Article 353

by Tanguy Viel

  I would have wanted to add an adverb like “probably,” “eventually,” or “maybe” to each thing he said. Saying this today, I wouldn’t be short of adverbs, but on that day I didn’t have the time to see things that way, with adverbs, since I was bending under the weight of his accumulated data while he continued to talk generally, in other words to everyone else except me, and trying to make me out to be more independent than I was. This is something he understood perfectly that evening when he said, I’m not the person to tell you what you should do, Kermeur. You know how to steer your own ship.

  And you can’t imagine, I told the judge, that ten-foot waves rose like walls of water in that brain of mine at this sudden idea of steering my own ship, as if I were on that ship, lost in the middle of the ocean next to a huge liner bound for America. So because of that very feeling, under my skull, it was like a magic bullet fired from one side to the other and breaking all the windows. And at the same time as this ricocheting bullet was doing more damage than a stone tossed into a lake—at the same time, I’m saying—something in me was swelling with pride or, I don’t know, sovereignty, something that was saying, Yes it’s true you know how to steer your own ship, without realizing that Lazenec would soon be making himself at home in my pride, my resistance, and my free will, flopping down on a leather sofa he had upholstered himself.

  We went on drinking our beers while we watched the sea under the setting sun. And we continued to talk about fishing and about his new life in the region, and this whole future opening up to the peninsula. He never stopped planting seeds in my brain, the way you broadcast seeds in a field, with the same ease where you know that not all of the seeds will take root, that some will rot on a stone or be eaten by birds, but it doesn’t matter, because you scatter so many seeds that enough of them will grow into a uniform carpet of grass. Well, this was exactly the same thing, I told the judge.

  From that moment on, it was as if the captain who was supposed to be living with me in my brain had abandoned the ship even before the wreck began. And maybe he was on some distant rock, his eyes wild, that captain who’s lived inside me for more than fifty years without stumbling and had suddenly left and was watching from shore as the ship sank.

  Thinking is a strange business, isn’t it? It’s not that it’s so far from your brain to your lips, but sometimes it can seem like miles, that for a sentence to make the trip, it would be like crossing a war zone with a sack of stones on your shoulder, to the point where even a thought that seems firm and solid, considered and reconsidered a hundred times, chooses to take shelter behind some sandbags. What I’m trying to say is that in the following days, instead of clearly saying “No,” which was going on inside me, instead of letting myself be led back to my groundskeeper job with the friendly self-regard I carried in my heart, instead of that, with the voice of a ghost who can hear himself, I picked up the phone one evening and said, “Lazenec?” And then I said, “Why not?” And I said, “When do I sign?”

  The judge was on his feet now, looking out the window. Backlit that way, with his hands behind his back, he looked maybe twenty years older, in the way that people’s ages can vary from one minute to the next with a frown or a change of the light. So it didn’t help when he spun around, with his backlit face now dark and only his voice coming out of the shadows, saying: For heaven’s sake, Kermeur, what were you thinking? He slammed his fist on his desk, almost knocking off the documents piled there.

  I think it scared me, that a guy who’s supposed to stand for the calm and coldness of the law should get so angry and seem so emotional. It actually did scare me, and I kept my eyes fixed on the ground, letting his question sink into the strips of the old parquet floor creaking under our feet. I don’t remember what happened just then. I don’t remember if he repeated his question two or three times or if it was just pounding like a drum inside me. What I do know is that all I could think to say was, Can I step outside for a minute?

  The judge looked at his watch and then the wall clock hanging behind me, as if to make sure that they were properly synchronized. Then, without answering, he walked around his desk, opened the door, and called the cop outside to escort me down the hall. At that moment, maybe I should’ve run and let myself be shot down on the courthouse steps, but maybe he also knew I wouldn’t do that.

