Other Lives But Mine

by Emmanuel Carrère

  One December morning, Patrice awoke to the sound of labored breathing: next to him, Juliette was weeping and choking. He tried to calm her. Between spasms, she gasped out that she didn’t know what was happening to her but felt it was serious. Patrice made an emergency appointment with an internist in Vienne, and since it was Saturday and the girls wouldn’t be in school or with their nanny, the whole family had to go. During the consultation, Amélie and Clara drew pictures in the waiting room. The doctor sent Juliette to have an emergency chest X-ray. To distract his increasingly restless daughters, Patrice took them to a bookstore, where the girls soon wreaked havoc on a shelf of children’s books. With Diane wailing in his arms, Patrice patiently reshelved the books in his daughters’ wake, apologizing to the store clerk, who fortunately had children of her own and understood completely. Father and daughters returned to the radiologist’s office and, armed with the X-ray, they all went back to the internist, who seemed concerned and sent them on to Lyon for a different scan. They drove off, but they’d spent all morning with the doctors and the girls hadn’t had lunch or a nap, Diane needed changing, all three were screaming away in the backseat, and Juliette in the front was in no condition to soothe them. It was hell. They waited again at the hospital in Lyon for the scan, but luckily there was a playroom for children, with a pool full of balloons. Every ten minutes an elderly lady asked Patrice where she was and he said, In the hospital, in Lyon, in France. He was so overwhelmed that he hadn’t had time to be worried but when the diagnosis arrived—a pulmonary embolism—he was surprised to feel relieved. A pulmonary embolism is serious, but it isn’t cancer. Juliette was sent by ambulance to the Clinique Protestante de Fourvière in Lyon and there put on intravenous anticoagulants to dissolve the blood clots blocking her lungs. Patrice took the girls home, then returned with some clothes and toiletries for Juliette, who’d be spending a few days in the clinic. Before leaving, Patrice saw the doctor, who said the scan showed nothing alarming. The only slight problem was that the radiation seventeen years earlier seemed to have left traces of fibrosis in the lungs, and it was difficult to distinguish between old lesions and any new ones, but on the whole, everything was under control.

  As soon as Juliette was admitted to the clinic, she called Étienne. He remembers her words: Come, come right away, I’m scared. And when he entered her room half an hour later: I’m worse than scared, I’m terrified.

  What’s terrifying you?

  She waved vaguely at the tube connected to the intravenous bag hanging on its little gallows: That. Being sick again. Gasping for air. Choking to death.

  Her voice was jagged, angry, fierce with a revolt he’d never seen in her before. That wasn’t her style, revolt; neither was bitterness or sarcasm, but that day he saw her in biting, sharp-tongued rebellion. Her face, which even in the greatest fatigue did not usually look harsh, was stern and even hostile. With a tight little smile that seemed even more alien to her, she said, I’d been wondering lately if I ought to buy more retirement insurance, but I’ll save myself the trouble. Why bother?

  Without taking the bait, Étienne calmly asked if she’d been told she was going to die, and she had to say no. She’d been told the same as Patrice: pulmonary embolism, perhaps due to the radiation therapy, which made her so fucking mad—and that was a word she never used, but that day, yes: it made her fucking mad to be still paying for an old illness she’d thought long gone.

  After a pause, she spoke again, more quietly: I’m horribly afraid of dying, Étienne. You know, when I was sixteen and got sick I had a romantic idea about death. I found it seductive, and although I didn’t know if I was really in danger, I was up for it. You, too—you told me one day that at eighteen you thought, cancer … that could be cool. I remember very well: you said “cool.” But now, with the girls, I’m appalled. The idea of leaving them horrifies me. You understand?

  Étienne nodded. He understood, of course, but instead of saying what anyone else would have told her (“Who’s talking about dying? You’ve got a pulmonary embolism, not cancer, don’t be so frightened!”), he said, If you die, the girls aren’t going to die of that.

  They will, they need me too much. No one will ever love them as I do.

  How do you know? You’re going a bit far. I hope you’re not about to die, but if you are, you have work to do. You’ve got to tell yourself this and really believe it: Their lives will not end with me. They can be happy even without me. It’s hard but that’s what you have to do.

  When Patrice returned after leaving the children with neighbors, Juliette didn’t let him see any sign of the panic Étienne had witnessed. She played the role of the model patient, confident and upbeat, and she stayed that way almost till the end. The doctors said the crisis had passed; there wasn’t any reason not to believe them, and perhaps she did. She went home after five days with a prescription for some support hose and anticoagulants meant to prevent further clots and restore normal pulmonary function.

