Suddenly there is a great burst of white light, blinding me. Someone leans over me, a voice stabs my head, I hear screams echoing in distant corridors, but I know they are mine. I breathe in blackness through my mouth, a blackness peopled with strange faces, with murmurs, and I die again, happy.
A moment later – a day, a week, a year – the light returns on the other side of my eyelids, my hands burn, and my mouth, and my eyes. I am rolled down empty corridors, I scream again, and it is black.
Sometimes the pain is concentrated in a single spot behind my head. Sometimes I am aware of being moved, of being rolled elsewhere, and the pain spreads through my veins like a tongue of flame drying up my blood. In the blackness there is often fire, there is often water, but I no longer suffer. The sheets of flame frighten me. The columns of water are cold and sweet to my sleep. I want the faces to fade away, the murmurs to die down. When I breathe in blackness through my mouth, I want the blackest black, I want to sink as deep as possible into the icy water, and never to come up.
Suddenly I come up, dragged towards the pain by my whole body, nailed by my eyes under the white light. I struggle, I howl, I hear my screams from a great distance, the voice that stabs my head brutally says things I do not understand.
Black. Faces. Murmurs. I feel good. My child, if you start that again, I’ll slap your face, with Papa’s fingers which are stained from cigarettes. Light Papa’s cigarette, angel, the fire, blow out the match, the fire.
White. Pain on the hands, on the mouth, in the eyes. Don’t move. Don’t move, child. There, easy. This won’t hurt. Oxygen. Easy. There, good girl, good girl.
Black. A woman’s face. Two times two is four, three times two is six, ruler blows on the fingers. We walk in a line. Open your mouth wide when you sing. All the faces walk in two lines. Where is the nurse? I don’t want any whispering in class. We will go to the beach when the weather is fine. Is she talking? At first she was delirious. Since the graft she complains of her hands, but not her face. The sea. If you go far out too, you will drown. She complains of her mother, and of a schoolteacher who used to hit her on the fingers. The waves went over my head. Water, my hair in the water, go under, come up again, light.
I came to the surface one morning in September, with lukewarm hands and face, lying on my back on clean sheets. There was a window near my bed, and a great splash of sunlight in front of me.
A man came and spoke to me in a very gentle voice, for a time which seemed to me too short. He told me to be a good girl, and try not to move my head or hands. He cut off his syllables when he spoke. He was calm and reassuring. He had a long bony face and large black eyes. But his white gown hurt my eyes. He realised this when he saw me lower my eyelids.
The second time he came in a grey woollen jacket. He spoke to me again. He asked me to close my eyes for yes. I had pain, yes. In my head, yes. On my hands, yes. On my face, yes. I understood what he was saying, yes. He asked me whether I knew what had happened. He saw that I kept my eyes open, in despair.
He went away and my nurse came to give me an injection so I could sleep. She was tall, with large white hands. I realised that my face was not uncovered like hers. I made an attempt to feel the bandages, the salve, on my skin. Mentally I followed, piece by piece, the strip that wound around my neck, continued over the nape of my neck and the top of my head, wound around my forehead, missed my eyes, and wound once more around the lower part of my face, winding, winding. I fell asleep.
In the days that followed, I was someone who is moved around, fed, rolled through corridors, who answers by closing her eyes once for yes, twice for no, who tries not to scream, who howls when her dressings are changed, who tries to convey with her eyes the questions that oppress her, who can neither speak nor move, a creature whose body is cleansed with ointments, as her mind is with injections, a thing without hands or face: no one.
‘Your bandages will be removed in two weeks,’ said the doctor with the bony face. ‘Although I have mixed feelings about that: I rather liked you as a mummy.’
He had told me his name: Doulin. He was pleased that I was able to remember it five minutes later, and even more pleased to hear me pronounce it correctly. Before, when he used to hover over me, he would simply say mademoiselle, or child, or good girl, and I would repeat mamaschool, goodiplication, mamarule, words which my mind knew were wrong, but which my stiffened lips formed against my will. Later he called this ‘telescoping’; he said that it was the least of our worries and would disappear very quickly.
Actually it took me less than ten days to recognise verbs and adjectives when I heard them. Common nouns took me a few days more. I never recognised proper nouns. I was able to repeat them just as correctly as the others, but they meant nothing to me besides what Dr Doulin had told me. Except for a few like Paris, France, China, Place Masséna, or Napoleon, they remained locked in a past which was unknown to me. I relearned them, but that was all. It was pointless, however, to explain to me what was meant by to eat, to walk, bus, skull, clinic, or anything that was not a definite person, place, or event. Dr Doulin said this was normal, and I was not to worry about it.
‘Do you remember my name?’
‘I remember everything you’ve said. When can I see myself?’
He moved away, and when I tried to follow him with my eyes it hurt. He returned with a mirror. I looked at myself, me: two eyes and a mouth in a long, hard helmet swathed in gauze and white bandages.
‘It takes over an hour to undo all that. What’s underneath should be very pretty.’
He was holding the mirror in front of me. I was leaning back against a pillow, almost sitting up, my arms at my sides, tied to the bed.
‘Are they going to untie my hands?’
‘Soon. You’ll have to be good and not move around too much. They’ll be fastened only at night.’
‘I see my eyes. They’re blue.’
‘Yes, they’re blue. You’re going to be good now: not move, not think, just sleep. I’ll be back this afternoon.’
The mirror vanished, and that thing with blue eyes and a mouth. The long bony face reappeared.
‘Sleep tight, little mummy.’
I felt myself being lowered into a lying position. I wished I could see the doctor’s hands. Faces, hands, eyes were all that mattered just then. But he was gone, and I went to sleep without an injection, tired all over, repeating a name which was as unfamiliar as the rest: my own.
‘Michèle Isola. They call me Mi, or Micky. I am twenty years old. I’ll be twenty-one in November. I was born in Nice. My father still lives there.’
‘Easy, mummy. You’re swallowing half your words and wearing yourself out.’
‘I remember everything you’ve said. I lived for several years in Italy with my aunt who died in June. I was burned in a fire about three months ago.’
‘What else did I tell you?’
‘I had a car. Make, MG. Registration number, TTX 664313. Colour, white.’
‘Very good, mummy.’
I tried to reach out to keep him from going, and a stab of pain shot up my arm to the nape of my neck. He never stayed more than a few minutes. Then they gave me something to drink, they put me to sleep.
‘My car was white. Make, MG. Registration number, TTX 664313.’
‘The house?’
‘It’s on a promontory called Cap Cadet, between La Ciotat and Bandol. It had two storeys, three rooms and a kitchen downstairs, three rooms and two bathrooms upstairs.’
‘Not so fast. Your room?’
‘It overlooked the sea and a town called Les Lecques. The walls were painted blue and white. This is ridiculous: I remember everything you say.’
‘It’s important, mummy.’
