Her face when I showed her Toph’s profile on my cell…a terrible memory. I understood right then, in that fraction of a second, that I was wrong, it was a disaster. She recognized him, I saw the look in her eyes when she identified him. Her world fell apart, she slid off her chair, and as she collapsed to the floor, she just said, “The shame.” I don’t know whether she was talking about herself, Chris, or Joe. Or possibly me. Because I was ashamed, it’s true. That’s all I can say. I’m ashamed and I’m suffering. The pervert is actually me, by all accounts. But I didn’t want this, oh no, I didn’t want it.
Afterward she had her really acute episodes, she hallucinated, hallucinating the world. She hallucinated to stay alive. But dying is a higher power. And I didn’t know she wasn’t taking her medication, that she was stockpiling it and hiding it at the foot of the fig tree.
Do what you want with me. I want only one thing: for her to live. For her to get out of this.
No.
Yes.
Yes.
Perhaps. Perhaps I do love her, yes, after all, yes, why not use the right word. I love her. She moves me. I want to take her in my arms. I think about her, I carry her in my heart, I cradle her in my memory. She touches me and captivates me, yes, I’m a captive. I want to see her. “Love is being there.” There is no other truth. And I like being there for her. I’d like to bandage her wounds. She may be mad, after all, in the way we understand the word. Certainly. But it’s the mad who heal us, isn’t it?
II
a personal story
The only way out of a personal story is to write it.
—MARGUERITE DURAS
I tell you this true story just to prove that I can.
My frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.
—JOAN DIDION
3
ROUGH DRAFT OF A LETTER TO LOUIS O.
My dear Louis,
Sorry for this handwritten letter, I don’t have a computer at the moment, I hope you’ll be able to read it.
Your message upset me. I can understand that you don’t like my title, even if I disagree. You think Go Die! is too aggressive for a cover? Too cheap? Even if I add a couplet from Corneille as an epigraph? Are you saying it’s as if I’m addressing readers, as if I’m rejecting them before they even start? Fine. I don’t think readers take titles personally, not at all, it certainly never occurs to me, but I’ll accept that—from a commercial point of view—you may be right, I don’t know, we’ll talk about this again, that’s not the most important thing. I’m far more concerned about the rest—what you say after that, about the content: that, given the situation in publishing over the last few years, it’s best to be cautious. You ask so many questions. Are you like all the rest, then? You’re afraid. You don’t want any trouble, you’re remembering recent novels whose authors have been sued, and their publishers along with them, you’ve lost a couple of court cases yourself. Once bitten, twice shy, you say.
First let me remind you you’ve won some too. Literature sometimes triumphs. “The fact that the events related were experienced by the author detracts nothing from the aesthetic dimension of the work”—don’t you find that reassuring? Mostly I’m sad that my editor—my friend—doesn’t have more faith in me. How can you think, you, Louis, that there’s no distance between fiction and reality? Or worse: that I stole this story from someone? Parasitized their life? Don’t you know what writing is? You’ve been an editor for fifty years and you don’t understand writers? We’ve been friends for twenty years, you’ve read all my books, and you want a lawyer to read Go Die!? Are you afraid someone will recognize themselves, is that it? We’re co-owners of our lives and that worries you? Are you wondering exactly how far the communal parts extend? You’re probably thinking that while I was in residence for a writing workshop in a psychiatric hospital, I milked the tragic experiences of an inmate. Is that it? Don’t you trust me? Do you think I’m completely unethical?
