Adèle Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  ADÈLE

  Leila Slimani is the bestselling author of The Perfect Nanny, for which she became the first Moroccan woman to win France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Goncourt. She won the La Mamounia Prize for Adèle. A journalist and frequent commentator on women’s and human rights, she is French president Emmanuel Macron’s personal representative for the promotion of the French language and culture. Born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1981, she now lives in Paris with her French husband and their two young children.

  Look for the Penguin Readers Guide in the back of this book.

  To access Penguin Readers Guides online, visit penguinrandomhouse.com.

  ALSO BY LEILA SLIMANI

  The Perfect Nanny

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2014 by Éditions Gallimard

  Translation copyright © 2019 by Sam Taylor

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Originally published in French as Dans le jardin de l’ogre by Éditions Gallimard, Paris. English-language edition published simultaneously in the United States of America in Penguin Books and in the United Kingdom by Faber & Faber Ltd.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to FTM Agency, Ltd., Russia for permission to quote from Requiem by Anna Akhmatova. Russian text copyright © by Margarita Novgorodova. English translation by Sacha Soldatow.

  Quotations from The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. English translation copyright © 1984 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. Translated from Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí, copyright © 1984 by Milan Kundera. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Slimani, Leïla, 1981- author. | Taylor, Sam, 1970- translator.

  Title: Adèle / Leila Slimani ; translated from the French by Sam Taylor.

  Other titles: Dans le jardin de l’ogre. English

  Description: New York, New York : Penguin Books, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018039406| ISBN 9780143132189 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525503903 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PQ2719.L56 D3613 2019 | DDC 843/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018039406

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Julianna Lee

  Cover photograph: plainpicture / és / Laurence Mouton

  Version_1

  For my parents

  CONTENTS

  About the Author

  Also by Leila Slimani

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Readers Guide

  It isn’t me, someone else is suffering. I couldn’t.

  Not like this.

  ANNA AKHMATOVA, REQUIEM

  * * *

  *

  Vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves . . . We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down.

  MILAN KUNDERA, THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING

  Adèle has been good. She has held out for a week now. She hasn’t given in. She has run twenty miles in the past four days. From Pigalle to the Champs-Elysées, from the Musée d’Orsay to Bercy. In the mornings she has gone running on the deserted banks of the Seine. At night on the Boulevard de Rochechouart and the Place de Clichy. She hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol and she has gone to bed early.

  But tonight she dreamed about it and she couldn’t fall back asleep. A torrid dream that went on forever, that entered her like a breath of hot wind. Now Adèle can think of nothing else. She gets up and drinks a strong black coffee. The apartment is silent. In the kitchen she hops about restlessly. She smokes a cigarette. Standing in the shower, she wants to scratch herself, to rip her body in two. She bangs her forehead against the wall. She wants someone to grab her and smash her skull into the glass door. As soon as she shuts her eyes she hears the noises: sighs, screams, blows. A naked man panting, a woman coming. She wishes she were just an object in the midst of a horde. She wants to be devoured, sucked, swallowed whole. She wants fingers pinching her breasts, teeth digging into her belly. She wants to be a doll in an ogre’s garden.

  She doesn’t wake anyone. She gets dressed in the dark and does not say good-bye. She is too agitated to smile or have a conversation. Adèle leaves the building and walks the empty streets. Head down and nauseated, she descends the stairs of the Jules-Joffrin metro station. On the platform a mouse runs across her boot and startles her. In the carriage, Adèle looks around. A man in a cheap suit is watching her. He has badly shined shoes with pointed tips. He’s ugly. He might do. So might that student with his arm around his girlfriend, kissing her neck. Or that middle-aged man standing by the window who reads his book and doesn’t even glance at her.

  She picks up a day-old newspaper from the seat opposite. She turns the pages. The headlines blur, she can’t concentrate. Exasperated, she puts it down. She can’t stay here. Her heart is banging hard in her chest, she’s suffocating. She loosens her scarf, unwinds it from around her sweat-soaked neck and drops it in an empty seat. She stands up, unbuttons her coat. Holdin
g on to the door handle, her legs shaken by tremors, she is ready to jump.

