During September, I was away again, helping the children settle in. Paul had got a room in the halls of residence at his school and Louise had found a flat-share with two friends who’d gone to do the same course as her. The trips to IKEA and Castorama, a few days in Tournai and then Lyons, took up the first weeks of the new term and kept the question of writing at bay. I was happy to be able to make the most of these times with the children. To delay the moment of separation.
I didn’t have the mental space to get down to it; that’s how I explained it to L. one night when she asked me on the phone how my project was going. In a gentle tone, without pressing, she asked if all this (the trips, the children moving out, documents to fill in, purchases to make) didn’t give me a convenient alibi for not recognising my inability to sit down and write, an inability linked to the project itself and not the circumstances. At other times, hadn’t I been able to find the necessary time and space when I was working four days a week in a distant suburb? In her view, I was refusing to acknowledge that my idea was no good and that I’d been working for months on territory that wasn’t right for me, which even ran counter to the way my work had developed. Wasn’t it this mismatch, to which I was vainly clinging on, that was stopping me writing? She’d leave me to think this over. The question seemed fundamental to her, and she could allow herself to share it with me now that we were friends. She wasn’t certain; it was just an intuition.
I didn’t come up with arguments to contradict her.
It was true that in busier periods I’d found time to write.
But I was no longer so young and I no longer had the energy, it was as simple as that.
I showed L., who was so interested in my working methods (like no one before), my current notebooks, three or four of the same size, with smooth, soft covers that François had bought me at an Edward Hopper exhibition. Each cover had a reproduction of one of the artist’s pictures.
I take notes in small notebooks. I like fine, light ones with soft covers and lined pages. I keep them at the bottom of my bag wherever I go, when I travel and on holiday, and I always put one on my bedside table at night. I jot down ideas or phrases for my work in progress, but also other words, the titles of future books, the openings of stories. Sometimes I decide to get organised: for a few weeks, one notebook is for ideas related to the work in progress and another is reserved for later work. It has happened that in periods of ferment, I’ve had five or six notebooks on the go, each of which corresponded to a different project. I always end up mixing everything up.
I gave my editor the impression that everything was going fine. I used rather vague language to distance myself from the lie: I was doing some extra research, I was preparing the ground, I was consolidating the foundations . . .
There was no cause for concern. I was just about to get down to it.
In reality, I was procrastinating, getting distracted, deferring from day to day and week to week the moment when I would have to admit that something was broken, lost, no longer working.
In reality, when I turned the computer on, as soon as I began to think, the critical voice kicked in. A sort of sarcastic, pitiless superego had taken possession of my mind. It chuckled, mocked, grimaced. It tracked down, even before it had taken shape, the poor sentence which, taken out of context, would provoke hilarity. On my forehead a third eye had been grafted above the two others. Whatever I prepared to write, it saw me coming in my clumsy clogs. The third eye was waiting for me at the corner, demolishing every attempt to begin, unmasking the deception.
I had just discovered something terrifying and dizzying: I’d become my own worst enemy. My own tyrant.
Sometimes a dark, unbearable thought overcame me: L. was right. L. was warning me because she could see the impending disaster I was heading for.
I was on the wrong path.
L. was trying to warn me and I was refusing to listen.