You’re right, in a way, but not the way you think. I’m a coward, that’s true. I don’t have the moral courage it would take to tell the precise truth—the naked truth, which is one hell of a cuckold. A banal experience I had—pitiful thing, a cuckold—a micro-event but I got lost in it. I don’t have the courage because it’s too stupid, too vulgar, too insignificant, because as a woman, as a writer, as a woman writer, I’d look like an idiot, a pathetic girl, seriously neurotic. Hence the novel, the manuscript you’ve just read. Pure fiction—or nearly—even though the clinic really does exist and I’m still running a writing workshop there. But because you have your doubts, and in order to reassure you, you and Mr. Thingy, your lawyer, I’ll tell you the real story, the true story, the one that happened to me. You should like this off-camera stuff, you, as an editor, you’ll see, it’s closely connected with writing itself, with literature. “True confessions,” that’s what we could call this. And you’re bound to like seeing me in the miserable part I play, secretly you’ll enjoy it, although you’d never admit that, it might even move you: I’ve noticed how much you gays like mature women frantically scrabbling toward their own destruction. Your idols are all aging and suicidal, they die listening to a Dalida song. What it is that so fascinates you, I don’t know: the fact you see yourself in it or that you hate yourself in it?
Above all, I hope to reassure you: in the novel you’ve just read I changed, or at least I could change, most of the names, places, and professions. Anyway, a photographer will fire the reader’s imagination better than a musician. In fact he was a singer-songwriter with dreams of releasing a single, having a song in the top ten, and I was meant to write the lyrics. But to avoid worrying you, I’ll keep the identities fictional, it’ll be easier, particularly as the whole opening of my story is pretty much identical, so you need only reread up to this page. Like my character, I created a false Facebook page and played an undercover game with—let’s call him Joe. It was very immature of me, I’ll agree. Age is a strictly administrative concept, you know. And novelists have the right to inhabit novels in real life. Anyway, if that’s what’s worrying you, I don’t think setting up a fake Facebook account is enough for anyone to file a complaint. Mind you, if it were, you’d have to charge the tens of thousands, no, hundreds of thousands of people all over the world on every dating site and social network who pass themselves off as someone they’re not, changing their age, lying about their work, their marital status, even their sex, posting photos that are twenty years old and inventing a life that’s freer and more exciting than their own. You wouldn’t believe how many people invent a character for themselves! Life’s a novel. Did you know there’s an Internet site that helps people construct another life for themselves? Not a video game or a Second Life but IRL, in real life. It provides tangible proof of the things you invent, alibis for the little lies you tell people, theater tickets for plays you’ve never seen, hotel reservations in a country you’ve never visited, a detailed report of a conference you didn’t attend, pictures of you in a Chinese newspaper dated the day you were in Pornic with your secretary for the weekend, fake photos, fake qualifications, fake memories, and fake proof of your fake life. Compared to that I’m the Care Bears. Who’s the injured party? There’s no adultery, no fraud. I haven’t taken anyone’s identity, as you’ll see, I’ve just invented one. My deception doesn’t do anyone any harm, except me. Besides, Chris did so much lying himself in this whole affair that I can’t really see him firing off about the imposture. In the ongoing fictions of our lives, in our lies and our accommodations with the truth, in our need to possess, dominate, and control other people, we’re all novelists in the making. We all invent our lives. The difference, in my case, is that I’m living the life I invented. And, like every creation, it’s broken free of its creator. If you want to be difficult you could say I’m living it only so that I can write it, that this life is only a pretext for writing. But it’s completely the other way around. Life is beyond me, it destroys me, writing is just a way of sur
viving it—the only way. I don’t live to write, I write to survive life. I’m saving myself. Writing a novel for yourself is like building an asylum.
So, for the reasons I’ve told you, I forged an avatar for myself, created my character, Claire Antunes. (Incidentally, don’t fret, the pretty brunette really was a picture chosen at random on Google Images, and sent only by private messaging—stay cool, lawyer guy, no litigation on that front. And anyway I don’t have any nieces.) That crazy little Claire lived her life through me, I hadn’t anticipated it at all, she fell in love, I really had to do something about it. And, despite this love, I was more lucid than she was, or more cynical, at least I thought I was, not so misty-eyed, more beady-eyed, I was up for the poker game, prepared to gamble in order to see. I was like a reader halfway through a crime thriller, dying to know what happened next. And, as you know, I loathe anything virtual, it makes me very anxious, the things that don’t happen frighten me far more than those that do, I need to feel the world around me. So I wanted to meet Chris for real—IRL. I, Camille, I’m more ballsy or more confident than Claire, more hotheaded than my alter ego, not so preoccupied with youth and aging, I couldn’t pass up the chance. Not that I would turn my back on the dream, quite the opposite, I spend my life dreaming, I write all my books in a dream; chaos in a bubble, the antechamber to the book, that’s my greatest pleasure. But I also like actually getting down to it, concretely, pen to paper, skin and bone. I dream of things happening. Then, in order to make them happen—whether it’s writing or loving, and whatever the cost, the price I’ll have to pay, I never think about that—I’m ready for action. Well, I was.
