This Little Family

Hervé, the other asset management adviser, is particularly anxious. He knows he hasn’t made the grade during this first trimester and Marie feels bad for him. She can tell that this man, pushing fifty and coming toward the end of his career, is especially despondent about his work, his clients, and the pace imposed by the company’s new diktats. He’d like to give up but has no choice. He needs to pay the mortgage, provide pocket money for his thankless teenage daughter, support the wife with whom he hasn’t been able to picture a loving future for years, and keep a little money for his passion, ornithology. Hervé is fascinated by wild pigeon species, turtledoves in particular. In a drawer of his desk he keeps a secret file of all the articles he’s found on the subject. He’s very proud of it. After a difficult appointment with a client or sometimes simply for the pleasure of it, he takes out his file and spends the rare moments of peace in his life leafing through these yellowed photographs of birds gliding through the air. Hervé is endearing but deeply unhappy.

Marie sits herself at the meeting table, laden with a pile of files that she hopes will be adequate in her defense. There’s a deathly silence in the large room except for the crackling of a fluorescent light with a loose connection. The branch manager gets up to switch it off. Marie has always been awed by her crisp manner and authoritative stride. When the two of them are alone in her office, Marie keeps her head down, trying to avoid eye contact. Colette Sirmont is a strong, willful, demanding, and almost oppressive career woman. Marie sees nothing of herself in any of her characteristics, either in her professional or her personal life. When Marie has meetings with her clients alone she’s relaxed, at her ease, and sometimes even surprisingly amusing. Her work at the bank allows her to play the part of someone else. With Laurent she can’t seem to establish her identity as anything other than gentle and restrained, just as she already was with him and his friends ten years ago. All around the room people eye their colleagues, studying them in an effort to determine who’s in the worst position.

The CEO arrives and slams the door. Faces screw up, hands don’t know where to put themselves, throats constrict politely. He’s tall, imposing, a rather attractive man. The women have noticed. With the sharp eyes of someone accustomed to managing other people, he quickly takes up his position at the head of the table. And is happier staying on his feet.

Marie watches him from afar. While his assistant starts up the overhead projector, he begins his talk, saying that he won’t have time to discuss things case by case and would prefer to analyze individual results in one-on-one meetings over the coming week. There’s a ripple of relief around the room. Marie is asked to speak about her experience selling the new life insurance package. She stands up, eyes lowered, and walks over to join the CEO. He stares at her intently, appraising her. Marie can smell his scent. A powerful combination of eau de cologne, leather, and sandalwood. She never wears perfume, Laurent doesn’t like it. When Marie has finished her report she walks back to her seat, under the satisfied gaze of the CEO. A colleague congratulates her, saying she argued her case well for her marketing methods. After an hour the CEO brings the meeting to a close and everyone leaves the room to return to work. Hervé is relieved but he knows it won’t last and that he has only a few days’ respite before receiving his sentence. As she leaves, Marie catches the CEO’s eye, and he smiles and nods at her. She has three more meetings this afternoon. She gets on with her day.

It’s six thirty. Marie has finished helping the day’s clients understand financial codes of practice and can leave at last. Once outside, she finds to her surprise that she still has that effervescent feeling. She’s so calm, level, moderate, and patient, Paris gives her a buzz, brings her alive. She always felt slightly wrong living out of town as a teenager. Granted, Bois-le-Roi isn’t far from Paris, but she was frustrated by the journey she had to make on the transilien train every weekend to meet up with her friends in the city. She always knew she’d live in Paris later.

The October night is closing in and she thinks the rue Meslay feels darker than usual, perhaps one of the streetlights isn’t working. Marie doesn’t remember exactly where she left her bike. Maybe outside the little Turkish restaurant where she likes to have lunch on Thursdays. The street is as good as deserted, with just a few pedestrians hurrying home. The tall buildings are lit up with warm lights. She’s always liked looking into apartment windows when she walks through the city’s streets. Discovering people’s intimate lives, their taste in interior design, seeing children playing and parents chatting on the balcony or cooking. She suddenly wonders whether other people do this too, whether anyone watches her walking around her apartment. Under the weak glow of the streetlights she can make out her bicycle in the distance. It’s tipped onto the ground, the front wheel horribly twisted, one tire gone, and the frame broken. Horrified, she runs over, tries pointlessly to stand it back up against the pillar, but quickly realizes she won’t be able to ride it. She feels helpless. This is the first time in her life she’s been the victim of an act of vandalism. She casts around for some form of help and reaches into her bag for her phone to call Laurent. She knows that he won’t come over for such a small thing and is bound to tell her to catch the Métro home, but she needs to hear his voice, to be reassured. He picks up on the second ring.

