So I’m asking you not to get in touch with me for a few months, not to ask me round, or suggest meeting up. Except in case of emergency, of course. For my part, I won’t be in touch either while I’m writing this book.
This may seem like a drastic measure. I’m sure now that it’s something I have to go through.
Love,
Delphine
The message was dated November, the time when L. first had access to my computer. Corinne had replied with a message of encouragement and support and, not daring to phone me, had written two or three times since. (As did most of my friends and some members of my family, as I learned later. L. of course didn’t pass any of these messages on to me.)
I thanked Corinne and promised to come back and see her or to call her soon so that we could go for a drink.
I set off for home. I felt very tired.
I tried calling François from outside my building – he’d gone for two days’ filming in the provinces – but I got his voicemail. I was behaving like someone who was scared. That was ridiculous. Why didn’t I wait till I was home and call him more calmly? Why did I speak in a low voice when L. was at home?
L. was waiting in the kitchen. She was surprised to see me back from my walk so late; she’d begun to worry. She’d made the rooibos tea I liked and bought some macaroons. She had something important to tell me. I interrupted her: ‘No, I’m the one who’s got something important to tell you.’
My voice was shaking.
‘I know you sent an email to all my friends telling them not to contact me.’
I waited for her to deny it. Or at least to be taken aback. But L. didn’t show the least sign of surprise, or discomfort. She replied without hesitation, as though she were completely sure she was in the right.
‘Yes, I did. I wanted to help you. That’s my role, you know, to create the best conditions for you to work in. To stop you drifting.’
I was flabbergasted.
‘You know, you can’t just do that. Don’t you get it? You send my friends a ridiculous letter telling them not to contact me. That’s serious. It’s really serious. You don’t have the right to do that without talking to me; I need my friends . . .’
‘I’m here. Isn’t that enough?’
‘No, that’s not the issue. I can’t get over the fact you did that . . .’
‘It was necessary. It still is. Be careful. You need silence and solitude to write that book.’
‘Which book?’
‘You know very well which book. I don’t think you have the choice. You need to respond to the demands of your public.’
It was probably the word ‘public’ which hit me, which struck me as so jarring. A word she uttered as though I was a variety star on the eve of a tour. Suddenly I could no longer ignore the fact that L. took me for someone else and was projecting a fantasy onto me that had nothing to do with who I was. I protested firmly; I was afraid of my voice becoming shrill. I wanted to stay calm.
‘Listen carefully. I’m going to tell you something: I have never written to please anyone and I have no intention of starting now. When, through some misfortune, that idea comes into my mind – pleasing or giving pleasure, because yes, if you must know, it does come into my mind – I stamp on it with all my strength. Because deep down, writing is much more intimate and much more commanding than that.’
L. stood up and was manifestly making an effort to talk gently to me. ‘Exactly. That’s what I’m talking about: more intimate. That’s what your readers expect of you. Whether you like it or not, you are responsible for the attention, and the love, that you have aroused.’
I think I shouted.
‘What the fuck has that got to do with you? Why are you getting involved? Who are you to know what’s good or bad, desirable or regrettable? Who are you to know what literature is or is not, and what my readers expect? Who do you think you are?’
She didn’t look at me. I saw her get up, pick up the plate on which she had carefully arranged the macaroons. With the tip of her foot, she pressed the bin pedal and, with a movement whose speed surprised me, threw them away.
She walked out of the kitchen without a word. We hadn’t touched the tea.
In the night, I heard L. get up several times and thought she must have insomnia. There was a full moon and she’d told me that it disturbed her sleep.
The next morning when I got up I found her ready to leave. Her cases were lined up in the hall. Her face betrayed an unusual degree of tiredness, her eyes had dark rings and it looked to me as though she had no make-up on. She must have spent the night packing. She didn’t seem angry (or if she was, she was hiding it successfully); in a very calm voice she told me that she had found a hotel in the 10th arrondissement; the rooms weren’t large but she would cope for a while. I tried to protest but she gestured with her hand to stop me.
‘This isn’t the time to discuss it. I’m aware that my presence is getting you down. I don’t want to prevent you writing. You know how much I respect your work. You probably need to be alone for a bit before the children come back for the holidays. I understand. I thought I could help you regain your self-confidence. I thought I could help you avoid wasting time, falling into traps. But perhaps that’s something you have to go through. I was wrong and I’m sorry. You’re right, only you know how you need to work. What’s right for you. I ask your forgiveness and if I’ve said anything that has hurt you, that wasn’t my intention.’
Suddenly I felt guilty. I was about to throw onto the street the friend who had been helping me for weeks, who’d been lumbered with my dirty work.
L. opened the front door. She hesitated for a moment and came back in.
‘You know, Delphine, I’m afraid for you. I hope nothing happens to you. I have a bad feeling. Look after yourself.’
With those words, she left and the door closed behind her. I heard her going down the first steps and then heard nothing. She’d left the keys I’d lent her on the kitchen table.
