Other Lives But Mine

by Emmanuel Carrère

  (And then there’s the Gospel according to Matthew: “Judge not …”)

  To explain his vocation, Étienne says three things. That he loved the idea not of defending the widow and the orphan but of saying what is right and dispensing justice. That he wanted to change society, sure, but also to live a bourgeois life, a comfortable life, free of financial worries. And finally, that judges exercise power and that he has, if not a taste for power, then some taste for power.

  When he said that he hadn’t a taste for power but some taste for it, I didn’t really get the nuance, but it illustrates a characteristic I like and have learned to recognize in Étienne. Even on the day of the family visit, I noticed it. Every time someone interrupted Étienne, not to contradict him but to confirm, complete, or comment on something he’d said, he would shake his head and murmur that no, that wasn’t quite it. Then he’d continue, saying almost, but not exactly, the same thing. Thinking a little along his lines, I believe he needs to disagree with people in order to agree with them. For example, when Juliette’s father mentioned Étienne’s friendship with Juliette, Étienne picked up on that word: Juliette and he were not friends, they were close, and that wasn’t the same thing at all. When I knew him better, I told him that to me friendship seemed like the right word for what existed between him and Juliette and if that wasn’t it then I didn’t see what friendship could be. While remaining alert to his obvious fondness for precision, I began teasing him about his mania for quibbling over whatever people said to him by saying almost the same thing back, and it amused him to be teased about that. We’re always pleased when people who love us pounce on our shortcomings as extra reasons to love us. From then on, he consented more and more often to agree with me.

  11

  It’s January 1981. I’m twenty-three, fulfilling my military obligation with alternative service in Indonesia, where I’m writing my first novel. Étienne is eighteen, in his last year of high school in Sceaux. He knows what he wants to do next: law school, then l’École nationale de la Magistrature (ENM), the nation’s school for the training of judges and prosecutors. Étienne plays tennis. He’s still a virgin. And for several months now, his left leg has been hurting. A lot. And more and more. After a few inconclusive consultations, there’s a biopsy; when the results are in, his father immediately drives Étienne to the Institut Curie in Paris. His face is solemn, distressed; he doesn’t use the fateful word but tells his son through gritted teeth that there are suspicious cells. In a basement room, several doctors are gathered around the boy. Well, young man, says one, we’ll try to keep you whole.

  You won’t be going home. You’re staying here.

  What’s going on?

  You didn’t understand? exclaims his father, upset and sorry that he’d been too vague. You have cancer.

  Visitors and family members must leave at eight. Étienne is alone in his hospital room. He’s had dinner, a pill to help him sleep; soon the light is turned off. It’s nighttime. The first night, the one he spoke about the day we met. And this time he tries, because it’s important, so important, to tell me everything.

  He’s lying in bed in his underpants; his father hadn’t thought that events would move so swiftly, that his son would be staying in the hospital, and he hadn’t brought any overnight things. Étienne lifts the blanket to look at his legs, his two legs that seem normal, an athletic teenager’s legs. In the left one, in the left tibia, there’s that, working to destroy it.

  A couple of months earlier, he’d read Orwell’s 1984. One scene had particularly unnerved him. Winston Smith, the hero, is in the hands of the political police, and the officer interrogating him explains that his job is to find, for each suspect, the thing that scares him the most. People can be tortured, have their nails or testicles torn away, but some victims won’t give in, you can’t identify them in advance, and the heroes aren’t always the ones you might think. Once you’ve identified a man’s deepest fear, however, you’ve won. Heroism isn’t possible anymore, no resistance is: when you can bring in his wife and child and ask if he’d rather have that done to him or to them, then no matter how brave he is and even if he loves his wife and child more than himself, he’ll say, Them. That’s how it is. There are horrors, different for each of us, that we cannot face. As for Smith, the officer has investigated and discovered that in his case the appalling, unbearable thing is a caged rat held up close to his face, a famished rat that leaps through the opened door to devour him, its sharp teeth biting his cheeks, nose, soon finding the choicest morsels, the eyes, and tearing them out.

