Philippe Djian - Betty Blue

My efforts seemed to be reaping results, though-her face was getting some color back into it, her cheeks were less sunken. For the last three days, the weather had been fabulous. We’d crisscrossed the whole area on foot, breathing the fresh air and sleeping twelve hours a night. We were starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I was sure that if Lisa had been there to see her just then, lovely as the day is long, sipping her tomato juice in the sun, she would have called it a miracle. I myself had to be content with that. I still had a disquieting feeling when I looked at her closely. I felt like I had lost something important that I could never get back, but I didn’t know what. I wondered if I was just imagining things.

“Oh wow! Come here quick-take a look at this…!”

She was looking into a viewer-one of those big jobs on a pedestal that magnifies, the kind you have to keep shoving coins into every two seconds. It was aimed at a neighboring mountain top. I went over to see.

“Incredible!” she said. “I see eagles! Geez, there are two of them, perched on a nest…!”

“Right, it’s a daddy and a mommy.”

“Shit, it’s beautiful…”

“Really?”

She stepped back to let me take a look, but just as I bent over to see, the thing stopped working-all I saw was black. We rummaged through our pockets but we didn’t have any change left. I took out my little nail tile. I tinkered with the slot. But no dice. It was hot. I started to get irked. To be so close to Heaven, and still have to put up with mechanical bullshit-I couldn’t believe it.

The little old lady tapped me gently on the shoulder. Her face sagged, but her eyes were bright-you could see that she’d preserved the essential. She put her hand out to me. There were three coins in it.

“This is all I have,” she said. “Take it…”

“I only need one,” I said. “You keep the rest.”

Her laughter was a tiny stream of water, flowing through foamy lace.

“No, I can’t use them,” she said. “My vision isn’t as good as yours.”

I hesitated for a moment, then took the coins. I looked at the eagles. I told her a little bit about what I saw, then turned the thing back over to Betty. I thought she could describe it better than I could. Though there wasn’t any snow, mountains for me have always been synonymous with avalanches. I had brought a little flask of rum with me. I went over to the sack and took a few swigs. The old man was there, sitting on the table, smiling in the sun, scraping the mud off his shoes, the little white hairs trembling on his neck. I offered him the bottle, but he refused. He motioned to his wife with his chin.

“I promised her when we met that if we lived together more than ten years I’d never touch another drink.”

“And I bet she’s never forgotten that,” I said.

He nodded.

“You know, you might think it’s silly, but I’ve lived with that woman for fifty years now, and I’d do it all over again tomorrow.”

“That’s not silly. I’m kind of old-fashioned myself. I’d like to be able to do the same someday.”

“Yep, it’s tough to go it alone…”

There was enough in my bag to feed a whole family, all delicacies-almond paste, marshmallows, dried apricots, health crackers, those little crunchy things made out of roasted sesame seeds, and a bunch of organic bananas. I put it all out on the table and invited the old couple to eat with us. It was beautiful out. The silence was lovely. I watched the old man busily chewing a cracker. It made me feel optimistic. Maybe I’ll be like that fifty years from now, I told myself… well, let’s say thirty-five to be on the safe side-it seemed less far away than I thought.

We talked easily, waiting for the cable car to come. It arrived, whining. I bent forward a bit and looked down the dizzying descent of the cable. I shouldn’t have looked. I pushed a finger against my throat, pressing on the point of my anxiety. Two women followed a colony of children out of the cable car. One of them looked scared to death, her pupils dilated. As she walked past me, our eyes met.

“If that miracle of modern technology hasn’t come back an hour from now, you’ll know that it was your lucky day and not mine.”

Whereas the trip up had proved to be quite frightening, the trip down was fear itself. The brakes were likely to snap any second-you could distinctly hear them grinding. I was sure they were going to burn up. With all that rubbing there was no doubt in my mind; the car was too heavy. I considered throwing all unnecessary objects-the seats and all accessories, for example-overboard. According to my calculations, the car must have weighed one ton. Once the brakes failed, we would eventually reach a cruising speed of 750 miles per hour. Just behind the finish line, there was a huge buffer made of fortified concrete. Result: impossible to identify the bodies.

I started eyeing the emergency brake, as if it were the forbidden fruit. Betty pinched my arm, laughing:

“Hey, you okay? Take it easy!”

“It’s not a sin to be prepared,” I explained.

One night at the hotel, I woke up suddenly. There was no explainable reason for this-we’d spent the day taking a ten-mile hike, stopping only to drink our tomato juice, and I was beat. It was three o’clock in the morning. The bed was empty beside me. I saw light coming from under the bathroom door. Now it happens that even girls get up during the night to pee-it was something that I’d been able to verify on several occasions-but three o’clock in the morning seemed a bit unusual. Anyway, so what, I yawned. I stayed there stretched out in the dark, waiting for her to come back, or for sleep to overtake me again. But nothing happened. I couldn’t hear anything. After a while I rubbed my eyes and got up.

I pushed open the bathroom door. She was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, her hands clasped behind her neck, elbows in the air, staring at the ceiling. There was nothing to see on the ceiling-nothing, just white. She didn’t look at me-she just rocked lightly back and forth. I didn’t like it.

“You know, sweetheart, if we’re going to make it to the much talked-about glacier tomorrow, we’d better get some sleep…”

She looked right through me. I could see right away that all my work was out the window. She was horrifyingly pale-her lips were gray. I felt the bamboo slivers go under my fingernails as she flung her arms around my neck.

“Oh my God, tell me it’s not true!!” she said. “I HEAR VOICESI!”

I held her head against my shoulder, pricked up my ears. I thought I heard something. I breathed easier.

“I know what it is,” I said. “It’s the radio! The news. There’s always some nut in every hotel who has to know what’s going on in the world at three o’clock in the morning…”

She burst into tears. I felt her stiffen in my arms-nothing was more fatal to me than this, nothing more killing.

“No, God, no… I hear them inside my head. THEY’RE INSIDE MY HEAD!!”

Everything suddenly turned cold-abnormally cold. I cleared my throat, like a jerk.

“Come on, calm down now…” I whispered. “Come tell me all about it…”

I picked her up and carried her to the bed. I switched a lamp on. She turned the other way, poised like a hair trigger, her fist shoved in her mouth. I ran and got a washcloth-I was incredibly efficient-and folded it over on her forehead. I kneeled down beside her. I kissed her. I held her fist to my lips.

“And now do you still hear them?”

She shook her head no.

“Don’t be afraid, it’ll be all right,” I said.

But what did I know? Dumb-ass that I was, what was I supposed to tell her? What could I promise her? Did I hear them in my head, those goddamn voices? I bit my lips fiercely. Next thing you know, I’d be singing her a lullaby, or offering her a cup of poppy-flower tea. So I stayed close, tense and silent, about as useful as a refrigerator at the North Pole. Long after she’d gone to sleep and I’d turned off the light, I was still there, eyes wide open in the dark, waiting for a tribe of banshees to come screaming out of the night. I’m sure I wouldn’t have known what to do.