Other Lives But Mine

by Emmanuel Carrère

  There we were out on the street, the eight of us, stunned. Hélène and I decided to take the train to Paris, and the others would return to Rosier. We all embraced. We’d see one another again at the funeral. I walked with Hélène to the Gare de Perrache; we crossed the vast place Carnot. Sunday, two in the afternoon, oppressive heat. Middle-class families were dining at home; the poor had claimed the green spaces. While waiting for the train we ate sandwiches at a sidewalk café. We hadn’t spoken since leaving the others. What had happened in those last two hours had deeply unsettled but also—it’s the only word—thrilled me. I wanted to tell Hélène but was afraid my enthusiasm would seem inappropriate. Besides, I wasn’t sure that she liked Étienne as much as I did. At one point, she’d been almost aggressive with him. He’d promised Juliette, he was saying, to take her three daughters on as interns, one after the other. Just a minute, Hélène had said: It’s early days yet and we’re not going to force them, out of respect for their mother’s memory, to become lawyers if they want to do something else. It’s not a question of becoming a lawyer, Étienne had replied quietly. I was speaking only about a few days of internship, the kind kids do in high school. Several times, while he was talking, I’d felt Hélène grow impatient next to me and almost rigid. It was like watching a film you love beside someone who’s less impressed, and I understood how some of the things Étienne was saying could have antagonized her. Venturing to break the silence by saying I’d found him an extraordinary guy, I fully expected her to reply, A bit self-righteous, though … But she didn’t say that. She, too, had been moved by Étienne, or rather, she’d been moved by what he’d said about Juliette. Étienne interested her because he had been her sister’s friend and confidant. With me it was the opposite: it was because of what he’d said that I was beginning to take an interest in Juliette.

  Still, observed Hélène, what he’s saying, without saying it, is that he was in love with her.

  I said, I don’t know about that.

  The next night, the first one after Juliette’s death, I thought about what Étienne had told us and considered taking up his challenge. Although I later had many doubts about this project and abandoned it for three years (for good, I assumed), that night it clearly seemed like the thing to do. I had received a commission and had simply to accept it. Lying next to a sleeping Hélène, I was enthralled by the idea of a short narrative, something readable in a couple of hours, similar to the time we’d spent with Étienne, a text that would let others share the emotion we’d felt listening to him. The plan, for the moment, seemed quite limited in scope, quite feasible. Technically, I’d have to write it, like The Adversary, in the first person—no fiction, no special effects—yet at the same time it would be precisely the opposite of The Adversary, its photographic positive, in a way. The events had taken place in the same region, the same social milieu; the people lived in the same kind of houses, read the same books, had the same sort of friends, but on the one side there was Jean-Claude Romand, the incarnation of deception and misfortune, while on the other were Juliette and Étienne, who had relentlessly pursued justice and truth in both their law practice and the ordeal of illness. There was also this coincidence, which bothered me: Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the cancer Romand had pretended to have so as to give an acceptable name to the unspeakable thing possessing him, was the one Juliette had had at about the same time, and for real.

  Hélène, for her part, decided to write a eulogy to read at the funeral. We talked about it, and I helped her organize her ideas. What she wanted to say was that throughout what Juliette had called her quiet little life, which had been neither quiet nor little, she had always made choices. Juliette never hesitated, never went backward. She made choices and stuck with them: her profession, her husband, her family, their house, their way of living together—she had chosen everything except illness. This life was hers: her place was here and she’d never looked for another one, she’d filled this one completely. There was a point here that was important to Hélène, perhaps in contrast to her feeling that her own life was chaotic. Meanwhile, Hélène was remembering things that didn’t seem to make sense, and this upset her. Some people feed those they love; Hélène dresses them. I always wanted to give Juliette a purse, she told me, a lovely handbag, and just as I stepped into the shop I remembered that no, she couldn’t carry a handbag because of her crutches. But I could have given her a really nice backpack, instead of the crummy one she had. I could have. I didn’t like it that she carried that junk, I didn’t give her enough beautiful things. It’s horrible—the last present I gave her was that wig. And there was this: when we were little, I was jealous because she was the youngest and the prettiest. Yes, it’s true, you saw her only at the end, I’ll show you. She went and got some photo albums and spread them out on the kitchen table. I’d already glanced through them with her when we’d unpacked after moving in, but then I’d been paying attention only to Hélène. Now I looked at Juliette: Juliette as a child, a young woman, and it’s true, she was pretty. Prettier than Hélène? That I don’t know, I don’t think so, but pretty, yes, very, and not at all stern the way I’d imagined her, probably because of her handicap and her job. I looked at her smile, at the crutches never far away, and I didn’t see her as brave but as alive, fully and avidly alive. It was after seeing those photos that I spoke to Hélène about my project. I’d feared she might be shocked: her sister, whom I hadn’t known, had just died and, bang, I’d decided to do a book about her. She was astonished for a few moments and then decided I was right. Life had brought me to this place, Étienne had defined it for me, and I settled into it.

