Celine Curiol: Voice Over

A small red light is blinking in the semi-darkness of the living room. She takes off her shoes and coat, stretches out on the carpet. She is tired. From the floor, the furniture looks gigantic; its straight edges map bands of darkness across the walls. She reaches out an arm and presses the play button on the answering machine. The recorded voice lodges itself in the corners of the walls, in the folds of the pillows, under the high and the low tables. The voice says it is calling to see how she is, that it hopes she enjoyed the party, that it has something to offer her, that she has to call back. There’s a beep, followed by silence. Inside her something swells, triggering a sense of wellbeing. Her finger is still on the button. She presses, and the voice repeats the same message. She ought to go on listening until it no longer has any effect on her. Create the antidote through repetition. So that in case he eventually started talking to her in a direct way, she could survive. After hearing the message four times, she takes her finger off play and picks up the phone. She barely has time to say a few polite words before Ange, in top form, monopolizes the conversation, without the least intention of relinquishing it. This weekend they’re having a dinner party at their place, his place, Ange corrects herself, they would really like her to come. She doesn’t know what to say; she is disappointed. A dinner party to which others will be invited, and once again she is denied exclusive access to him. When at last Ange stops talking, she screws up her courage and asks to speak to him. He’s gone out, says Ange, but she’ll pass on the message. She hangs up. There is still no light on in the room. She lies down on the bed, fully dressed. The last sound she hears is the gurgling of her stomach.

She undresses, showers, gets dressed again, and goes out. The platforms in the métro are packed with commuters champing at the bit. Ready to push aside anyone that gets in their way, they charge forward when the doors open, pouncing on the handful of free seats. Their only master is time. Everything they do is fast, to claw back the fleeting minutes, as if they stood to gain a bonus, to push back the end of their lives. She is wedged upright between two stony shoulders that have no intention of budging to give her more room. She can smell the reek of strong scent, feel someone’s breath on the back of her neck, the tension of mute, sweating bodies packed into a narrow carriage, bodies too close to inspire in each other anything but a mutual sense of suppressed revulsion. She shifts a little to keep the blood flowing in her legs. Someone gives her a dirty look for not knowing how to keep still, for disrupting the smooth progress of the journey. Inside the station, commuters are gathered around the departure boards. Many are alone. They’re waiting for a number or a letter to appear before rushing off to the platform from where they’ll set out. She recognizes the voice of her colleague announcing the 7:10 TGV as she heads towards the small door marked “Staff only,” which they refer to as the stage door. The last time she took the train was over two years ago. She can’t remember the exact date, only the price of the return ticket. Six hundred and twenty-four francs to go from Paris to Montpellier and back to bid goodbye to a friendship. Montpellier was where Marion lived. Perhaps she still lives there. She doesn’t know. Has made no attempt to find out, not since the day she held Marion in her arms before boarding the train and promised to keep in touch more often. Call me. Yes, yes; you too; of course. At the time they believed what they were saying. And yet, in that instant, she also knew that it was goodbye, that the parting would be final. A dissonance in their voices, their stares, a suspect rush of mutual warmth — and she understood that their friendship was ending for good. It made no difference whether she said it or not. Take a good look at her, she had told herself, because you won’t see her again. She wanted to keep with her a particular image of her friend; the last image seemed critical. And so she had tried to commit Marion’s face to memory. Today she wonders if it might not have been that look, taken by Marion to mean that she should leave, which led to their breaking off relations. Perhaps. Behind the window of the train that has been in the station too long, there is Marion with her yellow T-shirt and tiny bag, clutching her sunglasses. That is when she realizes there is nothing harder than looking into someone’s eyes through the window of a train. It’s no longer possible to touch that person, no longer possible to talk. There is only the look in the eyes, the intuition that the other person’s feelings more or less match your own. And seeing the expression on Marion’s face had made her want to cry, Marion who was condemned not to follow the train, to stand stock still on the platform, to recede until she disappeared from within the frame of the carriage window. They both stood there, smiling for all they were worth, struggling to contain that ridiculous pressure expanding the walls of their chests. By the end, they were just doing one thing: waiting for the damn train to leave. She had almost forgotten it was the last time. And the moment the carriage jolted into motion — the relief. At last Marion was gone from behind the window; her eyes were no longer there, tempting her to climb back out and explain what by now seemed inevitable. There was only an unvarying succession of houses, then fields, then hills. The serenity inspired by a world now devoid of human forms, a world that was but did not seek to be. She clearly remembers how there had been no one next to her. She vowed eternal gratitude to the SNCF ticket-seller who chose that particular place for her. She imagined him at his computer screen, telling himself that he could save the little lass from being squeezed in or getting bothered at lunchtime by some person in the next seat taking out his sandwich of soft bread and moist ham. She imagined that the ticket-seller had recognized her voice and granted her that small favor. Delighted, she had lifted the central armrest. Two whole seats to herself. Relief at leaving Marion behind had lasted a good hour. Travelling through space without moving from her seat no doubt catalyzed that feeling of buoyancy. Gazing out at the landscape sucked back by speed, she had dozed off. The need to take stock became apparent only when she awoke. Sleep had given her back a clear head.

Marion was the only one who knew what had happened to her. Before they reached adulthood, she had told Marion about the rite of passage. At the time she referred to it in that way for she was trying to extract from the event a kind of pride. No doubt in order to bear it, to believe that its only consequence had been to help her grow up faster than the others. They had never spoken about it again, not since she told Marion the first time in the drab surroundings of a school playground. But was “tell” the right word to use in this case? She had hurriedly, somewhat randomly, strung together a series of words describing what she thought had happened to her. With a mixture of conceit and disgust, she had described what she had seen, felt, and said, and it was perhaps then that the magnitude of the event had escaped her. In Montpellier, she had realized that Marion had forgotten nothing. The three days they spent together had been slow and heavy-going. There had been enough time to understand who her friend had become and, with such a person, she could not share her past and sustain relations in the present. For as long as the conversation had moved between matters of little importance, she had not noticed a thing. But as often happens when people live and sleep in the same room, vigilance slips; living at such close quarters soon becomes trying unless you agree to go beyond mere pleasantries. And the moment they ventured down that path, she had sensed her own secret steering her friend’s remarks. Though no mention of it was ever made, it crept into her thinking, formed the basis of the logic she was using to size up her guest. As if Marion could no longer conceive of her except in terms of that central piece of information, the event confessed to years earlier. The more they talked, the harder it became to bear, and the more Marion kept returning to it, both of them coming to realize, with each passing hour, how little they had in common. Marion thought she could use the rite of passage to find a path back to intimacy, whereas for her part, she dreaded the slightest, even tacit mention of the episode. Ever since that visit, neither she nor Marion had made any attempt to get back in touch.