* * *
During this winter—or maybe spring?—Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right politician, appears on The Hour of Truth for the first time. He enters the studio of Antenne 2 alongside François-Henri de Virieu, accompanied by Paul McCartney’s “Live and Let Die,” with the air of a man who has already won. The Olympic Games are held in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, which still existed then. It is six republics, five nations, four languages, three religions, two alphabets, and one party: “the House of Flowers,” as Tito, who now resides in a mausoleum in Belgrade, was fond of saying. The country has not yet been dismembered but its communism is already dying. Perrine Pelen wins two medals in skiing. I remember her short hair and baby face. David, “the boy in the bubble,” dies at the age of twelve. The miners begin their strike in Britain. No one knows yet that it will last a year, claim several victims, and inspire the Clash’s song “London Calling,” that in the end the strikers will return to work without getting anything and that from then on Margaret Thatcher will own the labor movement. In France, hundreds of thousands of people march to defend Catholic schools. As the son of a secular school educator, I find my political conscience is awakening. Indira Gandhi orders the assault on the Golden Temple of Amritsar, sending tanks to the Sikh sanctuary, and will be murdered by a Sikh a few weeks later. And then there is AIDS, of course. AIDS, which will rob us of our innocence.
* * *
I wrote the word: love. I did consider using another one. It’s a curious notion, love; difficult to identify and define. There are so many degrees and variations. I could have contented myself with saying that I was smitten (and it is true that Thomas knew how to make me weaken), or infatuated (he could conquer, flatter, even bewitch like no one else), or obsessed (he often provoked a mixture of bewilderment and excitement, turning everything upside down), or seduced (once he caught me in his net, there was no escaping), or taken with (I was stupidly joyful, I could heat up over nothing), or even blinded (anything that embarrassed me, I pushed to the side, minimizing his defects, putting his good qualities on a pedestal), or disturbed (no longer was I ever quite myself), which would have had less positive connotations. I could have explained it away as mere affection, having a “crush,” an explanation vague enough to mean anything. But those would just have been words. The truth, the brutal truth, was that I was in love. Enough to use the right word.
All the same, I wondered if this could be a complete invention. As you already know, I invented stories all the time, with so much authenticity that people usually ended up believing me (sometimes even I was no longer able to disentangle the true from the false). Could I have made this story up from scratch? Could I have turned an erotic obsession into a passion? Yes, it’s possible.
* * *
In June, we take our baccalaureate. In July, we read a list on the blackboard telling us that we passed. I’m happy, as one is in these moments. Thomas acts like a killjoy. He starts in on me: You never really thought you wouldn’t pass, it’s not like you were shaking in your boots as you looked for your name on the list, right? Even the passing with honors wasn’t a surprise to you. I tell him that knowing it doesn’t prevent happiness, that we can still savor the moment. I did not understand then that the bac was the end of us.
Or rather I absolutely refused to see it, remaining in a stubborn state of denial. I had ignored the weight of the terrible phrase expressed to me on that first day: “Because you will leave and we will stay.” (In hindsight, I’m shocked by my attitude. Ever rational and pragmatic, how did I manage to sweep away the evidence, the undeniable certainty of the end?) I suppose I didn’t want to be overcome by grief in advance.
* * *
Later I will do the same with death. I will behave as if life will just continue. I will talk to a friend the day before he dies, imagining the future, even when he is emaciated, intubated, clearly on his deathbed. When I hear of his passing, it will always be a surprise to me.
Thomas, however, has forgotten nothing. Nothing has disappeared for him. It’s why he scowls. I do not know what is hiding behind that pose. If I had to think about it, I would say: melancholy, sadness, perhaps the beginning of nostalgia, which he will quickly excise; or nothing at all, since he has been so good at refusing to commit himself. In any case, I would not say: despair.
* * *
For me, when I finally realize the extent of the rupture, my heart will break. It is pure suffering. I always figured it would be me who would suffer the most. I even thought that I would be the only one. Sometimes there is a lack of discernment.