‘What’s important is that I’m repeating. It doesn’t mean anything. They’re just words.’
‘Could you repeat them in Italian?’
‘No. I remember camera, casa, macchina, bianca. I’ve already told you that.’
‘That’s enough for today. When you’re better, I’ll show you some photographs. I have three big boxes of them. I know you better than you know yourself, mummy.’
It was a doctor named Chaveres who had operated on me, three days after the fire, in a hospital in Nice. Dr Doulin said that this operation, after two haemorrhages on the same day, had been wonderful to watch and full of amazing details, but that he wouldn’t want any surgeon to have to repeat it.
I was in a clinic on the outskirts of Paris run by a Dr Dinne. I had been moved there a month after the first operation. I had had a third haemorrhage on the plane when the pilot had been forced to gain altitude a quarter of an hour before landing.
‘Dr Dinne took charge of you as soon as the graft had passed the critical stage. He made you a pretty nose. I’ve seen the plaster cast. It’s very pretty, I assure you.’
‘What about you?’
‘I am Dr Chaveres’s brother-in-law. I work at Saint Anne’s. I’ve been looking after you from the day you were brought to Paris.’
‘What have they done to me?’
‘Here? They’ve made you a pretty nose, mummy.’
‘But before that?’
‘That doesn’t matter now; what matters is you’re here. You’re lucky to be twenty years old.’
‘Why can’t I see anyone? If I saw someone, my father, or anyone I knew, I’m sure everything would come back to me in one blow.’
‘You have a way with words, my dear. You’ve already had one blow on the head which gave us enough trouble. The fewer you have now, the better.’
Smiling, he moved his hand slowly towards my shoulder and let it rest there for a moment without pressure.
‘Don’t worry, mummy. Everything is going to be fine. In a while your memory will come back a little at a time, without a fuss. There are many kinds of amnesia, almost as many as there are amnesiacs. But you have a very nice kind: retrograde, lacunar, no aphasia, not even a stammer, and so comprehensive, so complete, that now the gap can only get smaller. So it’s a tiny, tiny little thing.’
He held out his thumb and index finger, almost touching, for me to see. He smiled and rose with deliberate slowness, so that I would not have to move my eyes too abruptly.
‘Be good, mummy.’
*
The time came when I was so good that they no longer knocked me out three times a day with a pill in my broth. This was in late September, nearly three months after the accident. I could pretend to be asleep and let my memory beat its wings against the bars of its cage.
There were sun-filled streets, palm trees by the sea, a school, a classroom, a teacher with her hair pulled back, a red wool bathing suit, nights illuminated by Chinese lanterns, military bands, being offered chocolate by an American soldier – and the gap.
Afterwards, there was a sudden burst of white light, the nurse’s hands, Dr Doulin’s face.
Sometimes I saw again very clearly, with a harsh and disturbing clarity, a pair of thick butcher’s hands with large but nimble fingers and the face of a stout man with cropped hair. These were the hands and face of Dr Chaveres, glimpsed between two blackouts, two comas, a memory which I placed in the month of July, when he had brought me into that white, indifferent, incomprehensible world.
I did mental calculations, the back of my neck painful against the pillow, my eyes closed. I saw these calculations being written on a blackboard. I was twenty. According to Dr Doulin, the American soldiers were giving chocolate to little girls in 1944 or ’45. My memories did not go beyond five or six years after my birth: fifteen years wiped out.
I concentrated on proper names, because these were the words that evoked nothing, were connected with nothing in this new life I was being forced to live. Georges Isola, my father; Firenze, Roma, Napoli; Les Lecques, Cap Cadet. It was useless, and later I learned from Dr Doulin that I was banging my head against a brick wall.
‘I told you not to fret, mummy. If your father’s name means nothing to you, it is because you’ve forgotten your father along with everything else. His name doesn’t matter.’
‘But when I say the word river, or fox, I know what it means. Have I seen a river or a fox since the accident?’
‘Look, when you’re yourself again, I promise you we’ll have a long talk about it. Meanwhile I would rather you remained quiet. Just tell yourself you’re going through a process which is definite, understood, one might almost say normal. Every morning I see ten old men who haven’t been hit on the head and who are in almost exactly the same state. Five or six years back is just about the limit of their memories. They remember their schoolteacher, but not their children or grandchildren. This doesn’t prevent them from playing their belote. They have forgotten almost everything, but not belote or how to roll their cigarettes. That’s the way it is. You’ve got us stymied with an amnesia of a senile variety. If you were a hundred, I’d tell you to take care of yourself and that would be that. But you’re twenty. There’s not one chance in a million that you will stay like this. Do you understand?’
‘When can I see my father?’
‘Soon. In a few days they’ll take off this medieval contraption you have on your face. After that, we’ll see.’
‘I want to know what happened.’
‘Another time, mummy. There are things I want to be very sure of, and if I stay too long, you’ll get tired. Now, what’s the number of the MG?’
‘664313 TTX.’
‘Are you purposely saying it backwards?’
‘Yes I am! I can’t stand it! I want to move my hands! I want to see my father! I want to get out of here! You make me say the same stupid things over and over every day! I can’t stand it!’
‘Easy, mummy.’
‘Stop calling me that!’
‘Calm yourself, please.’
I lifted one arm, an enormous plaster fist. This was the afternoon of ‘the fit’. The nurse came. They retied my hands. Dr Doulin stood against the wall opposite me and stared at me with eyes full of shame and resentment.
I howled, no longer knowing whether it was him or myself I hated. I was given an injection. I saw other nurses and doctors come into the room. I believe it was the first time that I actually thought about my physical appearance. I had the sensation of seeing myself through the eyes of those who were watching me, as if I were two people in this white room, this white bed. A formless thing, with three holes, ugly, shameful, howling. I howled with horror.
Dr Dinne came to see me in the days that followed, and talked to me as if I were a five-year-old girl, a little spoilt, something of a nuisance, who had to be protected from herself.
‘If you start that performance again, I won’t be responsible for what we’ll find under your bandages. You’ll have only yourself to blame.’
Dr Doulin did not come back for a whole week. It was I who had to ask, several times, for him. My nurse, who must have been criticised after ‘the fit’, answered my questions reluctantly. She untied my arms for two hours a day, during which time she kept her eyes fastened on me, suspicious and ill at ease.
‘Are you the one who stays with me while I sleep?’
‘No.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘Someone else.’
‘I’d like to see my father.’
‘You’re not ready to.’
‘I’d like to see Dr Doulin.’
‘Dr Dinne does not wish it.’
‘Tell me something.’
‘What?’
‘Anything. Talk to me.’
‘It’s not allowed.’
I looked at her large hands, which I found beautiful and reassuring. Eventually she became aware of my gaze and was annoyed by it.
‘Stop watching me that way.’
‘You’re the one that’s watching me.’
‘You need to be watched,’ she said.
