Other Lives But Mine

by Emmanuel Carrère

  Étienne’s two choices seemed like a good match, but they eventually placed him in a difficult position. Under Mitterrand, the Syndicat had managed to acquire some real clout in political circles. Its elder members, veterans of ’68 now in their forties who had hitched themselves to the left’s rising star, had commandeered important judicial positions. They could look forward to a good twenty more years in which to monopolize their cushy posts and block the careers of younger colleagues, but they didn’t mind throwing a few crumbs to a talented and accommodating beginner like Étienne. The young hope of the judicial left, Étienne was tapped for a commission on sentencing reform that might conceivably have paved his way to a ministerial position. It was a tempting offer. By his own admission, Étienne’s desire to be a judge reflected a taste for power and comfortable living, and he could hardly ignore the fact—with his acute class consciousness—that his chosen profession was losing status in the world. Judges had once had considerable standing, but in 1989, for example, the year he left the ENM, a downgrade in protocol left them ranked below subprefects, and their invitations to official receptions began to dry up. Unlike most high-ranking civil servants, whose jobs come with lodgings and an official car (especially in the provinces), judges had lost their previous perks. They worked in poorly heated premises with old rotary phones, no computers, and surly secretaries. In one generation, the leading citizen who lorded it over others became an ordinary man who traveled by métro, ate his lunch off a cafeteria tray, and more and more often this ordinary man was a woman—an infallible sign of the proletarianization of a profession. Étienne had every reason to grab the first chance he could to migrate upward to classier spheres. Just how strongly the commission offer was put to him he doesn’t say, but I know he’s too proud a man to boast and I believe it was again his pride that led him to choose, really choose to stay on as a low-level judge among the down-and-out in that grim city in the North.

  What Étienne does in his office as a sentencing judge is something like what a psychoanalyst does in his. His role is to listen and find out what the person in front of him is able to understand.

  The walking wounded are his clientele: many are heroin addicts and HIV positive. Their chances of making it are not good, so words of encouragement are in theory useless. Yet a judge can offer them anyway, words that are both true and timely, and sometimes even helpful.

  Faced with these lost souls, so beaten down, doomed from the start, Étienne discovers that the more painful their stories are, the calmer he is. Listening to the sufferings of others, he instinctively adopts the attitude that guided him through his ordeal with cancer, anchoring himself in a core of strength. No revolt, no struggle; let things—the drug, the illness, life itself—run their course. Now, too, he doesn’t hunt for the perfect thing to say; just lets the words come on their own. They may not be the right ones, but this is the only way the right ones have a chance of coming.

  Often, he talks about himself. To those who are afraid and despise themselves, he speaks of his own fear, of the degraded self-image he’d once had. To the sick, he speaks of his illness. He doesn’t mince words. His two cancers and missing leg impress the people who come before the bench, he knows that. He uses such experiences shamelessly, happy to find they serve a purpose.

  What purpose, exactly? Being more human? Wiser? Better? Étienne says he hates that idea. I tell him it seems right to me. The orthodox view, Hélène might say, a little RC, but still, right, and he’s the living proof of that.

  Meaning what? I’m a nice guy because I had cancer and got a leg cut off? You’re serious?

  No, no, I say. It’s more complicated than that, I agree: a guy can have had cancer and still be a shit or an imbecile, but in fact yes, that is what I mean. What I don’t say, just as I don’t talk about Fritz Zorn or Pierre Cazenave, is that I think his cancer cured him of what ailed him.

