I waited for what felt like the right moment to ask L. why she’d been outside my building the day of my fall. She explained what had happened. She was going along the street, when a searing pain in her foot had stopped her in her tracks for a few minutes. And then a thought had come into her mind, as lucid as this: something had happened to me. A presentiment, or rather a certainty, she explained, so much so that she decided to come and find me straight away. At the corner of my street, she encountered the fire truck.
For various reasons, I’m the sort of person who is likely to believe such a tale without seeking a more rational explanation. The day Paul broke his arm, during one Easter holiday (in a square in our neighbourhood, he fell from a piece of play equipment right in front of my eyes), Louise, who was staying with a classmate, asked her friend’s mother to phone me. In the middle of the afternoon, hundreds of miles away, sitting in front of a brioche and a jar of Nutella, she told this woman: ‘Paul’s hurt himself, I have to call mummy.’
Another time, when the twins were still babies and slept in the same room, Paul started crying in the middle of the night. A strange, unfamiliar cry. I turned on the light and went into their room. Paul was crying, but Louise was the one with spots all over her face.
Even today, Louise doesn’t have to assign her brother a specific ringtone to know when he’s calling.
I can’t remember if I told L. either of these anecdotes. The fact remains, I took her at her word.
At lunchtime, I told L. I was starting work on a book project that would explore my intellectual, affective and emotional make-up. Something very personal.
No, I couldn’t tell her more, for fear of blocking this unexpected impulse.
Yes, it would be very autobiographical.
I saw L.’s face light up. Her features suddenly relaxed and, since she couldn’t suppress a smile of satisfaction, I quickly added that nothing was certain, it was too soon to celebrate.
I admitted to L. that I still couldn’t turn on my computer or even take notes on paper. The very idea of doing either of those things made my hands start to shake again. But that would change. I sensed it. I was sure that things would get back on track as soon as I had properly begun a new manuscript; it was just a matter of time. Meanwhile, I was going to try a different tack. I told her I was going to attempt to write by dictating each day until I could eventually hold a pen again. As it would be a sort of confession, a type of introspection, I would make do initially with recording a first draft, which I could then revise when I felt better.
L. was happy. Beside herself with joy.
She’d won.
In the hours that followed this news, her face became more open, her attitude changed. I’d never seen her so relaxed. Calm. As though her entire life for months had been dependent on this capitulation.
On the second evening we opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate my return to writing. L., who had restrained herself from asking more detailed questions since the day before, could hold back no longer:
‘Does the thing you’ve begun have something to do with the phantom book?’
I hesitated before replying. The phantom book again. What had she imagined? What story of childhood or adolescence would she have me tell? What did we have in common, real or imagined, that interested her so much?
I saw the hope in her eyes, an intermittent light waiting for my assent, and without thinking, I said, Yes. Yes, of course it had something to do with the phantom book. I added that it would be a hard book to write, as she might imagine. But she was right. It was high time I got down to it.
I heard the inflection of my own voice, serious, assured, and I thought that the wind had changed. I was no longer the spent writer that L. had been carrying single-handedly for months; I was the vampire who would soon be nourishing herself on her blood. A shiver of fear and excitement ran up my spine.
‘You know, what interests me,’ I went on, ‘is understanding what we’re made of. How we manage to assimilate some events, some memories, which mix with our own saliva, spread through our flesh, while others remain like sharp stones in our shoes. How can we decipher the traces of the child on the skin of the adults we claim to have become? Who can read these invisible tattoos? What language are they written in? Who is capable of understanding the scars we think we’ve learned to hide?’
‘Your scars?’ she asked.
There was no hint of suspicion in her voice. I hesitated again, then said yes.
It happened exactly as I’d hoped.
Believing I was in the state of introspection that writing the hidden book required, L. began talking about herself. As a sign of encouragement and solidarity, she started talking about specific events in her childhood and youth that she’d never spoken of before. She probably regarded these confidences as stimuli likely to help me summon my own memories, excavate my own wounds. I’d been right. All I had to do was get her to believe that I was progressing with my work for her to provide me with the things that would, without her realising, gradually feed the text.
From L. I would create a character whose complexity and authenticity would be palpable.
Of course, one day, when the book was sufficiently developed, perhaps finished, I would have to tell her the truth. Then I’d remind her of her rejection of any writing that was detached from life. I’d remind her of the conviction she had so strongly wanted me to share and which I’d eventually yielded to. I’d talk about our meeting, of the months spent close to her, of how it had become obvious to me that she alone could be the subject of the book. I’d talk about the necessity I felt to bring together the fragments she had willingly confided in me, and give them a new order.
I was now dependent on L. in every respect.
First, because I couldn’t put my foot on the ground. And then because I needed her words, her memories, to nourish the beginning of a novel she knew nothing about.
