Based on a True Story

by Delphine de Vigan

  L. reactivated that: the exclusive and imperious way of being linked with each other that you can experience when you’re seventeen.

  And yet the regular, intense relationship that was established between L. and me fitted quite well within the parameters of my adult existence. For example, although she hadn’t asked me many questions about François, she had completely absorbed how we lived and the rhythm of our time together. She knew my timetable and knew that certain days were reserved for him. L. also very quickly became interested in my children. She’d probably realised that that would give her privileged access to my private life, indeed that it was a necessary condition of our relationship becoming closer. L. often asked me about Louise and Paul, asked me to describe their personalities or to tell her about memories of their childhood. I sometimes thought that L. wanted to make up for lost time, the time that she hadn’t known. But L. showed equal interest in the period they were currently going through: were they feeling confident as the baccalaureate approached? Had they chosen their courses?

  L. showed me some prospectuses about the career that interested Paul and sent me a file about the national civil aviation school, whose entrance exam my daughter wanted to sit. Later, she emailed me very detailed information about the Guild of Arts and Crafts as well as a list of preparatory classes in science.

  I have to confess that the curiosity that L. showed so quickly about the children surprised me at first. Then it struck me that my perplexity stemmed from a stupid prejudice: why shouldn’t a woman who doesn’t have children take an interest in someone else’s? The truth was that L.’s ability to listen was unequalled when it came to the things I worried about as a mother: the fact that Louise and Paul are twins, the fear they were feeling at the prospect of being apart, the inevitability they probably felt about having to go through this, their respective choices, the application process, the files to prepare, their personal statements, inputting their choices in the mysterious computerised application form after the baccalaureate, and then the wait . . . lots of stages that L. shared with me as though she were intimately involved.

  L. asked questions, requested news, sometimes gave advice.

  Today, it’s tempting to claim that L. was not interested in Louise and Paul but in the place they occupied in my life: their manifest influence on my mood, my sleep, my availability. Today it would be easy for me to write that L. was interested in me as a mother solely because she was interested in me as a writer. It didn’t take L. long to grasp that these two aspects of my personality are not separate. L. probably wanted to gauge the extent to which Louise and Paul were likely to interfere with, disturb, prevent or, conversely, stimulate my writing. In addition, the courses both of them had chosen would mean they would be leaving Paris, one for the provinces and the other to go abroad. It would be easy now to think that L. was delighted that they were planning to leave after the summer. But I know that would be unfair; it wasn’t that simple. In truth, nothing with L. was ever simple. In hindsight, it seems to me that the interest that she showed in the children was deeper and more complex than that. L. experienced genuine fascination for mothers in general and for me as a mother in particular. I’m certain L. loved to listen to me talking about my children: the memories of their early years, how they grew up, their teenage anxieties. L. asked for details, was amused by our little family mythology. In retrospect, I have to say that L. understood my children to an astonishing degree. Several times I spoke to her about a worry, an argument, a lack of understanding between them, or between them and me, and she immediately grasped the issue and helped me respond. Yet L. never felt the need to meet them. I would go as far as to say that she avoided any circumstance that might have led to such a meeting. She never came to the cinema when I went with them, and when I suggested meeting somewhere, she’d ask if I’d be alone. Likewise, she never came to the apartment when she knew the children would be there and when in doubt, avoided the risk.

  It took me a while to realise this.

  In the end, I thought it was a matter of reserve, or a way of shielding herself from an emotion she was afraid of confronting. In the end, I thought that the issue of motherhood was more painful for her than she cared to admit.

  In the space of a few months, I think L. managed to get a fairly accurate overview of the way I lived: my priorities, the time I gave to people, the fragility of my sleep.

  When I think about it, L. very quickly positioned herself as a resource: someone trustworthy, unusually available, on whom I could rely. Someone who worried about me, who gave of her time like no other adult I knew.

  L. was a generous, funny, singular woman I met at a party. That was how I first described her to François.

  François knew how hard I found it to let people go, to make do with just bumping into them. He knew I needed to know what became of them, that I refused to lose them completely. So he said with gentle irony: ‘As if you didn’t have enough friends . . .’

  One evening in June, L. sent me a photo of a huge piece of graffiti in black and red, which she’d noticed on a grubby wall in the 13th arrondissement. Someone had daubed at eye level: WRITE YOURSELF, YOU WILL SURVIVE.

  10

  I’ve always liked observing women. In the metro, in shops, on the street. I like watching them in the cinema, on TV. I like watching them play, dance, hearing them laugh or sing.

