Other Lives But Mine

by Emmanuel Carrère

  At eighteen, this ravishing and athletic girl had to confront the fact that she would never walk unaided again. One of her legs would be partially paralyzed, the other one completely so. She would drag them along by leaning on crutches. She wouldn’t be able to spread them when she made love for the first time. She would need help, the way she was helped to get out of the bathtub or go up stairs. One of the people who spoke at her funeral linked her vocation for justice to the injustice she had endured. When her parents had considered suing the radiology center, however, Juliette, who was already in law school, had opposed the idea. It was no more unjust to be left handicapped from the treatment than from the disease. It wasn’t even particularly unjust. It was too bad, yes, unfortunate, but justice had nothing to do with it. To come to terms with her handicap, Juliette preferred to distance herself from its cause and those who might have been responsible for it.

  Knowing her injury to be permanent, Juliette had a horror of being told gently, You never know, everything might come back. With the best intentions in the world, Patrice’s mother wanted to believe something would click into place one day and Juliette would walk again. An advocate of alternative medicine, she insisted that Juliette consult a spiritual healer for a laying on of hands, and the woman then showed Patrice how to massage Juliette’s back: from top to bottom, for a long time, and when he reached the sacrum he was to shake his hands vigorously to disperse the bad energy. For several weeks Patrice conscientiously followed her instructions, expecting some improvement. As for Juliette, she loved being massaged, but for the pleasure of it, without any hope of being cured. She finally told him this and also told him she did not want to be trundled along mountain paths in a kind of sedan chair or taken to the beaches of the Landes and urged to roll around in the waves, as if that could do her any good. There were enough things that did help her, so why go through all that other folderol? Ingenious though they might be, she wasn’t interested in contraptions that allowed someone who could not stand up to ski or climb Mont Blanc. That wasn’t for her. Patrice understood and gave up all hope of one day seeing her walk again. He had never known her without crutches, and he loved her with them.

  20

  It’s six in the evening in Étienne’s office, a few months after he and Juliette met for the first time. Both have had a hard day. They ought to have gone straight home, he to Lyon, she to Rosier, but Juliette already knows that before closing up shop, Étienne likes to sit still for a moment in his armchair, his eyes closed. He’s not necessarily thinking about his work that day or what the next one will bring—or if he is, it’s not on purpose, and he doesn’t dwell on those problems. He simply lets things go through his head, without passing judgment. That’s when Juliette likes to join him, and although he used to prefer to be alone at such moments, now he awaits her visits with pleasure. They talk, or not; they have no trouble being silent together. As soon as she arrives this evening and sits down, propping her crutches against an arm of her chair, he can tell something’s wrong. She says no, everything’s fine. He asks again. Eventually she tells him about an incident that afternoon. Incident, that’s too strong a word: a tense moment, but it affected her painfully. She’d asked a court usher to get some files from her car, and he’d gone off with a sigh. That’s all. He hadn’t said anything, merely sighed, but to Juliette that meant he found having to do things for her because of her handicap irritating. And yet, she says, I really try not to take advantage …

  Étienne interrupts her: You’re wrong. You should take more advantage. Don’t fall into that trap, don’t drive yourself crazy playing the cripple who’s pretending not to be handicapped. You need to get clear on this, decide that people owe you these little services, and by the way they do owe them to you, and they’re usually happy to do them, happy because they’re not in your position and because helping you reminds them just how happy they are. You mustn’t resent them for it—if you start that you’ll never see the end of it—but what I said is true.

  Juliette smiles; she’s often amused by his vehemence. They could stop there but this evening he doesn’t want to and asks, You’re fed up, aren’t you?

  She shrugs.

  Me too, he adds, I’m fed up.

  And when he describes this scene to me, he says again, I’m fed up.

  Then he explains: It’s a simple but extremely important statement, because it’s something you can’t let yourself say, can’t even let yourself think, insofar as that’s possible. Because if you start thinking “I’m fed up,” that leads to “It’s not fair” and “If only life were different.” Well, such thoughts are unbearable. If you start thinking “It’s not fair,” you can’t live anymore. If you start wishing life were different, that you could run like everyone else to catch the métro or play tennis with your kids, then life becomes poisoned. Such thoughts go nowhere, but they exist, and it’s no good spending all your energy trying to pretend they don’t. But dealing with them—that’s complicated.