At first I tried to meet Chris “by chance,” and I went to wait at the Gare de l’E at Montparnasse Station (don’t worry, there isn’t really a house in Lacanau). But his father was there. All I managed to do was confirm how strong my feelings were for him. There was something dazzling about Chris, like the sun, he saturated the screen of reality, he had an imposing presence—and there he was on that station platform somehow looking as lost as an evacuated orphan. Because at the same time his vulnerability smacked you in the face, I thought he was in a bad way. Precarious—that’s the first word that came to me when I saw him: a precarious man. Do you know the etymology of the word “precarious”? Obtained by prayer. Except that I had to find another way, I wasn’t going down on my knees to beg him to love me! What I do know is that when I saw him, I wanted him. Mind you, at over forty (I changed the ages too, you saw that, his and mine—I thought that in a novel it’s like being in a film or on Meetic: it’s best for the heroine to be on the right side of the expiration date), at over forty, then, he still behaved like a teenager: his clothes, his unkempt hair, his guitar slung across his back, his daddy. But maybe that was what made him attractive, that refusal to bow to time, it hit a nerve in me. And it was the start of the summer, people were leaving Paris, I couldn’t seem to write much, Joe had left me high and dry, my daughters were far away, I needed a life-giving source, proof of life. Chris was like a promise just waiting to be kept, I remembered the gentleness in his voice on the phone, and in my daydreams that became confused with the unknown gentleness of his hands.
I knew, because Chris had told me himself, he didn’t have any money. Just seeing his father would have told me that: the stooped outline, the hunched back, the restrained greeting, the muddy color of his face under his cap—a total contrast to what life must have been like in Lacanau with Joe. So I chose a solution that had the advantage of doing Chris a favor. Because, to be honest, I felt guilty about the little game I’d been playing with him for months, falsely stringing him along—no, not falsely, that’s not the right word—stringing him along with a hidden love. I was the cause of the sadness I could see in his face. I’d run away, claiming I was marrying another man in Lisbon, leaving all his hopes dashed. He was moping about a phantom I’d cobbled together. It seemed only natural I should pay. I even pictured nothing happening between us, never meeting him, just that I would pay my dues, find my own way to reimburse the debt of love he’d spent in vain on me.
So I messaged him from my real Facebook account, the one belonging to Camille, the writer, Camilleon to my nearest and dearest (yes, I know, Louis, I can see your smile. But this went way beyond the boundaries: the chameleon was struggling on a tartan blanket). I introduced myself straight out: so I was a former friend of Joe’s, back in the day Joe had shown me his pictures and I thought they were beautiful, I particularly remembered one: an arrow drawn onto the ground with the sign TO HAPPINESS. I was looking for an original idea for a gift and wanted to give the image to a girlfriend for her birthday, was it for sale? I gave him my phone number and a friend request.
He called me soon. I was afraid he’d recognize my voice, the voice of Claire Antunes, with whom he’d had long conversations so many evenings, so I said hello in a deep voice. Yes, he sold his pictures. Two hundred euros each. “What size is that?” I asked.
