Based on a True Story

by Delphine de Vigan

  ‘Your scars?’ she asked.

  There was no hint of suspicion in her voice. I hesitated again, then said yes.

  It happened exactly as I’d hoped.

  Believing I was in the state of introspection that writing the hidden book required, L. began talking about herself. As a sign of encouragement and solidarity, she started talking about specific events in her childhood and youth that she’d never spoken of before. She probably regarded these confidences as stimuli likely to help me summon my own memories, excavate my own wounds. I’d been right. All I had to do was get her to believe that I was progressing with my work for her to provide me with the things that would, without her realising, gradually feed the text.

  From L. I would create a character whose complexity and authenticity would be palpable.

  Of course, one day, when the book was sufficiently developed, perhaps finished, I would have to tell her the truth. Then I’d remind her of her rejection of any writing that was detached from life. I’d remind her of the conviction she had so strongly wanted me to share and which I’d eventually yielded to. I’d talk about our meeting, of the months spent close to her, of how it had become obvious to me that she alone could be the subject of the book. I’d talk about the necessity I felt to bring together the fragments she had willingly confided in me, and give them a new order.

  I was now dependent on L. in every respect.

  First, because I couldn’t put my foot on the ground. And then because I needed her words, her memories, to nourish the beginning of a novel she knew nothing about.

  But I wasn’t afraid of this state of dependence.

  It was justified by a higher project, which would develop without her knowing.

  L., meanwhile, was working on a manuscript that she’d begun before the summer. One of those books where a lot was at stake which she was contractually bound not to discuss. A book that would bear the name of someone else who would pretend to have written it.

  I asked L. who it was. Which actress, singer or female politician had called upon her services this time?

  L. was sorry, but she couldn’t tell me anything about it. The confidentiality clause was longer than the actual contract and she couldn’t take any risks. Once she’d let slip a confidence and the person she’d told had accidentally betrayed her. I hazarded a few guesses: Mireille Mathieu? Ségolène Royal?

  L.’s face remained impassive. I didn’t press her.

  Within a few days, we’d resumed the rituals of our recent time together. L. got up before me. From her room, I heard the sound of the shower, then the coffee maker. I’d get up and we’d have a quick breakfast before she got down to work. From the first day, she settled in a small room by the kitchen. There was no daylight; she liked that atmosphere. On a little table she’d set up her computer, her drafts, her plans, her research.

  I would shut myself away in my office on the other side of the house a bit later. I sat in the same position as I would have done to write, my upper body leaning slightly forward. I kept my crutches within reach, propped up on the dressing-table drawer. I wrapped myself in a shawl and began dictating in a hushed voice. Given the distance between us, it would have been impossible for L. to hear me.

  Yet I couldn’t stop myself checking that the door was properly closed several times a day. And that she wasn’t behind it.

  Around one, I’d join L. in the kitchen for the soup or pasta that she’d made.

  At the start of the afternoon, we’d both go back to work, each on our side. As L. progressed with her manuscript, I continued to record my dictation without her knowledge, the account of our increasingly intimate conversations.

  After a few days, I managed to turn on my computer to back up the audio files from my mobile.

  At the end of the day, we sometimes went out to take the air.

  As my arm muscles grew stronger, the range of our walks expanded.

  In the evening, we’d have a glass of wine in the kitchen while L. made dinner. I could help her sitting down: I sliced sausage and mozzarella; I peeled onions and vegetables; I chopped herbs. L. did everything else.

  We’d start off talking about nothing in particular and then drift imperceptibly to the subjects that interested me. I would tell L. my own memories. Memories of childhood and adolescence, which might resonate with hers.

  After dinner, L. would light a fire and we’d draw closer to the hearth, warming our hands in front of the flames. I knew her well. With time, I’d learned to decipher her answers, her emotions and reactions. I knew how to read the most fleeting signs of pleasure or annoyance on her face. I knew how to tell from her posture when she was about to say something important, and when she was about to reimpose some distance. Over the weeks, I’d become familiar with L.’s language, her way of sidestepping certain subjects and then confronting them in a sudden reversal when I least expected it. I’d never known her so calm. So relaxed.

