Patrice found his mother at home with the girls; she’d just arrived to take over from Christine. The children weren’t too frightened; Juliette’s hospital stays were now part of ordinary life for them. What they did want to know was whether she would be at the school show, and when their father said no, they protested: She’d promised! Then Patrice told them she would not be coming home, that they’d all go to the hospital after the school festival the next day, and it would be for the last time, because she was going to die. He held Diane in his arms and spoke to her as much as to her older sisters, even though she was only fifteen months old. He remembers that Amélie and Clara cried and screamed, that this went on for an hour, and then they were out of control until bedtime, completely overexcited. Strangely enough, everyone managed to sleep. Patrice returned to the hospital quite early the next morning, so that he could then be on time for the beginning of the school show. Juliette’s condition had deteriorated further during the night. She was quite agitated, and her eyes kept rolling back into her head. All her remaining strength was now devoted to breathing harshly, painfully, in spasms that shook her whole body. Sensing his presence, she clung to Patrice’s arm and exclaimed several times in a bitter voice, rocking back and forth, So, it’s over now! So, it’s over now! Patrice tried to talk to her, very gently, to tell her that the girls would come to see her after the school festival, but Juliette didn’t seem to understand and kept saying, So, it’s over now! Patrice was appalled, both because the girls might see her like this and because when Juliette had told him she was no longer afraid of dying, he’d believed her. What was unbearable, she had said, was leaving her little family, but death, she’d prepared herself, it would be all right. Such stoicism was her way, she would have wanted to leave that image of herself, but what Patrice saw now was a body wracked with suffering, prey to something like panic. Her clear mind, serenity … gone. She was losing control. This wasn’t Juliette anymore. He went to see the nurses, who told him it was the effect of Atarax, an antihistamine with sedative and antinausea properties, and they assured him that, as promised, they’d do their best to have her as calm and lucid as possible for her daughters’ visit. All their efforts worked only halfway, however, and when Patrice and Cécile led in the girls, Juliette was barely conscious. If you spoke to her from close up, her gaze would fix on you for a second before wandering off. Her head bobbed once or twice, which could have been taken for acquiescence. Amélie and Clara had made drawings for her and they’d brought a video of the school show, but in spite of its importance to the girls—and to Juliette herself only the day before—Patrice didn’t have the heart to play the video on the TV in the room. The situation was so painful that the visit was cut short. Clara kissed her mother, Patrice held Diane’s face against her cheek, but Amélie was so frightened that she wouldn’t leave her aunt’s arms.
At this point in Patrice’s story, a barefoot Amélie came into the living room in her pajamas. She’d been put to bed long before but must have awakened and heard our discussion through her half-open bedroom door. This didn’t bother Patrice, who’d started talking to me about Juliette’s last days while his daughters were present and without lowering his voice. Amélie planted herself in front of us and said, It’s even harder for me than for Diane and Clara that Mama died because I didn’t say good-bye to her, I was scared. Patrice assured her calmly that she hadn’t kissed her but she had said good-bye, that the important thing was that she was there, and her mama had seen her. I gathered from his tone that this wasn’t the first time they’d talked about this, and while he put Amélie back to bed, I thought it was a good thing that she was able to voice her self-reproach: once expressed, that guilt was less likely to poison her life later on without her even recognizing why. And since I have good reason to think that the psychoanalytic faith in the healthy powers of speech (as opposed to the ravages of silence) is well founded, I commended Patrice sincerely when he returned, for letting his entire attitude show his girls that things should be said.
The visits over, Patrice remained alone with Juliette. She was less agitated, but the serenity he’d hoped for was not there. Sitting next to her on the bed, he tried to communicate with her, to sense her desires. When he helped her drink, she managed to swallow. Her chest began to heave spasmodically; as her body grew tense he felt her hour had come, but no, she wasn’t dying, she was suffering. Drawn toward the void, she was fighting back. He asked her, Are you afraid? She nodded, emphatically. Wait, he said, I’ll help you. I’m coming back. Don’t worry, I’m coming back. He pried himself away from her as gently as he could and found her doctor to tell him that she needed his help, now. Right, the doctor replied, wait for me here. And when Hélène and I went to the same office a half hour later to ask the same thing of the same doctor, he told us they had begun to take care of it.