  She’s forgotten her phone. She sits down again and empties her handbag. A powder compact falls to the floor. She tugs at a bra strap entwined with earbuds. Seeing the bra, she tells herself she needs to be more careful. She can’t have forgotten her phone. If she has, she’ll have to go back home, come up with an excuse. But no, here it is. It was there all the time, she just didn’t see it. She tidies her handbag. She has the feeling that everyone is staring at her. That the whole carriage is sneering at her panic, her burning cheeks. She opens the little flip phone and laughs when she sees the first name.

  Adam.

  It’s no use anyway.

  Wanting to is the same as giving in. The dam has been breached. What good would it do to hold back now? Life wouldn’t be any better. She’s thinking like a drug addict, like a gambler. She’s been so pleased with herself for not yielding to temptation for a few days that she has forgotten about the danger. She gets to her feet, lifts the sticky latch, the door opens.

  Madeleine station.

  She pushes her way through the crowd that swells like a wave around the carriage and gushes inside. Adèle looks for the exit. Boulevard des Capucines. She starts to run. Let him be there, let him be there. Outside the storefront windows she hesitates. She could catch the metro here: Line 9 would take her directly to the office, she’d be there in time for the editorial meeting. She paces around the metro entrance, lights a cigarette. She presses her handbag to her body. Some Romanian women in headscarves have spotted her. They advance toward her, holding out their stupid petition. Adèle rushes off. She enters Rue la Fayette in a trance, gets lost and has to retrace her steps. Rue Bleue. She types in the code and goes inside, runs upstairs to the second floor, and knocks on the heavy wooden door.

  “Adèle . . .” Adam smiles. His eyes are puffy with sleep and he’s naked.

  “Don’t speak.” Adèle takes off her coat and throws herself at him. “Please.”

  “You could call, you know . . . It’s not even eight yet . . .”

  Adèle is already naked. She scratches his neck, pulls his hair. He doesn’t care. He’s hard. He shoves her violently, slaps her face. She grabs his dick and pushes it inside her. Up against the wall, she feels him enter and her anxieties dissolve. Her sensations return. Her soul is lighter, her head an empty space. She grips Adam’s ass and drives him into her angrily, ever faster. She is possessed, in a fever, desperately trying to reach another place. “Harder, harder,” she screams.

  She knows this body and that annoys her. It’s too simple, too mechanical. Her surprise arrival did not transform Adam. Their lovemaking is not obscene enough or tender enough. She puts Adam’s hands on her breasts, tries to forget that it’s him. She closes her eyes and imagines that he’s forcing her.

  Already he is somewhere else. His jaw tenses. He turns her around. As always, he pushes Adèle’s head down toward the floor with his right hand and grabs her hip with his left. He thrusts hard, he groans, he comes.

  Adam tends to get carried away.

  Adèle gets dressed with her back to him. She’s embarrassed at him seeing her naked.

  “I’m late for work. I’ll call you.”

  “Up to you,” replies Adam.

  He smokes a cigarette, leaning against the kitchen door. With one hand, he touches the condom hanging from the end of his penis. Adèle looks away.

  “I can’t find my scarf. Have you seen it? It’s gray cashmere. I’m really fond of it.”

  “I’ll look for it. I can give it to you next time.”

  Adèle tries to act casual. The main thing is not to look as though you feel guilty. She crosses the open-plan office as if she’s returning from a cigarette break. She smiles at her colleagues and sits at her desk. Cyril emerges from his glass cage. He has to shout to be heard above the din of keyboard rattle, phone conversations, chugging printers, and vending-machine discussions.

  “Adèle, it’s nearly ten!”

  “I had a meeting.”

  “Yeah, right. You know what? You’ve missed your deadlines for two pieces, so screw your meeting. You’ve got two hours.”

  “Calm down, you’ll get your articles. I’m almost done. After lunch, okay?”

  “I’ve had enough of this shit, Adèle! We can’t waste our time waiting for you. We’ve got a bloody paper to put out!”

  Cyril is still waving his arms as he collapses on to his chair.

  Adèle turns on her computer and covers her face with her hands. She has no idea what she’s going to write. She should never have agreed to do this piece on social tensions in Tunisia. What the hell got into her, raising her hand in that editorial meeting?

  She’ll have to pick up the phone, call her contacts, ask questions, check facts, dig deeper. She’ll have to care about her job, to believe in the journalistic rigor that Cyril is always going on about, that hypocrite who would sell his soul for a better circulation. She’ll have to eat lunch at her desk, headphones over her ears, fingertips caressing her food-stained keyboard. To nibble at a sandwich while she waits for some self-important press officer to call her back and demand to read her article before it’s published.

