The Selected Stories

IN A WHISPER

It was the last day. The very last.

She was wearing a pale blue dress with a wide-brimmed hat, its black velvet ribbons dangling down to the middle of her back. Most of all I remember the velvet bow and the color of her dress, because that is what I saw last. That blue: a sky blue. Sometimes in summer the sky takes on a blue like her dress, a gray, sun-gorged blue. On scorching summer days, a blue as bitter as gentian.

The blue dress. Her eyes with the tiny pupils that were black like the velvet bow, her mouth — all milk and roses — her hands. All of it, the shape and the color, was a challenge, an insult to my propriety. “There are sad loves and happy loves. Ours is sad,” she told me one day long ago with a gray, monotonous voice. It hurt so much that I couldn’t put it out of my mind. “Why sad?” “Because you’re a proper man.” We hadn’t seen each other for eight days, because I had accompanied my sick wife to a village in the mountains, for her to convalesce. A proper man. This man, who lived for a simple gesture from her. Everything about her, everything that came to me from her filled me with emotion.

I can still see the canvas awning at the café that morning (orange with a fringe that flapped in the wind), the bushes by the sidewalk, the notice on the mirror about the soccer match. I can hear her deep, cold voice. “I’m getting married.” She had lowered her head, and the brim of her hat concealed her face. I could see only her lips and her nervously trembling chin. And the toxic blue of her dress.

Everything around me, everything within me felt empty. It was as if I lived in a shadowless, echoless cavern. It was a terrible period of inescapable magic. All the things that might have seemed a signal, might have engendered hope, had suddenly vanished, as if an invisible hand had snatched them away. They had ceased to be.

But at the age of forty, nothing ceases. No. Nothing ends. The child that I wanted was born and will live when I am dead. The last child. A pale child, light as a bouquet of flowers. When Albert went to peek at her, his Latin book under his arm, his mother asked: “Aren’t you pleased to have a little sister?” He looked at the baby with curiosity and disdain, knitted his brow, pouted his arched lips, then left without a word, closing the door without a sound. The last child. I had wished for it darkly, from the depths of my loneliness, hoping to alleviate it, as if I might revive the sweetness that had died, preserve it within a being that was marked and still faltering.

We celebrated her first birthday today. She’s beginning to walk but needs to grasp onto the furniture, the wall. If she has to take a few steps alone to get from one chair to another, she looks around anxiously and bursts into tears. I requested that a blue dress be made for her. I picked her up for a moment, and she laughed, making little cries of joy like a bird. I have concentrated all my tenderness in this little ball of warm flesh, in these tiny hands and feet. It is a bitter tenderness. When the child looked at me with sudden attention and curiosity, I had to close my eyes. Her shiny, black pupils are surrounded by a sky-blue shadow.

I had an impetuous desire to write to her. “Just to have a glimpse of you. If only to see you pass. If you would wear the blue dress, the dress you wore that last day.” I tore the letter into a thousand pieces. I know she asked about me. She would have used that neutral voice of hers: “Ah, so he’s had a daughter?” If I could only explain to her. . “I’m getting married.” If I had only been able to say: “I don’t want you to.” Her words cast me into a void, left me spinning, falling. “Gracious, you’re young!” Her youth frightened me so. Since the child was born, my son looks at me as if he were trying to understand me. I sense him smiling harshly.

I haven’t been able to sleep all night, and now my head is splitting. I got up to open the window and came back to bed. Slowly the dark room filled with starlight. I felt cold and pulled the duvet over me. The wind brushed the leaves on the lemon tree against the glass. “She’s in Algeria,” I was told yesterday afternoon. “She left two months ago.” All night I imagined the sea and the ship. I couldn’t rid myself of the image of the sea, the ship rocking back and forth like the leaves on the lemon tree. When it was almost day, I went to my daughter’s room and lifted her frantically. She grumbled but didn’t wake. I held her in my arms for a long time. Slowly the daylight returned the shape and color to objects. I clasped that tiny bit of flesh with its beating heart. I must have hurt her, for suddenly she started crying. “What is it?” My wife rushed in anxiously, tying the sash on her dressing gown. “Has she been crying long?” Then she glanced at me: “If you could only see how ill you look! What’s wrong?” “Nothing,” I said. “Nothing’s the matter. Don’t look at me like that. I assure you, it’s nothing at all. Don’t give me that look.” Never, not even on the worst day of those eighteen years, had I wished so furiously to die.