  His question continued to echo in the faded hallway and was still echoing as the flow of urine streamed into the toilet bowl. His voice echoed off the tile squares of the toilet wall: For heaven’s sake, Kermeur, what were you thinking? And it seemed to ravage me like insecticide sprayed on a ladybug, as if in that instant my own body was just that, a ladybug being blown over. Then I walked back the way I’d come, to that same badly painted office, with the judge on the other side of his penal code, as it were. In the meantime, he had sat back down and erased the anger flowing through his body, as if the leather of his armchair diffused a kind of soothing balm around him. I couldn’t tell whether he was annoyed at me for having signed or only angry at himself for having gotten carried away—carried away over a guy he would soon be leading to the gates of a prison.

  He didn’t say anything. And I didn’t say anything, either. And now, wrapped in the silence that went on and on, I wondered if it wasn’t really best to not look too deeply into things in silence, a little like swamp water that hadn’t been stirred up, and which would be all the clearer because of the stillness, whereas in the last years you would’ve thought that all the mud had been churned up to the surface, along with the kinds of images that occur to me when I think of clear water. I often thought I would be perfectly happy being like the surface of a lake, but the judge didn’t. He wanted me to go deeper, down to where things sleep or slither or crumple like tectonic plates. He wanted to drill down, to catch sight of essential oil, or something. He wanted to do that and I didn’t. I told him several times that everything was right here under our eyes, and that it was a mistake to try and go back to some time that was dead, or defective, or defunct, in any case a time that wouldn’t bring back the hours and the shames. What would there be to bring back? I asked.

  A ghost, he said.

  Yeah, a ghost, I guess.

  I wanted to stand up then and fold my hands behind my back like an old sage explaining life to his disciple. Instead I stayed sitting across from him, just turning my head to look at the dozens of civil and maritime codes on the bookshelves, which seemed to contain all the answers on earth, their dark red and wine-colored covers gradually fading in our rare sunshine. Then he spoke more calmly, almost whispering this time, as if I were a wild animal he didn’t want to frighten, and repeated his question: For heaven’s sake, Kermeur, what were you thinking?

  So I asked him: Do you know the story of the guy who almost won the lottery? It’s pretty rare to know someone who won the lottery, right? But isn’t it even rarer to know someone who almost won? Picture this: For ten years this guy plays the same numbers every week without fail, and then it happens, the day his six numbers came up is the one day he forgot to register his ticket. And it’s true, it’s unbelievable. There’s one chance out of thirteen million of winning the lottery, and about the same odds of this guy forgetting to register his ticket, and the guy managed to multiply one by the other. I know someone this happened to, and it wasn’t a neighbor or uncle: It was me.

  Each week for years I kept a properly registered, carefully folded lottery ticket deep in my pocket, I told the judge. I would often touch it during the day, to make myself believe that some evening I would finally be a millionaire. And each week, Erwan, France, and I would sit down in front of the TV to watch the drawing broadcast, to watch the smiling girl on-screen announce the winning numbers, and then life would resume its normal course, that is, the course it never left, except that I left it every day, all week long, wanting to believe, each time I put my hand in my pocket, touching the ticket that for some reason, or for no reason, in any case, I knew for sure I hadn’t regis
tered.

  So on Saturday the three of us are on the sofa as usual in front of the TV, as usual we aren’t going to win the lottery, and we’re happy. So I must’ve looked strange when the first number came up, then the second number, and the third, and I turned pale when I remembered that that morning, no, I can’t believe it, that morning, this can’t be real, it’s impossible, but it was too late, and when the sixth number came up, it was much too late.

  The look on Erwan’s face, who didn’t know. The look on France’s face, who was on her feet saying, It’s true, right there on the screen, those are our numbers. So without moving or looking at anyone I said, I didn’t register the ticket.

  The silence that followed. The girl on-screen smiling stupidly, repeating the numbers, 2, 5, 12, 24, 27, 31, and the bonus number, 7 of course, the bonus 7, and the girl on the screen, smiling as she looked at us.