  Adèle doesn’t like her job. She hates the idea that she must work to make a living. The only ambition she ever had was to be looked at. She tried being an actress. When she first came to Paris she took classes, but apparently she lacked talent. The teachers said she had beautiful eyes and a certain mystery. “But to be an actress, mademoiselle, you must be able to let go.” For a long time she stayed at home and waited for her destiny to reveal itself. Nothing went according to plan.

  She would have loved being married to a rich, absent husband. To the outrage of all those proud working women who surround her, Adèle wishes she could spend her days lazing around a large house with no objective other than to look beautiful when her husband returns. How wonderful it would be to get paid for her talent of giving men pleasure.

  Her husband makes a good living. A gastroenterology consultant at the Georges-Pompidou hospital, he works long hours and takes on extra shifts. They often go on vacation and they live in a large rented apartment in the eighteenth arrondissement. Adèle is spoiled and her husband is proud because he considers her a smart, independent woman. But it’s not enough, she thinks. She finds her life small, shabby, lacking in grandeur. Their money smells of work, of sweat and long nights spent at the hospital. It has an aftertaste of reproachful looks and bad moods. It is not a passport to idleness or decadence.

  Her husband pulled strings to get Adèle this job. Richard was friends with the son of the newspaper’s managing editor and he put in a good word for her. That didn’t bother her. It’s just how the world works. To start with, she wanted to do a good job. She was excited by the idea of impressing her boss, surprising him with her efficiency and resourcefulness. She was bold and enthusiastic, landing the kind of interviews that no one else at the paper even dreamed about. Then she came to realize that Cyril was a thick-headed philistine incapable of appreciating her talent. She started to despise her colleagues, who drowned their failed ambitions in alcohol every night, and ended up hating her job, this office, this computer screen, the whole idiotic charade. She can no longer stand making phone call after phone call to ministers who refuse to comment before finally offering a few dull, hollow quotes. She is ashamed of the coquettish voice she puts on to win favors from a press officer. All that matters to her is the freedom the job gives her. Her salary is low but at least she gets to travel. She can disappear, invent secret rendezvous, without having to justify herself.

  Adèle does not call anyone. She opens a blank document and starts to type. She invents quotes from high-up anonymous sources: “a figure close to the government,” “a well-placed observer who asked to remain nameless.” She comes up with a nice hook, adds a dash of humor to distract any readers who wer
e expecting the article to provide some information. She reads a few other pieces on the same subject and copy-and-pastes lines from each. The whole thing takes her barely an hour.

  “Here’s your article, Cyril!” she calls out, putting on her coat. “I’m going for lunch—we can talk about it when I get back.”

  * * *

  *

  The street is gray and cold. The faces of the passersby are drawn, their complexions greenish. It all makes her want to go home and lie in bed. The tramp outside Monoprix is more drunk than usual. He’s asleep on an air vent. His trousers are around his ankles and she can see his back and buttocks covered in scabs. Adèle and her colleagues enter a dirty little brasserie and, as always, Bertrand says, a bit too loud: “We weren’t supposed to come back here, remember? The owner’s in the National Front.”

  But they go there anyway, because it has a fireplace and the food is reasonably priced. To head off boredom Adèle makes conversation. She tells stories, asks her colleagues about their plans for Christmas, tries to rekindle old scraps of gossip. It’s exhausting. The waiter comes over to take their order. When he asks what they would like to drink, Adèle suggests wine. Her colleagues look coy, halfheartedly shake their heads, claim they can’t afford it. “It’s on me!” Adèle announces, despite the fact that her bank account is overdrawn and these colleagues have never once bought her a drink. But so what? She’s taking charge now, she’s treating them, and after a glass of Saint-Estèphe, in the woodsmoke-scented air, she has the feeling that they love her and are forever in her debt.

  * * *

  *

  It’s three thirty by the time they leave the restaurant. They are slightly drowsy from the wine, the too-rich food, and the warmth of the fire that they can still smell on their coats and their hair. Adèle takes the arm of Laurent, whose desk is opposite hers. He is tall and thin and his cheap false teeth give him a horsey smile.