This Little Family. Inès Bayard

      Bois-le-Roi is a delightful place. The Forest of Fontainebleau protects its inhabitants, nestling them in a natural, leafy cradle of calm. The reddish facades of the large buhrstone buildings peep through the impressive oak trees that edge the old properties. Below them the Seine flows past. They can hear the sound of the water, the pressure of it. This is where they’ve chosen to have their picnic. In crisp beams of autumn sunlight Marie’s mother, Irene, is busy unwrapping the picnic basket she prepared this morning. A multitude of bread rolls arranged perfectly by flavor give the finishing touch to the bucolic mood of the scene.

      It’s nearly three weeks since Marie’s assault. Her vagina has stopped hurting. The pain inflicted by her rape has disappeared, taking with it the few precise recollections that clung to her memory. She has continued to make love with her husband. He still hasn’t noticed anything unusual about her behavior, just a few bad moods put down to stress and tiredness.

      Laurent is unfolding the fishing rods down by the river with his father-in-law, Gérard. They’re hoping to grill their catch this evening. Marie’s father, a retired pharmacist, has always exercised a kindly authority over his family. His wife, a stay-at-home mother who attentively raised their two daughters, showed no inclination to have a career. Being a mother was enough for her. Marie has never thought to ask her whether she was truly happy, whether having a child could fill the void that she sometimes feels opening up around her. “Children are life itself,” her mother often tells her. “When life is added to life, what more could you want to give meaning to everything else?”

      Marie is helping her sister change her baby’s diaper on the plaid blanket. He seems to like his aunt. She forces a smile.

      “How are things at the bank? I heard it was heating up right now.” The pitiful ordinariness of the questions Marie has to answer shoots through her head at the speed of sound. Is she such a good actor? How can this loving, affectionate, attentive family, this husband who’s so close to his wife, not see anything, how come not one of them has noticed the change in her? They’re uncorking the champagne, handing around petit fours on china plates. It’s absurdly cheerful. Marie feels like taking the big knife, snatching it from her mother and, in sheer desperation, driving it straight into her heart and slicing it down into her belly.

      Laurent comes back, swinging the half-full bag of fish from one hand to the other. He’s pleased. Marie finds him uglier by the minute. With his fishing rod, his blissful look of permanent happiness, and his perfect little life, she feels like spitting on him, ramming something right down his throat. Someone needs to focus on the details in this tableau that has no visible flaws. No one thinks to do that, preferring instead the smooth, supple contours of reassuring surface emotions. Whatever happens they wouldn’t want to make out the black stains, the dysfunction and the torment. Marie remembers how shocked she was when she first saw Magritte’s paintings on a trip to Brussels with Laurent. She’d always been fascinated by the precision of his work, the almost photographic mastery of his subject, his perfect grasp of the laws of perspective, but was terribly disappointed. Proximity can shatter everything in an instant. As she moved closer to her favorite work, The Castle of the Pyrenees, featuring a huge rock suspended in the sky with a small medieval town on its summit, she noticed the first imperfections. The irregular brushstrokes, the rough-hewn curves and contours, cracks in the paint … It was so disappointing, so far removed from everything she’d envisioned about this artistic perfection that she’d believed in since she first came across the painting as a child, on the glossy paper of a school book.

      The sun illuminates the scene. Its gilded beams light up the damp lawn, radiate through the air. Only Marie is surrounded by gloom. In total darkness. She has the same faltering feeling as in that museum. The veil is finally being lifted on her existence, crushing the idealistic lie. She longs for silence to think over what she can do to extricate herself. They all clink their glasses. Marie feels like snapping the tablecloth out from under them as they guzzle champagne and macaroons, she wants to topple them over like glasses, break the crockery and dump everything on the ground. She never wants to feel her vagina again. Neither the suffering nor the arousal that are destroying her day after day. No one will ever touch her again.

      “What’s this, then? Don’t you like champagne anymore?” her father says. “And I thought it would make you happy, it’s your favorite!” He puts his strong arms around her, squeezing her a little too tightly. Within a second she’s driven away her thoughts and buried her longings and is smiling at him. She eats and drinks, and kisses her husband, mother, and sister. She forgets the details, camouflages the flaws, ejects the pain, represses her disgust at the indifference of her loved ones. Their lunch is over. They need to go home, Roxane’s baby is getting cold.

      Marie clings to her Monday morning delay like a precious undying feature. Some things mustn’t change. Laurent found his file right away, he’ll be on time. He wanted to make love to Marie last night. She couldn’t refuse, she gave herself to him with complete abandon. She lost that game long ago. The memories are gradually being quashed in her mind. She puts her cup in the sink and suddenly feels dizzy. Then it stops. She’s not sleeping well at the moment and, when Laurent’s not looking, she takes a lot of sleeping tablets before bed. Maybe the pills’ harmful side effects are making her weaker than usual.

      She heads off to the bank on her new bicycle. Hervé’s happy to see her and shows her a picture on his phone of the turtledove he decided to buy on Saturday at a pet store on the banks of the Seine. “The look on Corinne’s face when she realized the cage had a new occupant! I just saw that and I knew I was going to have the best weekend of my life!”

      Marie goes to her office for her nine-thirty meeting. She puts down her coffee and turns on her computer. Her stomach clenches, her eyes glaze over. Time stands still, the taste of urine comes back to her. Her vagina contracts, instinctively protecting itself. Her old phone has been placed in the middle of her desk. Marie can still feel it vibrating at her feet in that car. She remembers the configuration of the screen, the colors, the rhythm of the new message ringtone, her finger typing away on the keypad a few minutes before the attack. He has been in this office. He’s decided to come back into her life. She slowly picks up the phone. “Oh yes, the CEO’s assistant came by this morning. He found your phone after the last meeting, he wanted to give it back to you in person but you’d left already.” He’s lying to everyone too. She’s not the only one. She’s strangely reassured by this thought, it brings her closer to him in the intimacy of their shared secret. They’re in the same boat, perhaps even in the same dead end. When she’s plugged the phone in to charge it she switches it on, rereads Laurent’s messages, now finds them appallingly childish, thoughtless, almost indecent. Why did the CEO want to give her back her phone? There’s no evidence left now. He’s completely in the clear, it would be her word against his. No gynecological examination, no traces of violence, his car must have been cleaned from top to bottom the very next day, Marie threw her clothes in the bin. No one knows about it, it’s too late, the moment has passed.

      Her client arrives late and she asks for him to wait in the corridor. She feels like throwing up. She runs to the bathroom, flips up the lid, and spews out her breakfast. It’s too much of a shock. Everything’s getting more and more complicated. One thing leading to another. But life just keeps on doing the opposite of what she wants, and she decides that today must go ahead without a letup.

      

      A section of boulevard Voltaire is blocked because of a strike. The warm croissants will go cold. “You need to take rue Richard-Lenoir,” a policeman tells her, and she has an urge to retort that that was the street where she was raped and she doesn’t feel like walking along it, and, as an agent of the law, he should find another solution by way of compensation. She doesn’t say anything. The entrance to the car park isn’t all that wide, after all. It was dark, but Marie suddenly thinks it strange that no one saw anything. She pictures people turning away at the point where the deepest core of her parted company with the rest of her body,