Unforgivable

by Philippe Djian

  Alice was first. It wasn’t enough for her to intrude upon me. Her own wreckage of a marriage wasn’t enough for her. I threatened to crack her skull open if she opened her mouth again. Or even to chuck her out, but she could not stop herself voicing her opinion about the way I dealt with my relationship with my wife, showing me just how badly I had handled things with her, just how much I now lacked dignity by involving myself in a matter that no longer concerned me.

  She forgot that her own marriage had also collapsed, that her affairs had not had the anticipated piquancy—the newspapers were going on about her romantic idylls with someone who looked the spitting image of Shia LaBeouf—she forgot that she was feeling a little lost and incapable of soothing an infant who burst into tears the moment she picked him up, she forgot that she was here, under my roof, in my house, due to some kind of miracle after the way she had behaved toward me.

  “You’re wrong to think that I wouldn’t throw you out. It wouldn’t cause me any problem.”

  “I’m sure of that. Mama was right. Mama was right when she said that the more one delved into you, the frostier you became.”

  I grabbed her by the wrist. “What are you talking about? I got on perfectly well with her. Don’t say such things. Don’t invent such nonsense. Don’t overstep the mark, Alice.”

  I let go of her; I pushed her arm away abruptly.

  “Do you think we didn’t used to talk about you, perhaps?” she replied.

  I stepped outside. “Do you think the fact that you were a writer frightened us? Do you think that it impressed us?” I walked away. “Do you think we didn’t know who you were?”

  She added something else, but I was already far away.

  Once again, I walked as far as Hendaye. The weather was fine and the beaches were still empty. I went and had dinner at Fontarabie, then I got drunk with some friends I met there. The wife of one of them kept her hand on my thigh for a good part of the evening. Her husband wanted to know what my next book was about. And she kept on saying to him: “Oh, come on now, leave Francis alone. You can see you’re annoying him. Oh, come on now, leave Francis alone with your questions. You can see he doesn’t want to answer you. Oh, come on . . .” Etc.

  Lucie-Anne and Anne-Lucie had been putting on their mother’s makeup. I looked up from my computer screen when I heard Alice’s yells. “The poor girl is at her wit’s end,” I said to myself, returning to the job in hand and trying to rediscover the particular rhythm I was trying to impress on a sentence that had been holding up the entire novel for a good twenty minutes; I had this habit, when things weren’t working out for me and in order to alarm myself even more, of turning on the timer on my cell phone.

  But she was screeching much too loudly for me to be able to compose the slightest thing.

  Touching her makeup was certainly the most serious offense one could commit in the little world of theirs, and the girls, ever since they had set eyes on this world, had been given ample warning. When I arrived, Alice was now wanting to know what had got into them, and the silence of the twins, who said nothing and were rooted to the spot, their heads sunk into their shoulders and their eyes lowered, made their mother shout even louder.

  I stayed to admire the spectacle for a moment, but the yelling caused me to flee just as surely as the faces of certain authors do; it cannot be overstated just how much a writer resembles his own style, and how blatant this is.

  What a fool I’d been to let her into my house, I told myself, while glass was shattering upstairs. That’s what happened when you hadn’t been filming for six months.

  I made myself a bowl of fat-free fromage frais for my afternoon snack. If it went on like that, she would have no voice left and her daughters would have perforated eardrums.

  I didn’t know how long my patience would hold out at this rate; Alice did not enjoy a great deal of credit in my books, nor did she have my entire sympathy. I had taken pity on her for a fleeting second and she had stormed off before I could finish formulating the details of my strict conditions. And instead of things improving, they got worse. I was entitled to some kind of nervous breakdown upstairs. I knew that often—and even in the majority of cases—bringing up a family meant cries, blood, and tears, but was I going to feel sorry for her because of this? Was I going to sympathize with the harshness of her fate?

  I made a few pieces of toast, which I spread with raspberry jam. And I was about to bite into a slice when I noticed the twins, hesitant and keeping a low profile, holding each other’s hand, their eyes glued to the object I held between two fingers, topped with such a lovely red, ruby color.

  I held out the plate to them so that if they liked these things with raspberry jam on them, they could help themselves. I put down the one I was intending to eat myself, before they bit my hand off.

  I advised them to keep out of harm’s way until the evening, to find themselves something serious to do, such as watching Gone with the Wind or starting Sense and Sensibility—which I strongly recommended personally—which would allow me time to do a little more work, and afterward I would come and see whether there was anything they needed, such as getting something to eat should their mother forget that she had two little girls to feed; they could trust me, I would not abandon them. South Park? Of course they could watch South Park—I didn’t even know what they were talking about.

  Passing by her bedroom, I could hear her sobbing quietly. In the old days, I would have knocked on her door to see whether everything was all right.

  She considered that my behavior toward her was not worthy of a father. She told me that she would soon have been there for six months and that in those six months she had seen how cold I could be, she had been able to observe how far my indifference could go. “It’s even worse than I feared,” she told me.

  She was wrong to think I did it deliberately.

