Japrisot The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80533-424-8
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

Dany Longo is blonde, beautiful - and thoroughly unpredictable. After doing a favour for her boss, she finds herself behind the wheel of his exquisite Thunderbird on a sun-kissed Parisian morning. On impulse she decides to head south.What starts as an impromptu joy-ride rapidly becomes a nightmare when strangers all along the unfamiliar route swear they recognise Dany from the previous day. But that's impossible: she was at work, she was in Paris, she was miles away . . . wasn't she?

Sébastien Japrisot (4 July 1931 - 4 March 2003) was a French author, screenwriter and film director, born in Marseille. His pseudonym was an anagram of Jean-Baptiste Rossi, his real name. Japrisot has been nicknamed 'the Graham Greene of France'. One Deadly Summer was made into a film starring Isabelle Adjani in 1983. A Very Long Engagement was an international bestseller, won the Prix Interallié and was later also made into a film starring Audrey Tatou in 2004.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Japrisot, Sébastien

Weitere Mitwirkende

Weaver, Helen

Leseproben

The Lady

I have never seen the sea.

The black-and-white tiled floor sways like water a few inches from my eyes.

It hurts so much I could die.

I am not dead.

When they attacked me – I’m not crazy, someone or something attacked me – I thought, I’ve never seen the sea. For hours I had been afraid: afraid of being arrested, afraid of everything, I had made up a whole lot of stupid excuses and it was the the stupidest one that crossed my mind: Don’t hurt me, I’m not really bad, I wanted to see the sea.

I also know that I screamed, screamed with all my might, but that my screams remained trapped in my throat. Someone lifted me off the ground, someone smothered me.

Screaming, screaming, screaming, I thought again, It’s not real, it’s a nightmare, I’m going to wake up in my room, it will be morning.

And then this.

Louder than all my screams, I heard it: the cracking of the bones of my own hand, my hand being crushed.

Pain is not black, it is red. It is a well of blinding light that exists only in your mind. But you fall into it all the same.

Cool, the tiles against my forehead. I must have fainted again.

Don’t move. Above all, don’t move.

I am not lying flat on the floor. I am kneeling with the furnace of my left arm against my stomach, bent double with the pain which I would like to contain and which invades my shoulders, the nape of my neck, my back.

Right near my eye, through the curtain of my fallen hair, an ant moves across a white tile. Further off, a grey, vertical shape, which must be the pipe of the washbasin.

I don’t remember taking off my glasses. They must have fallen off when I was pulled backwards – I am not crazy, someone or something pulled me backwards and stifled my screams. I must find my glasses.

How long have I been like this, on my knees in this tiny room, plunged into semi-darkness? Several hours or a few seconds? I have never fainted in my life. It is less than a hole, it is only a scratch in my memory.

If I had been here for very long someone outside would have become worried. I was standing in front of the sink, washing my hands. My right hand, when I hold it against my cheek, is still damp.

I must find my glasses, I must get up.

When I raise my head quickly – too quickly – the tiles spin, I am afraid I will faint again, but everything subsides, the buzzing in my ears and even the pain. It all flows back into my left hand, which I do not look at but which feels like lead, swollen out of all proportion.

Hang on to the basin with my right hand, get up.

On my feet, my blurred image moving with me in the mirror opposite, I feel as if time is starting to flow again.

I know where I am: the toilets of a service station on the Avallon road. I know who I am: an idiot who is running away from the police, a face towards which I lean my face almost close enough to touch, a hand which hurts and which I bring up to eye level so I can see it, a tear which runs down my cheek and falls onto this hand, the sound of someone breathing in a strangely silent world: myself.

Near the mirror in which I see myself is a ledge where I left my handbag when I came in. It is still there.

I open it with my right hand and my teeth. I look for my second pair of glasses, the ones I wear for typing.

Clearly visible now, my face in the mirror is smudged with dust, tear-stained, tense with fear.

I no longer dare look at my left hand, I hold it against my body, pressed against my badly soiled white suit.

The door of the room is closed. But I left it open behind me when I came in.

I am not crazy. I stopped the car. I asked them to fill the tank. I wanted to run a comb through my hair and wash my hands. They pointed to a building with white walls behind the station. Inside it was too dark for me, so I did not shut the door. I don’t know now whether it happened right away, whether I had time to fix my hair. All I remember is that I turned on the tap, that the water was cool – oh, yes, I did do my hair, I’m sure of it! – and suddenly there was a kind of movement, a presence, as of something alive and brutal behind me. I was lifted off the floor, I screamed with all my might without making a sound, I did not have time to understand what was happening to me, the pain that pierced my hand shot through my whole body. I was on my knees, I was alone, I am here.