  She never got it back. She was always breathless, gasping like a fish out of water, craning her neck, with a constant weight on her chest. Is it unbearable? asked the doctor over the phone. Unbearable, no, since she was bearing it, but distressing and, even more, frightening. Wait a little while for the medications to take effect. Let’s see where we are in January.

  Over the Christmas holidays, which the family spent with Patrice’s parents in Savoie, her daughters constantly complained that she was tired all the time, hadn’t decorated the tree, wasn’t doing anything with them. So she’d pretend, joke around, play the game of the worn-out old mama who needs to be tossed in the trash, which made the girls laugh and shriek, No, no! Not the trash! To Patrice, though, she confided that that’s exactly how she felt: damaged, beyond repair, ready for the rubbish heap. The house was bustling with lots of people, noise, and cavalcades of children up and down the stairs. The couple took refuge in their room as much as possible, lying on the bed in each other’s arms, and she would murmur, stroking his cheek, My poor dear, you drew an unlucky number, and Patrice would tell her he’d picked a real winner, the best in the world. Touched by his utter sincerity, she’d say, I’m the one who picked the winner. I love you.

  Boxing Day was also the day of the tsunami. The family learned that Hélène and Rodrigue were safe even before learning what had happened, after which they didn’t miss a single news-cast or any of the special reports that allowed viewers to follow the catastrophe live, minute by minute. Those devastated tropical beaches, the straw huts, the people in rags who wailed and wept, all seemed unbelievably far from snowy Savoie, from the compact stone house, the blaze in the fireplace. They threw on another log, felt sorry for the victims, enjoyed feeling safe. Juliette did not feel safe, not at all. Everyone was treating her as a convalescent rather than an invalid, acting as if she were better, but she knew she wasn’t, because it wasn’t normal to be always short of breath. She could see that Patrice was worried, and she didn’t want to add to his anxiety. I imagine that she wanted to call Étienne and that if she didn’t, it wasn’t to spare him the worry (him she knew she could worry as much as she wanted), but because calling Étienne was like taking an extremely powerful and efficacious drug, one to be kept in reserve for truly great need. She was already in bad shape, but she was beginning to suspect that soon she would be much worse.

  The day after their return to Rosier, Patrice had to take her back to the hospital, where a complication of the embolism was diagnosed: water in the pleura, the thin membrane around the lungs and inner walls of the chest cavity, was compressing her breathing. She spent New Year’s in the hospital in Vienne, where they drained the liquid from her lungs, then let her go home again, telling her that now she should feel better. Again, days passed and she didn’t feel better. Again, she was hospitalized, this time in the pneumonia ward at the Hôpital Lyon-Sud. Again, the doctors drained her lungs, but this time they analyzed the liquid from the pleura, where they found metastatic cells, and told her that once again she had c
ancer.

  23

  That morning Étienne had accompanied Timothé, his eldest son, to his tennis lesson. Sitting on a bench behind the chain-link fence, he was watching him play when his cell phone rang. Juliette said what she had to say, straight out. Her voice did not quaver; she was calm, nothing like the time she’d called in anguish from the Clinique Protestante a month earlier. Étienne was profoundly calm as well, anchoring himself the way he knows how to do, deep in his solar plexus. He considered rushing immediately to Lyon-Sud but decided to wait, because he was working that day, because she’d told him that Patrice was there, because he preferred to see her alone, and because he knew from experience that the evening is the most difficult time in a hospital room, and also the moment of greatest intimacy.

  He arrived after dinner. She watched him walk up to the foot of the bed, but no farther. No bending over her, kissing her, squeezing her shoulder or hand. He knew that all day long she had been able to let herself go in Patrice’s arms, listening to him murmur to her the tender, silly, soothing words one tells a little girl awakened in the dark by a nightmare: Don’t be afraid, I’m here, take my hand, squeeze my hand, as long as you hold on to my hand nothing bad will happen to you. With Patrice, she could be a little girl: he was her man. With him, Étienne, it was something else, and she was a different woman, a capable person in charge of her life and fighting for it. Patrice was her solace, not Étienne. But she had to take care of Patrice, not Étienne. She had to have courage for Patrice, whereas with Étienne she had a right to feel what one denies oneself with those one loves: terror and despair.

  She seemed as calm as she had been on the phone that morning. They were both silent for a moment; then she said it wasn’t lung cancer she had but breast cancer. The primary tumor was in the breast; the lung trouble was a metastasis. They’d given her a bone scan that afternoon to see if the cancer had also spread there, but the results were inconclusive, or perhaps they simply hadn’t dared tell her what they’d found. In any case, it was bad.

