I can find no mention of this outing in my diary, probably because it was organised on the day we went, which explains why I didn’t write it down. We met outside the cinema. L. had arrived early and bought the tickets.
The film tells the story of seventeen girls from the same school who decide to get pregnant at the same time. It was inspired by real events in 2008 in Gloucester in the US. The Coulin sisters relocated the story to a small town in Brittany. It’s a beautiful film, suffused with a languorous sense of expectation, a kind of nameless ennui, the longing for an elsewhere that never seems to materialise. Shots of the young girls sitting motionless in their rooms are the melancholy tableaux that give the film its rhythm, like a countdown. In themselves, they speak of a time that no longer belongs to childhood, nor yet to adulthood, a hazy, uncertain in-between. For these girls, being pregnant is an act of liberation, the promise of a different life. Besides these recurring pregnancies, the film also tells the story of an influence: Camille, who is first to get pregnant, is the brightest star in the school. She’s one of those girls whom others follow blindly and long to be like. One of those teenage idols we all knew, who eventually disappear and no one knows what became of them. When the lights went up, I turned to L., who seemed rather tense. I immediately noticed the way her jaw had tightened, and a slow throbbing in her cheek, making first a hollow, then a slight bump just below her ear, while the rest of her face remained still. Outside, she offered to drive me home. She had her car for once. She didn’t normally use it in Paris, but she’d been on her way back from a meeting in the suburbs and hadn’t had time to take it to her garage. I said yes.
L. had found somewhere to park near the cinema and we walked there in silence side by side.
Once in the car with her seatbelt fastened, L. opened her window. At first she paused it halfway, then let it slide all the way down. Cold air rushed in. She remained like that for several seconds, looking straight ahead. I saw her blouse rise and fall in time with her breathing. After a while she eventually said: ‘I’m sorry. I can’t drive.’
She had her hands on the wheel and was trying to breathe deeply, but her breathing was short and effortful.
‘Was it the film?’
‘Yes, it was the film. But don’t worry. It’ll pass.’
We waited. L. stared at the road exactly as though the car were hurtling along an expressway at a hundred miles an hour.
I tried to defuse the situation. I was prone to this kind of reaction too, films that go off like a time bomb when the credits roll. I knew the feeling. It had happened to me several times, it had even forced me to sit down on the kerb (Jerry Schatzberg’s Scarecrow) and rendered me speechless (Céline Sciamma’s Water Lilies). I really understood. Sometimes a film causes a visceral reaction. To distract her, I told L. about the day I first saw The Hours, based on Michael Cunningham’s novel. Though I hadn’t shed a single tear during the whole film, I crumpled as soon as it was over. It just happened without warning; I began crying hot tears, unable to leave the cinema, or explain anything to the father of my children, in whose arms I had collapsed.
Something in my internal protection system had clearly given way.
I tried a dash of self-mockery, hoping to distract her a little. L. was listening carefully, but it was clear that she could neither laugh nor nod; her whole body seemed engaged in an attempt to regain control.
Several more minutes went by in silence before she turned the key in the ignition, and several more again before she put the car in gear.
We didn’t speak on the drive home either. I thought over the scenes in the film that had affected me, looking for a clue as to what had so overwhelmed her. I didn’t know enough about L. to identify the point of impact. But I remember I thought about the character of Florence, the rather unattractive red-haired girl, who appears at the start of the film and is kept at arm’s length by the other girls. She’s the one they mock; she’s rather awkward and ridiculous, without it being possible to say quite what causes her rejection. Florence is also the first to admit to Camille that she’s pregnant. Pregnancy opens the door to the group she’d been excluded from, and, without meaning to, Florence encourages the others to follow suit. More and more girls fall pregnant. Later, in a very cruel scene, the girls discover that Florence’s pregnancy is a trick; it was just a lie so that she’d be accepted by the group, which now casts her out without any kind of hearing.