Just after I get the results of the bac, I say: Hey, I have to show you the camera my parents gave me. He jokes: Well, at least they weren’t very worried if they got you a gift before they knew. I shrug my shoulders. He adds: And that’s the only pretext you’ve found to go to your house, to fuck, to celebrate, what. . . ? I burst out laughing; I don’t know that it’s my last laugh with him. The house is empty, the room welcomes our intimacy. And then, without thinking, and without much hope either, I make a suggestion: We could go for a ride on your bike, in the countryside, to use my new Canon. To my surprise, Thomas agrees, without complaining. We leave immediately. The air is warm, the light almost blinding. We end up stopping in a wooded area that I like, away from everything. I start taking my first pictures. Thomas stands a little behind; I guess he’s amused by my childish excitement. He goes to sit on a low wall of pale stones and pulls out a blade of grass to hold between his fingers. I turn around, discovering him in this position, and find him more beautiful than ever. Behind him is an oak tree surrounded by a yellow sky. I want to immortalize this moment, this moment of his beauty at the beginning of summer, but I sense that he will tell me no if I ask him. And I refuse to photograph him without his knowing. I approach slowly, already resigned to his refusal. Yet, almost despite myself, probably because the desire is too strong, I find myself asking him. I can see the hesitation in his eyes, but in the end he accepts. I’m stunned but I don’t show it and I hurry to get what I want before he changes his mind. I take the picture. In it, he’s wearing jeans, a plaid shirt with rolled-up sleeves. He has the blade of grass between his fingers and he’s smiling, a slight, complicit smile, almost tender. This smile devastated me for a long time after, whenever I happened to look at this photograph. It upsets me even now as I write these lines and contemplate the image, resting on my desk, right next to my keyboard. Because now I know. I know that Thomas consented to this single picture only because he knew (had decided) that it was our last moment together. He smiled so that I could take his smile with me.
* * *
And then it was time for my departure for the island of Ré, just like every summer since childhood. The island had always been a part of my life. The reason? My father’s best friend, whom he’d met at twenty, during his military service, “in the regiment,” as they say, lived there. When I search my memory, the oldest one I can think of is on the island: I’m three years old, wearing short pants, a striped shirt, and a miniature bicycle cap, sitting on my mother’s lap in front of a boat. The sun makes me squint. The boat is the ferry that connects the mainland to the island, between La Pallice and Sablanceaux. The crossing is twenty minutes long. The wonder I felt at this moment has never left me.
I spent every summer on the island. We would wait for hours in unbearable heat in a line at the pier, the leatherette of the car seats sticking to our bare thighs. Once we were on board the ferry, though, everything—the waiting, the humidity—would be forgotten. We’d get out of the car and let the euphoria wash over us. The smell of fuel and sea salt mingling together as we looked out over the flickering light on the surface of the water. When we arrived on the other side, we headed to Sainte-Marie.
* * *
The island is popular at that time: There are campsites, paid holiday vacations, Paul Ricard bucket hats, and folding tables on the sides of roads. It is not the extension of Saint-Germain-des-Prés that it has since become. The stone façades are dark, th
e shutters bottle green. In the afternoons, we head out to the other side of Saint-Sauveur on foot to go swimming. The roads are dotted with umbrella pines. I adore this beach, with its warm and turbid seawater that smells like kelp. In fact, I almost drowned here once (which, who knows, might be responsible for my obsession with drowning so many characters in my novels—and yet the experience itself left me with no lasting consequences).
* * *
Today, when I meet children on this beach, when I see them running in the dunes, or lying on the hot stone wall that was once a levee, I remember that I was like them once, with their incredible lightness and insouciance, soaking in the sun. You can never really let go of your childhood. Especially when it was happy.
* * *
(I will sometimes lament that my childhood and my adolescence were so protected, so ordinary and indolent, because one is so often expected to recount a childhood trauma to justify being a writer. But for me there was no crazy family, no abuse, no father who was absent or particularly present, no running away or drifting. No serious illness, no poverty, and no great wealth either—nothing really to make a book that catches the eye.)
* * *
In short, this summer of 1984 should not have been any different. There is always the large bay of Rivedoux, the small cliffs of La Flotte, the flat beaches of Bois-Plage, the marshes of Ars, the rocky point of Saint-Clément. The hollyhocks in alleys, pine needles crunching underfoot in the forest of Trousse-Chemise, the green oaks under which one goes to find shade. The fortifications of Vauban to protect me from imaginary invasions, the open-air abbey that always terrified me at night, and the Whales lighthouse, whose spinning light makes me dizzy. Always the same boys my age; before we went to the carousel, now we go to the bar. Everything is in its place, everything reassures me. Except that I miss Thomas. I miss him terribly. And that changes everything. Have you noticed how the most beautiful landscapes lose their brilliance as soon as our thoughts prevent us from seeing them properly?
* * *
I do not write a letter, let alone a postcard; he forbade it. I phone very little, as he strongly advised me. Anyway, during the day he works in the fields and is unreachable. In the evening, I don’t know what he’s doing. I don’t want to know. Then, as is his tradition, he goes to Spain and becomes inaccessible for good.
* * *
At the beginning of August, I sleep with a boy who set up his tent at the Grenettes campsite. We have sex under the canvas, indiscriminately, on a blanket stinking of sweat. I went with him because of his blond hair, bleached out by the sun and salt, his golden skin and green eyes, and because it was easy. I wasn’t looking for a diversion, or a way to soothe my pain. I wasn’t looking for an alternative. I just gave in to the ease of it. That was all.
