As the Eagle Flies E-Book

Nolwenn Le Blevennec

• Herausgeber: Peirene Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 211

Beschreibung

This is the story of an affair, or two. The narrator of As the Eagle Flies has been with Igor for seven years, and has two children with him – when she meets Joseph. Before long, they are deeply entangled with each other and she must decide between the life she knows with Igor and this unpredictable, and potentially destructive, affair. She is willing to start again with Joseph, but at what cost? And, does he feel the same way? With a sharp wit and a refreshing honesty, Nolwenn Le Blevennec uses literature, psychology, and popular culture to get to the heart of questions about love, family and identity. This is a book about getting lost in other people, and the lengths we go to to find ourselves again.

Leseprobe

AS THE EAGLE FLIES

Nolwenn Le Blevennec

Translated from the French by Madeleine Rogers

To my mother, Christine Béroff

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEDEDICATIONIN THE AIRTHE NESTTHE CAGETAKING FLIGHTACKNOWLEDGEMENTSTRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSTHE PEIRENE SUBSCRIPTIONABOUT THE AUTHORSCOPYRIGHT

IN THE AIR

My days were spent scurrying around like some busy little mammal. Back then my children were still young. After work I would run to them. I mean I would literally run, risking the danger – the one no one ever talks about – of my brain bashing against the inside of my skull. Coming home from reporting, I would be so eager to see them that I’d leave my bag on the train. The camera roll on my phone was full of pictures of them: a work of documentation on the level of a suburban American obsessed with the tidiness of his neighbour’s lawn. I was holding on to no less than four videos of my eldest dancing to the Crocodile Song, and I was incapable of deleting a single one. I had tried. They were the same, but different. The only limit to my devotion was that I never cooked for them.

In the spring of 2016, my youngest son was a little over a year old when, one evening, I didn’t come home as quickly as usual. I had stopped by a drinks party on the third floor of the excessively large building that housed the newsroom of the magazine where I worked, a low-ceilinged, open-plan space with black cables running across the floor. I’d been working there for a good two years but had never really noticed Joseph, the artistic director. I hadn’t ever given him much thought, even though he was considered the prodigy of the team. Even though he had a signature style: he always wore a polo neck. I remember, that first time, we talked about Boulogne-sur-Mer. I have a soft spot for that town, up there on the north coast, because of its highly competitive downsides (weather, low elevation) and because it relies on the primary sector, which I find quaint. Like the port of Guilvinec in Brittany. It’s quaint, the port of Guilvinec. So that’s more or less what I said, and that it was undoubtedly better to go on holiday there than to the South. I added that the Mediterranean is nasty, that the sea is too calm there, that the water is scummy and yellow, that it stings your skin. That it’s disgusting.

Basically, I was talking shit, and Joseph let me know it. It was brilliant, because everything I said infuriated him, and everything he added made me laugh. It was like we were playing a game of Jenga, and it was getting vertiginously high. My face felt like it was sizzling; sparks were falling into my plastic cup of red wine. The conversation lasted twenty minutes, and it was like something was gently squeezing my insides the whole time. I don’t know if I had yet noticed his extensible bottom lip, the strange bit of skin on his forehead that you’d sometimes feel like playing with, or his tendency to rock backwards and forwards while talking. These are actually his defining qualities. What I did notice was that I liked him, that he was about my height and that his hair was thick and curly. I thought, You could definitely hide a rubber in there.

Three years later, I find myself no more than ten metres away from the location of that first encounter. 1 January 2019. I’m on call in the newsroom, and my partner for the day is a colleague who’s giving me the urge to run away: he wishes me ‘Happy New Year’ every time we make eye contact. As for Joseph, he took off several months ago. At the moment, he’s exhibiting in Budapest. You can see a few pictures from his new life as an artist on Instagram, and on a few sketchy websites if you’re not scared of getting a virus. Which is the case for me. He’s living his best life. While here I am, scrolling endlessly through Twitter, where the outrage du jour is a climate-sceptic TV clip. It’s pathetic. I end up clicking on my email archive, which doesn’t bode well at all. I reread our messages in silence. But on this, the first day of 2019, I realize that these exchanges don’t upset me. That my throat hasn’t tightened. That they no longer intoxicate me. Everyone told me that indifference would break through in the end. I see that the moment has come.