  That’s the image that comes to Étienne on his first night. But this rat is inside him. Eating him alive. Starting with his tibia, then moving up the leg; soon it will be cutting a path through his gut, along his spine, right into his brain. And the rat is an image more than a sensation; strangely, Étienne doesn’t feel a thing, as if his body and the relentless pain tormenting him for months had gone, but the image is so unbearable that he wishes he could die to break free of it, because he’d rather the light in his brain went out and everything stopped and he himself just disappeared—if that would get rid of the rat. Trapped in his horror, Étienne manages to tell himself that he has only one way out: he must find something else. A different image … other words … If only he can get through the night, something will happen. Maybe it won’t save him, but it will release him from that. Thanks to the sleeping pill, he half dozes, while the rat gnaws and prowls. Étienne goes to sleep. Wakes up to sheets drenched with sweat. And at dawn, the rat is gone. For good. In its place, a sentence has appeared, which he can see as if it were written on the wall right before his eyes.

  Étienne does not reveal this dazzling sentence. He produces others I take for approximations, paraphrases, displaying none of the force and clarity he ascribes to the one that came to him that night. I record in my notebook: The cancerous cells are you, just like the healthy ones. You are these cancer cells. They aren’t a foreign body, a rat that’s gotten inside you. They’re part of you. You can’t hate your cancer, because you can’t hate yourself. (I think, without saying out loud: Of course you can.) Your cancer isn’t an adversary, it’s you: il est toi.

  I understand what Étienne is telling me: that these phrases and the one still hidden behind them were decisive. I believe this, I know he’s evoking something that rang absolutely true to him, but for the moment, I can’t understand what he experienced. Just wait, I think; we’re not finished with the first night …

  The image of the rat, however, is familiar. Except that the animal gnawing away inside me is a fox. Étienne’s rat is from 1984; my fox is from the story of the little Spartan boy I read in Latin class. The boy had stolen a fox he kept hidden beneath his tunic, but as he stood in the Assembly of the Elders, the fox began to bite his belly. Rather than free the animal and reveal his theft, the boy let it eat into his stomach, without flinching, until he died.

  I told Étienne that I had once gone to see the elderly psychoanalyst François Roustang. I spoke to him about the fox, which I still hoped to chase away by discovering how and why, toward the end of my childhood, it had lodged itself under my sternum to compress and chew on my solar plexus. Roustang shrugged. He no longer believed in explanations or even in psychoanalysis, only in rightness of action. Let it out, he said. Let it curl up there, on the couch. That’s all you can do. You see, there it is. Lying quietly. And when I left, as he shook my hand, he added, You can leave it with me, if you like. I’ll take care of it for you.

  For a while I thought that would work. I didn’t return to fetch the fox; it came back on its own. These days it leaves me alone, because it has either fallen asleep or gone away (I hope) forever, but at the time of my conversations with Étienne, it was still making me suffer. And it helped me to listen to what he had to say.

  They began chemotherapy right away in an effort to save his leg, and save it they did. Étienne bravely endured most of the treatment, but what he couldn’t bear was the idea of losing his h
air. He was an edgy teenager, tormented, his virility still in flux. He found girls as frightening as they were attractive. So when his hair began to fall out, when his reflection in the mirror began to morph into a bald zombie without eyebrows or pubic hair, all those assurances that everything would grow back quickly meant nothing, the anguish was too strong, and he stopped the treatments. Secretly, on his own, without telling anyone. He had just a few half-day appointments left to go, not the full three-day sessions he’d had at the beginning. Although his parents offered to drive him, he said he preferred to take the métro, but then he didn’t. At the Institut Curie, he explained that he was continuing his treatment at a clinic in Sceaux; he even asked them for a prescription, and he must have been convincing because no one called his parents to check that the protocol was being properly followed. He spent these free hours wandering around Paris, browsing in the book-stores of the Latin Quarter. What was going through his mind as he cut his chemo the way one cuts useless classes at the end of the year? Was he aware of the risk he was taking? He says yes. He also says that when he relapsed he wondered, If I’d stuck with the chemo to the end, would I have gotten sick again? Would they have cut off my leg? He still has no answer and says he quickly lost interest in the question.