  With each other, Étienne and Juliette have some leeway, but the rule—and they note that they both follow it—is not to talk about these things with the others. By which they mean their others: Nathalie for him, Patrice for her. In theory, their spouses can hear everything, but it’s important to hide these particular thoughts from them, because they cause pain, the pain of sorrow, helplessness, and guilt, which must not be passed on to them. But one must also be careful not to be too careful, not to police oneself too much with the other person. Sometimes, Étienne says, I let myself go with Nathalie. I blurt out that I’m sick of it, it’s too hard and too unfair to have a plastic leg, it makes me want to cry, and I cry. This happens when the pressure’s too great, every three or four years, then I’m good till the next time. What about you? You ever tell Patrice?

  Now and then.

  And you cry?

  It happens.

  While they’re talking, tears start trickling down their cheeks, tears that flow freely, without shame, even with joy. Because being able to say “It’s hard,” “It’s not fair,” “I’m fed up” without worrying that your listener will feel guilty, being able to speak and be sure—these are Étienne’s words—that the other person understands what you said as you meant it, nothing more, reading nothing else into it, is wonderful, a huge relief. So they keep talking. They know or sense that this sharing will happen only once, that they’ll never allow this again, or else it would become an indulgence. But this evening they go for it.

  Étienne says, What I do is, when I’m on the toilet, I keep score in a tennis game. I visualize the shots. I haven’t played tennis in ten years but in my head I still play it and I know I’ll miss it until the end.

  For me, says Juliette eagerly, it’s dancing. I loved dancing, I danced until I was seventeen, that’s not very long, and at seventeen I knew it was over forever. Last month, when Patrice’s brother got married, I watched the others dance and I wanted so much to join them I could have died. I was smiling, I love them, I was happy to be there, but then they played something that was popular when I had my legs, “Y.M.C.A.”—you remember: Why-Em-See-Ay!—I think I’d have given ten years of my life to dance that, for the five minutes the song lasted …

  Later, when they’ve made themselves almost giddy with these confessions, Juliette says, more seriously, At the same time, if that hadn’t happened to me, I might not have met Patrice. Definitely not. Come to think of it, I would never have even noticed him. I’d have loved a completely different kind of man: more brilliant, masterful, my match in the marriage market because I was pretty and brilliant. I’m not saying my handicap made me a deeper person, but it’s thanks to my legs that I’m with Patrice, thanks to them that the girls were born, and my girls chase away all bitterness and regret. Not a day goes by when I don’t think, I have love. Everyone runs after it. Well, I can’t run but I’ve got it. I love this life, I love my life, love it totally. You understand?

  Oh yes, says Étienne. I love my life, too. That’s why it’s so hard to tell
Nathalie when I’m fed up. Because if she hears that, she thinks I’d like a different life, and since she can’t give me one she gets sad. But saying you’re fed up doesn’t mean you’d like some other life, or even that you’re sad. You, are you sad?

  Not anymore.

  21

  They had recognized each other. They’d known the same suffering, the kind one cannot understand without having gone through it. They came from the same world. Their parents were middle-class Parisians, scientists, Christians; Juliette’s were right-wing, Étienne’s more to the left, but that difference paled next to the lofty social position both families felt they enjoyed. Étienne and Juliette had both married “beneath” themselves, as their parents would have put it (Étienne’s note: Not mine), and they’d married for real love. Their marriages were the heart of their lives, the key to their accomplishments. Étienne and Juliette were already solidly grounded before they met and would have been surprised to hear there was something missing from their lives. But when this something appeared, they welcomed it with wonder and gratitude. Étienne, true to his mania for contradiction, rejects the word friendship, but I say that what they were together was friends and that having a true friend in life is as rare and precious as true love. Friendship between a man and a woman is more complicated, of course, because desire is involved and, with it, love. On that score, there’s nothing to report, but Patrice and Nathalie both understood that for the first time someone else mattered in the lives of Juliette and Étienne, and they made their peace with that.

