Unforgivable

by Philippe Djian

  Once the evening had drawn in, I hadn’t felt capable of writing anything at all. Alice had a fairly large bedroom at her disposal at the far end of the apartment and she made a lot of noise, but she was not responsible for the total loss of concentration I had shown over twelve hours at a stretch. The same thing happened the following day.

  And throughout this time, a few feet away, Alice lay sprawled on her bed or rolled on the carpet without my being aware of anything.

  I, too, found it difficult to overcome the loss of Johanna and Olga. I couldn’t bring myself to say anything to her when I found her drunk or stoned. Quite often we would end up in tears, the two of us—which was not the best solution for our problems.

  So in addition to this there was my terrifying inability to concentrate on work for more than a minute, to write more than the few lines that regularly ended up in the wastepaper basket once it grew dark; in the morning, I would wake up, feeling drained and as weak as if I’d written ten thousand words nonstop.

  Being unable to write put me in a panic. Each day I was rooted to the spot between two doors, as if I’d been stabbed, or else I was unable to get out of my chair and I’d get bogged down.

  When Alice and I happened to share the odd meal together, I would tell her about my difficulties while she nodded off over her bowl of cereal with red berries. She was deaf and I was totally blind.

  Sometimes I even found myself looking at her and not recognizing her. One February morning, in the kitchen, as I was watching her, I noticed that she had goose pimples—even though she was wearing several sweaters—and that her breath was turning into white vapor. Puzzled, I placed my hand on the radiators, the huge cast-iron radiators, and they were freezing.

  The thermometer showed 28°F in the apartment. I could not believe it. Twenty-eight. The same temperature as outside. And she said nothing. She was allowing herself to die of cold.

  It was a worrying spectacle. I turned toward the sink. The hot water was running cold. I suddenly remembered the storm that had burst three days earlier; standing in front of the open window, I had hoped that a bolt of lightning would strike me and bring me back to life. Averting my gaze, I rose to my feet.

  The fuses in the boiler had blown. This meant that Alice had been washing herself in cold water for several days—if she ever washed. I was appalled. A zombie. My daughter had become a zombie.

  I dashed off to town in search of fuses. Was she feeding herself, at least? Did she get any sleep? I preferred not to think about it. The right thing to do would be not to have taken my eyes off her even for a minute, but that had not been possible. There had been Johanna’s death, and now this: being unable to pull myself together, being unable to start writing again, as if I were lacking the arm that held the pen, the legs to keep going. I realized just how badly I had fulfilled my role as father, just how badly I had failed to protect her—was she not there at that very moment, her teeth chattering, in an apartment that had become an icebox, obviously high and barely able to stand up?

  On my return, I hastily replaced the fuses and relit the boiler. The burner roared once more. I went and knocked on her bedroom door. Nothing. No answer. The streetlamps lit up the apartment from outside, but Alice’s bedroom was as dark as a cave. I hardly ever had reason to go in, but I had glimpsed the room occasionally during my comings and goings—in search of inspiration or God knows what—so that I was not altogether surprised when, pushing open the door, I saw nothing initially, because it was too dark.

  The shutters were closed. The walls were plastered with pages cut out of magazines: actors, musicians, artists, and the rest. The ceiling, too.

  “Where’s the light?” I asked.

  “What is it?” came a voice from the back of the room. “What do you want?”

  “I’ve come to find out how you are,” I said. “Let me see you. Have you heard the good news? Haven’t you noticed anything, these past few days?”

  From the sofa where he lay, her boyfriend, Roger, groaned. I had actually never seen this boy in a normal state. Seldom on his feet, in any case. That he was a banker was the only thing I knew about him, apart from the fact that he wasn’t violent with Alice. But I never managed to exchange the slightest word with him. We would slow down when we encountered one another—we’d break into a kind of motionless ballet—but without really stopping.

  “Is he all right?” I asked, walking over to the bed, where my daughter was huddled up beneath a pile of blankets; I had the impression that I’d heard a death rattle coming from the throat of the said Roger.

