Other Lives But Mine

by Emmanuel Carrère

  We talked about Patrice. How was he going to manage, alone with his three daughters and no real resources? The comic strips he worked on in his basement office at home didn’t bring in much; it had been Juliette’s salary as a judge that supported the family, and even though the girls didn’t lack for anything, there was a feeling things were tight at the end of the month. Of course the insurance would kick in and the house would be paid off. And Patrice would find work. Gentle and modest, he was no live wire, he wasn’t about to open a public relations firm, but you could count on him: everything there was to do, he would do. Eventually, he would remarry. A fellow that nice, that handsome, would naturally find a woman who was equally nice. He would know how to love her the way he’d loved Juliette; there was no morbid streak in Patrice, he wasn’t the type to settle comfortably into mourning. So all that would come; no need to rush things. For the moment, he was there, cradling his dying wife, and however long she took, he would surely hold her until the end, until Juliette died safely in his arms. Nothing seemed more precious to me than that security, that certainty of being able to rest until the last moment in the embrace of someone who loves you completely. Hélène had told me what Juliette had said to their sister, Cécile, the previous day, before we arrived, when she could still speak. She’d said she was content: her quiet little life had been a success. At first I thought her words had been words of comfort; then I thought they were sincere, and in the end, true. I remembered Fitzgerald’s famous dictum “All life is a process of breaking down,” and there I had to disagree. Or at least I didn’t think it held true for every life. For Fitzgerald’s, perhaps. For mine, perhaps—though I feared that more at the time than I do today. The truth is we don’t know what goes on at the last minute; there must be lives that only seem to be failures, that find their meaning in extremis or whose value we have simply missed. There must also be lives that seem a success but are living hells, perhaps even at the end, although that’s horrible to imagine. When Juliette passed judgment on her life, however, I believed her, and what led me to believe her is the image of that deathbed on which Patrice held her close. I told Hélène, You know, something happened. Only a few months ago, if I’d learned I had cancer and would soon die, if I’d asked myself the same question as Juliette—has my life been a success?—I could not have given the same answer. I’d have said no, I hadn’t made a success of my life. I’d have said I’d succeeded in some things, had two handsome sons who were alive and well, and had written three or four books that gave form to what I was. I had done what I could, with my means and my shortcomings, and I’d fought to do so: that was something, after all. But the essential, which is love, would have escaped me. I was loved, yes, but I had not learned how to love—or hadn’t been able to, which is the same thing. No one had been able to rest in complete confidence in my love and I would not rest, at the end, in anyone else’s. That’s what I’d have said at the news of my impending death, before the wave hit. And then, after the wave, I chose you, we chose each other, and now nothing’s the same. You’re here, close to me, and if I had to die tomorrow I could say like Juliette that my life has been a success.

  8

  I’m looking at four pages torn from a spiral notebook and filled on both sides with notes describing as precisely as possible Room 304 of the Hôtel du Midi in Pont-Évèque, Isère. I’d been asked to write something for a Festschrift in honor of my friend Olivier Rolin, who the year before had published a novel describing in detail various hotel rooms around the world. Each one provided the setting for a short story, the chief ingredients of which were B-girls, arms dealers, and shady characters with whom the narrator went on epic benders. His publisher had decided to pursue the conceit by enlisting some twenty writers, friends of Olivier’s, to describe a hotel room and take it from there, as they pleased. At one point in that interminable night when we were waiting to hear that Juliette had died, to distract Hélène I talked about the project and my hesitation over choosing the hotel. The playful, novelistic tone of the endeavor called for a kind of sophisticated exoticism. In that light, the Hotel Viatka in Kotelnich, Russia, was an apt choice: a classic example of the Brezhnevian style of abandonment, where not a single lightbulb had been changed since the hotel opened and where I spent all told three or four months. At the opposite end of the scale, the only other hotel I’d stayed in for any length of time was the luxurious InterContinental in Hong Kong, where Hélène had joined me during the filming of The Mustache. Meeting in the lobby, gazing from our room on the twenty-eighth floor at the panorama of the bay, gliding up and down in the elevators, we might have thought ourselves in Lost in Translation. The hotel awaiting me in Yokohama would have been something along those lines, I imagine, and I’d planned as a pleasant vacation exercise to describe my room there. If you don’t end up going to Yokohama, said Hélène, you could just describe this room instead. We can do that now, it’ll keep us occupied. I grabbed my notebook and we set to work with as much enthusiasm as when we’d rehearsed the erotic scene in my film. I wrote down that the room, approximately 150 square feet, was covered—both walls and ceiling—with yellow wallpaper. Not yellow wallpaper, insisted Hélène, a textured wallpaper imitating a loosely woven fabric that must originally have been white and was then painted yellow. Next we tackled the woodwork, the doorway surrounds, window frames, baseboards, and headboard, all painted a deeper yellow. In short, it was a very yellow space, with accents on the curtains and sheets of the same pink and pastel green found in the room’s two pictures, one hanging above the bed and the other on the wall facing it. Printed in 1995 by a company called Nouvelles Images, they betrayed the influence of both Matisse and the style naïf of Yugoslavia. Propped up on an elbow, I hastily recorded Hélène’s observations as she paced about the room counting the wall sockets, testing the two-way switches, getting caught up in taking inventory. I’ll skip the finer points: it was an ordinary room in an ordinary hotel that was, however, well and pleasantly run. The one slightly interesting (and most difficult to describe) feature was in the small entryway. From my notes: “It’s a cupboard with double access, one door opening onto the entryway and the other, at a right angle, onto the outside corridor. The equivalent of a serving hatch with two shelves, the upper one for linens, the one below for breakfast trays, as indicated by the pictographs engraved in the glass of two tiny windows that allow you both to understand what should go where and to see if anything’s there.” I’m not sure that’s entirely clear, but so what. We wondered if that kind of cupboard, rarely encountered, had a name that could replace its laborious description. Some people are good at that, they know the names of things in all—or most—categories. Olivier does; I don’t; Hélène’s a little better. The word pictograph in the above lines—I know that was hers.