  Aside from that one deeply personal talk in Étienne’s office, they had hardly any private, intimate conversations. Their discussions were always about work. One can love working with someone the way one loves making love with someone, and Étienne says he’ll always miss the pleasure of collaborating with Juliette. There was no physical contact between them. They shook hands when they first met, but not in parting that time in the office or ever again. They didn’t embrace each other, either, or even nod in greeting, or say hello or good-bye. Whether they’d last been together the day before or just returned from a month’s vacation, they’d meet as if one of them had been gone only a minute to fetch a dossier from the next room. But according to Étienne, there was something carnal and voluptuous in the way they practiced law together. They both lived for the moment when the flaw is discovered, when the logic clicks, unfolding on its own. I love it, Juliette would say, when your eyes start to shine. Their styles, as judges, could not have been more different. Juliette was composed, reassuring. She always began a hearing by explaining what would happen. What justice was, and why they were all there. The principle of proof, the importance of full debate. If she had to go over her explanations again, she did. She took all the time necessary, helped those who had trouble understanding or expressing themselves clearly. Étienne, on the other hand, was brusque and sometimes brutal, capable of cutting off a lawyer by announcing, I know you, Counselor. I know what you’re going to say, there’s no point in making your plea, next case. People left his hearings in a daze and left Juliette’s feeling relieved. These differences persisted even in the style in which they rendered their judgments, Étienne told me, describing Juliette’s writing as classic, clear, balanced, and his as more novelistic: rough, uneven, with sudden changes in tone that I, frankly, could never make out; my ear isn’t experienced enough for that.

  They fought the same battles, meaning Juliette was inspired by Étienne’s crusades regarding housing law and especially consumer law, but I don’t think they were driven by the same reasons. If someone as brilliant as Étienne chooses the tribunal d’instance, the provinces, petty cases, I think it’s because he prefers to be at the top in his small arena rather than risk winding up even in second place in Paris. The Gospels, Lao Tzu, and the I Ching all urge us with one voice to “help the little people,” but when people like Étienne or me, who are much alike in this respect, adopt such strategies of humility, it’s obviously from a restless, thwarted taste for importance, and I detect in his enthusiasms a kind of possessive vanity, a desire to be recognized for accomplishments that to me seem slightly absurd—as if the literary vanity that grips me were spurred by something incomparably more noble.

  Juliette did not have such problems. Obscurity suited her; she didn’t mind that people took Étienne for her mentor and talked more about him than about her. Verdicts they had discussed at length but that were delivered by him appeared under his name in law journals. He offered several times to send some of her decisions to these journals, to put her in the spotlight, but she refused. I think what motivated her was both a disinterested love of justice and the unexpected satisfaction of being a judge after her husband’s heart. The couple often discussed politics together, the way they discussed everything else, in fact, and although they agreed on the essentials, Patrice was so suspicious of all institutions, so quick to denigrate them whatever their merits, that Juliette found herself automatically on the side of order and continuity. She did feel she’d made great progress, however, with regard to her background: she voted socialist, or for the Greens when they weren’t too much in the socialists’ way, and read the articles Patrice recommended in the left-leaning Politis and Monde diplomatique. She’d been the one to introduce him to the popular aphorism that she’d learned at the ENM: the Penal Code is what keeps the poor from robbing the rich and the Civil Code is what lets the rich rob the poor. And she freely admitted there was a great deal of truth in the joke. In taking up her post at the tribunal d’instance, she’d expected to have to rubber-stamp more often than not the workings of an unjust social order, but thanks to Étienne, there she was at the forefront of a dangerous and exhilarating struggle to defend the widow and the orphan, the pauper against the prince. She rejected such rhetoric, of course, saying she was neither for nor against anyone, intent only on ensuring respect for the law, but increasingly, when the law journals talked about “the judge in Vienne,” they meant two gimps instead of one.

