Lie With Me

by Philippe Besson

  I ask if he’s in a hurry, or if maybe he has time for a coffee. The question arises without prior reflection, without the filter of intelligence. It testifies to my need to keep this “miracle child” near me; to question him more thoroughly, to fill a twenty-three-year-old gap. I don’t have time to counter this urge, let alone to decipher or be troubled by it. He says that his train is not for another hour, that he can stay for a bit. Immediately (paradoxically), I am shocked that he could so easily accept the solicitation of a stranger: I wouldn’t have. I would have refused to submit to such an interrogation and gone on my way, glad to be alone.

  He has understood, of course. He knows what accounts for my interest in him, but why would that be enough for him to stay? Especially since, as he said himself, people frequently make the comparison to his father; he should be tired of it by now. But he doesn’t say he’s tired of it, he just keeps smiling. And then he gives an explanation for accepting my invitation.

  He says: You must have liked him a lot, to look at me like that.

  * * *

  We go back into the hotel, where I abruptly end my interview with the journalist, and we sit down at the same table.

  I say: I don’t even know your name.

  He says: Lucas (and I’m disturbed by this name, since I have so often used it in my books—as if there were no such thing as chance). I don’t give him my name, and he doesn’t ask.

  He goes on: So you are an old friend of my father’s, is that it?

  I hear the description, finding it lovely, false but lovely. I say: Yes . . . that’s it, an old friend . . .

  * * *

  I stop speaking. The words are stuck because the emotion has come back. It’s the voice and the resemblance. The gestures, too, which are fascinating in their similarities. It makes me wonder about the part nature plays versus nurture.

  I ask him if Thomas is well. (I don’t say Thomas. I say, “your father.”) The question has the appearance of being a polite one, a natural beginning to a conversation, but it’s something else, something more existential. Fortunately, the young man doesn’t detect anything, he hears only politeness. The smile returns to his face, but I notice confusion and perhaps even a touch of bitterness mingled in it. He says: It’s always so difficult with him to know how he is. He’s always so withdrawn . . . Was he already like that, in your day?

  I know “in your day” is intended without malice, but it still manages to put my youth firmly in the past, turning it into a sort of curiosity. I answer that indeed I never knew his father to be extroverted, that he often withdrew into silence, or at least the background. Lucas seems very different: playful, open, not at all antisocial. It seems that part was not inherited.

  * * *

  I ask if Thomas still lives in the same place, surprising myself by my indiscretion. The son confirms: Obviously! Could you see him living anywhere else? My father is one of those guys who’ll never leave, who will die where they were born.

  By reflex I say: And not you?

  He nods his head: I want to go somewhere else. It’s normal at my age, right?

  I agree, without insisting. I point out that his father also went away one day, since he found a job in Spain. I add: It was then that we lost touch, he and I. These last words are articulated with the least possible affect, as if life is just like that sometimes, you spend time together and then lose touch and life goes on—as if there were no breaks from which you never quite recover.

  The son takes issue: Galicia is not exactly Peru! It’s just next door. And then: It’s family for us. Frankly, there are far more impressive exiles.

  I sense the ambition and ease of a generation that has grown up on a much smaller planet. Those who consider travel an ordinary adventure rather than a grand expedition, for whom a quiet life is considered a slow death. I see this child of the world and can’t help but think how fate probably would have played out differently had his father been driven by the same curiosity. If he had not lived in another day. If he had known how to free himself.

  * * *

  The boy adds: Well, having said that, without his Spanish digression (digression: could we find a more apt term?), I never would have been born. At my obvious confusion, he immediately clarifies: He met my mother there.

  And so the story unfurls:

  Thomas works on a large property in Galicia with his uncles and cousins. It is said that he works hard, that he puts all his strength into it, and refuses no task, even under the burning sun or heavy rain. He begins early in the morning and is one of the last to finish, leaving the other men in awe of him. His aunt says that he is obsessed with work. Could she have guessed that it wasn’t quite normal for a young man of eighteen years old, one who could have continued his schooling, to throw himself into chores that required only his arms, his brute strength? Did she perceive that this selflessness was probably a way of forgetting himself, of putting himself to the test, maybe even of hurting himself? (It’s me who thinks that. Lucas is content to evoke the heroic image of a boy plowing the earth under inhuman conditions.)

  * * *

  One evening Thomas is at a party in a village that is festooned in flags. At the sound of a drunken accordion he turns and sees a young girl. She is seventeen years old, with dark hair and olive skin, and her name is Luisa. He walks toward her. (Here, I believe the story must have been rewritten. The scene cannot possibly be so cinematic. The years spent telling and retelling it have surely shaped it into a kind of family legend.) I’m guessing that there was probably no bolt of lightning, just a warm night full of wine and fluttering moths and the feeling that nothing is really important and everything is possible. I’m sure that Thomas would not have gone naturally to the girl himself, that he would have been trapped by his reserve, and by what he is; it was she who had to have overcome her inhibitions. It was she who figured out how to manage his fear and shame. I also know how much of yourself you have to leave behind in order to look like everyone else. This is what is at play in the Galician night—the night of the flags.

