Catherine Leroux - The Party Wall

There is still no sound from inside Marcus’s apartment. Not even a slight cough.

“Marcus? Are you there?”

She can feel something vibrating against the door panel. It takes her a few seconds to realized it’s Marcus’s trembling body. Then she hears his voice, so dry one might think he had swallowed sand.

“I gave everything away, afterward. It’s what they would have wanted, even her. It’s my one consolation. A part of them goes on living in a dozen bodies spread around the world. Their flawless little hearts. My daughter’s beautiful green eyes. My boy’s lungs — the kid could run like the wind! And her, even her. Her kidneys saved some poor slob somewhere. Someone who has no idea he owes his life to a monster. It’s the best thing anyone could get out of her.”

Carmen has sunk down on the doorstep, dropping her flowers, leaning her head back against the door. Her legs are numb. Marcus is still shaking on the other side. The day is breaking.

Two rooms in the shadow of the hills — that is all Simon has from now on. In their relationship, it was Claire who earned the most money. Given the rents in San Francisco, his policeman’s salary is enough for no more than a dim, two-room apartment a few paces from a cable car that makes the dishes dance whenever a train passes by.

Considering his wife’s barely disguised dalliances, Simon could have tried to squeeze every last cent out of her, but he did nothing of the sort. On returning from Mexico, rasped by the sun and worn out, his mind was already made up. In a matter of days, his lease was signed and his boxes packed. When Claire saw he was leaving she barely batted an eyelid. He didn’t think long explanations would serve any purpose, so he restricted himself to a terse, “We hate each other,” something she could not deny.

When Alan heard the news he was hardly more forthcoming with his feelings and confined himself to muttering, “So, every second weekend?” As for Jessica, contrary to Simon’s expectations, she expressed no wish to live with him. A few weeks after he had moved out she announced she would be spending the summer in Europe. Claire made a scene; Simon, no longer bound by his wife’s demands, gave his daughter the money for her airfare. After twenty years of family life, all he was left with was this vague alliance with an adolescent girl who was already far away.

Living alone calms him. He works the night shift, gets back before dawn, draws the blinds, sinks into his sofa, and stares at the shadows flitting on the wall without trying to interpret them. He speaks to only a few people and the telephone has stopped ringing. He is scarcely aware of world events, the royal wedding, the death of Bin Laden, the Dodgers’ victory. Roberto’s picture, Frannie’s letter and all the other elements of his investigation have been stored in a cardboard box marked with an X. His trip to Las Palmas, in addition to dispelling any desire to go on living with Claire, drained him of his last drop of hope. He resigned himself to remaining an orphan.

He eats frozen meals, drinks cheap tea, and dozes off just anywhere, sometimes even on the threadbare carpet, like a dog suddenly overwhelmed by fatigue. The sounds of the street and the neighbouring apartments come to him muted and he soon learns to ignore them, to live in a chosen silence, a blinding solitude. He has finally found his lair and discovered what sort of creature he is. An animal that thrives in the midst of scarcity and austerity. In the evening, when his clock sends out its shrill alarm, he finds the wall covered with rough patches, like granular stone. He blinks his eyes three times and the room regains its cubic shape, its civilized texture. He stretches his back, counts his vertebrae and once again dons the uniform of an ordinary man.

The runners are divided into categories that are fenced off in specific enclosures: marathon, semi-marathon, ten kilometres, etc. In the family paddock, a handful of parents are warming up behind strollers and some eager kids are itching to tackle the thousand metres allotted to them. The adjacent section is for the handicapped, who will follow a special route that avoids the city’s most treacherous hills. San Francisco is a place of inclusion and its marathon aims to embody this spirit of tolerance, which doesn’t preclude classifying people in a manner worthy of the heyday of segregation.

Carmen is warming up. It won’t be her best race — she can already sense this in the pit of her lungs, in the jut of her ankles. She slept badly and the humidity weighs on her. She is busy tying on the number 132 that has been assigned to her, when a familiar voice reaches her ears.

“Mrs. Lopez! Carmen!”

On the other side of the fence Carmen recognizes the young woman who took care of Frannie during her last months. She is grinning from ear to ear.

“Angie! You’re doing the marathon? I didn’t know you were a runner!”

“It’s recent. Actually, it’s you who inspired me! I’ve been training for three months; I even got these legs, specially designed for impact sports.”

She shows the prostheses attached to her knees. Carmen knew she was handicapped, but this is the first time she has seen her artificial legs, which look both highly sophisticated and strangely organic.

“I hope you don’t find this too nosy of me, but I never knew how you lost your legs.”

“You’re not being nosy. It changed my whole life, so I don’t mind talking about it. I was run over by a train when I was nine.”

“My God! I’m so sorry.”

“There’s no need. I wouldn’t have lived the way I have if it hadn’t been for that brush with death when I was young.”

The two women continue their conversation as their respective enclosures fill up. Carmen relates how the stuffed cat recovered its bygone dignity; Angie tells her she has won a scholarship that will allow her to pursue post-graduate studies in Berkeley. Then she asks about Simon.

“To be perfectly honest, I haven’t spoken to him in a long while.”

Angie nods with a knowing expression on her face.

“It was that letter that upset him, wasn’t it? I hesitated for a long time before handing you those papers.”

“Why is that?”

Looking ill at ease, the girl examines at the tips of her soles.

“Your mother wrote those letters one day when… well, I believe she’d been drinking. She asked me to give them to you after she died. She was doing okay at the time so I put them away and forgot about them. But not too long before her heart attack — I guess she was beginning to sense the end was near — she pulled them out again and ordered me to burn them. I have to admit, I read them. I told her I’d destroy them but I couldn’t do that. I thought it would be better to let you have them. Maybe I was wrong.”

“Not at all! We had to find out the truth at some point. My only regret is that Simon took it all so literally. From one day to the next he stopped being my brother.”

“You know, even blood relations can become estranged like that. Siblings don’t make up an indestructible organ. Not many things do, actually.”

Carmen gives her a sad nod of agreement. Now a whistle sounds to rally the runners. Carmen squeezes Angie’s hand through the steel mesh.

“Any last minute advice?” the young woman asks.

“Do a proper warm-up. And when you get to the point where you think you’re about to croak, keep going. There’s always life left, even when you can’t see it.”

A few minutes later the starter’s pistol goes off and Carmen bursts out of the enclosure jostling against hundreds of runners who are about to do violence to their bodies to prove to themselves they have the stuff of winners, of survivors, to forget their shortcomings and faults, to stop thinking altogether, or to lose themselves in the essence of absolute effort. The throng on either side of the road cheers them on. Despite the massive number of spectators, Carmen immediately spots Marcus’s face. Overjoyed, she veers away from her path to slap his open hand. When she gets closer she sees he is holding a daffodil petal out for her. She slows down to snatch it and puts it against her lips. Marcus kisses her fingertips as she picks up the pace again, her strides diligent, her ambition discreet, running at the speed of those the pack never catches up with but who don’t overtake the frontrunners. Those who run for the sake of running and nothing else.