Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

There was something, on the first or second or third day, that began with the word “once,” that followed from it.

Once the child went out of the mother’s bedroom into the yellow hallway. It was midday, the hour between the mother’s two jobs. The shocking silence in the house and outside it made the child leave the room, as if the world had suddenly emptied, retreated. She stood in the entrance to the hall and looked: Maurice was lying on his back, on the sofa bed, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, his Adam’s apple sticking out, a cigarette in one hand. The mother, in her better work clothes for the afternoon job, was kneeling at the foot of the sofa bed, at his feet. Her forehead was buried in the upper part of his stomach, next to his diaphragm. His other hand, the one not holding the cigarette, stroked her head, not stroked, dug, stirring her thick hair, into the skin of her scalp.

LA DAME AUX camélias

She always came to the Champs-Elysées alone in her carriage, in which she showed herself as little as possible, in winter wrapped in a large cashmere shawl, in summer dressed very quietly; and although she naturally met during her favorite drive many men whom she knew, if perchance she smiled on them, the smile was visible to them only, and a Duchess might have smiled thus.

She did not drive between the “round point” and the entrance to the Champs-Elysées, as was and is the practice of ladies like her: her pair of horses bore her rapidly to the Bois. There she left her carriage, walked for about an hour, entered it once more, and returned home at full speed.

All these circumstances, of which I have often been a witness, recurred to me, and I regretted the death of this girl, just as one regrets a complete destruction of some fine work of art.

In fact, it was impossible to meet with a more perfect beauty than Marguerite had been.

Tall, and at the same time very slender, she possessed to a superlative degree the art of hiding this forgetfulness of nature by simply arranging the dress she wore. Her cashmere shawl, the point of which reached the ground, allowed to be seen the large flounces of a silk dress; and the thick muff, which concealed her hands and rested upon her chest, was surrounded by drapery so skillfully arranged that, however fastidious the beholder might be, he could not help being pleased by the general aspect.

Her head was charming, and a marvel in itself. It was very small, and De Musset would have said that her mother must have taken particular pains to shape it thus.

A pair of black eyes, surmounted by brows so perfectly arched that they seemed as if penciled, shone in an oval countenance of indescribable charm. Imagine eyes with lashes so long that, when drooping, they cast a shadow on the rosy tint of her cheeks; a nose perfectly straight gave an intelligent expression to her face, while the nostrils were slightly expanded by the ardent aspirations of a passionate temperament; a mouth regular in form, with lips parted gracefully above teeth as white as milk; a complexion tinged with that velvety down that covers a peach that has never been touched; and you can form an idea of how that exquisite countenance looked.

Her hair as black as jet, and curling naturally or artificially, parted upon the forehead in two large bands, fastened at the back of her head, exposed the tips of her ears, in which sparkled two diamonds of the value of four or five thousand francs each.

How was it possible that the passionate life she led should have left Marguerite the virgin-like, nay, even childlike expression that characterized her countenance? We can only say that it was so, but we do not pretend to understand it.

Marguerite had a beautiful portrait of herself, drawn by Vidal, the only artist whose crayon could have reproduced her countenance.… Marguerite made it a point of going to all “first nights” at theaters, and passed nearly every evening either there or in the ballroom. Whenever a new piece was produced, she was sure to be present, with three things that she always carried with her, and which she placed in front of her box on the ground tier: her opera glass, a package of bonbons, and a bouquet of camellias.

Generally these camellias were white, sometimes they were red, but no one knew why she chose them of different colors, and the “habitués” of the Paris theaters and her own friends had observed this as well as myself.

Marguerite was never known to have any other flowers than camellias, and eventually she came to be known at Madame Barjon’s, the florist from whom she purchased these flowers, as “the lady of the camellias,” and that name stuck to her.

I FOUND HER sitting in the hospital armchair, next to the bed, bathed (“I got up and washed myself very early, before everybody else”), wrapped in the green-and-blue wool tartan shawl I had brought her. The shiny white softness of her cheeks. She said that my sister, Corinne, had brought her a toasted bagel from the cafeteria downstairs and “these, too”—she indicated the bedside locker: six containers of Actimel yogurt in a cardboard tray.

“Your sister,” she said in a half-complaining, half-gratified tone, “forces me to eat. I don’t know what she wants, that one.” I sat on the edge of the bed, my profile toward her. “But I’m not hungry,” she said. “She doesn’t understand that I’m not hungry.” Her eyes glittered, an exaggerated, unnatural brilliance, as if from a high fever or great excitement.

The excitement, the near-electric conductor of her body under the big shawl that came down to her thighs.

“Don’t force it,” I said. “Don’t force yourself to eat.”

She examined the edges of the shawl intently, separating the tangled tassels from one another. “Nothing by force,” she said.

We went down in the elevator to the inner courtyard of the hospital, next to the cafeteria: a dozen white plastic chairs scattered randomly over the clearing of lawn surrounded on three sides by glass walls and open to the sky above. In the middle of the courtyard was a tree that refused to grow, or that wasn’t meant to in the first place. She thought she wanted coffee. I fetched some. She took two sips and put the cup down on the dripping saucer, wiping it with the paper napkin. The mild sunlight of the beginning of December, behind the glass wall an entire family following one of their members on a gurney. “A lot of them come here from Kalkiliya,” she said. “The one they brought last night to the bed next to me is from Kalkiliya. She didn’t sleep all night.” I moved my chair toward the narrow strip of shadow cast by the wall. Two dragonflies, one big and one medium-sized, came to rest on the used wrapping of something or other, some sandwich somebody had eaten. “I think a lot,” she said, carefully prodding the sandy lawn with the toe of her slipper, “there are a lot of thoughts here at night.” “What thoughts?” I asked. “You know, the way I was, this and that.” She raised her eyes and looked in front of her, blinking. “How were you?” I asked, reluctantly, out of a sense of obligation. For a moment she was silent. “Like some sort of donkey, I think,” she said, closing her eyes: “ Yallah , let’s get out of this sun.”

We waited for the elevator, she held my elbow — just touching it, really, making the motions of leaning but not actually leaning.

She glanced at me briefly, like a passerby. “Don’t you be like a donkey,” she said.

The elevator opened its doors, two-thirds occupied by the lunch trolley. We could have squeezed into the remaining third, but we didn’t want to. She didn’t want to. “What have we got to do? We’ll wait for the next one,” she said, and stared up at the blinking lights showing the location of the elevator. I bent down to pick up the lighter that had fallen out of my pocket. I felt the shy tips of her fingers on the nape of my neck, heard her low, bashful voice above my head: “It’s good that you’re writing a book.” “I’m not,” I said. “Never mind”—she took back her fingers—“it’s good.”