  According to L., I hadn’t broken my foot by accident. The fracture was a visible way of signifying the blockage, the entanglement that had consigned me to silence. The fall needed to be understood in every sense of the term: beyond the physical loss of balance, I’d fallen in order to put an end to something. To close a chapter. Falling or having a psychosomatic reaction ultimately came down to the same thing. And also, according to L., the main function of our psychosomatic reactions was to reveal an anxiety, a fear, a tension that we refused to acknowledge. They were sending an alarm signal.

  L. hadn’t expounded one of her theories to me for some time. She adopted a tone that amused me, a learned tone in which a hint of self-mockery was easily discernible. We laughed. L.’s theory seemed quite probable: in her view, in order to avoid always stressing the same organs, we change how we manifest psychosomatic reactions over time, switching from migraines to heartburn, then from heartburn to bloating, and from bloating to rib pain. Had I noticed? When you thought about it, each of us had experienced different periods of psychosomatic reactions and had put different organs to the test so as not to always exhaust the same one. You just had to listen to people talking about their aches and pains. Falls were simply a more spectacular way, at pivotal moments, of triggering a normal alarm system. You had to take the trouble to decipher them.

  François called every day. I’d take my crutches and limp to the end of the garden, then haul myself as best I could onto the little mound of earth that enabled me to get a signal. We talked for a few minutes, me precariously balanced on my crutches, and him in a hotel room in the Midwest or Montana. He quickly sensed that I was doing better and asked if I was managing to write. I told him I’d decided to begin a new project, and even better, I was on to something; I couldn’t wait to tell him about it. I didn’t say more.

  In the house at Courseilles, L. had made herself at home with disconcerting ease. She was one of those people who are able to adapt to unfamiliar places in record time. In a matter of hours, she knew where everything was. No drawer or recess had escaped her radar. It was as though she was at home, and I must say that to see her moving around without the slightest hesitation in a place that seemed perfectly familiar to her, that expression seemed entirely appropriate.

  47

  I found some audio files on the computer at Courseilles that I saved during the early days of our stay. Beyond the feeling of strangeness we all experience when we hear our own voices, I have difficulty recognising mine. I speak softly so that L. can’t hear me. I reproduce below the contents of these files.

  AUDIO FILE, 4 NOVEMBER 2013

  L.’s mother died when she was seven or eight.

  She was the one who found her, on the floor. Her mother was lying in the hall, on the parquet. She raised her hair from her ear so that she could hear her better. She didn’t respond. And then she felt something was wrong and lay down beside her, full length. Her mother was wearing the dress with yellow flowers that L. loved. She stayed like that for some time, in that position; she even fell asleep, with her arms draped over her mot
her’s side, her head on her chest (this image really moved me).

  Then the phone rang and woke her up. She got up to answer it, her hair still clammy from the sweat of her sleep. When she picked up the receiver, she heard the voice of one of her mother’s friends, who wanted to speak to her. She said ‘Mummy’s asleep’ and the friend got worried because her mother never slept during the day. She asked if she was ill. L. said no, but she wouldn’t wake up. The friend asked her to wait quietly at home, beside her mummy. She said she’d be there right away.

  L. went back and lay down again.

  After her mother’s death, L. stayed shut up in the apartment. I haven’t managed to find out how long. Some time. I don’t think she went to school.

  Need to dig further: I think L.’s father forbade her to cross the threshold except in an emergency. I think she was so afraid of him that she went for several weeks, or even months, without going out. Alone in the apartment.

  She didn’t go to school.

  Under no circumstances was she to open the door.

  Her father summoned her to his office to give her his instructions. She had to stand up straight, raise her chin. Stand to attention.

  L. imagined a world full of enemies. She didn’t know what she would find outside if she managed to escape. She imagined predatory humans, children with weapons.