  Étienne recalled something he’d read in a book by the oncologist Laurent Schwartz: the cancerous cell is the only living thing that is immortal. Étienne thought: She’s thirty-three years old. Instead of sitting in the armchair near the bed, he perched himself gingerly as far from her as he could get, on the cover of the enormous cast-iron radiator, which diffused a stifling heat throughout the room. Since she said nothing more, he spoke. He told her that from now on things would change every day: treatments, protocols, hopes, false hopes—that’s what is hardest about an illness like this and she’d have to prepare herself. He told her to restrict as much as possible visits from well-meaning people who just eat up your energy. He told her the essential thing was to hang on, day after day. To conserve her strength. For example, working in Vienne—that was too hard, she’d done enough. If she was well enough in a few months to consider going back to work, she should ask for a transfer to Lyon, as he had. He was quite bossy on that point, even offering to write her a letter and speak to the chief justice of the court of appeal in Grenoble about it. He did not mention her girls again, said no more about preparing herself to leave them or preparing them for what was coming. He knew that’s what she was thinking about but for the moment he had nothing to add to what he had already said at the Clinique Protestante, and he fell silent.

  There was another pause. Then Juliette said she didn’t want to be dispossessed of her illness the way she’d been when she was sixteen. Her parents had devoted all their love, all their energy, all their knowledge to protecting her; if they could have, they would have had the cancer for her, but she no longer wanted anyone to have it instead of her. She wanted to experience it fully, even unto death if death was what was waiting for her now, which seemed likely, and she was counting on Étienne to help her.

  Do you remember, he asked her, the first night of your illness, the first time? The night of the day they told you you had a cancer?

  No, Juliette did not remember. She didn’t remember having heard those words: You have cancer. And she didn’t remember having understood, after the fact, that what she’d had had been cancer. It must have happened, obviously, since she did know it, but the moment when she passed from ignorance or confusion into knowing that, the moment when that word was spoken … escaped her. You understand what I mean about being dispossessed of my illness?

  Fine, said Étienne. So this will be your first night. And I’m going to talk to you about mine. It’s important.

  I’ve already related how at the end of our first family meeting with Étienne, after two hours of monologue from which I emerged feeling as if my brain had been centrifuged, he turned to me and said, You ought to think over what I said about the first night. Perhaps it’s something for you. I did think about it—and began to write this book. He returned to the subject at our initial private discussion, when I wrote down as precisely as I could his story of that night in the Institut Curie, with the rat eating at him and the mysterious words that saved him in the morning. I didn’t understand much of it but thought, yes, it’s important, and we’ll come back to it sooner or later, so maybe I’ll see things clearer then. And here we are, three months later, still in his kitchen sitting at the little table with our espressos, as he tells me about his visit to Juliette the day she learned she had cancer. He tells me again what he said to her; he tells the same story of that first night. I listen avidly, but the phrase that saved him is still elusive. I take notes. The next day I look in my earlier notebook for what I’d written that other time, and my notes are identical. Word for word, they’re the same disappointing phrases, without any of the oracular illumination that made, he says, the real words so splendid. Discouraged, I decide that the only way to talk about this moment is to have experienced it—and that words fail even Étienne whenever he describes his own experience. Leafing through the notebook, I come across a quotation from Mars, which I’d been rereading at the time: “As we know, the cancerous tumors themselves don’t hurt; what hurts are the healthy organs being compressed by the tumors. I believe the same thing applies to soul sickness: Wherever it hurts, is me.” I go back to Étienne’s words. For example: “My disease is part of me. It is me. So I cannot hate it.” The thoughts are similar but not exactly the same. And Fritz Zorn drives the point home: “My parents’ legacy in me is like a gigantic cancerous tumor: everything that suffers in me, my anguish, my torment, my despair, is me.” Étienne doesn’t say that, he doesn’t say that a family or social neurosis has taken the form of a tumor to weigh on his soul, but he says and repeats in every way: My disease is me. It is not outside me. Well, what he’s saying, or in any case what something or someone deep inside him is saying, is the opposite of what he says out loud in the light of day. Then he says, like Susan Sontag in her lovely and dignified essay Illness as Metaphor, that the psychological explanation of cancer is both a myth without any scientific foundation and wickedly immoral, because it “culpabilizes” the patient. What Étienne says in the shadows, however, is what Fritz Zorn and Pierre Cazenave say, that his cancer is not a foreign aggressor but a part of him, an intimate enemy that may not even be an enemy. The first way of thinking is rational; the second is magical. One can claim that growing up, which psychoanalysis is supposed to help us do, means abandoning magical thinking for rational thinking, yet one can also maintain that nothing should be abandoned, that what is true on one floor of the mind may not be true on another, but that one must live on every floor of the mind, from the cellar to the attic. I think that’s what Étienne does.