I think Juliette suffered more from this contempt than he did, because she was indeed her parents’ daughter and couldn’t help seeing Patrice through their eyes. She wasn’t the type to pretend to herself. She’d chosen him with her eyes wide open. But before she had, she’d hesitated. She must have imagined, very thoroughly, in a bright and even cruel light, what spending her life with Patrice would be like. On the one hand, the limits this choice would impose on her. And on the other, the bedrock support he would give her. The certainty of being loved absolutely, of always being carried.
Even Patrice began to ask himself questions. The law, her parents, the need to succeed—none of that was for him. With Juliette, he was too far from his roots. And anyway, was it reasonable to settle down with a handicapped wife without ever having known another woman? He told me that one day they talked and came to the reasonable conclusion that they weren’t made to live together. They told each other why. Patrice talked the most, it was always like that with them. He said whatever went through his head, whatever he felt in his heart, freely, whereas with Juliette you never really knew what she was thinking. After talking, they resolved to separate, and began to cry. They cried for two hours in each other’s arms on the narrow bed in the little room in Cachan, and while they were crying they each realized that there wasn’t any sorrow they couldn’t survive together, that the only inconsolable sorrow was precisely the one they were inflicting on themselves that very moment. So they said no, they would not separate, they would live together, would never leave each other, and that’s exactly what they did.
Juliette let her parents know she accepted their disapproval of her choice but required them to respect it, and the couple moved into a tiny studio apartment on the ninth floor of a crummy building in the 13th arrondissement. When the elevator was out of order, which was often, Patrice carried Juliette up the stairs. A few floors below them was a center for ex-cons, for whom Juliette did pro bono work. She made it a point of honor not to ask for money from her family, and the two of them lived on very little: Juliette’s disability pension and the freelance work Patrice did on comic strips in a magazine for phone card collectors. Later they lived in Bordeaux, where Juliette studied at the ENM almost ten years after Étienne. She was brilliant and, as always, much loved. One of Patrice’s drawings, representing Marianne—a national symbol of France—with Juliette’s features, was chosen as the emblem of her graduating class. Amélie was born. When Juliette graduated from the university, she chose civil law, the tribunal d’instance, and Vienne, because she’d made sure the courthouse there had an elevator.
18
The more Patrice told me, that afternoon beneath the catalpa, the more astonished I was by how much he trusted me. It wasn’t me in particular; he would have trusted anyone else the same way, because he’d never learned to be on his guard. An unknown quantity, a writer brother-in-law, the author of supposedly dark and cruel books, had turned up at his house to write another one about his dead wife and had asked him for the story of his life, so he’d complied. He didn’t try to make himself look good, or bad, either. He played no role, didn’t care what I thought. He wasn’t proud or ashamed of himself. Consenting to be defenseless gave him great strength. About him as well, Étienne says with admiration: He knows where he is.
Amélie and Clara came home from school and the four of us went off on bikes to pick up Diane at her nanny’s house. Patrice had a seat on his bicycle baggage rack for Clara, but Amélie already knew how to ride on her own without training wheels. We crossed the street, passed the school, then the church, and turned onto the little road leading to the cemetery. It was really the country there, with hills, dales, cows. Shall we go say hi to Mama? suggested Patrice. We leaned the bikes against the cemetery wall; Patrice picked up Clara. Juliette’s grave was covered with loose earth and surrounded by big round stones brightly painted by the village children, who had written their names on their stones. I thought back to the funeral.
Patrice had read a simple, moving text in church, saying he had lost his beloved. Étienne had then read some fierce words telling us death was not a gentle thing. Finally Hélène had read the text I’d seen her compose, saying that Juliette’s quiet little life had been neither quiet nor little but fully chosen and lived to the full. There’d also been a kind of homily delivered by Juliette’s godfather, who was a deacon and had lost his own daughter to cancer. Étienne told me later he hadn’t liked the kindly Catholic smiles with which the man had announced that Juliette was now with the Father and we should rejoice in that, but Étienne also understood that some people were comforted by such thoughts, so why not? The funeral procession had followed the route I’d just taken with Patrice and the girls and had lacked solemnity, but that was all right. There had been no hearse; pallbearers had simply carried Juliette’s coffin. Many children and young couples were part of the procession, for it was the funeral of a young woman. Things had gotten slightly out of hand at the graveside because Patrice, who had also been irritated by the deacon’s speech and what he considered sanctimonious crap, had announced that now we could all say good-bye to Juliette in whatever way we wanted. Back at the church, he’d already removed the cross lying on the coffin. Like his family, Patrice believes in sincerity and spontaneity in all circumstances; that’s how he lives and it’s good for him, but without the decorum provided by religious ritual, the ceremony fell apart. Instead of everyone filing by to toss a bit of earth on the coffin, people wandered around at a loss, not daring to say a personal farewell, perhaps not even knowing how. Some mourners crowded around the grave, and the children tried to find places for the stones they’d been told to paint in school. To reintroduce a little order, one believer intoned a Hail Mary, but only a few others joined in. Most people left the cemetery to gather on the road in small groups, silent and upset; some were already smoking, no one knew whether the funeral was over or not, and it was the gravedigger who decided the matter by bringing over his backhoe to fill in the grave and make an end of it.
