The Age of Reinvention

by Karine Tuil

  There are six of them there today, in the large living room decorated with peeling greenish paint. They struggle to hide their embarrassment at seeing a man here, the question hovering on their lips: What is he doing here? He moves forward cautiously, greets them, blushing slightly, and oh, there she is, in the middle of these women of various nationalities, this little Babel—what a shock. He is tense, visibly uncomfortable, looking into her eyes—to see what? Desire? Emotion? A hint of tenderness that might make him happy? At this point, her mere presence is enough. Yes, there she is, wearing jeans and an overlarge white T-shirt, a weak smile lighting up her face. She doesn’t move, doesn’t stand up to greet him, and yet she has recognized him, she has noticed his metamorphosis: the fitted suit, the polished shoes, the bouquet of flowers in his hand, the paper bag branded with a famous perfumery (Hey, it’s Prince Charming! one of the women1 shouts, and the others start laughing: Can we try on the glass slipper?)—the perfect replica of Samir the day they saw him on television. From this distance, however, he has trouble recognizing her. She has cut her hair very short (and she’s done it herself, he thinks, maybe in a fit of anger, or at least in the absence of a mirror, because the cut is uneven and unattractive) and the roots are white. She has put on weight. She is not wearing any makeup at all. He has never seen her like this before. He walks up to her and, when he’s standing next to her, thinks about kissing her and decides against it, despite their close proximity. He hands her the flowers and the gifts. She takes them, but does not open or even look at them, her face unmoved, while he asks her if they can speak in private. Yes, of course. Back into the hallway, trying not to breathe in the putrid stink. He leads her into the backyard and she sits on the bench and there, amid brambles and thistles, he gives her the big spiel: declaration-gifts-promises, his hands and pockets full, he plays the self-assured success—he can, now. She listens without any particular emotion. She radiates a certain hardness, something sharp-edged and incisive. “Why have you come?” “First of all, for this,” he says, giving her a copy of his book that he has signed for her. She takes it, opens it, and reads the words: For Nina, the only one who knew how to console me. “Did you know I’d had a book published? Have you read it? Did you see the reviews? Yeah, it’s incredible. I’m so happy. I travel a lot these days, I never have a minute to myself, I try to stay calm, try to keep a cool head.” A little later in the conversation, he will even speak these words: “I’m still the same, simple person, despite my success.” She smiles, closes the book. “But I also came to bring you these,” he adds, pointing to the gifts. “I’ll open them later, after you’ve gone,” she replies a little coldly, before asking, in a neutral voice: “Have you heard anything about Samir?” He never imagined she would mention Samir to him; instinctively, he bridles: “Hasn’t he put you through enough already?” Then, in a gentler voice: “Sorry. But you know what’s happened to him, don’t you?” “Yes. One of his partners told me.” “You haven’t tried to see him again?” “No.” “I think there’s a good chance he’ll be freed.” She does not cry when she hears these words, she only turns away, and shards of gold sparkle in her pupil. Reflected sunlight? Time to change the subject: yes, she found out he’d been published, by chance, when she arrived at the shelter. She read and liked his book, that tension between the real and the imagined, that disillusioned humor undercutting the tragedy. She was not upset at reading her own life turned into literature; on the contrary, there had been something cool about seeing herself represented as the heroine of a novel. He listens to her for a long time, then interrupts, moving closer to her, noticing the lines that traverse her forehead, the sagging upper eyelid of her right eye. “I came here to get you. I’ll take care of you. I’ll give you everything you want.” He says this with a certain pride in his voice: I’m here to save her, he thinks. I’m here to save her from poverty, save her from the street, from idleness; it’s a beautiful/great/powerful thing, it’s heroic. I am saving her life because, twenty years ago, she saved mine. “Come on, let’s go. Pack your bags.” And, with these words, he gently takes her hand in his. But she shakes him off unhesitatingly. No. Did he mishear her? He doesn’t understand. No, I’m not coming with you. She will stay here, in this women’s shelter, for another three months. And then? I’ll decide when the time comes. This is ridiculous—she can’t stay here—it’s ugly, sad, horrible. No. She likes this place. She feels comfortable among these woman brutalized by life, by men, these women with bloated/wasted bodies, with callused hands, toothless mouths, these tough, combative, tenacious women who have lost everything and won everything back, these women who were manipulated and docile for so long, who were sexualized and desexualized, beasts frightened of their masters’ wrath, reduced to the ranks of slavery, abused, shrunk to nothing, unaware of their own bodies, incapable of saying No, from fear of no longer being loved, invisible in society, in male society, nonexistent. Yes, she feels comfortable here; among these women, she has found her place. She loves those moments of untroubled complicity, listening to the tales of their thwarted lives; she loves the warmth of their meals, eaten together in the large refectory that they decorated themselves. She loves her body, now freed from her obsession with perfection; it’s a new feeling for Nina, who has always sought men’s approval and protection. Ha, what protection? They have exposed her to the worst of the world. She accepts herself the way she is now: a poor woman. Poor but free.