  Dawn arrived. We’d finished our inventory and the phone hadn’t rung. The idea that her sister was still hanging between life and death appalled Hélène. I wasn’t doing so well either. We closed the curtains, pulled up the covers, and slept badly but a little, close together like spoons. The phone woke us at nine. Juliette had died at four.

  We joined Antoine, Jacques, and Marie-Aude for breakfast in the hotel dining room. Cécile was with Patrice and the girls in Rosier. We hugged one another in silence—this silence, when accompanied by a hand patting a shoulder, being the maximal expression of sorrow in our circles. Then we discussed practical matters such as the funeral, who would be where that day, and how to relay one another in the coming days to provide company for Patrice and the girls. Plans were already being made for them to visit this or that household over summer vacation. The next few hours were set: we’d be heading back to Rosier, then to the hospital funeral parlor—I think we simply said “to see Juliette.” Not to say our last farewells or to pay our respects to the deceased; our good old-fashioned bourgeois class disdains such euphemisms. When you die you’re dead, not deceased or departed, however dearly. Afterward, we were to go to Lyon to see one of Juliette’s colleagues. A collea
gue? On the very day of her death? Hélène and I were surprised. Yes, explained Jacques, a colleague who’d been a judge with her in Vienne and who’d been very close to her during her illness. One of the things that had brought them together was that he, too, had had cancer in his youth, and it had cost him a leg. That morning, on his own initiative, he had invited Juliette’s family, since they were all together, to come to his house so that he could talk to them about her. This condolence visit to a one-legged judge struck me as somewhat absurd, but all I had to do was go along.

  I don’t remember anything about the first meeting with the little girls who’d just lost their mother. I think they were calm, didn’t cry; there was no screaming, anyway. Then there was the visit to the hospital funeral parlor, a modern building containing a single huge space with a towering ceiling and lots of light, a kind of atrium reminiscent of the stage settings for classical tragedies and off which opened several smaller areas: viewing rooms, the chapel, the toilets (where one flushed as discreetly as possible, because the whole place was as sonorous as it was silent). We were the only visitors that Sunday morning and were welcomed by a fellow in a white coat who seated us in a corner of the atrium to explain what would be happening in the days leading up to the funeral. He was not, in fact, a medical man, but a volunteer assigned to assist families, and he described succinctly what services the hospital and public agency he represented would handle and what a professional funeral director would provide. Until that professional placed the body in its coffin, the hospital would be in charge of all visits and see to it that the body was brought from the morgue to the viewing rooms and presented as nicely as possible, meaning dressed, coiffed, sometimes made up. All that was free, the families shouldn’t hesitate to ask, because people like himself were there to help. On the other hand, especially in the summer, if the funeral was several days away more elaborate cosmetic care might become necessary. That would be provided by the funeral director and would thus cost money. The volunteer was especially careful to explain what was free and what wasn’t, repeating himself to make sure he’d been clearly understood, and when I thought about families who were less well off than Juliette’s, I found that a good thing. In a speech he must have recited word for word to all families, one sentence kept returning: “We are here to make sure that everything goes as smoothly as possible.” No doubt that sentence is a cliché in all professions that deal with death and misfortune, yet one still felt he was really doing what he could to make sure that everything did go as smoothly as possible.

