Unforgivable

by Philippe Djian

  The next in line, a vague cousin, was bleating like a calf about to be slaughtered.

  Johanna joined us outside and thanked me as she hugged the children to her. They were like that in the South, she apologized. They were sensitive about ritual and very fussy about it being observed. I expressed my opinion without comment. I had already had to give way on the question of baptism or risk being treated like a leper and held at arm’s length, something that Johanna could not have accepted.

  These people could not care less whether I was a writer or whether they heard me speaking on the television or the radio, literature did not impress them, and my income, which was still fairly sparse at that time, made them smile; whereas other people would have thrown their cloak in the mud so that I could cross the street without dirtying my shoes. But they were much rarer.

  I could be a writer, or a scriptwriter, or a fireman, or a juggler, it mattered little, as long as I did not deviate from the path they had trod, as long as I kissed their dead ones while making the sign of the cross and passed down the codes of behavior to my children.

  I carried Alice on my shoulders—she had certainly deserved it. Still full of admiration for the way she had turned the situation around to our advantage—along the path from the cemetery, we were now collecting our full share of satisfied smiles—I kissed the palm of her hand. The autumn was mild, for some days the trees had been a blaze of color, exceptionally sharp and bright, with their incredible reds and dazzling golds.

  Had I dreamed all that? Had I not woven the deepest relationship there can be with her, forged in the furnace of our distress? Had I been dreaming?

  I began to think so. Be that as it may, I now knew that if she had to choose between me and her career, she would not spend very long on the question. I should draw the obvious conclusions.

  I had never thought that such a terrible thing could ever happen. I had made the mistake of believing that certain terrains remained firm and solid, and could withstand wind and tide. I had shown great naïveté in this regard, sidereal blindness. At any moment, the ground can give way beneath your feet, whereas in my case I had imagined some chimera of terra firma, some nauseating El Dorado that was supposed to provide me with a little inspiration. As a result, everything was in place to provide the painful landing I had made six months ago, at the very moment that she had turned toward me in her wretched duplex apartment, on that deathly pale and mind-blowing night—as a result, there had been nothing left.

  A postcard arrived from Australia. I didn’t pay it a moment’s attention and left it in the box, prey to all the drafts, at the entrance to the garden. It only required a slight storm and the mail was ruined. The ink of the best fountain pens could not withstand it, and still less felt pens, which did not last three seconds on the sodden stand.

  Judith rang me in the late afternoon, as she did every day, so as to make sure that I was not allowing myself to die of hunger and was not neglecting the house—our cleaning girl had left us to follow her fiancé to Scotland and to work on a salmon farm. I did not leave anything in a mess.

  I now had this secret to keep. In addition to my own family troubles. I was not allowed to speak to Jérémie about it, nor to anyone else. I tried to imagine this boy suddenly made an orphan and not one scenario appeared satisfactory, not one bright light shone on the horizon. And since it wasn’t even certain that A.-M. would survive the summer—galloping cancer—the dark horizon was growing ever closer.

  This job—which I had found for him by making three telephone calls—would probably not last forever. Agreed, spending one’s life on a lawn mower did not constitute an ideal life, of course, but did Jérémie give the slightest sign that he could aspire to anything else? Was he much more than a child? Was not holding up a service station, in broad daylight, on his own, a fair indication of immaturity?

  But did I have time to bother myself with this problem? Did I still have time to bother myself with any problem?

  I thought of starting to write a novel in order to erect a wall around myself; I thought about it seriously. Over the years, I had developed the knack, by means of a few articles, a few vague short stories, of appearing busier than I actually was, but today, in this situation, returning to a novel seemed to be a requirement. The hardship involved seemed to be a requirement. Writing a novel demanded such energy that everything else became secondary. That was the advantage.

  I had often had this experience. I had written my most recent novels as if I were building a fortress, and circumstances appeared to suggest that it was time to summon up these powers again, even if it might ruffle a few feathers. I had written these novels in the form of a forest, from which there was no escape: when Johanna died, I had begun to write the first pages of a book that would eventually contain one thousand, and the exercise had helped me keep my head above water, I freely admit; it had not always been easy, some days turned out to be bleaker than death, emptier than the streets of Hiroshima on August 6 at 8:16, 2 seconds, local time, more barren than an ice floe; but I had held the dogs and their jaws at bay and had otherwise enjoyed mixed fortunes in the bookshops.

  Unfortunately, Jérémie passed my windows every day, perched on his lawn mower—he looked like a giant riding a child’s tractor—so it wasn’t very easy for me to wipe him from my memory. I could hear him coming from afar, a whistling noise that alerted me that the boy was in the vicinity. Occasionally, I would lie down on the floor or flatten myself against a wall, but that didn’t alter matters very much.

  A.-M. was apparently deteriorating before our very eyes, but her expression had never been so sparkling. I held my breath as I awaited her request, anticipating the blow that would come crashing down on me, but how to avoid it?

