Mme Lapoule

Arjun Razdan

My wife, that is to say the mother of my two children, was not a woman to be taken for granted. Not that she was particularly beautiful, though she was beautiful enough and never gave me a reason to complain, not that she was particularly gracious, though she never rubbed anyone the wrong way, not that she was a good mother, though her children love her for who she is and would not replace her with another, not that she was particularly thrifty, though we never came to the streets because of her spending, not that she doted particularly on her friends and colleagues, though they all came round to support her at the time of our divorce, not that she had any particular talent or outstood herself in any way but she did many things reasonably well to emerge as efficient for what it was worth. She had a restrained manner of parler, and never gave a false compliment or spoke out of turn, something which earned her the trust of many people, though none of them would have called her special.

She was petite, for which she wore high heels, of tanned complexion and black hair, and a top-heavy figure, which she liked to show off in a red bikini with a slotted kerb she wore year after year on the beaches of the South around Toulon where she spent most of her summer vacations. That was her one great passion. She worked at a bar, had a regular salary, and was in all other aspects like her colleagues, except in her one great craving for the sun. Her other weakness was cordon bleu, especially when served with sauce roquefort, which she could munch on all afternoon long, never mind then the concerns of figure she frequently brought up. Otherwise, she had a straight nose which was a little hooked at the end like some exotic vegetable, the sort of a nose I like, and the reason I fell for her when I was eighteen, not knowing better and getting hooked six months later. 

Thirty-one years of married life was like one long shopping trip to the vegetable marché, if you did not like something you did not talk about it, and if you liked something, you tried getting it on the best terms possible. We lasted so long because we never thought twice about it, for I think had we done it early enough we would have found out it was not worth it. It had nothing to do with other people. She cheated on me at least once with this old acquaintance of hers called Eric, a motard with a gap in his teeth and a million-watt smile, who had recently started losing control of his waistline, while as far as I am concerned, I stayed mostly true to the path, though the flirtations were legion. You know how I found out? One day Eric turned up at a neighbourhood bar, all groggy and panting for beer. It was five years after our marriage. He had not shaved, and on his trousers he was wearing a ridiculous white string instead of a belt. I asked what had happened, and he said every time he went to bed he woke up a size fatter. I thought that was a fantastic story but then he was in no mood to joke, saying he had to discard his belt because there was no more space to punch holes. 

I thought nothing more about it for a week or ten days, following which I felt the need for a pair of drawstring trousers I have at home, which being in white linen are not exactly my style, but I do not mind prancing around in it in the house, being the holiday souvenir that it is. To my surprise, I found the lace at the neck missing. It could not have flown off on its own, or shrunk when the rest of the trousers was intact, and I did not remember having taken it out for any purpose whatsoever. It was crystal clear to me. My filet had become the last-minute retainer of my wife’s lover’s expanding navel. 

I did not press her on the point, or on any other, though I have reason to believe that the affair did not last for long, notably because Eric was razed to the ground by a passing lorry on one of his motorcycling expeditions to Belgium. It is not the great storms that uproot a giant tree, it is the disease which creeps up from below and makes the timber so brittle that any passing wisp of a breeze can knock it off its feet. Such things usually die of a slow momentum of their own. When the severance comes, you cannot even feel the incision, so insensitive you have become from years of not being able to breathe freely. 

Splitting is no different from slicing a finger in the process of cutting an apple, then. Why did we part ways? As is always the case, the breaking-point was something stupid. I was sick of picking the excreta of her pet mongrel, Couti. The little devil became the most common point of dispute between us, being as it was a gift from her mother (the old lady did not forget to sound the death knell for our relationship before her death, something she would have wished all her life). For eight years, it tormented me, right from the first moment of the morning when it would stuff my nose with its tail in its excitement to get to his mistress to lick her face, to the last hours of the day when it lost its head at the emerging cuckoo at midnight doubling over itself and whining so murderously you would think the German army was at the doorsteps. Even the neighbours complained about it. 

One day I really had enough when it pissed on an 1875 edition of the Communist Manifesto which I had left on the carpet by the side of the sofa to allow the glue on the binding to dry. Without thinking twice about it, I shunted it outside along with its mistress. She banged on the door but I would not open. All of them thought I was heartless, but I was over it, and for no price in the world would I let that woman into my four walls again let alone her canine companion. To be fair to us, she never offered to part ways with it to save our marriage. That was our story. A stack of cards that you built for years took one moment in unravelling. There were two or three things that were hard at the beginning, such as you did not find coffee in your cup in the morning (she used to leave early for work) and had to do it from scratch, and that laundry did not appear stacked of its own, but had to be lugged to a nearby self-service, but little by little life pivots round its new routine. Habit is a very strong fellow. Even now, as I sift through the schedule of programmes on television later in the night, having locked the doors and having taken a pillow under my arms, I am merely wondering if I would catch a cold or not if I wear my pantouffles without the socks after shower. The plants have to be watered, the electricity bill has to be paid at the Commission, three days’ meat has to be taken out of the congélateur for tomorrow’s hotpot, and there is no cat to feed luckily. I often read history books then, to put me to sleep, for I find nothing new in them, and that bores me tremendously.

That is how I learnt to start from a scratch, four years ago, and by and by it is has been an exciting adventure. We all see each other once a year, including the wife (who still has the other pair of keys), at the Christmas dinner and it is my luck to have begotten children who are sympathetic, especially the daughter who was the only one to have supported me over the problem of the errant dog. The son is younger. He had drifted away from me a long time ago. I consider it a good sign. When sons go away, and daughters are distant but sympathetic, it means one has succeeded in raising good children. Scrupulously, under my flap I hatched them and now they have flown away to their respective enclosures to found new families. It is good that new saplings should find earth. I never had second thoughts about having them, or about any of the promulgated exigencies of life. I took most of what life threw at me, without complaining, for otherwise I would not have stayed in a marriage which did not work for thirty-one years. During this time, while we were as close to inhaling each other’s breath, she might well have been the extra seat on the sofa we always lacked.

Image: Siefkin,DR (2016), Wikimedia Images