So there you go: this is the commonplace story of a short-lived romance in the offices of a failing magazine. The story of the discovery that willpower can be annihilated. Devoured. Of a traumatic separation at the height of union, and the devastating crash back down to earth. The day after the break-up, I burst into tears at the first note of the prelude to La traviata – it’s a B – at a concert in Metz. All three acts then passed without me managing to pull myself together. It was noisy. Ridiculous, to be honest. And disturbing for my neighbour. At the point when Violetta breaks it off with Alfredo (‘Dite alla giovine’), I was hyperventilating, my head between my knees. After the concert, which had been a present for my mother’s seventieth birthday, I slept next to her in twin beds with mustard sheets in a dreary hotel room. All of which – much as I love my mother – added to the feeling that I’d fucked up my life.

On the train back to Paris, my mind was blank, my body was exhausted, and the top of my head was itching. My mother pretended not to notice anything because she’s afraid that I’m going to end up dying alone. Every time a threat hovers over my love life, she freezes like a lizard. When Joseph, fresh from the hairdresser’s, broke up with me by the Assemblée nationale, I felt like a drugged-up dog abandoned by the side of the road after crossing Spain in the back of a dealer’s speeding car. The wave of depression, immense as it was, was interspersed with moments of lucidity: The good news is, you’re not a dog. And also: You have discovered his limits (Joseph’s). And finally: Bury yourself in other activities for as long as you need to.

*

As you might have guessed (because if it’s not forbidden, there’s nothing to get so worked up about, you’re just going to the cinema), we’re talking about an affair. In its most widespread and tragic form: adultery with a profound disagreement over the desirable outcome. Nothing to do with conservative or religious values here, but rather two psychic structures in conflict. From the very first minute, there was no point of agreement between Joseph and me on the definitions of love, happiness or risk. For him the relationship had a settled meaning, while for me it was mobile. He held his words in, while I spilled mine out. If you’re not afraid of psychoanalysis, you could say that my ego was inflated: his went into retreat.

In the spring of 2016, when I first met him, I was thirty-three, although I didn’t look it – my face is ten years behind my age (this is something that will surely turn against me one day: I’ll wake up in the morning and my cheeks will be slack; already I smoothen out less quickly). But my body was in line with it. Half firm. As I’d had two children in four years, I was about eight kilos overweight. Chubby arms contrasting with a slender nose. Good skin. I was gradually regaining my previous shape. In no rush, because I only ever saw myself when I had my photo taken (never) and because I had no one to seduce. Other than by the father of my children, I hadn’t been penetrated in seven years. Unless you count the forearms of several midwives trying to check the dilation of my cervix.

During the delivery, those midwives had had to step over a short man lying on the floor, playing chess on his phone. He was twenty years older than me, and I had been living faithfully beside him ever since we first met. In perfect harmony. For as long as I’ve known him, my partner, also a journalist, has proved himself unsurpassable. Firstly in the sense that, without having to do anything at all, he has twenty years on me. But also in the sense that I’ve always found him more original than anyone else. He’s something of a ludicrous character whose sense of humour is based on games, silly voices and imitations – and never sarcasm. He’s also an obsessive, the incessantly rolling ball of a roulette wheel, and is always coming up with alternatives to alternatives – but we’ll talk more about that later.

When I met Igor, in the summer of 2009, I was twenty-six and he was forty-six. I had just left journalism school and a relationship with a Lebanese boy who had chiselled abs, a strong nose, hair that bounced when freshly washed, and enough brains to pass the civil-service entrance exams. Igor was less disciplined. And less slim, although I discovered at that point that I liked it that way. His fat belly, which I came to fetishize, had the consistency of a cushion filled with rice (and it pressed down on me when we fucked, like hundreds of sexual organs).