  She winced. “How do you manage?”

  “How do I manage what, Alice?”

  “You’re dressed in a shirt. In this cold. What are you thinking of?”

  “Listen, it’s unimportant. Forget it. It’s not what I’m wearing that I want to talk to you about. But much more serious matters. May I sit down?”

  She immediately sat up, clearly irritated. I sat down nevertheless—even though I wasn’t invited to do so—on the edge of her bed. She was shivering.

  “I can’t do it anymore,” I said. “Bloody hell, Alice. I can’t write anymore. Don’t ask me why, I haven’t a clue. I’ve spent one month writing three pages, do you realize? I’m doing my best not to shout, you know.”

  “But what are you talking about?”

  “Don’t tell me it’s like riding a bicycle, Alice. Spare me such nonsense. I’m really down in the dumps, you know.”

  She sighed.

  “What?” I persisted. “It’s as if I was dead, isn’t it? Isn’t it just as if I was dead?”

  She stretched out a feverish hand toward her bedside table to take a cigarette. Not only was she shivering, but her nose was running.

  I took Jérémie to choose a dog. The idea had come to mind when I became aware that my writing work would now make me less available. He didn’t say a word and looked straight ahead. The road ran between the pine trees. He had put on his safety belt and was twiddling his hands. “Come on now, don’t be so nervous,” I said to him.

  The kennels were about twenty kilometers inland, in the woods, and the closer we came, the more Jérémie shrunk into his seat like some fearful old man. I watched him out of the corner of my eye as we drove in the direction of the Pyrenees and I felt as if I was driving him to his first romantic rendezvous.

  I did not know much about this side of him, as a matter of fact. About his relationship with women. I didn’t know what had gone on during those six years behind prison walls. And I didn’t want to know. I had never brought up this subject with him. A.-M. had spoken to me about a girl before the service station episode, but the trail had gone no farther. She didn’t know whether they had slept together, whether they had been in love with one another or anything like that, because as soon as she had the misfortune to inquire a little deeper, he exploded. He yelled at her. He held her responsible for everything that had gone wrong, starting with the death of his father, whom she—the ultimate in despicable behavior, he barked at her—had left for the love of a woman.

  I hoped that the dog was a good idea. I was going to have to devote much more of my time to my office and I could already imagine Jérémie prowling around outside my windows if I were seen to be doing nothing, calling out to me to tell me of his arrival; starting a novel was the hardest bit, the riskiest part of the exercise, and it required the full attention and all the energy of the person at the controls.

  A twenty-five-kilo bag of dry roast-meat dog food lay prominently on the backseat. My share in this business. My gift. Top-of-the-line dog food. “I’d advise a boxer,” I said as we were passing through a forest of extraordinarily green oak trees. “If you see a boxer, take it. Listen to me, take it. The boxer is ideal. Intelligent, strong, devoted, affectionate, noble, etc. Especially if it’s a bitch. So don’t hesitate. You won’t be disappointed.”

  I had phoned and they had put two aside for me, one of which they had brought from Lower Navarre, which was just three months old.


  “Have you got something against boxers?” I asked to fill in the conversation. “You know what they are, at least? You won’t be able to resist them, I promise you. And don’t forget that they’re smooth-haired animals. I won’t go through the list of advantages of a smooth-haired domestic animal. You know them as well as I do. In any case, don’t forget to give it a name this time.”

  The gates of the kennels appeared a few moments later, and they were wide open. I pulled up in the parking area and suggested that he get out, since no one was going to choose a dog for him.

  The manager was a charming man who immediately invited us into his office. From outside came a cacophony of barking and mournful howls. He asked me to sign one of my novels, in very poor condition. It was because he had read it over and over again, he explained, so I forgave him for having turned down the corners of the pages and treated the jacket so roughly. When I told him that I was working on a new novel, he blushed and stammered. I hoped that I still had a few more readers like him around the world.

