by Inès Cagnati
IC: That’s to be expected, I’d say, because to be a child, it seems to me, is to be born apart, misunderstood by adults, who want to treat you like a miniature woman or little man . . . which isn’t right, and which already constitutes one kind of strangeness for the child. Then beyond that, we had the misfortune of being foreigners, and always being regarded as strangers.
P-PR: There’s a sentence by the father in Les Pipistrelles, I don’t know if it’s something your own father said, but the father who’s an Italian immigrant who’s moved to France, says of his neighbor peasants, who are French, “They are foreigners, but they’re at home.”
IC: My father didn’t say that, I did.
P-PR: It’s a very nice sentence; he thinks the French are strangers, “but they’re at home.”
IC: Yes, but worse . . . For example, when you think of the Polish Russians, who are also their neighbors, they are even stranger than you, there’s a whole hierarchy of foreignness; they’re foreign because of their language, because of [the distance of their home country, like Siberia] . . . so there’s a whole hierarchy among foreigners.
P-PR: In your life in France, did you feel very strongly in your childhood this condition of being a daughter of immigrants, of being a foreigner?
IC: Yes, always. Even now. And on top of that, when my parents had me naturalized, that was a tragedy, because I was not French. I wasn’t Italian anymore either. So I was nothing.
P-PR: Do you still feel like a foreigner today?
IC: Yes.
P-PR: You don’t feel French?
IC: No. Only my son is French.
P-PR: But French is your language.
IC: No, my mother tongue is Italian.
P-PR: But you write in French.
IC: Yes, and I’m even a professor of French language and literature.
P-PR: But you learned French late.
IC: One year, at school.
P-PR: One year at school. Before school you only spoke Italian at home?
IC: Yes, we knew nobody. And worse, the only people we went to see were foreign. As I said of the French—foreigners but at home—they were foreigners, at home, but of another commune, so strangers, too . . . even more so, from my point of view.
P-PR: Was childhood a happy time for you?
IC: For me, unhappy, completely unhappy.
P-PR: Why? Because of this solitude, because of this incomprehension of the adult world?
IC: Maybe it was just that I lived badly. I don’t know. You’re all alone. Nobody understands you, they demand things of you that you don’t understand, particularly when you don’t speak the language.
P-PR: That’s a theme that emerges in many of these stories: the solitude and the cruelty of this solitude, the difficulty of this solitude. Children are isolated, as are the elderly, because they’re abandoned.
IC: Or crazy people.
P-PR: Or crazy people.
IC: Yes. They’re not like other people, they don’t react like other people, they’re not perceived to be like other people. So, it’s a shame, life is crazy for them.
P-PR: This is a world that you inhabited and felt very strongly?
IC: Yes. Even now.
P-PR: Even now.
IC: Yes.
P-PR: But your anchor point, the value you hold to most firmly, seems to be the family unit.
IC: Yes, because it’s the only foothold you have in the world, the familial unit, with the father and the mother, even if they did not do for you what they could have done . . .
P-PR: Without which you’re alone.
IC: Without which you’re alone. You’re always alone in any case, but you feel it less in the family setting. In truth, my true family right now is my son, perhaps because I made him.
P-PR: Your son is foremost.
IC: Yes.
P-PR: Is that not excessive?
IC: Not if I don’t make him feel it that way, no.
P-PR: Yet there’s another source of joy, or comfort, or pleasure, and even sensuality [in your writing], and that’s the pleasure of nature, which you describe magnificently well, almost sensually; one feels that you rejoice in sensuality in your descriptions of nature. I can’t resist reading a short passage:
We arrive, out of breath, at the banks of a stream of cool, flowing water that traces fine lines on the sand of the riverbed, we sit on moss, our backs leaning against a poplar to eat our bunches of grapes, mine is a little crushed, I’d gripped it too hard as we ran; we wade in the water, inhaling the scent of the fresh herbs, not the same as the ones back in the field, except for the peppermint; pushing aside the water skeeters, cupping our hands like shells to take a drink.
There’s truly a sense of rejoicing in contact with nature in these stories.
IC: I still feel that. It’s not just a question of memories. It’s the same today.
P-PR: You live in the countryside now?
IC: More or less.
P-PR: Do you feel a need for the countryside?
IC: It’s where I feel at home. In town I feel unhappy, unhappy. With the people in town I feel still unhappier.
P-PR: With everyone?
IC: Yes.
P-PR: You’ve never had encounters in cities that felt a little bit friendly and warm?
IC: Sure, but most of those have been chance encounters.
P-PR: Fortuitous.
IC: Yes, but it’s fine with me if they’re fortuitous. Whereas in the countryside, people know me when they see me, and come along with me when I go on walks. That’s just how it is.
P-PR: Is writing a comfort to you? A means of liberating yourself from certain things?
IC: It is terrible to write certain things.
P-PR: It’s hard to write?
IC: Yes. Certain things are hard to write, for example . . . it didn’t happen in this book, except for in the last story, “The Woman with No Name.” But, in my novel Génie la Folle—you haven’t read that one I think?
P-PR: No.
IC: There’s a passage, I don’t know how I managed to write it. It’s about a little boy whose cousins made him drink from a wine cask when he was only eighteen months old. He died. Even to write it . . . [Gasps, remembering the horror.] He was barely off the breast.
P-PR: Yet there’s a lot of cruelty in the stories in Les Pipistrelles. Is that hard? Is it hard to write about cruel things?
IC: Very. Even things that sound banal, as with the lizard [I write about].
P-PR: Yes.
IC: Because writing takes time.
P-PR: We’ll speak later of the lizard. But there’s a question I’d like to ask you. You’ve just published your fourth book, you’ve already received three literary prizes, but you’ve been writing for a long time. The first book was in 1973, the next one in 1977, the next in 1980, and now one in 1989. In other words, in almost twenty years of writing, you’ve published four works, that’s not very much. Is that because you write slowly, or because you publish little of what you write, or because you take great pains with your writing?
IC: It’s because if I have nothing to say, I say nothing. And I find there are many more occasions to keep quiet than to speak. And if you have nothing to say, it’s best to keep quiet.
P-PR: Are there periods when you don’t write at all?
IC: Yes.
P-PR: You don’t miss it?
IC: No.
P-PR: What’s after Les Pipistrelles, anything else coming up?
IC: I have half a book.
P-PR: Half a book?
IC: [Laughs.] That I have to finish.
P-PR: So, we’ll have to wait another five years?
IC: Maybe not. [Laughs.]
P-PR: In any case, we have this magnificent book. I’ll remind you of the title, Les Pipistrelles, by Inès Cagnati, published by Julliard. And to conclude our Inès Cagnati interview, Maria will read for us the ending of this magnificent short story, which is extremely cruel, yet also, as you said earlier, banal, about the lizards—two elderly people
who have invited their children over for dinner, and are disappointed because the children only come for the meal, then leave very quickly, when the old folks had been looking forward to their visit for a very long time.
IC: Yes.
P-PR: And a little question I had forgotten. As one sign of your originality, rather than citing other authors—poems at the outset of your works—you cite them here at the end of your stories. Why?
IC: I think it has more meaning that way.
P-PR: So that it can serve as a kind of conclusion?
IC: Yes, in a way. If you highlight them before the story has begun, the reader doesn’t know what you’ve talked about yet. I think it’s better for them to look up the sentence or the sentences at the end—like in a movie when you watch the credits.
*This interview aired on Hôtel, a French literary television program, on November 23, 1989.