  “If it’s so as to punish me, you know . . .”

  “It’s not to punish you, Alice. There’s nothing I can do. There was probably a bit of that, in the very beginning, but it didn’t last very long. Resuscitation had not been possible. I’d be delighted to inform you of the opposite, you know.”

  “I’m telling you. I know of no one who is capable of such spitefulness toward his own daughter. Absolutely no one.”

  I stood up. I was much more concerned about the fact that Judith had allowed Jérémie back into her bed; he was scarcely out of his convalescence and now had long hair, according to my sources. The story was already provoking a good deal of laughter.

  One evening I paid for a woman whom I brought back to the house. I imagined her to be a prostitute, but as we walked along I realized—in spite of the effect the alcohol had on the functioning of my brain—that she worked at the central post office.

  I guided her, somehow or other, to my study, walking through the dark and silent house with a finger vaguely on my lips and an arm around her neck.

  I needed to unwind. When she wasn’t busy pointing out my faults and my failings, Alice made some telephone calls that depressed her still further owing to the ups and downs of this roller-coaster profession. She threatened to change agents, to return to the theater, to bring a lawsuit against the firm that supplied her with babysitters; I could hear her pacing back and forth, slamming cupboard doors, wailing occasionally, or even stamping her foot.

  She made the atmosphere unbearable. I hadn’t paid for my ticket in order to have a grandstand view of the life of one of those girls one saw more or less everywhere. I hadn’t asked for anything. What did it matter that I should have succumbed to the panic of living alone or yielded to some sort of instinctive fatherly weakness? I hadn’t asked for anything. Whatever the situation.

  She had interrupted me in the middle of the afternoon on the pretext that she had suddenly run out of milk for the baby. Which was the reason why the child, at that very moment, began kicking up a terrible fuss.

  “You have the look of a man who has had a tough day,” the woman who came up to me at th
e bar had said. I had offered her a few drinks and, when my head began to loll on the counter, she had stroked my neck.

  I didn’t turn on the light because a bright, ash-colored, powdery, and absolutely wonderful moonlight was bathing this room that normally witnessed me toiling and wringing my hands.

  I undid my trousers and took them off with the greatest difficulty in the world—innocent that I was, convinced that the trials of the day have an end, that sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, etc.

  “I’m saving up to buy myself a Vespa,” she confided to me as she folded her clothes over a chair.

  Alice slammed the door so violently as she went out that a postcard I had had framed—Hemingway writing to say thank you for the anchovies—fell off the wall and the glass shattered into a thousand pieces on the wooden floor, while the slamming of the door continued to reverberate so loudly in my head that I remained momentarily stunned—my eyes closed, my underpants down to my knees, my hands clasped on the ample buttocks of the postal worker—as if struck by lightning.

  I withdrew from my partner, who was taken aback for a moment, but as far as I was concerned the whole thing was ruined and my erection dwindled almost immediately.

  The post office woman pulled up her knickers nonchalantly. She had quite pretty legs, milky white skin, and a nicely rounded belly, but it was too late, and all I really wanted to do was to have a drink and recover my spirits.

  I received Alice’s pledge—that henceforth she would never address another word to me—serenely.

  I knew that it wouldn’t be the cause of my death.

  Did I not already have one foot in the next world? I often thought of this following my separation from Judith—and Alice’s extreme bad moods, which in themselves were unimportant, only added to my vexation. Of the four women who had given meaning to my existence, two were dead, one had left me, and the remaining one refused to speak to me.

  I thanked heaven for having given me literature. I thanked literature for having given me a job to do, for having provided for the needs of my family, for having let me experience the thrill of success, for having punished me, for having made me stronger, and I thanked it today for the hand it still proffered to me, but would it be sufficient from now on? Would literature maintain the role it had played for much longer, as far as I was concerned? Now that I was alone, now that the dust was settling again.

  I scarcely went out anymore, in any case. I had soon grown tired of those evenings when kindly souls placed me opposite the obligatory single woman—wearing a low-cut dress, inclined to blush, and either silent or completely hysterical—who was supposed to suit me down to a T. I had had my fill of sympathetic looks, of ineffectual embraces, of smiles of consternation, of endless discussions as to the reasons that could have propelled Judith into the arms of a totally uncontrollable twenty-six-year-old lad; I had built up a considerable stock of encouragements, of comforting words, of invitations telling me that I was not to feel awkward and to call by, night or day, if things were going badly, if I was in a gloomy mood. How could I have explained just how unbearable I found this concern, just how much it upset me?

  It was not in the least surprising that I should not feel any better today. Added to the fiasco of the previous day—extremely frustrating, extremely unpleasant—were the expressions of disgust on Alice’s face; she pretended to believe that I had picked up some tropical disease—possibly a venereal one—and she walked away from me as the twins looked on in bewilderment.

  “One knocks at a door,” I said after two days of silence. “One knocks and one waits for permission to enter. When one has a minimum of good manners. No? It’s the proper way to behave. Is it too much to ask of you? Haven’t I the right to some private space in this house? I am in my own home, I believe. Listen. I’m going to tell you something. I don’t want to have people living in my house who sulk at me. It’s only human, isn’t it?”