The five minutes he spent alone in the office were an eternity for Patrice. He stared numbly at the chipped paint on a base-board, the neon tube on the ceiling, the gnat flitting around the tube, the summer night beginning to fall outside, framed in the window, and he felt that all the world’s reality was there, nothing else existed, had ever existed, would ever exist. When he went back into Juliette’s room, her eyes—half closed when he’d left her—were shut. Some time later, he became terrified that she’d slipped into a coma during his brief absence. That she had seen a stranger come into her room and do something (it didn’t matter what—a shot or an adjustment to the intravenous drip) and had believed, in her semiconscious state, that the intruder had come to finish her off. Patrice feared that her last thought before everything went dark had been: I’m dying, and Patrice isn’t here. In the days that followed, he was so tormented by this horror scenario—which did not occur to him at the time, fortunately—that he finally called the doctor, who reassured him. Things couldn’t have happened that way: that dosage of morphine takes more than an hour to act, and Juliette’s slide into unconsciousness had been very gradual.
Patrice stretched out beside her again, but this time more comfortably, almost as if they were home in bed. She was breathing calmly, seemingly without pain, drifting in a twilight state that at some point would become death, and he stayed with her until that moment. He began talking to her, very softly, and as he spoke he gently touched her hands, her face, her chest, and now and then he kissed her, lightly. Although convinced her brain could no longer analyze the vibrations of his voice or the touch of his skin, he was sure that her flesh could still sense them, that she was entering the unknown enveloped by something loving and familiar. He was there. He told her about their life and the happiness she’d given him. He told her how he had loved to laugh with her, to talk about anything and everything with her, and even to argue with her. He promised he would continue without fail to take good care of the girls, she mustn’t worry. He would remember to put on their scarves, they wouldn’t catch cold. He sang the songs she loved, described the instant of death as a great flash, an unbelievable wave of peace, a blessed return to the fount of all energy. One day he, too, would experience that and would rejoin her. Those words came easily to him; he spun them out in a low, calm voice, and they mesmerized him, too. It was life that hurt, by resisting, but the torment of being alive was ending. The nurse had told him that it was the patients who struggled who died the quickest. If Juliette was taking so long, Patrice thought, it might be because she had stopped fighting, that what still lived in her was tranquil, at rest. Don’t fight it anymore, my love, let go, let go, let yourself go.
Toward midnight, though, he thought it wasn’t possible, just wasn’t possible that she could still be in that state another day. He decided that if at four in the morning she was still this way, he would unplug the breathing apparatus. At one, though, he couldn’t stand the waiting anymore, thought Juliette might be communicating her own impatience to him, and went to find the nurse on duty to ask if someone could unplug the machine, because he felt it was time. She said no, that might be too brutal, it was better to let th
ings take their course. Later, he fell asleep. A helicopter woke him shortly before three, hovering for a long time over the hospital. Patrice now kept his eyes glued to the clock. At a quarter to four Juliette’s breathing, which had become a mere wisp of air, ceased. He watched for another few moments but there was nothing more: her heart had stopped beating. He told himself that she’d guessed what he meant to do at four and had spared him that pain.
Patrice keeps talking, telling his story, as if he never wants it to end.
I didn’t need to close her eyes. I gazed at her: her face was lovely and serene, not like in those final days. I thought, She is my wife, and she is dead. My wife is dead. I felt her warmth ebb away and was astonished at how quickly that happened. By four o’clock, she was cold. I got up, I informed the nurses, I called Cécile, who was awake back at the house, and then I went outside, to walk around the hospital grounds. I could see a strip of sky growing light in the east, and pink clouds over the city; it was magnificent. I was relieved that everything was over but above all, at that moment, I felt immense affection for Juliette. I don’t know how to put this; affection seems like a feeble word, but I felt something greater and stronger than love. A few hours later, at the hospital funeral parlor, the feeling had already changed. Love, yes, but that vast affection, it was gone.
26
Before leaving Juliette that Friday, Étienne had asked her if she would like him to come back or simply to remain available, and she’d said, To be available. He spent the night in waiting, suspecting she would not call again. They had said everything to each other; now there was no place left for anyone but Patrice. In the morning, he took the bus to the hospital but got off two stops early and went home. He spent Saturday with his family, ran some errands at a sporting goods store with his kids, tried to work. Juliette had asked that he be informed as soon as she died; it was Patrice’s mother who called him at five the next morning, which made him angry, he remembers, because she woke him up and especially because she said, “Juliette has passed away” instead of “Juliette is dead.” He growled, I know, I know, and when she invited him to view the body at the hospital funeral home he replied no, he wasn’t interested.