‘How old are you?’
‘Forty-six.’
‘How long have I been here?’
‘Seven weeks.’
‘Have you taken care of me all that time?’
‘Yes. That’s enough, now.’
‘How was I at first?’
‘You didn’t move.’
‘Was I delirious?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘What did I say?’
‘Nothing of interest.’
‘What, though?’
‘I can’t remember now.’
At the end of another week, another eternity, Dr Doulin came into the room with a package under his arm. He was wearing a dirty raincoat which he did not remove. The rain beat against the window panes beside my bed.
He came over to me, touched my shoulder the way he always did, very quickly and gently, and said, ‘Hello, mummy.’
‘I’ve waited a long time for you.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I got a present out of it.’
He explained that someone outside the clinic had sent him flowers after ‘the fit’. The bouquet – dahlias, because his wife liked them – was accompanied by a little key ring for the car. He showed it to me. It was a round object, in gold, which struck the hours. Very useful for parking in a restricted parking zone.
‘Was it my father who sent the present?’
‘No. Someone who has taken care of you since the death of your aunt, whom you have seen much more of than you have of your father in the last few years. It’s a woman. Her name is Jeanne Murneau. She followed you to Paris. She asks after you three times a day.’
I told him that this name meant nothing to me. He took a chair, set the timer on his key ring, and put it on the bed near my arm.
‘In fifteen minutes it’ll ring and I’ll have to go. How do you feel, mummy?’
‘I wish you’d stop calling me that.’
‘After tomorrow I’ll never call you that again. You’ll be taken to the operating theatre in the morning. Your bandages will be removed. Dr Dinne thinks everything should be nicely healed.’
He unwrapped the package he had brought. It was photographs, photographs of me. He handed them to me one at a time, watching my eyes. He did not seem to expect me to recognise anything. At any rate, I did not. I saw a girl with black hair who looked very pretty, who smiled a great deal, who had a slender figure and long legs, who was sixteen in some of the pictures and eighteen in others.
The pictures were glossy, beautiful, and horrible to contemplate. I did not even try to remember this clear-eyed face, nor the series of landscapes I was shown. From the first photograph, I knew it would be wasted effort. I was happy, eager to look at myself and unhappier than I had been since I had opened my eyes under the white light. I felt like laughing and crying at once. In the end, I cried.
‘There, there. Don’t be silly.’
He put the pictures away, in spite of my desire to see them again.
‘Tomorrow I’ll show you some others in which you are not alone, but with Jeanne Murneau, your aunt, your father, friends you had three months ago. You mustn’t expect this to bring back your past. But it will help you.’
I said yes, that I had confidence in him. The key ring rang near my arm.
I walked back from the operating theatre with the help of my nurse and an assistant of Dr Dinne’s: thirty steps along a corridor of which I saw only the tiled floor under the towel that covered my head. A black and white chequerboard pattern. I was put back in bed, my arms more tired than my legs, because my hands were still in their heavy casts.
They arranged me in a sitting position with the pillow behind my back. Dr Dinne, in a suit, joined us in the room. He seemed pleased. He watched me curiously, attentive to my every movement. My naked face felt cold as ice.
‘May I see myself?’
He motioned to the nurse. He was a stout little man without much hair. The nurse came towards the bed with the mirror in which I had seen myself in my mask two weeks before.
My face, my eyes looking at my eyes: a short, straight nose. Skin taut over prominent cheekbones. Full lips opening in an anxious little smile, slightly plaintive. A colour not ghastly, as I was expecting, but rosy, freshly scrubbed. In short, a very attractive face, which lacked naturalness because I still did not dare move the muscles beneath the skin, and which I found decidedly oriental because of the cheekbones and the eyes, which were drawn towards the temples. My face, immobile and mysterious, down which I saw two warm tears trickle, then two more, and two more. My own face, which was becoming blurred, which I could no longer see.
‘Your hair will grow back fast,’ said the nurse. ‘Look how much it’s grown in three months under the bandages. Your eyelashes will get longer too.’
Her name was Madame Raymonde. She did the best she could with my hair: there was three inches of it to hide the scars, and she arranged it a lock at a time to give it body. She washed my face and neck with cotton wool. She smoothed my eyebrows. She seemed to have forgiven me for ‘the fit’. She prepared me every day as if for a wedding.
She said, ‘You look like a little monk, or Joan of Arc. Do you know who Joan of Arc was?’
She had brought me from outside, as I had requested, a large mirror which was fastened to the foot of my bed. I stopped looking at myself only when I slept.
She was more willing to talk to me too, during the long hours of the afternoon. She would sit on a chair near me and knit or smoke a cigarette, so close that by bending my head slightly I could see both our faces in the mirror.
‘Have you been a nurse for a long time?’
‘Twenty-five years. I’ve been here for ten.’
‘Have you had patients like me before?’
‘There are a lot of people who want their noses changed.’
‘I’m not talking about them.’
‘I took care of an amnesiac once. A long time ago.’
‘Did she get well?’
‘She was very old.’
‘Show me the pictures again.’
She went and got from the chest of drawers the box that Dr Doulin had left with us. One by one she handed me pictures which had never meant anything to me, which no longer caused even the pleasure of those first moments when I thought I was on the verge of discovering the what lay behind these gestures frozen on glossy 9 * 12 paper.
I looked, for the twentieth time, at someone who had been me, whom I already found less attractive than the girl with short hair at the foot of my bed.
I also looked at a stout woman with heavy jowls wearing a pince-nez. This was my Aunt Midola. She never smiled, she wore knitted shawls around her shoulders, and she was sitting down in all the pictures.
I looked at Jeanne Murneau, who had been devoted to my aunt for fifteen years, who had been with me constantly for the last six or seven years, who had come to live in Paris when I had been moved there from Nice after the operation. The graft, a piece of skin ten inches square – that was her. And also the flowers in my room, fresh every day, the nightgowns which I had to be content merely to admire, the cosmetics which were still forbidden, the bottles of champagne which were lined up against the wall, the sweets which Madame Raymonde distributed among her colleagues in the corridor
‘Have you seen her?’
‘That young woman? Yes, several times, around one o’clock when I go to lunch.’
‘What does she look like?’
‘Like the pictures. You’ll be able to see her in a few days.’
‘Has she spoken to you?’
‘Yes, several times.’
‘What did she say?’
‘Take good care of my little girl. She was your aunt’s right-hand woman in a way, a sort of secretary or housekeeper. It was she who took care of you in Italy. Your aunt could hardly get around at the end.’
In the photographs Jeanne Murneau was tall, serene, rather good-looking, rather well-dressed, rather severe. She was next to me in only one picture. It was in the snow. We were wearing fitted trousers and woolly hats with tassels. In spite of the tassels, the skis, and the smile on the face of the girl who was me, the picture did not give an impression of light-heartedness or friendship.