That afternoon, another boy, as young as the previous one, came to collect her cases.
On the days that followed I didn’t hear from L.
I didn’t try calling her.
I couldn’t stop thinking about her parting words. It wasn’t a warning: it was a curse. A dire and inescapable fate that L. had thrust upon me.
PART THREE
Betrayal
‘Annie, will you tell me one thing?’
‘Of course, dear.’
‘If I write this story for you—’
‘Novel! A nice big one like all the others – maybe even bigger!’
He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. ‘Okay – if I write this novel for you, will you let me go when it’s done?’
For a moment, unease slipped cloudily across her face, and then she was looking at him carefully, studiously. ‘You speak as though I were keeping you prisoner, Paul.’
Stephen King, Misery
42
I have few memories of the summer that followed L.’s departure.
Louise and Paul came back in June to spend two weeks with me, then we all went to Courseilles together, where they stayed with us for a while before they went off with their friends. I remained in the country with François throughout July. I remember the anxiety I felt – a mixture of fascination and revulsion – when I looked at the quantity of books he’d brought with him. It was the same ritual every summer: dozens of books spread around the living room in little piles, on tables or the floor, according to some system only he understood. I remember thinking that L. was right; it was suicide for a novelist to be around someone like him. Someone whose job was reading books, meeting and entertaining novelists, giving his opinion on their work. Hundreds of books would appear every autumn. That’s not just a figure quoted in the media. They were all here, arranged in piles or in still-sealed cardboard boxes, which he was about to unpack: five or six hundred novels of various dimensions, which would be published between late August and late Septemb
er.
I’d met François through his work. At first we’d both stuck to our roles and it took a few weeks before we truly connected.
I loved him. I loved him for a thousand reasons; one of the reasons I loved him was because he loved books. I loved his curiosity. I loved watching him reading. I loved our similarities, the things we disagreed about, our endless discussions. I loved discovering books with him, before him, through him.
But this time, I found all those novels unbearable. Their covers, their belly bands, their blurbs mocked my impotence. Spread out before me, such a quantity of paper suddenly struck me as ostentatious and threatening.
I wanted to grab them from his hands and throw them all out of the window.
I longed to say to François, who sometimes talked about quitting on evenings when he felt dejected or very tired: OK, you’re on, I dare you, let’s see if you can do it, let’s give it all up and go and live somewhere else, let’s reinvent ourselves in a new place, in another life.
In August, I went with Louise and Paul to join our friends in the ‘holiday house’. As I write this, I realise I have no recollection of the house we rented that summer; the images escape me, they’re mixed up with other, older ones; I’m unable to visualise the place, or the little town it was on the edge of.
I only remember the bike track we used to cycle along to get to the sea, the headwind that would get in my mouth, the sensation of speed that I’d seek flying downhill. I was happy to be there, not to miss out on this time with my children and friends; anxiety eventually loosened its grip for a few days.
After two weeks’ respite, we took the train back. When Louise, Paul and I took our seats at the family table we’d booked on the train, I found myself projected back a year, almost to the day, behind the grey-green SNCF curtains, in a place that in every respect resembled the one we’d occupied then. All at once, I saw clearly the journey that all three of us had made then, at the same time, returning from the holiday house: the picnic spread out on the table, Paul’s new haircut, Louise’s red T-shirt, their tanned skin. Suddenly, as though it were yesterday, I remembered the thoughts that had preoccupied me that day as I looked out of the window at the same landscape flashing by, seeking some impossible point of anchorage. I’d thought about François, whose year was looking very busy; I’d thought about the book I was preparing to write; I’d thought about the documentary on the Armenian genocide that I’d ordered to show the children (they are Armenian on their father’s side); I’d thought about winter skies and then I’d knocked over a soft drink and we’d used more than one packet of Kleenex mopping it up. All this came back to me in peculiar detail. I remembered that Paul had wanted to play the Yes-or-No game, like when they were children, but the game had become too noisy for our fellow passengers.
A year had gone by, a whole year since that journey and I’d done nothing. Nothing. I was in the same place. Or not exactly. I was now unable to sit at my computer, open a Word file or answer an email. I was unable to hold a pen for more than a few minutes or look at a white surface, whether lined or squared. In short, I’d lost command of the elementary skills needed to do my job.
In early September, Louise and Paul went back to their studies.
Like many people, I think and calculate in school years, from September to June. The summer seems like a parenthesis, a period of respite from obligations. For a long time I thought this came from being a mother, whose biorhythms eventually fuse with the school calendar, but I think that it’s mainly the child within me, within all of us, whose life is chopped in slices for so long: an enduring trace of our perception of time.
It was a new school year. The time for new stationery and good intentions. The time of beginning, or beginning again.
But not a single molecule of air stirred and everything seemed frozen.
