Other Lives But Mine

by Emmanuel Carrère

  For “the boys,” their five weeks of scouting in Sri Lanka became a magical memory. Backpacking with a travel guide for the hip and frugal, they traipsed around by tuk-tuk, train, and bus, lucking into village festivals and chance encounters, living on the spur of the moment. Philippe was proud to show his island to Jérôme and then a little irritated, but in the end even prouder, to see that after a few days his son-in-law was managing better than he was himself. With his even temper and gentle sense of irony, Jérôme seems to me the ideal travel companion: letting things happen, never in a hurry, treating setbacks as opportunities, seeing every stranger as a possible friend. More excitable, more talkative, Philippe whirled around his tranquil broad-shouldered companion the way the frantic half of a comic duo plays up to the straight man in a buddy comedy. It must have amused them both no end, when chatting with other travelers on guesthouse verandas, to surprise everyone by announcing they were father- and son-in-law.

  They headed south. They took their sweet time traveling the coastal road from Colombo to Tangalla, a stretch we covered by taxi in half a day, and the more the road twisted and turned as it left the capital behind, the more their lives seemed to stretch out between the surf and the coconut palms into something timeless, Edenic. The last real city on this coast is Galle, the Portuguese fortress where Nicolas Bouvier had ended up alone forty years earlier to live a long season in hell in the company of termites and ghosts. Having no particular affinity for hell, Philippe and Jérôme went on their way whistling. After Galle, there are only a few little fishing towns: Weligama, Matara, Tangalla, and, just beyond that, a little spot called Medaketiya, a handful of houses in green or pink brick corroded by the salt spray and a jungle of coconut palms, banana plants, and mango trees that drop their fruit right onto your plate. On the white sand beach: outrigger canoes in bright colors, nets, shacks. No hotel, but a few of the shacks serve as guesthouses and the guy who owns them is called MH. Well, he actually has one of those Sri Lankan names with at least twelve syllables, without which a man has no substance on this earth, but to make life easier for foreigners he calls himself MH, pronounced as in English: Em Aitch. Medaketiya and MH’s guesthouses were the dream of every beach bum in the world. It was the beach, the end of the road, the place where you finally settle in. Smiling folks, easygoing, who won’t cheat you. Not many tourists, and those few are like you: individualists, quiet, jealously guarding this secret spot. Philippe and Jérôme spent three days there swimming, dining in the evening on the fish they’d caught that morning, drinking beer, and smoking joints while congratulating each other on the success of their scouting expedition: paradise on earth did exist, they’d found it, now all they had to do was bring along their wives.

  When they announced to MH at the end of their stay that they would soon be back, MH responded politely with the Sri Lankan equivalent of inshallah, but all four of them did show up the following year, and the next year, and the year after that. Their lives slowly organized themselves around two poles, Saint-Émilion and Medaketiya. While Philippe managed to spend three or four months in Medaketiya, the rest of the family was more tied down and came only on vacation. (Isabelle, for example, who spent much of her time at her boutique in Arcachon, was back home in France when the tsunami hit on that Boxing Day in 2004.) In Medaketiya, Philippe always stayed with MH, who gradually became a close friend and even visited them all once in the Gironde. The trip was not a huge success. Out of his own setting, MH was ill at ease and did not become a convert to les grands crus bordelais. So it goes.

  Philippe eventually left the guesthouse to take up quarters in a bungalow that he rented from MH by the year and that he and Isabelle fixed up as they pleased, making it a real home. They had a house in Medaketiya, friends in Medaketiya. Everyone knew them there and loved them. Juliette was born and they brought the baby with them to Medaketiya. Along with his grown sons, MH also had a little girl named Osandi. Three years older than Juliette, Osandi quickly learned how to take care of her: she was her big sister.