Étienne and I had lunch together in Vienne the day after my long nocturnal conversation with Patrice, and Étienne accompanied me back to Rosier. The first thing he said when he got there was that he had to leave right away. Patrice and he had not seen each other since the funeral, and they seemed to feel a little awkward together, but I offered to make coffee so we could have it outside, under the catalpa, where we wound up spending the afternoon, more and more content to be with one another.
I remember two moments of that afternoon.
Patrice talked about how he and the girls were learning to live without Juliette. She carries me along, he said; her energy lifts me up … and then sometimes it doesn’t carry me anymore. The nights are tough. At first I thought I’d never manage to sleep without her. My body was so used to hers that I think I feel her against me, and then I wake up, she’s not there, and I’m lost, utterly lost. But I’m gradually getting used to it; I know that with time her presence will fade. I know some day fifteen minutes will go by without my thinking of her, and then an hour … I try to explain this to the girls … When I tell them we were lucky to be with her and love her and have her love us, Clara says that Amélie is the luckiest because she had her the longest, and Diane’s lucky because she doesn’t really understand, so she, being in the middle, has the hardest time … In spite of everything, I think we’re in a good place, the four of us. I think it’ll work. And you?
Patrice had turned to Étienne, who was startled by his question. Me, what?
You, insisted Patrice. How is it for you, life without Juliette? Later, Étienne told me he’d been stunned, then deeply moved to have been thus included in the circle of mourning—and by the widower—almost on an equal footing. In his heart of hearts, he found that position justified (Étienne’s note: “Not entirely; I felt justified simply in being included”), but he never would have claimed it on his own. It took Patrice’s incredible generosity to acknowledge his place.
But out in the garden that day, Étienne gave a little laugh. “For me? Oh, that’s simple. What I miss is being able to talk to her. It’s quite selfish; as usual I’m thinking only of myself in this, and what I find is that until I die there will be things I can no longer tell a soul. It’s over. The one person to whom I could have said them without its being sad is gone.”
Later, we talked about the slide show Patrice was putting together for the family and friends in memory of Juliette. He’d made a first, large selection of photos, and now he was winnowing them down. Certain pictures virtually picked themselves; he lingered long over others, and when he discarded any he did so with a pang and the impression, each time, of condemning to oblivion a moment of their life together. He was working on this project at night in his basement workshop, after putting the girls to bed. It was a moment he loved, both sad and sweet. He wasn’t rushing to finish his slide show, knowing that when he’d finally sent everyone a copy of the finished product a milestone would have been passed, one that he wasn’t all that eager to reach, at least not right away.
A bit like the letter Juliette wanted to write to the girls, remarked Étienne. She kept promising herself to do it and putting it off because she knew once she’d finished it she’d have nothing left to do.
We fell silent. Across the village square, there was an explosion of shouting and laughter as school let out. Amélie and Clara would be home in a few minutes, expecting their afternoon snack, and soon Diane would need to be picked up. It was then Étienne said, There’s one photo that won’t be in your slide show because it doesn’t exist, but if it did and I could keep only one, I’d choose it, no question. One evening, you remember, the four of us went to the theater in Lyon. Juliette and you, Nathalie and I. We arrived first and were waiting for you in the lobby. We saw you enter downstairs, and you carried her up the grand staircase. She had her arms around your neck, she was smiling, and what was beautiful was that she looked not only happy but proud, incredibly proud, and so did you. Everyone watched you two and stepped aside to let you pass. It really was the knight carrying the princess.
Patrice was silent for a moment, then smiled, with that astonished and dreamy smile with which you recognize a truth you’ve never thought of before. It’s funny, now that you mention it, he said, I’ve always liked that, carrying people … Even as a kid, I carried my younger brother. I’d put the little kids in a wheelbarrow and push them, or I’d hoist them up on my shoulders …
On the train back to Paris, I wondered if there was a formula as simple and right as that—he liked to carry, she had to be carried—to define what bound us together, Hélène and I. I didn’t find one, but thought that one day, perhaps, we would.