In bed, Igor feels like a brioche. He’s a soft round mass and I surround him like water. But as soon as his clothes are on – and I always find this surprising – he becomes an old grey-haired Russian. He sticks his chin out when he’s thinking. Sideways on, in these moments, he looks like a bulldog. Round glasses and dark-coloured sweaters suit him: they make him look like he could be a McGill history professor. Yet Igor is also something straight out of a pantomime; it sometimes occurs to him, for no apparent reason, to raise his arms and let out a piercing ululation, like North African women do in moments of celebration. He rides his bike through the streets of Paris, leaving crumpled receipts and the last strains of ‘La Madelon’ (with all the Rs rolled) trailing behind him. Everyone in our neighbourhood knows who he is, because of all this, and also because he stood as a leftist candidate in the 2014 local election.

*

Igor and I met on a Saturday evening in Saint-Ouen, on an editorial deadline. I was on a temporary contract at my first journalism job, a current-affairs and photojournalism magazine. That evening, in his Established Political Journalist’s office, he suggested I should interview Ségolène Royal, had a very long and very loud phone conversation with Bernard-Henri Lévy (whom he called ‘Bernard’ throughout) and made me listen to Mozart and Salieri on his computer. The audio was shit. He skipped from one clip to the other. His hand tapped out the rhythm on his desk. Could I hear the huge difference in talent? It was all ridiculous, and endearing.

That first contact took place a week before the death of his wife, at the age of forty-four. When our relationship started to take off, a month later, Igor was still crying in front of the Activia yoghurts in the supermarket and driving around in his in-laws’ old car. It was inside that car that he kissed me for the first time. I didn’t say no, but I pressed my lips together tightly to show him I saw complications down that path. Not the best start. After I’d left, I sent him a message to tell him he shouldn’t think I always kissed like that.

In our first weeks together, I watched him the way you’d watch someone about to jump through a ring of fire. He was exhilarated and I was curious. But as the months went by, I got used to his ways, his superhuman energy, and how he needed me in order to survive. After his wife’s death, Igor was all over me like a rash. Every morning, in my tiny attic apartment, he’d bring me a croissant and a can of Minute Maid orange juice. He followed me while I was out reporting. He would call me all the time: ‘I’m on my way.’ An excessive presence. Counter-intuitively, I started to love him because he would call me every half-hour, and then one day he didn’t for over three hours. I missed his restlessness (I live my life adagietto, rather slowly; I take after my grandmother, who used to say, ‘I can’t wait to go to bed tonight,’ from the moment she woke up in the morning). When, ten years later, I reread the fluvial messages he used to send me, it makes me choke.

This strangeness, now, when I don’t really know whether I’m the only one wanting/believing in/thinking about/hoping for tomorrows and day-after-tomorrows and on and on after that, without knowing for that matter whether I’m just extrapolating a temporary need (for you, for you, and for you again, in every possible way, but temporary all the same) or if something inside me has really recognized that the essential is there.

But at the time – I’m astonished by who I was then – I stashed them all away, and in the spring of 2010, ten months after we first met, the river of words having dried up, I decided I wanted to live with him. To cling to the cyclone. My body made it easy for me: I slipped over on an icy pavement and exploded my left elbow. My arm had to be kept still for three weeks. Thanks to these circumstances, I sublet my little apartment and moved myself in with him. I piled up my painkillers on his nightstand and waited for him to bring me food. Our whisperings usually began in the total darkness of the early morning. Later in the year, at daybreak, at his mother’s country house in Beauce (which has two flaws: you can hear the main road in the distance, and it’s located in a hollow, which makes bike rides difficult), I woke up and said to him: ‘So, are you ready to start again?’ On the uncomfortable mattress, under the musty covers pulled up around his shoulders, his little eyes shone. He replied: ‘That’s what we’re doing already.’

The difficulties of our relationship – his grief, the existence of his two grown-up children and the birth of our own two – took up all my energy for years. For a long time, I felt like some kind of thalassotherapy special offer for the bereaved. It took me a good two or three years to soothe my jealousy over the fact that I hadn’t been chosen over his wife, but to take care of him in her absence (and even then, not really chosen: I just happened to be in the office next door wearing a short skirt). A further year or two to stop feeling the need to put her down in my head. And then years more to feel affection for her and, finally, to relate to her.

