A few weeks ago I went into William’s study. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. Every morning when I’m alone, I walk around the apartment. I pick up things that are lying around, water the plants, check that everything is OK, that everything is as it should be. I imagine that all housewives have their little daily circuit, a way of circumscribing their territory, of knowing where the limit is between inside and outside. So this particular morning I was doing my usual rounds.
I never spend long in William’s study because of the smell of stale tobacco. Generally, I limit myself to opening the curtains and the window and come back at the end of the day to close them again. William spends most of his evenings in this study and until that day I thought he was reading the papers or preparing his files. But on this morning I’d just gone into the room when I noticed a ball of crumpled paper in the trash can. I don’t know why. There’s often paper in William’s trash and I had no reason to bend down to pick up this particular piece of paper or to open and read it. But that’s what I did.
The text was in his handwriting on paper with his company’s letterhead. The paragraphs had been worked on, corrected in several places, words substituted for others, and an arrow indicated that the middle paragraph was to be moved to the end. It was the draft of something quite different from the reports William writes for work. So I read it from beginning to end. In fact I stayed like that for a few minutes, stunned, reading and rereading the sentences steeped in hate and resentment, words of extraordinary virulence. I couldn’t believe that William was capable of writing such things. It was impossible, unimaginable. Why had he copied out these repulsive lines? I tried to start up his computer. I was clinging on to the idea that I’d find this text in one form or another and for some obscure reason he’d copied out the writings of a madman. But his computer was password protected. I left his study with the sheet of paper in my hand. I felt unsteady on my feet. I went to get my laptop from my bedroom and sat down on the sofa. I went through these motions without thinking, as though part of me already had the answers, as though this part of me was taking charge while the other rejected the evidence and struggled to remain in ignorance. I typed the first four words of William’s text into the Google search bar and pressed “Enter.” The text appeared in its entirety. It had been formatted and the corrections on the draft implemented. It was signed “Wilmor75.” It took me a few minutes to grasp that I was looking at a blog that William had created pseudonymously, on which he regularly posted his reactions, reflections and commentary on everything.
Next I entered this pseudonym in the search engine and found dozens of messages posted by Wilmor75 on news sites and discussion forums. Bitter, hateful, obscene, provocative comments, which had apparently gained him some notoriety on social networks. I spent several hours in front of the screen, stunned, shaking, clicking from page to page despite the nausea I felt. When I closed my laptop, my neck hurt. In fact, I hurt all over.
Today I’m able to describe this scene—I mean, relate how I discovered the existence of William’s double. But for the first few days it was impossible for me to say anything about it at all, because there were certain words I could not utter.
It was impossible for me to imagine that my husband—the man I’d lived with for over twenty years—could use terms like “homo,” “slut,” “raghead,” “asshole,” “piece of shit,” “camel jockey” and plenty more in comments whose racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic and misogynist connotations would be hard to deny. But this murky, malignant but skillful prose was his. It took me some time to acknowledge that it was indeed William who had been writing this blog for nearly three years, and using this language to comment on the political and media news as well as the many non-stories that set the internet ablaze every day. It took me some time to be able to describe what these sentences were like without euphemism—I mean, for these words to come out of my mouth in front of Dr. Felsenberg, even if only to give him some illustrative examples.
I refused to acknowledge that William was capable of conceiving and posting such horrors. And at the same time, it was as though I had always known.
And it’s strange, the feeling of calm you get when finally it emerges, the thing you refused to see but knew was there, buried nearby; a feeling of relief when the worst is confirmed.