Based on a True Story

by Delphine de Vigan

  I’ve learned to conceal this handicap and by now I think I know how to hide what I’m up to quite well. I’ve developed a number of automatic reflexes, strategies, preventative measures that enable me to go for days on end without banging into anything, making a fool of myself in public or endangering anyone else’s life. But I also now know how to spot the moments of exhaustion, unhappiness and confusion that oblige me to redouble my attention.

  I have on several occasions distinguished myself, sometimes publicly, with acts of improbable clumsiness. I don’t know if other people my age – that is, who have had a certain numbers of hours of practice – find themselves in the same situation.

  One day a few years ago, my English publisher invited me to London for the publication of one of my novels in translation. I hadn’t been to London for some time and I was preparing, not without some apprehension, for my first interview in English. My publisher came to meet me at St Pancras station and we took a taxi straight to the studio where the programme was going to be recorded. I may have been wearing a skirt or a dress for the occasion. In the cab, we swapped news. My English publisher is a significant figure in the world of publishing. He’s in his fifties, extremely English and extremely seductive. To me, he embodies the very essence of British chic. When we reached our destination, he got out of the taxi first and held the door for me, smiling. All I had to do was get out the cab. In the few seconds before I moved, a voice in my head warned me: you’re not going to manage it. That made no sense, had no rational basis, but the fear was there, as though, from high up in the big top, I now had to jump from one swinging trapeze to another. I was scared. I wanted to look good. I wanted to show I could be fluid and feminine. I wanted to please him. And suddenly getting out of that car in front of my English publisher seemed an insurmountable challenge.

  At that precise moment, I thought: There are some words and some glances you cannot recover from. In spite of the passage of time, in spite of the kindness of other words and glances.

  As I got out of the taxi, through some unfathomable tangle of my legs or feet, I pitched forward. I didn’t quite go flying, which would at least have been worth the spectacle, but rather, through a sort of pitiful plunge, found myself on the ground with the contents of my bag scattered on the road. My English publisher held out his hand to help me up in a gesture of the greatest delicacy, without showing any surprise, as though this was a phenomenon frequently encountered in French writers.

  Through contact with L., in particular during the period when she lived with me, this clumsiness kept increasing, developing, like a reactivated virus that might have mutated into a more harmful, tenacious form. I bumped into things all the time. Objects slipped from my hands and seemed to possess an energy of their own. My movements weren’t functioning properly. The bumps, falls and collisions increased. I lost count of the bruises and breakages. My body’s ill-adaptedness to its surroundings, which I’d got used to and had learned to hide, had been reawakened in a sort of permanent rift. I progressed through an accident-strewn terrain full of traps, at every moment on the lookout for the slip, landslide, collapse. Wherever I went, I was scared of my own instability. I felt feverish and inept. Trembling. Being able to keep myself upright was no longer a given, but a precarious thing I had to struggle to do.

  François, who had often teased me about my clumsiness (was I the secret daughter of Pierre Richard or Gaston Lagaffe?), began to worry. He started looking at me sideways, as though seeking irrefutable evidence that something was wrong. In his presence, I sometimes fell over or dropped things, just like that, mid-movement, for no reason, exactly as though the infomation ‘I’m raising a glass to my lips’ or ‘I’m holding a saucepan in my right hand’ had suddenly disappeared from my brain. Sometimes the connection was brutally interrupted. In addition, as I had increasing difficulty in judging the distance between my body and the rest of the world, the question of whether I should go and see a neurologist frequently came up.

  When I think back, my clumsiness was one of a variety of symptoms that appeared or reappeared at that time, symptoms that were to some degree incapacitating, whose coexistence, increase, proliferation I accepted without raising the alarm. Now I’m able to link these events together. But back then, it all merged into a state of unhappiness, loneliness, whose cause I was unaware of and about which I refused to consult any kind of doctor. I was unhappy, that was all there was to it; it wasn’t the first time and it probably wouldn’t be the last.

  Sometimes it did occur to me that L. might have something to do with my state, directly or indirectly.

  Ostensibly, she was carrying me, supporting me, protecting me. But in reality, she was absorbing my energy. She was tapping in to my pulse, my tension, my appetite for fantasy, which had never before deserted me.

  When I was in her presence, I was emptied of all substance; she spent hours working, going in and out, taking the metro, doing the cooking. When I watched her, it sometimes felt like I was watching myself – or rather my double – reinvented: stronger, more powerful, charged with positive energy.

  And soon there would be nothing left of me but a dead, dry husk, an empty shell.

  40

  As I try to advance through this story, I see how I’m constantly attempting to provide chronological reference points, through a probably clumsy desire to anchor the narrative in a shared, objective time tangible to everyone. I know that will soon explode and there will come a moment when the temporal markers will become meaningless and there will be nothing but a sort of long, empty corridor.

  I would describe in more detail the weeks that led us to the summer if I could. But I have no trace or memory of them. I presume my life continued in that halting masquerade that was going nowhere.

