Unforgivable

by Philippe Djian

  But it seemed to me that I preferred her like this rather than as a junkie or someone involved in a road accident; I was her father, I had no other choice, and so I didn’t want any difficulties with her and I depended on time and introspection to save her soul.

  For the time being, she was consumed by fervor, quite clearly. The poison had taken hold of her. All too often, actresses don’t become people one would want to mix with until they are in their fifties, when the masks begin to slip.

  Scarcely had she arrived than she shut herself in my study and remained there, glued to my phone for a good hour.

  “I hope she’s making a reverse-charge call,” I remarked as I poked at a large beech log that was sparkling. “I hope my publishers aren’t trying to get hold of me either. They have my direct line. They know they can call me at any time, day or night.”

  By way of a reaction, Roger let out a sort of groan. I looked up. We were alone, for Judith was putting the children to bed.

  “Is everything all right?” I asked, finally taking note of his generally sorry appearance. I handed him a drink.

  “It’s all true,” he sniggered. “It’s all absolutely true, Francis. They spent a week together in a luxury hotel in Saint-Raphaël. Shit! She lies with every breath!”

  I nodded silently. Then I looked up at him. “Even as a very little girl, she lied,” I said. “It’s dreadful.”

  There was always a price to pay if you went for a walk with a pretty girl on your arm. And if, for one reason or another, that pretty girl was even slightly well known—an actress, an heiress, a singer, model, television presenter, writer—it was better to take the joke coolly, better to break your heart before you walked through the door.

  Two days later, succumbing to their impulsive ritual, some elderly arthritic swimmers threw themselves bravely into the frozen sea and emerged with a smile on their lips—even though they were that much closer to death—while Alice and I had breakfast in the silent house. Looking faintly amused, she watched me carefully butter the slices of toast. Her chin resting in the palms of her hands. Indolent. Alice’s eyes were wide open, but her face was still asleep.

  I had become hopeful again on the day I came across her in the kitchen, early in the morning, when I realized that we were out of the woods—at least, partly so.

  The day was breaking and the pale light was giving way to a coppery glow—which must have had red in it somewhere—in which microscopic sparkling particles hovered. The wind had dropped completely. A fine layer of frost gleamed on the surface of the snowy carpet that covered the garden and was beginning to melt in the salt-filled air.

  “First of all, let me inform you that you’re not in a position to preach to me.”

  “I’m simply reporting back the remarks he made to me, I’m not judging your behavior.”

  We exchanged smiles.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” she said. “He wasn’t like that in the old days.”

  “In the old days, you could have gone off for six months with whomsoever you liked without him noticing.”

  I squeezed some oranges and put some eggs on to boil while she stretched her limbs. I far preferred her like this, when she wasn’t made up and was dressed only in a kind of T-shirt—abuse of power comes as no surprise—and blue-and-black Chinese pajama bottoms, and when her hair was awry and she began to move, speak, breathe, and think like a normal person.

  “I shouldn’t tell you this, but I spent a marvelous week with him. He’s incredibly handsome, isn’t he? We didn’t spend a moment apart. We gave ourselves a real holiday. Apart from you, nobody knew where I was. I hadn’t felt so calm and free for ages.”

  “I know just what you mean, as you can imagine. Sometimes one just wants to go and lose oneself in the forest. Not to be answerable to anything, to be unable to be reached . . . But I get the feeling that Roger’s not taking it as well as the other times . . . It’s a long time, a week. I imagine that if Judith were to disappear into the arms of someone for a whole week, however lackluster our relationship these days, I would not exactly be pleased.”

  I served the eggs and sat down opposite her. Should we curse the heavens for what has been taken from us or give thanks for what we have been left?

  “Let’s eat before they get cold,” I said.

  “All OK, with Judith?”

