Angelbirds

By Régine Detambel

To ward off any future bad luck that might befall his family, Laurent says, "We certainly paid our dues that day," referring to the car accident in which his father died. Nonetheless, life still has struggles in store for him, his married mistress Florence, her husband Pierre, and their daughter Marine. As Marine faces teenage anxiety, sexual harassment, and her first consensual sexual experiences, Florence must decide if her future is with Pierre the web designer or Laurent the French professor with a passion for astronomy. On the other hand, Pierre must learn to leave behind past hurts and be honest about his feelings, while Laurent decides if he is better off with people in his life or if the stars in the night sky are better company. Marine in particular is helped forward by Laurent's mother, stricken with dementia and living in a nursing home, but convinced that her guardian angel is close at hand. But where are Laurent's, Florence's, Pierre's and Marine's guardian angels?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Jun 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9780228878643

Régine Detambel

Author of over 20 titles, Régine Detambel is both a novelist and an essay writer. She holds the rank of Chevalière de l'ordre des Arts et Lettres and has been awarded the Académie française's Anna de Noailles prize. Her most recent publication, Platine (2018), explores the theme of oppression of women through the example of Hollywood sex symbol Jean Harlow. In addition to writing, Régine Detambel also offers training in her own method of book therapy.Translator Dawn M. Cornelio is a professor of French at the University of Guelph, where she specialises in contemporary French women's writing and literary translation. She has published a number of articles about author Chloé Delaume, along with several book-length translations. She is the founder and president of New Dawn Editions, which focuses on bringing more French and Francophone women's writing into English. Anglebirds is the company's second title.

Book preview

Copyright © 2022 by Dawn M. Cornelio

Originally published as Mésanges

Copyright © 2003 Éditions Gallimard, Paris

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-0-2288-7863-6 (Hardcover)

978-0-2288-7862-9 (Paperback)

978-0-2288-7864-3 (eBook)

Two loves made two cities;

namely love of self unto contempt of God

made the earthly city; while love of God unto

the contempt of self has made the heavenly city.

Saint Augustine

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

It’s entirely possible no one will ever hear this whole story. Who can see everything that really happens to Laurent, Florence, Pierre, Marine? Who can see their joys, their words, their journeys, their actions? And who knows all that is yet to happen to them on Earth? Who can predict what becomes of Laurent’s mother when she discusses angels with Marine about angels? Who hears what Laurent whispers to Florence and what Pierre says to himself when he clenches his fists? Not even a fortune teller. Not the planets (those wanderers!), the stars, the earth, and not even themselves.

I

Whenever he leans his face close to his mother’s, it’s like he’s restarted her engine, the old woman talks and talks, just lets everything spill out. Laurent’s face, just opposite her own, seems to serve as some strange source of enthusiasm. As she opens her mouth, she probably still doesn’t know what she’s going to say, but Laurent’s attentive eyes, his chin, his cheekbones, everything his eyes and the texture of his skin make her think of, it all provides her with an abundance of ideas and the courage to speak. Once again, Laurent leans his face in close to his mother’s. And once again she begins to talk. He pulls back, averts his eyes. And his mother falls silent. He tries the experiment once more.

Laurent is impressed. He literally puts her in a trance. This is why he comes, works with her like a trainer for two reasons: so that, on any perfectly ordinary afternoon, the old woman can suddenly find herself in an extraordinary state, and so that, even though she has no one and recognizes no one, she can shiver with anticipation, with the heat and the intensity of her own voice and the sensual waves she creates in the water bed, as well as in the two stacked pillows, the metal IV stand, the bar holding up the sheets as if it were a dais above the octogenarian’s deformed feet, and making her bed look like an upside down baby carriage.

He always shaves carefully before coming to see his mother at the nursing home. He realizes how much his face matters to her, now that he’s become the trampoline, the path leading to the dangerous edge that she’ll consider for a while before finally getting all wound up and leaping in herself, or rather immersing herself in her own chatter, for hours on end, while Laurent approaches and withdraws his face, rocking left and right, on his seat, as he tries hard, despite his hands that never grew to the size of his body, to grab the can of Orangina he always gets from the vending machine in the hall.

Nonetheless, this sudden impulsiveness, this talkativeness from the woman who just moments before was so deeply disembodied and nearly asleep is frightening and real, like a baby’s reflex.

It works every time, Laurent says to himself.

