L.’s perfume floated in the air not far from me. The scent got closer, coiled around me. I examined the faces in front of me; I could no longer concentrate on the conversation.
I didn’t reply. A disappointed murmur rippled through the hall as I took a drink from my glass.
When I went to bed that night, I reflected on the expression the man had used – pure fiction – which I’d also used in the past. In what way was fiction pure? From what was it supposedly exempt? Wasn’t there always some part of ourselves in fiction – our memory, our intimate being? People talk about ‘pure fiction’, never ‘pure autobiography’. So they’re not completely taken in. But ultimately, maybe neither one nor the other existed.
Then an image came back to me: in the kitchen of the family house at Pierremont, my clumsy child’s hands breaking eggs over some receptacle, separating the whites from the yolks. This gentle, precise movement that my grandmother Liane had shown me several times, this movement that consisted of transferring the yolk from one half of the shell to the other, so that the white slips into the bowl without getting contaminated. Because the white needs to be pure so that it can be whisked into peaks. But often a tiny bit of yolk or a minuscule fragment of shell breaks off. Once it falls into the dish, lost in the translucent white, the sliver slips away from your finger, evades the spoon, is impossible to catch.
I closed my eyes and heard my grandmother’s voice, her singsong voice – the memory of which I preserve religiously – asking me: ‘My little princess, is that lie true?’
53
I stopped jumping at every little sound, constantly checking I wasn’t being followed, feeling I was being watched all the time. I stopped seeing L. everywhere – in the bakery queue, in front of me or behind me at the cinema, at the other end of the metro carriage. I stopped being suspicious of any woman with blonde hair or every grey car that came within sight.
I started calling my friends again; I got back in touch with people I hadn’t seen in ages. I began a period of resocialisation, as I called it, in order to be able to laugh about it. I agreed to co-author a screenplay.
For a few weeks, I felt as though I was picking up broken pots, repairing furniture, rebuilding foundations. I accepted it as a time of convalescence.
One Friday evening four or five months after L. disappeared, I received a text from my editor:
Safely received your manuscript. What a surprise! I’ll read it very quickly and call you this weekend. You can imagine how delighted I am . . .
At first I thought she’d sent it to the wrong person; I knew that haste could lead to mis-sending a text. Then I imagined a paranoid version of the incident: it wasn’t an error but a base strategy intended to let me know that other authors were still writing and even delivering manuscripts. Then I reverted to the original hypothesis and didn’t bother to respond. My editor would realise her mistake.
But late on Sunday night, I received another text from her:
I’ve just finished it. It’s risky but marvellous. Bravo! Will call in the morning.
I thought to myself that she was pushing things a bit far. She ought to be a bit more careful not to send things willy-nilly.
I contemplated various messages in reply, from the simplest (‘received in error’) to the deadliest (‘too late, I’ve already sold it’), but in the end I didn’t reply. One of the company’s authors had written a risky, marvellous manuscript that had bowled my editor over . . . I felt annoyed at myself for experiencing envy, jealousy; it was pitiful and childish, but that was how I felt. Other people were writing risky, marvellous stuff and that made me unhappy.
In the morning, my editor rang. Before I could open my mouth, she launched into an enthusiastic, heartfelt spiel: she was quite bowled over, it was an intelligent manuscript, she had read it at a sitting, unable to put it down; it was disturbing and captivating, without doubt the best thing I’d written; it just goes to show that all those doubts and the fear that I had reached the end of the road were way off the mark; she knew, in fact she was sure, that it was the start of a new phase.
Eventually I managed to interrupt her and say, with some exasperation, that I hadn’t written the manuscript she was talking about. And so as to be perfectly clear, I added, ‘I didn’t send you anything, Karina, do you get it? Nothing. It wasn’t me.’
She gave her familiar laugh of surprise, which is one of the reasons I’m fond of her.
‘Yes, of course I understand. In fact, that’s what’s disturbing about your manuscript, the implicit reflection on the author and her doubles, these fictional characters to whom you leave the task of confronting one another.’
I was stunned. What in God’s name had she got her hands on? I carefully adopted my firmest tone and repeated that I had not written ANYTHING for three years and had not sent her any manuscript.
She laughed again and then said affectionately, ‘I’m not sure we can stick to that position when it comes to the media, but we can talk about it, if you want. Anyway, I want you to know how confident I feel about it. I’m going to reread it and we can meet up as soon as you like. It’s good, it’s really good . . .’
I hung up on her. She called me straight back and left a warm, reassuring message. She realised it wasn’t straightforward for me: the text was on the edge, it was playing with fire, but that’s what gave it its power.
I don’t know how long I sat motionless on the sofa. In a state of shock. Staring into space, unable to flex my legs or stretch my arms, or wrap myself in the blanket that lay beside me. Long enough for me to become aware of my body gradually getting colder. My frozen fingers.
It was the cold that roused me from my torpor. I got up, my back stiff, my legs seized up, and stamped on the floor to get rid of the pins and needles.
