Lost Words

by Xavier Hennekinn

Late afternoon, Julian and I watched our favourite animation on television. It was about a clever sheep, a less clever sheep dog, and the flock of sheep, three pigs and their farmer. Julian and I love that show. All the characters are made of clay.

  After the show, Julian and I were playing with the train tracks from his bedroom, which we had pulled apart and put together again in the living room. I was using the disconnected line between the two switches and Julian was using the main line, having his engines stop at the station or rest in the sheds. I had been thinking about Julian’s dream conundrum and I stopped playing and said I had something to talk to him about.

  I said, ‘You know dreams are natural, everyone has dreams, and most of the time dreams are pleasant. Dreams are created by your imagination.’

  I paused.

  ‘They are an animation?’ Julian asked.

  I was surprised, I didn’t know he knew the word animation. His mother, who had been listening, exclaimed, ‘Yes! They are like an animation that is shown when you are asleep. By your mind.’

  There was the word mind again, which his mother and I seemed unable to avoid.

  I felt that perhaps his mother had made a breakthrough but she had employed the word mind, so I further explained, ‘Yes, an animation, a story, created in your head, by your animation… I mean, by your imagination!’

  That evening, before going to bed, after we had read our two stories, Julian asked, ‘Papa, there was a story on my head this afternoon, when I slept.’

  ‘Not on your head, in your head,’ I corrected.

  ‘No,’ Julian said. ‘It was on my hair.’

  The following evening, Julian and I went for a walk after dinner. It was a warm and pleasant spring evening. Some magpies and mynahs were still out quarrelling on tree branches above our front lawn.

  The moon was almost full and when we got home we sat on the front brick wall and looked up at it while talking about it. Julian described its roundness and its glow. I talked about the different states and empires that existed on the moon. While I made little sense to Julian, now and then I captured his attention thanks to the outrageous things the people on the moon did. Julian would say, ‘That’s silly, Papa!’

  His mother had turned on the front light so we could see the step to the porch and the door’s keyhole. As we approached the porch moths started to fly around us.

  Later, Julian lay in bed. Ready for sleep. His mother had tucked him in and I was looking at the scene with a smile. Julian said, ‘Dreams sleep on the moon, Papa. They sleep with the moths, on the moon.’

  ‘You are probably right, my little Julian.’

  And that was the last any of us said about dreams.

  THE INK ON OUR HANDS

  We learnt to write with fountain pens. To avoid smudging our notebooks with the wet blue ink we placed a buvard under the hand that did not hold the pen. The buvard absorbed the ink that had not yet been tattooed onto the white page. Those who wrote with their left hand placed the buvard under their writing hand to avoid the hand rubbing the ink across the page. Writing with a fountain pen was slower for left-handed children. The two Bertrands in the class – Bertrand Beauvalais and Bertrand Billemont – were both left-handed and were dirtier than all the other children. We all went home at the end of the afternoon with both our hands stained by spots of a blue not marine, not azure. The buvard had mainly preserved the writing exercises and mathematics problems on the page from the almost immaterial ink, not our hands, not our sleeves. The Bertrands had ink marks on their faces.

  How long does one’s unconscious require to fully digest such events? Years later it is still ruminating! Is it of any consequence that something is taking place inside us and we pay no attention to it until it wells up to the surface again? Did the events even take place?

  DRIED HEART

  You’ve been hit many times. The harder you’re hit the stronger you are. It’s physics. That’s what you believe, knowing perfectly well this truth to be wrong. If you had to explain this element of disbelief in the context of love to a novice, you could say it is like crossing the road without looking at the traffic knowing, because you saw them from the corner of your eye before you stepped onto the road, that cars are approaching fast.

  The last time you were hit, you went flying. You flew over the green wall. You landed in the thuja trees. After several seasons had passed you fell to the ground, in the Pelletiers’ garden. It was winter so the Pelletiers were away. It was not until spring that the old wooden gate was pushed opened by a Pelletier kid and the car was driven to the cottage down the gravel driveway overtaken by weeds. Not long after Madame Pelletier had opened all the windows, the two Pelletier kids and their dog – a long-haired brown dachshund who never stopped barking – were out playing in the vast unkempt garden.