  Go back over what L. has mentioned without dwelling on it: the moment when she told herself that she wouldn’t leave that apartment alive. The idea of suicide.

  If possible, go back to L.’s father.

  I sense this is slippery territory.

  L. baulks at telling it in sequence. I sense she’ll give me scattered episodes, and I’ll have to do my best to stitch them together.

  What L. said last night about her father: everything in me that’s uncertain, ill-adapted, broken, comes from him.

  AUDIO FILE, 6 NOVEMBER 2013

  I’m trying to find the exact words L. used.

  She chooses them carefully and it seems to me that every one of her words is important.

  I’m sorry I can’t record her with my iPhone without her knowing, but it’s too risky.

  Someone must have intervened at some point because she went back to school. And then on to secondary school.

  She lived with her father in a permanent atmosphere of reproach. Each of her actions, each of her words was likely to be interpreted, dissected, taken out of context. Each of her words turned against her some day, coming back to hit her full in the face.

  The way he observed her, his accusing look.

  The silent fury that filled the house and sometimes made the air so hard to breathe.

  He looked for the flaw, the sign of betrayal, the proof of her guilt. He prowled around in search of reasons to lose his temper.

  His suppressed violence weighed on her like a permanent threat.

  Then L. tells me about the self-control this demands.

  Because any sign of excess on her part (joy, enthusiasm, talkativeness) was seen as pathological.

  She often comes back to this: her impossible adolescence.

  The destructive force of his eyes, just when she was becoming a woman.

  But something in her character was being formed in those years, a sort of way of her ensuring her survival in a hostile environment.

  L. just hints at this being who was on the lookout, on the alert, ready to fight, that she became.

  When she was at school, her father didn’t want her to go out with friends. Or to invite them home.

  Strange story about a neighbour (try to return to this), which L. has alluded to twice.

  AUDIO FILE, 7 NOVEMBER 2013

  For several years, L. had an imaginary friend called Ziggy.

  Ziggy spent her days with her. L. slept like a gun dog on one side of the bed, to leave space for her. She let her go through doors, made sure she could sit beside her at the table, spoke to her aloud when they were alone.

  L.’s father didn’t know about Ziggy.

  At night, she dreamt of running away with Ziggy. Hitching, taking trains, going far, far away.

  One day, Ziggy asked L. if she still wanted to go. L. said yes, but it seemed impossible because of her father.

  Ziggy said she’d work something out.

  How?

  Ziggy put her fingers to her lips, as if to say: don’t ask questions, because you might not like the answer.

  A few days later the house burned down. Everything went up in smoke.

  Furniture, clothes, all her childhood toys, all the photos.

  Everything.

  They moved to a new house.

  I didn’t manage to find out how old L. was when this happened.

  I had to get her to go back to the start several times to get some chronological details. As though L. wouldn’t let me establish links between certain events, she pretended to doubt the order in which they happened.

  I asked L. what became of Ziggy. She hesitated for a moment, then told me that Ziggy got run over. One day when they were both going along the street, Ziggy slipped off the pavement and fell under the wheels of a car.

  Even if they sometimes struck me as confused, L.’s confidences confirmed my intuition: L. had been the victim of some invisible brutality that language struggled to describe, a tortuous, insidious brutality that had profoundly shaped her being. But L. had wrenched herself from its grasp. Her ability to construct, reconstruct herself, the exercise of her will: that was what continued to impress me about L. One day, long before I met her, she had become this highly protected, tenacious creature of will, whose armour, I knew, could suddenly crack.

  During those first days, L. took the car a couple of times to fetch bread or fresh food. The rest of the time, the gate remained shut.

  L. was in a joyful mood and redoubled her attentions towards me. During this time, she never made me feel she was taking care of almost everything. It occurred to me that this solicitude, the constant care she lavished on me, was another form of control.

  But which of the two of us had the upper hand I couldn’t have said.