‘She looks as if she’s angry with me here.’
Madame Raymonde turned the print around to look at it, and nodded her head grimly.
‘No doubt you gave her good reason. You got into more than one jam, you know.’
‘How do you know?’
‘The papers.’
‘Oh.’
The papers for July had told the story of the Cap Cadet fire. Dr Doulin was keeping the issues that discussed me and the other girl, and still would not show them to me.
The other girl was also in the photographs. They were all there: tall, short, pretty, ugly, all strangers, all smiling the same set smile which I was tired of seeing.
‘I’ve seen enough for today.’
‘Would you like me to read to you?’
‘Yes, my father’s letters.’
There were three from him, a hundred from friends and relatives I no longer knew. Best wishes for a quick recovery. We’re living in a state of anxiety. I no longer exist. I can’t wait to hold you in my arms. Dear Mi. My Micky. Mi darling. My sweet. My poor child.
My father’s letters were kind, worried, shy, and disappointing. There were two boys who had written to me in Italian. Someone else, who’d signed himself François, declared that I would belong to him always, that he would make me forget this hell.
From Jeanne Murneau, however, there was only a note, sent two days before the removal of my mask. It was delivered to me then with the letters. It must have come with a box of candied fruits or some silk underwear, or the little watch I was wearing on my wrist. It said, ‘My Mi, my love, my angel, you are not alone, I promise you. Don’t worry. Don’t be unhappy. Love and kisses, Jeanne.’
I didn’t have to have this one read to me; I knew it by heart.
They removed the casts and bandages that immobilised my arms. They put on a pair of soft, lightweight white cotton gloves without letting me see my hands.
‘Will I have to wear gloves like this?’
‘The main thing is that you have the use of your hands. The bones are not damaged, the knuckles will be painful only for a few days. You won’t be able to fix watches with these fingers, but you will be able to make all the ordinary movements. At the worst, you’ll have to give up playing tennis.’
It was not Dr Dinne who spoke, but one of the two doctors he had brought into the room. They were answering me severely for my own good, to keep me from feeling sorry for myself.
They made me bend and unbend my fingers for a few minutes, and open and close my hands on theirs. They left, giving me an appointment for a check-up X-ray two weeks later.
It was the morning for doctors. After the others there came a cardiologist, then Dr Doulin. I walked around the flower-filled room dressed in a skirt of thick blue wool and a white blouse. The cardiologist unbuttoned my blouse to listen to a heart which he pronounced sound. I thought about my hands which I would soon see without my gloves. I thought about my high-heeled shoes, which had immediately seemed natural to me. If everything had been wiped out, if I had somehow become a little girl of five, should not all these things – high-heeled shoes, stockings, lipstick – seem strange to me?
‘You’re impossible,’ said Dr Doulin. ‘I’ve kept telling you not to go into raptures over this kind of nonsense. If I should invite you to dinner now, and you were to hold your fork properly, what would that prove? That your hands remember better than you do? Even if I let you take the wheel of my car, and after a little trouble with the gears because you’re not used to a Peugeot 403, you were to drive more or less normally, do you think we would have learned anything?’
‘I don’t know. You should explain it to me.’
‘I should also keep you in a few days longer. Unfortunately, they’re anxious to take you away. I have no legal power to keep you here, unless you want to stay. And I’m not even sure I’m right to ask it of you.’
‘Who wants to take me away?’
‘Jeanne Murneau. She says she can’t stand it any more.’
‘Am I going to see her?’
‘What do you think all this packing is about?’
Without looking around, he indicated with his hand the room, the open door, Madame Raymonde arranging my clothes, another nurse taking away the bottles of champagne and piles of books which had not been read to me.
‘Why do you want me to stay?’
‘You are leaving with a nice face, a little heart in good order, hands you will be able to use, a third left frontal convolution which gives every indication of being healthy: I was hoping that when you left you would take away your memory as well.’
‘The third what?’
‘Frontal convolution. The left side of the brain. That was where you had your first haemorrhage. The aphasia I noticed at first must have originated there. It has nothing to do with the rest.’
‘What is the cause of the rest?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps simply the fear you must have experienced during the fire. Or the shock. While the house was on fire, you were thrown outside. You were found at the foot of a flight of stairs, with a head wound over four inches long. In any case, the amnesia from which you suffer is not related to any brain injury. I thought so at first, but it’s something else.’
I was sitting on my unmade bed, my white-gloved hands resting on my knees. I told him that I wanted to leave, that I couldn’t stand it any more either, that when I saw Jeanne Murneau, when I talked to her, everything would come back to me.
He spread his hands in a gesture of resignation.
‘She will be here this afternoon. She will certainly want to take you away immediately. If you stay in Paris I will see you at the hospital or at my surgery. If she takes you south, it is imperative that you see Dr Chaveres.’
He was sharp and I could see he was annoyed with me. I told him that I would come to see him often, but that I would go mad if I stayed in this room any longer.
‘There is only one madness you have to worry about,’ he told me, ‘and that would be to think, “I have plenty of time to make new memories.” Later, you’d be sorry.’
He left me with this thought, which in fact had already occurred to me. Now that I had a face, the fifteen lost years did not bother me so much. All I had left was a tolerable pain in the back of my neck, a feeling of heaviness in my head, and that, too, would disappear. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I was myself. I had the face of a little monk, a life waiting for me outside. I was happy. I liked myself. Never mind the ‘other one’, since this one was me.
‘Do you know, when I see myself in this mirror I adore myself. I’m mad about myself!’
I was talking to Madame Raymonde and pirouetting to make my skirt whirl. My legs were poor partners to my enthusiasm: I almost lost my balance and stopped in confusion. Jeanne was there.
She was standing in the doorway with one hand on the doorknob, her face strangely immobile, her hair fairer than I had imagined, in a beige outfit that caught the light. Something else I had not noticed in her pictures was that she was very tall, almost a head taller than me.
Her face and manner were not really strange to me, and for a second I thought the past was going to rise up in one great wave and knock me down. It must have been the dizziness from turning around, or the unexpected presence of a woman who was as familiar to me as someone encountered in a dream. I fell onto my bed and instinctively I hid my face and hair in my gloved hands, as if I were ashamed of them.
A moment later Madame Raymonde had discreetly left the room. I saw Jeanne’s lips part, I heard her voice, which was soft, low, and intimate like her gaze, and then she came over to me and took me in her arms.
‘Don’t cry.’
‘I can’t help it.’
I kissed her cheek, her neck, I regretted that I could touch her only through my gloves, I even recognised her perfume, which also came from a dream. With my head against her breast, ashamed of my hair which she was brushing aside gently and which would surely reveal the scars, I told her that I was unhappy, that I wanted to go away with her, that she could not know how I had waited for her.
‘Let me look at you.’
