I talk to myself. At home when I’m alone and in the street when I’m sure no one can see me. Yes, I talk to myself, but it would be more accurate to say that one part of me talks to the other. I say, “You’ll get there,” “You did it!” or “You can’t go on like this.” Those are examples. I tried to explain this to Dr. Felsenberg when I met him a few weeks ago, this thing about there being two parts of me. The very first time. He thought it was worth clarifying. OK. So: one part of me, which is dynamic and which I would call positive, talks to the other part. My weak part. To keep it simple, let’s call it the problem part.
Neither my husband nor the children know I’m seeing Dr. Felsenberg and it’s much better that way. At the time of our weekly session, I’m officially attending a yoga class, which only exists on the kitchen calendar.
So I talk to myself to reassure, console and encourage myself. I speak familiarly, since the two parts of me have known each other for a long time. I’m well aware that this may seem ridiculous. Or worrying. But the fact is that the part of me that talks to the other always appears confident and reassuring. She sees the best in everything, always looks on the bright side and mostly gets the last word. She’s not the sort to panic.
And in the evening when I go to bed it’s not unusual for her to congratulate me.
The two parts of me have always existed. The concerned parties, so to speak, but until recently they didn’t communicate with each other, at least not through the medium of my voice. That’s much more recent.
Dr. Felsenberg also asked me if an event or an episode had created or triggered this voice. As I was thinking in silence, he rephrased the question.
He wanted to know if I’d ever talked to myself when I was a girl or a student, for example. Or when I was first married. Or when I stopped working. I was certain I hadn’t.
“It’s not a problem in itself, you know. Lots of people talk to themselves,” Dr. Felsenberg said. “But it is a problem for you, because you’ve brought it up.” He wanted me to think about it. He decided we would reflect together on the function of these exchanges between me and myself.
It took a few sessions for me to realize (and acknowledge) that the voice appeared shortly before the discovery I made on my husband’s computer. And a few more sessions to talk explicitly about this discovery in Dr. Felsenberg’s office.
What I saw that day, and what I saw on the days that followed, when I started to look, I can only express indirectly, through circumlocutions. I’m unable to set it down in black and white.
Because the words are vile and stained with dread.
Yesterday when I got home I found Mathis and his friend there. Normally at that time they should have been in school. My son claimed the music teacher was absent and I could tell at once that he was lying.
They looked odd. Both of them. Mathis doesn’t like me going into his room, so I stayed at the door, waiting, trying to work out what was wrong. They were sitting on the floor. It was tidy. They hadn’t gotten any games or books out. I wondered what they were up to. Théo was looking down. He was staring at a point on the carpet as though observing a colony of microscopic insects that only he could see.
I have a problem with that boy. To be honest, I don’t like him. I know it’s horrible to think that. He’s just a twelve-year-old boy, pretty well brought up on the whole, but there’s just something about him that bothers me. I’ve been careful not to share this with Mathis, who idolizes him as though he has supernatural powers, but I don’t get along with him. I really don’t understand what Mathis sees in him. When he was in elementary school, Mathis had a friend I really liked. They got along brilliantly and never fought. But that kid moved away at the end of fifth grade.
Last year when Mathis started middle school, he met Théo and from then on nothing else mattered. He became attached to him immediately and exclusively and defends him tooth and nail if I ever express the tiniest reservation or ask anything about him.
I asked them if they’d had a snack and my son said they weren’t hungry. I let them be.
Nonetheless I can’t help feeling that Théo is dragging Mathis down a slippery slope, that he’s having a bad influence on him. He’s tougher than our son, less emotional. That’s probably why Mathis thinks so much of him. The other day after dinner I tried to talk to my husband about it. Since I discovered how William really spends his evenings, apart from the largely prosaic exchanges that allow us to maintain a life together, I have not been tempted to communicate with him. To tell the truth, I’d just spent weeks observing his little tricks and lies from a distance.
After dinner he retired to his study as usual.
I knocked on the door. I was tempted to go in without waiting for his response; it was an unexpected opportunity to surprise him in the act. It was several seconds before he permitted me to enter. The computer screen was blank. He’d taken off his jacket and had some papers spread out in front of him. I sat down in the armchair and began talking about Mathis and the negative influence I felt his friend was having. I explained why I had the feeling that this relationship was disturbing our son and gave a few random examples. William seemed to be listening carefully, without impatience. As I reached the end of my little speech, this phrase came into my mind: here you are, confronting the devil in his lair. It was ridiculous and completely over the top. If William had heard me he would probably once again have mocked my affected figures of speech. But from that moment I have not been able to shake off that phrase and its powerful reverberation. William wanted hard facts. Signs of regression, a graph showing decline, quantifiable evidence. What evidence could I put on record? Mathis’s grades were very respectable. William didn’t see what the problem was. I was imagining things. The fact is, he always thinks I’m imagining things. About everything. It has become an effective way to gently bring any conversation to an end. “You’re imagining things.”
The truth is, most of what I tell my husband holds very little interest for him. It’s one of the reasons I tell him almost nothing. It hasn’t always been like this. When we first met, we spent entire nights talking. I learned almost everything from William. Words, gestures, the way I stand, laugh, behave. He held the codes and the keys.
I don’t know when we stopped talking. A long time ago, for sure. But the most worrying part is that I didn’t realize it.
This morning, Mathis got up before me. When I went into the kitchen he was making his breakfast.
I sat down and watched him for a few minutes: the nonchalance with just a hint of cockiness in the way he picks things up, lets the cupboards close automatically, the embarrassment on his face whenever I speak to him or ask a question. I understood then that he was on the threshold, right on the threshold. It’s already stirring and incubating in him like a virus, at work in every cell of his body even if nothing is perceptible to the naked eye. Mathis isn’t an adolescent yet, at least not visibly so. But it’s just a matter of weeks, perhaps days.
My little boy is going to be transformed before our eyes just as his sister was, and nothing will be able to stop it.