  The children cried joyfully, running to their almost forgotten favourite spots in the garden. Rocco the dog excitedly leapt in the overgrown grass to wherever the children went. Then a thunderous noise startled him. His ears spread like those of an elephant. Tall on his short legs, Rocco looked at the children who continued their game unconcerned, then back at the house, at the garage near the house. Monsieur Pelletier was moving into the garden in a sitting position, looking into the distance, on his machine. Rocco was unsure about the machine. It was fun running past it, in front of it, but it was so loud and its left side threw thousands of grass cuttings at such velocity that they were like a thousand lashes in the space of an instant. He liked to smell the grass in the wake of the machine. The razed, soft lawn smelt of warmth, it changed the air. It somehow brought Rocco back to the times he got to fuck a few bitches. On occasion he would stop and sniff the air to see if the scent of one of the bitches’ could be found. Nothing. So, he continued following the little tractor, proud to show he didn’t fear it, chest puffed up when he was not sniffing the ground or munching on a juicy leaf of that grass.

  Rocco found you. After Monsieur Pelletier’s machine had run over you. It’s hard to tell what it had done to you. Hard to describe what you looked like after the machine had gone over you, hard to imagine what you suffered. Again, the violence of what happened to you! Your appearance changed completely. You were sort of cut open. Your hair seemed to have been shaved, but how could it have been shaved when no hair had stuck out and it was so very short in the first instance? In that new condition of yours, Rocco could easily plant his teeth into you. Here and there openings in you allowed his teeth to rip a little more of your rubber shell and repeatedly pierce your core. He had you between his two front legs for a long while, chewing at the edges of openings in your shell and gnawing at your heart.

  Yes, you wish the Pelletiers children had found you before the grass was cut, and played with you. Maybe even threw you back over the thujas onto the tennis court where you had come from, though you doubt their arms were strong enough for such a throw. You had softened during the months in and under the trees. Your yellow had turned into a yellowish green, you looked like phosphorescent moss, and you would have most likely been discarded by your old owners. You would have been forgotten on a shelf in the garage with a few other old balls.

  MAUD

  I had met perhaps five or six other girls by the time I met Maud. Back then I would devote myself to a girlfriend, we would break up out of misunderstanding, or for not getting on well enough rather than by lacking sentiment towards each other, or she would leave me for no clear reason; I would meet someone new with whom I would get on well; that someone new would allow me to recover from the previous relationship, which had consumed me, to survive it, in other words; once my spirits lifted, my self-esteem somewhat restored, once the past had become the past, I would grow bored and less dependent on that someone new I was getting on well with and would leave her to seek a more burning love. I met Maud at that moment of the cycle.

  Maud had known one boy, of whom she had nothing special to say. He had not broken her heart. One day, in the morning, on their way to university, he tells her th
at for one reason or another, he no longer loves her. There is no one else, he quickly reassures her. He simply says, ‘I have stopped loving you, that’s all, and at the end of the school year I will leave for England.’ He left for England and Maud had to leave the apartment she and he were renting together. Her parents then bought her an apartment where she could live by herself.

  We met on the main beach of Le Touquet, one day in the off-season. Amaury and I were spending two or three weeks at his parents’ house on Rue de Moscou before going back to university. After meeting on the beach Maud and I went for a drink at the Paris-Plage, at about nine in the evening. It was raining lightly and our hair had got wet on the way to the café. We spoke about our hair. Maud’s hair curled in the rain. We had not touched each other yet and Maud passed her right hand through her hair and I, mine through my hair.

  I had no money, or little, and I let Maud know at the beginning of the evening that I only had fifty francs to spend. Around eleven, I had spent my fifty francs. Maud’s hair was now dry and unruly. I thought of my hair and how desperate I had been to get a haircut. Now that I had taken Maud out for drinks, I had no money left for a haircut before the start of university.

