Emmanuel Bove - Henri Duchemin and His Shadows

Robert Marjanne was a short, very well-proportioned man. Had he been stooped or deformed, he would have been ugly and his intelligence would perhaps have seemed surprising, whereas short and well built, he was oversensitive, and his misanthropy was such that it verged on neurasthenia. When asked his age, he answered like those people who pretend not to know where they are in their lives: “I was born in ’64. You do the math!” But he did not leave them time to obey this injunction, turning the conversation to other subjects. The only child of rich storekeepers, he had grown up surrounded by a great deal of care and attention so that once he had come of age, he had only a vague idea of life in general; until late middle age he had dreamed—and he kept this dream as hidden as a teenager might keep his knowledge of lovemaking—of a woman who would be an artist of some kind, of traveling, of the high life.

When he turned fifty, he had an abrupt change of heart. His parents had died. His commercial enterprises were running on their own steam. He wanted to live. As if audacity had come with age, he decided to move toward—but in his own way, that is, very slowly—what seemed to be his ideal. He had countless moments of leisure. It was during one such moment that he met a young woman, Claire Paoli, the daughter of an engineer. She was so beautiful that soon he confused her in his mind with the woman he had dreamed of marrying his whole life.

Some years earlier, Claire had left her family to be with a young man who had just finished medical school, but who did not have enough money to open his own practice. They had lived together for three years on rue Gay-Lussac using the money from a few private lessons he gave to young boys who always resided on the opposite side of Paris. Then they separated, and Monsieur Paoli had taken his daughter back solely, it seemed, to heap criticism on her day after day. So when Monsieur Marjanne offered to marry her, she accepted immediately.

From that moment on, Robert Marjanne lived as if in a dream. He couldn’t do enough to make his wife happy. He was attentive to her every need. Not like a man in his twilight years who uses all his past experience in order to continue to please, but like a man who had wasted his youth and had never been attentive to anyone before.

And Claire became attached to him. Every day, she cheered him up with little jokes, gave him serious advice that she did not believe and that would change a few hours later. Due to her poor treatment by her parents and the medical student, she found her husband’s thoughtfulness charming and no amount of pride could lead her to reject it. Nonetheless, she intended to retain a degree of independence. She had demanded to have her own bedroom. She always refused to give the slightest details about her schedule for the day. Once lunch was finished, she would go out and not reappear until dinnertime.

* * *

That evening, however, for the first time, Monsieur Marjanne waited for her in vain. He continually went to the window in the hope of seeing her step out of a taxi in front of the house. A few times he had even gone out to be at her side more quickly when she arrived. Then, suddenly, fearing she had come in without his seeing her, he climbed back up hurriedly and found himself in the empty apartment in front of the table, covered in a frosty white tablecloth, that had been set for dinner. Slowly time passed. The clock chimed ten, and Claire had still not come home.

After letting his mind wander for several minutes, Robert Marjanne got up again. For an instant he remained motionless. What could he do? Pace back and forth, sit down again, go out walking in front of the house once more, lean out the window? But how would any of that make his wife appear more quickly? He was in the most painful state of anxiety, the state in which, because the anxiety has lasted for so long, the weary mind seeks explanations, begins to try to reason, and, because there is nothing to be done, ends up becoming annoyed with itself.

“I’m just too tense,” he thought. “It’s ridiculous to get in such a state. She has been delayed. Why always look on the dark side? Everything seems complicated, but I’m sure it’s very simple. Naturally, because I am by myself, I have come up with all the conjectures one can come up with. By myself, the truth escapes me. Right now, I have no more grounds for thinking the worst than thinking the best. She was delayed. That’s undeniable. Everything else is just my imagination. Still, she could have found a minute to phone me.”

Thinking that perhaps his telephone was not functioning, Monsieur Marjanne was overjoyed to have to verify this, while confusedly imagining he would gain a few minutes in doing so. Very slowly he walked to his study, then, so as to still have this task before him and because he secretly hoped to find another one, several times he lit the room then made it dark again, trying to persuade himself that the light switch was not working properly. But whichever way he flipped it, it obeyed him.

At last Robert Marjanne sat down in front of the telephone. “Let’s see if it’s working,” he thought. “Whom can I call? The Bertrins? Perhaps Claire is at their house, after all!” But at the thought that, if this were true, she would make a scene when she got home or, in the opposite instance, it would be impolite to disturb friends at this late hour simply to ask them if his telephone were working, he refrained. “The best thing would be to telephone the operator.” He picked up the receiver and requested that she call him back in a few minutes to make sure the line was functioning properly.

A moment later, the telephone rang. Even though he was absolutely certain that it was a telephone employee, he was filled with emotion.

Because he had now returned to the dining room, he suddenly noticed the clock on the mantel. It was a few minutes before eleven. All at once he realized Claire should have been back four long hours ago. The uneasiness he had been experiencing abruptly became a sharp pain. It was the middle of the night. Everything such an absence could imply filled his mind. “She must have a lover,” he thought. “She is with him right now. He doesn’t want her to go. She doesn’t have the strength to leave him. If there had been an accident, someone would have called me. It doesn’t take much common sense to guess the truth. She is at his place. They are not asleep yet. They’re talking, laughing...”

He could not shake the idea that Claire was cheating on him while he was waiting for her. Yet he wanted to go on hoping she would come home from one minute to the next. But midnight chimed, then one in the morning. Robert Marjanne was hardly recognizable.

After going to get some blankets, he lit all the lights in the living room, sank down in the lowest armchair, and covered his legs. From time to time he heard the little clocks in the apartment. The same thoughts continued to come to him, one after the other.

Daylight arrived and Robert Marjanne got up from his armchair. He had dozed off, as one does on a journey, haunted by nightmares in which Claire had turned into an insolent, drunken woman, then into a repentant wife begging her husband to forgive her. He opened the window. The sky was gray like silty water. The bare trees of boulevard Raspail, which were not yet twenty years old, did not even reach the height of a third story. An east wind, heavy with rain, was shaking them and there was something infinitely sad in seeing them sway like this on the deserted boulevard. Monsieur Marjanne closed the window. The light of dawn and the light from the streetlamps blended together, forming a single pale glow that filled the room with a strange brightness. It was seven o’clock in the morning.

* * *

As he was about to enter the dining room, he suddenly found himself face to face with his wife, who had just come home and, before going to join him, had rushed to her bedroom, no doubt to reacquaint herself with her surroundings before seeing her husband again. She had already removed her hat and coat. She smiled and said: