The Girl at the Door Read online

  We went to bed with our moods spoiled, but I had a desperate need for warmth. I nestled in under the covers with the comforter pulled up to my nose. I just wanted to stay there, next to her, hold her tight, enjoy the warmth of that familiar bed – since I was still able to enjoy things. So I extended a hand to her belly, trying to feel the baby’s movements. Usually I don’t feel anything, but it relaxes me. It’s an exercise in meditation. I close my eyes, I know I’m there, together with both of them. I didn’t feel anything.

  Her

  My boyfriend lay down beside me, behind me. He hugged me. We stayed like that for a few moments, like two lovers in a mattress commercial. I felt his breath on my neck.

  ‘We could repaint this room,’ he said.

  It must have seemed like a tender way of changing the topic. Usually it’s women who come up with these kinds of things, out of the blue, as if they had a whole series of them packed away somewhere: We could go for a trip to the lake. We could go see that funny silent film. We could buy a nice lamp for the living room.

  Nothing clashed with the colour of the walls. They were white.

  ‘For the baby,’ he added.

  I don’t know what kind of colour perception a newborn has, but I believe that in this case, to say ‘for the baby’ has a much more extensive meaning. In the mirror in front of us I saw my boyfriend’s leg on mine. His tapered and nervous feet always made a great impression in a pair of sandals. There are men who can’t pull it off, but he looked great in them.

  In the girl’s letter to the Commission, there were three practices that involved those feet: my boyfriend had walked on her; she had licked them; he had masturbated her with his foot.

  ‘What colour were you thinking of?’ I asked.

  ‘Light blue,’ he said. ‘Or aquamarine.’

  Before moving to Miden, I’d lived in different apartments and houses. I lived with other people, students, young workers, dogs at first, then cats. In every place, there was always a room with aquamarine walls. Or, more precisely, each place had a room with some sort of green that the renter at the time described as aquamarine. The variation was baby blue.

  ‘If you walked on me now,’ I asked, ‘do you think we could consider it assault?’

  My boyfriend kept silent, his breath intensifying on my neck.

  ‘If you walked on my belly,’ I continued, ‘could we consider it a form of violence?’

  ‘I should say so,’ he said. I could feel him straining to keep calm.

  ‘And if I consented?’ I asked.

  ‘Then we’d both be idiots,’ he said.

  Him

  I reconsidered my life prior to Miden. Before the girl. Before my girlfriend. I thought about my friends. Our evenings together talking about how we were going to make it big with our music. I thought about my parents. Even about my grandparents. I thought about their old age. I thought about my father’s father, his war stories, how he ate a piece of dog shit thinking it was a hunk of dried bread. I thought about how he’d never gathered cherries from a fir tree. There I sought the warmth I needed that night. I didn’t find it.

  Her

  I’ve never been walked on by my boyfriend. From among the practices in the letter, that was one we hadn’t tried. I wondered how he did it with the girl, who was a wisp. How did he manage not to break her back? How much self-control did he need to exercise in his excitement? How much loving care to choose the right point on which to place his feet without causing damage: a thigh, at the edge of the belly, but not the chest? Or maybe she was turned over with her back facing up, in which case so was her arse, but he couldn’t step on her vertebrae without fear of hurting her. Such care was moving, so moving that I felt the urge to shatter my vertebra, one after another. But I wasn’t like that. I wasn’t the one possessed by demons. A glass of whisky too many to make my boyfriend angry was the extent of my wrath. The spine-snapping demon, the demon that slits your wrists, the demon that comes to stick your head in the oven or wake you at 4:48 a.m. has never deigned to even glance at me.

  Him

  I wrote to the girl. I didn’t know what the penalty might be. I could have found out if I had read the restraining order, but if I had read the restraining order, I wouldn’t have written to the girl. That’s what’s called rigorous reasoning.

