One evening, L. told me she could identify at first glance the people who had been victims of violence. Not just physical violence. Also people whose personality, whose self, had been put in danger by someone else. She knew how to detect in them a form of impediment, entanglement, imbalance in the literal sense. Hesitancy, uncertainty, a fault line that no one but her seemed to notice.
It was almost winter and L. was hard at work. I, meanwhile, was making the most of this time when I could still proffer more or less credible excuses. Defer. I claimed I was preparing something. I continued to invent research and drafts.
I didn’t know that two years would go by before I would be able to create a new word-processing file and write a sentence of more than three words.
23
Between the birth of the children and the year when their father and I separated, I created ten or so photo albums, each of about fifty pages. Thereafter, I continued to take photos, and sometimes had them printed, but I stopped arranging them and sticking them in. In hindsight, I could provide various hypotheses both about our separation and stopping creating albums, but that’s another story. If my home were to catch fire one day, I think I would pick up these albums before the books, the letters and everything else. They represent an infinitely precious time in my life, in our lives. They are the epicentre of my nostalgia, a fragile casket at the heart of my memory. Often when I open them, I think how I’d love to be able to convey in words this time now vanished, borne witness to by the image, which is simultaneously so precise and so impotent.
When winter came, and with it the threat of idleness, I got it into my head that I should start making these albums again. It had been several years since the last one. I spent the best part of two days finding a shop that sold albums like the ones I had at home, then two more selecting the photos, most of which were saved digitally. The files were spread across a variety of obsolescent storage devices.
Once I had the pictures printed out, I sat at the living-room table in front of the blank albums, which I now had to fill. Fundamentally, it wasn’t that different from writing, I told myself: a reinvented story would emerge from these images once they had been chosen, arranged, ordered and put on the page.
One day, as I was starting to stick in the prints, L. pressed the entry buzzer.
The photos were all spread out in front of me, sorted by period. L. sat down beside me, and became interested in the bundle in front of her. A series of fairly recent photos showed Paul covered in mud after a motocross session, and there were several shots of Louise with all her friends in her last year of school, taken in the snow on a winter’s day.
‘She looks like you,’ L. said with evident emotion, as she looked carefully at Louise. At that moment, it occurred to me that Louise was the same age as L. and I had been when we’d first met. Since L. had revealed that we’d been in the same class, we’d only spoken of it once or twice. I had no recollection of her and it seemed insensitive to bring the subject up again. I didn’t want to turn the knife in the wound.
L. must have read my thoughts, because she asked if she could see the class photo. I rummaged in the box till I found the print, the colours of which had faded a bit. The photo was taken in the school courtyard. The students are in five rows around Mr E., the philosophy teacher. Nearly all the boys are kneeling or squatting in the bottom rows. The tallest girls are perched on a bench that you cannot see. Having immediately identified my face and pointed to it, L. spent a long time looking at the photo, scrutinising every student. Then, starting with the top row, she traced her finger from right to left and began reeling off everyone’s full names. Some of the names I would have been unable to recollect unaided, but once she said them, they came back to the surface of my memory and were confirmed.
Having named the last of them, she turned to me with a look of triumph. Out of a class of fifty, only about ten names had eluded her.
Suddenly her mood darkened.
‘It’s such a pity I was absent that day. I would have so loved there to be some proof . . .’
‘Proof of what?’ I asked.
‘Of the year we spent together.’
But we didn’t spend it together. I didn’t share that time with her. My connections were with others. And in fact the main memory I have of that year is of a slow descent. Now that period feels so distant it might as well belong to someone else. The physical state I was in probably contributed to the blurring of my memory.
‘Yes, it’s a shame,’ I eventually acknowledged. ‘But why would we need proof?’
‘Because you don’t remember me.’
She was looking at me severely, but also seemed beseeching. Maybe I should have claimed I remembered her, that it had all come back to me at last. I didn’t know how to comfort her, or even extricate myself with a joke.
I was about to close the box (which contained dozens of jumbled prints from around the same time), when L. asked if she could have a souvenir of me. Before I could reply, she looked in the box and held up a set of three photo booth shots in black and white for my approval. The missing photo must have been used for my student card.
I saw her put them carefully in her wallet without waiting for my response.
I think it was that day that she uttered a sentence I noted down on a Post-it just after she left: ‘We’ve got a lot of things in common. But only you can write about them.’
L. stayed for dinner. Later in the evening, she reentered the fray: Where did things stand? Had I got back to work? L.’s persistence was getting on my nerves. But at the same time, I couldn’t help registering that she was the only person still asking me that question. Who still believed in it.
As I confessed to her I was unable to write, L. admitted she thought I was adrift. I was surprised by the expression. Adrift?
She wasn’t questioning my idea about the photo albums – in fact, she found that quite creative – but it was all the other stuff. In her opinion, I was still much too connected to the outside world.
