During this time, I didn’t hear from L. I don’t think I talked about her with my friends.
Three weeks later, Louise, Paul and I took the train back. We were happy, we occupied a family table in the TGV, we looked relaxed. Suddenly I felt really alive, incredibly alive; I was with my children in a train that was taking us back from the Landes. I’d made the sandwiches they loved – with and without butter and lettuce. We’d had a wonderful holiday. I watched the countryside rush by through the window. My children were going to leave and begin their own lives. I was proud of them, proud of the people they’d become, proud of both of them. I thought that beyond the anxieties and family wounds, I’d passed something on to them, which, in spite of everything, resembled joy.
On the bus, when all three of us were squashed in the rush-hour crush, I suddenly felt moved to tears. Something was ending and something else was about to begin. I’d been incredibly lucky from the start. Through all this time, luck fundamentally had stayed with me. The new academic year was looking wonderful and intense; I’d get back to my writing and I’d go and see the children, often, in their new places. I’d explore a new life in a new set-up and I’d adapt. I had to keep nostalgia at arm’s length and get in step with the present. There was nothing to be scared of.
14
Delphine,
It’s a drag. Being part of your family, having the same name as you is a drag. You have appropriated that name, sullied it, shat on it. That’s what you’ve inflicted on all of us, that and the irritating question we constantly hear: ‘Do you belong to the same family as the author?’ Yes, I’m from the same family as the author and that pisses me off. Me and the rest of us, believe me, it really pisses us off. Is it possible now to exist beyond that question, to have any other identity apart from being in the author’s family? It’s not a gift.
You seem to be forgetting that you’re sick. Yes, sick. You’re really sick. And what’s worse, it’s catching. You think you’ve got away with it, but you’ve forgotten the consequences. And any doctor will tell you: these things can relocate, but they never disappear. It’s hereditary. It’s in you.
I heard you’re getting shot of your kids. The perfect mother reveals her true colours at last! Well played. The coast is clear, isn’t it? You can live it up, splash your cash, be a cougar at all your fancy parties. I know you’re a bad mother who’s grabbed the first opportunity to send her kids as far away as possible on the pretext that they’ve chosen to study.
Your children’s mother is an overexposed storyteller.
I pity them.
I stood there with the letter in my hand.
At first I felt a sort of scarcely identifiable discomfort breathing, and then a ball began to swell in my chest, an uncontrollable sensation that I’d experienced before. My fingers were shaking a little. I hadn’t taken time to unpack my case or put things away; I’d laid the bundle of letters I’d collected from the mailbox on the table. I’d made myself some tea and begun to separate the junk mail from the correspondence, then open the envelopes one by one, when I’d come across this one, postmarked the day before. Louise and Paul had gone to their rooms. They could emerge at any point and it was out of the question that I should start crying. I thought of calling François, but with the time difference, I had no hope of reaching him.
I folded the letter up. I took a deep breath and moved on to the next envelope. At that very moment, my mobile rang. It was L. She’d remembered that I’d be back from holiday around now and wanted to hear my news. For a split second I wondered if L. had seen me come into the apartment and, out of some strange reflex, I looked out the window. There was no movement: most curtains were drawn, blinds lowered, a little further down an open window revealed a couple sitting at a low table, smoking.
It only took L. a few seconds to realise that something was wrong. My voice above all betrays my mood, though not for want of trying to learn to modulate and control it, but to no avail: my voice betrays who I am, emotional, despite the constant increase of my vocabulary. L. immediately suggested we should have a drink. She’d finished the manuscript she’d been working on that morning; she needed to relax too. I agreed to meet her a bit later, to give me time to compose myself and go to the supermarket to restock the fridge. I put the letter in my bag with the intention of showing it to her.
In the café, L. unfolded the piece of paper in front of me. I watched as her eyes scanned the lines. Her hair was down; on her eyes she wore a metallic silver, which brought out the pallor of her skin; her lips were pale pink. She looked very beautiful. She took her time reading it; I saw her face transform with indignation.
‘Do you know who it’s from?’
‘No.’
‘Do you think it’s someone in your family?’
‘I don’t know.’
As L. reread the letter, visibly shaken, I told her about the one I’d received a few weeks earlier. I remembered it as less virulent. L. seemed thoughtful for a moment, then looked at me again.
‘Have you never thought about writing a book about after? A book that would describe the publication of your last novel, its consequences, what it provoked, precipitated, what it revealed? The way it works, as a delayed reaction?’
Yes, I’d thought about it. The idea had crossed my mind. Describing the book’s reception, the unexpected support, the overwhelming letters. Describing the effort that some people had made to accept the text, their resolve to process it, which they never abandoned. The respect for literature. Describing late confessions, whispered after the book had been printed, the memories that resurfaced. The defensive strategies, the silent trials. Yes, it was tempting to write about that: the disturbance had not just affected the zones identified as at risk. The at-risk zones had circumscribed the point of impact, assimilated it, accommodated themselves to it. A more devastating earthquake erupted in other areas, those I had merely touched on or avoided, those I had voluntarily excluded from the scope of the narrative.
