Other Lives But Mine

by Emmanuel Carrère

  We’d gone to see Philippe, Delphine, and Jérôme in Saint-Émilion a few months after our return from Sri Lanka. Little Juliette’s room was a shrine; it was horribly sad. Then Philippe wrote his book, and we exchanged a few affectionate yet distant e-mails. Camille was born a year later, ten days after Jeanne, and there again we exchanged birth announcements and left it at that. So it was after two years of silence that I contacted Philippe once more, sending him the manuscript, asking him both to read it and to help ease his daughter and son-in-law into taking a look. Aside from one topographic detail, Philippe found everything fine but thought it better that Delphine and Jérôme not read the text. Not then, at any rate, and perhaps not ever. Later on, the four of us—Hélène, Rodrigue, Jeanne, and I—spent a weekend with them and had a delightful time. They’d just had another child, a boy, Antoine, not even a month old. The two little girls got along immediately. Rodrigue, who adores Delphine, was happy to see her again, and she him. I passed along news of Jean-Baptiste, who was studying at an Irish university, and of his older brother, Gabriel, a fledgling film editor. Philippe told us how his aid association for the fishermen of Medaketiya had sprung up, then closed down after accomplishing its mission. He still goes back there for three or four months every year. From his beach bungalow, he looks at the ocean. He thinks about his life; sometimes he manages not to think about anything. The evening passed the way evenings do chez Delphine and Jérôme: commenting on the wines in a blind tasting, listening to rare Rolling Stones records, smoking home-grown pot, and laughing, laughing a lot. Juliette’s room is no longer a shrine, it’s Camille’s bedroom and she’ll share it with Antoine when he’s a little bigger, but there is a photo of Juliette on the mantelpiece and no one has any trouble saying her name. Delphine and Jérôme have not two children but three, it’s just that one of them is dead.

  When we got around to talking about my book, Delphine said she did mean to read it, but Philippe, with that suddenly shrill, quavering voice he’d had over there, warned her off: it would be particularly difficult for her because she would learn things that had been hidden from her. Puzzled, I asked him later in private what he’d meant. He’d been thinking of the moment when Jérôme, returning from the morgue in Colombo, tells Delphine that Juliette is still beautiful, then admits to Hélène that he was lying: their little girl is decomposing. Can you imagine, said Philippe, Delphine discovering in your book that Jérôme lied to her? I offered to remove that detail if he thought it more painful than the others, but he said there was no question of that, and by the time we’d finished our talk, he allowed as how Delphine would see her husband’s lie not as a betrayal but as one more proof of his love. It was decided in the end that Philippe would pass the book on to Jérôme, who would then give it to Delphine, if he thought that appropriate. I recognized in that order of precedence the way her two men, her father and her husband, had banded together to protect her over there, but when I said this to Hélène, she shook her head and said, She’s the one protecting them, you know—she’s the one who holds everything together. That they remained a couple, had other children, that life won out in the end, it’s thanks to her. Then I remembered something Delphine had just said during dinner: the moment over there when life carried the day, when she chose to live instead of letting herself go under, was when she agreed to watch Rodrigue while we were gone. At first she’d thought, No, take care of a child two days after my daughter died, I just couldn’t, but she’d said yes, and from then on she’d continued, despite everything, to say yes.

  This morning, Jeanne woke up at seven, climbed out of her crib the way she has learned to do, and joined us in our bed. I went to the kitchen to prepare her bottle, which she drank lying between us without too much noise or squirming, but that respite never lasts long, for soon there must be songs and games. Her favorite song at the moment is “Mister Bear.” Snoring mightily with my back turned and the duvet pulled over my head, I play the Bear. Hélène sings: Mister Bear, wake up, you’ve slept quite enough, when I count three, time to get up! One. Two. Three! Mister Bear? Can you hear me? And the first time, in my deepest voice, I answer: Nope. Hélène tries again: Mister Bear! Can you hear me? This time I turn over, growling, Yup! Hélène and Jeanne imitate the children’s squeals of fear on the song tape, and Jeanne is in heaven. Mister Bear will last only one season; before him there were the Three Little Kittens who’d lost their mittens, and when Jeanne happens to open the musical book of the Three Little Kittens with its failing batteries, Hélène and I already feel something akin to nostalgia: that’s the song from when she was tiny, barely toddling and not yet talking, and that miraculous time is already past, never to return. I think about all those childish things that enchant us and about what torture they must become if the unspeakable happens: the nursery rhymes, toys, fuzzy slippers all survive while the little girl is rotting in a box underground. And yet that enchantment became possible again for Delphine and Jérôme, with their two other children. They haven’t forgotten anything, but they did not stay lost in the abyss. I find that admirable, incomprehensible, mysterious. That’s the best word: mysterious.