  Next we were going to see Juliette, who had been prepared for our visit. Her daughters would come that afternoon. Patrice’s mother had thought to have them pick out one of Juliette’s favorite dresses, or their own favorite of the ones she’d worn. (In reality, Juliette hardly ever wore a dress, preferring loose, comfortable pants; the clothes she truly cared about were her daughters’: the girls had to look like “princesses,” that was the word she used, which might well have been why Amélie was always drawing them.) That morning, the two oldest girls had chosen the dress their mama would wear in her coffin, and we’d brought the dress with us so she would have it on when the girls came to see her that afternoon. The volunteer approved of our idea and even announced that fortunately the colleague who would soon take over from him was the acknowledged makeup specialist of their team. Marie-Aude nervously informed him that Juliette had usually worn very little makeup. That was precisely, said the volunteer, why his colleague would be perfect: he would use a light touch and give the impression that she was not made up but alive. When we left the viewing room, after ten minutes about which I have nothing to say, the specialist arrived. Informed of the family’s concerns, he took pains to reassure us and asked if one of us, a sister, perhaps, might want to help him apply the deceased’s makeup. It’s a gesture, he explained, that may seem difficult but that can also do a lot of good. And of course, if at the last minute the person could not go through with it, he would do the job himself, and no harm done. Hélène and Cécile looked at each other without enthusiasm, and in the end neither helped make up her sister. I’m thinking back to that specialist, whom we made fun of a little in the car, Antoine, Hélène, and I: a chubby guy with a lisp in pink Bermuda shorts, who with his dyed hair worn in bangs seemed to be playing a homosexual hairdresser in a theatrical farce, and it’s only now, writing this, that I wonder what could have made him volunteer on Sundays to make up corpses, guiding the fingers of their loved ones over the faces. Perhaps, quite simply, the desire to be of help. That’s a motive more mysterious to me than plain perversity.

  9

  I’ve tried to delay describing our arrival as long as I could, but here we are now, all eight of us, in the one-legged judge’s stairwell. The ancient middle-class apartment building is on a pedestrian street that leads to the Gare de Perrache, and I think, That will be convenient if Hélène and I decide to go straight to Paris from here. There’s a narrow stone staircase and no elevator, which I find strange for a man with one leg, but fortunately for him it’s only one floor up. We ring, the door opens, and we troop in one by one, introducing ourselves and shaking hands with our host, who doesn’t notice, now that the stairwell light has automatically switched off, that there’s still someone out on the landing—and closes the door in my face. I don’t know why but I find it funny (and so does he) that that’s how Étienne Rigal and I first met. And I don’t know why I’d imagined the one-legged judge as a bachelor living in a tiny dark apartment cluttered with dusty dossiers and smelling, perhaps, of cat. Instead, the apartment was spacious, bright, with attractive, well-cared-for furniture, and there was no need to glance through the half-opened door to a child’s bedroom to know that this was a family home. Étienne must have asked his wife and children to go out for a walk, however, because he was by himself. Early forties, tall, well built, in jeans and a gray T-shirt. Prominent and very blue eyes behind rimless glasses. An open face, a soft voice, with the occasional shrill note. When he led us into the living room, we could see that he limped, relying on his right leg to drag the entirely stiff left one along. The room looked out onto the street and sunshine flooded through the windows, bathing the entire floor of handsome old parquet in light. We guests sat down as couples: the parents in a pair of armchairs, Hélène and I close together at one end of a long sofa, Antoine and his wife at the other end, Cécile and her husband on some chairs. There was a bowl full of cherries on a low table, along with a tray of glasses and fruit juices, but when Étienne asked if we wanted coffee, we all said yes, so he went to make some in the kitchen. No one said a word while he was gone. Hélène got up to smoke a cigarette by a window, where I joined her after perusing the bookshelves, which revealed more personal tastes (or interests closer to mine) than those in Rosier. Étienne returned with the coffee. Although he’d used a one-cup espresso machine, all nine cups arrived—mysteriously—piping hot. He asked Hélène for a cigarette, adding, I stopped a long time ago but today is different, I feel scared. We’d all naturally left the armchair facing the sofa free for him because it was in a central position, somewhat like the witness stand in a courtroom, but he preferred to sit on the floor, or rather, to crouch on his right leg with the left one stretched out in front of him, a position that looked fiendishly uncomfortable and that he maintained for almost two hours. We were all looking at him. He looked back at us, one by one, looking at him; I couldn’t decide whether he was utterly calm or incredibly keyed up.

