The Visit
Danile Sallenave

She only had biscuits, she said, and behind her, in the glazed upper part of the door, hovered her double - grey, head nodding symmetrically. If only we'd warned her, she would have made a cake, a pie, although the plums are not too good this year, with all that rain in June, or she would have gone and bought one at Marion's, yet their pastry isn't the best, but since Renaudin has closed (Renaudin has closed as well? Yes, both, the one and then the other) there is no other place to go. In the summer she doesn't light the coal stove and for pies, you see, the gas cooker is no good. As she spoke, she stepped back into the entrance of the dark room with its high ceiling, speckles of pink veining her cheeks, and pushed back some strands of hair which had escaped her comb; while with the other hand she tried to grip the dog by his collar, through the thick fur of his neck; he had thrown himself between our legs and had bared his yellow teeth. One couldn't hear oneself speak, just stop it, will you! The dog rushed past us and ran towards the end of the street, where his bark vanished. You can't speak when he's around, and he wasn't that young either. His eyes had turned blue, had dimmed, his muzzle had gone white. She smiled and sighed; but surely we shouldn't have been left standing there, on the doorstep.
         The room smelled of apples and freshly-ironed washing, of mustiness, of wax. She stood there, still smiling, and pushed the chairs forward, counting, and lifting her forehead towards us, she apologized for not having answered, she never wrote. Above all, she had been touched by the telegram. She was just going out when it had been handed to her; she was going to visit her cousin, Marie, yes she still lives farther down, such an impractical house, so difficult to heat. Had we heard that her husband had had a stroke, a small stroke, though (all the same, he had stayed in hospital a fortnight and yes, he was well, he was better now, as well as could be expected at his age). The door had to be opened for the dog, which was scratching and which, after going racing round the table two or three times yapping, rubbed himself against her who raised his muzzle in her hand to show us how white it had become. The dog wriggled about to escape and, putting both his forelegs on her lap, tried to lick the face leaning over him. She laughed and freed herself; but wouldn't we like something? how thoughtless of her, and, having got up, she sat down again, calling us to witness: it's true, she did forget everything. She was always tired, the doctor couldn't understand it. We smiled at her and nodded: that was why we had come, we had so much wanted to come earlier, we looked at each other, exchanging glances to confirm it. She had started to cry. The golden light of the afternoon entered through the corner window, through a curtain hanging from a spring rod, tracing a yellow quadrilateral figure on the dark flagstones. A shadow screened it, lingered on, vanished. And indeed, there she was, Marie, would we have recognized her? But didn't she have her little dog any more, that yellow mongrel with stiff hair following her everywhere? Oh yes, Kiki! He had died, what do you expect, the poor old dog, a natural death; he was not hers anyway, he was her mother's. We must have got them mixed up; all of a sudden we had gone back twenty years in time, and it was not a happy resurrection, at best the grimace of time, mournfully and mechanically repeated. Same hair, sparse and curly, same cough, same bent back, same way she had of throwing her leg sideways as she walked: the dead woman had taken hold of the living young woman and had merged with her. Yes, her mother, she said, the poor old woman had not been lucky. The silence fell on a memory we could not retrieve, only the pain was left, like a perfume, like a tenuous echo. Again the dog yapped softly. She looked at him and seemed to wake up. There was still some coffee left over from the morning, if we didn't mind, as long as she didn't let it boil, and she was already standing by the wall to pick up a saucepan with a black, dented bottom, and was looking for the matches to light the gas. The saucepan was dancing on the flames, the smell of coffee wafted upwards. She stood there, keeping an eye on it, took her handkerchief out of her pocket and clumsily wiped her eyes, her nose, slowly, persistently, mechanically. One of us had got cups from the lower part of the dresser, he had not forgotten where things were then, had he? We laughed. She sat down again and held out to each of us in turn a flowered dish where she had arranged "the biscuits."