I did not want to, but she made me raise my head, and her eyes, so close to mine, made me believe again that everything was going to come back to me. Her eyes were golden, very light, and something hesitant stirred in their depths.
She, too, was renewing her acquaintance. She studied me with a puzzled expression. Finally I could not bear this examination, this searching of my face for a girl who had disappeared. I took her by the wrists, crying harder than ever, and pushed her away from me.
‘Take me away, please. Don’t look at me. It’s me, Mi! Don’t look at me.’
She continued to stroke my hair, calling me her darling, her baby, her angel. Then Dr Dinne came in. He was embarrassed by my tears, and by the height of Jeanne who, when she got up, was taller than anyone else in the room: taller than he, or his assistants, or Madame Raymonde.
There were instructions, a long list of concerns on my behalf which I did not understand, which I no longer wanted to understand. I was standing huddled against Jeanne. She had her arm around me, she was speaking to them in the voice of a queen who was taking away her child, her Mi. I was happy. I was no longer afraid of anything.
It was she who buttoned my coat, a suede one I must have worn before, for it was shiny at the sleeves. It was she who arranged a beret on my head and knotted a green silk scarf around my neck. It was she who guided me through the corridors of the clinic, towards a glass door splashed with sunlight, blinding.
Outside was a white car with a black soft top. She helped me into the seat, closed the door, and reappeared at the wheel. She was calm and silent, and from time to time she looked at me and smiled, or placed a quick kiss on my temple.
We were off. Gravel under the wheels; a gate opening; wide avenues with trees on either side.
‘This is the Bois de Boulogne,’ said Jeanne.
I was tired. My eyelids were drooping. I felt myself slipping, my head lying on the velvety material of her skirt. Near my head I saw the steering wheel turn. I was miraculously alive. I fell asleep.
I awoke on a low couch with a red plaid blanket over my legs, in a huge room lit by table lamps which could not chase the shadows from every corner.
A fire was burning in a grand fireplace thirty paces away, across the room. I got up, the weight of emptiness in my head heavier than ever. I walked over to the fire, drew up a chair, sank into it, and again fell into a light sleep.
Later I was aware that Jeanne was leaning over me. I heard her voice murmuring. Then suddenly I thought I remembered Godmother Midola being pushed in her wheelchair, her orange shawl over her shoulders, ugly, horrible … I opened my eyes to a world that made my head swim, where everything was blurred as if seen through a rain-drenched window.
The world came back into focus. Jeanne’s clear face and golden hair were over me. I had the impression that she had been looking at me for a long time.
‘How do you feel?’
I said I was fine, and held out my arms to her. Beyond her hair, which was against my cheek, I saw the enormous room, the panelled walls, the lamps, the shadowy corners, the couch I had abandoned. The blanket was around my knees.
‘What is this place?’
‘A house someone’s letting me use. I’ll explain later. Do you feel all right? You fell asleep in the car.’
‘I’m cold.’
‘I took off your coat. I shouldn’t have. Just a minute.’
She held me tighter, then rubbed my arms and back vigorously to warm me. I laughed. She drew back with an impenetrable expression, and again I saw hesitation in the depths of her eyes. Then, abruptly, she joined in my laughter. She handed me a cup which had been placed on the carpet.
‘Drink it. It’s tea.’
‘Did I sleep a long time?’
‘Three hours. Drink.’
‘Are we alone here?’
‘No. There’s a cook and a butler who don’t know what to make of you. Drink. They couldn’t get over it when I brought you from the car. You’re thinner. I carried you myself. I’m going to do everything I can to put some weight on you. When you were little you used to hate me for making you eat.’
‘I hated you?’
‘Drink. No, you didn’t hate me. You were thirteen. Your ribs stuck out. You have no idea how ashamed I was of those ribs. Drink, do you hear?’
I drank the tea in one swallow. It was lukewarm, and the taste was not unfamiliar, although I did not particularly like it.
‘You don’t like it?’
‘Not especially, no.’
‘You used to, before.’
From now on there would always be this ‘before’. I told Jeanne that they had given me a little coffee in my last days at the clinic, and that it was good for me. Jeanne bent over the chair and said that she would give me whatever I liked, the main thing was that I was here, alive.
‘Just now, at the clinic, you didn’t recognise me, did you?’
‘Of course I recognised you.’
‘Did you?’
‘You’re my baby,’ she said. ‘The first time I saw you was at the airport in Rome. You were very small, with a huge suitcase. You had the same lost look. Your godmother told me, “Murneau, if you don’t fatten her up, you’re fired.” I fed you, washed you, dressed you, taught you Italian, tennis, draughts, the Charleston, everything. I even gave you two spankings. From thirteen to eighteen, you never left me for more than three days at a time. You were my own girl. Your godmother used to say that you were my “job”. And now I’m going to start all over again. If you don’t become just as you were, I’ll fire myself.’
She listened to my laugh, studying me with such an intense look that I stopped abruptly.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing, darling. Get up.’
She took my arm and asked me to walk across the room, drawing back to observe me. I took a few halting steps, with a painful emptiness at the back of my neck, and legs that felt like lead.
When she came back to me, I thought she was making an effort to hide her dismay so as not to increase my own. She managed to put on a confident smile, as if I had always looked like this: high cheekbones, short nose, cropped hair. Somewhere in the house a clock struck seven.
‘Have I changed so much?’ I asked her.
‘Your face has changed. Also, you’re tired: it’s only natural that your gestures and walk should not be the same. I’ll have to get used to it myself.’
‘How did it happen?’
‘Later, darling.’
‘I want to remember. You, me, Aunt Midola, my father, the others: I want to remember.’
‘You will remember.’
‘Why did we come here? Why don’t you take me straight to some place I know, where they know me?’
She was not to answer this question until three days later. For the moment, she held me close, she rocked me in her arms, she called me her little girl, and said that they would not hurt me any more because she would never leave me again.
‘Did you leave me?’
‘Yes. A few days before the accident. I had some business of your godmother’s to settle in Nice. I returned to the villa to find you more dead than alive at the foot of a stairway. I went mad trying to find an ambulance, the police, a doctor.’
We were in another huge room, a dining room with sombre furnishings and a table ten feet long. We were sitting next to each other. I had the plaid blanket over my shoulders.
‘Had I been at Cap Cadet a long time?’
‘About three weeks,’ she said. ‘I stayed there with the two of you at first.’
‘The two of us?’
‘You, and a girl you liked to be with. Eat. If you won’t eat, I won’t talk.’
I swallowed pieces of steak to get pieces of the past. We played this game sitting side by side in a big, gloomy house in Neuilly, served by a cook who moved furtively and called Jeanne by her family name without saying Mademoiselle or Madame.
‘The girl was one of your childhood friends,’ said Jeanne. ‘She had grown up in the same house as you in Nice. Her mother did your mother’s laundry. You lost track of each other when you were eight or nine, but you ran into her again this year in February. She was working in Paris. You became attached to her. Her name was Domenica Loï.’