  He chuckled, to acknowledge his uneasiness, and said, It’s strange, isn’t it, this situation? It suddenly seems ridiculous to me, and presumptuous, to have made you come like this, as if I had things to tell you that you didn’t know about your own daughter, your sister … I really am scared, you know. I’m afraid of disappointing you, and of making a fool of myself, which isn’t a very dignified fear but, well, that’s how I feel. I haven’t prepared a speech. Yesterday I tried to sort of compose one in my head, listing the things I wanted to talk about, but that didn
’t work, I gave up, and anyway I’m not good at that. So I’m just going to say what comes into my head. He was quiet for a moment. There is one thing, he began, I don’t think you’re aware of and that I’d like you to understand: Juliette was a great judge. You know, of course, that she loved her profession and was good at it; you probably think she was an excellent magistrate, but it’s more than that. During the five years we worked together at the courthouse in Vienne, Juliette and I, we were great judges.

  That phrase, and the way he said it, caught my attention. In his voice I heard incredible pride, a pride filled with both apprehension and joy. I recognized the uneasiness; I can spot it in others, from the back, in a crowd, in the dark: they are my brothers. But the joy mixed in with it—that took me by surprise. You sensed that the man speaking was anxious, emotional, always straining toward something just out of reach—but that at the same time he already had what he needed, that he was grounded in an unshakable confidence. This confidence sprang not from serenity or wisdom or mastery but from a way of accepting his fear and using it, a way of trembling that made me tremble, too, and understand that something important was happening.

  I’ve quoted Étienne’s opening words from memory; they’re not literally what he said but close enough. After that, everything is mixed together in my mind, the way everything was mixed together in his narrative. He spoke of justice, of the way Juliette and he dispensed justice. At the court in Vienne, they dealt principally with debt law and housing law: in other words, with cases that pitted the powerful against the impoverished, the strong against the weak, although things were often more complicated—and they liked when that happened, when a dossier was not a series of blanks to fill in but a story and, in the end, a model case. According to Étienne, Juliette would not have liked people to say she was on the side of the poor: that would be too simple, too romantic; above all it would not be juridical and she was above all a jurist. She would have said that she was on the side of the law, but she became—they both became—expert in the art of applying the law justly. To do so they would spend endless hours going through a repayment plan or unearthing a directive no one else would ever have thought of. They would file briefs with the European Court of Justice arguing that the combination of interest rates and penalties charged by certain banks exceeded the usury limit and that this way of bleeding people dry was not only immoral but illegal. Juliette and Étienne’s decisions were published, discussed, and violently attacked. The two magistrates were insulted in the Recueil Dalloz, the hugely influential series of legal bulletins that publish cases, legislation, and commentary. In judicial circles, the tribunal in Vienne became an important place, a kind of laboratory. People wondered what the hell they’d come up with next, those two little lame judges. Because there was that, too, of course: they both limped, they’d both survived cancer when they were adolescents. They’d recognized each other that first day, fellow cripples, people in whose bodies something had happened that no one can understand unless they’ve lived through it. I’ve since become familiar with Étienne’s way of thinking and speaking through free associations that owe more, I imagine, to the experience of psychoanalysis than to any law school education, but at that first encounter I occasionally got lost in his sudden leaps from a technical point of law to some memory—possibly quite personal—of his handicap or Juliette’s, of her illness or his. Cancer had devastated and formed them, and when it returned to attack Juliette, Étienne had had to confront it anew as well. A space had opened up, a place near her that neither Patrice nor any family member could fill, only Étienne, and that place was what he was describing to us. To tell us what? Not glad tidings. Not that Juliette was brave, or that she fought hard, or that she loved us, or even that she died happy. Others could tell us all that. Étienne was talking about something else, something he—and we—found hard to grasp, something baffling that filled the sunny room with an enormous, crushing presence. And yet that presence was not a sad one. I felt that presence signaling to me at a precise moment, when he evoked what for him was the foundation experience, the first night. The first night you spend in the hospital, alone, having just learned that you’re seriously ill and may die and that from now on, that’s your reality. What happens then, he said, is on the order of all-out war, a complete collapse, a total metamorphosis. It’s a psychic destruction; it can be a refoundation. I don’t remember any more of what he said, but I do recall that when we were saying good-bye, while we were each, out in the vestibule, shaking his hand, he spoke to me. At no moment had he shown that he knew I was a writer but there, in front of everyone, looking me in the eye, he said: You ought to think over what I said about the first night. Perhaps it’s something for you.