But I wasn’t afraid of this state of dependence.
It was justified by a higher project, which would develop without her knowing.
L., meanwhile, was working on a manuscript that she’d begun before the summer. One of those books where a lot was at stake which she was contractually bound not to discuss. A book that would bear the name of someone else who would pretend to have written it.
I asked L. who it was. Which actress, singer or female politician had called upon her services this time?
L. was sorry, but she couldn’t tell me anything about it. The confidentiality clause was longer than the actual contract and she couldn’t take any risks. Once she’d let slip a confidence and the person she’d told had accidentally betrayed her. I hazarded a few guesses: Mireille Mathieu? Ségolène Royal?
L.’s face remained impassive. I didn’t press her.
Within a few days, we’d resumed the rituals of our recent time together. L. got up before me. From her room, I heard the sound of the shower, then the coffee maker. I’d get up and we’d have a quick breakfast before she got down to work. From the first day, she settled in a small room by the kitchen. There was no daylight; she liked that atmosphere. On a little table she’d set up her computer, her drafts, her plans, her research.
I would shut myself away in my office on the other side of the house a bit later. I sat in the same position as I would have done to write, my upper body leaning slightly forward. I kept my crutches within reach, propped up on the dressing-table drawer. I wrapped myself in a shawl and began dictating in a hushed voice. Given the distance between us, it would have been impossible for L. to hear me.
Yet I couldn’t stop myself checking that the door was properly closed several times a day. And that she wasn’t behind it.
Around one, I’d join L. in the kitchen for the soup or pasta that she’d made.
At the start of the afternoon, we’d both go back to work, each on our side. As L. progressed with her manuscript, I continued to record my dictation without her knowledge, the account of our increasingly intimate conversations.
After a few days, I managed to turn on my computer to back up the audio files from my mobile.
At the end of the day, we sometimes went out to take the air.
As my arm muscles grew stronger, the range of our walks expanded.
In the evening, we’d have a glass of wine in the kitchen while L. made dinner. I could help her sitting down: I sliced sausage and mozzarella; I peeled onions and vegetables; I chopped herbs. L. did everything else.
We’d start off talking about nothing in particular and then drift imperceptibly to the subjects that interested me. I would tell L. my own memories. Memories of childhood and adolescence, which might resonate with hers.
After dinner, L. would light a fire and we’d draw closer to the hearth, warming our hands in front of the flames. I knew her well. With time, I’d learned to decipher her answers, her emotions and reactions. I knew how to read the most fleeting signs of pleasure or annoyance on her face. I knew how to tell from her posture when she was about to say something important, and when she was about to reimpose some distance. Over the weeks, I’d become familiar with L.’s language, her way of sidestepping certain subjects and then confronting them in a sudden reversal when I least expected it. I’d never known her so calm. So relaxed.
According to L., I hadn’t broken my foot by accident. The fracture was a visible way of signifying the blockage, the entanglement that had consigned me to silence. The fall needed to be understood in every sense of the term: beyond the physical loss of balance, I’d fallen in order to put an end to something. To close a chapter. Falling or having a psychosomatic reaction ultimately came down to the same thing. And also, according to L., the main function of our psychosomatic reactions was to reveal an anxiety, a fear, a tension that we refused to acknowledge. They were sending an alarm signal.
L. hadn’t expounded one of her theories to me for some time. She adopted a tone that amused me, a learned tone in which a hint of self-mockery was easily discernible. We laughed. L.’s theory seemed quite probable: in her view, in order to avoid always stressing the same organs, we change how we manifest psychosomatic reactions over time, switching from migraines to heartburn, then from heartburn to bloating, and from bloating to rib pain. Had I noticed? When you thought about it, each of us had experienced different periods of psychosomatic reactions and had put different organs to the test so as not to always exhaust the same one. You just had to listen to people talking about their aches and pains. Falls were simply a more spectacular way, at pivotal moments, of triggering a normal alarm system. You had to take the trouble to decipher them.
François called every day. I’d take my crutches and limp to the end of the garden, then haul myself as best I could onto the little mound of earth that enabled me to get a signal. We talked for a few minutes, me precariously balanced on my crutches, and him in a hotel room in the Midwest or Montana. He quickly sensed that I was doing better and asked if I was managing to write. I told him I’d decided to begin a new project, and even better, I was on to something; I couldn’t wait to tell him about it. I didn’t say more.
In the house at Courseilles, L. had made herself at home with disconcerting ease. She was one of those people who are able to adapt to unfamiliar places in record time. In a matter of hours, she knew where everything was. No drawer or recess had escaped her radar. It was as though she was at home, and I must say that to see her moving around without the slightest hesitation in a place that seemed perfectly familiar to her, that expression seemed entirely appropriate.