Based on a True Story

by Delphine de Vigan

  There was no cause for concern. I was just about to get down to it.

  In reality, I was procrastinating, getting distracted, deferring from day to day and week to week the moment when I would have to admit that something was broken, lost, no longer working.

  In reality, when I turned the computer on, as soon as I began to think, the critical voice kicked in. A sort of sarcastic, pitiless superego had taken possession of my mind. It chuckled, mocked, grimaced. It tracked down, even before it had taken shape, the poor sentence which, taken out of context, would provoke hilarity. On my forehead a third eye had been grafted above the two others. Whatever I prepared to write, it saw me coming in my clumsy clogs. The third eye was waiting for me at the corner, demolishing every attempt to begin, unmasking the deception.

  I had just discovered something terrifying and dizzying: I’d become my own worst enemy. My own tyrant.

  Sometimes a dark, unbearable thought overcame me: L. was right. L. was warning me because she could see the impending disaster I was heading for.

  I was on the wrong path.

  L. was trying to warn me and I was refusing to listen.

  17

  Louise and Paul had begun their new term and I was now alone at home. I hadn’t imagined this and in a way was unprepared for it. I mean it had been impossible to foresee the silence, and the suspect stillness in which the apartment had suddenly been frozen.

  Yet I’d tried before they left to anticipate my solitude in this deserted space. I’d tried to imagine how the emptiness might feel, and the new life that went with it. But I was wide of the mark. Now it was no longer an idea to be imagined, but a reality to be got used to. I wandered from room to room looking for something that had disappeared. One period of my life had ended and it had happened in a way that was natural and joyous, without jolts. It was in the nature of things and yet I felt an aching emptiness. In their empty rooms the beds were made, the books neatly aligned, the cupboards closed. A couple of objects were out of place, an item of clothing on the back of a chair. I observed this fake untidiness, the kind of thing you see in furniture catalogues or interior decor magazines which doesn’t look like what it is: a ridiculous simulation, a factitious representation of life. I wanted to cry.

  L. rang me regularly, concerned about my morale.

  L. seemed to really be taking it all to heart, empathising, and seemed to me more and more the only person able to understand what I was feeling: this apartment full of memories that I now had to inhabit alone, the time at home that I didn’t know what to do with.

  Yet I had a book to write and the moment had come to get down to it.

  Each day I turned on my computer and adjusted my chair. With the screen at the right height, I opened the Word file that contained an opening I had started over and over for weeks, but which never got beyond two pages. I was looking for a title. Sometimes a title stimulated my appetite. But it never created more than a brief enthusiasm, followed by a general sense of numbness, an overwhelming feeling of fatigue that always, in the end, forced me to leave my desk for fear of toppling from my chair or suddenly falling asleep there, with my head on the keyboard (the image of Paul at eight or ten months came back to me: one day we’d got back from the square late and had gone beyond his nap time, so he crashed nose-first into his plate of baby food in his high chair).

  Or else in the distance the mocking laughter would return.

  Yet every day I would ritualistically recreate the conditions, as though nothing stood in my way, nothing frightened me.

  There comes a moment when there is no further obstacle, when the necessary space has been cleared, where everything has been put in its place, ordered, classified, recopied. Silence has well and truly returned, the cushion has been positioned in the right place on the chair, the computer keyboard is simply waiting for the fingers to start tapping.

  There comes a moment when you have to plunge in, recover the rhythm, the impulse, the determination. But nothing happened.

  There comes a moment when you tell yourself that it’s a matter of discipline, that all you need do is give yourself a good kick up the backside, then you play the game, turn on the creature at the appointed time first thing in the morning, sit at your desk: there you are, you’re ready, stick at it. But nothing happens.

  There comes a moment when you tell yourself that it shouldn’t be like this, that it’s not so painful, or that if it is, the pain is part of the pleasure, yet still nothing – it’s simply a defeat. My blank stare before the screen.

  A bit later came the time when there were no more excuses, no pretexts. Everything was ready, but nothing got written.

  I was scared. I’d lost it.

  The characters I’d described to L. had been emptied of their substance; they had drifted off without me realising and ended up out of sight. The idea of the novel as a whole had been deflated, had collapsed like a punctured balloon.

  It rang hollow.

  The story, the situation, the very idea of the book, the very idea of the idea.

  Nothing made sense any more.

  One evening in October I told my editor that I was giving up on the project I’d talked to her about. It wasn’t working; it was running on idle. She asked me to send her what I’d written, even in draft, in its raw state; she could read between the lines, even the very beginning, even a few pages. I told her I hadn’t written anything, not a single line, and hung up.

  I was unable to explain the feeling of the dead end I found myself in, the disgust it all caused me, the feeling of having lost everything.

  At no point did I imagine that the exchanges I’d had with L. could be linked with my giving up. Until then, no opinion, no words, no exhortation had had any influence on my work. Books imposed themselves on me: there was no discussion or negotiation. It wasn’t a choice, it was a path and there was no other.