L. pulled up outside my building. She smiled and thanked me. Probably just ‘Thanks for coming with me’, but said as though I had accompanied her to a painful examination at the hospital or to hear news of a serious illness.
I felt a sort of impulse towards her, a desire to take her in my arms.
By some curious intuition, I remember thinking that L. hadn’t always been the beautiful, sophisticated woman I saw before me. Something in her, something buried and barely perceptible, suggested that L. had come back from far away, a dark, treacherous place, and that she’d undergone a phenomenal transformation.
From then on, we saw each other more and more often.
L. lived very near me. She worked from home, set her own hours and decided how she used her time. L. would call me because she was passing, or had read a book she wanted to tell me about, or had found a quiet place to have tea. She integrated herself into my life because she was free to come and go, because she permitted herself the unexpected and the spur-of-the-moment, because it seemed normal to her to say, ‘I’m downstairs,’ as though we were fifteen: ‘I’ll wait for you at the corner, let’s meet at the baker’s, at Monoprix, at Réaumur-Sébastopol station, I need to buy a jacket this afternoon, come and help me choose a lamp for my desk.’ L. liked deciding things at the last minute, changing her plans, cancelling a meeting to prolong the pleasure of an encounter, going out for dessert, or simply not interrupting a conversation that interested her. L. cultivated a kind of openness to the moment that made her unusual in my eyes, since I had so long tried to quell my anxiety through a more or less successful effort to anticipate things.
I admired L. for her ability to refuse constraints and only imagine the future in an immediate way. For her, there was the present moment and the one just after: nothing beyond that was more important or more urgent. L. didn’t wear a watch and never looked at her mobile to check the time. She was totally present and behaved like that in all circumstances. It was a choice, a way of being in the world, a refusal of all forms of distraction or dispersal. I spent whole afternoons talking to her without her ever worrying about the time, and I don’t think I ever heard her mobile ring during those two years.
L. never put off a meeting: things happened on the spur of the moment or they didn’t happen. L. lived now, as though everything might come to an end that very day. L. never said, ‘I’ll call later to arrange when to meet,’ or, ‘Let’s try to meet up before the end of the month.’ L. was available immediately, without waiting. What’s done was done.
I admired her determination and don’t think I ever knew anyone with such presence in the moment. L. had long known what was important to her, what she needed and what she had to protect herself against. She had made a sort of pre-emptive choice that enabled her to assert her priorities categorically, and avoid the disturbing elements she had definitively excluded from her environment.
The way she lived – insofar as I could tell – seemed to me to express an internal strength that few people possess.
One morning, L. called me at seven because she’d just discovered her dictaphone wasn’t working. She had an appointment at eight thirty with a female politician whom she’d started working with. She had no chance of finding a shop open and wanted to know if I could lend her mine. We met half an hour later at the counter in a café. I watched her cross the street. I observed how she walked, so stable and assured despite her heels; her blonde hair pinned up with a clasp accentuated the length of her neck and the elegance of her bearing. She seemed lost in thought. Putting one foot in front of the other evi
dently was the least of her worries. (For me it’s sometimes a major concern.) Heads turned as she came in; she had a look that you couldn’t ignore. I recall that moment perfectly because I thought: it’s seven thirty in the morning and she has everything under control. Nothing was creased or crumpled; every element of her person was perfectly in place, and yet there was nothing frozen or manufactured about L. Her cheeks were only a little pink from the cold, or some flesh-coloured make-up; she had light mascara on her eyelashes. She smiled at me. She exuded a genuine sensuality, something to do with her ease and facility. To me, L. embodied a mysterious blend of movement and formality.
I’d long ago accepted that I was not one of those impeccable, irreproachable women I’d dreamed of being. I always had something that escaped or stuck out or collapsed. I had strange hair that was both straight and frizzy. I was unable to keep lipstick on for more than an hour, and there was always a point late in the evening when I would rub my eyes, forgetting I was wearing mascara. Unless I was extremely careful, I’d bump into furniture, trip over steps and uneven ground, and go to the wrong floor in my own building. I’d got used to this, and other things besides. It was best just to laugh it off.