  He passed his baccalaureate exam in June and that summer, rather than rest as he’d been advised to do, he found a job at a sporting goods store, at the tennis racket counter. He was forbidden to play tennis because if his tibia broke it wouldn’t heal, which didn’t stop him from playing tennis and even soccer, a sport with the maximum risk of getting kicked, with spikes no less, and right in the tibia. Whether he was showing the normal bravado of an adolescent who’s had a brush with death and wants to live on his own terms or whether there was a darker impulse at work here—that’s another question he doesn’t answer.

  After a year, he was pronounced cured. He needed simply to have checkup exams every three months, then every six. He would go to the Institut straight from his law courses at the Panthéon. When he went in for his checkups, he’d look at the cancer patients in the waiting room with real disgust. One day, he remembers, they brought a woman in on a stretcher who must have weighed less than eighty pounds, with a face as wrinkled as a shrunken head. She was seen immediately and Étienne thought angrily, Why does she get to go ahead of me when I have so much to do in life, while all she’s got left is to die? He wasn’t ashamed of this harsh attitude—on the contrary, it fed his pride. Sickness revolted him, sick people did too, and all that had nothing to do with him anymore.

  12

  He was twenty-two when it came back. His leg ached, the same one, hurt so much he couldn’t sleep and walked only with difficulty. I find it hard to believe when he assures me neither he nor his parents immediately feared a relapse, but, well, they were so convinced he’d been cured they thought a pain in his leg, even a bad one, couldn’t be anything more serious than a pulled muscle or tendinitis. He did not, in any case, recognize the pain. But back he went to the Institut Curie for his X-ray and this time the results—when he returned for them three days later—were clear: the words cancer and amputation said everything.

  The medical meeting with the medical team was at one o’clock and that morning at nine, at the Panthéon, he was to take his oral exam for his master’s degree. The examiner was late; he had still not arrived by eleven. Étienne went to the secretary’s office to explain his situation, that he had to be at the Institut Curie at one. It was important: they were going to decide whether or not to cut off his leg. Étienne has nothing against theatrics and relished the secretary’s sudden discomfiture. She suggested, given the circumstances, that he receive special dispensation to postpone the exam, but he nixed that, so she scrambled to find another examiner. Étienne feels that he did well on his oral and, considering both his qualifications and the compassion his predicament should have inspired, he’s still surprised that he received only a low-average grade.

  At the Institut, the verdict was definitive: cancer of the fibula, amputation as soon as possible. As they had four years earlier, the doctors wanted to hospitalize him immediately so they could operate the next day, but Étienne was insistent: there was a party the following Sunday for his girlfriend’s twentieth birthday and he intended to go. It was agreed that he would return to the hospital Sunday evening to be operated on the following morning.

  I try to imagine not only his state after the consultation but that of his father, who had accompanied him. There’s a worse nightmare than learning your leg will be cut off: it’s to learn that your twenty-two-year-old son is going to lose his leg. What’s more, his father had suffered in his youth from osteal tuberculosis, so he wondered if Étienne’s cancer could be somehow connected to that, and this highly unlikely hypothesis added guilt to his already appalling feeling of helplessness. Distraught, he began talking seriously about having his own leg amputated to replace his son’s lost limb. Étienne laughed and said, Don’t want your old leg, you keep it.