  I try to imagine him, this young judge hobbling along the side-walks of Béthune. He doesn’t live there, he needn’t go that far; he’s got an apartment in Lille, full of books and records. In the evening, he takes off his prosthesis and goes to bed. Alone, always alone. The medical treatments, the physical damage, the loss of his hair have put his libido through the wringer. He’s doing better now, his hair has grown back, he’s got some pep; you could say he’s an attractive man, but you can’t honestly say that it’s not a problem in life and with women to be missing a leg. The woman who will accept him as he is, the one who would have loved him with two legs but will meet and love him with only one—he doesn’t know her yet. Does he believe she will come, that something will shift, bringing love, confidence, and trust within reach? Or does he despair? No, he doesn’t despair. Even at the worst of times, he never truly loses hope. He has always kept the elementary appetite for life that made him go straight from his hellish chemo sessions at the Institut Curie to the café across the street, where he would belly up to the counter and order a huge sausage sandwich and tear into it while thinking, It’s still good to be alive, still good to be Étienne Rigal. Nevertheless, he is caught in what psychiatrists call a double bind, a twofold constraint that makes him lose on both counts. Heads I win, tails you lose. To be rejected because he’s got only one leg, that’s hard; to be desired for the same reason, that’s worse. The first time a girl let me know she didn’t want to sleep with me because of my leg, he says, it was a slap in the face. But I once heard another girl say in front of a whole bunch of people, Sleeping with Étienne would really excite me because of his wooden leg. Well, that was even harder to take, I mean it. But you have to learn to take that, too. One thing that helped me: toward the end of this long sexual drought, I had a relationship with a girl who’d been raped as a child by her father and later, as a teenager, by two strangers. She was completely terrorized by sex. I was too, at the time. So we were both terrorized, which is probably why we wound up in bed together. We did what we could to be less afraid—and it was incredible. Sexually incredible, I mean it, with fantastic tenderness and abandon, one of the great experiences of my life. When women, or boys, who’ve been raped come before me in court, I sometimes tell them about this liberating relationship. Then I tell them, It’s real, what happened to you; it’s an awful trauma, a handicap that hurts your sexuality, but you need to know that there are good people out there who will deal just fine with your handicap, and if you accept this, you’ll be fine, too.

  When I Googled “sexuality” and “handicap,” I found a site called OverGround pitched at people sexually attracted to amputees. They call themselves devotees, and some are more than that, they’re wannabes who’d like to be amputees themselves so they can identify with the objects of their desire. Wannabes who actually go through with amputations are rare; most just play with the idea, Photoshop their images so they can see what they’d look like with the stump of their dreams. Those who go all the way live a Calvary. I read one person’s account of trying for years to find an understanding surgeon who would cut off a healthy leg; in the end he mutilated his own leg so badly with a hunting rifle that amputation was inevitable. Devotees and wannabes form a shameful community that would like to throw off its shame. We’re not perverts, they say; our desires may be distinctive, unusual, but they’re natural and we’d like to be open about them. These desires, they admit, are difficult to satisfy. The ideal pair would be a devotee who found a wannabe who’d get an amputation, and both would enjoy their perfect match in perfect harmony. The Internet is good for facilitating these types of encounters—assuming they take place between consenting adults—even, as happened a few years ago, matching a man who wanted to eat someone with a man who consented (at least at the beginning) to be eaten. But this ideal conjunction is rare. For one thing, the wannabe’s vocation tends to be more phantasmic than anything else. And as for the devotee, what usually happens in reality, as with closeted homosexuals, is that he—let’s say he’s a man—is married to a woman who is completely unaware of his desires and who would be appalled if she discovere
d them. The OverGround site advises the devotee to make cautious approaches, to propose erotic games involving crutches to his companion, but it’s obvious that a taste for amputation is less “acceptable” than an interest in sodomy or urophilia and that the chances of converting anyone to this paraphilia are slim indeed. By far the most promising path for the devotee is to find an amputee. In theory, you might think that amputees, whose infirmity repulses many people, would be happy to meet those who actually find them attractive. The problem, which even a militant and proselytizing site like OverGround must acknowledge, is that most involuntary amputees—meaning most amputees—react as Étienne did when that girl said she’d like to sleep with him because of his wooden leg: they feel disgusted with such desires. So the devotee’s only recourse is hypocrisy: when courting an amputee, the devotee must carefully hide all attraction to that handicap and make the amputee feel desired in spite of it.