  Jérémie was not an easy case, no, far from it. The other day, she had spoken to me about the brawls he regularly sparked off, the confrontations he went in search of—like a dog seeking its bone—as soon as it grew dark, and which were not just directed at homosexuals and those like them, but anyone who happened to be in his path. “He’s right to keep it simple,” I had said in a matter-of-fact tone.

  Now that A.-M. had lost quite a lot of weight, my memories were reignited. Images returned. Now, I recognized her almost definitely. I saw her once more, surrounded by all those girls we went around with at the time, among that group whose faces and figures had become hazy; I was now even pretty well convinced that we had slept together. A.-M. and I had never reached that precise point—we had drawn a sort of heavy curtain over it—but I vaguely felt that there was an old bond between us. Watching her die was particularly painful for me.

  “I’ll do what I can,” I told her. “But don’t ask me to do more. Don’t ask me to go beyond myself. Please. I’m beginning to get a bit old, you know.”

  “Never, Francis. I’d never dare ask you such a thing, do you hear?”

  “Why not? What harm would there be? I’m answering you all the more frankly, A.-M., because you know my situation. Other matters are on my mind at the moment, as you well know. You have a ringside seat.”

  “Do you think I don’t realize? You’ve already done so much for him.”

  I winced. She coughed slightly. Her lungs were riddled, the doctors maintained. Among the nurses, it was said that they hadn’t seen such appalling X-rays since Chernobyl. Her eyes had filled with tears. Given the little interest that Jérémie showed in her—he informed me that he had thought his mother had picked up a bad flu bug—one could say that she was not rewarded in return.

  Each time I listened to Animal Collective’s “Banshee Beat,” I became aware that man was not merely destined to spread suffering and ugliness in the world. It was raining, it was bucketing down, but this music came close to the miraculous. There was a moment when one could not help putting down one’s glass and starting to dance—thanking God that one was not living through war or famine—and swaying one’s hips, releasing a smile of satisfaction.

  It was getting increasingly difficult to preserve
such moments. By and large, in my view, life was a painful business. I had not danced every day, if my memory serves me right. And so, since that’s the way it was, I allowed myself to be carried away momentarily by the music—wiggling around like some kind of worm in an electric socket—while the rain streamed down the bay windows. It was already growing dark. How would we manage, I asked myself, if there were no music? I had opened a good bottle of white wine.

  I had not danced once since Johanna’s death. Not really danced. I had not married Judith in order to dance, but so as not to die. I had asked no more than that. Now, it was being thrown back in my face. It really did one good to dance sometimes. I did not intend to stand on ceremony. I was the only living person in this house. The music seeped into me through the base of the skull and ran down through my feet to disappear into the ground. Over the sea, there were heavy patches of black sky. Which collided. Which straddled the horizon. And when the disc was finished, I put it on again at the beginning.

  One evening, Jérémie and I were sitting at the bar when he suddenly attacked a slightly drunken fellow who was moaning about his wife—who was seeking a divorce. It was a brief fight because the man turned out to be overexcitable, and he actually gave Jérémie a severe hiding before we managed to control him and chuck him outside.

  I couldn’t get over the way in which Jérémie had hurled himself at the man, apparently without thinking. The guy had in any case greeted him with a right full in the face that had literally stopped Jérémie in his tracks—and had put him in a position to receive the next blow. Total madness. He fell to his knees with a vague smile on his face, while his opponent thumped him again.

  There was probably nothing to be surprised about in all this. A.-M. kept me regularly informed about these outbursts, but it was another matter to be part of it, to see it with one’s own eyes.

  I made him sit down on a kitchen stool and brought him various medicaments to treat his bruises. His face was red. Within a few hours, it would turn black—later would come the violet, the green, then the yellow.

  “Keep them all,” I said to him after he had finished. “Keep them with you. I think you’re going to need them.”

  He very soon brought me proof that I had good intuition. The manager of the golf club eventually called me to say that despite his wish to be on good terms with me, he would not be able to keep Jérémie any longer. Not in the state he was in. Not with this swollen face, these grazed fists, the strange countenance that upset many people.

  “Listen, old friend,” I sighed. “OK. You win. I agree. I agree to take part in your literary festival. You have my word. I’ll come and sign my books. I will sit behind a stall. Take it as done, old friend.” I could hear him breathing on the other end of the phone. “His mother is on the point of death,” I added—letting him understand that a kind of curse would come down on anyone who darkened the last light in her windows, on anyone who cast a shadow, in one way or another.

  I gained a few months. Or, rather, Jérémie gained them. Although nothing was definite; it probably required one or two further complaints for the man to go back on his promise and get rid of the boy right away.

  Meanwhile, Alice imagined that a few postcards from Australia would suffice, but I let them pile up in the mailbox without even reading them. For me it was a source of additional amazement to realize that she thought it still possible, still conceivable, etc., that she could resume some sort of relationship with me.

  Judith, too, thought as much. But she had the excuse of knowing me far less well than my daughter knew me. I thought of Alice leaning over a balcony in Sydney, while a flight of gigantic bats emerged from between the tower blocks above her, leaning forward and scribbling a few words that were supposed to soothe me. Whom was she fooling?