And yet when I saw her arrive that morning, I thought that there was a lot I could learn from L. If I took the time to observe her, perhaps I could capture something that had always eluded me. By sticking close to her, I could understand how she managed to possess all those things at the same time: grace, assurance, femininity.
It had taken me ten years to learn to stand up straight, and almost as long to wear heels; maybe I could become that sort of woman one day after all.
That morning, L. sat on a stool close beside me. She was wearing a straight skirt, quite close-fitting, I could see the shape of her thigh muscle beneath the fabric. Her tights were dark and had a slight sheen. I admired her posture, which accentuated the roundness of her breasts, discernible under her blouse; she had a way of arching her back, just enough, so that it seemed natural, almost casual. I thought that I needed to learn to hold myself like that, and her legs too, one crossed over the other despite her tight skirt; L.’s body balanced on a bar stool was like static choreography that dispensed with music and attracted glances. In the absence of a favourable predisposition, was it possible to copy that posture?
It was seven thirty in the morning and I’d made do with having a shower and pulling on jeans, a sweater and ankle boots. I’d combed my hair by running my fingers through it. L. looked at me and smiled again.
‘I know what you’re thinking. And you’re wrong. There’s a big difference between what you feel, the way you see yourself, and the impression you create. We all bear the trace of how we were looked at when we were children or teenagers. We bear it, like a mark that some people can see. When I look at you, I see tattooed on your skin the imprint of mockery and sarcasm. I see how you were looked at. Hatred and mistrust. Sharp and without indulgence. A way of being looked at that makes it difficult to construct yourself. Yes, I can see it and I know where it comes from. But believe me, not many people can. Few people are able to discern it. Because you hide it really well, Delphine. Much better than you suppose.’
L. was spot on most of the time. Even if from her lips things seemed more dramatic than they really were, even if she had a tendency to mix things together, there was always a core of truth.
L. seemed to know everything about me, without me saying anything.
As I try to explain how I became close to L., to identify the stages of this attachment, another moment comes back to me, which dates from roughly the same time.
We’d gone to see an exhibition, a late-night opening, and afterwards we had a croque-monsieur in a café near the museum. It was raining heavily, so we waited for it to stop. It was quite late when we caught the metro. We were sitting side by side near the door on flip-up seats. The carriage was full, but not so full that we had to stand. A man and a woman got on. The woman immediately gripped the central post right in front of us. ‘Gripped’ is the word that occurred to me when I saw her; she seemed to be having difficulty standing. The man was older than her. He quickly resumed the monologue he’d evidently begun on the platform. He was talking loudly; most of the carriage could hear. The woman’s head was lowered, her shoulders slightly stooped. I couldn’t really make out her face, but it looked to me as though her body was starting to give under his verbal assault. The man was criticising how she’d behaved at the dinner they’d just been to. Exasperated and with a look of disgust on his lips, he was spouting phrases as though he were making a political speech: ‘You sit like a stupid bitch, you eat like a stupid bitch, you talk like a stupid bitch, you make me fucking ashamed.’ (I’m transcribing virtually verbatim; I don’t think I’ve forgotten anything, such was my shock at this man’s brutality and the public humiliation he inflicted on this woman.) People drew away from them; some moved seats. The man, far from easing off, kept going: ‘You’re the only one who doesn’t realise, Magali. Everybody was upset, oh yes, and everyone was thinking: what’s he doing with a bitch like that? You exude awkwardness – what can I say, it really pisses me off. And let me tell you, even when you started talking about your work, what do you think? That that’s of interest to people, the life of a poor nursery teacher? They don’t give a fuck. No one gives a fuck. You think people are interested?’
L. was looking at the man, not discreetly, furtively, like the rest of us. L. was staring at him, ostentatiously, with her head raised towards him, like at the theatre. Her jaw was set, the throbbing had returned, intermittently creating a little hollow in her cheek.