  How could I have imagined that a couple of conversations could have been all it took to take my breath away?

  At night I lay with my eyes open. I couldn’t see anything: not a glimmer, not a spark.

  18

  Very early one morning, when I was on my way home after a night at François’s place, I came across L. at the corner of my street. Not outside my door, but a few hundred yards away. There was no reason for her to be there. My street is narrow and has no shops on it. It was around daybreak and all the local cafés were still shut. I was walking with my head down and quite quickly because of the cold. Yet my eye was drawn to a long, white shape on the other side of the street, probably because of the immobility in which she appeared to be frozen. L. was wrapped in a long coat with the collar up. She wasn’t moving. She seemed to have come from nowhere and not even be waiting for someone. After a few seconds I got the impression she was occasionally checking the entrance to my building. When she saw me, her face lit up. There was no embarrassment or surprise in her eyes, as though it were completely normal for her to be there at seven o’clock on a midwinter morning. She’d wanted to see me and had found my door closed. That’s what she told me. She didn’t try to make anything up and her straightforwardness touched me, because, as she made this admission, L. had a childlike expression that I hadn’t seen before.

  She fell into step with me and followed me into the apartment. I’d turned the heating down before I left and the temperature had dropped in the night. I offered her a shawl, which she refused. She took off her coat. She wasn’t wearing a pullover but a sort of satin blouse in a flowing material that moulded the contours of her stomach, shoulders and arms. It was more the sort of thing you’d wear to party or a dressy dinner. I wondered where she’d come from and if she’d slept. I put the Italian coffee pot on the stove and we sat on the sofa. I was frozen. Beside me, L. seemed heated by some internal combustion that protected her from the cold. Her body seemed strangely sensual. Relaxed.

  We remained silent for a few minutes and then she leaned closer. Her voice sounded a bit broken, as though she’d spent the night singing
or smoking cigarettes.

  ‘Have you ever been unable to go home?’

  ‘Yes, of course. But not in ages.’

  ‘Last night I made love with a man in a hotel room. At around five or six, I got dressed and took a taxi that dropped me outside my building. Once I was there, I couldn’t go in. I didn’t want to sleep or even lie down. As though some part of me was refusing to give in. Do you know that feeling? So I just wandered. And ended up here.’

  The percolator had begun to whistle, so I got up to turn it off. With any of my friends, I would have poured the coffee and gone straight back to the sofa. I wouldn’t have waited a second longer to laugh and begin a close interrogation: Who was this man? How long had she been seeing him? Where? And would she see him again?

  But I put the coffee and sugar down in front of her and remained standing.

  I was unable to ask her any questions at all.

  I looked at L. I could see the fever that pulsed beneath her skin. From where I stood, I saw it very clearly, the acceleration of blood in her veins.

  I remained there, apart from her, leaning back on my dishwasher. For the first time I thought that there was something within L. that eluded me, that I didn’t understand. For the first time, I believe I was afraid without knowing why, without being able to represent that fear by a form or an image.

  L. drank her coffee and got up. She thanked me.

  It was daylight now and she felt ready to go home. She was exhausted.

  19

  I’d like to be able to give an account of L.’s personality in all its aspects, however contradictory.

  L. showed herself in different lights, sometimes serious and under control, sometimes mischievous and unpredictable. That’s probably what makes representing her character so complex: these sudden breaks in her self-control, this mixture of authority and seriousness that would often suddenly check an access of humour or fantasy, whose intensity made me think of those unexpected gusts of air that make windows fly open from the pressure of the wind.

  L. continued to impress me with her ability to instantly pick up on others’ moods and adapt herself to them. She knew how to get round the irritation of a waiter in a café or the tiredness of an assistant in a bakery, as though she’d perceived how they were feeling the moment she crossed the threshold. She was always one step ahead. In public, she could strike up a conversation with anyone, and in less than three minutes would have heard about their desires and been entrusted with their confidences. L. came across as indulgent and tolerant, and gave the impression of being able to listen to anything without judging.

  L. knew how to say the right thing to console and placate.

  L. was one of those people who others turn to instinctively in the street for directions or information.

  But sometimes the smooth surface would suddenly rupture and L. reveal a surprising facet of herself. From time to time, evidently out of a desire to contradict her usual equanimity, L. would get into an appalling, disproportionate rage, for example because someone who passed her on the pavement didn’t change his course (she maintained that two people coming towards each other should both move one pace to the side, or at any rate make to do so, as a sign of respect or good will). Among incidents on the metro, I remember the time when L. imperturbably made comments out loud for over five minutes while a woman yelled into her mobile without the woman realising, causing hilarity among the other passengers.

  Another time, when I met her in the place Martin-Nadaud, I found her purple with rage, shouting insults at a man who was yelling even louder, but whose vocabulary seemed very limited compared to hers. In her low, firm, authoritative voice, L. had gained the upper hand. When she eventually consented to leave, she told me that the man had behaved rudely and aggressively to two young girls who had walked past in shorts.

