Lost Words

by Xavier Hennekinn

  Someone from that someone else’s group, a relative of that someone else, another person of average intelligence and almost unnoticeable presence, but of a curious and unworried nature, had observed the scene from the other side of the fire and came to where that someone else was sitting and saw that someone else’s crumbled potato. The relative of that someone else looked at the crumbled potato with an expression you and I would describe as amused. The relative, in quick movements, stuffed the bits of potato in their mouth. The relative was surprised at how quickly the bits could be chewed and ingested. The potato’s texture, while unusual, perhaps wrong, made it quick to eat. The relative started telling others in the group what had happened and soon many started placing the potatoes they had found into the fire, to amuse themselves, and before long all in the group, including the individual who had first discovered the potato in the fire and had been distressed by having crushed it to pieces, only ate potatoes that had been in the fire until the skin had blistered, because they were quick to eat that way and they found the crispy skin delicious.

  THE BOOK OF MERIT

  You were in transit in an airport, reading a book. Not the book of merit, the book of merit is another thing. You were reading a novel or perhaps a book on some subject you knew little about. Some people looked at you and smiled at your ignorance. There was no benevolence in their smiles, for people like you, who decide to display their ignorance and open a book in public, have others’ disapproval coming. These people also saw you as selfish for you preferred to spend time by yourself in a book. People walking past thought you uneducated and asocial, barely worth a look.

  THE BENCH OPPOSITE THE SCHOOL

  Across the street from my children’s school, there is a bench where I read Vargas Llosa. There I read parts of Aunt Julia and the scriptwriter. But now when I walk down that street, towards the bench, I think of Vargas Llosa’s In praise of the stepmother, and of Garcia Marquez’s Memories of my melancholy whores. I imagine the heat and the humidity in the places where the novels take place and I long to be there.

  Luca was a few weeks old and Julian about four and did not attend the school. On weekends I would swaddle Luca in a blanket and lay him in the pram and go for a walk to help him fall asleep. After a long while walking around the neighbourhood he would settle into a nap and I could park the pram and sit on the bench opposite the local school to read. I would have about half an hour, or at best an hour, to feel alone.

  Most times, the book’s story would be eclipsed by thoughts of her. The woman I was not living with, the woman who was not the mother of my, then, two children. The woman who could in another story be my children’s stepmother or my Delgadina.

  BETRAYAL

  You will look at a woman. The shape of her body. Her hips. Her legs. She will turn and you will look at her breasts under her beige cardigan. God knows what will go through your mind. You will start smiling, to yourself, joyous to behold such splendour. You will stop looking at the woman. Who stares at women this prolongedly? Pigs. You see men look at women as if they had never seen a woman before. You will look at the woman again. She will be there, a few steps from you: a miracle, not an apparition. As I said, she will have turned, and as you move your gaze up to her face she will see that you are looking at her. She will see your smile, and she will figure that you know each other from somewhere, you must have met, you have never exchanged a word but seen each other on occasion, around here, at the shops perhaps, perhaps at the café in front of which you are now both waiting, or that you are a smiling, polite man, a pleasant man, and she will smile back at you. For a moment your face will contort in expressions you would never imagine possible, and you will look away. You will emit a deep sigh and smile a more controlled smile. You will look around the woman; you will see her there, still a few steps away, as you are still waiting, but you will not look at her, you will make sure your eyes don’t meet again. Then a soft and familiar voice coming towards you will make you turn your head.

  ‘Let’s go,’ that voice will say.

  MICHEL PICCOLI

  It was not until I saw Les choses de la vie that I could watch Michel Piccoli. I was eighteen or nineteen. Michel Piccoli drives, has an accident and lies in a hospital bed, in a coma. The viewer thinks he will die – I thought he would die – and he does die. Michel Piccoli was driving either to his mistress or to his wife. We don’t know, the viewer is meant to wonder. Both his mistress and wife love him and he loves them both. The viewer knows this from the flashback scenes of Piccoli with Romy Schneider (his mistress) and Lea Massari (his wife). Where was he driving to? Was he returning to his wife and about to break off from his mistress, was he joining his mistress? Was he going to do something else altogether, do nothing? These questions are not answered for the viewer but are answered for Piccoli’s wife and mistress by the time he dies.

  Why? I don’t know, but when I was adolescent the sight of Piccoli’s face made me feel uneasy. If I happened to turn on the television and he appeared in a film, a play, or the preview of a film or a play to be shown later in the week, I would leave the room or quickly change the channel. There was a time when, it seemed to me, Michel Piccoli’s dark, thick brows and his black hair, though he was mostly balding and his hair was turning grey, were ubiquitous. His face displayed an air of indifference; it seemed to me to be a façade for many dark secrets. To my young self, Piccoli had the air of a reprehensible man. Quietly anxious, disturbed by his cold gaze, his obsequious voice, I would try to occupy my mind and forget him by watching something else on television or going to my room to read. For many years, until I imposed the viewing of Les choses de la vie on myself because of Romy Schneider, whose beauty I was then discovering, and because I had forgotten he was in the film, I had not watched from beginning to end a film in which Michel Piccoli had a part.