  He asked his father to drive him to the home of Aurélie—his girlfriend, who also lived in Sceaux—and pick him up later. He’d been with Aurélie for two years; they’d had their first sexual experiences with each other. She was very pretty, slender, and even now he thinks they might well have gotten married one day. They lay down on her bed; he said to her, Monday they’re going to cut my leg off, and he finally began to cry. As night fell, they lay in each other’s arms for hours, or rather, he lay in hers as she held him as tight as she could, caressing his hair, his face, his whole body, perhaps even the leg that would soon be gone. She whispered tender words to him, but when he asked her if she would still love him with only one leg, she was honest. She replied, I don’t know.

  A strange thing happened the night before the party. Without telling his father where he was going, Étienne borrowed the family car and drove into Paris, to a sauna on the rue Sainte-Anne, to have sex with a guy. He had never done that before, never did it again, he doesn’t feel at all homosexual but that evening he did it. It was one of the last things he did with his two legs. Did what, exactly? As in certain dream experiences, he doesn’t remember any of it, or yes, some peripheral details. The drive to Paris. Parking the car in a lot on the avenue de l’Opéra, then looking for that street where he’d never been before, paying the entrance fee, undressing, stepping naked into the steam room where other naked men were tentatively brushing up against one another, sucking one another off, taking one another up the ass. Did he suck anyone off, was he sucked off? Did he take anyone up the ass, was he taken? What did the guy look like? All that, the heart of the scene, is gone from his memory. He knows only that it happened. Then he drove back to Sceaux, found his parents still awake, and talked to them, in that neutral tone you use when there’s been a catastrophe and there is nothing, in fact, you can say about it.

  I don’t know if the preceding paragraph will appear in the book. Étienne was clear on this point: Everything I tell you, he said, you can write down, I don’t want to exert any control. Still, I’d understand perfectly if, while reading the text before publication, he were to ask me to keep quiet about that episode. Out of concern for those he loves rather than shame, because I’m sure he’s not ashamed: it’s a strange thing to have done, one he can’t fully explain to himself, but it isn’t a bad thing. Anyway, even a bad action—I don’t think he’d be ashamed of that, either. Or he would, but he’d consider the shame a good thing to mention as well. He’d simply say: I did it, I’m ashamed of it, that shame is part of me, I will not deny it. The dictum “I am a man and nothing human is alien to me” strikes me as the last word in wisdom, or at least close to it, and what I love in Étienne is that he takes it literally. In my opinion that’s what gives him the right to be a judge. He doesn’t want to edit out anything that makes him human, uncertain, fallible, magnificent, and that’s also why, in this account of his life, I don’t want to cut anything either.

  (Étienne’s note, in the margin of the manuscript: “No p
roblem, keep it.”)

  Aurélie’s birthday celebration was not a party just for young people. Her friends were there, but also her parents and her parents’ friends, all ages mixed together. It was an afternoon affair, in a garden full of flowers. A show had been rehearsed; Étienne was to sing. He sang. The pain was such that he had to lean on crutches. Everyone there knew he was going into the hospital that very evening to have his leg amputated in the morning.

  At around six o’clock, he was lying beneath a tree, his head on Aurélie’s lap, while she stroked his hair. Sometimes he looked up at her face. She’d smile at him, saying softly, I’m here, Étienne.

  I’m here. He’d close his eyes again. He’d had something to drink, not much; he was listening to the murmur of conversation around them, the buzzing of a wasp, the car doors slamming in the street. He felt good and would have liked that moment to go on forever, or for death to take him like that, without his even knowing. Then his father came to get him and said, Étienne, it’s time to go. Today he still thinks about what it meant for his father to have to say, Étienne, it’s time to go. It seems an impossible thing to do and yet he did it. Those words were said, those actions taken calmly, but after all, Étienne says, there was nothing else to do. Except, yes, actually: he could have begun screaming, struggling, yelling No, I don’t want to! Like certain people condemned to death and waiting in their cells when they hear those same words: It’s time to go. But no, people helped him get up, and he got up.