Who I Am

by Rampling, Charlotte; Bataille, Christophe;

  This is where you met Carlos. A handsome, older man. A rich Argentinian cattle rancher, a man of experience. And there you did something very strange, Sarah. Without saying anything to anyone, a week after meeting him, you married him.

  I read about it in a newspaper in London. My mother was frantic. She couldn’t bear the thought of Sarah being so far away.

  Sarah would come back with Carlos from time to time. Gradually we sensed that this separation from her language, her country, her culture, her family, was starting to weigh on her.

  Three years after they married, my mother is at her sewing machine. Her body suddenly gives way. She goes completely limp and slumps forward onto the table.

  She pulls herself together as best she can and manages to drive to the nearby golf course where my father is working.

  A few hours later, the phone rings at home: at the very moment my mother had collapsed, Sarah had died in Argentina.

  The voice of suffering is an innocent voice. It leaves no room for certainties. It leaves no room for vanity. It leaves no room for others.

  I was making a film for television at the time. I was playing a young woman from the 1900s, a spirited girl throwing off the shackles of convention. She embodied the sense of life coursing through me.

  When I get to my parents’ house, I see my father push open the little garden gate and come towards me. He announces in a loud voice: ‘Your sister is dead.’ That was how I found out. ‘Go and see your mother.’ Which I did, leaving him lost and alone in the middle of the garden.

  My mother is in an armchair in the living room. I kneel in front of her. She takes my hand and holds onto me as if she will never let me go, as if she is going to take me with her. I struggle and gently try to pull away. She holds fast, she is hurting me. Suddenly she releases her grip and falls into unconsciousness.

  For many years afterwards she is inconsolable. With Sarah, everything went out of her life.

  A stubborn refusal to be tamed. A relentless quest. A primal solitude. An unyielding struggle.

  Absurd sometimes. Excessive. Wilful. Since forever inflamed.

  For the Ramplings, there was no body, no funeral. Sarah had disappeared. When the phone rang that evening, she had already been buried. Because of the heat, we were told.

  All I know is that Sarah has lain in her husband’s family vault since February 1967.

  For some reason I still cannot explain, I have never been to Argentina.

  My memory leaves me with an impression. An outline without detail, a fragment without form. The image fades leaving a reminiscence of absence. A disturbing sense of being out of time. It’s just an impression, but the impression remains.

  Tell me, Charlotte, what have we been doing in this book all these years?

  Until my twenties I used to be called Charley. By my parents, my friends, my sister. I was Charley.

  Sometimes, you just have to reach out your hand: mine rests on a nineteen-year old girl’s. Bent over her desk, Charley is sticking articles and photographs into a scrapbook, conscientiously captioning them.

  There I am, in a tweed dress, below-the-knee or very short. There I am, lying on the boot of a car, or hidden by flowers, or standing next to my father in a double-breasted suit, or with a group of actors. I’m laughing, humming a tune. A man is stroking my hair or putting his arm around my waist.

  There’s Sarah too, in a ‘New Look’ dress and silk gloves, looking hesitant at an award ceremony.

  Sarah and her photographer friend, Roland. Sarah, so happy.

  I close the photo album. I’ll leave you now, Charley, it seems as if my name left with Sarah.

  And I can never again hold a young girl in my arms lost in the wilds of Argentina.

  What is our book? A search for the right form. A few words, a few images. And one or two secrets.

  The secret of the piece of paper the colonel holds in his right hand as he kneels on the grass, his left hand clutching his face.

  The secret of Sarah’s death.

  The secret of who knows. It’s a bit like a Persian tale: it takes a lifetime to write and a hundred to read. And only one to forget. But no, it takes two lives to write. And if we lack innocence, let me write these pages that a child can read.

  One night I woke up screaming. I saw Sarah’s death in a dream. And my scream became lost in time, until today, until these words which I never wanted.

  Sarah and I had developed a taste for a certain type of freedom. We liked being outsiders.

  After Fontainebleau, we returned to Stanmore and our house: Westwood. The garden gave onto the ‘green belt’. The thatched roof gave it an old-fashioned feel. Westwood had a fairytale charm and a soul.

  Sarah started at the French Lycée. She would disappear every morning into the London Underground on her way to South Kensington. On a secret adventure.

  Sarah stayed with the French, while I went back to uniform and discipline. It was painful, this return to barracks.

  Mathematics resisted my every attempt to grasp them. I discovered that numbers literally stopped me in my tracks. I had terrible turns at school, like fainting fits. I’d fall over. Was it because I didn’t understand? Was it some logical terror?

  The school and my father were consulted. I was dispensed from maths lessons. And that is how a part of the world remains a mystery to me ever since, paralysing and fascinating me in equal measure.

  Stop the world. I want to get off. Everyone can keep going but I have to stop.

  What do you think if I stay where I am for hours and days and weeks on end. The outside world barred. All dialogue shot. Your words are snares, you know that very well … Nausea without definition. All illusions gone.

  We create our universe in the attic. Our own world: a big sitting-room, two bedrooms. Sarah and I bring up armchairs and books. This is our poetic horizon.