  The next morning at breakfast Hélène laughed heartily and said, You’re so funny. You’re the only guy I know who could think a friendship between two lame and cancer-ridden judges who pore over debtors’ files at the tribunal d’instance in Vienne would be a golden opportunity. What’s more, they don’t even sleep together—and, at the end, she dies. Have I got that straight? That’s your story?

  Yes, I said. It is.

  10

  This was my routine: I’d take the eight o’clock train at the Gare de Lyon, pull into Perrache at ten, and be at Étienne’s door fifteen minutes later. He’d make coffee. We’d sit down facing each other at the kitchen table, I’d open my notebook, he’d start talking. Years ago, when I was working on The Adversary, interviewing people connected to the Romand case, I avoided taking notes in front of them because I feared it might threaten any fragile bonds of confidence I might manage to establish with my subjects. Back at my hotel, I’d transcribe what I remembered of the conversations. With Étienne I had no such concerns. In general I never thought in a “tactical” way with either him or, later, Patrice. I was never afraid of saying the wrong thing or taking the wrong attitude and perhaps alienating the sympathy vital to my endeavor. When I told Étienne at the funeral that I wanted to write about him and Juliette and that now we had to talk, he hadn’t seemed at all surprised and simply pulled out his appointment book to propose a date: Friday, July 1. For our project to work he would have to tell me about his life, and he never tried to hide the pleasure that brought him. He liked to talk about himself. It’s my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too. He knew that in talking about him, I would of necessity be talking about myself. That didn’t bother him. Nothing bothered him, I believe, so I felt completely comfortable with the situation as well. It’s rather unusual to find yourself talking about not only your past but who you are, what makes you you and no one else, to someone you barely know. It happens in the early stages of an affair or in psychoanalysis, and it happened here with disconcerting ease. Étienne’s way of talking, as I’ve said, is free and associative, with abrupt leaps from subject to subject, from one time period to another. I, on the other hand, care intensely about chronology. I find ellipsis acceptable only as a rhetorical device, duly rationed and controlled by me, otherwise I can’t stand it. Perhaps because there are snags in
the fabric of my life (which I try to repair by keeping the weave as tight as possible), I need to establish markers—such as “the previous Tuesday,” “the next night,” “three weeks earlier”—and not miss any sections, so in our conversations I kept calling Étienne to order on that point, which requires that I begin this narrative by evoking his father.

  Étienne describes him as an atypical academic, curious about everything, who taught first astronomy, then mathematics, statistics, the philosophy of science, and semiology, but because he never settled into one discipline, he missed out on the bright career for which he’d seemed destined. Coming from the hard sciences, he wished to draw closer to a more human reality and to the uncertainties that come with it. In the sixties he wound up teaching autoworkers at the Peugeot plant in Montbéliard, where his wife’s family owned a massive, labyrinthine house that was impossible to heat and eventually had to be sold, to Étienne’s lasting regret. The managers at Peugeot had hired a mathematics teacher to provide some scientific education, but Étienne’s father wanted to awaken minds by teaching philosophy, politics, and ethics instead. He was fired after several months, as happened in a number of places he passed through, leaving his mark on a few noble souls. He was a typical left-wing Christian, a reader of the French philosophers and social activists Simone Weil and Maurice Clavel, and a member of the Unified Socialist Party, on whose slate he ran in the parliamentary elections in Corrèze—the family strong-hold on the paternal side, this time—against the local conservative bigwig. He lost, but still, he forced a run-off election. A Christian when with atheists, he became violently anticlerical in Christian company, perfectly ready to argue that Jesus slept with his beloved disciple John. At heart, he was a rebel intent on pissing off every level of the establishment, an activist friar equally at home on an assembly line or tramping in sandals along highways and byways, but also a respectable burgher hungry for recognition and haunted by his failures in life. In hindsight, Étienne feels his father must have spent at least ten years of his life in a deep depression. At times, his eccentricities were hard to take—it wasn’t fun hanging out with friends and running into your father in a jacket, tie, black shoes and socks, with his thin, hairy legs sticking out of Adidas shorts—but he was the least egoistical of men and his son cannot remember him ever behaving dishonorably. From Mosaic law, he had adopted the commandment to give 10 percent of his earnings to the poor, and if at the end of the year he hadn’t managed to set this sum aside, he borrowed it to fulfill his duty. He was a just man, melancholy and disheartened, but a just man withal, against whom Étienne never had to rebel, and his own choices, he claims, carry on those of his father.