Jeanne was watching me, waiting for a sign of recognition to appear on my face. But it was hopeless. She was talking about people whom I pitied, but who were strangers to me.
‘Is that the girl who died?’
‘Yes. She was found in the part of the villa that was burnt. It looked as though you had tried to get her out of her room before you were burned. Your nightgown caught on fire. You must have been trying to get to the swimming pool – there’s one in the garden. I found you at the foot of the stairs half an hour later. It was two o’clock in the morning. People had come running in their pyjamas, but no one dared touch you; everyone was frantic, they didn’t know what to do. The Les Lecques fire brigade arrived right after I did. They took you to the naval infirmary in La Ciotat. During the night I could have ordered an ambulance from Marseille, but in the end it was a helicopter that came. They took you to Nice. You were operated on the next day.’
‘What was the matter with me?’
‘You must have fallen down the last few steps as you were rushing out of the house. Unless you decided to go out the window and let yourself fall from the first floor. We learned nothing from the investigation. What we do know for sure is that you fell head first onto the steps. You were burned on the face and hands. Also on the body, but less seriously; the nightgown must have given you some protection. The firemen explained that to me, but I’ve forgotten. You were naked, black from head to foot, with shreds of charred cloth in your hands and mouth. You had no hair. The people I found with you thought you were dead. You had a cut on the top of your head as long as my hand. This was the injury we were most worried about on the first night. Later, after Dr Chaveres’ operation, I signed a paper for a skin graft. Yours wouldn’t heal any more.’
She spoke without looking at me. Each sentence entered my head like a burning drill. She pushed her chair away from the table and pulled her skirt above her legs. I saw a dark patch on her right thigh, above the stocking: the graft.
I put my head into my gloved hands and began to cry. Jeanne put her arm around my shoulder and we stayed this way for several minutes, until the cook came in and placed a tray of fruit on the table.
‘I must tell you all this,’ said Jeanne. ‘You must know and remember.’
‘I know.’
‘You are here, nothing can happen to you. It’s all over now.’
‘How did the fire start?’
She rose, her skirt fell back down. She went to a sideboard and lit a cigarette. She held the match in front of her for a moment so I could see it.
‘A gas leak in the girl’s bedroom. Gas had been installed in the villa a few months before. The investigation concluded that there must have been a bad connection. The pilot light of the water heater in one of the bathrooms caused an explosion.’
She blew out the match.
‘Come here,’ I said.
She came over and sat down beside me. I put out my hand, took her cigarette, and inhaled a puff. I liked it.
‘Did I smoke, before?’
‘Get up,’ said Jeanne. ‘Let’s look around. Bring an apple with you. Dry your eyes.’
In a low-ceilinged room with a bed big enough for four of me in my present condition, Jeanne made me put on a heavy turtleneck sweater, my suede coat, and my green scarf.
Taking my gloved hand in hers, she guided me through some deserted rooms towards a hall with a marble floor on which our steps resounded. Outside, in the garden with its dark trees, she helped me into the car I’d been in that afternoon.
‘At ten o’clock I’m putting you to bed. I want to show you something first. In a few days, I’ll let you drive.’
‘Would you please say the girl’s name again?’
‘Domenica Loï. They called her Do. When you were children, there was another girl who died a long time ago, of rheumatic fever or something of the sort. They called you cousins because you were all the same age. The other little girl was named Angela. You were all three of Italian origin: Mi, Do, and La. You see where your aunt got her nickname?’
She was driving fast, along wide, illuminated avenues.
‘Your aunt’s real name was Sandra Raffermi. She was your mother’s sister.’
‘When did Mama die?’
‘When you were eight or nine. I don’t remember. You were put in a boarding school. Four years later your aunt got permission to take you. You’ll find out sooner or later, she’d had to struggle to make ends meet in her youth. But now she was a lady, she was rich. The shoes you’re wearing, the ones I’m wearing, are made in your aunt’s factories.’
She put her hand on my knee and said that if I liked they were my factories, since Raffermi was dead.
‘Didn’t you love my aunt?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Jeanne. ‘I love you. I don’t care about the others. I was eighteen when I went to work for Raffermi. I was a heel-maker in one of her workshops in Florence. I was alone, I earned my living as well as I could. That was in ’42. She came one day and the first thing she gave me was a slap in the face, which I returned. She took me away with her. The last thing she gave me was also a slap, but I did not return it. That was in May of this year, a week before she died. For months she had known she was dying, which did not make her any easier to live with.’
‘Did I love my aunt?’
‘No.’
For a full minute I said nothing, trying in vain to remember a face I had seen in the photographs, an old woman in a pince-nez sitting in a wheelchair.
‘Did I love Domenica Loï?’
‘Who could help it?’ said Jeanne.
‘Did I love you?’
She turned her head and I saw her face illuminated by the street lamps as they went by. She shrugged her shoulders quickly and answered in a rough voice that we were almost there. Suddenly I felt a pain as if I were being torn inside. I took her arm, and the car swerved. I apologised; undoubtedly she thought it was because of the swerve. She showed me the Arc de Triomphe, Place de la Concorde, the Tuileries, the Seine. After Place Maubert, we stopped in a little street that went down to the river, before a hotel lit by a neon sign that said HÔTEL VICTORIA.
We stayed in the car. She told me to look at the hotel, and saw that the building meant nothing to me.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘You’ve come here often. This is the hotel where Do lived.’
‘Let’s go home, please.’
She sighed, said yes, and kissed me on the temple. On the way back I pretended to fall asleep again with my head on her skirt.
She undressed me, helped me bathe, rubbed me down with a big towel, and handed me a pair of cotton gloves to replace the ones I was wearing, which were wet.
We sat down on the edge of the bathtub, her dressed and me in my nightgown. At length, it was she who took off my gloves. I looked away when I saw my hands.
She put me in the big bed, tucked me in, turned out the lamp. It was ten o’clock, as she had promised. She had had a strange expression on her face ever since she had seen the scars from the burns on my body. She had said only that they were almost gone, one spot on the back, two on the legs, and that I had lost weight. I felt that she was trying to act natural, but that she recognised me less and less.
‘Don’t leave me alone. I’m not used to it and I’m afraid.’
She sat down beside me and stayed for a while. I fell asleep, with my mouth against her hand. She did not speak. It was just before I fell asleep, in that moment on the edge of unconsciousness when everything is absurd, when everything is possible, that the idea occurred to me for the first time that I was nothing apart from what Jeanne told me about myself, and that she had only to be lying for me to be a lie.
‘I want you to tell me now. For weeks I’ve been hearing “later”! Yesterday you said I did not love my aunt. Tell me why.’
‘Because she was not lovable.’
‘To me?’
‘To anyone.’
‘If she took me in at the age of thirteen, surely she must have loved me.’