Every author who writes about him- or herself (or family) has probably been tempted at some point to write about after. Recount the wounds, the bitterness, imputed motives, ruptures. Some have done so. Probably because of the delayed effects. Because a book is nothing other than a sort of slow-release, radioactive substance with a very long half-life. And we always end up being thought of as what we are, human bombs, whose power is terrifying, as no one knows what use we will put it to. That is exactly what I was thinking, though I remained silent.
As I didn’t reply, L. rephrased her question:
‘Maybe it would be a way of responding to this person? Publish their letters, as they are, without changing a comma. Make them understand that you couldn’t care less if it’s complicated for him, or her, to share a name you didn’t choose, and show there are a thousand ways to share the name that he, or she, has; all they have to do is invent another . . .’
‘But it’s not true that I couldn’t care less.’
‘It is! You mustn’t care! You should write about all this, all you’ve told me since we’ve known each other, how relations with some people change, get ruined in spite of what you do; about the people who no longer care how you are, the ones who now like to think of you as a celebrity – as if that made any sense for any writer in the world we live in – the ones who are more interested in how many zeros there are on your cheque than the turning point it represents in your literary progress; those who would die rather than ask you the question direct; those who convince themselves that you’ve changed, that you’re more distant, more remote, less accessible, less available; those who no longer invite you because they have decreed once and for all that you’ve gone too far; those who suddenly want to ask you round every Sunday; those who imagine you spend your evenings at cocktail parties or smart dinners, who imagine you’re not bringing up your children, who wonder if you’re not secretly drinking or have had an eyelid lift. Isn’t that what you told me the other day, Delphine, when you made a joke of it? Now read this lette
r. Read it again carefully. It’s no joke. It’s about hatred. It’s meant to hurt you.’
I felt L.’s growing anger and indignation as she spoke, and it did me a power of good to know that someone was taking my side like this, entirely, unconditionally.
Yes, of course all that could be written about, but there would be no point. I was responsible for what was happening; I may not have meant to, but I caused it. I had to take ownership of it, or at least get used to it in turn. And then there was nothing that could stop what other people fantasised about us. I knew that. Writing a book about after would deepen the divide or the lack of understanding. It seemed to me that I had better things to do. I reminded L. that I’d been thinking about another idea for months, a real work of fiction. I’d kept taking notes during the holidays, my project was taking shape, the plot was getting clearer.
L. interrupted: ‘Plot? Are you saying that seriously? You don’t need plot, Delphine, or developments. You’re above all that now. Eventually you’re going to have to acknowledge that.’
Now she was speaking very softly. There was no aggression in her voice. L. was keen that I should see her incredulity at what she’d just heard. Had I really devised, imagined a plot? She went on: ‘You’ve no need to invent anything. Your life and character, the way you look at the world should be your only material. Plot is a trap, a snare. You probably think it gives you shelter or support, but you’re wrong. Plot doesn’t protect you from anything. It will suddenly give way beneath your feet or crash down on your head. Make no mistake, plot is a vulgar illusion. It doesn’t give you a springboard or support. You don’t need it any more. You’re somewhere else now, don’t you see? You underestimate your readers. Your readers don’t expect you to tell them stories that send them peacefully to sleep or reassure them. They don’t care about interchangeable characters that could be swapped from one book to another. They don’t care about more or less plausible situations deftly stitched together, which they’ve already read dozens of times. They couldn’t give a fuck. You’ve proved to them that you know how to do something different, that you could take hold of reality, have it out with it. They’ve understood that you were looking for a different reality and that you were no longer afraid.’
We were no longer in the tense situation I’d felt in her kitchen a few weeks previously. We were two friends talking about my work and its consequences, and I was touched that L. felt so concerned about it.
L. wasn’t asking if I was capable of writing something after that. L. was certain that I was capable and she had a very precise idea of the direction it should take.
Amused, I replied that she was playing with words and caricaturing what I’d said. I’d said ‘plot’, but that was just shorthand; none of my books had ever offered the reader a plot and resolution in the way she was using those terms. She should at least give me time to explain what I’d imagined, since she was so interested in the use to which reality could be put, and she might well find what she was after.
L. motioned to the waiter to bring us two more mojitos, a way of showing me that she had all the time in the world, all night if necessary. She leaned back in her chair. Her posture said, ‘Go on, I’m listening. Let’s drink to the book you refuse to write and the one you claim to be fixated on.’ I finished my drink and began.
‘The heroine . . . I mean . . . the main character . . . is a young woman who . . . who has just left a reality show that she’s won. The viewers fell in love with her from the very first episodes. Social networks were alight. She was on the front page of the gossip and TV magazines. In a few weeks, while she was still on the show – it’s one of those ones where they’re shut away – this girl became a star.’
I was waiting for a sign of encouragement from L., but her face only expressed extreme vigilance. I went on: ‘Anyway, it’s not really the show that interests me, or even being shut away, it’s what happens after, when she comes out. I mean the moment when she has to confront this image of herself that’s got nothing to do with who she is.’