  Although not a believer, Étienne follows the teachings of the Gospel and fondly remembers the chaplain of his school in Sceaux, just south of Paris, who championed the poetic writings of Dom Hélder Câmara and other liberation theologians. Étienne doesn’t think it’s an accident that three of his friends from those days became magistrates as well, men among the most brilliant and left-leaning of their generation. Like his father, in the end Étienne tried to change society, to make it more just, except that he tried to be shrewder than his old man, a reformer instead of a Don Quixote.

  Later, Étienne told me something else about his father. I had gone to see him in August in the paternal family house in Corrèze, an edifice of thick stones with narrow doors and windows that has belonged to the Rigal family since the seventeenth century. His father was the one who insisted on buying the house from a cousin and restoring it with an authenticity precluding heating and other comforts, and it was he, with his wife, who assembled those peasant furnishings, the bread bins, dark wooden side-boards, and heavy cathedral chairs with hard backs that seem straight out of a painting by Le Nain but inspire no longing to sit in one to read by the fire. Étienne remembers with pleasure his summer vacations in the house, in fact he still goes back sometimes, but he’s nevertheless convinced that his father was sexually abused there as a child. He has no evidence to back up this claim, which reminds me of an American biography of the novelist Philip K. Dick that makes the same assumption about its subject: though the author has no proof that the novelist was raped as a child, he feels that everything in Dick’s personality points in that direction, to that trauma. When I mention this to Étienne, he sees the parallel and admits that his conviction has more to do with himself than with reality; perhaps his suspicion is unfounded, maybe it’s only his imagination working up an explanation for his father’s fear of physical contact. He was a loving father, God knows, and even better, a father who was able to instill confidence in his children, but he never kissed them, never took them in his arms, and even the slightest brush against them would make him shudder as if he’d touched a snake. So perhaps he wasn’t raped, but there’s no doubt the human body disturbed him deeply.

  Did Étienne have this same problem? At first he said no, things were fine; then, on reflection, he said he’d been a solitary child at school, lost in daydreams, tormented by nightmares, and a bed wetter until he was sixteen. I’m familiar with those traits—although I did stop wetting my bed at an earlier age—and I can say that no, things weren’t fine at all.

  Early on, Étienne understood that he wanted to be a judge, a vocation that intrigues me. In high school I knew a boy who wanted to become a judge. I don’t know if he became one, but as I recall he was a scary guy. He gave the impression that when he said judge he meant “cop,” and a certain kind of cop: wily, suspicious, and perverse, a cop into whose hands you wouldn’t want to fall. Perhaps I was mistaken, though; perhaps we were all mistaken, we young readers of Charlie Hebdo, the satiric political magazine. Maybe the scary boy was simply shy, proud of his intended vocation, wounded by our mockery, and perhaps he grew up to be as remarkable as Étienne Rigal. Maybe if I’d known Étienne Rigal back then, I would have been suspicious of him, too. I don’t believe so; I’d rather think that we’d have become friends.

  One of the things that made me want to write this story is the way Étienne said, The first time we met, Juliette and I, we were great judges. He spoke with unmistakable pride and confidence. He spoke as an artist who, while knowing that his career isn’t over, that he must go on, keep striving, also knows that he has to his credit one accomplishment, at least, that will let him sleep easy come what may: he has made his mark. All the same, the idea of greatness applied to a judge perplexed me. Asked to name three great judges or even just one, I’d come up blank. Even though we may all subscribe to the conventional—and fair—idea that what matters isn’t what you do but how you do it and that it’s better to be a good butcher than a bad painter, we still generally make a distinction between creative professions and all the rest, and it’s the creative ones that usually inspire us to see excellence (defined not only as competence but as talent and charisma, too) in terms of greatness. Regarding the legal profession: a great lawyer, I could see what that meant; a great bailiff, not really. And a great judge, frankly, especially when we’re talking about a juge d’instance, a specialist not in major criminal cases but in civil disputes over property lines, trusteeships, unpaid rent—let’s just say I didn’t find the idea all that inspiring.