The Elementary Particles Read Online Free PDF Page B

complete the cycle.
    Bruno could still see the beautiful deep black coffin with a silver cross. It was a soothing, even happy image: he knew his grandfather would be at peace in such a magnificent coffin. He did not learn about
Acaridae
and the host of parasites with names like Italian film stars until later. But even now the image of his grandfather’s coffin remained a happy one.
    He remembered his grandmother, sitting on a suitcase in the middle of the kitchen on the day they arrived in Marseilles. Cockroaches scuttled between the cracks in the tiles. It was probably then that she began to lose her mind. The litany of troubles in those few short weeks had overwhelmed her: the slow agony of her husband’s death, the hurried departure from Algiers and the arduous search for an apartment, finding one at last in a filthy housing project in the northeast of Marseilles. She had never set foot in France before. Her daughter had deserted her, and hadn’t even attended her father’s funeral. Deep down, Bruno’s grandmother felt certain there had been a mistake. Someone, somewhere, had made a dreadful mistake.
    She picked herself up and carried on for another five years. She bought new furniture, set up a bed in the dining room for Bruno and enrolled him in a local primary school. Every afternoon she came to collect him. He was ashamed of the small, frail, shriveled woman who took his hand to lead him home. All the other children had parents; divorce was still rare in those days.
    At night she would replay her life over and over, trying to discover how it had ended like this. She rarely managed to find sleep before dawn. The apartment had low ceilings and, in the summer, the rooms were stuffy and unbearably hot. During the day she puttered around in old slippers, talking to herself without realizing it. Sometimes she would repeat a sentence fifty times. Her daughter’s memory haunted her: “Her own father’s funeral and she didn’t come.” She went from one room to another carrying a washrag or a saucepan whose purpose she had already forgotten. “Her own father’s funeral . . . Her own father’s funeral.” Her slippers scuffled on the tiled floors. Terrified, Bruno curled himself into a ball in his bed. He knew things could only get worse. Sometimes she would get up early, still in dressing gown and curlers, and whisper to herself, “Algeria is French,” and then the scuffling would begin. She walked back and forth in the tiny two-room apartment staring at some fixed, faraway point. “France . . . France . . .” she repeated slowly, her voice dying away.
    She had always been a good cook; here it became her only pleasure. She would cook lavish meals for Bruno, as though entertaining a party of ten: peppers marinated in olive oil, anchovies, potato salad; sometimes there would be five hors d’oeuvres before a main course of stuffed zucchini or rabbit with olives, from time to time a couscous. The one thing she had never succeeded in mastering was baking, but every week when she collected her pension she would bring home pastries, boxes of nougat, candied chestnuts and almond cakes. As time went by, Bruno became a fat, fearful child. She herself ate little or nothing.
    On Sunday mornings she would sleep in, and Bruno would climb into her bed and press himself against her emaciated body. Sometimes he dreamed of getting up in the night, taking a knife and stabbing her through the heart; he could see himself break down in tears beside the body. In his imagination, he always died soon after her.
    Late in 1966 she received a letter from her daughter. Bruno’s father—with whom she still exchanged cards at Christmas—had given her their address in Marseilles. In the letter, Janine expressed no real regret about the past, which she mentioned in the following sentence: “I heard Daddy died and you moved to France.” She explained that she was leaving California and returning to the south of France. She gave no