  I presume L. continued working, looking after my correspondence and papers, and I continued doing nothing. I presume the two of us went out together a few times in the evening for a drink and for a change of scene.

  Louise and Paul came home for the weekend twice. The first time, L. took the opportunity to go off and stay with her mother in Brittany. The second time, she said she’d prefer to go to a hotel so as not to get in our way.

  One evening when we were at his place, I remember François and I had an argument. I think it was about psychoanalysis (psychoanalysis occupies a significant place among our subjects of disagreement, ahead of Americano coffee, the use of quotations, nostalgia, some authors he doesn’t like who I stick up for, and some films he adores but I think are duds, and vice versa). We very rarely argue, and when we do it never lasts more than ten minutes, but that evening I pounced on the first opportunity to contradict him. It’s something I’m very good at when a part of me decides to pick a fight (fortunately this doesn’t happen often). The pitch rose without me realising. I was tense and tired. There was electricity in the air.

  Haven’t we all felt the temptation to destroy at least once in our lives? The sudden dizziness of destroying, annihilating, smashing everything, because it would only take a few well-chosen words from who knows where, finely honed and sharpened, words that strike home and wound, irremediably, and cannot be retracted. Haven’t we all felt it at least once, that strange, mute, destructive rage, because ultimately it would take so little to lay waste to everything? That is exactly what I felt that evening: I was capable of taking action, sabotaging all I held dear, destroying everything so that I would have nothing left to lose. That’s what overwhelmed me, the crazy idea that the moment had come to put an end to all this, this enchanted episode and all the bullshit that I’d ended up believing. I thought I’d found a man capable of loving me, understanding me, following me, supporting me, but in fact, ha, ha, no, that was all just a trap, a clever lure and it was high time I put a stop to it. And I knew the words that would cause the irreparable wound; I knew his weak point, his Achilles heel. All I had to do was aim straight in the right spot, and in less time than it took to utter them, it would be over.

  That’s what L. had rea
ctivated in me: the insecure person who was capable of destroying everything.

  For a minute, I stood on the brink of disaster, and then I pulled back.

  Several times during that period, François suggested I come to live with him, at least for a while. He was getting concerned. There was no fooling him. Not with my bravado or my so-called work in progress. He thought that the anonymous letters had got to me much more than I’d admitted. He thought I’d allowed some monster or ghost that had loomed up from the past to catch up with me.

  I remember another evening, coming back from Courseilles, we had an odd discussion, as though François could see around me some abnormal aura without being able to identify it. It had been dark for ages and the road was quiet. In the car, he started asking me questions. Yes, he was worried about me. He could understand that I needed to be alone, that I was protecting my work, that there were things I didn’t want to talk to him about. But I was taking it too far, putting myself in danger. I was refusing his help. Perhaps, just once – at least for a short time – I could let someone look after me? He felt that I had again constructed a sort of cordon sanitaire around myself so that no one, not even him, could have access to what was really affecting or worrying me. He understood that I didn’t want to share everything, but I didn’t have to deploy such a defence system. We weren’t at war. He wasn’t my enemy. He’d known me calmer.

  Then he took his eyes off the road for a moment to look at me.

  ‘You know, sometimes I wonder if someone’s taken possession of you.’

  I don’t know why I didn’t tell him that day. Why I didn’t mention L. and the impression that, through contact with her, the talons of a bird of prey were crushing my brain.

  Anyone who has experienced their mind being controlled, an invisible prison whose rules are incomprehensible; anyone who has experienced the feeling of no longer being able to think for themselves, an ultrasound that you alone can hear and which interferes with every thought, every sensation, every emotion; anyone who has experienced the fear of going mad or of already being mad will probably understand my silence in the presence of the man who loved me.

  It was too late.

  41

  From the age of twelve until after the birth of the twins, I kept a private diary. I’ve already mentioned these little school notebooks, which I filled with my writing as a child, then teenager, then young adult. They are numbered and arranged in order in an airtight plastic box that I have several times tried to remove to the cellar, but I always end up bringing it back up. I used these notebooks when I was writing my first and most recent novels. Apart from these two occasions (ten years apart), I haven’t reread them. If something happens to me one day, I hope these notebooks will be destroyed. I’ve told my friends and family and left written instructions: I don’t want anyone to open or read them. I know it would be safer to separate myself from them, to burn them, but I can’t resolve to do that. The plastic box has found a place in the cupboard by the kitchen where I store all sorts of things: the vacuum cleaner, household linen, my sewing box, a box of stationery, sleeping bags and camping equipment.

  One evening, as I was about to take the ironing board out, I noticed that the lid of the plastic box – the box containing my notebooks – was askew. I opened the stepladder and took the box down. At that very moment, perhaps because she’d heard the noise, or because she really did possess a sixth sense, L. came out of her room and joined me in the kitchen.

  Having put the box on the floor, I began checking its contents. As I verified that all the notebooks were there, L. whistled in admiration.

  ‘You’ve got your work cut out, that’s for sure.’

  I didn’t look up. The notebooks were out of sequence, but they were all there.