  One evening not long after my first viewing of Les choses de la vie, I confessed to my friend Amaury the emotions the face and voice of Piccoli had provoked in my younger self. He laughed but understood what I meant. He told me that, as far as he was concerned, in his adolescence, he could not bear to watch Yves Montand. For different reasons, of course. Montand did not evoke for him the idea of malevolence but that of arrogance – arrogance and vulgarity. I told him to leave Montand in peace. He told me that he had watched Clair de femme recently. The book was one that Amaury and I loved and had spent nights discussing, reading passages to each other. I asked him why he would want to watch the film version of the book, why he would want to do a thing with such a predictably disappointing outcome. He said he had in fact expected the film, which had Yves Montand and Romy Schneider as Michel and Lydia, to change his opinion of Montand, since he loved the book so much. It did not – it worsened his Montand affliction. He said Montand had been gravely miscast and he could never forgive him for having played opposite Romy Schneider; Piccoli would have been the right actor for the part. Piccoli had gravitas, he said, depth of emotion. He was a real actor, not an entertainer. It was fine for Montand to play in a musical opposite Marilyn Monroe but how could you have him break Romy Schneider’s heart in Clair de femme?

  I told him to leave Montand and Piccoli where they were. And he and I spent the next hour or so – we never kept track of time – with nothing said, listening to whatever music had been playing in the background. And during that time of silence between us, and until Amaury read something to me out loud from the book he had been quietly reading, lying on the carpeted floor, I pondered how and why Piccoli had been such an eerie figure in my adolescence. And came to no conclusion.

  SLEEPLESS NIGHTS

  It is during the sleepless nights of your twenties that you form the books you will write. That is if you are a writer. If you are not a writer, or an artist, how will the sleepless nights of your twenties affect you later?

  THE DEATH OF CIORAN

  I met Amaury at his one-bedroom apartment in the ninth arrondissement to watch a new television show about literature on the public channel. Berna
rd Pivot, who for decades had animated Apostrophes and Bouillon de culture, was retiring from television. This new show – I cannot recall its name – might fill the gap left after Pivot’s retirement.

  It was nowhere near as good as Pivot’s shows. Pivot had a natural, intimate way of interviewing writers one-on-one, as well as stimulating a conversation between five or six intellectuals.

  That new show was in its third or fourth week. Its format was different from the format of the Pivot shows: it had three or four critics arguing about a recently published work of fiction, an essay or some poems.

  That week the critics were to discuss the collected work of Emil Cioran, who, everyone knew, was dying. Amaury and I had read all of Cioran’s work. We could cite lines, entire paragraphs, of his awe-inspiring prose. Amaury and I had discussed at length the inconvenience of being born. Cioran was one of our masters. Many a time Amaury and I had hung around Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Rue de l’Odéon, hoping to accidently meet Monsieur Cioran. We had learned from his book of interviews that he regularly lunched at the university canteen, so we sought him there too. But Cioran must have been ill and confined to his small apartment by the time Amaury and I started our stake-outs.

  That night the show’s critics, particularly one who looked more smug than the rest and whom we had never heard of, savaged Cioran’s work. No one defended him.

  ‘Cioran is a supermarket Nietzsche,’ one said.

  When another said, ‘How can a man like this man live, eat, drink, considering the nihilistic outbursts which constitute his work?’ someone else responded, ‘You do not understand this man! This man wants to reject nihilism with nihilism. We are in full delirium!’ The first one concluded, ‘This man saw himself as the enemy, someone not to be trusted, and yet millions, particularly young people, have been reading him and have trusted him. We should all be happy that this man spent his life writing in an attic room and didn’t pursue a political career!’

  Amaury and I were incredulous, speechless at first. Why would these ignorant television hacks attack a dying man who, we believed, had elevated the French language to such heights, who had so eloquently exposed the pointlessness of almost everything? Cioran was an intellectual giant and they were not and they were spitting on a grave that had yet to be filled with the writer’s coffin and the dirt above. The bastards were pissing on a monument. What were they doing on national television, in front of an audience of millions?

  The moralising critics had rejected the painful truths Cioran had revealed to Amaury and me, to all of us.

  Tears had welled up and they were now flowing over my face. Tears also ran down Amaury’s face. We stood up from the couch and screamed insults at the critics in the television. Soon screaming was not enough to express our anger. We started kicking the television set, and it stopped working. Then Amaury pulled it out of its cabinet. The power and antenna cords followed. He shouted to me to open the window and I did and Amaury threw out the television set. It exploded in the deserted courtyard seven storeys below. The screen seemed intact but hundreds of pieces had flown onto the cobblestones. Amaury spat in the direction of the set’s screen. I closed the window. Amaury went to lie on the floor, and crossed his arms under his head. I lay on the couch and we both looked at the ceiling for a long moment. We fell asleep.

