Black Forest

by Valérie Mréjen

  AND THEN THERE WERE THOSE awful scenes glimpsed fleetingly on the side of the highway, while police in fluorescent vests waved you on so as to keep traffic moving: the mangled bodywork of cars and the revolving red lights, the fleets of ambulances, or that car you spotted one night as you rounded a sharp curve in the expressway, completely flipped over, an arm sticking out from underneath. On a corner of the rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, in an area cordoned off by security tape, a policeman had the presence of mind to ask passersby to look away as he motioned for the trucker, who surely hadn’t seen the cyclist coming from the rue de la Forge Royale—his head now crushed beneath the enormous tire—to go into reverse.

  On the avenue des Pyrénées, a brown blanket was thrown over the body of a man who’d just leaped into the void. An absurdly isolated, unpaired shoe had been flung slightly farther away, and a thick ribbon of blood escaped from beneath the blanket, tracing a line on the pavement.

  RETURNING HOME ONE NIGHT AFTER a brief absence, he noticed a pool of blood on the floor, and as he made his way through the rooms of the apartment, gradually discovered that his roommate had decided to end things in the most viciously painful manner at his disposal: by swallowing a bottle of drain cleaner.

  WHILE THEY WERE TIDYING THE attic room where he stored some of his books, his friend, who had come along simply to chat and leaf through a few old volumes on heraldry or mycology, received a phone call and learned that his sister had jumped off the roof of her building earlier that afternoon.

  THE WOMAN, WHO CONTINUED TO grow older and had only just begun to understand why, after a certain age, the vast majority of people no longer bothered celebrating their birthday, was introduced by a mutual friend to an Italian writer who lived in Rome and whom she contacted the moment she arrived there, having planned to stay in the city for a few months and wanting to go out in the evenings and meet locals. He was older than she was, a bachelor and likely a bit of an alcoholic, and had lived for years in a slightly antiquated building on a residential avenue, in an apartment his uncle had left him. This was seen as an oddity in his bohemian circle, not in keeping with his style nor with his standard of living, and they all gently mocked his absurdly privileged situation, as if he were an imposter on foreign soil. The writer pretended to be amused by it, too, even though he actually found it a little disconcerting and had always sensed a hint of reproach in their jokes about the affluence of his neighborhood and the cachet of his apartment. The only way to make this anomaly seem acceptable to his friends who lived in neighborhoods farther from the city center or near the train station was to refer to it himself as an eccentricity. And so she called him as soon as she arrived in Rome and they saw each other many times at his apartment or in the wine bars he liked to frequent, and to this day, she wonders why he agreed so often and so kindly to take her out when it was clear that nothing would ever happen between them and both knew that this somewhat forced affiliation would last only as long as her time in the city. He was probably lonely, just as she might have been, and he must have liked the idea of this casual friendship that they nonetheless maintained by calling each other regularly. She’d even tried to film him describing a moment of guilt he’d experienced in life; they very seriously prepared for the shoot and even discussed which anecdote he might choose. Finally, seated on a folding chair in an old painter’s studio, he explained to the camera that, morally, he felt quite bad about eating octopus salad since he’d heard that octopuses were among the most intelligent animals, and it bothered him to chew on a creature that might possibly be aware, sharply conscious, in fact—even once slain and boiled—of its suffering.

  A few years later, she had the occasion to return to Italy for a few days, and it seemed perfectly natural and fitting, after so much time had passed and so many life events had no doubt taken place, that she should surprise him with a visit. She no longer had his phone number but needed only to type his name into a search engine to discover a free encyclopedia page where his life was recounted in the past tense and, scrolling down a little further, she learned, two years too late, that he’d died in a motorcycle accident.

  SHE HAD, FOR SOME YEARS, been attached to several objects that held sentimental value: for instance, a tub of coral-pink lip gloss—a typical mother-to-daughter gift, bright and very “springy,” or so said the saleswoman at the perfumery in Honfleur, and unquestionably more charming than the greasy, overdramatic kohl that always prompted people to ask why young women insisted on wearing all that eye makeup—which she’d kept for years and years until it began to resemble nothing so much as a lumpy paste, as if ravaged by a strange affection. She’d kept a number of cards and letters as relics, while many others were lost, incomprehensibly, though she told herself now that it was quite possible she’d tossed them out in a moment of youthful carelessness—letters that, in the end, contained little apart from a few anecdotes about the other family members, primarily the cat and the tiny dog. Those missives sent to her at summer camp or on language study trips often had to do with what these animals might feel, likely as a metaphor for feelings the writer didn’t dare express directly. She found in one of them the lines: Zoë thinks her milk is served too cold, she reproached me again for it this morning; and Tartine often curls up on your empty bed and looks up at us sadly… What a pathetic picture!

  It took years—but truly, years—for the twenty-seven-year-old woman to realize something that had never before occurred to her; that the dog’s name was only one letter removed from her mother’s.

  In that scant pile of correspondence, there was a birthday card with a picture of a cat wearing braids and a floral dress, drawn in black, sinuous lines. Above this, a caption in the style of Magritte’s paintings read Nattes à Chat, cat’s braids. She’d always wondered if this Natacha wasn’t the image of the ideal daughter her mother would have preferred, a daughter with long hair and glossy lips, well-mannered and smiling, light years from the self-conscious tomboy who always dragged her feet and sat slumped on the sofa.

