Commas

In this one, it’s a rainy day. They walk out of the cinema. A Jean Eustache film. They talk as they walk, getting wet. They recite quotes to each other, they hum a little tune, like in the film. They go home, they make love, it’s the easy life. No one would think of putting a bullet in his head.

They walk naked through the house. His cock hangs loose. They cook spaghetti. Anyone can see that they’re in love. It’s the easy life. They run a bath, they have a breath-holding contest. She wins every round. She gets out of the bath, she asks have you seen the scissors, I want to trim my pussy. He tells her where. He watches her do it. The black hairs fall onto the tile. He says they’re commas.

One day she cheats on him. The next morning, as promised, she confesses. He’s stunned. He drives off in the car in the middle of the night. He parks, he starts walking, he feels sick. He falls asleep in the forest. In the morning he’s found dead.

The police come to her door, they bring her to the morgue. She wails before the body. Her nose bleeds. They stabilize her. Now she goes home. She turns on the TV, falls asleep in front of it. She dreams of a wild boar, in a forest, they walk along side by side. The boar talks to her, he says when your nose bleeds in the morning, at night it will rain. She wakes up. It’s nighttime. Outside, the automatic sprinklers—she can hear them. 

The dog paws at the door, she lets him in. She undresses on the sofa. She turns toward the dog so that he’ll lick her where she wants. The dog turns away. She goes upstairs to the bedroom, cries and cries. She bangs her head hard against the mirror, collapses. The dog goes upstairs, sniffs her body on the floor, goes back downstairs.

It’s morning. The cleaning woman comes in. She finds her on the floor, the collapsed woman. Bathed in blood. The cleaning woman calls the hospital. They come. On a stretcher they lay out the collapsed woman, her skull split in half. You can see into her skull, she’s lost a lot of blood. At noon, they declare the collapsed woman dead.

Now the collapsed woman is on a table, at the morgue. Beside her is her man, the man who died in the forest, on his table. The cleaning woman asks to see them. She’s brought down to the morgue. She takes out her phone. She photographs them. Beside her is the doctor, he watches her do it. 

The cleaning woman returns to their place. She feeds the dog. She goes upstairs, she lies down, falls asleep. She dreams. In her dream she sees an old woman, a dwarf, with gouged out eyes. The dwarf is looking for her glass eyes, which she’s lost. The cleaning woman offers to help, finds the eyes in the fridge, gives them to her. The old dwarf says thanks. She puts her eyes in. She sees. The dwarf says it’s nice to have eggs stuck inside your head. The cleaning woman wakes up.

The dog sleeps beside the cleaning woman as she wakes. He dreams. He sees clouds passing. One of the clouds immobilizes in front of him, then transforms into an image: it’s a dog’s head, it’s his mother. He wakes up, he’s all alone in the room.

The cleaning woman is downstairs in the kitchen. She’s beating eggs for an omelet. She eats. She rummages through their things. She puts the things into bags, loads up the car. The cleaning woman takes the dog, puts him in the backseat. She drives. She comes to a bridge, stops. Down below there’s a river, run dry. She carries the dog in her arms, she throws him into the void. He falls. She gets back in the car and drives. Here, there’s a silence.

Then the cleaning woman turns on the radio, it’s the news. The news says the force of the winds and the tidal coefficient will call for the State to reinforce the dikes. She turns it off. She drives for a long time in silence. The road is perfect, almost too well maintained. It’s light outside and the sky is too blue. She thinks it’s sickening. She drives for a long time through the countryside, she sees a hotel in the distance. She gets a room, pays for it with the checkbook of the woman who collapsed and the man who died in the forest. She settles in, lies down, falls asleep. She dreams.

She sees herself young: she’s twenty. She folds items of clothing, tags them, puts them in order: she works in a shop. A man comes by every day and stands in front of the shop, from the street he looks in at her. And through the shop window she looks back at him. It goes on for days. It goes on for weeks, the looking. One day when she leaves the shop he’s there, he’s waiting for her. They stand face to face. Together they go walking, they talk: she’s thirteen years younger than him, she’s a shop girl, she’s a student. He’s thirteen years older than her, he’s a painter. They look at each other.

They can’t stop looking at each other. They’re together all the time, wherever they go. They’re devoted to each other. Every night they fall into each other’s arms. They don’t know what’s real anymore. They’re falling. Always, they come together. Their eyes fill with tears. They speak low in each other’s ears and every time, they come. Every hour they fall into bed, every night. Often they forget how to speak. They drink wine, they begin in the morning. She stops going to the shop. Every time, they come. Every day they fall in love again, every week. It goes on for months. Now they live together.