The baby he’s thinking of was his daughter (oh little feline, absolute joy and sweetness!), who taught him about this long ago. Oh so gently, he would scratch her little palm (no longer than a woman’s ear and just as intricate) and she would reply to the tickling by lightly contracting her fingers, such a calm and certain movement that he was convinced that his daughter possessed healing powers. He imagined her, later on, as a surgeon. Laurent thinks that, for a girl, other professions where the hands are used are ambiguous: prostitutes are also professional touchers. What is Isabelle doing today? He’s gotten little news since she fled to Norway, when she was 23, with a man Laurent really didn’t care for. He had deeply annoyed Laurent the day he had given him such a savage handshake that, though he hesitated, Laurent had to cry out let go because the boy was torturing him so. Don’t worry, Isabelle had told her fiancé, my father’s hands are so small they almost look like an eleven year old’s. Buying him gloves is quite a production, they never grew.

As he thinks about his daughter (the one who had been his little dove, whose ears are more delicately edged than a postage stamp), who is now almost 26 and who ran so far away from him, Laurent leans his chin closer to the old woman, who had fallen silent again. His unbearably short fingers flexibly lined up around the huge can of Orangina, he calmly listens to the babble this stimulation immediately sets off.

His mother dreamed of being oh so light when she was young, a ballerina of celestial delicateness. But life, on the other hand, weighed her down with three children. In those days, mothers sacrificed themselves for their progeny. In her unending chattering, the old woman reveals dozens of different episodes of what she did with her vigour, her youth, her need for adoration. She converted them into expectations, sewing, tallow soap, coats cut from blankets, boiled water, saved coal. Laurent admits to himself that he benefited from his mother’s sacrifice. He was born during the war, between two snow falls, and was nearly two metres tall until the car accident in 1978. His pelvis was fractured. When they got him up, two months later, and put a crutch in each of his hands, he could walk again, but was eight centimetres shorter and twenty-two kilos lighter. His father had died in the accident. His father had been driving.

We certainly paid our dues that day, Laurent used to say to his mother. I don’t know what else could happen to us. We paid. Now, there’s nothing else to worry about. We’ve always paid our debts. And now, we don’t have any more. Now, it’s the opposite, life owes you something. All you have to do is wait patiently for good things to just fall from the heavens. And you won’t even have to bend down to pick them up.

I think it’s just all because of history, that particular time, he confides that afternoon to Florence, the head nurse at the home. When I was born, so much had happened already! What people went through is incredible, and they hardly complained at all. The height of the war. Luckily, my mother’s head is not as solid as a brick wall and she didn’t remember forever everything we know about the camps and the gas chambers, he says to the nurse.

The fact that old people lose their memory is a good thing, it’s consoling, she replies. Despite everything, your mother is undoubtedly more at peace now than she once was.

He doesn’t react. He looks at her. It’s two or three o’clock. He wants to invite her for a coffee and then he feels stupid, ridiculous, incestuous even. He had a sister. Died during the war. The head nurse, Florence, has grey hair, but she’s 45 at the most. Her eyes are brown with very bright whites. He has to squint when he talks to her, because of the light from the whites of her eyes. Her skin is tan all year round, slightly coarse from beauty treatments. It’s not from tobacco. Her hands and her uniform smell like liquid soap, her hair is steeped in perfume. It’s funny, thinks Laurent, he’s sure an anthropologist could explain men’s obsession with assessing and commenting on the female anatomy without even a second thought about their own neglected appearance or lack of elegance. He has often graded women’s bodies on a scale going from one to ten, without ever imagining for even a second that they do more or less the same thing, but that they refrain from unveiling to the opposite sex. He looks at the head nurse again, he gives her fourteen out of twenty then adds five for her breasts when she breathes. And since she glanced at his hands discreetly, though with professional curiosity (dwarfism? achondroplasia?), he hides them from her behind his back – his little puppets, sand crabs, swallows – where they flutter about, making the sign for so-so.

My mother had three children. I had a sister, but I never knew her. She was killed a few months before I was born, Laurent tells the nurse. One night, German soldiers emptied their weapons. Nobody knew what they’re looking for. My father hadn’t joined the Resistance yet. Then there were the bombs. In the trees, they were crackling, curling, sparkling. They could hear metal bouncing off the windows and doors. It was as if someone had tossed whole bags of rice against a newlywed couple’s windshield, as if someone had thrown sugared almonds against the taut waterproof fabric of a baby carriage. My sister went out to see. ‘We couldn’t keep an eye on her every second,’ my mother said.

Was she pregnant with you? asks Florence.

Yes. The first seconds, my sister managed to escape the slicers, the blazes that split open everything in front of them, as they pursue their path through space. But she wasn’t killed right away. First, she got burned, then stung by the metal dust and the earth raised by the bombs. And each one of her wounds is a canyon filled with chips of rock.

Behind his back, his hands are playing with the map of the moon he has in his back pocket. Laurent is an amateur astronomer. He thinks about moon rocks and the fine meteor dust, like powdery coal, that covers it. His hands fold over the corners of the map. Then they let it go and his fingers lace tightly together until he winds up swinging them out in front of him where, small but strong, agile, worried and stubborn, they help him support what he wants to say and