  I gave a slight shrug of the shoulders. Five long years had passed since Johanna’s death and I hadn’t really recovered. I had thought that marrying Judith would put an end to my suffering, but the illusion had not lasted very long and we had celebrated our third wedding anniversary at a luxury hotel in Normandy where I had had the poor taste to dissolve into tears.

  “We make love in the dark,” I said as I played with the yolk of my egg with my knife. “There’s both positive and negative in that. Nevertheless, when I was setting off to water your mother’s and your sister’s graves the other day, she told me that she would not come to the cemetery with me from now on. She didn’t need to explain why. That’s what she said to me: ‘I don’t need to explain why.’”

  My daughter took my hand for a moment—I never refused anyone warming the cockles of my heart when the occasion arose. I didn’t know how we had managed to cross the abysses, negotiate the storms, endure the flames, in order to share the occasional morsel of food, but one thing was sure: she could not have coped without my help, just as I could not have coped without hers.

  I would be unable to say at exactly what point she had begun to take herself seriously. What shift had occurred. So was what I thought funny not in fact so? Was it not tongue-in-cheek?

  An actress’s career is the worst a woman can choose. For herself and for those around her. And Alice had fallen into the trap, headfirst.

  When she let go of my hand, I gave a start.

  “I’m still waiting for the play you promised to write for me,” she said to me.

  “A play? Is that all? How could I have promised you such a thing? I don’t manage more than ten pages.”

  “You promised me.”

  “Well, I must have been crazy. If I ever promised you such a thing, believe me, Alice, I must have been crazy. And incredibly conceited when the only talent I possess, nowadays, consists purely in knowing how to brush aside what shouldn’t be done. That’s fine, but there’s not much to show for it. It doesn’t open up great horizons for me.”

  “If you were really bothered about my career, you’d write it for me.”

  “Don’t say that. Of course I bother about your career. From the day you were born, I’ve bothered about your career. So please don’t tell me I’m not bothered about your career. Don’t talk nonsense. As soon as I’m up to it, I’ll write a dozen for you. More even. It’s all I ask for. I’m prepared to espouse any religion to get the inspiration back, I’m prepared to pray to whatever God, provided the ability to string together five hundred thousand symbols with a beginning and an end were given to me again.”

  She nodded. She looked outside and then asked me what I had to clear the pathway with, for she felt in the mood to do some exercise.

  All I could find for her were a shovel and a garden broom. People around here used to say that there was a far better chance of glimpsing the empress Eugénie’s petticoats than of seeing snow fall in these parts.

  She put on a tracksuit and set to work. It was an excellent initiative on her part, in view of the extreme ease with which I attracted every variety of sciatica, lumbago, neuralgia, etc., available. My first back pain had come on a few days after the accident and I had experienced many more since—which no massage was able to relieve anymore. Had I not been destroyed as a writer at least, I thought a little bitterly, it would not have been half so bad . . .

  In any case, watching her shovel up all that heavy snow instead delighted me, there being few opportunities for avoiding backache.

  Her transition from teenager to being a woman had passed me by. And this person whom I saw bustling about my garden—efficie
nt, rosy cheeked, fearless, breathing streams of pure vapor into the chilly air—I found it the hardest thing in the world to imagine that she had been a spark within me, even before her mother’s involvement.

  Roger woke me from my daydream. “Being in love with that woman is a curse,” he groaned behind me. “She drives me around the bend.”

  “Roger? Hello. Slept well?”

  He winced.

  It was seven o’clock in the morning. I was going to pick up Jérémie from the police station. I was yawning, I had scarcely woken up, and I was still rubbing my eyes; I had worked very late, on a recalcitrant paragraph. Then I had collapsed onto my bed, dead weary, and the telephone had woken me with a start. The dawn was still clear and diaphanous, but a warm breeze was already moving in from the sea. In my job, if you gave in to a paragraph, if you didn’t deal with the problem before going to bed, you couldn’t climb the ladder, you condemned yourself to remaining a second-rate writer.

