And the same has been true for me, up to now.
I moved to Paris later than he did. But I was in the same frame of mind. I wanted to be swept up by the crowd, I wanted to choose the people I met and no longer just put up with them because I had no choice—because in the provinces choices are limited and lives are stunted.
Now I’m not so sure of myself.
Valentine has become a Parisian adolescent, selfconfident, aware of what is at stake, clued in about which friendships to avoid and which ones to nurture; she’s learned the social codes, she’s street-smart—and above all she’s savvy, really savvy. Compared to her, at the same age, I was a goose. A goose who got roasted in the oven and carved to pieces. I’m proud of Valentine. She won’t ever be duped the way I was. I watch her. In her love affairs, her friendships, she’s the one who’s in charge. And I was the one, rather than Luc, who wanted her to be like that.
My mother trembles.
She didn’t use to tremble. Her head trembles, when she’s fixing a meal, and serving the food, and she doesn’t realize, I would like to point it out, but I don’t dare. I wonder if she’s going to tremble more and more until her brain disintegrates. That’s what I dreamed last night. I woke up with a start: I had just seen my mother in bits all over the carpet in the living room, like a broken and bleeding robot.
That night, too, I woke up with a start.
I heard voices, two of them. His voice I recognized immediately. But the other one: female. English. Annoyed. Saying something about his sister. Philippe Leduc’s sister. I grasped the situation in instant. I sat up. I didn’t need to reach for the covers. I had fallen asleep with all my clothes on. He’d switched on only the bedside lamp. The girl was in the dark. All I could see was her nightclub getup: an exact replica of Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan. I thought about certain movies, saw myself as Rosanna Arquette in After Hours: the scene was insane, and the time of night was the same, according to the alarm clock: it was 3:30. I didn’t need a diagram. I never thought he would stoop so low, but clearly with Philippe Leduc he could always go lower.
A few minutes.
It only lasted a few minutes.
I didn’t say a single word.
Today this surprises me. I could have told him off, ranted, humiliated him, foamed at the mouth—but all I felt was disgust. Yes, that’s what it was, disgust.
The disgust I felt when my grandfather, my father’s father, would hit my grandmother. I used to spend the weekend with them from time to time. He wasn’t even drunk. For him it was just normal behavior. When I told my mother about it, she refused to let me go back there. My father didn’t insist. And yet the harm was done. My grandmother, cowering, trying to protect herself while I ran out to the barn for refuge.
The disgust I felt when I heard the father of my best friend and neighbor, Claudie, yelling insanely at his wife, a poor creature who was afraid of everything. He called her a whore, a sailor’s slut, a chamber pot, there was no end to it. When I ran into Claudie, an hour later, we acted as if nothing had happened, but she knew that I knew, and she was filled with shame.
The disgust I felt toward that guy who was stalking me. I knew he had it in for me. At a party the previous month I had rejected his advances. I was at the lycée. The year before my final year. I was going down the avenue that led to the center of town. He was on a motorbike. He stopped the motor. The swishing of his tires on the asphalt. I was focusing on the sidewalk. I had been told you shouldn’t look back, because it drives them crazy. I could feel my chin trembling, but I wouldn’t cry, I would be strong. I had five hundred yards to go. His voice. My first name. The sound of the kickstand. He was running. He grabbed my arm. I wanted to shout, “What?” but the words stuck in my throat. He tried to kiss me. I hit him. He raised his hand. A man who was passing by shouted, “What’s going on? Do you want me to call the police?” The guy’s hand stayed where it was. He stepped back. He stumbled. The passerby waited by my side. The motorcycle started up. The man said, “You ought to report him.” As he rode by, the boy on the motorcycle spat and called me a whore.
All that disgust.
All the instances of disgust you experience simply by virtue of being a girl.
And that night, you added one more, Philippe Leduc.
A pretty significant one, too.
Never had I felt like such a burden.
Or so humiliated.
I started getting ready, in heavy silence. Outside, even London was asleep. I straightened my clothes, splashed some water on my face, checked that I had my documents, my train ticket, the money I needed. Very professional. I felt like I was in a film, one of those black-and-white thrillers where the heroines sleep in motels and then disappear. I didn’t feel a thing, other than an anticipation of fatigue, because it was 3:30 in the morning and I had to walk all the way to Waterloo Station, a long way, and the city at that time of night would be full of boys on motorcycles wanting to follow me. As I left the room I managed to call out, trying hard to make my voice sound bright, “Have a nice evening!” but I knew that for them, too, everything had been ruined. The girl was acting blasé, but beneath her makeup and her getup, she was worried. About me. She was wondering where I would go like that. She was drawing a kind of parallel between me and herself. A sisterhood. The word almost made me smile. As I walked by her, I whispered, “I’m not his sister, you know.” But she already knew that—of course she knew. She had figured it all out.
Suddenly I was out in the street.
It was balmy, a horribly pleasant night.
London in July. If I’d been a smoker, I would have lit a cigarette.
I sat down on the bench across from the hotel and said, out loud, “Two minutes!”