Whenever Patrice bears the responsibility for a social occasion, he handles it poorly, I think, but alone with his daughters and me he was completely natural, his words simple and correct, and I felt such visits to the cemetery must be soothing to the girls. In her father’s arms, Clara was quiet, but Amélie made what seemed her customary tour of the neighboring graves, which she found less pretty than her mother’s. I don’t like marble, she said, I think it’s sad, and her slightly affected tone suggested both that she was repeating something she’d heard a grown-up say and that she said it at every visit, because the repetition made her feel better. I looked at her and wondered if I would still be in touch with her when she was an adult. If I were to write this book, then probably yes. Would I still be with Hélène then? Would we have had some joint role in the girls’ education, as Hélène so fervently hoped would happen? Would we have taken them off each year for a vacation, and not just that first summer after their mother died? In ten years, Amélie would be a young lady in whose life I would perhaps have a role, a kind of uncle who had written a book about her parents in which she had appeared as a little girl. I imagined her reading this book and felt that while I was writing it, she and her two sisters were looking on.
After dinner, I read a story to Clara to put her to sleep. It concerned a little toad who is all alone in the dark, frightened by strange noises, and goes to seek comfort in the bed of his mama and papa. Me, said Clara, I don’t have a mama anymore. My mama’s dead. That’s true, I said, and could think of nothing to add. I thought of my own children, of the stories I read to them when they were little. Hélène and I had almost had a child, which she’d lost right after her sister’s death, and I thought sadly that we probably wouldn’t ever have another. I remembered Clara during the week she and Amélie spent with us that summer. She kept saying, When we get home, maybe Mama will be there. She couldn’t help imagining that at some point the door would open and her mama would be waiting on the threshold. I thought
it was a good thing, those frequent visits to the grave: at least there was a place where her mama was, a place that wasn’t everywhere and nowhere. In time, she would no longer be behind every door.
After the girls were in bed, Patrice and I went down to his studio in the basement, where he had made up a bed for me. He talked about a comic strip he was planning, one of his usual stories about knights and princesses, to be entitled “The Paladin.” Really? The Paladin? I smiled, and he laughed a little ruefully, but proudly, too, as if to say, I am what I am. In the meantime, he had a commission, some sketches for a story set in a kennel with a half dozen dogs, familiar character types like the grumpy Rottweiler, the stuck-up poodle, the muscle-bound Dalmatian who likes to show off, the adorable mutt—who I suspected would be the noble hero of these tales. When I said as much, Patrice gave that same little laugh, meaning, Nice going, you got me: paladin and simpleton, that’s me. I looked at the drawings, one by one: a comic strip for children, a bit old-fashioned but drawn with a delicate and confident hand, and with incredible modesty. I should say, with incomprehensible modesty, because it’s a trait I can’t understand. I’m ambitious, I worry, I have to believe that what I’m writing is exceptional, that it will be admired, and I get excited believing this but collapse when I lose faith. Not Patrice. He enjoys drawing but doesn’t believe his work is exceptional and doesn’t need to believe it to live at peace with himself. Neither does he try to change his style. That would be as impossible for him as changing his dreams: he has no control there. I decided that in this respect he was an artist.
While we were examining his drawings, the phone rang. Ah! Antoine! exclaimed Patrice. So, are congratulations in order? They were. Laure, Antoine’s wife, had just given birth to their first child, a son. Arthur? That’s a great name, Arthur. Standing next to Patrice on the phone with Juliette’s brother, I was afraid he might mention I was there. Even though Antoine had other things on his mind, I imagined his surprise (and especially that of his parents) at hearing I’d come to spend a few days in Rosier without Hélène. Although I hadn’t asked Patrice to keep quiet about my visit, I’m certain he never lies, so he was lying by omission by not mentioning I was there.
19
Marie-Aude and Jacques are the last people to whom I spoke about this book. Patrice’s mourning doesn’t intimidate me, but theirs does. I was afraid that my questions would revive their grief, which is absurd because their sorrow never sleeps and time will not soothe it. They combat this grief not by talking but by taking care of their granddaughters every chance they get, with great tact and attentiveness. Patrice, Étienne, Hélène, and I, all in our own ways, believe in the therapeutic virtues of talking. Jacques and Marie-Aude, like my parents, distrust words: “Never explain, never complain” could be their motto. So I waited until I’d almost finished this project before I even told them about it and then asked them to help by talking about what they are best equipped to recall: Juliette’s first illness. Even between themselves, they don’t speak of it, or of her second illness and her death, but in the hope that this book might one day help the girls, they accepted. When they began, they were sitting in armchairs in their living room, a good distance apart, but Jacques went over to sit next to his wife when she moved to the sofa, and he took her hand and held it all the way through. Whenever one of them spoke, the other watched with tender anxiety, fearing a collapse. Tears flowed; they regained control of themselves, apologized. It’s their way of loving each other, and of carrying on with their lives.
