12 Fifteen Minutes Before the End of the World #3
“I’m telling you this now because many years have passed, but back then it was one nightmare after the other.
The roller coaster had started, and there was no stopping it.
And then, in the middle of the upheaval, someone did the math and realized that at the end of September, Anouk and I hadn’t been in Capbreton.
So she made up a story about how she’d actually been with me on a weekend she had said she’d be staying at a friend’s.
I’d gone all the way to Mulhouse, because we were so in love.
I’ve never been to Mulhouse in my life. No desire to go either, but anyway. It was lie after lie.”
“Why, Jean-Pierre? To save her?”
“What do you want me to say? Yes. Out of pity, I don’t know.
Out of friendship, because I saw a friend who was really desperate.
Because of the recklessness of youth. Because she was the devil, and I could see I should run away from her, but some strange force wouldn’t let me.
Because I guess I liked her, or loved her, or thought I loved her.
Why? Don’t make me say it. Because I guess I thought I was doing a good deed. I don’t know.”
“And where is Monique? With her mother?”
“Hold up. Don’t rush. Everything up until now has been the pretty part of the story.”
“I can’t believe it . . .” Paulina pitied him, but at the same time she felt like she had been stabbed. He had helped Anouk, because he loved her.
“Those were the happy days. The child was born. She was a healthy, calm, and magnificent baby. Anouk came to live in Paris, near here, in a little flat that was not associated with this one. There was no elevator, only two small rooms, a stench rising up from an unknown source. We both worked so that Monique could want for nothing. Our parents told us we’d have to manage on our own.
I was Monique’s father in everyone’s eyes.
In fact, I did act like her father. After a year, she was walking.
After two she was talking. It was that whole natural evolution that Anouk and I learned together, side by side.
From all appearances, Anouk and I were a couple.
Things weren’t too bad at home, but it was more like a student apartment with a child added on.
We slept in the same room, in a narrow bed, and I won’t say no.
There were some days, yes . . . We held each other, we finished each other off.
Young people things, you know. We were so overworked that we didn’t have the time or desire to look for anything else outside the house.
“In the mornings I worked as a librarian at the faculty of medicine. In the afternoons I started to work at a gallery in the Latin Quarter. Monique called me ‘Dad,’ and of course I loved her like a daughter. I don’t know if I loved her well enough.
I don’t know if she sensed some subconscious wariness in the way I treated her.
I don’t think so, because I did everything for her.
I bathed her, changed her, made her dinner, fed her, read her bedtime stories, cut her nails.
Everything. What can I tell you that you don’t already know? ”
“It’s twenty-four seven.”
“Twenty-four seven.” Jean-Pierre squeezed her big toe to show he understood.
“One day, when Monique was six, Anouk disappeared. She disappeared just like that, just like I’m telling you now.
I came home from work and I could already hear Monique fussing as I was climbing the stairs.
I went in and she was alone in the apartment.
She told me her mother had left hours earlier.
She was hungry. She’d wet herself, and she wouldn’t stop crying.
That night Anouk didn’t come back, not the next day, or the one after. It was a scene.
“Ten days later, she called me from Norway with an incredible amount of audacity. She told me she couldn’t take it anymore.
She needed to breathe, and she’d gone to Marifjora, her grandmother’s village.
She didn’t say she was sorry. She didn’t even ask about the child.
It’s like her daughter didn’t exist, and she hung up. ”
“What did you do?”
“I spoke with Anouk’s mother and asked for the grandmother’s phone number in Norway.
I called and spoke with the old woman, who didn’t understand anything I was saying.
Anouk wasn’t there. She hadn’t been there in years, and she wasn’t expected anytime soon.
And there I was, with the kid at home, not knowing what to tell her about her mother.
“One week, two weeks, three, four, a month, two months went by, and before the third month, Anouk came back to Paris. She turned up at Monique’s school, picked her up, and took her away. I never saw either of them again. Never again. To this day.”
“But—”
“To this day, Pauline. Where are they? I don’t know.
Why did they leave? I have no idea. Why hasn’t she given any sign of life, or an explanation, or a letter?
None of those. Never, nothing at all. It’s like the earth swallowed them.
Her parents in Colmar died—first her father, then her mother—without ever knowing what had happened to Anouk and their granddaughter.
There was no news of their daughter. She didn’t even come to the funeral.
There’s no evidence that she even knows her parents have been dead and buried for years now.
“In fact, according to my father, their notary, they left everything in their will to Monique. Her parents were hurt and wanted nothing more to do with Anouk. They left everything to the girl, but there’s been no way to locate her.
And that’s the story . . . You asked me whether I was Monique’s father. What do you think?”
“My God, you must have really worried.”
She realized, though, that if that story hurt Jean-Pierre so much, it was because, deep down, he loved Anouk.
Or perhaps, deep down, he missed Monique more than Anouk.
Maybe he needed to hear a child running up and down the apartment again, or he missed picking up the drawings the little girl with braids had left scattered all over the floor.
And to think that for four days Paulina was scared he might think she was too naive.
From the night of the wedding, lips pressed up against each other’s, she had been convinced he was some kind of hero.
Only now did she realize he was a survivor.
For the first time since they’d been together, she didn’t feel inferior to Jean-Pierre, who, with the last sip of malt, tried to choke back the emotion from a life of setbacks.
“What do my friends know? What does your cousin know? The same as everyone else. Anouk left me from one day to the next, went away, and took our daughter with her. What do only you know? That I was not the child’s biological father. That I didn’t get Anouk pregnant.”
“How cruel, Jean-Pierre, this whole story. To trade in your life to help a friend, however close a friend she may have been.”
“It’s not a pretty story, no.”
“You loved, and you were used.”
“Long ago I decided not to remember. The right to forget should be a fundamental law.”
“Memory isn’t a set of folding chairs that you can store behind the door once your guests leave. It’s a terribly sad story, but it’s yours.” Paulina slid her feet off the sofa and set them on the floor to feel closer to him. “And I’m very glad you trust me with it.”
“So you still love me, then?”
Like a little kid, Jean-Pierre scrambled up onto the sofa and hugged her hard, putting his cheek against her.
They couldn’t stop crying for a while. He had spent years as a hermit, carrying his grief the best he could, missing Monique and cursing Anouk.
Even if he didn’t show it, the wound was not as healed as he had thought.
She, feeling pity for him, felt terrible seeing Jean-Pierre come undone.
And she couldn’t understand how the sparkling man she’d met, confident, charmant, and cocky, could hide a tragedy so big, so unjust, the kind that marks an entire lifetime.
How did he live with that pain parked somewhere inside?
Would she have been able to go on after a similar loss?
And if Anouk was such a bitch, why hadn’t Jean-Pierre changed the name of the gallery?
Maybe he still thought that . . . And if she came back, would he forgive her?
She kept those doubts to herself. Paulina was ready never to mention Anouk, Monique, or any part of that bitter episode ever again if Jean-Pierre didn’t bring it up ever again.
In any case, she was leaving that afternoon and didn’t even know whether she would ever again speak to this man who had made her feel more a woman than she ever had, more valued, more attractive.
Starting tomorrow, could she manage without the person who had taught her how to live every moment like it was fifteen minutes before the end of the world?
Once they had wiped away the tears, Jean-Pierre packed his pipe and slid the lock over his past again.
He thought it had been good for him to let it out.
He had finally found someone to confide his story in, in detail and out loud.
But now he only cared about the future and about a person who had knocked down his barriers and worries.
“Don’t move. We’ll eat in a second. But there’s something we still haven’t done, and I really want to. I want you to taste something. Don’t move, okay?”
“No, no.” Paulina obeyed.