  We never watched nor spoke of that show again. It quickly disappeared from television and Bernard Pivot came back for several Bouillon de culture specials.

  When Cioran died we had a wake at Amaury’s place. We played the music of Bach. We read out loud from all of our master’s books. We shivered and fell silent at the truths he had written. We had decided to write our own obituary of Cioran, which we would send for publication to the national newspaper Le Figaro, where one of my uncles worked. But that night we could find no energy in our despair, no words worthy of Cioran came to us. Nor in the following days.

  SLEEPLESS NIGHTS

  I’ve never had trouble sleeping. Even when I was neurasthenic. I slept more. I felt lethargic and could sleep for days with a few hours of wakefulness. Cioran had the opposite problem. He was, in his youth, an insomniac. He said that he formed all his books in his mind during the sleepless nights of his twenties.

  Could it be a form of insomnia to sleep more than is necessary for one’s body and mind? I have formed, at least in my unconscious, the books I wrote during the few hours of wakefulness between the long periods of sleep of my early twenties. Or was it during the periods of sleep? The books and short stories I have written tell the same things and lack imagination, they are inhabited by a tiring obsession.

  THE REINVENTION OF DREAMS

  Julian started to wake at night and complain. One night he said the phone was ringing in his bed and he patted a spot to the right of his pillow to show his mother where the phone had been.

  ‘There is no phone,’ she said.

  But Julian was adamant – a phone had been ringing next to his pillow. His mother stayed a little, sitting on the edge of his bed. Julian went back to sleep and that was the end of the phone story.

  The following night, Julian woke and cried that there were planes flying over his bedroom. That was true enough as our house was under a flight path; planes flying over the house were not a new phenomenon.

  His mother got up. She said that, yes, planes flew over the house and it was perfectly okay. Julian was not convinced and his mother stayed, but this time it took Julian longer to get back to sleep, so his mother spent half the night in Julian’s bed.

  The following day I spoke to Julian, ‘Come here, my little boy, I’d like to talk to you about something.’

  He was playing with his wooden train tracks and engines. He had organised some of them to take a left turn at the first switch-track and was planning to have them come back to the main line at the next switch-track.

  Nevertheless, Julian came to me. I was sitting on his bed. I embraced him and said, ‘You have been having bad dreams, Julian. Which is why you wake up at night worried and wake us all up.’

  I paused. Julian was smiling and touching my five-o’clock shadow.

  ‘There was no phone in your bed…’ I added.

  But Julian didn’t agree and interrupted, ‘There was a phone and it rang and it was there.’ He pointed at the spot near the pillow on his bed.

  ‘It was in a dream, the phone rang in a dream,’ I explained.

  Julian looked up and his gaze moved about the wall.

  I saw that he was trying to understand what I had just said and I waited to let him process the explanation.

  He stopped smiling for a few moments then smiled again. Had he understood?

  I then said, ‘People dream when they are asleep.’

  Julian ignored that last remark and went back to his trains and asked me to play with him. While we played together I continued to explain, more casually, what dreams were and what impressions they could create in one’s mind, and how they could influence one’s mood, particularly upon one’s awakening in the morning.

  That evening I read to Julian and his mother came to tuck him in his bed after we had read the two customary books.

  Julian asked, ‘Maman, is there a dream in my bedroom?’

  I answered.

  ‘Dreams are not objects, my Julian. They are not things. They are in your mind.’

  I then thought that Julian didn’t know what the mind was.

  ‘Dreams are like a story you think about, they are thoughts,’ I continued.

  Julian pondered what I had said.

  ‘They are thoughts, Papa,’ he repeated.

  His mother said, after a short while, ‘Don’t worry about the dreams, Julian, don’t concern yourself, they are often good thoughts.’

  ‘Is there a dream in my bedroom?’ he asked once more.

  ‘Not at the moment,’ his mother said.

  ‘Will the dream sleep when I am asleep?’ he asked.

  ‘Good night,’ his mother and I said in unison while switching the lig
ht off.

  That night Julian woke and called, crying, for his mother.

  ‘What is happening, Julian?’ she asked upon entering the bedroom and turning the light on.

  ‘There is a dream in my bedroom, Maman!’

  She embraced him and he soon stopped crying. He asked her to stay and she stayed, lying next to him. She waited for him to fall asleep but she soon fell asleep too and woke with the daylight.

  That morning I was away and his mother decided to have her conversation with Julian about dreams. She explained, like I had, that dreams were like stories. She decided to leave, for now, the explanation at that.