‘Just look at the way you’re standing, it’s unbelievable. You’re like a hunchback. Oh yes, I forget, you’re the one who has to carry the world’s woes, Magali. Silly me. Ha, ha, ha, yes. It’s true. Madam carries the whole world’s misfortunes and God knows, there are plenty: kids whose parents are illegal immigrants, kids whose parents have lost their job, kids whose parents are crazy and all the rest of it, but hey! Madam is laid back about it every day come half-four, once she’s had a good tea! Have you taken a look at yourself, Magali? All you need is a blouse from the Trois Suisses catalogue and you’d look like a cleaning lady.’
We had just stopped at Arts et Métiers station. L. stood up. She was very calm. Each of her movements seemed to have been calculated in advance to the nearest millimetre. She positioned herself in front of the man, directly in front, and looked straight at him without saying a word. The man stopped talking and the murmuring around us ceased. A strange silence descended on the carriage. L. faced the man without taking her eyes off him, while people got on and off. The man said: ‘What’s this stupid bitch’s problem?’ The signal that the doors were about to close sounded.
Then firmly and with astonishing speed, L. pushed the man onto the platform. He fell backwards, put out his hands to save himself, and the doors closed before he had time to grasp what had happened. Through the window, we could see his stunned, incredulous face. He shouted, ‘You filthy whore!’ and then he was gone.
L. turned to the young woman and uttered a sentence that I have never forgotten: ‘You don’t have to put up with that. No one should put up with that.’
It wasn’t a hope, or words of consolation. It was an order. The woman went and sat down. She looked relieved. A few minutes later, I saw her smile, lost in thought, then she gave a little laugh, short, dry and almost guilty. I thought she looked as though she had straightened up a bit.
9
Even now I find it hard to explain how our relationship developed so quickly and how, within a few months, L. came to occupy such a place in my life.
L. exerted a real fascination over me.
L. surprised me, amused me, intrigued me. She scared me.
L. had her own way of laughing, speaking, walking. L. didn’t seem to be trying to please me, didn’t seem to be playing a game. She impressed me, in fact, with her ability to be herself (as I write these lines, I realise how naive th
ey are; how could I know who L. was after so short a time?). Everything about her seemed simple, as though all she had to do was clap her hands to appear like this: natural and perfectly adapted. When I left L. after spending time with her or after a long phone call, I’d often remain under her influence. L. exerted a gentle hold over me, intimate and troubling, the cause and extent of which I was unaware of.
Within weeks of meeting, L. established a frequency of contact that I no longer had with any of my friends. She was in touch in one way or another at least once a day. A little note in the morning, a message in the evening, a tiny story written specially for me (L. had a knack for recounting an anecdote about something that had happened to her in just a few words or painting the portrait of someone she had just met). L. sent me pictures she had taken out and about; strange, incongruous allusions to our conversations or things we’d experienced together: a man on a train immersed in the Chinese edition of my latest novel, a concert poster for La Grande Sophie, whose songs I’d told her I liked, an ad for a new dark chocolate bar from my favourite brand. Unerringly, L. expressed her desire to be in touch with me. To become my friend.
Without realising, I began to expect these signs. And the calls. I rang her more often to tell her inconsequential things. We began emailing each other.
I didn’t see at once how much L. was reviving my nostalgia for my post-adolescent years, the time when I entered adulthood, when I took stock of my vital energy. L. reactivated my seventeen-year-old self’s feeling of omnipotence, the incredible energy that bore me along for a few months before feelings of fear, anxiety and guilt caught up with me. L. reactivated that precise time in my life: my return to Paris after four years with my father, my first student conversations in cafés on the rue de Rome, cinema outings in the Latin Quarter, meeting my friend Coline, pranks on the metro, the Slavic-sounding language we invented, our silent conversations during classes, written from right to left in homage to Abel Tiffauges, which you could read if you held it up to the light or a mirror. A continuous thread, inextinguishable, which maintained contact. A way of sharing everything: fear and desire.
Based on a True Story Page 4