He laughed smugly. “No size. At that price, I’ll email it to you and you can have it printed, and framed if you like. I’m the artist, I sell the work of art, I don’t supply the materials.” I was speechless with surprise: was this the same man who, three weeks earlier, begged me in his tender, modest voice not to forget him? Confronted with this silence at my end, he softened. “If you like I can sell you the print from my last exhibition, it’s a hundred centimeters by two hundred and mounted on a metal plate. But then that’s three hundred euros. So you’re a friend of Joe’s? I have to tell you, we had a bust-up, big time, we don’t talk anymore, I’m sorry but he’s such an asshole.”
I said quickly that I didn’t see Joe anymore either. “But you and I have talked before,” I added facetiously (quick, quick, keep this going). “Yes, one time I called Joe and he handed the phone to you, you weren’t very nice, you said: ‘Go die!’ So you see, we know each other.”
I laughed but Chris took offense, “No, surely not, you’re making this up. I’m not like Joe, I know how to behave.”
I just said, “Maybe.” It wasn’t the time to spoil the conversation. He doesn’t know himself, I thought, he doesn’t know himself at all. There are people like that, who really don’t know who they are, they’re a million miles from recognizing themselves—it’s a slow process seeing yourself, some never do. Then I thought that perhaps I really was the one who’d got it wrong, that it hadn’t been Chris with Joe that evening, it wasn’t like him.
He said he was living in Sevran but often came to Paris. “I’m taking my cousin to the airport next week, and staying in his apartment near the Porte des Lilas while he’s away. If you like we could have a drink and I can give you the photo. Then you can pay me cash, which is better.”
I said “Okay” and he said “Cool.”
He was already there when I arrived, leaning against a post at the mouth of the Métro station. I’d almost canceled the whole thing, my intuition was saying nothing I wanted to hear. The Prince Charming on the phone had sounded just like an evil toad, so many virtual relationships fizzle out. But when I saw him, I got the same vibes as at the station: he was handsome, nonchalant, anxious too, and not quite hiding it. And all the longing accumulated by Claire Antunes during that loving correspondence couldn’t be reabsorbed that quickly. The craving to touch him, smell him, make him love me had flourished independently, like a plant, it would take more than vague disappointment to pull it out by the roots. And also I’m a writer, human beings are my raw material. I have no limits in that department, you know that, Louis, I’m infinitely curious. I arm-wrestle with people’s passions. I always think I’m strong enough to stir up the molten magma, and all I could see here was something vaguely like barely glowing embers. I should have paid more attention to the familiar feeling of anxiety that goes hand in hand with the beginnings of love, a feeling that seems to be warning me of imminent danger: a sort of cement that hardens in my chest till it hurts, hampering my breathing, and for no obvious reason, as if I were missing some vital
thing that I’ve never actually had. For me, the first manifestations of desire come in the shape of anticipated pain, of grief in advance, as if my whole body were reminding me it’s going to fail—even if it happens it’ll fail because it’s already failed, it’s written in the air we breathe, and on the wall, across the city, everywhere, the already mummified body of love. But when I’m given this internal warning I don’t run away, quite the opposite, usually—at least if I’m in public—I extricate myself with excessive poise, small talk plays the part of adrenaline for me when there’s some life-threatening risk, I overplay my sociability, don’t give silence a chance, let alone the distress calls of my inner animal, I concentrate on appearing unaffected by all assaults, the beast howls unheard, my smile is a mask, I block every exit, I shore myself up to the death, I melt into the landscape, camouflaged on every level, not for nothing am I a chameleon.
That’s what I did at the mouth of the Métro station that evening, even though Claire Antunes’s chest was very much there, palpitating with desire and fear. We kissed on the cheek and headed off in search of a bar. I was secretly aroused, finding myself by his side like this when we’d been flirting on Facebook for months—and here’s something you may not know, Louis, the word “flirt” comes from the Old French fleureter, to exchange little flowers. Well, that’s exactly what we’d been doing till then, when he posted pictures of lotus flowers and daisies for me, rose-tinted stuff for the little wildflower he thought I was. He didn’t suspect a thing, of course, and how could he? He’d have actually needed to listen to my voice, to pay attention to me, to recognize me.
Who You Think I Am Page 10