  We walked to her house, which was not too far from Amaury’s. Maud was staying with her parents and younger brother; their weekend house was on Rue de Londres. I think that on the way back to her house her right arm touched my left arm several times, I think we even bumped into each other a little, the alcohol we had consumed making us sway.

  The following day we met at five in the afternoon at the Touquet Tennis Club, at the Rond-point des Sports. I walked into the clubhouse where on a blackboard were written in white chalk the surnames of the day’s players. I didn’t know Maud’s surname so I went to the receptionist to inquire.

  ‘I’m here to meet Maud – tall, slim girl about nineteen or twenty. Black curly hair.’

  ‘Maud Léotard?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The receptionist looked at me with a smile.

  ‘She’s the only Maud I know. She’s about twenty,’ the receptionist said. ‘She’s playing on court eight with Mr Hannon, a young English man.’

  I immediately wondered how Maud knew young English men and came to play tennis with them. Did she speak English?

  Hannon looked like a child. He was short and skinny, with a head big in proportion to his body. He seemed very timid; he didn’t look at the person he talked to – though he barely talked – or who talked to him, but all around that person. I met him as he and Maud entered the clubhouse a few minutes before she and I were due to meet.

  At the club’s bar we drank a menthe-à-l’eau. Maud put her head on my shoulder and her hair tickled my nose. It had curled with the light morning rain, I assumed, or during her tennis game. I didn’t know what to do; I barely knew her and she had put her head on my shoulder, in public.

  She looked at Hannon, who looked elsewhere, with a movable smile. He is a nervous boy, I thought. Otherwise why would his eyes always be moving, ceaselessly considering the room, and his lips quickly and radically changing position, from a tense smile to a pout? Why is he nervous? Perhaps because Maud has placed her head on my shoulder. Is he embarrassed by her gesture? I gently moved in order to provoke Maud to sit up on her chair, and she sat up. Hannon’s attitude didn’t change. Most likely he was of an anxious nature.

  Now that Maud’s head was no longer on my shoulder, I relaxed. Later, after we had said good bye to Hannon and were walking to the beach, I told myself that placing your head on the shoulder of someone you barely knew didn’t make you this or that sort of person, it didn’t mean much. Perhaps Maud liked me; perhaps it didn’t mean, after all, that she was the kind of girl who placed her head on the shoulder of a boy she barely knew.

  Only a few strolling silhouettes, tiny in the distance, on the esplanade. Maud and I had left our clothes and Maud’s racquet on the sand. Maud had left her bra on the beach, almost half a kilometre away from where we were, where the sea had withdrawn. The water of the English Channel was strangely warm, the air fresh. September had just begun. With summer gone, the Le Touquet crowd had dispersed, the holiday-makers gone back to their hometowns. The beach was deserted, the sky had taken the appearance of a lunar landscape above our heads. I looked at the dark and flat aqueous expanse, infinite in front of me. Something in me stirred; I had been a mass of water in the sea a moment ago and now I was a minuscule foreign body in an element that was about to engulf me. I could no longer look at the horizon; I kept my eyes on Maud, on her bare breasts.

  CHARLES JULIET

  It was not unusual for me to be gripped by such visceral fears.

  I would not panic, lose my calm, but rather let myself sink, be taken by my insignificance. I wouldn’t fall, I would sink. Like that day. How many times have I stood there, realising I was finished?

  Is there a word for this? I can’t think of it. The anxiety caused by inner emptiness, its vastness, the impossibility of filling that space.

  I was a quiet boy. A quiet young man. Distant to many. I only had one friend then, Amaury. He and I were somewhat alike though he had other friends. I was however the only friend with whom he had a bond rooted in reading, reading philosophy and literature. We read and admired the same books.

  Amaury also wrote but had not been published. He was lazy about writing and accepted that he was. I read all he had written. Fragments. Thoughts. The words on Marguerite Duras were the closest to something whole. They constituted a kind of admiring poem in prose.

