That was how our conversations began, as we talked about the articles. We were surprised, we got along well. There were nearly ten years between us, but we didn’t really feel it. She had never befriended anyone as young as me. She said it was her wealth that had kept her apart from her generation. In Paris all her friends were older than her. But now she had got to know me, and she thought I was an easy person to like, or at least that is what she said.
We always ended with the agony aunt column. The stories amused us, even if they were not funny. We could not understand how these women could share their problems with someone they did not know. Thus, we came upon the misfortunes of one poor Geneviève.
‘My husband is unfaithful to me, he never dines with me in the evening and comes home late. What shall I do?’
To which the journalist replied:
‘Geneviève, your fate, alas, is that of many women. If you love your husband, continue to greet him as you do, without abandoning your calm. Reproaches would only drive him away from home, that is why I insist that you continue to be a wife in every sense of the term. Your husband will grow weary of his misconduct and will surely return to you.’
I remember this answer because of the way Madame M. reacted.
‘Who does this journalist think she is? What one ought to do or not do, what one is supposed to think or not think…Is there no salvation outside their standards?! I cannot bear this sort of talk!’
She went into a terrible rage, just like that, for no particular reason. I was astonished; as a rule this column, if anything, made us laugh.
I thought back on Sophie’s words, ‘Since she has got to know you, Madame M. has been improving by the day,’ and her husband’s ‘If I agreed to come and live here, it was so you would feel better.’
This woman didn’t seem to be unhappy by nature; there had to be a specific cause. Why had she come to L’Escalier for refuge? Whom was she ‘avoiding’, as her husband put it? I sensed it would serve no purpose to ask her. Not now. Her fit of rage was merely rage, not the beginning of an explanation, and as I did not really know what to say, I had a rather silly idea. I suggested we write a letter to this ‘Marie-Madeleine’, as the journalist called herself, to tell her just how much we disapproved of her advice.
I had hoped in suggesting we write this letter that it might give me some clue as to what had happened to Madame M., but it didn’t, she merely calmed down as quickly as she had flown off the handle. Letters to ‘Mary Pigpen’, however, became one of our rituals. We never sent them. Just writing them was enough to amuse us.
Madame M. might never have told me a thing if I hadn’t arrived one morning at L’Escalier in a panic, in the midst of an asthma attack. ‘I’m going to die, I’m going to die, I’m bleeding, look, I’m bleeding.’ Madame M. immediately understood what was going on. She smiled; she too had not dared say a thing to her parents the day it happened to her. She asked Sophie to run a hot bath for me to ease the pain. I don’t know how long I stayed in that bathtub looking at my belly, completely astonished by what was going on inside it. Were there many more secrets like this that life had in store?
The gong sounded for lunch, Madame M. brought me a bathrobe. When I stood up the blood began gushing down my legs again. I watched as the stain grew larger in the bathwater and I thought what a lovely painting it would make. Madame M. was also staring at the red patches that were taking some time to dissolve, and then she gave me an odd look. When I got out of the bathtub, there in front of me she took off her dress and her underwear, and she lay down in my dirty bathwater. I shall never forget, I was so embarrassed. I knew then that she would tell me everything.
*
It all began just after their wedding. Madame M. was nineteen, her husband was twenty. They had been devastated by the shocking death of their parents. They were unhappy, overwhelmed by heavy responsibilities. Her husband did not want to take over the family business. Property, land, companies: he decided to sell everything. Already all he could think of was journalism. They spent long months arranging everything and had time for nothing else. But then, as heirs, they had the inevitable reflex: what was the point of their considerable fortune if they had no one to leave it to?
In the beginning Madame M. wasn’t really worried. All the women in her entourage told her she simply had to wait for nature to take its course, it was only a matter of months. And besides, their parents’ death had been so sudden, one ought not to underestimate the shock.
But two years went by and nature still had not taken its course. Those couples who had got married when they did already had a child, some were even expecting their second. Madame M. was desperate. She had followed excruciating diets. She had taken medication she made up on her own, but nothing worked. Completely at a loss, she ended up inflicting torture on herself. But no matter what she tried, she did not get pregnant. Her story was horrifying. That is why she had come to settle at L’Escalier. To get away from those terrible memories.
By the time she stopped talking the water was cold, her lips were blue. Sophie was knocking on the door. Madame M. stood up, and I could not help but look at her body. Her skin was marked from her buttocks to her knees. The lesions were healing but I could still see the scars from the blows she had inflicted on herself. ‘To awaken the sleeping organs’, books advised ‘whipping the lower back and the inner thighs until they bleed.’ I could not understand how she could have subjected herself to such a thing. Her answer was chilling. ‘Because that is the only advice there is for infertile women.’ She had never looked at me like that. In that moment I remember thinking she no longer found me such an ‘easy person to like’, as she put it.
We sat down at the dinner table. Neither one of us was hungry, but we forced ourselves, so we wouldn’t have to speak. It seemed to me that I understood her. In a way I missed the brother or sister I had never had as much as she missed the child she could not have. I just wanted to reassure her when I told her that some day it would work, that my parents had also waited a very long time before they had me. She didn’t answer. She went on eating in silence.
After my parents, and then Madame M., I thought it was something of a coincidence, all these people around me yearning for children. And as I had never known what purpose I served in life, that day as I sat there staring at my piece of lamb I believed that my role in life would be to fight infertility. Suddenly it became absolutely clear to me. ‘The room without walls’, the paintings, Alberto – at last I had a way to thank her for everything she had done for me. I did not know how to tell her. The agony aunt column was there before me. I took a sheet of paper and a pencil and I wrote, reading it out loud.
‘Dear Mary Pigpen, a woman I love with all my heart cannot have a child. I don’t want children. The only thing that matters to me in life is painting. So I would like to bear her child for her. That way I could, in turn, give her what she needs in life.’
Madame M. did not look up. I saw her tears flowing into her plate, she went on eating without looking at me, shaken by terrible sobs. She eventually managed to say that the young girl who was writing this letter was extremely kind, but she didn’t know what she was saying, and Mary Pigpen was bound to bring her back to her senses. And then she stood up and left the dining room. We did not speak of it any more.
When, two months later, she told me she would do it, at first I did not understand. And then she murmured that we would have to be very careful so that no one would know. At the time I did not know what to say. I had made the suggestion in the heat of our conversation because everything had got muddled in my head. The idea of my recently discovered fertility. Her infertility. Her sorrow. My gratitude. Now the idea seemed a bit foolish. But I quickly reassured myself: her husband would never agree to it.
‘I have managed to convince my husband: you will try just once, and if it works, it works, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. God will decide.’
She did not ask me my opinion again. She explained in minute detail how it would all come about. I would not have to do a thing, it would not take long, she promised. She had arranged everything. Her husband would be coming back within the hour and she thought it would be a good idea if we made the most of