  * * *

  This scenario could have been without a future. It should have been. I think of all the boys I met for a few hours after a night of drinking or drugs and never saw again. Those bodies entwined over warm nights and lost in the early morning. Eyes that caught mine and were forgotten as soon as pleasure came. I have been a moment of passage for these boys too, an ephemeral lover, without a name—how many really remember me? Normally youth is like that, without attachments, without obligations. Yet these two particular young people see each other again and become closer. I am sure that Thomas compels himself to.

  I know that there are those who will object to my refusal to accept that he changed course, switched orientation, simply succumbed to a feeling that was previously unknown to him. I could be seen as upset, jealous, or even obtuse, and yet I persist in thinking that he put the same stubborn application into this as he did to his work. The same desire to forget himself, to return to the righteous path set out by his mother, the only one permissible. Does he end up believing it himself? That’s the fundamental question. If the answer is yes, then moving forward in life would be possible. If the answer is no, then it is a life condemned to interminable misery.

  * * *

  And then an accident (let’s call it that) decides things for them—for him. Luisa becomes pregnant. Bad luck, clumsiness, carelessness, it doesn’t matter, a child is coming. A child who will grow in his mother’s womb, one who cannot be done away with—it’s Catholic Spain after all, you don’t mess around with these kinds of things.

  It is “the accident” himself who explains it this way. He knows that he was unwanted, that he was conceived when his parents were young and barely knew each other, that their roads would probably have diverged had there not been this “accident.” He knows that in another time, another country, another culture, he would never have come into the world. He says: But hey, that’s the way it is. He adds: And anyway, I believe that children who wer
e not wanted don’t necessarily grow up worse off than the others. He’s not wrong. I too was an unwanted child, an accident. My mother was twenty when she gave birth to me and I never felt that I wanted for love.

  * * *

  When she learns of the pregnancy, Thomas’s mother—usually so mild-mannered and reserved—insists upon a wedding. It takes place two months later, in the church of Vilalba. You don’t go against the will of a woman who has expressed so little in her life. And where is Thomas in this story? He doesn’t refuse, of that I am certain. It’s not possible. They are all too powerful, telling him what he has to do as they oversee him. But he probably doesn’t want to rebel either. They are so happy! His father, who sighs in relief that his son will not leave the land; his mother, who is delighted that her son, twenty years later, is following the same story of a Frenchman marrying a young Spanish girl. Everything has fallen into place. Thomas lets it happen, resigning himself to fate. Perhaps he also tells himself that it’s a sign, that circumstances have given him the chance to escape from a life of deviance, and that now everything can return to order.

  The wedding is celebrated in the spring.

  * * *

  Lucas says: I’ve seen the wedding pictures, my mother put them in an album. She looks at them regularly, she must like to remember her youth. (Or else she confuses youth with happiness, as people frequently do.) In these shots taken over twenty years ago, the teenage bride and groom stand awkwardly on the steps of the church in borrowed finery, showered with grains of rice, surrounded by family.

  In other images, the newlyweds are in a garden. The bride clasps a bouquet in her hands under an archway of cascading wisteria; the groom stands beside her, with a straight neck. At the evening dinner, with everyone sitting at a long communal table, there is a feeling of togetherness. The married couple take their first steps under a garland of flowers exploding with color. The stone walls of the farm, the strangely Celtic landscapes, offer a deceptive image of a hopeful, open-ended future.

  * * *

  Lucas adds: Even so, there is something that has always struck me in the photos . . . my father often looks sad. I guess he didn’t like having to smile on command.

  It’s clear to me that the sadness was unrelated to the demands of an overzealous wedding photographer, but of course I stop myself from saying anything.

  I think: If it was already there, this sadness, from the very first hours of the marriage, if it was so massive that it could not be concealed even then, during these moments of the greatest communion, during the happiest of feasts—how heavy must this weight have become in the years that followed?

  The young man continues: I understand why people say that I look like him. In the photos, I have the same impression that I’m looking at myself, except of course, I smile.

  * * *

  I remember one day finding a photo-booth strip, forgotten on a bookshelf of the den in the house in Barbezieux, and wondering: when was this photo taken? I searched for a date, or a theory that could have told me the age I might have been. I figured I must have needed a photo for my identity card, and since there is never a need for every picture from these sets of four, these must have been leftover ones, the ones that turn up in a drawer or a wallet years later. I showed the strip to my mother, who looked at it, saying in an offhanded way: It’s not you, it’s your brother, don’t you recognize his sweater? It took me a few minutes to recover from having accepted a version of myself with someone else’s face. As if I were only a copy.

  * * *

  Lucas tells me that he doesn’t understand how you can take everything from one of your parents and nothing from the other. I suggest that maybe his brothers and sisters, if he has any, look more like their mother, that the distribution of features may have worked out like that. He specifies that he is an only child, that there were no children after him. His mother wanted one but his father refused. He never gave in, though this did not stop his mother from complaining, sometimes in front of others, which brought a flash of anger to his father’s eyes.