  It was my second visit; Étienne and I had been talking all morning. At noon he called his wife and invited her to join us at the Italian restaurant where he’d taken me the first time we’d talked. I’d only seen Nathalie briefly at Juliette’s funeral and was slightly uneasy about how she might view the bizarre endeavor her husband and I had embarked on, but as soon as she sat down on the banquette next to him, blond, cheerful, confident, my worries were over. The situation seemed to amuse her. Since Étienne trusted me, so did she, and they clearly enjoyed telling me in stereo about what in their personal mythology they called Sadie Hawkins time—an expression I didn’t understand, meaning the period during a dance or a party when girls get to take the initiative.

  Autumn 1994. Étienne is finishing his analysis. Even though nothing has changed objectively, he feels that something has opened inside him, and now it’s up to life to make a move. His analyst agrees, so they’re both prepared for the session they have jointly decided will be the last. It’s a disconcerting moment. Twice a week for nine years, you’ve told someone everything you don’t tell anyone else, establishing a relationship unlike any other, until by mutual agreement the relationship comes to an end—and this end is the crowning achievement of the relationship. Yes, definitely, it’s disconcerting. Leaving that last session, Étienne takes the train at the Gare du Nord for Lille, where later that afternoon he will be teaching his first class to a group of very young lawyers. Nathalie is among them, and they all repair to a café afterward to continue talking. Some of them adored Étienne, others loathed him. She adored him, thought him brilliant, original, an icono-clast. Moved by his gentle voice, she intuits a richness of experience behind his sense of humor, an intriguing mystery. She makes inquiries, learns where he lives and that he lives alone, walks around alone, and goes alone to a big chain store, Fnac, to buy books. She likes him more and more. She begins to think he might be interested in another young woman, but she’s not worried, because the other girl’s already engaged and anyway, even if he doesn’t know it yet, she does: he is the man of her life. She invites him to a party; he doesn’t show. The course is a short one, only a few classes, and it ends. So she goes to see him at the courthouse and explains that the students would really like at least one more class to round things out. It isn’t true, but she’ll enlist a dozen pals as extras for that supplementary session, held informally at Étienne’s apartment. Afterward, the extras vanish; Nathalie lingers and invites him to the movies. The film they see, Kieslowski’s Red, tells the story of a limping, misanthropic judge, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, but they pay no attention to this coincidence because after ten minutes she kisses him. They wind up at his place; she stays the night. Étienne realizes that something enormous is happening to him and becomes frightened. He’d been planning to leave the next day for a week’s vacation in Lyon, staying with a woman friend, and thinking to calm down, get some perspective, he leaves. During the one night he spends in Lyon he understands not only that he has fallen in love but that this love is trusting, shared, certain, and that he will build his whole life on it. He calls Nathalie in the morning: I’m coming back, do you want to meet me at my place? Do you want to live with me? She arrives with all her possessions, and they’ve been together ever since. But Étienne has something else to tell her, and it’s not good. Though he hasn’t checked for several years, not wanting to damage his morale any more, he’s fairly sure the chemo has made him sterile. Nathalie admits this is a drawback, because she does want children, but instead of balking at the problem she starts looking for a solution. She buys a book by the biologist Jacques Testart, the “scientific father” of France’s first test-tube baby, on the various methods of assisted reproduction. If none of them work, she tells Étienne, we’ll adopt. But first, he has to take the test again. She decides, organizes; he follows, dazed with admiration. Everything that weighs so heavily on his life—his missing leg, his fears, his probable sterility—she takes it on, she’ll cope with it. It’s part of the deal and the deal suits her. She goes with him when he masturbates at the medical center, and when they return for the results the following week, the secretary tells Étienne the intern wants to see them personally, which makes them nervous, but when the intern opens the door to the waiting room she smiles to see them clutching each other on the black leatherette bench, holding hands, and I smile as well, eleven years later, looking at them sitting on the restaurant banquette. I’ve had lots of bad news to announce lately, says the intern, so I feel like giving some good news: you can have a child. As they leave, they say, Well, shall we? A month later, Nathalie is pregnant.