  I think this interest relates to childhood, is intimately connected with it. It’s the extension of the role-playing games I played with some of my friends when I was a little girl, when all you needed to do was invent a new name to be transformed. You be Sabrina and I’ll be Johanna. Or vice versa. I’d be a beautiful princess with curls like Candy and an irresistible dimple. I’d be a young, talented actress like Jodie Foster in Bugsy Malone. I’d have blue eyes and porcelain skin. I’d be Christine Rosenthal, who danced to ‘Belinda’ in the end-of-year show at the primary school in Yerres. I’d be Christelle Portal or Isabelle François, the stars of L’Aigle school, magnetic brunettes. I’d be the sole girl in a boy band, whose members would only have eyes for me. I’d be a magnificent creature with long, smooth hair and breasts as soft as velvet.

  I’d be someone else.

  L. revived the unfulfilled hope of being more beautiful, wittier, more confident, of being someone else, in short, like in the Catherine Lara song I used to listen to over and over when I was a teenager: ‘Irresistible, I wish I’d been one of those women the whole world falls in love with, madly in love, thunderstruck . . .’

  Even now, even if I’ve gradually got used to myself on the whole, even if I feel as though I’m at peace, even in harmony, with the person I am, even if I no longer experience the commanding need to swap all or part of myself for a more attractive model, I think I’ve retained that way of looking at women: a recollection of the desire to be someone else that I had within me for so long. A way of looking that seeks in every woman I encounter what is most beautiful about her, most ambiguous, most luminous. Nevertheless, at least thus far, my sexual desire has been expressed only towards men. The wave, the frisson, the warmth in the pit of my stomach, in my thighs, difficulty breathing, my body in a state of alert, skin prickling with electricity, all of that only in contact with men.

  Still, one day a few years ago, I felt as though I experienced feelings for a woman that circulated in the blood, got under my skin. I’d been invited to a festival abroad to coincide with the publication of one of my books in translation. I answered readers’ questions in a dark, air-conditioned room (it was oppressively hot outside). After my contribution, I listened to this woman talk about her latest novel. I’d read several of her books but had never met her before. She was brilliant, funny, witty. Her speech was a succession of pirouettes, counterpoints and digressions. The audience was in the palm of her hand, as was I. She played with words and their multiple meanings; she was having fun. The audience, the laughter, the attention on her, it all seemed to be a joke, as though ultimately none of this pantomime (the writer
meeting her public) should be taken seriously. She was beautiful in a masculine way; it had nothing to do with her features but rather her posture, though I cannot identify exactly what gave this strange attraction she exerted on me substance. There was something extremely feminine in the way she took on the masculine, adopted its codes and subverted them.

  That same evening, the two of us went for a drink together near the port.

  Earlier in the evening, when we were still with the group (a dozen or so writers and festival organisers), she talked about herself, about her passion for cars and speed, her taste for wine, the teaching she did at the university. I felt a sudden desire that she should take an interest in me, that she should suggest we make our escape, that she single me out from the others. That she choose me. And that’s exactly what happened.

  I was sitting opposite her in the warm night and although we were roughly the same age, I felt as though I was a clumsy young girl, that she was in every way superior. Her mind, her language, her voice, all of those things fascinated me. I remember we spoke about the city she lived in, the beauty of airports, the way books lived on in our memory, despite forgetting. I remember I told her about my mother’s suicide, which had happened a few months before, and the questions that still haunted me.

  For the first time I wanted to lie down beside a woman, to be in contact with her skin. To fall asleep in her arms. For the first time I imagined it possible, that I could desire a woman’s body.

  We walked back to the hotel late that night. In the corridor, we separated without lingering; it was clear, limpid, each to her room. I have often thought about her, but haven’t seen her since.

  Was L. an object of desire for me? Given the way we met and the speed with which she assumed such an important place in my life, I have of course asked myself this question. And the answer is yes. Yes, even today, I would be able to give an accurate description of L.’s body, the length of her hands, the strand of hair she used to sweep behind her ear, the texture of her skin. The softness of her hair, her smile. I wanted to be L., to become her. I wanted to be like her. Sometimes I wanted to stroke her cheek, to take her in my arms. I loved her perfume.

  I don’t know what part sexual desire plays in all this; maybe it never entered my consciousness.

  11

  The day of the baccalaureate results, L. was the first person who called to find out if Louise and Paul had passed. We’d decided to celebrate the children’s success at home that evening with friends, a small party that I imagined as intimate and joyful before they went out in the neighbourhood, probably until the next morning. I invited L. along; that way she could meet them at last, and also François, whom she still had never met. After a brief hesitation, L. became enthusiastic; yes, it was a very good idea, what could she bring? Some wine, snacks to have with the aperitif, a dessert?

  During the course of the evening, L. left a voicemail to say she wasn’t coming; she was sorry, but her back was very painful and she was worried that it was a symptom of the onset of a bout of renal colic, which unfortunately she got quite often, and she’d prefer to stay at home and rest.