  It seemed easier to write a post-love letter, about the kind of love that was lost. We’re more used to those feelings, or more expert at them. Or maybe regret just has an interesting density.

  I’ve written love letters too, when I was younger. At university. I stuffed them with quotes, depending on what exam I was preparing for. And I wrote love songs. But in that case there were other elements to consider, the sense of rhythm, which words sounded good.

  She answered me:

  I wonder how it would’ve been if what happened hadn’t happened. How it would be now. But it’s an impossible thought, because the trauma has by now become a part of my identity. And you would no longer recognise me. I’m no longer who I was.

  I also wonder how the future will be, if we’ll ever see each other again.

  If you’re convicted, you’ll have to leave Miden. And I don’t think I’ll go looking for you. I’ve thought about this, too: many years from now, when I’m healed. Two adults? Two old people? How would it be then?

  Don’t ever write to me again. All this will be part of the trial. Your letter is already in the file.

  She was right, I might never have recognised her. Not because of the trauma. She’d become cunning. I heard every word measured for the Commission, but it was a sincere letter. She wondered how the future would be, but I already saw the future there: she was no longer a girl. As for healing, there didn’t seem to be anything to heal.

  Her

  That morning, there was sun in Miden, as pale as a Mormon but intense enough to need sunglasses.

  I took a walk around the market. I bought a juniper berry tea and aquamarine pyjamas for the baby, like the colour he’d never see on the walls.

  I felt the oppressive desire to smoke, even though I hadn’t touched a cigarette since the first day of my pregnancy.

  The lady at the tobacco shop had me try the new flavours of herbal cigarettes: hazelnut, elderberry, blueberry. Normal cigarettes are not allowed to be displayed in Miden, and they cost about the same as a dinner out. I asked for a packet. I wasn’t sure which Commission the tobacconist belonged to, so I cautiously added, ‘They’re for my boyfriend. He’s trying hard, but just can’t quit.’

  She gave me an indulgent smile and slipped into the back to get some cigarettes. As I pulled out money to pay, she said, ‘But your partner is –’

  I nodded without letting her finish the phrase.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She cast me an apprehensive glance, as if she herself didn’t quite know what to do with her eyes.

  ‘You shouldn’t buy him cigarettes,’ she added.

  ‘It’s a complicated situation,’ I said.

  ‘Of course,’ she said.

  After the tobacconist came all the others. I started wearing sunglasses even when the light was grey. ‘If you need something …’ they said without continuing the sentence. I would smile, trying to avoid the start of a conversation. They didn’t seem that keen on conversation either. It was all a pantomime of increasingly heartfelt looks and kind gestures. It took me twice as long to do my shopping at the market. There were always those moments of caring ferocity: me standing there with a dazed smile while somebody filled my bag with the best products. I had the feeling that everyone was slowing their movements so as not to destabilise me. But I could tell they were studying me. Someone had seen me smoking, someone had seen me drinking a beer at lunch, someone was wondering about those sunglasses. I started paying more attention to details. I couldn’t allow myself to have dirty hair, a shoelace untied, or a stain on my dress, but I knew they would find somet
hing anyway. There were those who saw me pale, with a cold, those who noticed that the strap of my shoulder bag was half torn. As for the squalor of my maternity trousers, with their elasticated waist, they kept quiet. They were the ones who’d given them to me. When I went to throw away the rubbish, my neighbours were there to say hello, lingering to make sure I didn’t put things in the wrong recycling bins. At times I saw them spying on me, looking through the transparent plastic bags for a clue. I don’t know what they were expecting to find. Maybe a foetus.