  Before the anger came pure rage; her expression registered surprise and total amazement. Then she grabbed her daughters by the hand and immediately dashed upstairs.

  I waited for a few moments, leafing through a literary magazine; my comment concerning the astonishing resemblance between a writer’s physical features and his handwriting (the same adjectives applied to them exactly) was borne out daily (give me the photograph of a writer and I will tell you how he writes). After which, since there was no sign of the girls, and because I could no longer hear them, I decided to go and see.

  “Are you packing your bags?” I asked.

  Half a dozen suitcases were well and truly open, as well as the windows, the cupboard doors, the different drawers they had at their disposal—which I had already emptied once, and which she had filled again—and everything seemed to be in a huge mess.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, keeping their mouths shut, the twins glanced at me sadly while their mother, conspicuously turning her back to me, continued to fold their clothes, her jaws clenched.

  I detected a sort of confusion in her movements, however. There was clothing everywhere, almost as if a typhoon had passed through.

  “I am sorry to have a sexual life,” I said.

  She stopped in her tracks without turning around.

  Then she slowly got on with what she was doing.

  I observed that the little girls were staring at me intently.

  “Think about it,” I said to her.

  I watched her suddenly fling her arms around my neck. Weeping silently on my shoulder. I thought it would never stop; the light of the setting sun accentuated this feeling. “I’m sorry,” she sobbed. “Oh forgive me, Papa, I’m sorry.” A kind of continuous prayer that seemed to come out of a dream.

  I patted her back. I laid my hand on her head. I waited until she had finished, allowing myself to be distracted by the breeze in the curtains above her shoulder, which reminded me of a playful and invisible young animal.

  One gray, very windy morning, I was in the kitchen listening to the radio and grilling some toast, as the coffee seeped through the filter and the world’s news trickled out, when all of a sudden, looking up, I spotted Jérémie.

  He was standing on the other side of the road, by the edge of the dunes. For a second, seeing how he had aged, how he had become wizened in a year and turned gray, I stood as if dumbstruck.

  I stepped back from the window. I knew that he had been between life and death, that the bullet had missed his heart by a few millimeters, I knew about it, of course—who didn’t?—but I did not expect to see an apparition, a veritable ghost. What a shock! I’d bet he wasn’t going to start picking quarrels around the place anymore—unless he was going to select the very pale and the very puny.

  Having recovered from my surprise, I leaned out of the window again to see whether he was still there. Whether the wind hadn’t blown him away, mistaking him for a scarecrow.

  It was difficult for me to go and confront the person who had stolen my wife—even if it was the price I paid for my own neglect—but he just stood there in the wind, his hands dug into his pockets, his shoulders hunched, his eyes downcast, and I knew he wasn’t going to budge.

  I went to open my front door. I glanced around me quickly. I beckoned to him. As I watched him draw near, I could feel all my anger, all my resentment vanish into thin air, without explanation, as if by magic, and I imagined, no doubt rather clumsily, that when a woman’s waters broke she must feel as I felt at that moment.

  We stood there in the doorway for an instant, in the draft, face to face.

  “I wanted to tell you that I was here,” he eventually announced.

  I paused. “I’d been told. It’s a small town.”

  He nodded. He seemed exhausted.

  “Alice is living here at present,” I said. “With the girls.”

  “Ah.”

  “It’s best that you don’t come in.”

  “I wanted to tell you . . .”

  “Good heavens.”

  “Listen . . .”


  Behind him, long gray clouds were sailing across the sky from east to west, flying along the Spanish coast like strange and somber troop carriers, and yet the visibility was so clear that one could see as far as Cape Machichaco.

  “No, you listen to me.”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “But you did.”

  “I swear to you I didn’t.”

  “Good heavens.”

  “Not on your life.”

  “But you did.”

  Some seagulls that were flying against the wind above the road cried as they began a series of loop-the-loops.

  “Good heavens.”

  “You were . . .”

  “Oh good heavens.”

  “Thanks to you . . .”

  “Shut up.”

  “I’m cursed.”

  “Stop it.”

  I could hear the twins coming downstairs. We exchanged a final glance, then I asked him to leave. His head dropped once more, and his hair fell into his eyes. Suddenly, he tried to take my hand, but I pulled it back in time.

  I waited until he was on the road again before releasing the door handle and went about my business once more.

  “Who was it?”

  “It was Jérémie.”

  “Who was it?”

  “It was Jérémie.”

  “You’re joking. I hope you’re joking. Jérémie? But what did he want?”

  “Well, would you believe, he didn’t tell me. It was very odd. In any case, he didn’t look very steady on his legs yet.”

  “You amaze me.”

  I couldn’t do very much for him. I hoped that if his mother could see me, from her cushion of white clouds on high, she wouldn’t have held it too much against me. I hoped so. But the situation had become impossible ever since her son had become my wife’s lover. My feelings had become impossible, too.