Whitney FI’s Reviews > Life: A User's Manual > Status Update

The bedroom is already a dead man’s room, and furniture, objects, and knickknacks already seem to be awaiting this coming death with polished indifference, standing in their proper places, properly clean, fixed for an all time impersonal silence.

I wanted you for my wife, and I wanted your child. I have neither the one nor the other, and that has been going on for so long now that I have stopped wondering whether it is hate or love which gives us the strength to continue this life of lies, which provides the formidable energy that allows us to go on suffering, and hoping.

Bartlebooth was sufficiently aware, if only from having experienced it himself, of the havoc that passion may wreak on the most sensible people, to know the critic’s words were no idle threat.

Mademoiselle Crespi was born in a village in the hills behind Ajaccio. She left Corsica at twelve & has never been back. Sometimes she closes her eyes & can see the landscape that lay beyond the window of the room in which everyone lived: the wall covered with bougainvillea in flower, the slope on which tufts of spurge grew, the hedge of prickly pear, the caper espalier; but she cannot remember anything else.

Finally, Bartlebooth turned to Véronique Altamont, because he had learned that she was studying watercolors & enjoyed doing puzzles. Since then, almost every day, the chit of a girl comes to spend an hour or two with the old Englishman, putting the little wooden pieces into his hand one by one, as she describes in her still, small voice the imperceptible differences of color between them.

Half-hanging in empty space, Carel listened to Ursula with tears in his eyes & when she had finished her story he swore to free her the very next day. As a token of his oath he slipped his signet ring onto her finger, an opaline corundum within an ovoid bezel. “For the Ancients,” he told her, “this stone was the symbol of memory & there is a legend that whoever sees this ring will never be able to forget.”

The main problem was to stay neutral, objective, and above all flexible, that is to say free of preconceptions. But, that is exactly where Gaspard Winckler laid his traps.

People said on some nights she held sumptuous parties, that men came to see her clandestinely, always shortly before midnight. People said that a third person also lived in the flat, but was not allowed to be seen, and that ghostly abominable noises rose through the cavities of the chimney, making children sit bolt upright in bed out of fright.

Today it is Isabelle’s turn to care for her father, who is now often sick. She does the shopping, beats the eggs into omelettes, scours the pots, keeps house. She is a thin little girl with a sad face and gloomy eyes who spends hours in front of her mirror whispering frightful stories to herself.

It was during this unforgettable journey that one evening, facing the crenellated walls of Rovingo, Valène declared to the young woman that he loved her, and obtained in reply only an ineffable smile. Many times he dreamt of eloping with her, or fleeing from her, but they stayed where they were, near yet far, in the warmth and despair of an insuperable friendship.