        She was in fact going to see Marie when the telegram had been brought to her; suddenly she could not speak and she put her left hand on the dog's head, no, he couldn't have a biscuit, he knew it very well, he had a kind of diabetes, yes, dogs could get it as well, that was why he had become so fat, ah! that time, so long ago now, when they both went out hunting. Her voice got muddled again, she coughed. The rectangle of golden light had slipped to the right, and now reached as far as the leg of the big sideboard. Well then, just a small piece, she said, a tiny square and that's all you'll get, but don't bite me, you greedy thing, you'd eat my fingers, wouldn't you? Then one of us asked the usual question about the blue shutters opposite, always closed. Her left hand still on the dog's head, flattening his ears backwards, she pulled a handkerchief out of her pocket and blew her nose once more. No, no, she said, her voice smothered in the hollow of the hand holding the handkerchief, no, no, the house hadn't been sold; besides, it wasn't that big, the garden swallowed up everything, you can't see it from the street. She preferred it that way, what sort of neighbours would she have had? To go back to the telegram, she had known immediately that it came from one of us, she has nobody living that far away. They had all been to see her anyway and besides, there weren't that many of them. And as our questions got entangled, the house with the blue shutters came up again: if we remembered right, the other garden was Mme D's, at the end of the small alleyway; well, the garden of the blue house started right there, which just went to show how big it really was. As to the telegram, it had been delivered by the new postman, it was just as well she had met him at the door, God only knows where he would have put it. They often changed, every three to five years, and with those new flat caps, one tended to get mixed up. They had a good salary though, and they didn't have to walk or ride a bicycle any more to do their rounds, we hadn't forgotten le pre Maurice with his square satchel, had we? No, no, he was still alive, it was just that one didn't see much of him any more, he rarely went out, just as with everybody else now, time hadn't been kind to him either.
        But she hadn't asked us about ourselves, she talked of nothing but herself, and she was not that interesting. She looked at all of us, sitting in a row in front of her with our elbows resting on the round table, with kind, misty eyes and took off her glasses to wipe them. If we could only see the lenses they had wanted her to wear. She had got up, get down, will you! he does hurt me with his paws, scratches me, and his nails are hard, old age again, you see, they should be cut. Now the one they had before, the little black and white bitch, they always cut them for her: claws, they're just like nails, they don't feel anything. With one hand on her hip she turned back towards us, above her a photograph in a round frame smiled at us, a woman's face surrounded by black hair. We didn't know her, did we? She thought we didn't, but why had she got up? Oh yes! From a drawer she removed a few envelopes, a pair of scissors and a spectacle-case which she had difficulty opening. In the frame, the image of the window rested on the photograph with a trembling pattern in the shape of a cross. Could we see how thick they were? She turned them round between her fingers, the two magnifying glasses mounted inside circles of thick plastic, dark pink. All that was very well, but what did she need them for? The newspaper, crimes, and wars, always the same thing; advertising, games on television. She had always liked the wireless best. She pushed the drawer shut and sat down again.
        The summer light of the summer day was waning, the setting sun sent a bright ray through the window overlooking the street, directly onto the painted glass surface of a tray standing against the back of the dresser. Every time someone went by, in the narrow paved street stained with the oil of passing cars, she glanced behind her feverishly and almost without looking at the person she would say somebody's name, if they were coming from their garden, and if it was their habit to do so. Yes, she would have to sell, the house was too big for her, wasn't it? And with her right arm resting on the table she lifted her left arm to describe the visible space as well as the invisible space - a clumsy half-circle suddenly brought to a stop: the door to the backyard - the dresser with its row of dishes, the shiny tray depicting a night scene, a huge moon with leaning palm trees - the kitchen range covered by an oilcloth with serrated edges - the television on the oak sideboard, and her gesture ended at the staircase leading to the next floor. Yes, she would have to sell, but who to, and where would she go? She didn't heat the top rooms, where her parents had died, she didn't want to rent them in the summer either, all that noise above her head· She was interrupted by the roar of an engine, and her sentence was left suspended in mid-air, ah! here they come, she said, I don't feel so lonely when they come, no, two or three days only, that's enough, I don't feel so lonely then. You see, there's nobody left around here. She opened the door to the yard; the silence fell. And indeed, where were they all: the hens' lazy cackle in the summer afternoon, the fountain gushing, and the conversations of the past, from one garden to the next, over the wall? Everything has changed, she said, but anyway, what can one do?
