Free Mend the Living by Maylis de Kerangal Page B

after all this time, after this heaping up of silence; she has imagined this moment for a long time, promising herself that she will be so beautiful when it comes, beautiful as she still can be, and that he will be dazzled at least if not touched, but now dried tears have stretched her skin and it’s dry as though covered with a clay mask, and her swollen lids only weakly ventilate the pale pale green he likes to plumb.
    She empties the glass of gin in one gulp, and then he’s there, standing before her, haggard and ravaged; bits of wood dusting his hair, sticking in the folds of his clothes and the creases of his sweater. She gets up, a sudden movement, her chair topples over – clatters to the ground – but she doesn’t turn, stands facing him, one hand flat against the table to support her shaking body, the other hanging at her side – they look at each other for a fraction of a second and then with one step they’re embracing, an embrace with a crazy force, as though they were crushing themselves into one another, heads pressed together hard enough to split open, shoulders compressed beneath the mass of thoraxes, arms bruised from holding on so hard, they intermingle scarves, vests, and coats; the kind of embrace you give in order to become a rock in the cyclone, a stone before leaping into the void, like something from the end of the world, while at the same time, at the exact same time, it’s also a gesture that reconnects them – their lips touch – that underlines and does away with the distance, and when they disincarcerate each other, when they finally release each other, stunned, done in, they’re like sailors washed up after a shipwreck.
    Once they’re sitting down, Sean sniffs Marianne’s glass. Gin? Marianne smiles – clowning – points to the menu on the wall and begins to read aloud all the things he could order for lunch this Sunday, for example a croque-monsieur, croque-madame, Perigord salad, haddock and potatoes, plain omelette, tartine provençale, fried sausages, crème caramel, crème vanille, apple tart, and if she could she would read the whole chalkboard out to him and keep reading over and over in order to delay the moment when she would have to put it back on, the costume of the bird of ill omen, those feathers of darkness and tears. He lets her go on, watches her without a word, and then gives in to impatience and grabs her by the wrist, his hand cuffing the slender joint and compressing the artery, please, stop. He, too, orders a gin.
    Then Marianne arms herself with courage – arms herself, yes, that’s exactly it, there is this naked aggression that hasn’t stopped growing since their embrace and which she covers herself with now, the way we protect ourselves by brandishing the blade of the dagger – and, from the bench seat, direct, delivers the three propositions she has prepared – her eyes stare straight ahead. When he hears the last one – “irreversible” – Sean shakes his head and his face twists, convulses, no, no, no, and he gets up, heavy, bumps against the table – the gin spills over the rim of the glass – heads for the door, arms at his sides and fists tight as though he were carrying a weight, the bearing of a man who’s going out to break someone’s face, who’s looking for him already, and when he gets to the doorstep outside he turns abruptly, comes back to the table, moving through the ray of light traced on the ground, and his backlit silhouette is haloed with a greyish powder: the sawdust that covers him lifts into space each time his foot hits the ground. His body smokes. And he’s storming forward, chest inclined as though he were about to charge. Once he reaches the table he grabs the glass of gin and, like her, empties it in one gulp, then shoots at Marianne, who’s already knotting her scarf, let’s go.

T he room is bathed in half-light, the ground reflects a curdled sky between the blinds, and, as a result, you have to