I objected: ‘Absolutely not! I see no one, call no one. I’m unable to go out to a dinner or a party. I turn everything down. Apart from François and the children, I can’t talk to anyone any more.’
L. responded in the opinionated tone I was familiar with: ‘That’s normal, as you well know. Because it’s in that healthy silence that you’ll be able to get down to work.’
What did ‘get down to work’ mean? What was the point of spending hours sitting in front of the computer, since nothing was coming out? I had to keep busy.
L. disagreed.
As a result of confronting the obstacle, something would emerge. Enlightenment or renunciation. If I kept running away, nothing would happen.
24
One morning my friend Olivier called to tell me that something disturbing was happening on my Facebook page, or rather on the Facebook page my readers had created. I didn’t understand what he was trying to explain at all: something about someone writing terrible messages about me on a wall. Someone claiming to be part of my family had published dozens of posts accusing me of the worst horrors. Olivier was afraid that a journalist would come across these messages and spread them further. Did I have a way of contacting the group administrator? Had the group been set up by my publisher?
Once I’d managed to grasp what he was on about (I’m not on Facebook, so this wall that was visible to all and messages posted by an invented profile wasn’t easy to fathom), I started to get worried. I didn’t know the group administrators, and as far as I was aware, my publisher had nothing to do with them.
I thanked Olivier for alerting me and hung up. I was pondering the situation when L. called me for the same reason. She divulged the tone of the messages, but refused to read them out, as she thought that would only be hurtful and pointless. They were about the harm I’d done by writing my last novel, and the harm I’d done in general since I was very young. I was sick and I had destroyed everything around me. I had a borderline, destructive personality. I�
�d falsified history, mixed up dates, I’d written a book that was far removed from reality, I’d lied by omission, embellished reality with the sole aim of concealing my own pathology. The messages had kept appearing throughout the night, contradicting each other, criticising me for saying too much or not enough, of having sugar-coated reality or exaggerated it; in short, everything and its opposite. According to L., they had not left the members of the group indifferent. Eventually, some of them had advised the writer to go and seek treatment. Over the course of the night, their author had lost credibility through the confusion and the growing virulence of the posts.
At some point during the day, the messages disappeared. Either the group administrator deleted them all, judging them out of order, or their author himself took them down.
That evening, L. buzzed my entryphone. She wanted to check I was OK and to talk about what had happened. In her opinion, the author of these messages and the anonymous letters were one and the same. And these attacks called for a riposte.
As I didn’t rise to this, she plonked herself down on the sofa in a position that clearly indicated that this time she intended to see through a proper discussion of the subject. She quickly launched in: ‘Someone in your family has been provoking you for months and you haven’t responded. He or she has written several times and you haven’t reacted. So he or she has gone to the next stage, which means using other people as witnesses, because he or she is waiting for a response. It’s simple.’
‘But there’s nothing to say.’
‘Yes, there is. Of course there is. He’s waiting for you to react. Write a book. Prove to him that you’re not afraid, that in literature anything is allowed. Write about your childhood, write about your family, write about yourself. Seek. Only writing will allow you to discover who you are. You’ve started something you’ve got to finish.’
No, I didn’t want to start that again. I wanted to go back to fiction. I wanted to protect myself and rediscover the pleasure of invention, I didn’t want to spend two years weighing every word and comma, to wake up in the middle of the night, my heart beating frantically after nightmares I couldn’t interpret.
L. was getting heated, but I now knew this more emotional side. I tried to explain why this was no longer possible: ‘Listen, if I hadn’t written that book, I’d never have written anything again. Even today I’m sure of that. It was a sort of trial I had to go through. An initiation ritual. But writing about yourself and your family means risking hurting people, even the ones you think you’ve spared or idealised. I don’t want to do that any more. I’m not saying I regret doing it, but I don’t have the strength to do it again. Not like that. Yes, you’re right, I have a weapon that others for the moment do not. Others, whoever they may be, don’t have the right of reply. At best, they can send me anonymous letters or try to fling mud at a wall that doesn’t belong to them. Whereas if I do it again, I can be sure I’ll be read by thousands of people. And will leave a trace that won’t be effaced for several years.’
‘So? You’re lucky to have within your grasp something that everyone envies. You can’t act as though that didn’t exist, as though it wasn’t part of you. Yes, writing is a weapon and that’s all to the good. Your family created the writer you’ve become. They created a monster – forgive me – and the monster has found a way to make her cries heard. What do you think writers are made of? Look at yourself! Look around! You writers are the product of shame, pain, secrets, collapse. You come from dark, nameless places, or you’ve been through those places. You’re all survivors in your own way, each one of you as much as all the others. That doesn’t give you unlimited rights. But it entitles you to write, believe me, even if that makes waves.’
L.’s state of excitement was starting to concern me.