Little happens outside their world. He paints her millions of times. The living room is his workshop. While he paints her, she films him with her phone. Sometimes she poses naked, and he paints a large-scale portrait. They live together. At night they make love in their sleep. In the daytime he goes to galleries, he sells his paintings. She goes to the library, she looks for books. She reads lines, she copies sentences down in her notebook. And soon, in her notebook, she writes her own sentences: thoughts she’s had, experiences. 

One day the painter comes back to the apartment alone. He sees the notebook and he reads it. He discovers things. He burns the notebook in the kitchen sink. The smoke takes over the entire apartment. He opens the windows but the smell is still everywhere. She comes home. She breathes in the air, the atmosphere. She understands right away. She calls out to him, looks for him: he’s locked himself in the bathroom. He won’t come out. She tries to speak to him through the door. He refuses to answer. She goes into the living room, lies down on the floor, exhausted. She falls asleep. In her dreams, she sees nothing. She wakes up. 

She’s in the living room that is also the workshop. Where the smell of smoke drifts. She goes into the bathroom, the door is open now. In the bathtub, the painter is sleeping. She brushes her teeth. He’s dreaming. She watches him. She lights a cigarette.

In his dream the painter sees his father. His father is in the hospital, on a bed, in agony. The painter sings a song that the father loves, a hymn he learned as a boy at mass. The father dozes off and, in his dream, sees a cloud that passes and transforms into a dog, solidifies as a dog. The dog turns toward the father, speaks to him, your wife was very pious, that’s why she smoked so much. The cloud disintegrates in the father’s dream, and the shape of the dog disappears.

The father wakes up. His hospital room is filled with smoke. He can barely see anything. On the armchair beside him, his son is sleeping. In the father’s breathing machine, a short circuit: the breathing machine burns out and the room is filled with smoke. Two nurses arrive, open the windows. They evacuate the father and the son but for the son, it’s too late, his lungs have closed up for good.

At that same moment the other son, the brother, arrives. They tell him. He wails. He goes into a panic. They give him oxygen. They hold him down. They force a needle into his arm. He falls asleep. Here, there’s a silence. 

One of the two nurses brings the son, the painter, down to the morgue and puts him in a big, cold drawer. Beside her the other nurse stands with her arms crossed, watching. The son is in a large black bag for dead people, in a drawer. Beside him, in another drawer, there’s the man who died in the forest, in his bag. Beside the man who died in the forest, there’s his woman, the collapsed woman, who banged her head against the mirror, in her drawer. It’s with this image of the three drawers in the morgue that the painter wakes up in the bathtub.

She’s next to him, seated on the edge of the tub. She’s smoking, she watches him wake up. She hears him say I was in a dream, in a drawer, in a morgue, and I was dead. There was a hospital smell. Now I’m not dreaming anymore and I’m in a bathtub. She smokes, she looks at him, she smiles.

Around them, in the apartment, there is still the smell of the burnt notebook. It’s something in their noses and in their eyes, that stings. She leans over the bathtub, she kisses the painter. He lets her kiss him. The painter gets out of the bathtub. In the living room, they are naked. They open a bottle of champagne, they drink. They smoke. They let the ashes fall to the floor. She gets down on the floor, on all fours. She laughs, she pretends she’s a horse. She does it for him because she knows he likes it. He says how sweet.

She paws the floor like a horse and whinnies. Now she pisses on the living room floor, the way a horse pisses without seeming to notice. That’s why she’s pissing and pretending as if she’s not pissing at all. It’s why she’s acting like someone distracted, absorbed in her thoughts, who’s doing something without even noticing it. He laughs. He says I’m a boy at the show. He goes into the kitchen. He comes back with his phone, he films her. She snorts, a horse in the piss. He loves her.

Later on, they’re still naked. Now in the living room he’s seated on a chair, she’s standing. She’s cutting his hair. The hairs fall to the floor, into the ash and the piss. On the floor there are also the hairs from her pussy and his hairs fall in with the pussy hairs. She shows him the hairs she’s just cut on the floor. She says look, they’re commas. He says yes, they’re uppercase commas.

From Tu ouvres les yeux tu vois le titre

Translated from the French by Katie Shireen Assef

Arno Calleja is a poet, novelist, and dramaturg who has published eight books of poetry and prose, most recently the novel La rivière draguée (Editions Vanloo, 2021). A book-length poem entitled Le blanc de l'oeil and a novel entitled Le Mal appliqué are forthcoming in 2025. He lives in Aix-en-Provence, teaches writing workshops throughout the south of France, and regularly collaborates with theatre companies.

Katie Shireen Assef is a writer and translator of French and Italian living in Marseille, France. Her fiction is forthcoming in 3:AM.