“You’ll never believe this, someone tried to steal my bike. I don’t even have a front wheel now, they trashed the whole thing.” Laurent is on edge, he’s about to go into a meeting to set up Gérard Lancarde’s defense. He tells her to take the Métro and leave her bike where it is. While she’s still talking to Laurent she notices a familiar-looking silhouette on the same side of the pavement as she is. The company’s CEO recognizes her.

“Well, well, what happened to you?” Marie hangs up. She’s slightly ashamed, feels stupid with her beaten-up bike. She explains the situation, doing her best to disguise her distress. The CEO smiles and tries to calm her with a friendly pat on the shoulder. “Look, my car isn’t far at all. I could drive you home if you like. Where do you live?” Marie looks at him for a moment, embarrassed. Then, not keen to take the Métro, which will be packed with rush-hour commuters, she decides to accept his offer.

On the way to his car they fall in step together, the clipped rhythm of their footsteps resonating on the pavement. He hardly says a word but smiles at her from time to time, turning to face her. She’s awed by him. He’s the CEO. He takes his car keys from his coat to open the Mercedes that’s perfectly parked by the curb. The headlights flash. He seems somehow proud of this flourish while still careful to remain strangely modest. Marie settles into the passenger seat. The smell of leather mingles with a strong blast of the scent she smelled on him during the afternoon’s meeting. He throws his coat onto the rear seat and then sits down and starts up the car; the engine purrs. Marie is relieved it’s not a very long journey. Her phone chimes in her bag. It’s a message from Laurent, asking if everything’s okay. He’ll be home late because he’s agreed to have dinner with his client, and tells her not to wait up. Marie’s disappointed, she would have liked him to be with her this evening to comfort her.

The CEO turns on the radio and Marie recognizes the opening notes of Erik Satie’s Third Gnossienne, her father’s favorite. In an instant this composition with its ambiguous melodies darkens her interpretation of Paris. The darkness feels stifling, the heady smell of sandalwood and the lights reflecting on the windshield giddying. The end of boulevard Voltaire appears at last. The man doesn’t move a muscle, his hands clamped firmly to the steering wheel, his eyes staring ahead, his lips motionless. She doesn’t dare turn to look at him. Time slows, freezes, chokes the space. Everything stagnates. She wants to get out. A car stops on a level with them at a red light and a woman smiles at her briefly before looking away. The car sets off again. There are only a few buildings left before they reach her apartment but there are no parking spaces and the boulevard is full of traffic. Marie wants to be let off onto the street but he chooses instead to drive around into rue Richard-Lenoir to find a better place. “This city really is impossible for cars.”

Marie feels the engine slow at last and the radio snaps off. They now enter a private car park where he pulls into a space. Silence settles into the darkness, against which she can make out the man’s tall silhouette. There are no passersby. “Thank you so much for driving me home, it was very kind of you. I mean, you really didn’t have to. I’m sorry but I need to go now, my husband’s expecting me and he’ll be worried.” She doesn’t know exactly why she came up with this lie. A subtle discomfort grips her stomach like the protracted suspense a viewer feels watching a film, before everything becomes clear at the end.

“Wouldn’t you like to stay here with me for a while?” the man asks, still looking dead ahead, his hands resting loosely on the steering wheel.

Marie starts to feel the first inklings of panic. She curses whoever destroyed her bike this evening, cornering her in this uncomfortable situation. “I really think you should stay awhile,” he insists. Marie hears the sudden clunk of the lock on her door. He’s locking her in. His shadow—an imposing, frightening presence—moves slowly closer, approaching her with implied intimacy. She feels something cold and smooth slide over her thighs. A shudder runs through her whole body, which is still secured to the seat by her seat belt. She struggles and asks him firmly to stop and let her out. She wants to scream but, strangely, doesn’t dare to. She wonders why this is … Maybe she doesn’t want to disturb the whole neighborhood, draw attention to herself for nothing. She doesn’t want to embarrass herself in front of her CEO for seeing an assault in what might simply be a rather clumsy attempt at seduction.