This time, I didn’t promise myself that I’d get back to work. The very notion of writing was a remote one. I no longer had the slightest idea of the form it might take; my body had forgotten the sensations I used to love, of tiredness and excitement, the hours spent sitting in front of a pool of light, fingers on the keyboard, tension in my shoulders, legs stretched out under the desk.
The children left and I once again found myself alone at home. L.’s absence was now added to that of Louise and Paul, an additional loss, the impact of which I was now becoming aware of. All I had to do was look around. Mail was piling up on the table in the living room, my computer screen was covered in a fine layer of dust. I was allowing myself to drift from day to day, continuing to pretend, filling my time with little things, drawing them out as far as possible to make them last, filling the unfathomable void that I’d unwittingly created around me in the course of a lost year.
Maybe this was how old people lived, in a succession of careful, tiny steps, of movements that were slow enough to fill the emptiness. It wasn’t so painful.
I imagine that all of us, at some point or another, believe there is no such thing as chance. I imagine all of us have experienced a series of coincidences to which we ascribe special meaning, inevitable meaning, a sense that we alone believe we can work out. How many of us have not thought, at least once in our lives, that some coincidence owed nothing to chance, but was in fact a message amid the hurly-burly of the world, just for us?
That’s what happened to me. For two or three weeks, I felt as though L.’s message, the intimate certainties she’d wanted to see me share, no longer required her in order to reach me: they continued to float in the air, to move of their own volition, choosing this or that new vector to convince me.
One evening I got a call from a director I’d worked with a few years before on the screenplay for a feature film that had not come to fruition, despite various grants and the backing of different bodies. The financing hadn’t been finalised and the project had fallen through. The director suggested we get together for a drink so he could update me on his projects. We met in a café where we used to go to work. He didn’t beat about the bush: he was looking for a true story to adapt. That was the only kind of thing that was working; you only had to look at the posters, at how many of them spelled out in letters almost as big as the title that they were ‘inspired by real events’; you just had to read the magazines, watch TV, with its hordes of witnesses and guinea pigs in all genres, or listen to the radio, to understand what people wanted.
‘Reality’s the only thing that’s real enough,’ he’d concluded. He knew I’d turned down various offers to adapt my previous book; he understood that, but if I had any ideas, if I heard of anything – an old news item or a recent one, a forgotten character from history – I shouldn’t hesitate to call him; he’d be delighted to work with me again.
I was in a gloomy mood when I left the café. So it was true then; that was what people expected: the real, guaranteed by a label stamped on films and books like the red or organic label on food products, a certificate of authenticity. I thought that people only needed stories to interest them, overwhelm them, sweep them along. But I’d got it wrong. People wanted it to have happened somewhere; they wanted it to be verifiable. They wanted lived experience. People wanted to be able to identify, to empathise, and for that to happen, they needed reassurance about the goods; they demanded a basic level of traceability.
In the following weeks, every time I turned on the television, opened a magazine, or new film posters appeared, it seemed as though it always came back to this: the real, the true, the truthful; all shoved in the same bag as though they were the same thing, a promotional offer, a package, to which we could now lay claim, to which we were entitled.
As I write this, I could not say whether these are genuine coincidences or a subjective impression, fabricated by my own preoccupations.
Twenty years earlier, in the months before I became pregnant, which seemed to be taking ages, hadn’t I been certain there were pregnant women everywhere? A genuine epidemic, I told myself, as though all the women in my neighbourhood of child-bearing age had s
pread the word to get pregnant before me, and what’s more, the only things I saw were them and their prominent, gorgeous, full bellies.
These signs always pointed in the direction of L.
What if L. were right? What if L. had sensed and understood a profound change in our way of reading, seeing, thinking? As a reader and viewer, I wasn’t an exception to the rule. Reality TV fascinated me to an extent that went beyond my literary plans. I pounced on the gossip magazines every time I went to the hairdresser or dentist. I regularly went to see biopics and films based on real events, and afterwards I’d go on the internet to check the facts, look for the real faces, hungry for details, proof, confirmation.
What if L. had understood something I refused to acknowledge? I’d written an autobiographical book in which all the characters were inspired by members of my family. Some readers had become attached to them and had asked me about what had happened to them. They’d confessed to me that they had a particular affection for one character or another. Some readers had quizzed me about the reality of the events. They’d conducted their own investigations. I couldn’t ignore it. And the book’s success, ultimately, may all have been down to that. A true story, or one that was thought of as true. No matter what I said about it. Whatever precautions I had deployed to assert that reality was ungraspable and claim my subjectivity.
I had poked my finger into the real and the trap had snapped shut.
And now all the characters I might invent, whatever their stature, their history, their wound, would never measure up. From these wholly invented characters nothing would emerge, no emanation, no juice, no smell. No matter what I might be capable of imagining, they would be small, shrivelled, sickly; they would never have sufficient weight. They’d be bloodless, dispensable; they’d lack flesh.
Yes, L. was right. It was necessary to grapple with reality.
43
Based on a True Story Page 18