  Him

  The girl and I had thought of forming a band together. Ah, we thought of so many things! I hadn’t played in years, and she didn’t know how to play anything, but her voice wasn’t bad. I’m not sure I’d have felt the same if I hadn’t gone to bed with her; to be honest, it was the kind of little-girl voice that I couldn’t stand in all the young Miden bands, but they all sang that way, and no one had any say in the matter, least of all me. In our best number, though, the girl was silent the whole time and then at the end simulated a sort of orgasm. Her voice disappeared, and there were only groans. It was something almost unlistenable, but I liked to watch her in the role of performer, with her short skirts and those lips making out with the mic. She wanted me to teach her how to play the bass, but she got bored with the practice exercises. The things that bored her were infinite. When we weren’t having sex, she always had the air of being delightfully bored. She asked me to show her how to place her hands on the strings, and then she’d send me a photo of her nude with the bass. Those photos never wound up in the Commission files. Evidently the trauma had spared them. She didn’t suddenly realise that she’d been forced to take them. No, that’s not the correct wording: she didn’t suddenly realise that she’d felt forced to take them. Everything hinged on that feeling. By now I liked seeing the situation in this manner, as a game. If I removed my antagonism, too, I would have found myself a pathetic character. So I opened the encrypted folder on my computer to look at the girl nude with the bass again. I thought, You were hot, you sent me this stuff, let’s enjoy the competition.

  There were other photos in the folder, too. Lots of them wound up in the Commission files. I’d taken some of them. But most of them were part of her artistic project. She’d called it Play and Control. I was the one who suggested the title. Even that was taken into consideration by the Commission and deemed to be proof of my bad faith, of my manipulative intent. Forcing her to play and exercise control. Of all the girl’s artistic projects, I believe it was her best. (You could also comb through this judgment, looking for bad faith, and I have no doubt you would find some. I’m still getting used to the privileges of lying.) I’m not saying it was an original project, not at all. At the Academy’s end-of-year exhibition, half of the work was an obsessive repetition of the nude body in almost any form – material, linguistic – at any level of abstraction. And there was always a strange bitterness in those works, the spectre of bodies without joy. There was the scent of death, with nothing accidental about it. The girls sought out death in their works; they went into them to commit suicide. A parade of dead bodies. It was like walking through a cemetery. And then I saw them – their live bodies, their febrile eyes, those coloured shoes, slight hips, skewed hairdos, the smiles for a compliment, the hands soaring through the air to explain a detail, a finger between their teeth, or a foot crossed over the other. They played coy or got drunk, blathered on, blushed, so fragile and powerful. Yet they set out to kill themselves in their work.

  Play and Control wasn’t like that. The girl was happy in those photos. The girl was happy with me. The trauma wasn’t that traumatic. The girl didn’t understand that she felt forced to be happy. I’m sure that when the Commission examined the photos, they saw in them what I saw.

  Her

  I went to the shore to gather my thoughts. I left home with that noble aim. There’s an iconic image of a solitary man standing above the sea; women are usually strolling on the shore. I didn’t feel like walking. I sat down in an uncomfortable position on the cold sand and did the breathing exercises the doctors recommended. I shut my eyes and thought of the child. I took deep breaths, thinking of the child. When I opened my eyes, I saw the dark water in front of me and imagined that inside me was a sea just as dark, with a child buried in the darkness. My thoughts were slimy; they wouldn’t let themselves be gathered.

  I went back home and found an email from my parents. Whenever I got an email from them, I always feared that something bad had happened. I was waiting for news of a catastrophe from one moment to the next. Even a minor catastrophe: a tax audit or a cat hit by a car. But they just wanted to come and see me. My mother attached a photo of a pair of booties she wanted to knit for the baby. I don’t know where she got the photos, or to whom those booties belonged. They were set on top of a Formica table in a kitchen I didn’t know. I paid less attention to the booties than to the kitchen’s particulars. There were objects in every corner, the affective layers of life, notes stuck on the fridge, dishrags, gloves, gadgets for baking, a large quantity of jams, a calendar with recipes, sea-themed watercolours on the walls. The booties were in the foreground, but it was obviously the background my mother was trying to hurt me with. I’ve never sent her photos of this house. She never came to find me. I had never really invited her. In Miden you need permission to have guests. It’s not hard to get, but I never bothered to figure out how. ‘Well, are you ever going to let us see that belly?’ she wrote. She always wrote emails in the plural. I don’t know if my father was there next to her while she was writing, or if he only gave his final approval. Or if, more likely, he was in the next room tinkering with something before it even broke. But the email was signed ‘The Mum and Dad’. Their use of the article was endearing; it seemed an attempt to give their affection a weird literary quality. More classical.

