss the window, pressing her lips against it, eyes closed, hands flattened against the glass, he can see the purplish lines that code her palms, then she turns around and he is left paralyzed, his heart incredibly dilated — what happened? — and the funicular moves off, up the slope, sluggish but unrelenting, and Simon decides to do exactly the same thing, only better, so he gets on his bike and begins riding up the hill. A wide bend in the road takes him away from her, but he pedals hard, crouched forward like a Tour de France rider, his schoolbag making him look like a hunchback, then the sky grows darker, the shadows on the ground vanish, and it rains again — a heavy, coastal rain — and in a few minutes the asphalt is streaming, slippery, so Simon changes gear and stands on his pedals, blinded by the drops of liquid hanging from the arch of his eyebrows, but so happy that he could, in that moment, lift his face to the sky, open his mouth, and drink everything that is pouring from above. The muscles of his thighs and calves are tensed with the effort, his forearms ache, he spits and gasps, but finds within himself the necessary momentum to follow the right line through the final curve, angled so exactly that he is able to speed up and he is freewheeling when he reaches the plateau at the top, and he charges into the funicular station just as the train brakes with a loud screech, skidding in front of the doors, soaked to the bone, jumps off his bike, and his legs buckle. Hands on his knees, head facing the ground, his lips foamed with spit, hair stuck to the edges of his face like a young marshal of the Empire, he parks his bike next to a bench and gets his breath back, opening his jacket and the top buttons of his shirt, his heart rate gradually slowing beneath the exposed tattoo — it is the heart of a swimmer in the high seas, an athlete’s heart with a resting pulse of less than forty beats per minute, a superhuman bradycardia, but barely has Juliette gone through the turnstile at the exit than it accelerates again — a wave, a surge — and he walks toward her, hands in his pockets, head withdrawn into his shoulders. She smiles, and lifts her oilskin as high into the air as she can: it’s an awning, an umbrella, a canopy over a bed, a solar panel capable of harnessing all the colors of the rainbow, and once he is standing next to her, she stands on tiptoes to cover him with it — and herself too, the two of them contained inside the sweetish odor of the plastic, their faces reddened by the waxed fabric, their lashes dark blue, their lips purple, their mouths deep, and their tongues infinitely curious. They stand under the tarpaulin as in an echoing tent, the rattling rain above them forming the soundscape against which can be heard the breaths and hissings of saliva; they stand under the tarpaulin as if under the surface of the earth, submerged in a damp, humid space where toads croak, where snails crawl, where magnolias, brown leaves, linden blossoms, and pine needles rot into humus, where old bits of chewing gum and rain-soaked cigarette butts slowly molder, they are there as under a stained-glass window that recreates an earthly day, and the kiss doesn’t end.

* * *

Juliette looks up, breathless. The light has dimmed; she switches on the lamp, and shivers. Before her eyes, the labyrinth has grown. She glances at her watch — nearly five p.m. Simon should be calling soon.