  After that, I don’t know. France picked up the remote, pressed the button, and went out to the kitchen. She didn’t say anything. Erwan and I wound up sitting together in front of the switched-off television. Erwan and I reflected in the gray screen, our faces hard to see because of the dust. I remember we stayed a moment like that, switched off, too.

  It’s no big deal, I tried to say, It’s no big deal. I kept on trying to say it more and more quietly, more and more falsely, sinking deeper and deeper into the sofa, my body would’ve melted into the cushions if it could have, an apple in my throat going up and down with emotion, and the strange urge to check again to see if by any chance, if out of habit I actually had registered the ticket, because I didn’t believe it right away. I went to bed without believing it. I tried to tell myself that it wouldn’t change anything. I tried to tell myself that winning changes your life, but that losing, well, losing is what’s usual, it wouldn’t change anything because that’s the usual. But there’s losing, and then there’s losing. And how can you tell if that or something else, if destiny can change for so little, not even knowing if you can say “so little” for a reversal of fortune so stinging it makes your head hurt for so long, because it’s never the same, see, to have someone tell you the story as for it to happen to you on a sofa on a Saturday evening.

  What about your wife? asked the judge.

  My wife, nothing. My wife, not a word. Maybe there was already trouble brewing, I don’t know, and I’m not saying this played a part in her leaving, I don’t know if some sort of crack opened up that day, but the fact is, it’s true that everything went to pieces around then, considering that if you look at life carefully everything converges at a few points and the rest of the time, nothing, or rather yes, the rest of the time you’re left holding the bag.

  In any case, today that’s the way I see the last decade as I’m pulling all the lines together here in front of you, and it’s like a kite whose strings I would tug on from a beach, as if suddenly I had a clear and almost supernatural view of the time passing, but it’s always easy, looking back, to weave things into a destiny and then mark out the years with something like stakes or corner posts, and even a color to give them their final hue. Only when you’re in it, in each year begun with a bottle of champagne, there’s never a road map handed out on New Year’s Day to lead us through the future. Never anything but the slightly fuzzy lines each of us tries to sketch to follow the course of the seasons, and that’s all. The whole problem is that you have to take the curves yourself. Although where I’m concerned, I didn’t feel I’d taken many curves. That’s the advantage of stupidity: You just stand in the intersection waiting for a car to run you over. I mean, was I the one who decided from one day to the next that my wife should leave almost without warning? Was I the one who decided to lay off three-quarters of the workers at the Arsenal?

  In any case, she found someone, I told the judge. France found someone, a new companion. That’s the way she said it, “a new companion,” standing at the door when she came to fetch Erwan for the weekend, and if by chance I invited her inside, in any case she would refuse.

  So Erwan was living with you? asked the judge.

  Yes, Erwan lived with me. It was his choice, to live with me. Don’t ask me why. That’s the way it is. I only know that France never liked it. Just imagine: a mother, her son. And he chooses his father. So maybe her “new companion” was her way of coming out on top. When she spoke about him, her new companion, I was never able to tell if it was out of embarrassment or pity for me, or maybe just pride: pride at having made the right decision, to not stay stuck with me, and today, with all the hours of loneliness when I felt she was beating me over the head with a spade, I can say she did well, more than well.

  Your Honor, the only thing I don’t want to know is whether it started before.

  If what started before?

  Her affair with him. Her new companion. Because after all she’s the one who left, remember, so I have the right to wonder, you understand, I have the right to wonder how long, I’m sorry to say it like this, but how long she’d been going to his bedroom.

  But that didn’t seem to interest the judge, who was as indifferent as a doctor to his patients’ complaints. I’ve since thought that doctors and judges are people who don’t deal in feelings, quite the contrary, they’re too busy pushing the branches aside and breaking through the understory they inhabit. Sometimes when the judge looked at me, you’d have thought he had a machete in his eyes and was using it to hack his way into me, as if he was aiming for some central point I didn’t know myself, something that he might’ve simply called “the facts” and because he thought the truth was inside them, inside “the facts.” As if truth would step out of the water all alone, dry and unwrinkled. And after all, why not?