  L. had very diverse topics of conversation. Among her subjects of choice were Parisian rudeness, petty bosses, inquisitors and torturers of all kinds, the different forms of somatization and their link with our times, and human teleportation. If you started from the principle that we are simply a collection of atoms joined together, there was no fundamental law of physics preventing us from living together respecting our respective boundaries. Nor would any fundamental law of physics prevent us, hundreds or thousands of years in the future, from teleporting ourselves from point A to point B in the same way that we could already send a photo or a piece of music almost instantaneously to the other side of the world.

  Among other crazy notions, L. thought that left-handed people were different beings, who could instantly recognise one another, that they had a connection with each other and formed an invisible, long-rejected caste, whose discreet superiority was beyond the need for proof.

  I soon discovered that L. also suffered from phobias: one day when we were having lunch in a local brasserie, I saw a mouse run along the corner of the bar, just behind her. It’s not unknown to see mice in Parisian restaurants, even the fanciest ones, but I have to say that it’s not common right in the middle of lunch. Especially as the creature trotted along so casually. It was a sight worth interrupting our conversation for.

  L. froze, unable to turn round.

  ‘A real mouse? Are you serious?’

  I nodded my head, smiling.

  And then I realised that L. was not putting this on at all; she’d gone white and a fine sweat had broken out on her forehead. It was the first time I’d seen her look so pale.

  I tried to reassure her: the mouse had vanished, there was no cause for concern, no reason why it would come back. L. wouldn’t hear of it. She didn’t take another bite of the salad that she’d just started. She asked for the bill and we left.

  Later I discovered that L. couldn’t bear any kind of rodent and she told me she hadn’t been able to get to the end of a short story I’d written because it featured white mice.

  Gradually, over the course of various conversations, I learned that L. had read everything I’d written and published: my novels, short stories, contributions to edited collections, everything, except the story she’d been unable to finish.

  In addition, L. acknowledged that she cultivated certain obsessions and took a keen interest in those of others. She had a theory about this. No one could survive in our society without developing a certain number of rituals that they weren’t always conscious of. L. had noticed, for example, that we all went through phases when it came to food. Did I know what she meant? If I thought about it, didn’t I see that over time what I ate had changed and gone through different phases, different periods, corresponding to different ages and influences, with some foods disappearing and, conversely, other previously neglected ones suddenly becoming things I couldn’t do without? She asked me to consider my breakfast, for example. Was it always the same? I acknowledged that I had indeed changed what I ate several times. I’d had a bread + yoghurt phase, a cereal + bread phase, then cereal + yoghurt, then brioche on its own . . . When I was twenty, I drank tea; at thirty, coffee; and forty, hot water. That made her smile. L. confessed that she’d gone through so-called colour phases just after she became an adult: an orange period in which she ate only foods of that colour (oranges, apricots, carrots, Dutch cheese, pumpkin, melon, prawns), and a bit later a green period (spinach, beans, cucumber, broccoli), which she ended when she got married.

  Likewise, L. had noticed that we perform a certain number of actions in our daily lives in an unvarying order without the involvement of decision or reflection. These sequences, she maintained, were survival strategies we put in place more or less consciously. Our linguistic tics, far from being random, revealed better than anything else we said the extent to which we were capable at a given moment of adapting to the major constraints of our environment (or resisting them). According to L., the current expressions we used collectively translated our most intense forms of distress better than any detailed analysis of our lives or how we spent our time. So, in an era in which nothing appeared to work any more and society
as a whole seemed frozen, in suspense, people endlessly repeated: ‘That works for me.’ Similarly, parties, films and people were no longer ‘very’ this or that – very nice, very crap, very quick, very slow – they had become ‘too’ – too nice, too crap, too fast, too slow – perhaps because we found our way of life overwhelming.

  When it came to strategy, L. had a very effective one to guarantee her personal space or the confidentiality of her conversations. When she arrived in a café at lunchtime, she always asked for a table for three, though there were only two of us. This ploy enabled her to enjoy a large table (or two small ones pushed together) when everyone else was elbow to elbow. After twenty minutes, with a weary look, she’d tell the waiter that we’d have to order without waiting for the third person, though we’d keep the extra place, just in case. Towards the end of the meal, when the place had emptied considerably, L. would apologise to the waiter: she was sorry; the person had stood us up.

  I must say that with her I was never bored.

  L. asked herself all sorts of questions aloud, or rather expressed aloud the questions that probably a lot of women ponder (I certainly do): Up until what age can you wear skinny jeans? A miniskirt? A low neckline? Would you yourself be able to see that it was too late, that it was getting ridiculous, or should you ask someone close to you (before it was too late) to warn you when the time came? Was it already too late? Had we crossed the red line without realising?

  I couldn’t get over it: L., who had seemed so sure of herself when I met her, so certain of her choices, so aware of her aura, expressed – with more humour – similar worries to me.

  This quickly became one of our favourite subjects: the effort of adjustment required to see ourselves as we are – a focusing, in the photographic sense, to which we had to regularly submit in order to place ourselves on the age scale, to know where we stood.