  What Philippe loved best was to go out there a month before the others and live alone in Medaketiya, knowing they would all be joining him soon. He enjoyed both the solitude and the happiness of having a family: a wife who suited him perfectly and vice versa, a daughter so marvelous that she’d managed to marry a man who’d become her father’s best friend, and a granddaughter who was the image of her mother at that age. Enough said. Really, it was a good life. Philippe had known when to take risks—the move to Saint-Émilion, a new profession, his divorce—but had never chased pipe dreams or broken anyone’s heart beyond repair, and he no longer wanted to conquer anything. He just wished to savor what he already had: contentment. He shared with Jérôme a trait rare in someone his age, a slightly sardonic way of looking at go-getters who plot and fume and stress themselves, always jockeying for position, never satisfied. Philippe and his son-in-law were men who did their work well, but once it was done and the reward received, they relaxed, enjoying the fruits of their labor instead of taking on more work to make more money. They were fortunate in that they had enough to be satisfied with their lot, but above all they had the wisdom to actually be satisfied, to love what they had and not crave more. They allowed themselves to live at a leisurely pace without feeling guilty, to carry on a relaxed and amusing conversation in the shade of a banyan, sipping beer. We must cultivate our garden. Carpe diem. To live happily, live hidden, as a French proverb says. That’s not how Philippe puts it, but it’s how I understand him, and as he speaks I feel far away from such wisdom, I who live in dissatisfaction, constant tension, running after dreams of glory and laying waste to my loves because I always imagine that one day, somewhere else, I’ll find something better.

  Philippe was thinking, I’ve found the place where I want to live, where I want to die. I’ve brought my family here and here I’ve found a second family, MH’s. When I close my eyes in my wicker armchair, when I feel the wooden floor of the bungalow’s front porch beneath my bare feet, when I hear the coconut fiber broom MH wields every morning swishing over his sandy yard with such a peaceful, familiar sound, I tell myself, You’re home. In your own house. His housekeeping done, MH will come join me, calm and majestic in his scarlet sarong. We’ll smoke a cigarette together. We’ll exchange a few casual words, like old friends who need not speak to understand each other. I believe I’ve really become Sri Lankan, Philippe remarked to MH one day, and he remembers the friendly but somewhat ironic look in MH’s eyes: You think so, huh … Philippe had been a trifle irritated, but he’d seen the point: he’d become a friend, yes, but he was still a foreigner. His life, no matter what he believed, was elsewhere.

  Today Philippe might well think, My granddaughter died in Medaketiya, our happiness was destroyed here in a matter of seconds, and I don’t ever want to hear of this place again. But that’s not what he thinks. He thinks he will finally prove to his dead friend MH that his life is indeed here, among them, that he’s one of them, that after sharing with them the sweetness of life he will not turn away from their misfortune, will not pick up his marbles and say, So long, maybe we’ll meet again someday. He thinks about what remains of MH’s family, about their destroyed homes and those of their fishermen neighbors, and he says, I want to stay by their side. To help them rebuild, begin living again. He wants to make himself useful. What else can he do with himself?

  3

  We don’t know when we’ll be able to leave. We don’t know where Juliette’s body was taken—to the hospital in Matara, perhaps, or to Colombo. Jérôme, Delphine, and Philippe will not leave Sri Lanka without her, and we won’t leave without them. Matara is too far to go to by tuk-tuk, but the hotel manager announces at breakfast that he has arranged for Jérôme to ride with a police van heading in that direction. Hélène immediately offers to accompany him and Jérôme immediately accepts. I believe I should have offered to go, it’s a job for a man, and I watch them leave with a shameful pang of jealousy. I feel like a child left home by adults
who are off dealing with grown-up things, the way Jean-Baptiste and Rodrigue must have felt, left on their own for the past forty-eight hours while Hélène and I have been concerned almost exclusively with Philippe, Delphine, and Jérôme. The boys have spent their days holed up in their bungalow rereading old comic books, joining us only for meals they eat in silence, sulking and feeling out of place. I suddenly see that it must be hard for them to be part of a cataclysmic event like this and yet be sheltered as if they were little kids. I suppose that seeing nothing can be more traumatizing than seeing corpses and that Jean-Baptiste, at least, is old enough to go to Medaketiya with me and Philippe, who is busy with his plans to help out and wants to evaluate the situation for himself. I’m a little reluctant to leave Rodrigue with Delphine, but she insists that he’ll be no problem, so we set out.