‘I did not say that she didn’t love you. It also made her feel important. You can’t understand. Loving, not loving, you judge everything by that!’
‘Why had Domenica Loï been with me since February?’
‘You bumped into her in February. It was much later that she moved in with you. Why? You’re the only one who knew that! What do you want me to say? Every three days you had a new craze: a car, a dog, an American poet, Domenica Loï – they were all part of the game. At eighteen I found you in a hotel in Geneva with a little office worker. At twenty I found you in another hotel with Domenica Loï.’
‘What was she to me?’
‘A slave, like everyone else.’
‘Like you?’
‘Like me.’
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing. What could have happened? You threw a suitcase at me, and a vase which I had to pay for, and you went off with your slave.’
‘Where was this?’
‘Résidence Washington, Rue Lord Byron, third floor, apartment 14.’
‘Where did I go?’
‘I have no idea. I wasn’t interested. Your aunt was only waiting to see you before she died. When I came back I received her second slap in eighteen years. A week later, she died.’
‘I didn’t come?’
‘No. I won’t say I didn’t have news of you – you got into enough trouble – but not a word out of you for a month. Just about long enough for you to run out of money. And to run up so many debts that even your little gigolos lost faith in you. I got a telegram in Florence: Forgive me, desperate, money, I kiss you a thousand times everywhere: forehead, eyes, nose, mouth, hands, feet, be nice, I’m crying, your Mi. I assure you, that’s the exact text, I’ll show it to you.’
She showed me the telegram when I was dressed. I read it standing with one foot on a chair while she fastened my suspenders, which I could not do with gloves on.
‘It’s a ridiculous telegram.’
‘And yet it’s typical. There were others, you know. Sometimes it was just Money, Mi. Sometimes there were fifteen telegrams on the same day all saying the same thing. You would enumerate my virtues. Or else you would line up adjectives referring to some detail of my anatomy, according to your mood. It was frightful, very expensive for an idiot who’s run out of money, but at least you showed imagination.’
‘You talk about me as if you hated me.’
‘I haven’t told you the words you used to use in those telegrams. You knew how to hurt. Other leg. I did not send you money after your aunt’s death. I came to see you. Put your other leg on the chair. I arrived at Cap Cadet on a Sunday afternoon. You were drunk from the night before. I put you under the shower, threw out the gigolos, and emptied the ashtrays. Do helped me. You wouldn’t speak to me for three days. There.’
I was ready. She buttoned me into a grey serge coat, took her own coat from an adjoining room, and we left. I was living a bad dream. I no longer believed a word Jeanne was telling me.
In the car, I realised that I was still holding the telegram she had given me. Here, at least, was proof that she was not lying. We remained silent for quite a while, driving towards the Arc de Triomphe, which I could see a long way ahead of us under an overcast sky.
‘Where are you taking me?’
‘To see Dr Doulin. He called at the crack of dawn. He’s starting to get on my nerves.’
She glanced at me, smiling, called me her baby, and asked why I had such a long face.
‘I don’t want to be this Mi you’re describing. I don’t understand. I don’t know how, but I know I’m not like that. Could I have changed that much?’
She replied that I had changed a great deal.
*
I spent three days reading old letters and examining the contents of the bags Jeanne had brought back from Cap Cadet.
I was trying to get to know myself systematically and Jeanne, who never left my side, sometimes had trouble making sense out of what I found: a man’s shirt whose presence she could not explain; a little pearl-handled revolver, loaded, which she had never seen before; letters whose authors were unknown to her.
In spite of the gaps, I gradually formed an image of myself which did not tally with the person I had become. I was not so foolish, so vain, so violent. I had no desire to drink, to hit a stupid maid, to dance on top of a car, to fall into the arms of a Swedish runner or the first boy who came along with a pretty face. But all that might seem incomprehensible to me because of the accident; that was not what bothered me the most. Above all I could not believe myself capable of the lack of feeling that had enabled me to go out drinking the night I learned of my aunt’s death and even to miss her funeral.
‘And yet it was typical,’ Jeanne repeated. ‘Anyway, there is nothing to indicate that it was lack of feeling. I knew you very well. You were capable of being very unhappy. This found expression in ridiculous tantrums and, more commonly for the last two years, in a pronounced need to share your bed with the whole world. Deep down, you must have felt cheated. At thirteen they have nice names for it: need for affection; the melancholy of the orphan; longing for the mother’s breast. At eighteen they use ugly medical terms.’
‘What did I do that was so awful?’
‘It wasn’t awful, it was childish.’
‘You never answer my questions! You let me imagine anything at all, and naturally I imagine horrible things! You do it on purpose!’
‘Drink your coffee,’ said Jeanne.
She no longer tallied, either, with the idea I had formed of her the first afternoon and evening. She was withdrawn, more and more distant. There was something about what I said and did that she did not like, and I could see it was worrying her. She would watch me for minutes at a time without saying anything, then suddenly she would talk very fast, returning tirelessly to the story of the fire, or to that day a month before the fire when she had found me drunk at Cap Cadet.
‘The best thing would be for me to go there!’
‘We’ll go in a few days.’
‘I want to see my father. Why can’t I see the people I knew?’
‘Your father is in Nice. He is old. It would do him no good to see you in this state. As for the others, I prefer to wait a little while.’
‘I don’t.’
‘I do. Listen, it’s possible that in just a few more days everything will suddenly come back to you. Do you think it’s so easy for me to keep your father from seeing you? He thinks you are still in the clinic. Do you think it’s so easy for me to keep all those vultures off? I want you to be recovered when you see them.’
Recovered. I had already learned so much about myself without regaining my memory that I no longer believed in it. With Dr Doulin there had been injections, electric shock treatments, lights in the eyes, automatic writing. They injected something into my right hand and put it behind a screen so I could not see what I was writing. I could feel neither the pencil that was placed in my hand nor the movement of my hand. While I filled three pages without being aware of it, Dr Doulin and his assistant talked to me of the sun in the south of France, the pleasures of the seaside. This experiment, which had already been performed twice, had taught us nothing except that my handwriting had been frightfully distorted by the fact that I was wearing gloves. Dr Doulin, whom I now trusted no more than I did Jeanne, maintained that these sessions soothed certain anxieties of an ‘unconscious personality’ who did have a memory. I had read the pages I had ‘written’. They were words without coherence, incomplete, most of them ‘telescoped’ as in the worst days at the clinic. Those that recurred most frequently were words like nose, eyes, mouth, hands, hair, until I felt as if I were rereading Jeanne’s telegram.
It was idiotic.
The ‘big scene’ took place on the fourth day. The cook was at the other end of the house, the butler had gone out. Jeanne and I were sitting in armchairs in the living room, in front of the fireplace because I was still cold all the time. It was five o’clock in the afternoon. I had some letters and photographs in one hand and an empty cup in the other.