  Judith reckoned that of the two of us I was the one who paid the greater price, a fact I did not dispute, but this did not necessarily make me feel any more inclined to redress the matter. I did not discuss prices. Whatever it was, I accepted. That had nothing to do with the silent stubbornness that Judith conjured up in the course of our telephone conversations between the seaside and the capital. It was not stubbornness. It was a simple observation. There was no possibility of anything at all. This had nothing to do with stubbornness. With mere stubbornness.

  She was still in a quandary. I could imagine her pouting. The weather in Paris wasn’t great, she told me. Her granddaughters were exhausting her. She asked me about how my writing was getting on but was obviously not much concerned to hear my reply. The witch. I could have written War and Peace or On the Road and her mind would still have wandered.

  Her lack of interest in my work proved to be particularly hurtful. Eleven years ago, when we first met, she was one of my most enthusiastic admirers and she would have listened to me in rapt attention if I had talked about how the novel I was writing was going. She would have listened to me with almost embarrassing enthusiasm.

  Losing a reader was an unpleasant experience. If it so happened that this reader was also the woman with whom you lived, the bill was all the steeper.

  “Take it from me,” I said to Jérémie on the way to the hospital. “Losing a reader is worse than being given a hundred lashes of a whip. Losing a reader is a terrible punishment.”

  He nodded feebly. It was not easy to explain how you could spend thirty years in front of a sheet of white paper, and still less that what propelled this madness was style—that pit, that prison, that hovel that made one allude to the absolute necessity of a sentence, its beauty, its hidden vibration, without batting an eyelid. If I read a few pages aloud to him, by way of demonstration, I had the feeling of being up against a wall, of having arrived at the gates of the desert.

  A.-M. was sleeping. There was a new treatment that required her being in the hospital for a few days—and at least this treatment made her sleep a great deal. As the evening drew in, we stood at the foot of her bed. She was asleep, yet getting her son this far had not been straightforward—he had said no to begin with.

  We were talking in low voices. The corridors of the hospital were emptying. A.-M.’s room was equipped with a television set, which that evening was broadcasting images of a region that we would have to decide to bomb if we wished to guarantee our security. We were shown some maps. Things appeared to be simple.

  There was a strong chance that in the fairly near future this world would be inhabited solely by murderers and madmen. The way things were going.

  When the program drew to an end—over the glazed features of its presenter, who was unsure whether to close her eyes or bite her lips—we decided to leave. Somewhat depressed. “That girl has a problem,” I said.

  I nevertheless gave him a few tips concerning the attitude he ought to adopt if he did not want to bring down the wrath of his employer—emphasizing that having a job, these days, was no small thing.

  “You frighten people. It’s not difficult to understand. They must think: ‘With a face like that, this guy is certainly going to mug us in a bush.’ Have you looked at yourself? Have you still got a bit of common sense left?”

  If they examined his hands, his swollen fingers, his raw knuckles—his gashed wrists—some people would run a mile.

  Spring was approaching. Alice had extended her stay in Australia and Judith, as a consequence, had extended hers.

  I woke at dawn, in the coolness and damp air. Then I immediately settled down to work. I slipped on a dressing gown and would sit down at my desk, set back from the window, or on the sofa. Writing a novel was absorbing. The last one I had written was about ten years ago and it had seemed to me that there would not be another one.

  An excellent novel, as it happens. I had not thought I could do better, until now. I still did not think so, what is more, but the desire had returned. Much to my surprise. The desire to write a novel. Caught out at my own game.

  It would actually have been better to stop at a success. I should actually have pulled out and rested on my laurels with art
icles and stories that did no harm to my image. But reason had nothing to do with it. When you are bitten by the demon of literature, what difference can an ounce of reason make?

  My agent called me from New York, my publisher sent me friendly messages. But I felt they only half-believed me: how often had I repeated that I no longer intended to run over long distances?

  There were many who thought that Johanna’s death had broken me and no one would have staked a penny on my chances of getting back to the forefront. Possibly. It could very well be that I was broken and totally finished as a novelist. That would not have surprised me. It was still too early to tell.

  Nothing was harder than writing a novel. No other human task demanded so much effort, so much self-denial, such stamina. No painter, no composer was in the same league as a novelist. Everybody knew this only too well.

  I had sometimes gritted my teeth so tightly in the midst of a sentence that the entire room began to sing. Hemingway said the same thing. The grass did not grow green of its own accord. The landscape did not drift by on the other side of the windowpane by magic.

  I should have preferred to resume normal relations with my daughter or start afresh with Judith, but writing a novel still seemed to be the most feasible thing to do in this case. Each passing day convinced me more and more. Nothing else appeared to be within reach. It was my last hope. I looked to the left, I looked to the right, and I saw nothing. I had never before started to write a book in this frame of mind.

  About six months after the accident, with the arrival of the first snow, early in the morning on New Year’s Day, I decided to set to work again.

  We had moved home, and I now had a view over the lake—a wonderfully strange and disturbing thing for a writer of fiction.