  The tuk-tuk gives the hospital a wide berth, but not wide enough to spare us the stench of death. When I catch a distant glimpse of the band of shipwrecked tourists milling around beneath the banyan, I feel yet again like a survivor in a zombie film, driving past a listless gathering of the living dead, who follow us with their empty eyes. The main street is eerily calm. We reach the marketplace where Philippe told Jérôme and Delphine of Juliette’s death, then drive down to the beach at Medaketiya, a field of reeking black mud from which protrudes the debris left by boats, houses, fences, uprooted tree trunks, and an occasional stretch of wall, still standing. Out among the ruins, people are busy dredging, searching, recovering all manner of objects: a basin, a fishing net, a chipped plate; this is all they have left. Everyone recognizes Philippe when we appear. They come up to him a few at a time, and it’s practically the same scene over and over: they hug, they weep together, and in garbled English his friends deliver their news, which is essentially a litany of the dead. Philippe has nothing to tell them; they already know about Juliette, Osandi, and MH, but he’s hearing for the first time about his neighbors, and with each name they mention he lets out, like those around him, a kind of moan. He wasn’t boasting when he claimed to know everyone, to have been adopted by them all. He mourns these Sri Lankan fisherfolk as if they were his relatives. He tries to explain to each survivor that though he must leave now, right away, with Delphine and Jérôme, he will return soon, after finding some money, and will stay a long time to help. It seems very important to him to tell them this, and important for them to hear it; in any case, they all hug him again. We move from one pile of wreckage to another, from survivor to survivor, embrace to embrace, until we reach MH’s little property. There’s nothing left of the guesthouses, and of the bungalow Philippe rented, only a few floor-boards and a shower bucket remain, along with part of a wall decorated with a brightly colored mural of coconut palms, nets, and fish. Delphine had painted it last year with Juliette. They’d both taken great pains with it; Juliette had been three, proud to be helping her mother. Philippe sits down in front of the painting, surrounded by rubbish. Jean-Baptiste and I step back a little and watch him.

  Would you do the same thing, in his place? Jean-Baptiste blurts out.

  Would I do what?

  If your four-year-old granddaughter were dead, or Gabriel and I, your sons, if we were dead, would you do stuff for the fishermen of Medaketiya?

  I hesitate. I don’t know.

  Well, says Jean-Baptiste, I don’t think I’d give a damn about any fishing families in Medaketiya.

  After a little thought, I say that giving a damn is either proof of incredible generosity or a survival strategy, which is how I prefer to think of it. That just seems more human. Sometimes thinking of yourself is what is most human. Caring about humanity in general when your child is dead? I don’t believe that, but I don’t think that’s what Philippe and Jérôme are concerned about. I believe they’re trying to survive Juliette’s death. And most of all, they want to save Delphine.

  Back at the hotel, I try to reach Hélène on her cell but she doesn’t answer. At lunchtime, she and Jérôme are still not back; after waiting a bit, we eat without them. For the last two days, the Italians running the hotel have been beyond reproach: they are feeding and lodging everyone, showing the same consideration to paying guests and penniless refugees, and although the meals are growing skimpier for lack of supplies, the service remains as casually elegant as it was before the catastrophe. Nervous, uneasy, I check my watch. I wouldn’t admit it for the world but the truth is, I see the situation this way: my wife has gone off to live an intense experience with another man. I, who two days ago found her glum and dull, now see her as the heroine of a novel or an adventure film, the brave and beautiful journalist who in the heat of action holds nothing back. In this novel or film, I am not the hero, alas; I see myself rather as the insipid husband, a cautious and caustic diplomat, perfectly suited to cocktails and garden parties at the embassy but who, when the Khmer Rouge surround the place, fails to measure up, dithers, waits for others to make decisions for him, and when his wife goes off bravely to the front lines to stare death in the face, watches her leave with someone else. I feel increasingly anxious, so to take the edge off waiting, I return to The Scorpion-Fish. I’m reading a chapter that describes Matara as a village of particularly redoubtable sorcerers when I come across this sentence: “If we knew how vulnerable it makes us, we’d never dare to be happy.” This does not concern me, since I have never dared to be happy. I play a game of chess with Jean-Baptiste; with Rodrigue, I collaborate on a series of fairly grotesque people drawn on paper we fold in such a way that we can’t see what the other has created. It’s a game I taught him, inspired by the Surrealists, called Exquisite Corpse, and when Rodrigue repeats the name I tell him to lower his voice. Hearing something in my tone, he understands immediately, glancing ruefully over at Delphine.

  When I talk with her later, she tells me about her life in Saint-Émilion. She’s always loved nature, has never imagined living anywhere but in the country. And has never tried to assert herself or be independent by working, either: she’s been a stay-at-home mother and has no hang-ups about it; she and Jérôme have divided up the traditional tasks in a natural and even modern way. Jérôme worked, she took care of Juliette, the house, the garden, the animals. Juliette adored the animals, especially the rabbits, which she insisted on feeding herself. Jérôme would come home every day for lunch and take his time, time to chat and relax with his wife, to enjoy the meal she’d prepared, to play with their daughter. He worked, yes, but at his own pace, always available to his wife and daughter, to his father-in-law, to their handful of friends, and to a few close clients who were an extension of the inner circle within which flourished the family’s happiness. Listening to Delphine, I study her: blond, gracious, charming, guileless. Her father says that she looks like the singer Vanessa Paradis—or rather, and he insists on this small point, that Vanessa Paradis looks like her. It’s true, but even though I saw Juliette only once, for half an hour, what I really think is that Delphine looks like her daughter. I try to imagine their life, so peaceful and different from my own. Delphine describes it calmly, but as if she were sleepwalking, as if it were all in the past.