  Neither the mother nor the father had ever met my boyfriend. I had no doubt that we would all hit it off fantastically once seated at the same table. Or walking around Miden, or in a bar at the port, watching the ships in the distance to charge our thoughts with intensity. None of us were prodigious talkers, but in such cases good manners go a long way. We were well-mannered people. My father, perhaps, would not have appreciated the wine in Miden, but how could you blame him. I could have asked him to stuff a few bottles to bring with him in his suitcase, even if that required another permit from the Import Commission. They would have tolerated a few bottles. The idea of tasting a decent wine again almost convinced me to invite my parents, but we would have eventually run out of alcohol, and it wouldn’t be easy to speak among well-mannered people about my life in Miden. I couldn’t even manage by email. So what kind of interesting things are you doing? my mother would ask. She always liked to add some nice words before a question: so, well, hey … It was her subtle way of showing she could be informal.

  What interesting things was I doing in Miden?

  I’m evaluating whether a lit candle inserted in the anus is evidence of rape, I should have told her.

  That was another practice my boyfriend had spared me, but only because I suffer from a rather rare allergy to wax. I may have got over it, though. I never checked again.

  Him

  My girlfriend started showing clear signs of paranoia. She was convinced that everyone was keeping her under observation. It seemed like a narcissistic delirium, because if anyone was under observation, well, it was me.

  ‘At the most they watch you with disgust,’ she said. ‘I get compassionate looks.’

  I don’t know whether she had just discovered the meaning of the word, whether she had never needed it in her private life up till then, or whether she had expressly looked it up in the dictionary, but suddenly ‘compassionate’ had become a filler word for her.

  ‘Stop looking at me with that compassionate expression,’ she would say when I brought her coffee in bed, when we played cards, or when I happened to caress her hair or thigh.

 
‘I wasn’t even looking at you,’ I told her once.

  ‘Exactly. Just what I meant.’

  Experience should have taught me that there’s no logic to these types of remarks, they’re merely a basic expression of irritability, touchiness. If you keep your cool, you might wind up getting laid; otherwise it’s better to pretend nothing happened. Experience, more generally, should have taught me a bunch of other things, but I never found empiricism convincing.

  ‘You meant that I was looking at you with a compassionate expression, otherwise you wouldn’t have asked me to stop,’ I retorted.

  ‘Is that how you two got off, you and the girl? You corrected her and she got wet?’

  Her

  My boyfriend asked me if I was jealous of the girl. He was neck-deep in shit and still worried about me being jealous.

  ‘I broke it off with her before meeting you,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, you wish,’ I responded.

  My boyfriend said I had become cruel. He started telling me a lot of unpleasant things. That I’d become cruel. That’d I’d become paranoid. That I’d become jealous. I think it was rather true, but the jealousy was the most disturbing because it was much worse than that: it was a complex form of envy. If I were older, I might have envied the girl’s youth, which would have been sad but tolerable. Still, only a few years separated us. When I was in my own country, everyone told me that I seemed young for my age. It was true, I hadn’t changed much over the years, but I shied away from such observations, I blushed with the coquettishness of a little girl. I looked at my bare legs in those ankle boots, the skin of my thighs still tight. I soon realised it wasn’t meant as a compliment. They weren’t saying that I looked younger, but that I didn’t seem fulfilled enough for my age. In the end, the Crash had voided any chronological subtlety. We aged and regressed; we could have been wrinkled babies or adults as smooth as silk.