Juliette was sixteen and beginning her next-to-last year at her lycée when she showed her mother a large, painful lump on her neck. She was taken immediately to the Hôpital Cochin in Paris, then to a radiology center where the diagnosis was Hodgkin’s lymphoma, cancer of the lymphatic system. Jacques and Marie-Aude believe not in the unconscious but in the random activity of cells, so it would have been both useless and cruel to discuss the psychosomatic hypothesis with them, especially since in their daughter’s case there isn’t much to support it, although Patrice says that at the end of her life Juliette did speak a few times of a feeling of abandonment in her childhood. The more urgent question was about her treatment. Juliette’s parents were extremely knowledgeable and very demanding, and their daughter’s medical team found them difficult to deal with; in the end the doctor caring for her left the choice between radiation and chemotherapy up to them. Now they find it monstrous to have been made responsible for this decision and therefore burdened with a futile and tormenting regret: Had they chosen the other option, might the outcome have been different? Juliette had radiation, a less onerous treatment that did not make her hair fall out. After a few months, she was considered cured. She returned to dancing, school, took part in a fashion show. No more was said of her illness; not much had been said about it in the first place. Her brother, Antoine, fourteen at the time, never once heard the word cancer.
The following summer, in Brittany, she began to stumble and lose her balance. Usually so lively, she now seemed cranky, not at her best. In reality, she was trying to hide—and especially from herself—the fact that her legs were beginning to fail her. Her story is like Étienne’s, except that her cancer did not return. The initial examinations were inconclusive; she had no less than three lumbar punctures, which must have been excruciating. Her parents feared she had multiple sclerosis. Finally, a neurologist at the Hôpital Cochin told them the truth: the problem was a lesion stemming from her radiation therapy. Though they’d tried to isolate the area of her back to be exposed to the ionizing radiation, two radiation fields had accidentally overlapped. Injury to the spinal cord in the overirradiated zone meant that nerve impulses had trouble reaching the legs, causing her increasing loss of control. But is there nothing you can do? asked the devastated parents. We can try to limit the damage, replied the neurologist, but his tone was not encouraging. Wait for the situation to stabilize. What’s lost is gone; what we need to see now is how far this will go.
Neither Jacques nor Marie-Aude dared tell Juliette what the neurologist had said. They remained evasive, waited to be alone to break down in tears. Jacques kept remembering the day six months earlier when he’d accompanied Juliette to her treatment and, waiting behind the door, had heard the radiologists arguing about where to center the radiation on the grid traced on his daughter’s back. He’d heard a loud voice, which had worried him, and, thinking back, he decided that was when the mistake must have been made. Because there had been a mistake, and it wasn’t having chosen radiation over chemo. The radiation had definitely cured Juliette of her lymphoma, except they’d done it wrong and their negligence was costing his daughter her legs. Jacques and Marie-Aude laid siege to the radiology center, attempting to make the chief physician acknowledge his responsibility. He was, they recall, a cold and self-important man, both indifferent to their distress and disdainful of their scientific competence. He brushed away the Cochin neurologist’s diagnosis, denied any malpractice, and ascribed Juliette’s handicap—which it now clearly was—to a “hypersensitivity” to treatment for which no one was responsible, only nature. He practically said it was her own fault. Jacques and Marie-Aude hated that pedantic cold fish more than they’d ever hated anyone before, yet they vaguely realized that what they hated in him was their own helplessness. When they asked to see their daughter’s medical file, the doctor sighed and promised to send it to them but never did. Later they were told it had disappeared.
And Juliette, all this time, what did she think? Hélène remembers she suffered from what the family called her “migraines,” spending entire days lying on her bed in the dark. No one could talk to her or touch her; all sensory stimuli were becoming agonizing. Hélène also remembers something her mother once whispered to her: Juliette might wind up in a wheelchair, but she mustn’t be told or she might stop fighting. Marie-Aude herself blurted out to me at one point that she didn’t dare leave for work in the morning for fear that Juliette, in spite of all her courage, might “do something foo
lish.” The atmosphere at home was infinitely worse than it had been the previous year. Hodgkin’s lymphoma is a serious disease, but the survival rate is around 90 percent and although the danger had been real it had also been quickly contained, then eliminated. It had been a passing incident, whereas now they were sinking into catastrophe.
The word irreversible was taboo: Jacques and Marie-Aude described that year as a constant battle, first to avoid saying the word, then to find the courage to say it. What they refused to tell their daughter, they first refused to admit to themselves. And then they had to. Juliette was about to come of age, and they began to understand the need to compile a dossier that would allow her to obtain financial assistance, a disabled person’s card, a driver’s license for a specially modified car, and other benefits that would now become part of her life. The dossier contained a declaration confirming the existence of a lesion, stabilized but permanent, in her spinal cord. The couple postponed as long as they could having to collect these documents, sign them, and hand them to Juliette, who signed them without comment. She received her disability card a few days before her eighteenth birthday.
Other Lives But Mine Page 15