  Later, Ruth arrives at the hotel. After spending forty-eight hours outside the hospital without eating or sleeping, she’s incredibly weak and she has been brought here more or less by force. In front of her sits a sandwich she hasn’t touched; the oldest of the Italians running the hotel comes to announce that a room has been prepared for her. He insists gently that she should go lie down, sleep a little, but she shakes her head. When she was under the banyan, she didn’t want to move. Now that she’s been uprooted and planted in this armchair, she doesn’t want to move from there, either, and certainly not to go to bed. She thinks that if she falls asleep, Tom won’t be able to come back. To make it possible for him to return, she must remain awake. She would really like to go sit on the beach right where the wave separated them, where their bungalow was, and stay there, staring at the horizon, until Tom walks alive out of the ocean. She sits up straight when she says that,
as if she were meditating, and you can imagine her waiting on the beach like that for days, weeks, without eating or sleeping or speaking, breathing more and more slowly and quietly, ceasing little by little to be human, turning into a statue. Her determination is frightening; you can sense that she’s quite close to passing to the other side, into catatonia, living death, and Delphine and I understand that our role is to prevent this. Which means convincing her that Tom will not return, that he drowned like the others. Two days have passed; he’s almost certainly dead. Trying to help Ruth the way Jérôme is helping her, Delphine tells her own story. She tells Ruth what others have been saying in her presence, something I haven’t heard her say, however, until this moment: her little girl is dead. She says the words in her schoolgirl English: My little girl is dead. Ruth asks only one question: Did you see her dead? Delphine has to say yes, and Ruth replies, Then it’s not the same. Me, I haven’t seen Tom dead. As long as I haven’t seen him, I won’t believe he’s dead. Believing that would be like killing him.

  Ruth doesn’t grasp much of what’s said to her, but we can get her to talk, it’s a way of maintaining a connection. She is a social worker, Tom a carpenter. She refuses to believe in his death, but she says, He was a carpenter. The past tense is already eating into her story. She and Tom have known and loved each other since they were teenagers. Married last autumn, they left the day after their wedding to spend a year traveling around the world. They knew what they would do when they returned: have their first child—they wanted three—and begin building their house. In a village not far from Glasgow, they’d gone into debt to buy a bit of land with a tumbledown stone barn Tom intended to restore. This would probably take around two years, because Tom would be able to work on the barn only in his spare time, so meanwhile they would live in a trailer. The baby would spend its first year there, but after that they and their children would have a house, a real one, all their own, which neither Ruth nor Tom had when they were children because they’d come from uprooted rural families and had grown up feeling lost in the city, without any real attachment there. Tom and Ruth were alike, with similar stories, and to hear Ruth tell it life hadn’t been easy for them. They had the same fear of drifting, of living an unwanted, unchosen life, but they had found each other and promised to stay together for better or worse, to help each other come what might. Together they were strong, they had a plan: they would build their life and not let it simply drift along. Before devoting all their energy to this plan, before tying themselves down at home through their children, work, the repayment of their loans (all responsibilities they looked forward to shouldering), they had decided to give themselves this year of freedom, to see the wide world, just the two of them. After that they’d buckle down and keep going, working hard in a Scottish village halfway between countryside and industrial suburb where it rains three days out of four. They would have had their world tour, though: backpacks, bus stations, tropical sunrises and sunsets, odd jobs at every stop to keep their savings intact (a month washing dishes in a pizzeria in Izmir, another month at a naval shipyard in southern India), and priceless images, memories that would last them a lifetime. They could even see themselves, an old couple in the house that Tom built, the house where their children would have grown up, where their grandchildren would visit, looking at the photos of that great adventure of their youth. But if Tom isn’t with Ruth anymore to share them, all memories and plans have become impossible. Youth is already over for her, and without Tom she will have no more use for old age. The wave carried away her future along with her past. She’ll have no house, no children. It would be futile for us to tell her that at twenty-seven her life is not over, that after a period of mourning she will meet another man with whom something else will be possible. Because if Tom is dead, all Ruth can do is die.