He anticipates her every reaction and swiftly flattens one hand over her mouth while his other hand insinuates itself inside her blouse and works progressively down toward her knickers. He drives his fingers inside her. Marie’s body shakes, sweating from every pore, her flesh frozen into the thick leather of her seat. She starts to fight, pushing against his chest that’s pinning her down. He’s too strong, much too strong. She now knows she won’t be able to escape. Marie is going to be raped here in this car. Like those women on TV who describe how they were attacked, she’ll have to go through that too. She struggles with all her might. Her wrists are bruised, her legs pinioned, her voice silenced, her stomach crushed. She can hear the man’s moans, his little gasps of pleasure in the crook of her neck. He unhooks her seat belt and presses firmly on the lever to lower her backrest. She jolts down and back. He spreads himself over her, mounts onto her. Marie can feel his erection through his trousers. She keeps fighting, screaming. No one will hear. Her thin arms are gripped by just one of the man’s hands while his other hand labors to undo his belt and the fly buttons on his suit. She feels her phone fall onto the car floor mat, vibrating and ringing under her feet, and is overwhelmed with frustration that she can’t reach it. The silk knickers that Laurent bought her for Valentine’s Day last year are torn in a fraction of a second. He scratches her at the same time. One last surge of energy convulses her, twisting her body in every direction, her feet stretching as far as they can to get away from him. She’s very soon exhausted, drained of strength. All her limbs ache for failing to help her. He penetrates her. The to-and-fro starts up, slowly at first, then harder. It hurts. Her vagina is dry, its walls rasped until they bleed. She remembers the slight burning sensations she had a few years ago because of genital herpes, and how much that hurt.

The man suddenly stops. With a single confident hand he grabs her hair and forces her over onto her stomach. Marie hears him mutter a few words, but can’t give the sounds any meaning. Reality distorts, nothing exists anymore. She’s going to wake up. Maybe she’s just in the bank’s staff rest area. Maybe her mind misinterpreted the look the man gave her before he left the meeting. She’s fallen asleep. Hervé’s going to wake her. His penis is hard as a weapon. He strikes deep inside her belly with violent thrusts. The pain makes her throw up over the rear seat. He doesn’t stop. His breathing accelerates. “Come here!” he says, lifting his heavy body toward Marie’s face. His hard penis hovers expectantly under her mouth. “Go on, put it in your mouth.” She twists her head in every direction, begs him to stop, tries to free herself from his hold. He stills her face with his hands, and his knees restrict her movements, then he rams his penis into her mouth, right to the back of her throat. It smells slightly of urine. She’s going to choke. She bites into it with her teeth. He pulls out and slaps her. “Filthy bitch! So that’s what you want!” He still has an erection. He comes back into her from behind, sodomizing her. She’s never done this with anyone. Marie can feel liquid trickling over her legs. The pain is intolerable. He switches back to her vagina and eventually comes inside her with a groan of pleasure. It’s over. His penis is limp, soaked in semen, vomit, blood, excrement, and vaginal fluid. He’s satisfied and clambers furtively back to his seat to button up his trousers. “That’s it, you can go.”

Marie sits up painfully, her body burning, swollen, weighed down with the agony of her slack muscles and her taut compressed skin. The locks click open. She steps out of the car, her trousers still hanging down over the tops of her thighs. He grabs her arm firmly and pulls her back onto the seat. “If you talk to anyone about what happened, you, your husband and your career are all finished. No one’ll believe you, so you keep your mouth shut and everything can go on like before.” In the feeble yellow glow of a streetlight Marie surreptitiously notices the gleam of a wedding ring on the man’s finger. The car engine starts up. She climbs out and stumbles a few steps out of the car park. The door slams behind her and the car pulls away.