  He whispers (yes, he really speaks lower. His voice is choked as if he were confessing a secret) that he would have liked to have had a little sister, that he would have felt far less alone in childhood. He describes the loneliness of the farm, with the fields stretching out as far as the eye can see and only adults around him. He corrects himself. His father’s sister was sometimes like a little sister to him, because you had to take care of her all the time, she was not independent, and looking after her was a way to feel useful. Living by her side was like living in a fairy tale because she had these moments of pure poetry—she invented whole worlds. He tells me that eventually she was placed in a specialized institution, that in the end his father resigned himself to it: the death of his soul. She is still there.

  * * *

  I assume that Thomas returned to France to work with his father. Lucas says yes, that’s what happened. His youth was over. No more Spain. There was Charente, the wife, the son to raise, the sister, the vineyard, the herd.

  I ask him if he still looks like his father today. He says: Oh yes! He hasn’t changed, you know. It’s almost strange to change so little, to age so slowly. If you saw him, you’d recognize him right away.

  I’m reassured by this vision of an undiminished Thomas, whom the years have not weighed down or damaged. I know so many men who collapse around their thirties. I am one of such men. The hair thins, the features thicken; there are few who are immune to it. I’m no longer the lean teenager in a high school courtyard on a winter morning. The hair is cut short, the face plainly transfigured by time. The overall appearance has become somewhat urbane. Only the myopia has remained. I still wear glasses.

  * * *

  I’m also disturbed by the prospect, brought up by the son so casually, of seeing his father again. I never considered such a possibility. Very quickly, at eighteen, after I learned that he had settled in Spain and I began my own new life, I had to admit to myself that what we had lived through together belonged irrevocably to the past.

  His “if you saw him” can never be realized. It is out of the question.

  * * *

  (I correct myself because I’ve just been lying. Of course, it took time, a lot of time, before I admitted that everything was lost, before I decided to say goodbye forever. I kept hoping for a sign. I thought of initiating another meeting, I started letters that I never sent. Desire does not go out like a match, it extinguishes slowly as it burns into ash. In the end I gave up on all possibility of a reunion.)

  * * *

  Lucas glances at his watch and I notice that he’s wearing Thomas’s digital Casio. He catches my surprise, without knowing what it is connected to (the image of his father lying naked next to me in bed a quarter century ago). He thinks that it’s vintage, one of those old things that have come back into style. He shakes his wrist and says: I have to go now. If I don’t, I’ll miss my train.

  But I’m not ready to lose this accidental child. Not yet, not like that. Instead, I propose that I accompany him to the train station. I say: Why don’t we take a taxi? It’ll be much faster. He accepts my invitation without hesitating.

  (In my panic, is there a part that is desire? An almost identical Thomas having been put in front of me, would it be so surprising if an identical desire reemerged?)

  * * *

  We walk to the Grand Theater, find a taxi, and head down the rue Esprit des Lois near the Place des Quinconces, then drive along the quay and pass in front of the Place de la Bourse. The building’s stone façade glows yellow in the morning sun, and the reflection in its high windows almost blinds us. There is a stretch along the Garonne where I can’t help but think of all the young men who’ve drowned there, without explanation, missing boys found weeks later. Those about whom it was never determined whether they jumped off a bridge or slipped accidentally from the wharf or were thrown violently into the water. We pass near the Saint-Michel district, where I spent time as a student of the Lycée
Montaigne. The memories rush back—I see myself staggering home in the early morning, aware that I could have been one of those boys who drowned.

  We take a detour onto one of the darker streets, one that hasn’t been modernized yet, and then get back onto the Canal Marne and then finally reach the Saint-Jean train station. The entrance looks nothing like the one I knew. Before it was dirty, windy and gloomy; today a gleaming tram glides silently along an esplanade.

  * * *

  During the drive to the train station, I say: I didn’t even ask what you’re doing here in Bordeaux. He explains that he’s only here in passing. He came to interview for an internship at a vineyard in the Médoc region. Since the interview was scheduled for late yesterday, he had to stay the night. Now he’s going back to Nantes, where he’s studying. I say: So you want to work in wine? He laughs and says no, what he wants is to work in exports.

  We enter into the din of the station. I recognize the pink and brown marble walls, the staircase in the middle of the hall. I think perhaps I should have said goodbye in the taxi. I was surprised by his insistence that I accompany him to the platform and yet I gave in easily. I ask him if the train he is waiting for is still a Corail. He says it is. It’s the same train that I would take on Friday nights returning home from Bordeaux on the weekends. I remember the sliding doors and the accordion passages between the cars. The clamor of moving from one car to another, and the stench of the toilets, that terrible mixture of urine and wholesale disinfectant. The long narrow corridors of the carriages where eight people could sit. People smoking, soldiers in uniform on a two-day leave from their garrison, with their khaki satchels and uninhibited manhood. I remember how long the trip seemed to me. It wasn’t, but since we stopped at all the stations, it seemed endless. To alleviate the boredom, I read, devouring the books of Duras and Guibert as I sat in my seat, among the young soldiers.