Two minutes to catch my breath. Two minutes to change my life, too. And then, of course, I burst into tears. I was instantly annoyed with myself. I didn’t want to be the caricature of the girl who’s been dumped and goes to pieces. I didn’t want to be like anyone, anymore. What I really wanted from then on was dignity and respect, and to be capable of insolence and determination.
I was sick and tired of being the ant.
I thought I’d try to find a place to spend the rest of the night—go to a park, walk through the damp grass, find refuge in a bush or under a tree, spread my towel for a mattress, use my backpack as a pillow, curl up and hope no one would approach me or attack me, and try to relax while I listened to the birds’ waking song.
But once I started walking, I knew it wouldn’t work out like that. As I walked through those London streets everything began to make sense. That girl’s expression for a start, straight out of an American movie; then Philippe Leduc’s, downcast, eyes averted. It was ridiculous. I sensed that I had to take it from there. That moment would be the sandbank—or shoal, rather—on which I had run aground, and now I would have to kick my heel against it to rise back up to the surface.
I built myself a future.
First of all, I would finish my studies: I’d been on the verge of letting them drag on and on, or of dropping them altogether, and they would have led nowhere. Now I would start learning, and then I’d learn some more. I would stop being the student who just scrapes by with average grades, and about whom people said, when they looked at the list of students who’d been promoted, “Huh, she actually passed?”
I would change where I lived, too—I’d move to a big city, where opportunities would be real and careers didn’t lead down some dead-end street. To a place where I could still meet people by chance.
And above all, I would never allow myself to be impressed.
No matter the age, gender, history, or social position of the people I met, I would immediately treat them as equals. Human beings with the same genetic heritage—vulnerable to viruses, prone to sudden illness during a romantic weekend in Amsterdam, capable of humiliating a girl by bringing another one up to the room, and probably concealing a secret life, full of inadmissible vices, moments of distress, grimaces in the mirr
or, and disgust.
Then there were my looks, obviously.
Change things: a concession I had never wanted to make until now. Start using the makeup kits I sometimes bought but rarely opened, as if they weren’t meant for me, as if I didn’t deserve them.
Go to the hairdresser’s. Get one of those boyish cuts that were suddenly cropping up in the photos in hairdressing salons.
Do something about my wardrobe.
Oh yes, my wardrobe.
Throw out anything shapeless, all-purpose, beige, brown, sea-green, gray, or blue. Start trying bright colors, accentuate the red, yellow, and orange, learn to stand out.
If I close my eyes, I can still see those London streets, that sweltering July night.
Of course I passed a few night owls, but they didn’t notice me. Just wait a few years, I thought, and then they’ll turn around when I go by. At one point I got lost on my way to Waterloo. I went in circles for a few minutes. Twice walked past the only store whose display windows weren’t protected by iron shutters. A boutique that sold herbs, and face creams made from plants, and makeup that was one hundred percent natural. It seemed ever so amateurish, like some holdover from the seventies, people living in communes—completely out of sync with the triumphalist eighties, a rotten tooth that needed pulling. It suddenly occurred to me: if I were in charge of that store, I would organize everything differently, make it modern, make it popular. No, not popular, better than that. Trendy. Upmarket.
For thirty seconds or so I saw through to my future—and then the door slammed shut. It took me more than fifteen years to open it again. They weren’t lost years. It took me that long to come to terms with everything I was feeling that night.
A desire for revenge; pride, determination, and even a sort of feverish joy. A joy that vanished the minute the sun came up. A joy which, on the train home, gave way to that electrifying hatred. Which spread all through my body. A hatred which left a lasting trace. A hatred which, much later, only Luc managed to extinguish—even though, in the beginning, all I wanted was to seduce him, the better to drop him not long afterward. To leave him reeling. Gasping. Needy. Like all the others, after Leduc and before Luc, whom I had unceremoniously dumped.
I never went back to London. I’ve visited half the planet, and I’ve always taken great care to avoid the United Kingdom.
Would I be ready to go back there now?
Would I be ready to forgive?
It still gets to me.
I may claim that it doesn’t. That it’s just some unpleasant memory I can brush aside. That would be true, too. I don’t dwell on it. But there are times when that night comes back to me. I’ll be shaving, looking in the mirror, telling myself I’ve gone downhill, that I look like an obese, wrinkled caricature of Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral—and my mind wanders as I pull at my skin, and the razor tries to restore a semblance of youth to my cheeks and my neck. Then all of a sudden, my lips pucker with a bitter taste. I can see myself outside the stadium in Aube, I’m twelve years old, and I’ve just made Karima cry, telling her that I don’t talk to foreigners. Or I’m sixteen and I’ve just told off a classmate because he’s worried about his mother, the chemo is really rough going, and I shouted at him that he was a pain, couldn’t he stop making such a big deal out of it? I don’t know what came over me. Then I’m twenty, there are two girls in a hotel room, it’s dead quiet, and one of them walks past the other and says, “I’m not his sister, you know.”
What do other people do to forget?