Marie doesn’t tell herself it’s over. She knows this is just the beginning. The entrance to her building is a little farther up the street, on the corner of the boulevard Voltaire. It’s not quite eight o’clock; Laurent is most likely having his dinner. He must have been on the way to the restaurant, joking with his colleagues and his new client while his wife was being raped by her boss, penetrated in every orifice on the seat of a car. She goes into the building and meets the caretaker wheeling out the rubbish bins. “Hello, Madame Campan, how are you?” Marie keeps her head down and slips away into the shadows in the corridor, answering with “A little tired, but I’m fine! Good night” as she goes up in the lift. She hopes he didn’t notice anything unusual. She knows already that she’s in the process of hiding the evil event, that she won’t say anything, that no one will ever know about the assault.

The apartment is shrouded in darkness partially diluted by the open curtains allowing light from the boulevard into the living room. There’s no one there. She’d like to call her husband to reassure him. Every step toward the kitchen is painful. The central corridor that leads to all the rooms in the apartment seems never-ending, almost ridiculous. She picks up the handset that she left on the sideboard this morning and dials Laurent’s number. She hopes he doesn’t pick up so she can leave a controlled message with no fluctuations or lurching in her breathing. He doesn’t answer. “Yes, it’s me. So I finally got home, one of the Métro lines was blocked … I’m going to take a shower and go to bed, I’m exhausted. I hope everything’s going well with your client. I love you.”

She hangs up, feeling absent, empty. She thinks this is best, and anyway, if she wanted to admit anything to him she wouldn’t find the right way to do it. He would always look at her differently, not only as his wife but as the victim, the woman who was raped, sodomized for the first time by another penis than his. Marie is suddenly aware of the smell of vomit on her. She doesn’t have the strength to take a shower but she still needs to. If she were single she would just take some sleeping pills and go to bed, but if she doesn’t wash now Laurent will notice this aftershave that isn’t his on his wife’s body, the sheets will be impregnated with the smell, and everything will fall apart all over again.

Standing in the middle of the bathroom she slowly unbuttons her blouse and painfully lowers her trousers with the shreds of her torn trousers still clinging to them. Blood has dried on her thighs. Foul-smelling brownish marks trail over her stomach. Now completely naked, she catches her reflection in the mirror above the basin. She moves closer and makes out traces of dried semen at the corner of her mouth. One eye is slightly swollen where he slapped her, but that will almost certainly have disappeared by tomorrow. This vision of herself floods her with unbounded sadness. The anger is sure to come later. The scalding water runs between her breasts, washes over her stomach, flows down the nape of her neck and relaxes her muscles. She collapses against the wall, hunches over, limply holding the showerhead above her. Everything she does becomes an ordeal, as if she’s never previously noticed how difficult it is to perform on a daily basis—stepping out of the shower, wrapping herself in a towel, putting on her pajamas. She knows she won’t be able to get to sleep tonight, nor perhaps for days to come. She needs sleeping pills, but in a flash it comes back to her: after Laurent had a bad reaction to a drug past its use-by date, she decided to have a clean-out. She clearly remembers throwing out the last sleeping tablets. The clock in the corridor says it’s ten o’clock. The pharmacy will be closed and she would never be able to go out again anyway.

The bedroom is a mess. Laurent was looking all over the apartment for his files again this morning and he thought that maybe they were hiding under the sheets. Everything is upside down. Marie never berates him for anything but right now a diffuse anger spreads through her whole body. She was raped this evening, assaulted, attacked, and she can’t even have sleeping pills or her husband by her side or a tidy bed. She buries herself under the cold sheets, turns out the small bedside light, and waits with her eyes open for sleep to be so good as to take her.

She thinks it’s about midnight when she hears Laurent come home. She recognizes his footsteps, his stride, his rhythm. From the way he lumbers around the hall she can tell he’s had a little too much to drink. That’s good, he’s sure to sleep. Every creak of the wooden floor stresses her. She wishes she could open the windows and jump into thin air before her husband reaches the bedroom. He sidles up close to her, his body hot and naked. “Are you asleep, honey?” She immediately closes her eyes, relaxes the muscles of her face, slightly slows her breathing and gives a few soft grunts. Laurent eventually turns away. His body rolls to the other side of the bed, far away from her. He’s a happy, healthy, well-fed man full of drink and plans for the future, he can fall asleep in a matter of minutes. His wife on the other hand knows she’ll have to pretend to live and sleep for many days to come. Marie opens her eyes. The silence is interrupted by the sound of scooters on the boulevard. Her eyes don’t move, staring straight ahead. Deep in the night, facing the wall that she’s previously looked at while bowled over by pleasure, the trouble down below feels to her like fate’s revenge on a life it deems too easy.