  She is from the North and has had enough of it, and so has he. Besides, for some time now one of the other sentencing judges has been telling Étienne (with that sagacious air of someone who can see what’s good for you even better than you can) that he’s a natural for the tribunal d’instance.fn2 This colleague is a much older man, right-wing, Catholic, a real old-fashioned magistrate. Although they don’t agree on much, they respect each other, and since Étienne hasn’t any definite inclination himself, he rather likes the idea of relying on someone else’s opinion, the way one would trust to chance or the way I consult the sibylline guidance of the I Ching in similar straits. Étienne thinks it’s good to make decisions, but you can also decide to just go with the flow, to accept advice or an offer simply because you feel like it. You can resolve not to hinder the course of life by obsessing over something as contingent as what you want. As it happened, he says, I didn’t really see myself as a juge d’instance, but if M. Bussières saw me there so clearly, why not? Why not apply for that position opening up at the tribunal d’instance in Vienne? Vienne, that’s right next door to Lyon: Nathalie can practice as a lawyer in Lyon, plus it’ll be warmer there than in Béthune.

  15

  Vienne, the subprefecture of the département of Isère, is a city of thirty thousand inhabitants, with Gallo-Roman ruins, a quaint historic district, a promenade lined with cafés, and an annual jazz festival in July. In fact, Vienne is as bourgeois as Béthune is run-down. Prominent citizens, commercial and legal family dynasties, severe facades concealing inheritance battles waged in close quarters: perhaps it amused Étienne to find himself in this province right out of a Claude Chabrol film, especially since there was no question of actually living in Vienne, merely of going there three times a week, a half-hour drive from the Perrache neighborhood in Lyon where he and Nathalie found the apartment they’re still in today. Yes, it did amuse him, and his reports from the legal front made Nathalie laugh, because the center of gravity in their life was elsewhere, in this handsome apartment they enjoyed decorating and where their second child had just been born. Still, on his first day presiding in court, when the lawyer arrived thirty minutes late without apologizing, Étienne understood that a test of strength had begun that he could not afford to lose. The lawyers at the bar of Vienne had been there for twenty years, they would still be there in twenty years, their parents were there before them, and their children would be there after them, so when a new judge walked in, their first concern
was to make him understand that they owned the house in which he was simply a tenant, and they expected him to follow house rules. Étienne summoned the lawyer and said pleasantly, Today was the first time, so I did not call you on it in court, but please don’t try it again or there’ll be trouble.

  It worked.

  When he’d been a sentencing judge, his work had consisted of meeting with people in his office. In jeans and a T-shirt, he listened to them, talked to them, and came up with concrete solutions to their problems, solutions that usually had nothing to do with the law. His dealings with these people could go on for years. Now he wore a judge’s robe and sat on a dais, flanked by a clerk and an usher, also in robes, who showed him a degree of deference he found a little too formal. That same first day, there was another hitch: leaving his chambers, he gallantly stepped aside to let his female court clerk pass in front of him, which so startled her that she stopped short, as rattled as if she’d feared he was about to goose her, and he noticed afterward that she was now careful to stay far behind him until he’d crossed the threshold. With slightly trembling hands, she’d pretend until the last moment to tidy files on the table. Étienne smiled at all this solemnity, but he missed the personal relationships with ordinary people. The decisions he was making affected the lives of men and women he’d seen for five or ten minutes at most. He was working no longer with individuals but with dossiers. What’s more, he had to move quickly. The case overload meant justice had to be dispensed mechanically (this offense calling for that penalty, this contractual flaw entailing that legal consequence) and quickly, all the more so because productivity—the number of decisions rendered—was a major prerequisite for a judge’s advancement. It didn’t bother Étienne to work quickly—indeed, he likes it—but he promised himself he would never do shoddy work and would treat each dossier as a unique and singular story calling for a carefully tailored legal solution.