  * * *

  Samuel says nothing. He suffers in silence. A narcissistic wound—the deepest kind. Finally, he gets up—If that’s what you want—and leaves. He walks away, does not turn back. He does not want to think about her, remember her. In the hallway, he sees the manager—No, not now. She wants to show him the library; she insists—he said he would—holds him back, and eventually he yields. Well, why not? And he follows her. He is gripped by nausea, almost staggers, holds on to a chair and keeps his eyes on the manager as she talks and talks like someone giving a speech to a packed room, when the truth is they are alone—I’m alone, from now on—no one can hear them, so why is she speaking so loud? Showing him the shelves filled with books, she explains that she has always considered literature as a tool for the liberation of women. “When you read Tolstoy, Duras, Stendhal, you learn more about men and women than you do from your own life. And then, you write about your own life.” He does not reply. He looks at the books, most of them written by women: Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Yourcenar,2 Marguerite Duras, Joyce Carol Oates, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Cynthia Ozick, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva . . . “Where are the men?” he jokes.

  Everywhere.

  * * *

  1. Lila Rodier, thirty-eight, a former prostitute. Keeps a private journal in which she invents “an exciting life with an upper-class guy.”

  2. Nina had been moved by this line from Marguerite Yourcenar’s book Alexis: “There is a release in knowing that you are poor, that you are alone, and that no one cares about you. It makes life simpler.”

  32

  The next day, while he is still devastated by the loss of Nina, Samuel discovers he has been awarded a major literary prize for his novel Consolation. His name had been mentioned in connection with the prize for a few weeks, rumors circling that he had a good chance of winning it; his editor called him every day to talk about it, checking his actions and movements, even going so far as to test his moral strength, “because not everyone is tough enough to deal with that kind of acclaim. Some writers are too fragile, and they never recover from it. But you’re strong, you’re ambitious. You had to wait until you were in your forties to get published, so you have enough perspective to cope.” Samuel is not so sure. He does not feel strong—his life story demonstrates his inability to deal with social violence, the trials of competition—and he has never been ambitious. He thinks constantly about a line that Witold Gombrowicz wrote in his Diaries, in 1967: “I have known for a long time—I was forewarned, in some sense—that art cannot and must not bring any personal benefit
. . . that it is a tragic undertaking.”

  * * *

  Now he was seized with a panicked fear at the thought of being surrounded again by photographers, journalists, booksellers, admirers, publishers, of being the center of attention, the center of a world from which he had for so long felt excluded. “It will be a great honor,” his editor told him, “for you, for both of us.” But what use is a great honor? Does it make you any more likely to be loved? Does it make you immortal? Invincible? A superhero? Is it a guarantee against a broken heart? Against melancholy and self-hatred? Against aging and sickness? Do you sleep better after you have received it? Do you become a better writer? A better lover? Does it increase your chances of people taking your calls? Of getting a doctor’s appointment at short notice? Of being given a better table in a restaurant? And what if those dizzy heights give him vertigo? When you reach a peak, the only way forward is down, and it’s often a steep and fatal ride. He feels more comfortable in the foothills, with those who have retreated, or even down in the plains, with those who have failed. From there, it is easier to see the social circus: all you have to do is look up and you’ll see men falling. Not that he loved himself when he was a failure, but at least then he seemed to possess a critical lucidity, a distance from beings and events, that success would deprive him of. When it comes down to it, you have to be just as arrogant and narcissistic to refuse honors and awards. Scorning glory implies wanting to prove that you are above it. Detached, incorruptible. The obsession with moral integrity, the desire for purity, are just other masks for ambition. It’s true: he wanted to be a famous loser: Julien Gracq refusing the Prix Goncourt (“I persist in thinking that there is no longer any sense in playing along, directly or indirectly, with any kind of competition, and that a writer has nothing to gain from allowing himself to be caught in that avalanche”); Jean-Paul Sartre, the Nobel Prize (“No artist, no writer, no man deserves to be consecrated in his lifetime”); Samuel Beckett refusing to go to Stockholm to receive his Nobel Prize for Literature, because he believed it was a “catastrophe”—the term that Tennessee Williams used to describe success.

  * * *

  (And his greatest fear: what success would do to him.)

  * * *

  He remembers what his editor told him soon after he had signed his first contract: “You have talent, but you live apart from the literary world. You’re an outsider, basically. Which is fine—that has a charm of its own, and personally I like it—but you will have to make an effort when your book comes out.” An effort? Writing already demanded so much of him . . .

  * * *

  He has dreamed of this brief moment of glory. But he is too frightened of the possible consequences. Those tragic mornings-after when, having given everything, the words still resist your advances.

  * * *

  I refuse.

