The Birthday Party

I.

She watches him through the window and what she sees in the car park, despite the reflection of the sun that blinds her and prevents her from seeing him as she’d like to, leaning against that old Renault Kangoo he’s going to have to get around to trading in one of these days – as though by watching him she can guess what he’s thinking, when maybe he’s just waiting for her to come out of this police station where he’s brought her for the how many times now, two or three in two weeks, she can’t remember – what she sees, in any case, elevated slightly over the car park which seems to incline somewhat past the grove of trees, standing near the chairs in the waiting room between a scrawny plant and a concrete pillar painted yellow on which she could read appeals for witnesses if she bothered to take an interest, is, because she’s slightly above it, overlooking and thus observing a misshapen version of it, a bit more packed down than it really is, the silhouette, compact but large, solid, of this man whom, she now thinks, she’s no doubt been too long in the habit of seeing as though he’s still a child – not her child, she has none and has never felt the desire to have any – but one of those kids you look after from time to time, like a godchild or one of those nephews you can enjoy selfishly, for the pleasure they bring, taking advantage of their youthfulness without having to bother with all the trouble that it entails, that educating them generates like so much inevitable collateral damage.

In the car park, the man has his arms crossed – robust arms extending from stocky shoulders, a thick neck, a prominent chest and a tuft of very straight chestnut hair that always makes him look unkempt or neglected. He’s let his beard grow, not too thick a beard, no, but it doesn’t suit him at all, she thinks, it only accentuates his air of gruffness, that impression he never fails to make on people who don’t know him, also giving him a more peasant-like look – she couldn’t say what a peasant-like look actually is – the image of a man who doesn’t want to leave his farm and stays there, literally cooped up, scowling like an exile or a saint or, all told, like her inside her house. But for her it’s not so bad, she’s sixty-nine and her life is rolling quietly towards its end, while his, he’s only forty-seven, still has a long way to go. She also knows that behind his gruff exterior he is in fact sweet and thoughtful, patient – sometimes probably too much so – and has always been obliging with her and with the neighbours in general, at any moment he’ll lend a hand, of course, without a second thought, to anyone who asks, even if it’s her he readily does the most favours for, like he’s doing today by driving her to the police station and waiting to take her back to the hamlet so she doesn’t have to ride her bike for something like seven kilometres both ways.

Bergogne, yes.

Even when he was a kid, she called him Bergogne. It happened simply, almost naturally: one day she addressed him by his last name to tease him; this amused the child and it amused her too, all because he often imitated his father, with that serious and furrowed look children sometimes have when they act like responsible adults. He was flattered, even if he didn’t really pick up on the hard, ironic edge she took when she called his father by his last name, because often it wasn’t so much to compliment him as to unleash a scathing comment his way or treat him the way an old schoolmistress scolds a kid, addressing him as sharply as possible. She and Bergogne senior argued readily, as a matter of habit, as one does among friends or close classmates, but anyway that no longer matters – thirty years, maybe forty? diluted in the fog of time passing – and none of it ever really mattered anyway, because they’d always been close enough to speak their minds candidly to each other, almost like the old couple they’d never become but had nonetheless, in a sense, been – a platonic love story that never found the space to play out, even in their dreams, for either of them – in spite of what the acid-tongued and the jealous might have insinuated.

It had remained after the father died: Bergogne. His last name for speaking to his son, to this particular son and not to the two others. Since then, if it’s been without the slightest irony, just force of habit, it would still be with that same tone in her voice, at once harsh and with a hint of superiority or authority of which she wasn’t even aware, when she called him to ask him to pick up two or three things for her at the Super U if he was passing through town, or to take her if he was going – a town, imagine calling it that, that village with its population of three thousand – but also with the sweetness of childhood he sensed behind her words,

Bergogne, I need a ride,

as though she were murmuring in his ear my little one, my boy, my kitten, my treasure, in a fold hidden within the coarseness of his name or that of her voice, in her way of saying it.

She used to come spend holidays here in a very elegant old house on the riverbank, and everyone looked at her like a grande dame, vaguely aristocratic but above all vaguely mad – a Parisian artist, exuberant and batty – wondering just what kind of peace she expected to find here, in La Bassée, reappearing as she did more and more often, staying longer and longer each time until one day she showed up for good, this time without a husband in tow – what she’d done with her banker husband was anyone’s guess – come to settle down with some of his money, no doubt, even if nobody knew why she’d decided to bury herself in a dump like this when she could have settled some place in the sun, at the seaside, in regions that were more hospitable, milder, less ordinary, no, on this point nobody could say, they just kept wondering, because even if they’re fond of their region people aren’t stupid enough to not see how banal and ordinary it is here, how flat and rainy, with zero tourists to combat the boredom wafting from its trails, its streets, its waterlogged walls – and if not why would they all have dreamed at one point or another of getting the fuck out?

She’d said it was here and nowhere else that she wanted to live and age and die – let the others keep the Tuscan sun, the Mediterranean and Miami, thank you very much. She, crazy to her core, had chosen to settle in La Bassée and hadn’t even wanted to buy or visit any of the three handsome houses in the centre of town, which looked like surprisingly decent faux manor houses, in the grand style, with turrets, exposed beams, timber frames and dovecotes, outbuildings. No, she had wanted to live in the middle of nowhere, saying repeatedly that for her nothing was better than this nowhere, can you imagine, in the middle of nowhere, in the sticks, a place no one ever talks about and where there’s nothing to see or to do but which she loved, she said, to the point that she finally left her old life behind, the Parisian life, the art world and all the frenzy, the hysteria, the money and the parties they imagined around her life, to come and do some real work, she claimed, to grapple at last with her art in a place where she’d be left the hell alone. She was a painter, and the fact that old Bergogne, the father, who sold her eggs and milk, who killed the fatted pig and bled it to its last drop in the courtyard, who spent his life in rubber boots covered in shit and animal blood, caked with soil in the summer and with mud the other eleven months of the year, that he, who owned the hamlet, should become her friend, this surprised people, and, bizarre as it seemed to those who wanted to suspect an affair, if only to make the whole thing imaginable and comprehensible, no, it had never happened, neither had ever shown the slightest attraction to the other, not the slightest amorous or erotic ambiguity, until one day he sold her one of the houses in the hamlet, making her his neighbour, further fuelling the rumours and speculations.

(…)