LTheir divorce will soon celebrate its fifth anniversary. And twice a year, the same journey of the tortured. At each of their children’s birthdays, they find themselves confined in the same space, inhaling-exhaling the same air, performing the same waltz of phantom domestic gestures around the table, as before, and it is, every year, the same titanic effort excavated with a backhoe loader.
Leaving the small supermarket, downstairs from her house, under the large, somewhat ridiculous hood of her rain cape, she takes a minute. She metabolizes the few hours that await her, her daughter’s 6th birthday. She will have to twirl, smile, produce in front of the other parents the choreography of complicit parenthood beyond the suppressed anger and the storms of disappointment.
She seeks this esoteric strength in the muscular tension that runs through her arms, mobilized to carry to her home the two shopping bags heavy with bottles of multi-fruit juice and packets of sweets bought at the last carat, while he waits, there – high with the children, the arrival of the forgotten magician-pirate-actor.
Distant laughter
Second floor left, she ends up opening the door to her house. Before closing it, the option of silent escape without a return ticket tempts her for another second; the idea of hitting her dark mouth pinched with rage, she doesn’t want to, but she doesn’t want to. From the living room then comes the specific sound of a video broadcast by a telephone, distant laughter, the hilarious and collective wave which floods the TV sets and the performance halls. And farts. A series of long, loud farts.
She enters and catches the eyes of her former husband, suddenly laughing, open and clear, eyes that she recognizes, second 1, having often crossed them in another life. They send her a message which she deciphers immediately, second 2. While the children are crowded together on the screen of his phone, he throws her an old orange plastic thing, which she identifies before catching it; his son’s tired whoopee cushion.
The video dates from the 1990s, the set of “Nulle part autre”. Antoine de Caunes presents Paul Something, a perfectly British name, the greatest petomane alive. The children watch, fascinated. Her ex-husband says: he’s mom’s mentor. Ah, there you go. Time to understand the rules of the game, she arranges the paper plates with gold polka dots, the parrot and palm tree napkins, a white paper tablecloth with big red hearts, nothing fits, nothing matches.
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