Based on a True Story

by Delphine de Vigan

  I can’t remember how she brought up the idea of going to Courseilles, but I’m sure that it was her idea, not mine. To me, Courseilles was primarily François’s domain. Even though in the preceding years he had always done everything he could to make me feel at home (in fact, an especially nice room on the ground floor had become my office), I continued to think of it as his place, alive with his particular energy. I never went there without him.

  That’s probably partly why, when I phoned François to tell him about the accident and ask if I could spend some time at Courseilles, once he’d been reassured I was OK, he immediately became enthusiastic. Of course! It was an excellent idea, especially if I wasn’t alone. The house was on a level and I had somewhere to work. Unfortunately he wouldn’t be able to get home early (he was with a crew of four, there were flights, shooting schedules, appointments with authors that had been made ages ago), but he would be happier knowing that I was there with a friend, rather than on my own at home, a recluse on the sixth floor. Since I had keys, all we had to do was set off. During this conversation, François had returned several times to my fall, concerned about how I had ‘actually done it’. I thought that I hadn’t done anything, nothing at all. But now I had a project. A big one. Because I was still thinking about writing about L. And that being so, going to the country with her, having her right there, was perfect.

  At the end of our conversation, François asked me again who I was going with, and when I mentioned L.’s name for the second time, there was a short silence. He told me to be careful. I think he was just thinking about our journey and my immobilised foot.

  When I hung up, L. left me in a café on my block so that I could warm up a bit while she organised our departure. She offered to go up to my apartment to get my things together. I agreed. I was exhausted by my fall, the hours I’d spent in A & E and the pain, which was returning in waves. I didn’t have the strength to climb six flights.

  She said she’d also take the opportunity to water my plants and turn down the heating. Then she’d go and fetch her things from the hotel.

  I sat in the café for over an hour, maybe even longer. I felt dazed. I remember looking at the clock several times.

  Then I saw L.’s car draw up outside the window again. She gestured to indicate she’d come in and get me.

  Everything was ready.

  We set off at once.

  The roads out of Paris were quite busy. We’d been driving for twenty minutes when, without my having asked about it, L. told me how she’d met her husband, one evening when the city was paralysed by a transport strike. In the middle of the traffic jams, some man had tapped on her car window. Through some rather absurd reflex of distrust, she’d locked the car door and driven on to the traffic lights. When the man had caught up with her, she thought for a moment that he was going to tap again, but she saw him get into another car. He gave an ironic smile and she felt ashamed of how she’d reacted. That’s probably why, a little further on, she’d picked up another hitchhiker. The man, who was tall, and older than he first appeared, slipped into the seat beside her, and then he looked at her. She was instantly captivated by this man’s scent, a blend of tobacco and leather. They drove on in silence for a while. Then later, they parked in a side street and went into a Parisian hotel, most of whose rooms were empty. L. had wanted Jean. From the second he got into her car, from the second she inhaled his scent. She’d known, from the first hours of the day, that she would stay with him. Because everything that had gone before seemed suddenly never to have existed. She was nineteen and he was twenty-eight.

  She broke off from her story. I remember saying it sounded like an encounter from a novel, or a film. I’m certain that at that moment I didn’t have anything in particular in mind.

  As the car sped along the dual carriageway and I eyed the speedometer in spite of myself, I kept asking questions. For the first time, L. responded. I discovered that she’d lived with Jean for six years. And then he’d died. When she met him, Jean was a dental surgeon. He’d gone into partnership with two fellow practitioners. A few months before their wedding, they’d taken an apartment together. And then after a year or two, Jean had given up his career. He’d spent six or seven years studying, but he was no longer interested in being a dentist. When L. was starting out as a ghostwriter, Jean had worked as a courier, then in a bar. He talked about opening a deli or a second-hand shop in their neighbourhood. And then there was talk of going to live abroad. And then there wasn’t talk of anything. Quietly, by her side, Jean sank into a silent sadness whose dangers she had failed to see.

  We drove on in silence for ten minutes. Then L. told me how her husband died. I think she chose this moment because it was impossible for us to be face to face. I noticed the same thing with Louise and Paul when they were younger; they’d talk to me when we were walking along the street, or sitting side by side on the metro or a train, or while I was making dinner. During their adolescence, our most intense exchanges had happened like that, while we were involved in doing something else.

  That’s what it made me think of, as we drove along the N12 and L. began telling me what she had always avoided: It’s because we aren’t face to face, because I can only see her in profile, that she’s finally been able to tell me about her husband’s death.

  L. loved the mountains. The isolation, the encounter with the elements. She and Jean often went there together. For ages, she’d wanted to spend several weeks in a lodge in the middle of the Alps, away from everything. Shortly after their third wedding anniversary, she suggested to Jean that he come with her. He didn’t want to, but she kept on at him. She thought that it might get him out of his torpor, that it would give them a chance to reconnect. In the end he agreed. Jean played along with the preparations and even researched what they should take with them. They acquired everything they needed to live completely independently: clothes, sleeping bags, a camping stove, dried food and all sorts of tins. It was a day’s walk to the hut from the nearest village. Jean had wanted to bring a rifle in case they were attacked by a wild animal. A customer in the bar had lent him one.