Marie got up several times in the night; Laurent didn’t notice a thing. She thought he’d be very tired this morning after his long evening but he clearly isn’t. She watches in silence as he paces around the kitchen. “I’m sure I put it here when I came home.” Marie doesn’t react. “I’ll end up putting tracking devices on all my files so I can find them. I’m super-late!” Marie can’t remember a single day when she hasn’t helped him find his stuff. Her husband notices something different this morning. “You okay, honey? You seem miles away.” She spots Laurent’s green folder on the fruit dish. She doesn’t tell him, waits for him to fret a little as he watches the minutes trickle by. She’s just about to tell him when he sees it. “Ah, there it is. I knew it was in the kitchen! Okay, I’m off to work, Jean’s waiting for me. And don’t forget we’re going to Paul and Sophia’s for dinner this evening. They’re expecting us at eight. Love you!” He drops his cup in the sink, kisses his wife, and runs out of the kitchen.

Obviously, Marie had forgotten this dinner. The stigmata of last night’s attack materialize again. Her vagina hurts, it’s burning and painfully swollen. All her joints are stiff, her knees and wrists ache. Maybe she should see a doctor. It’s eight thirty, time to go to work.

When she’s downstairs she looks for her bicycle in the building’s small inner courtyard. Gripped with sudden panic, she rings the caretaker’s doorbell. “Hi, sorry to disturb you, but did you see my bicycle?” As she asks the question she remembers: the remains of her bike are still at République. And then she was raped. She backs away slowly. “I’m so sorry, I remember now. I left it at work.” The caretaker smiles at her, thinking she must be working too hard and is tired this morning.

The day seems to go on forever. She wishes she could slip away and lie down, sleep for a lifetime. She sits facing her elderly customer with a rigid smile on her face. And yet the woman is promising a handsome investment, more than three hundred thousand euros of life insurance. With this contract Marie could make her grand entrance into the top three of the sales team for this quarter. Her colleagues will be full of admiration and the CEO will congratulate her personally. He raped her yesterday evening. Marie can’t stay upright on her chair any longer. Her lower back hurts, the pain in her vagina is radiating up to her stomach, wracking her guts with sharp spasms, swelling and subsiding, making it difficult for her to concentrate. “Is that your husband in the photo?” It was four years ago when Laurent arranged a romantic trip to Venice for their anniversary. They were happy. Marie had asked a tourist to take their picture in the Piazza San Marco. At the last minute the ice cream Laurent was holding fell right down the front of his shirt, making his wife and all the witnesses in the background laugh. Marie thinks about the dinner this evening. She doesn’t know how she’s going to hide everything from start to finish without arousing suspicion.

She’s having lunch with Hervé today. He tells her how helpless he feels with his wife and daughter. Yesterday they had the nerve to open the cage that housed a turtledove he found six years ago in the woods in Orne. When he came home at the end of his day’s work he found the cage empty but for a few feathers, and his wife and daughter laughed in his face at his despair. Marie finds this unbearably sad and wonders just how much pain you can cause another person without suffering any physical consequences. The two women are being so cruel, surely Hervé’s distress will eventually spill over into violence. A good gunshot in the head to each.

Laurent comes home earlier than usual so he has time to get ready for dinner. Marie is rummaging frantically through her walk-in closet, she has no idea which dress to wear for dinner. Too dark an outfit would only emphasize her mood. Something too colorful might be misinterpreted as a sign of happiness. Trousers are out of the question, her vulva can’t tolerate the pressure of thick fabric. She can’t wear knickers, just very fine tights. Laurent notices this when she takes off a dress for the tenth time. He comes over to her from behind, strokes her breasts, and plants a kiss in the crook of her neck. “You’re very sexy in your tights … We could get to work already, you know … We still have a little time.” She’s forgotten about the baby. The plan that so thrilled her only two days ago now seems laughable, stupid, disgusting.