  There was one writer I admired and for whom Amaury had no time. He had no time for literary diaries, he had confessed once, and Charles Juliet’s oeuvre is for a large part a diary. My ambition then was to be a writer like Juliet. A writer of the intimate, capturing the essence of things and devoid of éclat. Amaury thought Juliet’s writing banal. You are wrong, I told him. How can you not see what is there, in front of you, in Juliet’s books? Juliet was a friend; he was writing to us the way one writes to a friend.

  I never understood how Amaury failed to be touched by Juliet’s writing. Perhaps he had been confounded by its simplicity and the limpidity of its meaning. Juliet did not hide his meaning and perhaps Amaury was unaccustomed to such sincerity in a literary work.

  I FEEL BETTER WHEN I FEEL BAD

  We didn’t particularly know or like the singer Eddy Mitchell but that year Eddy Mitchell had a song come out with a refrain Amaury and I found ourselves talking about at length. The song was called ‘J’me sens mieux quand j’me sens mal’ – I feel better when I feel bad. Not so much a revelation as a well-captured sentiment.

  Back then, I did feel better when I felt bad. Feeling bad meant that an immanent process would occur, resulting in my writing introspective stories. These stories, when I read them today, have the power to conjure up a mild version of the feeling that inhabited me at the time I wrote the story. That’s how it was, I say to myself, that’s right! I sometimes weep when I read the stories taking place in Le Touquet. Yes, I do.

  Amaury went on to explore Eddy Mitchell’s repertoire. If he has captured something so true with this song, there must be others, he said. He enjoyed some of Mitchell’s blues songs but found none with the tragic truth of ‘J’me sens mieux quand j’me sens mal’.

  I was a quiet young man because I was contemplating the vacuum inside. Human presence, particularly human sounds such as voices and what these voices communicated, seemed to make that vacuum more harrowing because they echoed in it. Silences didn’t echo in the empty vastness but noises did and I constantly sought silence.

  LA DENTELLIÈRE

  Nowadays, it’s not difficult to know where people live and what they do for a living. Predictably Maud is now working for the lace company her family has owned for four generations. Her brother is running it. Her sister is a science journalist.

  La dentellière was Pascal Lainé’s fourth novel. For a long time I thought it was his first novel: it reads like a first novel
. Nowadays it’s easy to know when an author has written a novel and whether it is his first, fourth or nth. Amaury and I admired La dentellière. It was a novel I could have written because it was about a young woman I could have known and a young man I could have been. I told this to Amaury and he saw what I meant. He could not have been the young man of the novel, nor had he known anyone like Pomme, but he saw what I meant.

  Pomme, the young woman whose heart gets broken by the narrator, lives in the north of France and works in a lace factory. When I met Maud and she told me her family owned a lace factory in the north of the country and that one day she would run it, I could not help thinking that our story would turn out to be an enactment of Pascal Lainé’s La dentellière. An aspiring young writer meets a shy and quiet young woman, a factory worker. The young man is fascinated by the young woman. They start living together in a tiny apartment; he gets bored with her, leaves her; she subsequently goes mad and kills herself at the mental health home. Our story was different insofar as I played the role of Pomme, and it was I who ended up going mad.

  POMME

  Maud was not shy nor was she quiet. She sought attention through her physical presence. She was movement, laughter. She wanted her presence to be who she was, she wanted to be a stage actress. She took acting lessons at the Court Florent after her business classes. Could she have ever played the role of Pomme? No.

  ISABELLE HUPPERT

  Isabelle Huppert played Pomme in the film adaptation of La dentellière. It is one of her first films. Amaury and I often kept long silences after he and I talked about Huppert’s performance as Pomme, contemplating her tragic destiny. While we both disliked the film, we never re-read La dentellière imagining Pomme in any other way than with Isabelle Huppert’s appearance, soft and almost inaudible voice and pathetic, vacant gaze.