27
When I got back from Rosier, Hélène’s breasts had begun to swell and she announced that she was pregnant. I should have been overjoyed but instead I felt afraid. The only explanation I can find for my fear is that I didn’t feel ready: too many tethers were still in place, too many knots hadn’t been sliced through. To be a father again in the second half of my life, I would have had to be a son fairly at peace with himself, and I thought myself far from that. I give myself this: despite my dismay, I decided it was better to say yes than no, and more or less consciously, feeling my way, I endeavored to change. My project had become inopportune, so I called Patrice and Étienne to let them know I was abandoning it, adding that I might perhaps return to it one day, although I doubted it. Étienne said, See what happens. I began to write directly about myself, the disaster of my previous love affair, and the ghost haunting my family, a ghost I wished to lay to rest. The gestation of that book lasted as long as Hélène’s pregnancy, and it’s an understatement to say those months were difficult, but I finished the job shortly after Jeanne’s birth, and overnight the miracle for which I’d hoped without believing in it took pla
ce: the fox gnawing at my vitals went away. I was free. I spent a year enjoying the simple fact of being alive and watching our daughter grow. I had no ideas about what would come next, but no worries, either. Freud’s definition of mental health has always appealed to me, even though it seemed beyond reach: the ability to love and work. I was able to love and, even better, to accept being loved; work would come in its own time. Somewhat at random, without knowing where I was going, I began to gather my memories of Sri Lanka, then took another look at my notes on Étienne, Patrice, Juliette, and consumer law. I returned to this book three years after conceiving the project; I’ve finished it three years after abandoning the whole thing.
This time, I resolved to let those my book concerned read it before publication. I’d already done that with Jean-Claude Romand, but I’d warned him that The Adversary was finished and I would not change a single line. Submitting My Life as a Russian Novel, the memoir I wrote while Hélène was pregnant, for the approval of my mother and Sophie, my ex, would have been like heaving it into a bonfire, a luxury I could not afford, so I presented them with the fait accompli. I don’t regret that, it saved my life, but I wouldn’t do it again. Hélène was the first to read these pages. She had accepted my undertaking this project, but the closer I came to the end, the more she dreaded discovering what I’d written about Juliette. She still cannot believe in her death or talk about her; perhaps she reproaches herself for not having truly understood her sister. Once she’d read the book, we were both relieved, and I sent the text to Étienne and Patrice, telling them that they could ask me to add, remove, or change whatever they wanted, and I would. This promise worried Paul, my publisher, who reminded me that people are never happy with how they appear in books, and once my main characters had set their records straight, my book would be a shambles. As it happened, he was wrong, and in the end my last trip to Lyon and Rosier was for me and for Patrice and Étienne as well, I believe, the most moving visit of this entire endeavor. I felt like a portrait painter who, on displaying his canvas, hopes that the model will be pleased, and both of them were. Étienne told me, There are some things I completely disagree with, but I’ll be very careful not to tell you which, for fear you might change them. I like that this is your book, and on the whole I also like the guy in it who’s got my name. I can even tell you this: I’m rather proud. Although Étienne didn’t have me cut anything, he did ask me to add a few items, to give credit where credit was due. When I told the story of the appeal to the ECJ, I had focused, for the sake of dramatic economy, on the Juliette-Étienne-Florès troika, without mentioning Bernadette Le Baut-Ferrarese, the EU law specialist who advised them, and Étienne found it unfair to leave her out of the picture. As for Patrice, he was afraid I had overemphasized the political disagreements he’d had with Juliette. He kept coming back to that, quibbling, correcting, clarifying nuances. It didn’t bother him to pass for a naïve leftist, but he refused to let anyone believe Juliette had the slightest leaning to the right, and I felt to my amazement that I was hearing him pursue, through my book, the trusting and passionate discussion he and Juliette had carried on throughout their thirteen years together. After our work on the text, when we went to fetch the girls at school, several of Amélie’s classmates surrounded me and asked, Is it true you wrote a book about Juliette? Can we read it? But when I broached the subject at dinner with Amélie herself and her two sisters, they hardly reacted at all. Yes, we know, they said and, looking away, they changed the subject.
Other Lives But Mine Page 21