  I almost asked L. if she had opened the box, but it felt too aggressive to do it just like that, without proof or motive; it would amount to accusing her of snooping. Yet there was a probable scenario: L. knew of the notebooks’ existence and where they were stored; she could have been interrupted while reading them, which would explain why they had been put back in a muddle.

  She didn’t take her eyes off me as I closed the box again and put it back in its place. It occurred to me that I needed to find somewhere else to store it in the next few days.

  That same evening, L. expressed interest in the use I could make of those diaries. It was, she insisted, an amazing, unbelievable resource. Over fifteen years of memories, anecdotes, sensations, impressions, portraits . . . something about the way she spoke about them confirmed to me that she’d read them, at least in part. It’s difficult to explain this: she spoke about them as though she knew in some innate way, through intuition (not indiscretion) what the notebooks contained. So much so that if I’d objected, if I’d accused her, she would immediately have denied it.

  She thought it a shame that I refused to extract from the notebooks the precious material for the book that haunted me. Because it was definitely there, she could feel it, she knew it, pages and pages silently waiting for the day when I would consent to recount their contents.

  ‘It’s like a mine that you’ve condemned. You’re incredibly lucky to have written all that. Don’t you realise?’

  Yes, she was right. It was precious. Those notebooks were my memory. They contained all sorts of details, anecdotes and situations that I’d forgotten. They contained my hopes, questions and suffering. My cure. They contained what I’d shed in order to stay afloat. They contained what I thought I’d forgotten but which cannot be erased. What continues to operate, unbeknownst to us.

  L. didn’t give me time to reply. She spoke more softly, but just as firmly: ‘I don’t understand why you’re still looking for a subject when you have that in your hands.’

  I was in a bitter mood.

  ‘First, I’m not looking for a subject, as you put it, and second, that material is only of value to me.’

  ‘I disagree. I think it’s what you need to confront, that reality, that truth.’

  I was suddenly seized with anger. I hadn’t felt it building.

  ‘No one gives a fuck about that truth. Not a flying fuck!’

  ‘Yes, they do. People know. They feel it. I know it when I read a book.’

  For once I wanted to argue, to try to understand.

  ‘Don’t you think you feel that, as you put it, just because you know it? Because someone has taken the trouble to tell you in some way or another that you’re reading a true story, or that it’s “inspired by real events” or “highly autobiographical” and that this simple label is enough to arouse a different sort of attention in you, a form of curiosity we all have, not least me, for true stories? But you know, I’m not sure that the real is enough. The real, insofar as it exists at all, for it to be possible to recreate it, the real, as you put it, needs to be incarnated, transformed, interpreted. Without perspective or a viewpoint, at best, it’s boring as hell, and at worst it’s completely anxiety-producing. And that work, whatever the raw material, is always a form of fiction.’

  For once L. didn’t respond tit for tat. She thought for a moment, then asked, ‘So what are you waiting for to do it?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘This work you’re talking about.’

  That night I had a strange dream, which has stayed sharp in my memory: I’m standing facing the blackboard in a classroom with children’s drawings all over the walls. A teacher, whose face I don’t recognise, is asking me questions. I get the answer wrong every time and the teacher turns to L. (who is also a child, but a bit older than me) for the correct answer. The other pupils aren’t looking at me; they’re staring at their notebooks to avoid humiliating me further. Only my friend Mélanie is looking at me and making increasingly desperate signs for me to run away.

  I woke up in a sweat.

  I turned on the light and waited for my heartbeat to return to normal. I don’t think I went back to sleep.

  The following day, I spent the morning sorting my corresponden
ce. I keep every letter I receive, the smallest note written by the children, postcards, messages that come with flowers; I keep them all. Every two or three years, I make piles and packets and tidy them into boxes.

  That afternoon I went out for a walk.

  As I was passing the nursery school, what Nathan (the friend of Louise’s I’d bumped into a few weeks earlier) said came back to me with the force of a boomerang: ‘Mum told me you sent an email to all your friends begging them not to contact you!’

  I’d kept what he said at a distance all that time. It had stayed there, not too far away, suspended, waiting, because I didn’t have the courage to try to clarify it, to face up to what it meant, because I’d had neither the strength nor the courage to process this piece of information normally.

  I called Corinne, Nathan’s mother, from the street. She picked up at once and greeted me warmly. At last, I was coming out of my cave!

  Corinne confirmed that I’d sent her a message, as I’d apparently sent to all my contacts – to judge by the length of the recipient list – to warn them that I was getting down to work and I would need to keep myself away from all temptation.

  I asked Corinne if I could come round so that she could show me the message. I needed to see it. Corinne is not the sort to take offence at other people’s weird behaviour; she told me to come when I liked, she’d be there, she wasn’t going anywhere.

  When I got to her place, she’d found the message, signed with my name, addressed to all my friends and most of my contacts.

  She has since forwarded it to me and I reproduce it here:

  Dear all,

  As most of you know, I haven’t managed to get back to work. Along with this failure, I’ve also been very distracted in my activities and by a kind of idleness, which I hate and which is eating away at me.