  They made their ascent on a clear, sunny day. The cabin consisted of a large room with a stove and windows, and a small bedroom with no openings to the outside.

  There was snow all around. And silence interrupted by noises that in time they learned to identify. They were alone and far away. Time seemed to stretch out and was like nothing they had experienced before.

  After a week, Jean wanted to go home. He wasn’t feeling well; he felt oppressed. He needed to get back to the city, the sound of cars, horns, voices. But L. didn’t want to give up. They had promised each other they’d stay as long as their provisions lasted. She wanted to see the experience through to the end.

  Jean wanted to leave. She told him to go back without her; she was testing his loyalty. She said something a bit sharp (when she mentioned this detail, L.’s voice choked); she was no longer sure of the terms she used, but her words had been harsh, and reproached him again for being evasive.

  Jean stayed.

  Every day they went out walking in their snowshoes. They read a lot. They no longer made love. In the evenings they went straight to sleep, exhausted by the cold. Despite the stove, the cold was a constant struggle. A struggle that made time expand. She eventually forgot that Jean was ill, because Jean no longer seemed so ill.

  One evening he even said he was happy.

  For a few days, there was a storm so violent that they couldn’t go out. They stayed indoors and the frost on the windows got thicker and thicker. For a few days, all they heard was the howl of the wind and the sound of their own voices. Then a terrible idea came into her mind, which she couldn’t get rid of. She no longer loved this man whom she had once loved.

  On the fourth day, when the storm had at last abated, L. went out for some fresh air. She had left Jean in the chalet, huddled beneath the quilts. She was alone and walking towards the forest when she suddenly heard a shot ring out.
The shot resonated in the silence, yet a few seconds later, nothing of it remained. No echo. She wondered if she had in fact imagined it.

  When she returned to the cabin, she found Jean’s body. It was no longer really Jean, because his head was missing. His head had been blown off and there was blood everywhere. L. looked down and then recoiled because she realised that she had trodden on a piece of her husband’s skull. His dark hair was sticky with blood.

  She screamed but no one heard her.

  L. finished her story and I couldn’t speak for several minutes. I would have liked to find words of compassion, consolation worthy of the confidence she had just shared.

  Eventually I said, ‘You must have suffered such a lot.’

  L. smiled.

  ‘It was a long time ago.’

  We drove on in silence as darkness fell.

  When we reached our destination, I let L. get out of the car to open the gates. In the headlights, I watched her pull open the gates one at a time, with powerful, energetic movements. She holds the key, I thought, a phrase that emerged from some corner of my consciousness or a detective novel, whose double meaning wasn’t lost on me. When she’d opened them, she turned to me, triumphant. Her hair, as though electrified, formed a shining halo around her face. And then she got back in the car.

  L. turned the wheel and parked in front of the house. She pointed out that the garden was a minefield; in several places, in the part adjacent to the street, deep holes had been dug for a sewer pipe installation. The works affected the whole village and there were red and white barriers to mark the presence of works all over.

  L. opened the front door and took our bags inside. I showed her round the ground floor but left her to go upstairs alone. I couldn’t yet use the crutches well enough to follow her. We’d decided to sleep in the two guest bedrooms downstairs. The stairs that led to the bedroom where I normally slept with François struck me as too dangerous.

  In the larder, we found packet soup and pasta.

  I went to bed straight after dinner, exhausted.

  45

  The next day, I told L. how to get to the nearest Intermarché. Together we made a shopping list that would allow us to last a good week.

  After L. drove off, I opened the door to my office, a small room on the ground floor on the far side of the house. I turned the heating up full. I opened the curtains. From the window, I could see the gates, which she’d been careful to close behind her. There was a low, cement-coloured sky, which nothing seemed capable of penetrating.

  I felt something beat within my body, my hands, a familiar pulse, a kind of impulse of hope, which the slightest sign of rain could compromise.

  I didn’t attempt to turn the computer on, or pick up pencil and paper. I sat down gently. I slid the chair towards the table. Then, rather than trying to write, I had the idea of using my phone’s dictaphone app.

  I made a recording about L. meeting her husband, then Jean’s death, just as she had described them, with all the details I could recall.

  I dictated this story as if I were writing it, sentence by sentence.

  I redid it several times to capture L.’s words and give them shape.

  L.’s story had haunted me during the night. It resonated within me as though I knew it, as though I’d heard it before.

  Suicide (and the impotence, guilt and regrets that come with it) remained a sensitive subject for me. L.’s story had reawakened in me the terror I experienced when I’d discovered my mother’s body a few years earlier, and the memory of the adrenalin-filled weeks that followed.

  But it wasn’t that. Not only. Something familiar, which I couldn’t explain, was troubling me.

  L. had often hinted at pain, wounds, that she’d never spoken about. This time, she’d confided part of the story, which illuminated some things I knew about her: the solitude in which she lived, the friends who drew away from her and no longer came to her birthday, a sort of brutality in her way of being. L. probably concealed other stories, intact fossils, buried in the silt of her memory, stories kept secret, kept away from the light. Something that could be written about. That had to be written about.