By the spring of 2016, I was there. Soothed, relating to her. I was happy to see the Facebook statuses that Igor would post on each anniversary of her death. I checked who was liking them with benign approval. I wondered how she had managed to put up with Igor’s mess for so many years, his habit of getting everything out and never putting anything away. I approved of the presence of her ID photo in his wallet. I knew that, now it was broken, the watch that she’d given him was in the top drawer of his bedside table, which was dedicated to that kind of keepsake. I hoped (and also feared) that he would write a book about her one day. Obviously, I was afraid of turning forty-four. She’ll be on my mind from the very first second of that day.

So, on the eve of the beginning of the Joseph era, everything was going fine. Our complicated little family was doing well. We had moved out of his family apartment, where, on the wall opposite the bed, a photo of her in a turquoise bathing suit had still taken pride of place (I wonder now how I could have lived in that bedroom and slept in that marital bed, even if Igor went on her side and I took his). I got on well with their two children, who themselves had now each moved into their own one-bed apartments. In our new place there were still some photos of her – but not in our bedroom – and the furniture she’d chosen on the cusp of her fortieth birthday: a cabinet, a sideboard, a table, some black cushions. It was fine by me. Every day I was brushing past her belongings and catching up to her in age. I worked. I mothered my boys. In the evenings, after putting them to bed, I’d smoke a cigarette on the balcony while dreaming of the day when they’d have their showers on their own. I couldn’t wait to have myself to myself again. Igor and I made love once a week. It was a good rhythm. The age gap was a turn on. My body, eternally young.

*

After the drinks on the third floor and our excellent conversation about Boulogne-sur-Mer, Joseph was also smitten. Three days later, I bumped into him near the office while I was having a beer with an intern. We were standing outside on the pavement. He came and stood on my left. Just centimetres away from me. And this time, I noticed how he rocked back and forth (I know now that if he’s not moving his legs, he’s crossing his arms instead). When I left, he followed me without having any pretext. Then he waited with me for the blonde, curly-haired friend I was having dinner with. She arrived and parked her scooter on the square. He lingered. She walked towards us, curls poking out of her helmet. He was still waiting. He didn’t leave my side until, awkward at how we were all standing there, she asked if he was coming with us.

A few days later, I asked him to lunch. I took him to a restaurant which has the dual appeal of always being empty and also serving fresh sushi. He didn’t like raw fish, but he went along with it. I told him about my life with Igor and the children; I gave a darker version of the story so as not to put him off (we all do it, but that’s the image that will always stay in Joseph’s mind; the way we look at couples we’re scheming to destroy reminds me of the way a three-year-old looks at another kid’s sandcastle). On the way back from the restaurant, outside the office, Joseph asked me if I’d like to take part in his project of creating a space on the magazine’s website dedicated to art. Joseph was annoyed that our magazine always seemed to do its best not to stand out. We undervalued architecture terribly, for example, even though there was a niche to be filled. ‘Mm, yeah, it’s true, you’re right.’ Before we got in the lift, he uttered these words that I still find moving now: ‘Our magazine isn’t going through a crisis; it’s going through six.’ Here was someone who could manipulate an arbitrary opinion into absolute fact.

It was one idea out of the hundreds he had for saving us: in 2016, nobody was interested in weekly news magazines any more. An awkward publication schedule; a pointless recapitulation of the news. The summer went by with a few email exchanges about the website project. Once the page, which I’d vaguely helped to put together, was uploaded, I wrote to him saying it would be a relief to stop flirting with each other (which is what I, especially, had been doing). That’s how I called for us to put our desire into words. He replied that he’d quite like us to continue. I remember exactly where I was when I read those first words, announcing the action. I was on my way to pick up my son from nursery, a metre from the entrance. I performed a triple somersault (in my head). That evening I was a mother in high spirits. Laughing as I picked up grains of rice from between the parquet tiles like it was the most hilarious thing in the world.