  When you come right down to it, I’ll never know if there was a connection between the lottery ticket and France’s leaving. I couldn’t say there was, or rather I could say, but it bothers me too much. What I do know is that the four or five years that followed were certainly the stupidest of my life, if only you can call stupidity the hours of absence from one’s self. The fact is that France left, and I never played the lottery again, because I know that kind of luck doesn’t happen twice in a lifetime.

  Unless some balding guy asks you out for a beer and talks about the future, said the judge.

  Yes, except in that case. Except that this time the lottery ticket cost five hundred thousand francs.

  And in a way, the drawing never happened, he said.

  Yes, that’s right, it never happened.

  It’ll be six years now, I said. Six years since I wrote a check for five hundred and twelve thousand francs to one Antoine Lazenec.

  As I said those words, I would have wanted to gulp down a hundred gallons of air, the office suddenly felt even smaller, maybe because the afternoon was wearing on and the light was fading and the judge hadn’t yet turned on the lamps that would soon light up our faces. There in the shadows, even what was being said began to darken, as if each minute had its own thickness, its rough density, and was an obstacle to time itself, as if being there talking and thinking and seeing so many images being carelessly mixed together, time itself was being accumulated and entangled in all the days gone by, as if I had gradually stopped recognizing anything of the fossilized days except the sticky, almost shapeless mass of the past.

  You wrote a check, just like that? asked the judge. For five hundred and twelve thousand francs?

  You must think I’m stupid, I answered. Of course not. Of course I didn’t write a check just like that on the corner of a table in some restaurant. No, we did it all properly, before a notaire and all. Before a notaire, I repeated, as if I were unfolding the expression on the judge’s desk like an old marine chart. That’s right, before a notaire, in other words before a sworn officer of the court who could go to jail if he lets you sign something stupid. I remember, Lazenec and I were in the waiting room, with me pretending to read Figaro Magazine and Lazenec holding Paris Match when the notai
re called us in. He stuck his head out the door, with his gray hair parted on the side like all the notaires in France, and said, “You’re next,” as if we were at the dentist’s or the barber’s. Sitting across from this man who wouldn’t smile once in the next two hours, I had the feeling of being in front of the law in person. Do you understand? The law in person—that must mean something to you, I told the judge.

  We sat on two plastic chairs facing the notaire’s mahogany desk, and he read almost the entire grant deed, according to which I was indeed signing for a three-bedroom apartment with an ocean view, fourth floor, in Les Grands Sables apartment building, to be delivered within two years, with stipulations and clauses you can’t imagine, paragraphs that protect you from everything: fire, flood, banks, hidden defects, and natural catastrophes.

  And do you know what Lazenec said right there in the notaire’s office, at the very moment when he was about to sign the deed with his Montblanc fountain pen? He said, Contracts are like marriage, Kermeur, they’re mainly useful in case of divorce.

  I initialed forty-nine pages in triplicate that day. In other words, I carefully wrote M.K. for Martial Kermeur exactly one hundred and forty-seven times, and wrote my full signature at the end of each section, with very serious phrases like “Read and approved,” “Certified on my honor,” and “Signed and agreed.”

  When I left there two hours later with my signed and stamped grant deed, it felt like I’d had the Shroud of Turin authenticated by Christ in person. As I made my way home, with my fifty pages still warm with our three signatures, you mustn’t think I regretted what I’d done, signing without really understanding. Quite the contrary. I walked into my house proudly, laid the contract on the table, and spent the entire evening reading it in detail. I remember Erwan was there, of course, so I quickly made dinner, and we sat down to eat as usual. And he could have talked to me about anything he wanted that evening, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have heard a word of it.