  A MAN WHO LIKED WEARING a fragrance made from the essence of fig leaves once wrote that the best day of his life might already be behind him. For the nearly forty-two-year-old woman, the idea of the best day was a great mystery. That remarkable feat, a kind of chef-d’oeuvre that gracefully unfolded from morning to night and was meant to shed a light on more dismal periods to follow—did it ever really arrive? The notion of such a thing placed an enormous pressure on life itself, to be able to boast of producing a best day; and if such a day were to truly stand out from the rest, it would have to be free of any incidents, from beginning to end, with nothing to break its continuity or threaten to cast a shadow over the scene; otherwise, you’d have to swap it out for another day down the line and start all over again in the hope of, this time, achieving a flawless performance. If, for example, following a marvelous night, the day were to begin promisingly, with good news and the warmth of morning sunshine and yet, a while later, someone bumped into you on the street without apologizing, or you missed the metro by a few seconds, everything would be irrevocably ruined; a series of annoyances, even tiny ones, was enough to take that day out of the running. Even the slightest disturbance or the most trivial setback could undermine and call into question all the happy moments that had come before it.

  What’s more, if she’d gotten married—it’s often said that your wedding is supposed to be the happiest day of your life—she’d surely have spent every minute of her day on the lookout for blunders, obsessing over the smallest detail or gaffe, from a guest’s yawn or the alcohol on a waiter’s breath to the toughness of the meat, when they’d certainly ordered prime quality. She’d be determined to uncover any scrap of evidence that could contradict this cliché, as if seeking to distance herself, despite all she felt for her future husband, from the notion that marriage represents the pinnacle of happiness in a woman’s life. Something contrarian and a bit superstitious in her would be determined to prove that these grandiose sayings, so often drummed int
o us, also have their margin of error and don’t always apply to the whole of humanity.

  Besides, people spoke more often of the best day than of the worst day. You almost never wondered what your most sinister day would look like or when it would take place. No one—it was just as well—thought hmm, what do you make of this one: might it not be the worst day of your life?

  WE’D GET READY TO LEAVE the little square after sitting there for a long while, gazing at the serrated leaves and the arcs of water that splashed onto the sand whenever a child reached up to press the fountain button with both hands. She would no doubt want to return to the kingdom of souls, having understood that she wouldn’t really be able to adapt to life here below. I’d try to change her mind, but would soon run out of persuasive arguments. Then I’d hear myself proclaiming c’est beau la vie, but it would just make me think of a slogan for gummy candies, and I’d watch as she disappeared again, trudging up the avenue to have one more look at the crocodile leather sofas and other tawdry pieces of furniture in the shop windows before rounding a corner to the right and taking the long street that leads up to Père-Lachaise.

  As I turned and started in the opposite direction, I’d wonder what had happened to the lady who sold flowers at the market and whose magnificent dahlias, apparently grown in her tiny suburban garden, she wrapped in newspaper and tied with a wisp of wool, blaming mother nature for the fact that she didn’t have them every week, though she offered in their place no less fabulous bouquets of snapdragons and bluebonnets. And the tiny, wrinkled woman who waited on the doorstep of her stationary shop, fists plunged into the kangaroo pocket of her polyester blouse, making the fabric sag even though her hands couldn’t have weighed very much at all, and who always looked out at the street from that same position, filled with the undying hope that a few schoolchildren might come in to buy the stickers and slightly faded notebooks on display in the little window case.

  A FEW YARDS FARTHER ON, the street would be packed as usual with people crossing paths and weaving around each other, meandering along or hurrying off to appointments, pedaling on bicycles so as not to be late. It would be teeming with passersby continually moving forward, trying to stay on course, to avoid a puddle, to catch someone’s eye, while above their heads, in an apartment situated several stories high, a man might have stopped wondering what he would do the next day. Arms would lift boxes, carry bags, swing to the rhythm of footsteps; legs would turn in one direction or the other, march straight ahead, take the stairs. Minds would consider a thousand things, would pursue the thread of an idea, would recall an old phrase or two, dreaming relentlessly of some paradise.

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  If we storytellers are Death’s Secretaries,

  we are so because, in our brief mortal lives,

  we are grinders of these lenses.

  —John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

  GIVEN THE CHOICE, WOULD YOU rather know when—the precise moment—you were going to die, or how? A friend asked me this pithy question a few months ago, when I was in the final stages of editing the translation you’ve just read. I thought about it for a moment, then said it wouldn’t make all that much difference to me, so long as Valérie Mréjen wrote my obituary. How to explain to my friend: the lightness of hand, the quiet intensity of attention, the knack for finding poignancy in the banally absurd, all so distinctively Mréjen’s? Who wouldn’t want the postscript to their life to be handled with such care?