  “I saw your daughter the other evening,” he informed me, while Jérémie was inspecting the cages and winking at me. “On a television program. She’s making a film with William Hurt, isn’t she?”

  “I don’t know anything about it,” I replied, stiffening imperceptibly. “I’ve not been informed.”

  “She spoke about you. About her admiration for you, for your work.”

  “That’s what a father likes to hear,” I said, looking elsewhere.

  Jérémie had stopped a little farther away. He was sitting on his heels and staring at the inside of a cage. Yet again, I found it hard to imagine this boy holding up a service station—and, what’s more, causing the death of the checkout assistant. Although he had given me all the details, one evening—the hours spent behind the counter with the man, in the same pool of blood, up until the moment when, within a hair’s breadth of being killed by the incensed policemen, he had given himself up—I still couldn’t believe it. Even though there was not the slightest doubt about his active involvement in the reported incidents, I remained incredulous.

  How could one begin to imagine this boy with a gun in his hand?

  “She claims that you taught her how to cook.”

  “That’s wrong. I didn’t teach her a thing.”

  One morning, I removed all the postcards from my mailbox and chucked the whole lot in a garbage truck that was passing by.

  On hearing of this, two days after she had returned from her stay in Paris, Judith couldn’t believe that I hadn’t even glanced at what my daughter had written to me. She couldn’t get over it, she said. My hard-heartedness. My blindness.

  “I know people more hard-hearted than me. Much more hard-hearted than me. Believe me. Listen. Judith. Good heavens. You’re not obliged to be against me. It mustn’t become a reflex, you know.”

  I did not see her again until the evening. She came up to my study and positioned herself in front of me, as dusk was falling, while I was trying to write a few lines.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m not automatically against you. But I’m not going to say you’re right when I think you’re wrong, I hope you understand.”

  I looked up at her.

  “If you’re going to tell me I’m wrong,” I said, “you would have to have all the information to hand. So that you can judge with full knowledge of the facts. Now, I’m sorry, but that is not the case. You’re speaking without knowing.”

  I had spent part of the afternoon with problematic sentences. No one in the world had been as close to Alice as I had been and nothing irritated me more than when people seemed to think they could have an informed opinion about the relationship I had with my daughter—had we not already spent a lifetime together, had we not already made up our minds beforehand to spend our previous lives together?

  “I don’t intend to discuss it,” I said. “If it’s she who sends you, she’s wasting your time. I should like you to understand that it’s not stubbornness on my part, nor a question of pride. I should like to think that nothing is beyond repair, but let’s be serious for a minute. How could I still have anything to do with a daughter who sacrifices her father to her career as an actress? You know, it almost makes me want to burst out laughing when I say these words, it hurts so much. But it’s over for me. It’s over with her. How could she have thought otherwise, in any case?”

  She sat down on the Hemingway sofa, opposite me. The last beams of daylight streamed across the room.

  She leaned over toward me. “Forgiving would make you seem stronger, Francis.”

  “Don’t try that on. Don’t try that with me. I couldn’t care less about being strong. I don’t want to be stronger. She has let me die on a slow burner, she has tortured me for months, knowing full well what I was going through. Not the tiniest compassion. This obsessive need for publicity. This need to succeed at all costs. At any price. Shit!”

  She sighed. “But who has made them like that? Who has hardened them to such a degree?”

  “I agree absolutely. But not all fathers have been treated as I have been treated. Not all fathers in this country have been left high and dry, I’m sure. Torn apart, I mean, dismembered.”

  We went down to eat. Passing the door to my study, I turned around and cast a last glance over the room in which I had spent the entire day struggling with myself, and it seemed as if I could feel the electricity that still hovered there, hear the inaudible crackling of the air. I closed the door quietly.

  The last time we had sex was several months ago. I did not attempt to keep a precise tally, it was depressing enough as it was.

  That evening, however, we had it off, but it was strange. Not in the least disagreeable, but unusual, odd, and it reinforced my sense that she was giving herself to other men. I didn’t know exactly what it was to do with, but their imprint was there, I could tell. And once the business was over, just as I was imagining myself collapsing quietly alongside her, she asked me to go back to my bedroom.