  I took advantage of L. being out to record other things I remembered, scattered through our conversations. There weren’t many of them. A few sparse pieces of a puzzle whose complexity I was getting some sense of.

  But I was going to write. By dictating aloud if necessary.

  I’d begin by describing the party where she first approached me, and then all that followed.

  I would write about my fascination with L., and the strange bond that had formed between us.

  I would find the way to get her to talk. To harvest her confidences.

  I would try to find out who she was, this woman who once told me: ‘I could finish all your sentences,’ and, ‘I didn’t meet you, I recognised you.’

  The gate opened as I was making a list of questions I felt I needed to ask her. As L. drove up to the house, I checked that my audio file appeared in the list of recordings. Then I closed the door behind me and went to meet her.

  L. was smiling. The boot was full of supplies; I remember thinking that she had thought big, or else was planning to stay for several weeks.

  Leaning on my crutches, I watched her bring in packages without being able to help. As she went towards the kitchen again, I took the last bag, which looked light, from the boot. L. came back to the car.

  ‘You can’t stay still for two minutes! You didn’t need to come out, I’m managing perfectly well by myself! I don’t want you under my feet.’

  She closed the boot, then handed me the crutch I’d leaned against the car door. With a strange laugh that didn’t sound familiar, she added: ‘Otherwise, I’ll break the other foot!’

  46

  I waited for what felt like the right moment to ask L. why she’d been outside my building the day of my fall. She explained what had happened. She was going along the street, when a searing pain in her foot had stopped her in her tracks for a few minutes. And then a thought had come into her mind, as lucid as this: something had happened to me. A presentiment, or rather a certainty, she explained, so much so that she decided to come and find me straight away. At the corner of my street, she encountered the fire truck.

  For various reasons, I’m the sort of person who is likely to believe such a tale without seeking a more rational explanation. The day Paul broke his arm, during one Easter holiday (in a square in our neighbourhood, he fell from a piece of play equipment right in front of my eyes), Louise, who was staying with a classmate, asked her friend’s mother to phone me. In the middle of the afternoon, hundreds of miles away, sitting in front of a brioche and a jar of Nutella, she told this woman: ‘Paul’s hurt himself, I have to call mummy.’

  Another time, when the twins were still babies and slept in the same room, Paul started crying in the middle of the night. A strange, unfamiliar cry. I turned on the light and went into their room. Paul was crying, but Louise was the one with spots all over her face.

  Even today, Louise doesn’t have to assign her brother a specific ringtone to know when he’s calling.

  I can’t remember if I told L. either of these anecdotes. The fact remains, I took her at her word.

  At lunchtime, I told L. I was starting work on a book project that would explore my intellectual, affective and emotional make-up. Something very personal.

  No, I couldn’t tell her more, for fear of blocking this unexpected impulse.

  Yes, it would be very autobiographical.

  I saw L.’s face light up. Her features suddenly relaxed and, since she couldn’t suppress a smile of satisfaction, I quickly added that nothing was certain, it was too soon to celebrate.

  I admitted to L. that I still couldn’t turn on my computer or even take notes on paper. The very idea of doing either of those things made my hands start to shake again. But that would change. I sensed it. I was sure that things would get back on track as soon as I had properly begun a ne
w manuscript; it was just a matter of time. Meanwhile, I was going to try a different tack. I told her I was going to attempt to write by dictating each day until I could eventually hold a pen again. As it would be a sort of confession, a type of introspection, I would make do initially with recording a first draft, which I could then revise when I felt better.

  L. was happy. Beside herself with joy.

  She’d won.

  In the hours that followed this news, her face became more open, her attitude changed. I’d never seen her so relaxed. Calm. As though her entire life for months had been dependent on this capitulation.

  On the second evening we opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate my return to writing. L., who had restrained herself from asking more detailed questions since the day before, could hold back no longer:

  ‘Does the thing you’ve begun have something to do with the phantom book?’

  I hesitated before replying. The phantom book again. What had she imagined? What story of childhood or adolescence would she have me tell? What did we have in common, real or imagined, that interested her so much?

  I saw the hope in her eyes, an intermittent light waiting for my assent, and without thinking, I said, Yes. Yes, of course it had something to do with the phantom book. I added that it would be a hard book to write, as she might imagine. But she was right. It was high time I got down to it.

  I heard the inflection of my own voice, serious, assured, and I thought that the wind had changed. I was no longer the spent writer that L. had been carrying single-handedly for months; I was the vampire who would soon be nourishing herself on her blood. A shiver of fear and excitement ran up my spine.

  ‘You know, what interests me,’ I went on, ‘is understanding what we’re made of. How we manage to assimilate some events, some memories, which mix with our own saliva, spread through our flesh, while others remain like sharp stones in our shoes. How can we decipher the traces of the child on the skin of the adults we claim to have become? Who can read these invisible tattoos? What language are they written in? Who is capable of understanding the scars we think we’ve learned to hide?’