–20–

I didn’t take what my aunt said too seriously. On my way home, I mulled over what had happened at dinner, and I put it all down to a simple emotional crisis. My aunt and her husband were undoubtedly dealing with the anxieties of middle age; even the happiest marriages can go through rough patches during this period. She was probably asking herself if she really wanted to spend the rest of her days with him, I thought, and vice-versa. I could even imagine her dilemma. Her husband had given her a dream life from a material point of view, and still did. He was also fairly intellectually refined, and had always supported her artistic pursuits, bankrolling exhibitions at prestigious galleries, and showing pride in her woodcuts.

Nevertheless, from what I could tell, they didn’t enjoy true intimacy, even though they’d been together for many years. It was hard to believe they knew what was going on in each other’s heads, given the degree of formality with which they treated one another. I don’t know if this was too hasty a conclusion; nor do I know if a man and a woman, regardless of how much they love one another, can be transparent with each other. Perhaps the idea that it’s possible is no more than a romantic fantasy. Perhaps I’m too influenced by my own past, in which there was never such transparency — but the fact is that my aunt and her husband always behaved, in my eyes, like two strangers who find themselves having to share a ship’s cabin and, though they discover they are similar in many ways, seek to maintain their individual privacy at all costs, hoping for the voyage to end quickly. So much so that they never had kids, even though they both seemed to like children. When I heard that they were moving to Milan, I was sure of one thing: my aunt didn’t like the idea of having to leave Paris. The phrase, ‘No matter what happens, remember I’ll always be there for you’ was coming from someone who was about to leave and was not at all happy about it.

Isn’t it funny how we can turn logic into a house of cards?

After fifteen days, the solitude was starting to get to me. I didn’t yearn for my wife, but I missed her. I’ll try to explain the difference. Yearning is fuelled by affection, love, friendship. Missing, on the other hand, is pure and simple, and can be fuelled by feelings that aren’t necessarily warm. For example, a torturer can miss inflicting torture, or the opposite: the victim can miss his or her torturer. Not that my wife tortured me; far from it. But I’d grown accustomed to serving her — the voluntary servitude that La Boétie speaks of … Sorry? I didn’t catch that. Could you say it again, please … Did I, as the tortured one in my relationship with my father, miss my torturer? You’ve touched on something I’ve thought about many times, without coming to any conclusion. I gave my father a wide berth, because I couldn’t handle being around him, and he did the same with me. But maybe you could say our mutual hatred was so great that I didn’t need to be in his presence to feel tortured, and he didn’t need to have me in front of him to torture me.

The money he gave me, for example, was a highly effective instrument of torture, even from ten thousand kilometres away, since I knew that in his mental accounting he considered it a write-off. My father and I only had to know that the other existed in order for our hatred (like everything else that emanated from him) to live on … You’re right, we fed off it … Go on, ask. I promise I won’t be angry … In my relationship with my father, were our positions ever reversed, and did I ever become the torturer? I’ve already mentioned that when I was a child I tried to humiliate him in front of my mother, playing the know-it-all — I think that’s a form of torture, don’t you? … You want to know if, afterwards, I ever tortured or tried to torture him in any other way? I killed him. Is that enough for you?

I think we’d best end this session.