  Later, I fix our breakfast while Hélène dresses Jeanne. When I say that she dresses her, it’s not simply that she puts her clothes on; she chooses them and buys them with perhaps even more pleasure and feminine chic than when she shops for herself, which means that Jeanne is the best-dressed little girl in the world. They join me in the kitchen. Hélène wears yoga pants and a light pull-over with a low neckline; the pants cling to her buttocks and the top shows the outline of her nipples. She’s lovely, sexy, tender. I’m dazzled by the tranquillity of our love and by the intensity of this tranquillity. At her side, I know where I am. I can’t bear the idea of losing her, but for the first time in my life I believe that what might steal her from me, or me from her, would be an accident, illness, something that would strike us from outside—and not dissatisfaction, ennui, a craving for something new. It’s rash to say that, but really, I don’t think that would happen. I suspect, of course, that if we last long enough there will be crises, empty stretches, stormy patches; desire will flag and go looking elsewhere, but I believe we’ll hold together, that one of us will close the other’s eyes. In any case, that’s what I long for.

  In the front hall, Jeanne and I put on our coats and she takes a firm grip on her stroller—not the one her parents push her around in (and in which she sits with less and less good grace these days) but the miniature one she uses for a rather ratty-looking bald doll made of plastic that smells like strawberry chewing gum. Ever since Hélène bought her that stroller, Jeanne insists on taking it with her when she goes out. In general, she wants to do everything we do, and since we take our child out for walks, she wants to do the same. So we roll the stroller out onto the landing, and Hélène crouches in the front doorway of the apartment to give her daughter one last kiss. Jeanne starts to get into the elevator as I hold the door open, but she pauses, turns around to wave bye to Hélène, and only then steps in and reaches up on tiptoe to push the right button. Just before the glass-fronted door sinks below the landing, I see Hélène smile at us. We step outside, Jeanne pushing her stroller and me walking beside her, making sure she doesn’t wind up in the street. She’s so proud of imitating us that she forgets to dawdle and stop at each doorway, each lamppost, each scooter the way she usually does. She’s being responsible, heading straight down the sidewalk of the rue d’Hauteville almost as fast as if I’d been pushing her. She looks back occasionally so that I notice she’s doing everything correctly. When we reach her nanny’s building, I hoist Jeanne up to the keypad and, as I do every morning, guide her fingers over it. Next in our ritual come the timer switch for the staircase light, the doorbell, and listening at Mme Laouni’s door for her footsteps coming down the hall. Jeanne never protests when I take her to Mme Laouni’s place. She’s comfortable there; Mme Laouni is both affectionate and firm, so one feels she runs a tight, happy ship. Last year, though, she lost her hu
sband. She phoned one morning in tears to tell us she couldn’t watch Jeanne because her husband had died during the night: she’d found him dead of a heart attack next to her in bed. Before that, she’d seemed like a happy woman, at home in life. Never any bitterness, lassitude, sloppiness. Order, good humor, dynamism, kindness. And that impression hasn’t changed since her husband’s death. I know nothing about their life as a couple; I’d never met him, since he left for work before I brought Jeanne and returned after I’d picked her up, but I’m sure Mme Laouni loved him, that they were good partners, fine parents for their daughters, that she misses him dreadfully, that life without him is sad, unfair, unnatural, and what impresses me is that her grief, which she doesn’t hide when we speak with her, never seems to weigh on the children she cares for. She says they are the ones who help her keep going, and I believe her. Sometimes, when she opens her door in the morning, I can see that her eyes are puffy, that she must have been crying in the night, that it was hard for her to get up, but when she takes Jeanne in her arms the child laughs, Mme Laoumi laughs with her, and I know it will be like that all day long.