Open my bag again.

My money is there, in the envelope with the office letterhead. They didn’t take anything.

It’s absurd, it’s impossible.

I count the notes, lose track, start again. A cold shadow passes over my heart; they didn’t want to take my money or anything else, all they wanted – I am crazy, I will go crazy – was to hurt my hand.

I look at my left hand, my huge purple fingers, and suddenly I can’t stand it any more, I collapse against the basin, fall to my knees again and howl. I will howl like an animal until the end of time, I will howl, weep and stamp my feet until someone comes, until I see daylight again.

Outside I hear hurried footsteps, voices, gravel crunching.

I howl.

The door opens very suddenly onto a dazzling world.

The July sun has not moved over the hills. The men who come in and lean over me, all talking at once, are the ones I passed when I got out of the car. I recognise the owner of the garage and two customers who must be local people who had also stopped for petrol.

While they are helping me to my feet, through my sobs my mind fastens on a silly detail: the tap in the basin is still running. A moment ago I didn’t even hear it. I want to turn the tap off, I must turn it off.

The men don’t understand why I have to do that. Nor do they understand that I don’t know how long I have been here. Nor that I have two pairs of glasses. As they hand me the pair that fell off, I keep repeating that they are mine, they really are mine. They say, ‘Calm yourself, come now, calm yourself.’ They think I am crazy.

Outside, everything is so clear, so peaceful, so very real that my tears suddenly stop. It’s an ordinary petrol station like any other. With pumps, gravel, white walls, a gaudy poster pasted to a window, a hedge of spindle and oleander. Six o’clock on a summer evening. How could I have screamed and rolled on the floor?

The car is where I left it. Seeing it reawakens my old anxiety, the anxiety that had hold of me when it happened. They’re going to question me, ask me where I am from, what I have done, I will answer all wrong, they will guess my secret.

In the doorway of the office towards which they lead me a woman in a blue apron and a little girl of six or seven are watching me with curious, interested faces, as if at the theatre.

Yesterday afternoon, too, at the same time, a little girl with long hair and a doll in her arms watched me approach. And yesterday afternoon, too, I was ashamed. I can’t remember why.

Yes, I can. Quite clearly. I can’t stand children’s eyes. Behind me there is always the little girl I was, watching me.

The sea.

If things go badly, if I am arrested and must provide a – what is the word? – an alibi, an explanation, I will have to begin with the sea.

It won’t be altogether the truth, but I will talk for a long time without catching my breath, half crying, I will be the naïve victim of a cheap dream. I’ll make up whatever I need to make it more real: attacks of split personality, alcoholic grandparents, or that I fell down the stairs as a child. I want to nauseate the people who interrogate me, I want to drown them in a torrent of syrupy nonsense.

I’ll tell them I didn’t know what I was doing, it was me and it wasn’t me, understand? I thought it would be a good opportunity to see the sea. It’s the other one who’s guilty.

They will answer, of course, that if I was so anxious to see the sea, I could have done it a long time ago. All I had to do was buy a train ticket and book a room at Palavas-les-Flots, other girls have done it and not died of it, there is such a thing as paid holiday.

I’ll tell them that I often wanted to do it but that I couldn’t.

Which is true. Every summer for the past six years I’ve written to tourist offices and hotels, received brochures, stopped in front of shop windows to look at bathing suits. One time I came within an inch – in the end, my finger refused to press a buzzer – of joining a holiday club. Two weeks on a beach in the Balearics, round-trip fare and visit to Palma included, orchestra, swimming teacher and sailing boat reserved for the duration of the visit, good weather guaranteed by Union-Life, and I don’t know what else. Just reading the description gave you a tan. But, for some unknown reason, every summer I spend half my vacation at the Hotel Principal (there is only one) of Montbriand in the Haute Loire, and the other half near Compiègne at the home of a former classmate who has a husband, you know, and a deaf mother-in-law. We play bridge.

It’s not that I am such a creature of habit or that I have a passion for card games. And it’s not that I am particularly shy. As a matter of fact, it takes a lot of nerve to relate memories of the sea and St Tropez to your colleagues when you are fresh from the forest of Compiègne. So I can’t explain it.

I hate people who have seen the sea, I hate people who haven’t seen it, I think I hate the...