  I called her the next day to see how she was. She thought she’d avoided an attack but was feeling tired. As usual, it didn’t take her long to regain the upper hand in matters of interrogation: how had the party gone? Were Louise and Paul happy, proud, relieved? Did they go out with their friends afterwards? And what about me – how did I feel about it all? She imagined that it must be a funny stage for a mother, celebrating her children’s baccalaureate, and their eighteenth birthdays coming up soon, preparing to let them go, being happy for their success and the fact they’d got in to the colleges they wanted, but at the same time didn’t all that mean I’d soon be on my own? How was I feeling about this moment? Wasn’t it going too fast, didn’t it seem to have come suddenly, without warning, even though eighteen years had gone by since the children were born? Wasn’t it quite simply stunning?

  Once again, L. was formulating things exactly as I would have put them myself: the feeling of wanting to hold back time, the futile struggle to stop the clock for a moment, or that the hours should stretch a little, and my incredulity at having reached this point.

  L. was right. It was painful and wonderful. It had come round suddenly. It made me feel dizzy. I had hundreds of images and sensations that I didn’t want to lose, fragile memories, already altered, which I now needed to preserve.

  And then there was the question that sometimes came into my mind when I tried to bring together these two images: Louise and Paul at birth (two tiny beings born by Caesarean three minutes apart, who weighed barely 5 kg together) and Louise and Paul today (two young people with solid constitutions, measuring 1.78 m and 1.95 m respectively), a question I sometimes voiced aloud when I saw them in the kitchen in the morning, a question that expressed my astonishment – yes, that was the right word – as though the time that separated these two images had never existed: ‘What just happened?’

  12

  The first time L. asked me what I was planning on writing, it seemed as though we were at last getting to the heart of the matter. I don’t remember why I immediately thought this: everything between us that had gone before had simply served to lead us here, to this precise point, and L. had just laid down her cards to show me her hand.

  I was sitting at the kitchen counter and she was standing in front of me. The kitchen opened onto the living room and a smell of stewing meat was gradually permeating the room. L. was chopping vegetables; we were trying a red wine as an aperitif.

  She asked the question abruptly, unexpectedly, with nothing in what had gone before to justify its sudden appearance. We were talking about something else entirely and suddenly she said: ‘What are you going to write now?’

  For months, readers, friends and people I encountered had been asking me about ‘after’. The question was generally framed like this: ‘What are you going to write after this?’ Sometimes the questions were broader still: ‘What can you write after this?’ In such cases, it seemed to contain its own response: after this there is nothing. It’s a given. I had opened the black box, squandered the stock; the store was empty. In any eventuality, the question was not neutral. It seemed to me to conceal a confused threat, a warning.

  Perhaps I was the only person unaware of what everyone else knew. That book had been a terminus, an end in itself. Or rather a threshold that couldn’t be crossed, a point beyond which it was impossible to go, at least for me. After, there would be nothing. The familiar story of the glass ceiling, the incompetence threshold. That’s what the question meant. Maybe this was a false interpretation on my part, a paranoid night-thought. The question may have been as simple as it seemed, concealing no ulterior motive or insinuation. Yet gradually, through repetition, the terrifying idea that I had written my last book gained substance. A book beyond which there was nothing, beyond which nothing could be written. The book had completed the circle, broken the alchemy, brought the impulse to an end.

  During my encounters with readers, which she sometimes attended, my editor saw how destabilising it was for me to be continually faced with this question. Several times in her presence, I had to hold myself back from panicking and replying: Nothing. Nothing at all, madam, after this, one cannot write anything else, not a single line, not a single word, you zip it once and for all. You’re right. And yes, sir, I’ve shattered like a bulb, I’ve blown all my fuses – look at the little pile of ashes at your feet. I’m dead because I’ve burned everything.

  L.’s question was not exactly the same. She hadn’t said after, she’d said now.

  What was I going to write now.

  The great leap, the angel’s leap, the leap into the void, the hour of truth (these expressions flashed through my mind as L. chopped her vegetables with troubling determination) was now.

  François had just left for the US to make a documentary series on American writers and Louise and Paul were spending the weekend with their father. L. had i
nvited me over for dinner. It was the first time that either of us had proffered such an invitation, slightly formal and arranged in advance. It was the first time I’d been to her apartment and I had the strange impression when I went in that I’d stepped onto a film set. Everything seemed new, delivered that morning. That thought occurred to me, and then L. gave me a glass of wine and the impression vanished.

  I finished my wine and began telling L. about my reality TV show project. It was getting clearer; I’d had a female character in mind for several weeks and had been making notes on her (I’d sketched her out on the first page of the notebook that was always in my bag). My future heroine was the star of a programme with high ratings, a young woman of twenty-five, entirely fabricated, adulated and overexposed. A character halfway between Loana in Loft Story and Truman Burbank in The Truman Show.

  As I talked and tried to explain my project, I quickly registered her disappointment or, more accurately, her irritation. I felt it in the way her chopping speeded up; after the leeks she now attacked the carrots, her face over the chopping board. Her movements were rapid and precise. She was listening carefully but not looking at me.

  When I’d finished explaining the broad outline of my idea, she paused for a moment before speaking.