L. was completely still, but had her eyes fixed on me. She was giving nothing away. She was listening intently. Once again, it felt as though words were failing me and I couldn’t express my idea as I wished. Once again, I felt I had symbolically become the little girl blushing in front of her class, whose only thought was not to burst into tears. But I continued: ‘For several weeks, her slightest gesture, her least significant words have been the subject of comment. An omniscient, all-powerful voice has continually decoded her reactions. Over time, this voice has delineated what now seems to everyone to be her personality. In other words, a fiction that no longer has much to do with her. When she leaves the show, she embodies a character whose contours she doesn’t know, a sort of traced shape with copied dimensions, which is still feeding off her, devouring her like an invisible, insatiable leech. The press has been sniffing around the place she grew up. Her life has been reinvented to move viewers and for the most part relies on the accounts of people she doesn’t know. In fact, the young woman discovers this image of herself as a warrior, though she has probably never felt so vulnerable.’
L. didn’t hide a little pout, but encouraged me to go on. Through some unidentifiable sort of pride that means you don’t consider yourself beaten if you’re not actually on the ground, I went on: ‘OK, and then there’s another character, a guy who’s a film editor who worked on the show throughout the whole series. In fact, through his choice of images and sequences, he played a big part in creating the self she’s discovering. This guy’s trying to get in touch with her because he wants to see her again.’
Bizarrely, I was starting to have trouble feigning any enthusiasm for what I was saying. Suddenly it was all grotesque.
‘In fact’ – (and why was I repeating ‘in fact’ every few sentences?) – ‘even he doesn’t really know who she is any more. He’s hooked on a fictional woman, a woman he contributed to creating, but who doesn’t exist.’
L. hadn’t moved. My idea now appeared to me in a harsh light: it was all so predictable, so . . . artificial. It all seemed to me, at the very moment I was saying it, so pointless.
The waiter slipped between us and put the glasses on the table.
L. took a packet of hankies from her bag. She was playing for time.
She drank a large mouthful of her cocktail through a straw, mechanically swirled the mint leaves in her glass, and paused again before launching in.
‘People thought about all that ages ago, Delphine, long before you wrote your books. We read Roland Barthes and Gérard Genette, René Girard and Georges Poulet. We made notes on index cards and underlined key ideas with multicoloured pens. We learned new concepts and words as though we were discovering America. We changed our idols and spent hours trying to define autobiography, confusion, fiction, the genuine lie and “true lying”.’
I was well aware of what she was talking about, but I didn’t know what she meant by ‘we’. Maybe L. had studied literature at the same time as me. So she’d probably studied structuralism, the nouveau roman and the new criticism, and by ‘we’ she meant a generation, our generation, nourished on the same thinkers.
She continued: ‘We worked on the evolution of narrative forms, on the desire of some writers to attain the essential, the driver of true life.’
I nodded.
L. went on; the tone of her voice had suddenly become more intimate: ‘Mental and emotional turmoil, the changing colour of Emma Bovary’s eyes, the ravishing of Lol Stein, Nadja – all of them defined a sort of trajectory, showed us a path, let us understand the quest of which you writers are now the guardians.’
This time L.’s allusions were very clear. Books by Crébillon, Flaubert, Duras and Breton had all been on the syllabus in the second year of my preparatory course for the École normale supérieure. And this syllabus changed every year.
What L. was saying was that she had been in that preparatory class the same year as me. L. was indicating a sort of common reference p
oint. She pursued her thought, but I was no longer listening. My mind was trying to form an image of the young woman she had been at eighteen. Starting from the woman who was in front of me – so assured and self-possessed – I tried to draw a line, a solid line that went back through time, but ultimately there was nothing, no face.
In the end I interrupted: ‘What high school were you at?’
She smiled.
She let the silence last for a few seconds.
‘Don’t you remember me?’
No, I didn’t. I was now trying to summon the more or less buried faces of the girls in my class, flicking through those distant images as quickly as I could, but I had retained few of them and none looked like L.
‘No, I’m sorry. But why didn’t you say something?’
‘Because I could tell that you didn’t recognise me. That you had no recollection of me. That made me sad. You know, there’s something I’ve learned. Something unfair divides the world in two: in life there are people you remember and people you forget. Those who leave an impression wherever they go, and those who go unnoticed, who leave no trace. They leave no print on the film. It’s erased behind them. I bet you receive letters from people you were with in nursery school, secondary school, on ski trips, people who registered your name and face indelibly in a corner of their brain. People who remember you. You belong to the first category and I belong to the second. That’s how it is. Nothing can be done about it. You see, I have a very clear memory of you. Your long skirts, your weird hair and that black leather jacket you wore all year.’
I protested: ‘No, it’s not that simple. We all belong to both categories.’
By way of justification, I told L. about my encounter with Agnès Desarthe. Did she remember that Agnès Desarthe was in the same preparatory class as us? Of course, L. remembered perfectly.
Based on a True Story Page 7