  One thing is certain: as soon as I heard L.’s footsteps approaching the office where I was shut away, I stopped recording and for a few minutes, until her steps retreated, I could feel my increased heart rate all through my body. I was terrified at the idea that she’d realise what I was up to.

  Several times, before nightfall (and despite the harsh drop in temperature), I saw L. go to the little pond in front of the house. Leaning over the water, she spent a long time looking at the two goldfish François and his daughter had bought a few months previously in a local pet shop. One evening when she came back into the house after one of these strange observation sessions, L. declared that those fish were carnivores. She maintained that if we didn’t give them anything to eat as a consequence, they’d end up eating each other. I took this remark as one of her many whims (they were just regular goldfish, after all).

  That night, I dreamt that L. found out what I was doing. She had searched my mobile without me knowing, found the audio files and forced me to sit and listen to my own voice retelling her life story. Then she threw the phone on the ground and stamped on it furiously until all that remained were fragments, which she told me to swallow. As I couldn’t do it (the pieces were too big, I was choking and coughing up blood), she ordered me to throw them in the bin. As I got up to do this, she picked up a broom and struck my foot with all her strength. It was this pain that woke me from the dream, a real pain: my splint had got stuck between the wall and the mattress and was twisting my foot. I woke up with a sort of groan, which emerged from the dream and continued into the darkness.

  I eventually calmed my breathing and watched for daybreak between the shutters, as though this horrible nightmare would disappear along with the darkness.

  Another night, I woke with a start, certain that someone was in my room. I sat up in bed, all my senses alert, peering into the blackness and trying to make out the dark, perfectly
still shape in front of me. I could hear my heart beating wildly in my chest. I felt my temples pounding, and a panicked buzzing that prevented me making sense of the silence. The air in the room seemed heavy and saturated, as though someone other than me had consumed all the oxygen. I was sure someone was there, someone who was watching me. It took me several minutes to muster the courage to turn on the light and realise that the shape was just clothes on a hanger that I’d hooked onto a shelf the previous evening. And several more minutes for my blood to resume its normal circulation under my frozen skin.

  Yet during those early days, there was no sign that L. might suspect what I was doing. The official version seemed to fully satisfy her: I was recording the fragments that would soon enable me to write the hidden book.

  Little by little, after our evening conversations, I began jotting down words on Post-its in an uncertain, feverish hand. I then stuck them inside a notebook so that L. wouldn’t discover them if she happened to come into my office when I wasn’t there. The following day, these reminders helped me to remember L.’s confidences and dictate them. At the stage I was at, I still had trouble making links between them, finding a direction, a through-line. Each day, hunched over the dictaphone, I tried to order the scattered elements, whose coherence still eluded me, that L. had consented to confide in me, convinced that one day it would eventually become clear to me.

  For the first time in ages, I was able to hold a pen, to sit at a desk every day and write a few words: I was making progress. I had regained hope. Soon, the impasse I’d been in for months, the physical inability to write, the nausea in front of the computer, all those things would just be a bad memory.

  We were at the start of our third week – and I was just beginning to be able to put some weight on the splint – when one morning I heard L. cry out. A cry of terror. We had both only just started work. For a few seconds, I froze. Today, as I describe this moment, my reaction strikes me as strange. I didn’t rush to help L. I didn’t automatically go and look for her. I stayed where I was, immobile, entrenched, listening for the slightest sound. And then I heard L.’s hurried footsteps and, before I had time to realise that she was about to come into my office, she was standing in front of me, red-faced and breathless, in a state of extraordinary panic. She’d shut the door behind her and was talking at high speed, something about mice in the cellar, at least two of them, she was certain, and before long they’d find their way into the kitchen, she’d heard them one evening but hadn’t wanted to believe it, but now she was in no doubt, there were mice in the house. L. was having trouble getting her breath back. I’d never seen her like that, so vulnerable. I got up to give her my seat. She collapsed into the chair, trying to recover her breath, her hands knotted together with anxiety and her fingers white with the pressure she was exerting on them.