  On Sunday afternoons we invite people over. My mother, who has always loved balls, parties, dressing up, enthusiastically encourages us. ‘Charlotte and Sarah’s parties’ become a thing locally.

  Our friends sit quietly on chairs, on the floor: we drink orange juice, listen to records, sing and dance, rock’n’roll and slows.

  Listening and singing. The 45s fall on the spindle of the record-player.

  Sarah and I often speak French, our secret language. Everything seems innocent. It is an open-ended, happy time. Our golden age.

  When love steps in and takes you for a spin,

  oh là là là c’est magnifique

  and when one night

  your loved one holds you tight

  oh là là là c’est magnifique

  but when one day

  your loved one drifts away

  oh là là là it is so tragique

  but when once more

  he whispers je t’adore

  c’est magnifique

  The music fills us, lulls us into a gentle reverie, and in a sense, speaks for us as well.

  The atmosphere in Stanmore’s parish hall at the start of that summer was hard to believe. The room was packed. I remember the sound of rustling, of laughter.

  Sarah and I were in raincoats and fishnets. We wore berets. We sang Luis Mariano, our versions. It was so French …

  Afterwards people came up to me. They seemed surprised: ‘Charlotte, we didn’t know you had it in you!’

  I started to see. To understand a certain way of looking at people that wins them over. Holds them, challenges them. The look that disappears when you leave the stage.

  I was fourteen and I’ve never forgotten that unsettling, thrilling feeling.

  And then you felt people were staring at your face, your grey eyes, heavy-lidded and distant, your body, your smile, your grace.

  Years later, when my father and I started talking, he said in all earnestness, ‘If I had to start over, I’d be an actor.’

  In Stanmore, he played the lead in Terence Rattigan’s play, The Deep Blue Sea. Liberated from the army, from its uniforms and traditions
, he metamorphosed into a clumsy, eccentric leading man. I was amazed to see him walk out on stage, suddenly so free. This is the English spirit: they admire eccentricity. The joy has got to express itself somehow.

  I saw my mother dancing in fishnet stockings in front of the whole town, including her daughters and her husband, and she was happy.

  After a concert in Stanmore, an agent sought out Sarah and me and offered us an audition at a club in Piccadilly.

  We made plans for this expedition, which had to be kept secret. What would our parents think of us sneaking up to London like that?

  We hid our berets and raincoats in our satchels. Then one afternoon we rushed off after school. A mad scramble on the Underground, then through the streets of Piccadilly … I can still feel our feverish elation.

  We sang in front of three gloomy men who didn’t say a thing. Melancholy hung in the air. I can still see the look in their eyes as they watched us across the empty tables.

  Then the Underground swallowed us up again: we didn’t say a word until we got home. The colonel was waiting for us on the steps. He stared at Sarah and me in silence, as if he knew. And that was the end of my career as a cabaret singer.

  Even childhood with its vague and happy memories, the songs, the beaches, the waiting; neatly folded hands; laughter; lost images; the going away and coming back – all this can make a book too.

  Aren’t you writing any more?

  I don’t know.

  Each day disappears when another one starts.

  As if we no longer need the eternal round of gestures and rituals, the to and fro of a day. So I forget and disappear only to begin again.

  One day, it’s not the day. The door of the fifth floor is half-open. I cross the room. It’s strange, it’s as though this scene has already happened. Sitting at your desk, you are staring at the screen. A long text is scrolling down in front of you.

  We have tea.

  You call London. And those pages that were making you cry have disappeared.

  Little, so little, so wild that I am. Silent witness of uncontrolled minds. Silence becomes a voice without words. Irresistible urge of violence contained. Impulses that collide and knock me off course. Scattered through my story as markers of my way.

  I’m back. I’m not quite sure where at the moment.

  Sarah is sensual and defenceless somehow, I’m not sure really how to explain it. She has an uncommon grace and innocence. On that day I am playing big sister, that’s the part I’ve been given. I am her bodyguard, her protector.

  Sarah is sixteen and I am just fourteen. We are wearing light, summery dresses. Tom, her boyfriend, is on his own in the front of his tiny three-wheeler bubble car. I am sitting on Sarah’s lap in the back. We are racing through the countryside on our way to Oxford.

  The bubble car is going down a long hill at top speed when a construction truck slowly pulls out without seeing us. Tom brakes like mad. We are going far too fast. We are far too heavy. Death is inevitable.

  Miraculously, our bubble car got past. We drove another hundred yards, then Tom pulled over to the side, trembling, white as a sheet. We sat on the grass in the sun. I’ll never forget the sensation, the feeling of being alive.

  Later, on that same summer day, Sarah and Tom slipped away, their arms around each other’s waists. They walked off and lay down in the grass. I sat patiently waiting. I was just there. I was probably hoping for some whispering, rustling. Then Tom emerged into the sunlight, followed by Sarah. Scrutinising her beautiful face, I saw she was different, excited, miles away. I sensed a mystery in her.

  Sometimes I wish that all of life could be contained in my gaze.

  What cannot be said must be dreamed. When you dream, you cherish your secret.

