Catherine Leroux - The Party Wall

It was much easier to confirm that Claire was cheating on him. All he needed was to rifle through her sports bag, in which some perfectly clean clothes concealed a set of black lace underwear. Oddly enough, he admires the complexity of his daughter’s secret. She, at least, doesn’t reduce Simon to a pathetic cliché. He has never spoken to Claire about his discoveries — the ones concerning her infidelities aren’t worth the trouble and those about Jessica are too bizarre. He refuses to submit them to his wife’s insipid reactions.

“Do you remember Marcus Wilson?” Carmen asks, rousing him from his musings.

She, too, can’t help thinking about their father tonight. Simon nods, his thoughts flooded with memories. They were fourteen and sixteen years old. Frannie, exasperated by their relentless questions about their background, had ordered them to take a large umbrella and wait for her in the car. They drove for an hour through a downpour to a rain-soaked cemetery on a hillside. There, Frannie furiously led them to the modest tombstone of one Marcus Wilson, then twelve years dead.

“That’s him, your father. He was a boozer and he killed himself driving home from a bar when you were little. Now don’t bother me about this again!”

She turned on her heel as furiously as she had come, leaving her son and daughter alone at the graveside. Carmen cried, and Simon followed suit, not so much out of sadness as the wish to behave appropriately. Actually, it took him several weeks to digest this revelation and incorporate it into his personal history. He had a father, the father had a name, an age that would never change, a final abode.

For almost a year Carmen and he paid regular visits to Marcus Wilson’s grave, timidly at first and then unabashedly, leaving flowers and candies, stretching out to finally be able to speak to their father. Carmen asked him to help her get a high score on her SAT. Simon sometimes went there alone to confide his anxieties about girls, about Frannie’s fits of rage. He could sit there for hours leaning his back against the granite headstone.

They might have kept up this routine their whole lives, if only Frannie had chosen a more remote, more anonymous monument of someone the world had forgotten. But when Simon and Carmen arrived at the cemetery to picnic, in June of the year following their first meeting with Marcus Wilson, they found three people gathered at the gravestone, an old woman and two young men in their early twenties, all of them African American.

Simon wanted to turn back immediately, but Carmen couldn’t help approaching the family, so he kept his distance while she interrupted their prayers. She came back a few minutes later looking crushed. The two boys were Marcus Wilson’s sons and the old woman, his mother. Wilson had died after a five-year battle with cancer.

“He was buried here because this was his home town, but he died in Chicago. He was living there with his family. He couldn’t have known mother, much less have two children — two Latino children — by her.”

It took them months to tell Frannie they had discovered the truth. When they finally dared to do so, she had no idea what they were talking about. The cemetery, the rain, Marcus Wilson — all forgotten.

A lull in the downpour allows them to return to the car without being swallowed whole. Carmen’s Jeep is covered with white disks; some youngsters have been playing Frisbee with paper plates from the nearby pizzeria. Simon is itching to have a few words with some of them, but Carmen manages to distract him by asking him to check the oil. While he is busy under the hood, an elderly woman stops beside her.

“Excuse me, I think I recognize you from somewhere… Aren’t you an athlete?”

“Runner. Carmen Lopez.”

“That’s it! At the Barcelona Games… You were fantastic! And then Atlanta! But what happened…”

“Thank you!” Carmen cuts her off and jumps in the car. Simon barely has time to sit down beside her before she pulls away.

The hospital parking lot is almost deserted. There are seven cars there. Seven families keeping deathwatch or awaiting the birth of a child. So few. Carmen looks at her brother with the choking sensation that they are alone in the world.

The hospital is still swarming with staff who are busy clearing away the traces of the second quake in the geriatric department, as if the absence of debris could banish all thought of the tremors that will cast these old people out of existence one by one, one piece at a time. A team is at work in room 224, and Carmen and Simon are asked to wait outside. They are getting Frannie ready for the night, a nurse explains. Simon has no idea what this means. Are they putting on her pyjamas? Brushing her teeth? Maybe their mother is naked, her numberless wounds and protrusions, her manifold ugliness starkly exposed; maybe he and Carmen are being spared a sight that would change them forever.

While they are waiting, a doctor arrives and introduces himself; his hair is neatly combed but there are unsightly patches of perspiration under the sleeves of his smock. Simon is willing to forgive this sort of impropriety. Sweat is the sign of vital effort, of one’s commitment to something. A symptom that he values in his own person, the recurring confirmation he is not a bad policeman, but one who truly cares about his fellow human beings.

The doctor bluntly informs that Frannie had another heart failure while they were out.

“If I were you I would stay by her side tonight.”

The nurses file out with the guilty expression of people who have presided over the end of an empire without attempting the impossible, and Simon forgives every one of them.

Frannie’s body lies in the half-light, just a grim collection of bones and flesh that nothing holds together anymore; her face is distorted by the tubes serving as lifelines. Carmen and Simon pull up chairs on either side of their mother, ready for a sleepless night, white as a flag and long as a mast.

They have stopped speaking. Sometimes they stroke an arm, a cheek, terrified by the tentative gestures that were never possible before. Simon repeatedly places his hand on his burning chest; he needs some milk, and Carmen considers getting up to find some for him but she does not budge. She must stay there. The whole world is concentrated here now.

The hours go by. Carmen has the sensation there have been gaps in time, a sign that she has slept. At one point she realizes that Bastard has reappeared, nestled against his mistress’s shoulder. It’s an almost pretty picture, a strange quasi-still life. This is surely Simon’s doing. Simon and his big heart under all those layers of rules and restrictions.

Later, she catches herself singing. This must have begun while she was sleeping because she can’t remember starting into this old, approximate and cheerless Mexican serenade; nor does she even know where she could have learnt it. Frannie never sang them lullabies. And yet a fragment of childhood slips out between her lips to caress the dying woman, to draw her into her rare regions of happiness and lay her down there as one would a child, in the safety of warm blankets and the scent of milk.

First the hand comes to life, followed by the eyelids, fighting to open, and then the quivering arm rising toward the chin. Frannie tries to pull the tubes out of her nostrils. Simon does his best to stop her, but, as always, in vain; his mother knows what she wants. A great groan goes up from her throat. She’s back.

Her breathing is a bow sliding over a cordless violin. Her chest pushes as hard as possible to draw the air inside, to enable one more breath. Her feet are completely frozen; the blood has already given up — there’s no point in doing the full circuit. It nourishes whatever is indispensable: the fluttering nest of the abdomen, the commanding tower of the brain. But the extremities are left to fend for themselves. The throat stays sufficiently irrigated, because it must be. A few words still need to be uttered. But which? Nothing at all can be seen; before her eyes there is only turbulence, as when one tries to penetrate the sunrays dancing on the ocean’s surface to plumb the depths. The spinal column saws away at the trunk, where the muscles no longer hold down the sides of the big tent. The ribs alone keep on working. It’s enough. Enough to finish what needs to be finished. Francisca Lopez shall not die in silence.