  He was in a cell. Behind bars once more. The superintendent told me I had nothing to worry about and said I could take Jérémie away, but that I ought to warn the boy that here, between these walls, they didn’t want to hear of him again.

  “Make him listen to reason, Francis. I wish you well. Personally, I’m not so sure. I tell you, what goes on in the head of an eighteen-year-old lad who’s capable of holding up a service station . . . that’s pretty heavy stuff already. It’s not like helping a blind person cross the street . . .”

  I nodded in agreement.

  “Don’t let yourself get dragged into that,” he advised me.

  “There’s no danger of that. I’m writing a novel. I don’t have a moment to myself.”

  “That’s fascinating. Writing a novel must be fascinating. Well, it fascinates me.”

  I nodded in agreement.

  I came out accompanied by Jérémie. There was a café opposite. I needed a coffee so as to wake myself up properly; to bite into a creamy little pastry as a reward for having risen at the crack of dawn. I indicated to Jérémie that he should order whatever he wanted. His right eye looked like an Agen prune, his nose like a beefsteak tomato. His right hand was bandaged in a cloth or something. And the rising sun that illuminated him, covering him in a golden light, certainly didn’t manage to improve matters.

  Afterward, I took him straightaway to the pound and we retrieved his dog, which began to leap about all over the place, sending bits of slobber everywhere. We drove along the coast on the way back. Offshore from the casino, mounting their boards and shading their eyes from the sun, the first surfers of the day were scanning the still horizon, erect as prairie dogs. The sky was turning a deep blue. His dog was lying calmly for the time being, its tongue lolling over the backseat.

  “I’ve decided not to give her a name,” he mumbled. “I think it’s silly, after all, to give an animal a name.”

  I didn’t say anything. I pulled up outside his house and got out without waiting for him.

  I found A.-M. in the drawing room, in the half light. “He’s getting along fine. Stop worrying. Come on, it’s over, it’s already water under the bridge.”

  “It’s lucky you’re there, Francis. I can’t even drive any longer, you know. I’m so frightened something might happen while I’m driving. I prefer to stop straightaway, that’s how it is. And soon, I won’t be able to walk anymore, I imagine. That’ll be fun.”

  After she had drawn back a curtain, we watched in silence as Jérémie played with his dog outside the house. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed the photo of his dead father on the mantelpiece, dressed in his cyclist gear, with his enigmatic expression—I had no desire to wink at him.

  The neighbor was having his hedges clipped. The noise was unbearable. Even with the windows closed. Because of the erratic nature of the explosions of sound, there was no way one could get accustomed to the din—to the high-pitched screech of a moped—that the motor made. I hoped that someone would go and shoot this appalling gardener or stick his ghastly machine down his throat once and for all—I was ready to pay someone to do it—but no one came.

  Silence fell again. Then the fellow suddenly turned on the gas again just at the moment I was getting ready to thank the Lord for having put an end to this torture. I was prepared to pay a certain amount of money for him to stop.

  I wondered whether Hemingway would have gone and beaten him up. I was thinking of him because I had been rereading “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” the previous evening, and I had been reflecting that he really was one of the best writers I knew. I thought as much each time I reread this story, no question. A superb writer. Powerful. Economical. Subtle. Pity he hadn’t married my aunt as he had promised her he would—though he was mainly in love with Brett at the time.

  There’s a now well-known photograph in which he is wearing a loose-fitting white pullover, with a largely frayed collar, with cable stitching, and perfect for winter sports, and it was my aunt who had knitted this sweater for him. I’m not making it up. She knitted me an identical one before she died, which I never dared wear—but ever since then I had always written trying my best to be worthy of what I was doing.

  I went out into the garden, blocking my ears, and went straight up to the cause of the trouble and his stinking, noisy, long-handled machine that bristled with blades. The man was wearing a soundproof helmet. I tapped him on the shoulder. A plastic visor protected his face. He switched off the motor. When I realized that it was Jérémie, I turned on my heel, but he called out: “Are you angry?”