  My father had a bubble car too: an eccentric amalgam of metal and plastic with three wheels and no door. To get in you lifted up the see-through bubble and climbed in over the handlebars. Colonel Rampling was a sight to behold driving through Stanmore in his uniform, upright and concentrated. People would turn and stare as he passed, but he took no notice.

  Later, I found out the make of Tom’s bubble car that nearly killed the three of us on that day of sunshine and pleasure: it was a Kabinenroller. Because they had worked for the Reich, Messerschmitt was forbidden to produce aircraft after the war, so their factories recycled planes into these strange vehicles … Then the bubble cars disappeared – along with transparency, the colonel, certain memories, playfulness, the aircraft factories – and then cars all looked the same.

  London was dancing. The Blitz was a thing of the past. No more tears and deprivation. We were alive.

  Everything was different: skirts, music, objects, language, freedom, the riot of colour on every wall, friends, bars and restaurants, the visible and invisible. We were the baby boomers. All the codes were turned on their heads. There was a rhythm, a mutation, a collective heartbeat.

  A historic, indefinable moment.

  And soon we would never be the same again.

  I’ll keep silent about the things that are not in these pages. Other people will talk.

  And they don’t know. They poke around and repeat what others have said. Who wouldn’t want to walk joyously down the King’s Road in a miniskirt in the 60s? Who wouldn’t want to devote their life to the movies? To photographers? I was, and I still am, that woman.

  Eventually I opened the diaries my mother kept as a young girl, with her writings in purple ink, pale shades of violet and coloured pencils. I discovered events and thoughts detailed in her careful handwriting. My mother was a romantic. She made lists of the boys she liked, as though she was learning how to fall in love. Some were good dancers. Others were fun, distant. Charming, dashing or dreadful. My mother was dreamy and had many suitors. At one point someone called Godgers appears in the lists – her affectionate nickname for my father. Gradually the lists stop, and the diaries with them, as if they had been suspended in time until they landed in my hands.

  I found out the truth about Sarah three years after her death.

  She took her secret away with her when she took away her life.

  She killed herself on 14 February 1967, after having given birth prematurely to a baby boy on 13 January in a hospital in Buenos Aires.

  When I asked my father why he had kept such a secret, he said, ‘It would kill your mother if she knew.’

  So this became our secret and I’ve always wondered if Mum was protected by our pact or poisoned by the lie.

  Perhaps this is it, the cutting edge of truth: a secret that keeps us human.

  My mother and I stand in front of the mirror. We contemplate our images. Her reflection mirrors a woman she no longer recognises. Her eyes follow the trail of my sister. Her mouth speaks but I cannot hear. Silence settles between us.

  My father stands before me. He says I am young. He says I must go out into the world and not look back. He says he will always be there for my mother. He says, ‘Charlotte, you don’t have to come back for us’.

  I am standing at the window of a hotel in a country whose language and customs are strange to me. I am a stranger.

  I am in a city that I do not know and that does not know me.

  I observe from afar the daily ritual of everyday lives. The distance is reassuring. The hidden side of life shows a truth that transparency conceals.

  Everything is still, nothing moves. The city drowses in the scorching heat. I wait by my window for the movement to begin again. Waiting is anything but passive. Waiting is listening. Waiting is about knowing when to move on.

  I am immobile. I am weary. I wait for time to pass. I am haunted by the passage of time.

  I have come here to forget who I am. To find other images to erase those that hide the truth.

  I want to listen to a language with unfamiliar words. I want to perform rituals without knowing from whence they came. I am seeking a silent encounter to understand what I mean.

  My sister died a violent death.

  I saw
my family sink into silence.

  I took flight and became a stranger among strangers. An unconscious quest guided me here.

  I spent a long time in the wilderness before I could shed my first tear and be relieved of the pain so long denied.

  The colonel died peacefully in his sleep.

  He had just turned a hundred and he joined my mother who had died ten years earlier.

  At the end his skin was grey, his pulse slow. I didn’t go back to see him, without really knowing why. There’s still always time, isn’t there?

  A few prayers, a little music, two readings, the family. Absolute simplicity, just as he would have wanted.

  The words have come. After how many years? A walk in the wilderness. It’s this very book.

  One night I get a message from the end of the world: I’m sitting beside Sarah.

  I shiver.

  My son is writing to me from Buenos Aires. He is with Sarah’s son. They barely know one another.

  Charlotte’s son and Sarah’s son.

  David and Carlos Jr.

  They are young men now.

  They walk along the main avenue of the cemetery like laughing children.

  They go to your grave together.

  They stay with you.

  It seems that I can finally see that distant landscape, feel the southern heat, touch the grieving earth, watch the tall trees bending over you. It seems that I am getting close to you.

  It seems that these words were not the hard road but a poem that was reaching out for you.

  Sarah, you seem to be here: in this book, in these years, in this childhood, our childhood.

  Sarah, you seem gentle, absent, joyful, and unforgettable, and those two young men, sitting on your grave in silence, have brought my poem to an end.

  Charlotte Rampling is an acclaimed English actor with a stellar career in international films across three languages, known for films such as 45 Years (for which she received an Oscar nomination), Swimming Pool, and The Night Porter. She lives in France.