  I go back up the rue d’Hauteville. I will be stopping at the café on the place Franz-Liszt to read the paper and then going home. Rodrigue will have left for school, Hélène has perhaps gone back to bed, in which case I’ll join her and we’ll make love in that peaceful, slightly routine conjugal way that inspires in both of us an ever-renewed and I trust inexhaustible desire. I’ll make fresh coffee that we’ll drink in the kitchen while talking about the children, friends, domestic details, and what’s going on in the world. She’ll leave for work, and it will be time for me to get to mine, too. Every day for six months I deliberately spent several hours at the computer writing about what frightens me the most on this earth: the death of a child for her parents and the death of a young woman for her husband and children. Life made me a witness to those two misfortunes, one right after the other, and assigned me—at least that’s how I understood it—to tell that story. Life has spared me such unhappiness and I pray will continue to do so. I’ve sometimes heard it said that happiness is best understood in retrospect. One thinks: I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was happy. That doesn’t work for me. I was miserable for a long time and quite conscious of it. I love my lot in life now (no great achievement, since it’s so pleasant), and my philosophy can be summed up in the remark made on the evening of her son’s coronation by Madame Letizia, the mother of Napoleon, who murmured, “Let’s hope it lasts.”

  And one more thing: I prefer what I have in common with other people to what sets me apart from them. That, too, is new.

  Having reached the end of this book, I find something is missing. It concerns Diane. Amélie and Clara have small speaking roles, and each has a scene to herself like her very own bedroom, but when everything happened Diane was so little that she appears only as a quiet or squalling baby in her father’s arms. She’s four now, and I think she tells herself what her sisters thought, each for her own reason: that it’s even harder for her. Because she’s the last child, because she had her mother for only fifteen months, because she doesn’t even remember her. Nathalie, Étienne’s wife, told me that the last time they visited the family in Rosier, when Juliette was so sick, Diane was constantly demanding that Juliette pick her up, and Juliette was constantly handing her off to Patrice. Juliette had only one month to live and said, She mustn’t get used to me holding her, she’ll miss it too much, afterward. Patrice now says that her first words were, Where is Mama? And the first film she loved was Bambi. She’s watched the scene where Bambi understands his mother “can’t be with him anymore” a hundred times; it’s the closest she can come to her own story. Patrice also says that of the three girls Diane is the one who talks the most now about Juliette, and the only one who asks, often, to watch the slide show. The two of them go down to the basement and sit together in front of the computer screen. The music begins; the images appear. Patrice watches his wife. Diane watches her mother. Patrice watches Diane watch her mother. She cries, he cries, too, and there’s a gentle comfort in crying together for the father and his little daughter, but he can’t and won’t ever again tell her what all fathers would always like to tell their children: Everything will be all right. And I who am so far away from them, who for the moment—and knowing how fragile this is—am happy, I would like to offer what solace I can, small comfort though it will be, and that’s why this book is for Diane and her sisters.

  My thanks to Colette Le Guay, Philippe Le Guay, and Belinda Cannone for our “work-and-play” visits to Montgoubert and for their friendship; thanks as well to Nicole, Pascale, and Hervé Clerc, for our time in Le Levron and for their friendship, too.

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  Copyright © 2009 P.O.L. Editeur

  Translation copyright © Linda Coverdale 2011

  Littoral Drift Nearshore #464 (Bainbridge Island, WA 12.07.16, Seven Simulated Waves, Freezing and Melting), 2016. Forty-eight Dynamic Cyanotypes ©️ Meghann Riepenhoff, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

  Emmanuel Carrère has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  Originally published in France with the title D’autres vies que la mienne by P.O.L. Editeur, Paris in 2009

  First published in Great Britain by Serpent’s Tail in 2012

  This edition published by Vintage in 2019

  penguin.co.uk/vintage

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9781473567597

  Footnotes

  7

  1 Jean-Claude Romand is the subject of Carrère’s The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception. For eighteen years Romand pretended to be a doctor and consultant at the World Health Organization when in reality he had never finished medical school and was supporting his family by bilking friends and relatives through a Ponzi scheme. In 1993, fearing exposure, Romand killed his wife and two children, his parents, their dog, and quite possibly his father-in-law and tried to murder his mistress. He is currently in prison.

  13

  1 Freud describes the infant’s initial focus on the self, a kind of self-love the child is unable to separate from sexual desire, as “primary” or “normal” narcissism, a healthy defense mechanism that shields the child’s psyche during the formation of the individual self.