One day I started looking to see if there wasn’t some sort of group therapy, an Alcoholics Anonymous type meeting, where everyone would sit and hold hands and say their name—hello, I’m Philippe—and where you could off-load your most shameful memories. I couldn’t find anything. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough. That’s my problem, after all. I don’t look hard enough. I wait for the fruit to fall fully ripened from the tree. Stewed. For a while, it worked. But now I lack confidence in myself. No, that’s not exactly it, either. I don’t trust myself. That’s why I’m going to see Mathieu at the hospital.
Because Mathieu is at death’s door, and he trusts me. And it feels good.
It’s repugnant.
I could tell her, Cécile, about Mathieu. But she probably doesn’t remember him. They crossed paths only because of me. When I was going out with her, I saw a lot less of him. She must have met him two or three times at most, at parties, where they hardly spoke. He thought she wasn’t much to look at. He couldn’t understand why I was wasting my time with her. When I came back from London, I simply told him that it was over, he nodded, and we never spoke of it again.
I can’t believe it.
We can’t go our separate ways like this, with me getting to my feet, and her sitting there, and me saying, “Have a nice time in Paris!” and getting off the train. It’s idiotic, I have to do something, it’s my only chance. If only I had a business card. I’ve always been impressed by business cards. These people you hardly know, and after only a few minutes talking to them they hand you a card with their name and address, you don’t really know why, what do they expect, for you to call them? For you to go and have a drink together, and become friends or even more if you get along? And yet the fact remains I wish I had one now.
These days our kids have it easier. Manon and Loïc just tell someone that they’re on Facebook or Twitter, and the other person nods, and that very evening they’re virtual friends, and they know all about each other’s lives, their likes and interests, their professional situation. I’m not on Facebook. At one point I wanted to sign up—my kids couldn’t believe their ears. I toyed with the idea for a while and then on reflection I wondered who I would contact on a social network. Mathieu’s friends? Forgotten classmates? Colleagues I see every day anyway? It seemed pointless. I abandoned the idea. But now Paris is getting closer, and on our right you can just see the outline of Sacré-Coeur between two tall buildings, and I’m beginning to feel real panic.
I can’t go on letting things slip away from me. I can see the years ahead—like railroad tracks stretching into the distance, as far as the station. I meet people, and then they’re gone. And all that’s left is the debris they leave behind—remnants of shared lunches, hastily drunk coffees, snatches of conversation, murmurs.
It hurts.
There, in my chest.
Between my ribs.
I’m not scared. I’m used to it. It’s been waking me up at night for the last few months. I mentioned it to the doctor, he shrugged, he asked me if there was anything bothering me. It’s nerves, he added. Nothing out of the ordinary.
I’m nervous.
And nothing out of the ordinary.
That night was probably even more unexceptional than the others. Pathetic. Kathleen didn’t ask a single question after Cécile left. She just wanted to lie down and go to sleep. You could hear the birds in the little park across from the hotel. She got undressed very quickly and lay down on her back. She didn’t seem to care one way or the other about what was about to happen. It was depressing. As for me, I tried to revive a bit, but it didn’t go very far. By tacit agreement we didn’t take the experiment any further. She fell asleep almost at once. I didn’t. I lay staring at the ceiling—it had recently been repainted, it looked like a rush job. The day that had just gone by flickered past my eyes, but I couldn’t make any sense of it. I just wondered how I had come to this.
Apparently there are people who, at a certain time in their life, get the impression they’re touching bottom and then mentally, they kick the floor with their heel to go back up. I’ve never believed in that sort of nonsense. Because it’s never happened to me. I didn’t get the feeling I was headed back toward the light, either the next morning, or in the days that followed. I woke up at noon, and Kathleen had left, the room was paid for two more nights, so I hung around London. I wrote two or three letters, to Cécile, to Mathieu, but I didn’t send them, I forgot them at the hotel. I must have done that delib
erately.
I went back to France.
Life went on.
The defiance only came gradually. I knew I was capable of shabby betrayals, of low-down tricks. Whenever I started going out with a girl who was willing and eager, I tried to make her understand that I wasn’t worth it. And when we broke up, I would point out that I had warned her. But that never prevented the crying, the tears, the insults—on the contrary, the more they knew I was right, the more they hauled me over the coals.
And then at one point I just gave up.
I was twenty-seven, I was a TV and VCR salesman at a superstore, I was living in a cheap and reasonably comfortable two-room apartment; one evening, I sat by the window in the kitchen and I said to myself, Okay, I think I’ve had enough. I didn’t feel like meeting anyone—all the hoops you had to jump through, pretending to admire or understand—I would rather just fade into the background and let the world go about its business—it would be easier that way. I was tired. That’s it. Yes. Exhausted, even. I met my wife six months later. That’s what she liked about me, right from the start, my fatigue. My disillusionment. And consequently, my candor. She took up the challenge. My wife is something of a Pygmalion. She wanted to restore my fighting spirit.
And eventually she gave up.
I understand her oh so well.
But along the way, we did have two children together. That counts for something. That’s what I keep telling myself, every day. It’s not nothing. I still count for something.
Ouch.
It’s almost as if someone were snipping at my lungs with very fine scissors.
I have to stretch—as a rule, that eases the pain.
Like that, yesss.
The 6:41 to Paris Page 9