* * *
I am taken aback by this other body, so different from Thomas’s. I can’t find my bearings and it’s disconcerting. But it’s nice, too. When I return to Barbezieux around the fifteenth of August, I call Thomas but get his sister Nathalie (the secretary) instead. She tells me in a monotone voice: He stayed in Spain. I don’t know if you know, but we have family there. (She uses the formal “vous” with me since she doesn’t know me. Her tone is offhanded. I imagine that she’s busy doing something else: putting on nail polish or brushing her hair.) She goes on: They offered him a job, and he said yes, since he didn’t want to continue his studies. There’s a noise in my head as she finishes saying these words. It’s the sound of a ship’s horn as it casts away from the mainland. I don’t know why.
One day, I will find myself writing about ships leaving. I will write the story of a woman who waits on the quay in the port of Livorno watching the ships go. I will always remember the flat prolonged sound of the ship’s horn blowing in my ear as the summer of 1984 ended. A roar that gradually dies out, little by little.
* * *
After, it’s something else. It’s no longer a noise, but rather a physical sensation, a shock, like a collision. Like a casualty that the paramedics extract from a pile of mangled sheet metal and immediately put on a stretcher, throw in the back of an ambulance, and leave in the hospital emergency room entrusted to the care of the doctor on call. The wounded who’s operated on urgently because of blood loss, broken limbs, and other injuries. The stitched-up, bandaged survivor who wakes up slowly from the anesthesia, still groggy under the effects of the chloroform, already caught up by the pain that comes back to him, the memory of the trauma. And then the disoriented convalescent without energy, without will, who asks himself if it would’ve just been better if his body had been left to die in the crash but who eventually heals, because as is often the case, you eventually heal.
* * *
Yes, it’s this hackneyed analogy that is the most apt.
* * *
At the beginning of September, I leave Barbezieux. I go to college at the Lycée Michel-de-Montaigne in Bordeaux, working toward a graduate degree in business. I begin a new life, the one that was chosen for me, bowing to the hope and ambition that have been placed in me.
I erase Thomas Andrieu.
Chapter Two
2007
More than twenty years have passed. Bordeaux has completely transformed from the dark, soot-covered town I knew at eighteen. Since the buildings were cleaned, the ocher color of the façades dominates, bringing lightness to a city that was oppressive in its decline. There were abandoned slaughterhouses, tall grass, barbed wire, mud—you can’t even imagine. The bourgeois population was aging; now it is young, bohemian. Since the youth now predominates, the evenings in town have taken on a Spanish flair. You can see it in the happy faces of the people congregating in the squares, chatting on the café terraces, their tinkling glasses and bright conversations floating on the wind. Most of all, the city has rediscovered the river. The banks and quays have all been renovated. With the manicured lawns and rows of plane trees—the vast Miroir d’Eau reflecting pool with the sleek and modern tram running beside it—the city has been restored to its former elegance.
I became a writer. I’ve come to a bookstore here in Bordeaux for a reading of my latest novel. It will be too late to return to Paris afterward since all the trains will have stopped running, so I’ve booked a hotel room not far from the Allées of Tourny. The next morning, I have to meet a journalist and then I hope to enjoy the city a little, perhaps walk along the banks of the Garonne River before returning home. It is that morning, just as the interview is coming to an end, when I see the silhouette, the back of the young man with his suitcase leaving the hotel.
I see this image that cannot exist and cry out the name. Rushing to catch the boy on the sidewalk, I put my hand on his shoulder, and he turns around.
It’s almost him.
The resemblance is uncanny. So much so that it sends a tremor down my spine. I feel short of breath and lose my balance for a moment. (This kind of situation actually can cause a physical reaction. The body responds as if it’s in imminent danger: the muscles contract, the limbs suddenly go limp.) The boy’s features are the same, the look is the same—it’s alarming. Crazy-making. But there is a tiny difference, something in the smile, or maybe just his overall demeanor. It’s this tiny difference that manages to bring me back to reason. I don’t say to the young man: Sorry, I was wrong, I thought I recognized someone. Nor do I say: If you knew how much you resemble someone I haven’t seen for a long time . . . Instead I say: You are the spitting image of your father.
He responds immediately: People tell me that all the time.
And then there is nothing more to say. I continue to gaze at him as one would a painting. I linger on every feature, scrutinizing him almost as though he weren’t alive, as if he weren’t right there looking back at me.
My body begins to calm down.
The young man has every right to be embarrassed by this inspection and try to put an end to it, to find it out of place, even rude. But he chooses instead to have fun with it. He smiles. I was right; the smile is not exactl
y the same.
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