  * * *

  He had thought that recognition—however late, however sudden—that success, the achievement of the ambitions imposed by a competitive, consumerist society, would satisfy him. He had even hoped to profit from this sudden celebrity and the comforts it offered when events had taken such a favorable turn, but a part of himself, obscure and intangible, had resisted, had remained at the margins and had grown inside him like a stinging nettle. It is there, in that part of oneself overgrown with brambles and thorns—where every movement exposes you to pain and injury, to irritations and infections, where every advance sets off an opposing reaction, where every attempt at change ends in failure, falling to the ground, into the mire, over and over again—it was there, and not elsewhere, that the writing mechanism was engaged, with its risks of explosion, fragmentation, and destruction, a bomb that can never be defused. Away from this place, in the perfectly demarcated and manicured expanses beyond, life was good—but you couldn’t get your hands dirty. And a writer must have dirty hands.

  33

  The day of his liberation, Samir is released through a secret exit in order to avoid the crowd of journalists and photographers who are waiting for him. He is alone: no one—no family, no friends—has come to welcome him, and that is a relief. It is a relief to him not to have to fake contrition, redemption, the big apology—that whole social circus, leading to what? Absolution? Reintegration? So when he sees his family, his friends, he’s supposed to say sorry? Fuck that! He owes no debt (he thinks) to society, but society owes him big-time. He did something wrong—something morally wrong—in excluding his mother from his life and in depriving his children of part of their history and identity, and yes, he regrets this—he has difficulty forgiving himself for this—but that’s all. Everything else—the lies, the broken principles, those little compromises he made with himself—he was forced into those, he is certain of this, led there like a beast in a slaughterhouse, crushed by the machine of discrimination, isolated by society itself, equal opportunity my ass—he’d had no other choice but to sever himself from his origins, to bleed away his identity, to rip out his guts, boiling, spurting, staining, overflowing, hard lumps of bitterness and hatred swept along, infecting everything . . . and then being reborn, getting back on his feet, however weakened, however dismembered, moving forward in order to survive, free at last, do or die, as his father used to say; well, the dying’s been done, so it’s time to do now, to walk the walk, straight ahead, not thinking, blinkered vision, corrupting again, and under the weight of his footsteps, New York unfolds beneath him, vibrant, aswarm, and he’s running, trusting his internal compass, his emotional geometry; his body, stripped down, defused, finally discharged of its tensions, of the oh-so-heavy burden of guilt/lies/shame/childhood, speeds up for a few yards and then slows down again, a way of testing the mechanism—it works—the cogs of his body’s machinery not yet completely jammed—I’m alive, I’m free—skimming the ground, then suddenly he stops and gazes up defiantly at the skyscrapers stretching up above him in the diffracted light: an outrageous, arrogant aesthetic, the lurid beauty of the city awakening, a dusty landscape pierced with shards of iridescence. He had forgotten all this, his eyes for so long embedded in the gray walls of the prison, nothing ahead of him, nothing behind, fading to black. And at last, he sinks into the insalubrious world of basements, wastelands, ghettos, places that speak to his compromised duality, his profound ambiguity, his taste for the secret, the shadowy, and in these subterranean streets, surrounded by musicians (saxophonists, clarinetists), by illegal immigrants, by the poor and the passionately adulterous, by squealing minors, bodies electrified with desire, he walks past walls with thistles growing through holes in the bricks, then stands still so he can embrace the horizon in a single gaze, the beauty of slack water perfused by rain, and he stays there, sitting on a slab of broken concrete, until the sky turns to a ball of soot, indifferent to the damp air, to the ripples of spume that roll and vanish like the gray clouds that rise from the cigarette he smokes. Free. Free and happy. The death of ambition—at last. The obligation to succeed, the menace that weighs on you from birth, the blade that society puts to your throat and holds there until you choke, removing it only in the hour of banishment, the moment when it exiles you, purges you, strips you away like a dead branch . . . and what release there is in this banishment, which you never know is temporary or definitive, that moment when you are admitted to the brotherhood of the washed-up/the desperate/the has-beens, those people marginalized by age or failure, the homeless and the nameless, the small and the simple, the drab anonymous masses, who line up for their welfare checks, who wake at dawn, whose names mean nothing to you, whom no one ever calls back, to whom everyone says “no” or “later,” for whom no one is ever available or friendly, the ugly, the fat, the weak, the disposable women, the ridiculous friends, finally free of the fear of disappointing, the pressure created by the need to be liked, those imperatives that we force on ourselves, out of individualism/lust for glory/desire for recognition/thirst for power/mimicry/herd instinct—all those devastating effects of dreams aborted by parental authority/determinism/illusory utopias, the br
utal injunction that governs the social order, rules even the most intimate relationships—Be SUCCESSFUL! Be STRONG!—he had submitted to that just like everyone else . . . But it doesn’t matter as much now, when no one expects anything from him, when even he aspires only to make the most of his rediscovered identity. The blade has slipped. The next step is his.

  KARINE TUIL is a playwright and the award-winning author of eight books that have been translated around the world. She lives in Paris.

  SAM TAYLOR is an author and translator. His own novels include The Amnesiac and The Island at the End of the World, and his translated work includes Laurent Binet’s HHhH, Hubert Mingarelli’s A Meal in Winter, and Joël Dicker’s The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair.

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