After that exchange, it was me again who suggested a drink. One evening in September 2016, we sat down at a table outside a bar-tabac. We talked for some time about the magazine and its financial situation: this was the pretext conversation, a sign of our good manners and of our feelings. At the end of War and Peace, when Natasha and Pierre are finally together and talking about anything and everything, Tolstoy writes: ‘Just as in a dream, when all is uncertain, unreasoning and contradictory, except the feeling that guides the dream, so in this intercourse, contrary to all laws of reason, the words themselves were not consecutive and clear, but only the feeling that prompted them.’

Then the bar closed its shutters and we went across the road, to a touristy brasserie that stays open all night. There, surrounded by beer-drinking foreigners, the conversation arrived at its true purpose. Joseph told me that the situation was really bothering him because, if we gave it free rein, it would end with us packing up moving boxes. He would end up wanting to live with me. Since he liked the shape of my nose and my way of expressing myself, he was already daydreaming about us living together in a big, light-filled apartment. I didn’t know what to say: I could picture the apartment and the light, but I wasn’t quite there. I was fine where I was. I wondered in particular why it was a problem that he could see things going so well. He said, ‘It’s a problem because I’m a huge coward.’ That made me laugh. Since when do cowardly men announce it with a loudspeaker? Since Joseph. I understood later: his technique involves showing the worst of yourself at a point when the other person isn’t yet susceptible to getting upset about it. You can then consider them to have been warned. Declare all future complaints null and void. Wash your hands of it. In short, what I had taken for flirtatiousness was in fact part of his modus operandi.

So, that evening, when I was taking nothing of what he was saying seriously, Joseph explained to me that we wouldn’t kiss, because it was all too heavy for us to actually go through with it. I made wide eyes at him: ‘Obviously we’re going to kiss. Of course we will, because we want to.’ Towards ten o’clock we were back in front of our darkened office building. I wished I could make the fluorescent yellow child seat, reminding me of my imminent betrayal, disappear from my electric bike. I kissed him. I have no memory of how it felt. But I still have the image of him walking towards the opening of the Métro. He wasn’t whistling. His body was tense. He was dreading something.

A few days later, I scored a second drink. Joseph told me he couldn’t really see what there was to add to our previous discussion, but he still crossed Paris to come and join me. I still thought he was being a ridiculous tease. I was coming from a meeting with a far-right militant who lives in the tower blocks of Chinatown. The guy’s an antisemite, but he has a fast way of talking and a strong Burgundy accent that always cheers me up. So I was in a bright and optimistic mood. And, optimistically, I once more announced to Joseph that I wanted to kiss him. While he once more explained to me why it couldn’t happen: ‘I met my partner very young and I’ve poured everything into being with her.’ (Here he made a gesture of pouring water on someone.) ‘The way you’re making me feel is unprecedented. What I’d really like to do is put you under a bell-jar and keep you on my desk.’ So, the life of a cheese, then. At the top of the Métro steps, he said goodbye.

I walked down the passage of that station in south Paris, one of the rare few I wasn’t familiar with, shrugging my shoulders several times in different ways. Well. I’d been tossed aside. Igor had got me used to taking first and thinking later. Joseph, on the other hand, wouldn’t even dare to touch. Okay then. Waiting for the train, I thought about the marshmallow test. The experiment where they sit a nursery-age child alone in a room with a marshmallow in front of them. They’re given a choice: they can gobble it up straight away, but if they resist and wait for the researcher to come back, they can have two. There are the children who manage to wait (and will do well in life), and there are the others. And then there’s Joseph, aged four, who never even opens his mouth.

In the days following that first goodbye, I felt myself coming down. My face lost its points of symmetry and my body got so weak that, coming back from reporting in Rouen, I fainted on the train. Keeled right over. Joseph found out and it gave him food for thought: perhaps I wasn’t so threatening after all, if I was the sort to swoon on the train like a Victorian lady? The week after, while we were catching up, I told him off for his sang-froid. He had the manner of a Russian spy. He smiled, we parted ways politely. An hour later, he wound up sending me a message that he wanted to see me right away. (I want to see you right now, Alone, Come: Joseph pushes the eroticism of these authoritative phrases to its limit.)