  Of course, Mréjen’s approach to writing about death—its sly, callous inventiveness and the transformations wrought by it on the living—is formally more akin to the witness statement than to the obituary. Her aim is not to eulogize but to detail, to inventory, to record; to fulfill the role, in Berger’s sense, of Death’s secretary. And yet that word, care, is among the first that come to mind whenever I try to describe the peculiar intimacy of this writing that never once reaches for pathos. Mréjen’s insistence on maintaining a certain distance from her subject feels to me rooted in care, which is to say the opposite of carelessness: vigilance, discretion, accuracy. It’s as if she knew that to come any closer would be to breach some mysterious contract made with Death itself: I’ll show you my face, as long as you stay right there—no sudden movements—and as long as you don’t look away.

  And she doesn’t; not for a beat. She doesn’t flinch, either. The steady focus of her gaze keeps our attention on the space of the encounter with death; an encounter that, in these pages, almost always comes as the rudest of shocks. Like the anonymous writers of faits divers—the brief, sordid news items used as “filler” in French newspapers of old—Mréjen catalogues the kind of sudden, tragic, odd and unexplained deaths that we secretly believe only happen to other people. She treats each one as a complete story with its own internal logic and timing, and these self-contained narratives are often devastating in their concision. But as they accumulate over the course of the novel, intertwining with the dark tale of mother and daughter that stands at its heart, the sense of a larger pattern begins to emerge: the one death’s traces have left, indelibly, on a forty-something consciousness; the contours of a forest populated by ghosts.

  VALÉRIE MRÉJEN WAS BORN IN 1969 in Paris and grew up in the 17th arrondissement, a leafy, quiet enclave in the northwest corner of the city. Her circuitous path to literature began at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts in Cergy-Pontoise, where she developed a practice in video and mixed-media arts. The videos she made after graduating—brief sketches that mine the minutiae of everyday interactions, often revolving around a failure to communicate—were widely exhibited and remain touchstones of her oeuvre. (It bears pointing out that her first video, Une noix, contains the seed of what would become a leitmotif in this novel and in much of her work: the way language operates within the family, especially between parents and children. In it, a young girl grows increasingly frustrated as she tries to recite a poem and is interrupted again and again by her sermonizing mother.)

  Around the same time, she began working on a series of cut-up texts that mimic the language in personals ads, using only proper names found in the phonebook; the fastidious and somewhat obsessive process involved in making the cutups was, Mréjen later said in an interview, “an indirect way of coming to writing.” Her first novel, Mon grand-père, published in 1999, and the two that followed in short order—L’Agrume (2001) and Eau Sauvage (2004)—are each in their own way collage-like, fragmentary texts that toy with conventions of self-portraiture. To my mind, they can be read as a sort of triptych that engages with the question of how others’ words shape us, in particular when we are young and still stuttering ourselves into being. Forêt noire shares in those concerns to a certain extent, but if the earlier work was preoccupied with the limiting forces of language, here Mréjen acknowledges those limitations and attempts the impossible anyway: to speak at length, exclusively, and without interruption of the very thing that embodies the unsayable (for, as the saying goes, no one has come back to tell us about it).

  Little surprise, then, that the novel marks a stylistic and tonal break: from the short, declarative sentences that achieve a disquieting cumulative effect in the “tryptich,” to the meandering ones in Forêt noire that unfold like paper flowers; from the imposed flatness of tone that became Mréjen’s signature early on in her career, to the seamless shifts in tense, register and point of view that run through this novel, yielding more oddity and ambiguity. My greatest challenge in translating Forêt noire was, without question, finding the right way to carry that strangeness over into English, and striking the delicate balance between vagueness and precision—and, by extension, between formal distance and emotional immediacy—that gives this writing its subtle dissonance.

  The deeper I delved into Mrejen’s sentences, the more compelled I felt to immerse myself in her particular universe, too. Whenever I hadn’t been translating for a while and needed to ease into the mood of the book again, it was a comfort to spend time with the fil
ms—and the hallowed HBO series—that are woven into the narrative, each reflecting its overall tone in some way. I watched and re-watched Raymond Depardon’s 1983 documentary Faits divers, which follows a group of cops on their daily rounds in a Paris precinct, and Ernst Lubitsch’s fleet, enchanting 1943 comedy Heaven Can Wait, in which the boundary between the living and the dead becomes magically porous. The translating flowed more easily once I came to understand that the two films serve as counterpoints in the novel, playfully echoing its title’s double meaning.1 I revisited Six Feet Under, which Mréjen has said served as inspiration (and more than once, as I settled in on the couch and let the opening credits roll, I found myself gauging the distance to the bathroom door). Perhaps most significantly, I discovered a whole body of work that isn’t named in the text, but that casts a shadow over it from the first sentence; that of a man who liked wearing a fragrance made from the essence of fig leaves, and who decided one day that he’d lived long enough. Mréjen’s late friend and sometimes collaborator, Édouard Levé, left behind several books of photographs and four slim volumes of deeply thoughtful, witty, enigmatic prose; in his final novel, Suicide, Levé’s narrator addresses a friend who killed himself fifteen years earlier, at twenty-five, on his birthday, the 25th of December.2 Mréjen’s novel, too, is filled with eerie symmetries, and reading Levé’s works alongside it gave me a heightened awareness of these patterns and resonances.