        She was stirring her cold coffee with a spoon, she sighed. She understood very well why we hadn't been able to come, everything had been so quick! That was why the telegram had deeply touched her. She had not been able to read it, she was wearing her old glasses that day, and with them on she would not recognize you from across the table. Anyway, she had finally managed to read the name, that was the main thing; she turned round towards the signatory, who nodded his head with a smile. Everything had been so quick! She was still asleep when they called her. Normally she doesn't sleep so long into the morning, except for the nights when she stays awake because worries have got hold of her, then she only finally falls asleep at dawn, which isn't a good thing. She had been woken up by the telephone, and it was all over by the time she got there. One week - eight days to be precise - before his birthday! And it was as though the whole force of pain and injustice that had to be lived through had found shelter in that one week which had not been granted to the old man. The cups were empty, she lifted the saucepan and stared pensively at the blackened bottom where some grounds were floating. She could at least have got the coffee-pot out, she said, but the habit of being alone, and indifference to everything, that was what she felt now. Sometimes she did not even know what day of the week it was. The days were all the same, with the same sadness, the same emptiness; and the weariness, the ache, starting from the back and slipping down into the legs, the arms. She stopped; the tick-tock of the alarm clock came into the silence as a reminder, as a threat - as a comfort maybe. A week, yes, and it would be seven months on Thursday - the end of winter, a mild, damp spring, and the summer now drawing to a close. She was looking at her hands resting on either side of her cup. Seven months, seven months on Thursday, and what was the sense in going on like that, wouldn't it be better to be dead as well? The silence set in again, and it was not easy to break. It had closed in on her: it was not merely a pause, a breathing space, an interval in the muffled stream of the words exchanged. It was as if she had fallen asleep in front of us; what we were looking at now should not have been seen by us. She was not giving in, on the contrary: she was withdrawing. And whatever it was that she had withdrawn behind, it was impossible to go beyond it: the only thing left for us to do now was to leave. Had we crossed it anyway, that invisible line between us? Those years, that time common to us all, had ceased to exist; even our bodies did not remember the way they used to move; her way of moving her chair towards the table and resting her arms there, we had rediscovered it while watching her, and we had copied it whole-heartedly, so that she would see our willingness, to show her that we had come back. The illusion had not lasted long. In a little while there would be nothing left of that great effort, motionless and silent, which just then had us drawing closer to one another. Above each of us, useless now, floated our transparent doubles, the out-of-focus image of what we had been and which had been revived for a while by the stirring of the past. But the ghosts had not stopped speaking to each other, their grey film streamed now towards the ceiling invaded by the shadow of the evening, where they would soon disappear. Nothing could prevent time from slipping by, it had pushed us onto our separate roads where every one of us would one day meet a solitary death. The world had spun around her who had not taken part. She had not been affected by its incomprehensible changes; they had come to beat against her with an ebb from afar in the same way that the passing of a ship produces wavelets and brings to life the base of an isolated rock, at one end of a silent moor. She had welcomed them without understanding them: there was a grey telephone on the dresser and a big television set on the oak sideboard, and in the evening, as she had not found the switch, she always turned it off by pulling out the plug. We would go and she would stay, inexplicably compact and solid, though with no strength. Under our eyes, her squat figure, her short legs in grey stockings, her blouse dotted with small flowers, her wide back, her hands resting on the oilcloth, suddenly frozen, shrunk, smooth as a photographic plate, were beginning the long journey of their endless immobility.
        And you have quite a way to go, she said. Standing on the doorstep she lifted her hand a last time and waved. Around her the narrow houses turned their front doors in a single body towards the eight o'clock sun, like peaceful faces. The dog followed us up to the end of the village, barking at the tires, and then, at the start of the wood, ran into the bushes.

Translated from French by Bernard Hþpffner

By permission of ƒditions POL