And then I suddenly realised.
L. had written the manuscript for me and submitted it. L. had written a marvellous, risky text, which had produced such unprecedented rapture in my editor.
L. had stolen my identity to write a text infinitely better than any I had written.
54
I wish I could describe François’s expression when I tried to explain that my editor had received a manuscript that she hoped to publish in the autumn, of which I was purportedly the author but not one word of which I had written.
A few seconds during which he wondered what he had got himself into (not for the first time). A moment of doubt, and perhaps discouragement, before he asked a question which neatly summed up his state of mind: ‘What on earth is this all about?’
I think he bumped into my editor the following week and she managed to convince him that she had in her possession a high-quality manuscript whose authorship, she maintained, was not in doubt. I imagine they debated the reasons why I was claiming not to have written it, citing my fragile state since my last book came out, the anonymous letters I’d received, the way I’d isolated myself, turned inwards, my phobic, even paranoid attitudes, my whims, and the fear I probably felt at finding myself exposed again. After all, that was all true. And it was a small step from that to concluding that I needed time to be able to accept this text, to take responsibility for it.
The day I told François that L. had had access to my computer, my personal diary and everything I’d written up till then, and that it was beyond doubt that she was the author of the novel my editor had received, he made the sympathetic face he uses when he doesn’t want to make me cross.
He went through the motions of asking me questions about L. (most of which he’d already asked when I came out of hospital). Doubt lay behind each of his questions.
That was when I had the idea of tracking L. down.
To prove that she’d written the manuscript, to understand why she’d done it in my name. Was it a trap? A gift? A way of saying sorry?
L.’s mobile number was no longer in use.
I went back to the building I’d visited on her birthday, where she’d lived before she moved in with me. The entry code had change
d. I waited for about ten minutes before someone went in. I went up to L.’s apartment and rang the bell. A young woman of about twenty opened the door. She’d moved in a few months earlier; the apartment was rented through an agency; she didn’t know anything about the person who used to live there. Through the half-open door I recognised L.’s apartment, except now it seemed genuinely inhabited. The young woman gave me the details of the agency that looked after the rental. As it was in the neighbourhood, I went straight there. The person who dealt with that area wasn’t in. When I persisted, his colleague agreed to take a look at the file. The agency had only recently taken the property on; the young woman I’d met was their first tenant. The man wouldn’t give me the owner’s number. When I rang up the next day to beg them to give me even a name, he put the phone down on me.
I phoned Nathalie to ask her for the details of the friend who hosted the party where I met L. I had to supply quite a few details in order for her to work out which party I meant. Nathalie had no recollection of the woman I described. She thought she’d left quite early and couldn’t remember seeing me talking to anyone at all. Then I rang Hélène, a friend of Nathalie’s, who vaguely remembered me being at the party, but couldn’t think which of the guests could have been L., the sophisticated blonde that I described. I wouldn’t let it drop. I provided all kinds of details: L. and I were among the last to leave. We drank vodka sitting at the kitchen table. Hélène couldn’t picture it. Not at all. Someone must have brought this woman along, but who?
A few days later, I rang Lionel Duroy to ask if he knew a woman, L., a ghostwriter he’d often been in competition with, especially for Gérard Depardieu’s book. Lionel didn’t seem very surprised; there were other ghostwriters besides him, but one thing he was sure of: there had never been any question of another writer ghosting Gérard’s book. He’d met him for dinner one evening and the following night the actor had rung him to say yes. He didn’t know this woman; he’d never heard of her.
Then I wrote a note to Agnès Desarthe, reminding her that we’d been on the same preparatory course and asking if she remembered a girl called L., who was also in our class (but unfortunately not in the photo), and if so, whether she knew what became of her. Just before slipping the note into the envelope, I added a PS in red pen to say that my question was urgent and important. If she was still in touch with anyone from back then, I’d be very grateful if she could ask them too. Agnès replied two days later to say that neither she, nor Claire, nor Nathalie, nor Hadrien, all of whom she was still friends with, could remember L.
One night I remembered the secondary school in Tours where she’d gone in my place. I got up and turned on the computer to look for the emails L. had exchanged with the librarian before and after ‘my’ visit. But bizarrely, even though they’d been written in my name, none of the messages appeared on my computer. L. must have deleted them all. I couldn’t recall the name of the school, but with a bit of luck, I might find a trace of ‘my’ having been there online, even a photo of L. with the students. Schools like posting that kind of thing on their blogs.
It was while searching for this that I stumbled upon an old interview with me which appeared in the magazine of a school in Reims, in which I mentioned Normal People are Nothing Exceptional and Things People Do, along with Grande Petite by Sophie Fillières, as among the films that were important to me.
So it seemed that the strange, incredible coincidences that connected L. and me were probably not so strange after all.
