Vanessa

Vanessa is a married sex worker and mother whom Jean-Claude Pelletier meets several times. Her account of an unconventional household, her unsentimental understanding of the present, and her encounter with a novel by Benno von Archimboldi make her more than a passing figure in Pelletier’s sexual life: she becomes a test of how much he can know about someone whose priorities and judgments differ from his own. The novel gives Vanessa a direct voice, while making clear that much of the portrait is assembled through Pelletier’s gaze.

Identity and Household

Vanessa has a husband and a son, though she may go weeks without seeing them. She describes her husband as a good person despite calling him lazy and identifying him as Moroccan. When Pelletier asks whether the man knows she works as a prostitute, Vanessa says that he does and does not object, because he believes in individual freedom. Pelletier calls him her pimp; Vanessa allows that the description may fit, but distinguishes him from men who make excessive demands of the women they manage. In periods when she is languid and earns little, she says, he accepts what the household has and tries, unsuccessfully, to find occasional work so that the three of them can get by.

Her account of his beliefs is equally particular. He is Muslim and sometimes prays toward Mecca, but, as Vanessa presents his personal interpretation, Allah permits almost everything. The firm exception is harm to children: abuse, killing, or abandoning a child to certain death is forbidden. This account places the child at the moral center of the household, even as its adults live by arrangements that Pelletier finds difficult to categorize.

Vanessa tells Pelletier that her son is not the Moroccan’s child. The boy was almost blond and had already turned six when she met the Moroccan, during what she calls a terrible period in her life, without explaining what made it terrible. The Moroccan, she recalls, was literally starving when they met. Her sharp reaction to Pelletier’s question makes clear that she considers the suggestion that the boy is his son hurtful or offensive, rather than a neutral inquiry.

Barcelona and the Present

At some point, Vanessa, her son, and the Moroccan travel to Spain and meet the Moroccan’s younger brother in Barcelona. The brother lives with another Frenchwoman, whom Vanessa describes as tall and fat. The two men call themselves musicians, but the Moroccan tells Vanessa that they are really beggars. In Barcelona Vanessa sees her husband unusually happy: he laughs, tells stories, and walks tirelessly through the city, out toward its suburbs and into the mountains overlooking the city and the Mediterranean. She says she has seen comparable energy in children, but in few adults. The memory gives her portrait of him a warmth and vitality that complicate Pelletier’s reductive label of pimp.

Vanessa’s own manner is described through Pelletier’s impressions. He sees her as tall, with a straight Greek nose and a steely, arrogant gaze; he also interprets her disdain for books and culture as a mixture of innocence and elegance. His response is strikingly indulgent: he believes she can make foolish remarks without irritating him. These judgments reveal as much about the critic watching her as about Vanessa herself. Her opinions are not presented as literary arguments to be corrected; they register a distance from the cultural values through which Pelletier understands his own life.

Pelletier and the Archimboldi Novel

After making love, Pelletier gets up naked and searches his books for a novel by Archimboldi. He chooses The Leather Mask, hoping Vanessa might take to it as a horror story and be drawn to its sinister side. The gift surprises and touches her because her clients usually give her clothing or lingerie. Once Pelletier explains who Archimboldi is and what the German writer means to him, Vanessa says, “It’s as if you were giving me a part of you.”

Her remark unsettles Pelletier because he recognizes its truth: Archimboldi has become part of his identity. Pelletier and a few others have developed an ambitious interpretation of the author’s work, one he imagines continuing alongside the writing until one or the other is exhausted. But that confidence falters. Since he and Manuel Espinoza stopped traveling to London and ceased seeing Liz Norton, Archimboldi’s books have sometimes seemed to Pelletier like a foreign, shapeless verbal mass. He imagines the work as a pretext or false door, even as the setting for a bewildering, gratuitous suicide. Vanessa’s simple account of the gift thus touches a crisis in Pelletier’s relation to the literature that had defined him.

As Pelletier expects, Vanessa never tells him what she thinks of the novel. On a later visit to her home, he sees her son watching television instead of going to school. The boy says he has a stomachache, and Vanessa immediately prepares herbal tea. Pelletier watches her move busily around the kitchen, where the disorder and noise include dropped spoons, a broken glass, and calls demanding to know where the tea is. The Moroccan appears without being introduced to Pelletier, shakes his hand, and sits on the sofa to watch cartoons with the boy. When Vanessa comes out of the kitchen, Pelletier says he has to leave; she answers that this is fine with her. He reads belligerence into her reply, then remembers that he thinks of Vanessa as habitually like that. The encounter gives him a view of the household, but not the literary response he had hoped the book would produce.

Character and Narrative Perspective

Pelletier later thinks about Vanessa and reaches conclusions that are explicitly his own. He imagines that she belongs emotionally and physically to the Middle Ages, and judges the idea of modern life meaningless to her. He thinks she trusts what she sees more than what she encounters through the media; that she is wary yet brave, and that her bravery leads her to trust people who often betray her. He also sees her as quick to anger over betrayal, proud of speaking directly, and unwilling to concern herself with what she does not understand. In his view, she lives in a perpetual present, without planning for the future, even her son’s.

Those judgments sit beside contradictions that resist a tidy portrait. Vanessa calls herself free and has an answer for everything, yet she is indifferent to the future and understands freedom through the immediate terms of her life. More than half her friends are Moroccan immigrants, while she also regards immigration as a danger to France; she never gets around to voting for Le Pen. She is pretty, Pelletier thinks, but does not consider herself so. These details are not reconciled into a single explanation. They show a character whose stated beliefs, associations, and practical life do not fit a simple ideological or psychological category.

Vanessa’s importance lies partly in this unresolved difference. She speaks about her family and her convictions in her own terms, but Pelletier repeatedly turns those words and gestures into evidence for his theories about her. Even his gift of Archimboldi’s novel is at once an attempt to share what matters to him and a hope that she will approach it in a way he can recognize. Her silence about the book’s meaning leaves that hope unanswered. The episode consequently links a personal encounter to Pelletier’s larger uncertainty about literary interpretation: Vanessa receives a part of his world, but the narrative does not make her response available to him—or to the reader.