Jeanne was smoking. There were dark circles under her eyes, and she was again rejecting my request to see the people I had known.
‘I don’t wish it, that’s all there is to it. Who do you think these people are? Angels from heaven? They won’t let such an easy victim get away from them.’
‘Me, a victim? But why?’
‘The reason is written in figures with a lot of zeros. You will be twenty-one in November. Raffermi’s will is to be read then, but it really isn’t necessary to read it to guess the number of billion lire that will be transferred to your account.’
‘You should have explained all that to me too.’
‘I thought you knew about it.’
‘I know nothing, nothing! You can see very well that I know nothing!’
She made her first blunder: ‘I can’t tell what you know and don’t know! I’m going mad. I can’t sleep any more. After all, it would be so easy for you to be putting on an act!’
She threw her cigarette into the fireplace. It was just as I was rising from my chair that the clock in the hallway struck five.
‘An act? What are you talking about?’
‘The amnesia!’ she said. ‘It’s a good idea, a very good idea! No brain injury, no proof, of course, but who can be sure you don’t have it but you yourself?’
She had risen too, unrecognisable. Then, suddenly, she was Jeanne again: light hair, golden eyes, serene face, long, slender body in a full skirt, a head taller than me.
‘I don’t know what I’m saying, darling.’
My right hand moved before I heard her. I hit her on the side of the mouth. Pain shot up to the nape of my neck, and I fell forward onto her. She grabbed me by the shoulders, turned me around, and held me against her breast so I could not move. My arms felt so heavy that I did not try to escape.
‘Calm yourself,’ she told me.
‘Let me go! Why would I want to put on an act? For what purpose? Don’t you think you should tell me that?’
‘Calm yourself, please.’
‘I’m crazy, you’ve told me that often enough! But not that crazy! Why? Tell me! Let me go!’
‘Will you calm down? Stop shouting!’
She made me move back, forced me to sit on her lap, in her chair. She had one arm around my shoulders and the other hand over my mouth; her head was behind mine.
‘I’ve said nothing, or nothing of importance. Stop shouting, we’ll be heard. I’ve been beside myself for the past three days. You have no idea!’
She made her second blunder when, with her mouth next to my ear, she said in an angry whisper that frightened me more than when she raised her voice: ‘You can’t have made this much progress in three days without planning it! How can you walk like her, laugh like her, talk like her, if you don’t remember?’
I screamed into her hand, blacked out for a second, and when I opened my eyes again I was stretched out on the carpet. Jeanne was bending over me, moistening my forehead with a handkerchief.
‘Don’t move, darling.’
I saw the mark of the blow I had given her on one side of her face. She was bleeding a little at the corner of her mouth. So it was not a bad dream. I watched her as she unbuttoned the waistband of my skirt and lifted me again in her arms. She was afraid too.
‘Drink, darling.’
I swallowed something strong. I felt better. I looked at her and was calm. I said to myself that it was true that I would now be capable of putting on an act. When she drew me against her to ‘make up’, kneeling beside me on the carpet, I mechanically put my arms around her neck. I was surprised, all at once, and almost reassured, to taste her tears on my lips.
I went to sleep very late that night. For hours I lay in bed motionless, thinking about Jeanne’s words, trying to see what, from her point of view, might be my motive for simulating amnesia. I found no explanation. Nor did I guess what was bothering her, but I was certain that she had good reasons for keeping me isolated in a house where neither the cook nor the butler knew who I was. What these were I might well know by tomorrow: since she still would not let me see the people I had known, I had only to call on one of them to bring about precisely what she wanted to avoid. I would see for myself.
What I had to do was look up one of my friends who was living in Paris. The one I chose – I had his address on the back of an envelope – was the boy who had written to me saying that I would belong to him always.
His name was François Chance, and he lived on Boulevard Suchet. Jeanne had told me that he was a lawyer, and that he had not had much of a chance with the old Mi.
While waiting to fall asleep, I went twenty times over the plan I had devised for escaping Jeanne’s supervision the next day. This state of mind seemed about to summon up another moment of my life, but it passed. Sleep overtook me as for the twentieth time I was getting out of a white Fiat 1500 in a Paris street.
I slammed the car door.
‘Where are you going? Wait for me!’
She got out of the car too and caught up with me on the pavement. I shrugged off her arm.
‘I’ll be all right. I just want to walk around a little and go window shopping, be by myself! Don’t you understand that I need to be alone?’
I showed her the folder I had in my hand. Some newspaper clippings fell out of it and scattered on the pavement. She helped me collect them. They were the articles that had appeared after the fire. Dr Doulin had given them to me after a session of lights and inkblot tests: wasted effort, a lost hour which I would have preferred to use admitting my real anxieties. Unfortunately Jeanne insisted on being present at our interviews.
She took me by the shoulders, tall, elegant, hair golden in the midday sun. I pulled away again.
‘You’re not being sensible, darling,’ she told me. ‘It’s almost time for lunch. This afternoon I’ll take you for a ride in the park.’
‘No. Please, Jeanne. I need this.’
‘Very well, then, I’ll follow you.’
She left me and got back into her car. She was annoyed but not furious, as I had expected. I walked along the pavement about a hundred yards, ran into a group of girls coming out of their office or factory, and crossed the street. I stopped in front of a lingerie shop. When I looked around I saw the Fiat pull up opposite me, double-parked. I walked back to Jeanne. She leaned across the empty seat and rolled down the window.
‘Give me some money,’ I said.
‘What for?’
‘I want to buy some things.’
‘In that shop? I can take you to better shops than that.’
‘That’s where I want to go. Give me some money – plenty. I want a lot of things.’
She raised her eyebrows in resignation. I waited for her to accuse me of acting like a twelve-year-old, but she said nothing. She opened her purse, took out the notes that were in it, and gave them to me.
‘Don’t you want me to come and help you decide? I’m the only one who knows what you can wear.’
‘I’ll be fine.’
As I was going into the shop, I heard behind me, ‘Size 12, dear!’ To the saleswoman who came to greet me at the door I pointed out a dress on a mannequin, some slips and underwear, a sweater in the window.
I said that I did not have time to try anything on and that I wanted separate packages. Then I opened the door again and called Jeanne. She got out of the car, her face etched with fatigue.
‘It’s too expensive. Would you write me a cheque?’
She went into the shop ahead of me. While she was making out the cheque I took the first packages that were ready, said I was taking them to the car, and left.
On the dashboard of the Fiat I left the note I had in the pocket of my coat: ‘Jeanne, don’t worry, don’t try to find me. I’ll meet you at the house or else call. You have nothing to fear from me. I don’t know what you’re afraid of, but I kiss the place where I hit you, because I love you and I feel badly about it: I have started to resemble your lies.’
As I was walking away a policeman came and told me that the car could not stay double-parked. I replied that as it was not mine, I had nothing to do with it.