L. was, above all, very well informed.
I didn’t find any trace of L. having visited Tours. The next day I rang a few schools in the city. On my second call, I was put through to the librarian who’d invited me. I sensed from the start that this woman had been reluctant to take my call. Her tone was icy. When I asked whether she remembered ‘my’ visit a few months back, she gave a dry cough and then asked if I was fucking her about. She didn’t say, ‘Are you joking?’ or, ‘Are you making fun of me?’ No, in a flat tone whose fury she did not try to hide, she said, ‘Are you fucking me about?’ Because not only had I not turned up, I hadn’t let them know. A hundred students had prepared for the occasion, had read my books, had looked forward to it. She’d sent the train tickets, she’d waited for me on the station platform on a very cold day. And I hadn’t come. I hadn’t thought it appropriate to apologise or to reply to the furious letter she’d sent me.
I hung up. The ground was shifting beneath my feet; this wasn’t just a metaphor: the floor was silently pitching, pulled by vanishing lines at the four corners of the room.
L. had tricked me.
L. had disappeared, evaporated. L. had left no trace.
The days that followed brought only dizziness and confusion.
Every detail, every memory I thought I could hold on to, every piece of evidence I thought I could brandish was real only in my memory.
L. had left no imprint. No tangible proof of her existence.
Throughout the whole time, she’d arranged things so that she never met anyone I knew. And I’d been the perfect accomplice. I’d never introduced her to the children, or François, or my friends. I’d lived with her in an exclusive relationship with no witnesses. I had gone to crowded places with her where there was no reason anyone should remember us. She hadn’t committed any crime that required a hunt for clues or DNA. And if the idea had occurred to me to visit a police station six months after the event to explain that the sleeping pills and rat poison found in my blood had been administered without my knowledge, I’d have been taken for a madwoman.
I was a novelist who on several occasions had shown serious signs of disturbance, vulnerability, even depression.
I spent entire nights wide awake, looking for the clue, the flaw.
One evening, as I was trying to tell François about the anxiety that sometimes gripped me, stopping me breathing, as he was listening to me for the twentieth time going all the way back to the start, lavishing details, anecdotes, memories of conversations, he came out with something he probably hoped would enable me to turn the page: ‘Maybe you invented her so that you could write about her.’
That was when I realised I was wasting my time, tilting at windmills.
Of course, I wanted to read the manuscript. For several days, I pondered how I could get hold of it, or at least find out what it was about, without arousing more concerns about my mental health. For several days, I thought about giving my editor the go-ahead to put it into production and publish this risky, marvellous novel, even if it meant risking L. denouncing my deception publicly. At least then she might reappear and I could prove I hadn’t invented her.
It was tempting. A book already written, on a plate, ready to go. And good, to boot. A darker, more powerful book than all the ones I’d managed to write.
I mulled this idea over for several days, maybe for weeks.
And then one morning, I asked my editor to meet me in a café. She was worried by how tired I looked. I asked her as solemnly as possible to throw away or burn the text that she had. I affirmed in a tone that brooked no appeal that I would never publish it.
In response to her question, I admitted that I had no digital back-up. But if she valued our relationship, if she thought that one day I would be able to write another book, I asked her, begged her, to throw that one away.
Shaken by my determination, and probably also by the purple circles round my eyes, which made me look like I’d been beaten, she promised she’d do it.
I’m no fool. I know that the text will be stored in her office somewhere.
55
One morning, I found another letter in my mailbox:
Delphine,
You probably think you’re doing OK. Can move on to something else. You’re more robust than you seem. But you’re not in the clear. Believe me.
This time it was signed.
It had occurred to me that L. might be the author of those letters. But I’d been wrong. It wasn’t her. I’d rather it had been
.
That was the last one I received.
A few weeks later, Paul came home. One morning we were discussing a book he’d just finished, which had profoundly disturbed him; so this morning I was talking to my son about the way some books can haunt us for days, even weeks, and I mentioned David Vann’s first novel, Sukkwan Island – which prevented me sleeping for several consecutive nights after I read it – and the hallucinatory shock of page 128, which stayed in readers’ memories (the novel then plunges into a drama that the reader has sensed from the start, but in a way that is both terrible and completely unexpected). I got up to get my copy from the bookcase. The book is utterly black and I didn’t particularly want Paul to read it, but I wanted to confirm the terrifying memory that page had left me with. As I briefly summarised the story and told him what I’d subsequently discovered about what led David Vann to write the book, I opened my copy at page 113, which had a turned-down corner. I began to scan the lines and fell suddenly silent.
The description was, almost word for word, the same as L.’s of her husband’s suicide. As I read on, what at first seemed coincidental was plainly nothing of the sort: L. had taken her inspiration from this book, from these words, in describing Jean’s death to me. The isolation, the snow, the little cabin that was their refuge, the shot, the return to the cabin and the horrific sight she had described in the car – none of it was missing.
In a panic, I threw the book on the floor.
The two of us went out for a walk. The shiver of fear I’d felt stayed with me all afternoon.
Later that evening, kept awake by some confused intuition, I stood in front of my bookcase reading aloud, as L. used to do, the titles of my tightly packed books. All of them. Shelf by shelf.
Based on a True Story Page 24