  In the course of the week, I tried to persuade Jérémie to return to his surveillance task outside his hours of work and to report back to me once more on Judith’s movements. There were few people, fortunately, who would not strive for an additional income in these times of slow growth on the west coast. Jérémie now had a dog to look after.

  Ever since he had begun mowing the golf links, he smelled permanently of newly cut grass—and also of gasoline. I had the sense that he was struggling with himself less, that some of his tension was disappearing. It was not yet time to claim victory, but there was a light that was doing its best to glimmer; A.-M. declared that, in spite of her own wretched state of health, she was able to breathe more freely at last.

  Not that he devoted any more of his time to her or appeared to be more solicitous, but he seemed to her to be less tense, less closed in on himself; he was totally engrossed by the young boxer bitch he had adopted—her very existence enthralled him and left him speechless. She observed him, A.-M. told me, from the armchair to which her cancer had assigned her and she witnessed the changes that I myself had noticed in her son.

  “I hope he allows you to get on with your work,” she had said to me.

  “It’s all right, don’t worry. I know how to stand up for myself. Let’s try not to live like savages.”

  A lifetime had passed between the time when I had probably slept with the girl and finding myself together with this woman in a hospital room, half dead already and in a state of limbo. In that instant, I discovered that life lasted for a split second.

  “I’m glad you’re getting back to writing a novel,” she said to me. “It’s the best thing you could do.”

  I grabbed hold of her two bags and walked toward the exit while she signed papers at the desk. Jérémie had slipped off. Watching her walk toward me across the parking lot, I felt doubtful about the treatment she had been given. When she sat down beside me, for the return journey, I was reminded of a shadow.

  The doctors reckoned th
at it was too late to attempt anything else and that she would be much better off at home.

  Jérémie had come by to ask me a favor, giving the excuse that he was busy due to an appointment with the vet.

  So I drove her home. Jérémie was not marvelous at cleaning and, in the course of a few weeks, he had found a way of creating chaos in the house. The worst mess was in the kitchen. She clung to the side of the sink, shaky on her feet, to fully take in the spectacle.

  I sighed silently and made her sit down at the table, which was entirely covered with cutlery, plates, bottles, and bits of leftover food that was rotten, shrivelled, or dried up. There was an unpleasant smell everywhere, the saucepans and frying pans had not been washed, the floor tiles were sticky, and there were packets and cartons left everywhere.

  I wanted to clean things up a bit for her return home, but she stopped me immediately, with a sharp movement of her hand. “Please,” she breathed, keeping her hand raised.

  In her condition, and considering the extent of the task, I didn’t think she would complete it before nightfall. Unless she took a pick-me-up.

  Guilt gnawed away at her, more surely than did her cancer, and the latest eruption—Jérémie slitting open his veins—had literally ravaged her, stunned her, crushed her. So much so that she was unable to stand up to him, to impose any authority over him—if she ever had been. So she let herself die.

  In early June, she weighed no more than forty kilos. “Your mother weighs no more than forty kilos,” I informed her son.

  In spite of everything, she continued her inquiries. She hoped to put enough money aside to cover the burial costs and to increase the amount that would come to Jérémie once she had died.

  I wondered what he would do with it. I personally thought that this money had a specific value and that one could not just allocate it to anything, that it had a sacred value—not to say a sentimental one—but the only response I got was a slight shrug of the shoulders. “In any case, don’t trust a bank. See what happens. All these people whose savings have been swallowed up. Entire lifetimes of sacrifices and exertion. It’s outrageous. You see all these houses for sale? I see them myself. That should make you cautious. That should make you think. Take a guy like Roger, for example. Could you have an atom of confidence in a man like that? Who would dream of entrusting their savings to him? Your mother’s gone to a lot of trouble, old friend. Whatever you may think. And she’s doing it for you. Not for them. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”