A few years ago, when I was preparing to write something about the violence of workplace relationships – or something in that general area or taking that as a starting point – I met a psychiatrist who specialised in workplace suffering and psychosocial risks. Back then, I was thinking about a violent end to the novel I was working on. I wanted to know if such an end was possible, probable, from a psychological point of view: is a woman who has been harassed and the daily victim of insidious aggression for weeks, a woman who has suffered workplace bullying, capable of committing an act of violence or even murder? Was it possible for such a woman to carry out such a thing?
Having described the context, I framed my question like this: ‘Is it plausible that this woman might commit a dangerous act, even involuntarily? If you say no, I can swap my rifle to the other shoulder.’
We were in a café and the psychiatrist looked hard at me with a certain amusement: ‘Goodness, you are armed and dangerous!’
I laughed. The phrase I had used – swapping shoulders – haunted me for several days. How much anger had I brought to writing this book? What pain was it prolonging, in disguised form?
I was careful not to relate this anecdote to L.
She didn’t need my approval to continue.
L. was angry because she thought I was allowing myself to be intimidated by threats that should actually have spurred me to fight. L. was expressing her outrage out loud and exhorting me to rebel.
‘They’re going to have to realise that this is just the beginning, you know. You’ve been wearing kid gloves and tiptoeing around, letting various things go. You’ve set aside the most violent, the darkest part, and that’s what they resent! Do you want to know why? Because to them, that’s a sign of weakness. You’ve been careful, you’ve wanted to be the good little girl who wouldn’t hurt a fly. You’ve called the reader as a witness – you, who’ve never done that – to share your doubts and procrastination. You’ve endlessly reminded him of the measures you’ve put in place: “Please note, ladies and gentlemen, this is a novel, an attempt to approach the truth, but it’s just my view of things. I make no claims, take no liberties. I definitely don’t want to . . .” and so on. You’re down on one knee. You’ve opened the breach through which they’ll flood, the better to get at you. You’re wrong, Delphine. You’ve shown them that you were worried about them and their feelings, and it’s through that weakness that they’re now trying to annihilate you.’
I didn’t protest and didn’t correct her. I refrained from all comment.
I wondered if L. had been drinking before she arrived. What she was saying was out of proportion, irrational. And yet, I felt as though I were hearing some truth, under the grandiloquence of her indignation. In order to calm her, I said I’d think it over. But she hadn’t finished.
‘Yes, writing is a weapon, Delphine, a bloody weapon of mass destruction. Writing is even more powerful than anything you can imagine. Writing is a weapon for defence, shooting, alarm. Writing is a grenade, a missile, a flame-thrower, a weapon of war. It can lay things waste; it can also rebuild.’
‘I don’t want anything to do with that kind of writing.’
L. looked at me. Her expression instantly darkened. Her voice struck me as suddenly abnormally gentle: ‘I’m not sure you have the choice.’
Yes, I should have been worried that L. felt so concerned about what was happening to me.
Yes, I should have been alerted by the appearance of ‘they’ in her words.
Yes, I should have backed off from her a bit, at least for a few days and finally got down to some work.
But did I have genuine cause for alarm? L. was a woman of my age who spent her life writing other people’s life stories. She had a radical, extreme vision of literature, but it was a vision I found rich and which I sensed could be interesting to debate, unemotionally; in other words, disconnected from my own case.
Besides, L. was taking up my cause. And in such a moment as this – a moment of doubt and difficulty – L.’s compassion was an invaluable reassurance.
25
A few days later, I had gone down to the cellar to look for some old papers and came across my forgotten manuscript while I was rummaging through a trunk
of archives. I’d written this text about a decade earlier, before I’d published anything. I don’t remember in what circumstances exactly, but I’d written it. It was a rather confused period that was resistant to memory. The pages were ring-bound and the title page protected with a clear cover. The title made me smile. It was a good title. Under the flickering light in the cellar corridor, I leafed through the manuscript. I had patchy recollections of a conversation with a literary editor who’d encouraged me to persist but felt I hadn’t pulled this project off. I gave up on it without difficulty and put the text aside, concluding it had been too ambitious for me.
I rummaged in the trunk, looking for other copies but, after a more thorough search, it seemed I had kept only one.
I spent the afternoon lying on the bed rereading the manuscript. I didn’t take any calls, didn’t take a break. I didn’t feel the need to go four times round the block on various pretexts nor to polish all the shoes in the cupboard. For the first time in ages, I managed to stay focused. When I’d finished reading, it seemed to me that in a dark, distant corner of my brain, an emergency exit sign had just come on.
Later I looked for a backup of the relevant Word file. I didn’t find one. Since then, I’d changed computer twice and lost most of my data one stormy night.
At the end of that day, I rang my editor to tell her the news: I was going back to an unfinished novel, having just found the sole copy to have survived my house moves. There was a huge amount of work to do – it all had to be rewritten; but for the first time in ages, I’d rediscovered the desire to do so. My editor asked me if I was sure. Was it really a good idea to exhume an old text? Wasn’t it like putting on a dress that no longer suited me or shoes that had become too tight?
Based on a True Story Page 11