  “Angry? Why should I be?”

  “You haven’t spoken a word to me for three days.”

  “That’s another matter. That doesn’t mean to say I’m angry. I’m not angry in the least. I’ve got nothing to say to you. It’s not the same thing at all. I just wonder why we should continue to waste our time, you and I. Why should we waste our breath pointlessly? Since you don’t listen to me. Since the only thing that interests you, just at the moment when your mother gets a little closer to death day by day, before your very eyes, is going for walks with your dog or coming home in the middle of the night with your face all bloody, or not coming back at all and ending up in the police station with all the nutcases and drunkards like you. What can I say about that? What can I say, at this stage? If you’re all there. Listen, I begin to wonder whether you’re taking your medicaments. I wonder whether you’re not just making fun of us, Jérémie.”

  He swore that he was taking them. I had no way of checking. I shrugged my shoulders and returned home. I closed the bay window again. He looked in my direction without flinching. I stepped back and sat down in a chair, without taking my eyes off him.

  If one judged purely on the result, if one merely wanted to see the benefits of the scheming that had separated me from my daughter, I had to admit that the aim had been achieved: everything seemed to smile on her, professionally speaking.

  It was difficult not to come across her on television or in magazines, not to hear her on the radio when I was stuck in a traffic jam, not to hear her voice, not to feel the blow full in the chest. You saw her everywhere. She was in a film made the previous summer by a former graduate of the National Film School and praised in the top film magazines, and plaudits had been raining down on her ever since she returned from Australia. Her dance card was filling up. Getting oneself talked about, by whatever means, appeared to be the right thing to do.

  Sometimes, whenever Roger was in the picture, one couldn’t avoid his satisfied, nonchalant air—still less the eager expression on his face when he announced, taking his time, that the rumors of separation, as far as their relationship was concerned, had never been so groundless.

  It was probably the truth. At the end of the day, they were a close-knit team. Their relationship had withstood the various strains Alice put upon it—and got away with. They were an astonishing couple. It was the same thing every time, and I could not help remembering the occasion when they found it difficult to drag themselves out of bed, or fel
t too weak to climb on a stool to change a lightbulb—or simply close the door of the washing machine—and yet here they were, today, triumphant, attractive, relaxed, reaping what they had sown; they had trampled me underfoot, but then this generation loathed us, one had to come to terms with that.

  Roger could appear as if he didn’t care a damn about anything and Alice could seem resolutely determined. “I saved that fellow’s life,” I said to Judith, pointing to Roger with the tip of my knife. “Twice. Not once, two times. One evening, I prevented him from swallowing his own tongue. And on another evening, I drove across town with my foot on the pedal to take him to the emergency room. The miserable son of a bitch. Ruthless. Completely ruthless. I fed them. I gave them a roof over their heads. But for them, I was nothing more than a guy who fed them and gave them somewhere to live.”

  My appetite ruined, I pushed my plate away. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to channel-hop,” I said, getting to my feet to grab the remote control.

  “Well, now I know,” she said behind my back. “I know you’re not going to change your mind. I wasn’t absolutely sure. Now, I know.”

  “Did you think I was joking?”

  “I thought you would calm down eventually. Really nice people calm down in due course.”

  “Good for them. Much good may it do them. Wonderful. I admire them enormously.” I went back and sat opposite her. “Please. There’s nothing we can do about it. Don’t make things even harder for me. Please think of me a bit. I’m the victim in this business. Try not to forget it. Don’t make life any more difficult than it is. Can’t you see there’s nothing I can do about it? Something in me refuses.”

  She lit a cigarette. I switched conversations. “Have you heard about this house along the coast for which a Russian just paid five million euros? That’s over the top, isn’t it?”

  She stood up and took our plates away. I lowered my head. Instead of pouring oil, I was throwing sand.

  I went into the kitchen and asked her to forgive me. Then, with a resolute step, I went back to work.