  At the time when Juliette replaced Jean-Pierre Rieux, jurisprudence was taking a harder line. Credit companies disgruntled over a few left-wing judges who systematically sided with their borrowers in default were filing appeals, sending the cases up to the Cour de cassation, the Supreme Court of Appeal. No less systematically, the Cour de cassation, which is by nature conservative, began to quash the jugements en instance. The unfortunates who’d rejoiced at having neither interest nor penalties to pay were learning that they did have to pay them after all, because a more powerful judge had rapped the knuckles of their sympathetic judge. To do this the Cour de cassation used two weapons and here, sorry, things must get a bit technical.

  The first weapon is called the statute of limitations provision. The law says the creditor must take judicial action to enforce his rights within two years following the first payment received, or be thereafter barred from enforcing them, period. The idea is to keep a lending institution from suddenly demanding after ten years huge sums it has allowed to accumulate without ever attempting to bring the debtor to heel. This measure protects the borrower, obviously. What the Cour de cassation added here is a requirement that the statute be equitable, so that the same constraint must apply to both parties: the borrower, as well, thus has two years in which to contest the legality of his contract after signing it, and after two years, that’s it, he has no more right to complain. Now, I don’t know what a careful reader might think of this requirement, and I admit I might be too influenced by Étienne in my appreciation of these legal—and moral and political—issues, but I don’t see how that statute can be called equitable, because it’s still the creditor who sues the borrower, never the reverse. So all the creditor has to do is wait two years before attacking, serene in the knowledge that even if his contract is stuffed with abusive clauses, no one can say a word against it. To defend himself, the borrower would have had to know the contract was illegal upon signing it. He would have had to be perfectly informed, even though the spirit of the original law was
to prevent any creditor from taking advantage of his ignorance.

  For Étienne, Florès, and now Juliette, this trick of turning a clause intended to protect the borrower to the creditor’s profit was a serious setback. Their judgments were based on law, but when it comes to interpreting the law, the Cour de cassation has the last word, and it was having it more and more often. The statute of limitations provision could not be trotted out every time, however, so the three judges still had a bit of room to maneuver. The situation turned critical when the Cour de cassation brought out its second weapon: a decree issued in the spring of 2000 stating that the judge is not automatically entitled (i.e., under his own initiative) to challenge any infractions of the law. That’s classic free market thinking: the defendant cannot have more rights than the plaintiff; to right a wrong, the one who suffered it must make the complaint. In a lawsuit between a consumer and a credit industry professional, if the consumer does not complain about the contract, it’s not for the judge to do that in his place. All this is fine in theory, but in reality the consumer doesn’t complain, because he doesn’t know the law, he’s not the one who filed the lawsuit, and nine times out of ten he has no lawyer. Doesn’t matter, says the Cour de cassation, the job of the judge is to do the judge’s job: he should mind his own business, and if he’s scandalized, he should keep it to himself.

  Étienne, Florès, and Juliette were scandalized but hamstrung; the borrowers they’d plied with false hopes were dismayed. The credit companies rejoiced.

  One October day in 2000, Étienne is in his office leafing through some law reviews. He comes across a commentated decision by the European Court of Justice, which he begins to read casually, then with increasing attention. The matter involves a consumer credit contract stipulating that any legal actions be brought before the court in Barcelona, where the credit company has its headquarters. So consumers who live in Madrid or Seville are required to travel to Barcelona to defend themselves? The clause is abusive, that’s clear to the Barcelona judge, who denounces it. But in Spain as in France, the judge has no specific right to intervene, so he lays the matter before the European Court of Justice. The ECJ renders its verdict. Étienne reads the verdict. Even before he’s finished, he gets up and hurries down to the ground floor, to the small room next to the larger courtroom where Juliette is presiding. Opening the connecting door, he beckons her. Juliette, like an actress summoned unexpectedly from the wings in the middle of a performance, tries to ignore him, but he’s insistent. To the amazement of the court clerk, the usher, and the parties to a lawsuit over a defective human waste disposal unit, Juliette calls a recess, grabs her crutches, and hobbles into the little room where Étienne is waiting. What’s going on? Read this. He hands her the law review. She reads: