Fiction France n°3 (version anglaise) by Institut français

Twenty new French-language writers to be read and translated

foreword

With this third issue, Fiction France blows out its first candle. Even though it is still a little early to assess the outcome of this project, we are already delighted by the bonds which have been created over this past year between authors and translators and between French and foreign publishers. These bonds leave no doubt as to the dynamism of the exchange taking place in the field of contemporary French-speaking fiction.

How can you take part in Fiction FRANCE ? A selection of 16 to 20 titles are compiled in cooperation with the Publications and the Written Word department of culturesfrance, the staff in the foreign rights departments of the French publishing houses and the staff of the book offices in London, New York and Berlin—Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs. What are the selection criteria? • The book must be French-language fiction (novel, short story, narration). • Recent or forthcoming publication (maximum of 12 months before the publication of Fiction France).

Published twice a year, Fiction France offers a selection of excerpts from French fiction, along with English translations. The French publishers wish to highlight these books abroad by targeting translators, agents and publishers who take the risk of promoting contemporary fiction. Fiction France’s aim is to create a new burst of enthusiasm for translations of contemporary French literature, to be a literary showcase for book professionals around the world, as well as an essential support to the French book market abroad. It is a tool which fully reflects the mission of culturesfrance. Please do not hesitate to contact the Foreign Rights Managers of the publishing houses at the addresses listed in the table of contents and on the page presenting each text. Olivier Poivre d’Arvor director of culturesfrance

How should work be submitted? • The publishers should submit the book/draught/ manuscript. They will themselves have selected an extract of 10,000 to 15,000 characters. • Every entry should be accompanied by a commentary, a biographical note and the bibliography of the author (maximum of 1,500 characters). • Two printed examples of every proposed work will be sent to culturesfrance. Next deadline for submitting texts: 18th December 2008 Next publication date of Fiction France: 15th March 2009

CULTURESFRANCE is the cultural exchange operator of the French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs and the French Ministry of Culture and Communication.

Fiction France is disseminated free of charge through the French cultural network to its partners and to book industry professionals around the world. Fiction France is also available on line at www.culturesfrance.com

contents

p. 8

p. 12

p. 33

p. 38

p. 46

Jeanne Benameur

Bruno de Cessole

Mathias Énard

Sylvie Germain

Jérôme Harlay

Washing Shadows

Closing Time in the Gardens of the Occident

Zone

The Unnoticed

The Salt of War

Publisher: Actes Sud Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Élisabeth Beyer

Publisher: Albin Michel Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Belfond/Place des éditeurs Date of Publication: May 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Frédérique Polet

e.beyer@actes-sud.fr Translation: Charlotte Mandell cmandell@earthlink.net

Jacqueline Favero jacqueline.favero@albin-michel.fr Translation: Jody Gladding gladding@together.net

Publisher: Actes Sud Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Élisabeth Beyer

e.beyer@actes-sud.fr Translation: Ann Kaiser kaisertranslations@yahoo.com

Publisher: La Différence Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager:

Parcidio Gonçalves administration.ladifference@wanadoo.fr Translation: Jeanine Herman jeanine_herman@yahoo.com

frederique.polet@placedesediteurs.com Translation: Cole Swensen

colesque@earthlink.net

p. 17

p. 27

p. 51

p. 61

p. 67

Pierre Daix

Fatou Diome

Régis Jauffret

Maylis de Kerangal

Philippe de La Genardière

The Return

Our Lives, Unfulfilled

Lacrimosa

The Kennedy Corniche

The Year of the Eclipse

Publisher: Fayard Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Flammarion Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Gallimard Date of Publication: September 2008 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Verticales Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Sabine Wespieser Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Joschi Guitton

Carole Saudejaud csaudejaud@editions-fayard.fr Translation: Jane Todd fmost@aol.com

Patricia Stansfield pstansfield@flammarion.fr Translation: Pascale Torracinta pascale_torracinta@bbns.org

Anne-Solange Noble anne-solange.noble@gallimard.fr Translation: Bruce Benderson bruxe@aol.com

Anne-Solange Noble anne-solange.noble@gallimard.fr Translation: Michael Lucey mlucey@berkeley.edu

jguitton@swediteur.com Translation: John Cullen jocul@earthlink.net

p. 72

p. 79

p. 85

p. 111

p. 117

Bertrand Latour

Michel Le Bris

Virginie Ollagnier

Gisèle Pineau

Olivier Rolin

A Billion and Crumbs

The World’s Beauty

The Uncertainty

Morne Câpresse

A Lion Hunter

Publisher: Hachette Littératures Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Virginie Rouxel vrouxel@hachette-livre.fr Translation: Jonathan Kaplansky jkaplansky@sympatico.ca

Publisher: Grasset Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Heidi Warneke

Publisher: Liana Levi Date of Publication: September 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Sylvie Mouchès

Publisher: Mercure de France Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Bruno Batreau

Publisher: Éditions du Seuil Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Martine Heissat

hwarneke@grasset.fr Translation: Constantina Mitchell constantina@videotron.ca

s.mouches@lianalevi.fr Translation: Jody Gladding gladding@together.net

bruno.batreau@mercure.fr Translation: Linda Coverdale ljcoverdale@aol.com

mheissat@seuil.com Translation: Bill Cloonan bcloonan@fsu.edu (bio/biblio/argu) Jane Todd fmost@aol.com

p. 92

p. 98

p. 104

p. 124

p. 130

Christian Oster

Emmanuelle Pagano

Martin Page

Caroline Sers

Samuel Zaoui

Three Men with a Chair

Childish Hands

Perhaps a Love Affair

Small Sacrifices

Saint-Denis back of beyond

Publisher: Éditions de Minuit Date of Publication: September 2008 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: P.O.L Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Vibeke Madsen

Publisher: Éditions de l’Olivier Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Martine Heissat

Publisher: Buchet-Chastel Date of Publication: September 2008 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Éditions de l’Aube Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Lucie Poisson

Catherine Vercruyce direction@leseditionsdeminuit.fr Translation: Linda Asher lindaasher10024@hotmail.com

madsen@pol-editeur.fr Translation: Marjolin De Jager marjolijn@igc.org

mheissat@seuil.com Translation: Armine Mortimer armine@illinois.edu

Christine Legrand christine.legrand@buchet-chastel.fr Translation: Paul Raymond Côté prc@videotron.ca

agence.luciepoisson@gmail.com Translation: Trista Selous trista.selous@btinternet.com

Jeanne Benameur

Washing Shadows

Lea is on a quest for beauty, the perfect gesture, the complete mastery of the most obscure muscle in her body. But she can never free herself from the painful grace which leaves no room for pleasure. It seems as if a centrifugal force that she can’t define prevents her from dancing just as it prevents her from loving Bruno, the painter who she lets in, stopping just short of true intimacy. One stormy, apocalyptic night she heads to the coastal town where she was born. Mother and daughter are reunited to confront together the shadows of the past. In eleven tableaux, where present and past alternate, little by little the maternal body is freed from the shackles which

Publisher: Actes Sud Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Élisabeth Beyer e.beyer@actes-sud.fr Translation: Ann Kaiser kaisertranslations@yahoo.com

have left their marks. Naples during the war, the family-owned bistro, the “good French friend”, who, while promising marriage to a sixteen year-old girl, is in fact selling her body in a bordello. Then, the departure for France, the unexpected child, a seemingly peaceful pause next to the precipice. The assessment after the storm: recomposing otherwise the mythic image of the father, incorporate the faux pas into the dance. Lea can now flow back into life as the sea comes back to the shore. In a language at once restrained and vibrant, Jeanne Benameur has choreographed the mysteries of familial transmission and the fervent assumption of words that save us.

In the hot shower, little by little she rediscovers her skin. Her skin. Hers. She lets the tears flow. When she gets out, she spots her book, abandoned in a pile with her clothes. Tu, mio. Her heart does not belong to her. She belongs to no one. She gets dressed. As she slips on her clothes, she chases away all thoughts. She has to. So that there’s no room left for anything but her leaving. To be clear in one’s mind, so the saying goes. She has never been clear in her mind.

It’s over there, in the gaze of her mother, in her silence. A clear mind, she needs it. Her thoughts come together, quickly. The trip will take five hours, six at the most. If all goes smoothly, she’ll be there before nightfall. She won’t tell anyone she’s coming. She doesn’t want any calls, any of that voice that she doesn’t recognize.

Biography

Jeanne Benameur was born in Algeria in 1952. Her family came to France in 1958 and settled in La Rochelle. She lives between Paris and La Rochelle and dedicates most of her time to literature: novels, theater and poetry. She has published young adult novels, mainly with Thierry Magnier. Her novels for adults have been published by Denoël Editions. Publications Published by Denoël: Présent?, 2006 (re-ed. Gallimard, 2008); Les Mains Libres, 2004 (re-ed. Gallimard, 2006); Les Démeurées, 2001.

When she opens her door, she sees Bruno’s hand which she had pushed aside. If only he had taken her in his arms, had held her tightly against him without uttering a word. Could he have saved her? Bruno’s hand fell to his side. He let her leave. He didn’t know. Who can know? She herself doesn’t know. She pushes Bruno’s image away. Later. Later.

If something is still possible. If she has a clear mind.

The storm’s timing is perfect. The wind has always helped her. *

In the little seaside village where Lea’s mother lives, a storm is coming. Security instructions have been given to all in a room at City Hall. The old woman showed up like the others, but she’s not really listening. She came so that no one would worry, but she could care less about the storm. She has already put some souvenirs that mean something to her on her second floor. As for the rest of it, furniture and her old shell of a body, it’s no longer important. The only real concern she has is about her garden and no one talks about gardens. She quickly returned to her house, avoided the discussions among the neighbors. No one will worry about her, everyone knows she keeps to herself. She wants to be alone. Even the narrowest of paths always goes in two directions. She has always known this. But she didn’t want to go forward or back up. Just give the illusion that she was walking, like the others, from day to day, when, in fact, she was trying to go round in circles. To forget. She became an expert in the art of immobility. Nothing better than repetition to give one the impression of eternity. Eternity is not a path. It’s round. A circle has no direction. You go around. That’s all. She has consciously spent her life going round in circles, like the donkey and its water wheel. But circles have centers. One day the center calls, beckons. The center is Lea. Mother and daughter always end up reaching each other.

She knows, since the call from Lea that she can no longer back out. Even if she wanted to, she no longer could. The stage has been set. She’s the one that set it. She knows Lea. She’s stubborn, she’ll never give up wanting to know. Jeanne Benameur

The doctor told her that she had a fragile heart, but all she wants is a peaceful heart, fragile or not. The doctor added, with a smile, as if apologizing, at 76, no one still has the heart of a young girl! She responded if you knew how true that was. She nodded her head, smiled back and got up. That was three days ago. Watching her leave, he wondered if she took him at all seriously, if she would really take her medication. He had just recently replaced his former colleague. He’s getting to know each of his patients. He remembers the words of his predecessor when he was going through files with him. With her, his former colleague said, you won’t waste any time. I have never known a less talkative woman. And he was right.

Washing Shadows

The old woman returned to her house, closed the shutters, locked them. She shoved the mopping cloths against the door, prepared the candles, matches near her. Over time, arthritis has limited her movement. She struggles, but needs no one. If she has to hold onto a chair, she will.

The mother knows she has taken the first step toward leaving the circle. Once again, a path. She has to choose a direction. She’s afraid. But she’s one of those women who suddenly and completely commit themselves and stay committed. Now it’s about going back. About looking at. About telling. Her daughter. What she needs is to no longer see anyone, to no longer speak at all in order to know exactly what she wants to say.

Bruno de Cessole

Closing Time in the Gardens of the Occident

Philippe Montclar, a young student of literature in search of the absolute, happens to meet Frédéric Stauff on the pathways of the Luxembourg Garden, a philosopher initially praised to the skies by the Parisian intelligentsia, then excommunicated. Fascinated by this character who is no longer spoken of, he looks into the man’s past, hoping to see more of him. Little by little, the two men become friends, eventually falling into a master/disciple relationship. Through their discussions in the parks and cafés of Paris, Stauff confides the story of his life to the young Montclar—his conversion

Publisher: La Différence Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Parcidio Gonçalves administration.ladifference@wanadoo.fr Translation: Jeanine Herman jeanine_herman@yahoo.com

to an obscure and anonymous mode of being that advocates suicide as the only philosophical solution to existence. In support of this, he recounts the magnificent failures of exemplary lives: Senancour, Leopardi, Nietzsche, Bloy, Walser. Why does the initially spellbound Montclar begin to doubt his master? A trip to Rome with an old friend, a specialist on suicide in ancient Rome, leads him to wonder whether he is being manipulated by an heir to the sophists. Montclar’s mistress, Ariane, will be the instrument of fate.

Chapter XI

Biography

Bruno de Cessole, a journalist and literary critic, has worked for France Culture and several newspapers: Le Figaro, L’Express, Le Point, Les Nouvelles Littéraires, and Les Lettres françaises. He was the editor of La Revue des Deux Mondes and now edits the cultural pages of Valeurs actuelles. Publications Versailles, Chêne, 2002; Propos intempestifs, La Différence, 2001.

On each meeting with Mr. Stauff, on each of my visits to rue de Tournon, I made a little more headway into the private life of the character—though he was nothing less than familiar to me. Indeed, the old-fashioned courtesy that never left him, his ironic reserve, and his ascetic pride imposed respect almost immediately and encouraged no misplaced confidence. He was not the sort of person you would pat on the stomach after two or three drinks at the corner café and reveal your soul to, or show a photo of a woman to in exchange for one of his or a ribald compliment. So for a long time, we stuck with the rather formal monsieur; he then allowed himself to say “dear friend” with its sprig of affectionate sarcasm, and even “young man,” whose falsely paternal emphasis sometimes concealed comic or polemical intentions, before eventually calling me by my first name, provided I did the same with him. It was only later that I got used to that. Yet he never went from vous to tu, which continued to surprise me, accustomed as I was to hearing white-haired mandarins insist on the honor of being addressed in the tu form by awkward young oafs. Mr. Stauff, as I believe I have said, did not stand agape with admiration before youth. Far from joining his voice to the chorus of enthusiastic bleats prompted then by the slightest deed or gesture of an ambitious young fop, he admitted his clear preference for “old schmucks,” who were less arrogant all in all and—their life expectancy being limited—less unbearable than the kids credited a priori, by the grace of their age, with every seduction and talent. Because I could barely tolerate my own youth and waited impatiently for the moment it would end, the old man’s preference was partly the reason for my attachment to him.

Many times I’d wondered what the initials F. E. stood for, which preceded the name he had once signed to articles and the few books that had escaped his self-destructive fury. He introduced himself as Frédéric, and that was how I heard his rare acquaintances refer to him. I finally asked the question. With some reluctance, he confessed that his mother, a fervent admirer of Rousseau, had named him Émile in homage to the pedagogue of Geneva. At a very young age he took a disliking to this outmoded first name, which quickly became the abominable diminutive “Mimile,” and which was used and abused by his mocking schoolmates, the insult rounded out with punches in the schoolyard. Later, when he was old enough to read Jean-Jacques, his spontaneous antipathy was confirmed, and he decided to invert the order of his first names; from Émile he became—motu proprio—Frédéric-E. or F.-E. Stauff. It then became customary to call him Frédéric, and even Freddy, as is often the case in the countryside of the Vaud. Nevertheless, out of respect for his mother, he kept his first name in the neutral and enigmatic form of an initial. As certain biographers enamored of “the charlatan of Vienna” would not fail to underscore (and here I must say that Mr. Stauff harbored a robust aversion to psychoanalysis, showering its founder with unkind and colorful epithets), he no doubt wished by this gesture to disavow his origins and invent a family history more to his liking. And yet to keep suspicion at bay, he enjoyed vaunting the merits of the innate and of genetic patrimony, going so far as to maintain that everything good in man is inherited. We are only worth the accumulation of the virtues and vices of those who have preceded us, he reaffirmed. Then to be provocative, he liked recalling Renan’s line about the necessary sacrifice of thousands of mediocre people for the genesis of one great man, this reflection of the divine on an obscure descendant of Adam. You would think that these martyrs of finality would be worthy of the Species. In an unexpected moment of effusiveness, he confided that at times he felt a desire to forge another genealogy. He regretted not being able to exchange his placid Vaudois ancestors, a line of peasants, wine growers, teachers, and pastors, for brutes unaware of the ravages of introspection, for barbarians immunized against the poisons of lucidity and the pangs of contemplation. Once, in a fit of self-delusion, he believed himself to be a lost descendent of Attila, the last scraggy survivor of a horde of Huns or Mongols, destined to plague western civilization, looking in vain for a denouement worthy of his past glories. Alas! when he shaved every morning, he was forced to admit he was only a Mongol of the library, a Scythian of papier-mâché, condemned by the anemia of his organism and the intermittencies of his will to relive—in the ridiculous form of war games—the looting of empires and the waves of great invasions.

Compared to the Apocalypses of the good old days, he deplored in advance that the final explosion by which our universe would return to dust, would burden us with its sudden end-of-the-world etiquette. “I am speaking less for me than for you,” he pointed out sympathetically, “who will not have the bitter satisfaction of feeling yourself die and therefore of preparing yourself for the great passage.” In support, he quoted ‘The Art of Dying’ from the period of the CounterReformation, a fascinating piece of Jesuit rhetoric grafted onto Stoic treatises, where a whole panoply was unfurled, intended to tame the fear death inspired by “making love to death,” encouraging resignation to the decrees of Providence. What I am saying might make this man seem an old bookworm, a prep school pedant living only by proxy. That would be a mistake: the least priggish of men, Mr. Stauff avoided any display of his erudition, but he could not prevent his extraordinary culture from showing through in his remarks. What surprised me the most when he allowed me to come over was the absence of books in the home of a man who seemed to have read everything. Even more surprising was the wordless contempt he had for “those compromising traces of a crime against the spirit.” In each published book he saw a charge against its author, an insult to silence, to secrecy, where plenitude and the meaning of life were enclosed. “All this woodland needlessly deforested,” he lamented, “for these excrements of thought, this unstoppable flow of writing aspiring to be set in bronze.” During our walks, at the sight of piles of new releases, small piles of freshly laid paper that crowded the windows of bookstores, he veiled his face as if before an obscene spectacle. “What a shame,” he groaned, “that a giant universal Library doesn’t exist that might undergo the fate of the one in Alexandria!” He would have willingly offered to set it ablaze. I was surprised, I who had never been able to throw out a book and who, if necessary, would not hesitate to steal a desired paperback. I brought up Saint Jérôme’s cell, its walls lined with books, its gentle light so favorable for study. Wouldn’t he, the hermit of the rue de Tournon, like to live in the warmth of a library, enveloped by the reverberations of familiar authors rather than in the grayish anonymity of a former hotel room, as though amongst the wreckage of a ship? What a conventional idea I had, he retorted, of a man such as himself. Since childhood, he had been surrounded by books, encircled by walls of folios; soon he had exhausted the paternal library and began to haunt the public ones until he felt a nausea for the printed thing, these myriad flyspecks on the illdefended whiteness of the paper. Later, when he settled in Paris, he dragged to his suite two heavy trunks, his portable library, lugged around from move to move. Throughout the years, however, he realized that books could also be

Bruno de Cessole

Closing Time in the Gardens of the Occident

Pierre Daix

The Return

a form of prison. Little by little, he got rid of them, giving some away, trading others, selling the remainder to a secondhand bookseller. After reading and rereading them, he knew them by heart; their possession was superfluous, a pure concession to sentimental fetishism. The renouncement he was leaning toward demanded this sacrifice. As Chinese thought had taught him, wasn’t the ideal to know without traveling, to see without looking, and to think without reading? That was why in the cave of Diogenes I had seen only a few worn-out dictionaries, an old, bilingual edition of Lucretius, a lone volume of works by Gibbon, another by Jules Lemaître, and in a German volume, in gothic letters, the Aphorisms of Lichtenberg, the sole survivors of an sunken library. On occasion these volumes served to secure a shaky table, to hold open a door, or to elevate the mattress of his bed, where he lay down to peruse month-old newspapers, as was his strange habit. Yet this disdain for the book as such Mr. Stauff did not seem to feel vis-à-vis the works I happened to have with me; those he looked at and handled with curiosity, as if they were archeological vestiges, then returned them, a strange smile on his lips. He often asked about my reading. The extent of his knowledge and sureness of his memory confounded me. How naïve I was! I was shocked that he did not own any books, and yet this man was a living library. Penniless upon his arrival in France, he had exploited this talent by buying old books below their value from secondhand stores, then reselling them to specialized bookstores or wealthy booklovers. It was only fair, he told me, that books should have helped him to survive, he who had once lived for them. From the start of our friendship, eager to know him better, I sought to reconstruct his readings, and thus the genealogy of his thought, writing down in a notebook the names of authors who came up most frequently in conversation. I reread this list and remember how his eclecticism discouraged me. It was a joyous hodgepodge, where the most serious works mixed with the most frivolous, and erudition mingled with all and sundry.

Publisher: Fayard Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Carole Saudejaud csaudejaud@editions-fayard.fr

Translation: Jane Todd fmost@aol.com

Biography

Pierre Daix was born in 1922 in Ivry-sur-Seine. He abandoned his history studies to enter the Resistance in the fall of 1940. A survivor of the concentration camps in Mauthausen, he went on to become the editor-in-chief of Lettres françaises from 1948 to 1972. Starting in 1980, he would contribute work to the magazines Quotidien de Paris and the Figaro littéraire. He is a novelist, essayist and art historian. He used to be a friend of Picasso and has published many books on the artist and his work. Publications Among his novels are: Une maîtresse pour l’éternité, Éditions du Rocher, 2003; Une saison Picasso, Éditions du Rocher, 1997 ; Quatre jours en novembre, Belfond, 1994; L’Ombre de la forteresse, Robert Laffont, 1990; La Porte du temps, Éditions du Seuil, 1984; Les Chemins du printemps, Grasset, 1979.

The Return tells of five women, three French, one Belgian and one English, after their release from Mauthausen. The end of the war is at hand, and Wermacht lieutenant Franz Werfer is to escort them to Sweden to make a prisoner exchange. But he chooses instead to take them to the nearby Allied territory. There they meet Roger, special correspondent covering the war, who soon becomes part of their particular group.

From 1945 to 1953, the women, as well as Franz and Roger, relate in turn the post-war era, the difficulties of (re)living and their incredible story of solidarity—and true communion. Pierre Daix gives us an overwhelming novel, majestic in scope. Written between 2001 and 2008, it is the work of an entire life, a story of both a collective destiny and of individual lives.

3. Julia I want to be wood. Like when the abominable thug, the one who burned me with his cigarettes, tied my hands behind my back with my torn slip, leaving me with my bare ass and breasts exposed. Why get bogged down in that memory on the night that is to be your last here? You hear him again going at Henri: “We’ll pass her ass around the whole unit. We’ll burn her pussy a little beforehand, that’ll make her scream louder when they fuck her up. Isn’t that right, Mr. Obersturmführer?”I proclaimed my contempt through my unyielding silence. Maybe I distracted him that way, allowing Henri to bolt through the open window? It’s no life, being a survivor. You’re not even twenty-four years old and your husband killed himself that day. And others from the network, dead … You don’t know why, but when you arrived here in prison, you started telling Lucette, the savvy Belgian spy. She took you by the shoulders, and that did you good: “Must be a pimp, your French thug. Got to be sadistic with women to think of stuff like that on your cunt.” Cunt—I didn’t understand that any better than pussy. She had to translate. We were both waiting to be shaved all over, for the disinfectant, which reopened my wounds and triggered infection. Claudine, my cellmate, with her nursing experience, took care of me: “You’ll come out all right thanks to the sulfonamides. All the same, they messed you up something awful.” She coddles me. The mama I didn’t have. Said in my ear: “I have a daughter, Paulette, half your age. As sweet as you.” Two years later, and this morning the burn in the crease of my thigh is sore. Am I really getting out of this hideous world? Back to the pleasantness of before the war? I told Claudine about that other life in the first few weeks.

Got her shamelessness in response: “Just between us girls, my little Julia. Or rather my big one …” And how did her husband … ? She crowed: “A real muscle man. Made for fucking. My girlfriends were against it at first. You’re much too tiny for that slab of beef. He made me wet. Really wet! I was soaked.” Looking like a celluloid doll. So sweet with me. Even better than grandmother, because she was what? Ten years older than I. Nothing divided you, even when you discovered she’s a Communist and she discovered that you’re the daughter of White Russians. You got separated from her when the souris grises took you away to work in the prison’s administrative office, because you speak German. Your own cell. A bedstead all to yourself. Sawdust mattress, woven wood frame, and you wood on top of it, as if you were nothing but furniture. Because of Claudine, you tell yourself now that Henri sort of slipped on top of you. And then, last night, the prison matron, always stiff as a post, opens your cell. You jump to the regulation attention three steps away. “Tomorrow at dawn, the Western women are being evacuated. The French as well as the Norwegians. It’s up to you to organize yourselves.” Pursing her lips: Eine trennscharfe Evakuierung! A selective evacuation? Evacuated, but to where? You’re afraid of outside. Right away you’re given an army bread roll. You haven’t seen the like of it since February. A real piece of sausage. You devour it. Only the tea is the same dishwater. Now you’re already in the warden’s office. Why does the old lady leave me for so long? I sort out what she already brought me and slip on my wedding ring, in play. It still fits. An idiotic reaction. You got out of hard labor, so you’ve still got the fingers of a young lady from a good family. Your marriage belongs to a different existence, poste restante, which you will never claim. In play, you keep slipping the light gold ring over your skin. That’s how you got used to it before your marriage, not seeing any harm in it. It’s odd, all the same, how this waiting in the warden’s office takes you back to when you tried it on at a fine jeweler’s close to the Opéra; Henri, leaning toward you, smelled of cigar. His voice, pitched a little high for a man: “You have the most exquisite fingers in the world!” You thought he was going to give you a kiss, but nothing happened. And from then on the ring would seem a little too big, a little too loose for you. They’re going to get rid of us, now that the defeat seems irreversible. The fear returns to gnaw at me. Airplanes machine-gunning the roads like during the exodus in June ’40. If only grandmother’s still alive! Before the war, you fancied yourself a young lady à la page, as she said. The memory makes you blush, taking you back to when you were not yet eighteen. The night this wedding ring was purchased, you put it on before sneaking into Henri’s bedroom, having decided you had to be his wife already to be able to brave, above it all in your fancy white dress with train, the three ceremonies they made you rehearse: civil, Catholic, and Orthodox, one after another over three days. In front of your grandfather

Pierre Daix

The Return

in his general’s uniform. “I want you to make me your wife by my decision. Not by the authority of our Churches.” You made sure to drop your pajama bottoms. He couldn’t wait, taking you by the arm and led you back. Oh, very kindly. You thought you knew everything about a woman’s life, and you didn’t know a thing, no memory of your mother, who died so young, left you in the care of nurses, until, tall enough to reach the shelf, you found a dried cornflower in a book that had belonged to her, which your grandmother forbade you. The title held no interest for you. In fact, you didn’t understand it. The Red and the Black. Opened to the cornflower page—a cross in the margin caught your attention. Opposite it, underlined in pencil: I have the good fortune to love, she said to herself one day in a rapture of incredible joy. I love, I love, it’s clear!” From then on, you wouldn’t let it go. You wanted to be Mathilde de la Mole in the twentieth century. She loathed the lack of character, that was her only objection to the handsome young men who surrounded her. Children of Russian immigrants like you, whose parents bore high-sounding titles that left you cold. Henri, the exact opposite of Julien for Mathilde, came from the true nobility and never let it show. You knew immediately that he was made to brave the solitary, singular, unexpected, truly ugly danger. Truly ugly. The future proved you right, alas. “You’d like your life to be as orderly as a sheet of music paper,” said grandmother. What a dimwit I could be, believing I was daring and in the know! All because of another of mama’s books, without a cornflower, with ragged pages, in German, whose title I also did not understand and which I had to look up in the dictionary: Frauenabteil—compartment for ladies only. With the aid of drawings, it described in detail my womb, my genitals, and their use. Retaining the scent of my mama. It’s because of that book that I decided to flout all modesty. Like Mathilde. You burst out laughing uncontrollably, which floored Henri. You didn’t know anything, except that you weren’t made to expect a man to give meaning to your life. I jam my ring back on to punish myself for having thought so: Henri sacrificed his life for me. One more reason that the outcome depends solely on me. Provided there is an outcome. The wait is lasting too long. What an idiot to believe them! You’re wearing your coarse black dress, your prison number, the regulation wooden shoes. Once you’re out, they could gun you all down in the surrounding fields. Two executions I was forced to witness. They decapitate the women, judged by tradition unworthy of the twelve bullets, their heads hooded on the block. A single stroke of the ax. The torrents of blood spurting out. The political one, a Pole, shouted that the Red Army would prevail. The other one, a Volksdeutsche convicted of abortion, pleading until the last instant: Meine Kinder! My children! The old Aufseherin comes back on mice feet, places on her desk the selections from Goethe in keepsake edition, Berlin 1921, the only official souvenir of my parents, who died in a train accident. I fondle the leather cover, open it to find

the texts in Gothic script that I know by heart. A gift from my father to my mother, or vice versa. My two mother tongues: the Russian of my nanny and of my grandmother, the German my parents spoke to forget the world from before. French on top of it in Paris. The old lady has hauled in the blue canvas sack marked with my number and my name in German: Julia von Villeroy. No trace of my handbag, too stylish. Stolen no doubt. She looks hard at my ring and her Prussian voice barks that gold is not something to be shown around. Das Gold. “In the hell ruling outside, they’ll cut off your index finger to snatch your ring faster.” The old lady gives me back my identity papers, my card for the school of science at the university, my driver’s license. Adds confidentially: “On the road, it’s better to keep on your convict’s uniform. Germany in ruins can make you a gift of them.” She goes on, looking hard at me with her gray eyes, hammering in the advice: Meine Tochter, eine Primaware wie du! My daughter, top quality goods like yourself! And, with the thumb of her left hand, to make her meaning clearer, she skewers her right crackled palm. That gesture clashes so much with her manner, that of an uptight lady, that it seems all the more obscene to me. The nervous tension, the lousy food, as Claudine explained to me, keep us from getting our periods. I feel asexual. All the more offended; the old lady must sense it. She whispers: “Du sollst deine Nummer auftrennen.” You must unstitch your number. Then, again looking for my complicity: Du hast eine gute Nummer gekriegt. You drew a winning number. In spite of myself, I smile. I used to get out of difficult situations by being insolent. The prison taught me the limits of that: better to keep your trap shut. Suddenly, the old lady calls you back, muttering that you mustn’t go out in your convict’s cap. She hands me a khaki exercise hat. True that a woman cannot walk around bareheaded, even in the disorder that must reign outside, without looking … Especially when they can see at first glance that your head’s been shaved. Cap’s a good fit. The old lady has an eye. Finally alone, no relief from the tension. Fear of outside. Of the void. I open the bag so as to think about something else. My shoes, honest prewar shoes with flat heels, leather, chosen when they came to arrest me because not at all flashy. Along with the return of the wedding ring, a sign that we’re really being freed. Don’t lower your guard. Your life from before remains buried in a tomb, even more tightly sealed than you imagine, since you know the Gestapo never returned your husband’s body. Unless after the liberation of France … ? Nine months already. Underneath, folded intact, the sober light gray suit, Chanel style, selected the morning of your arrest to make you look like a well-bred lady. You used to wear it as a uniform, on exam days. At present, an indecent luxury given what you have to face. And incompatible with your widowhood. It’s as hard to think

Pierre Daix

The Return

of myself as a widow as it was, during the few months of my life with Henri, to think of myself as a wife. Hide the suit at the bottom of the bag to chase away the guilt that wells up. I get hold of myself again. I need only take a few steps to verify whether the order to liberate us, so perfectly absurd, is true. I casually go through a security door that has never been open to me. A hallway, newly repainted. Scrubbed down. Washbasins on the right. Real ones. FRAUEN. Ladies. German-style clean. And unexpectedly, my image in the mirror. That hasn’t happened to me in two years! A stranger. Faded. Pallid skin, high cheekbones, too prominent. A memory of the Mongols, said grandmother. Under the cap, my black mop of tousled hair. As far as Primaware is concerned, a cast-off. At not even twenty-four. Better that way. Do fellows take the time to look at the women they … ? I touch my cheeks and a little pink appears. Plaster down my hair on the sides, moisten it. My face from before. As if I had cut my hair too short. Your freedom, besides having your shoes, lies in no longer wearing a cap. No longer having to remove it whenever a guard … Why did I smile? I lower my eyes. In my other life, a smile opened all doors to me. Over and done with. The old lady is right. Outside, the shambles of defeat. Rumors spreading, ever since we’ve been housing refugees from Prussia, about the rapes committed by the Soviets. The gully of fear down my spine. Not from thinking about the rape: I truly feel like wood, but the still-stinging memory of savage blows, cigarette burns. I shut my eyes. Never again a shoulder to snuggle against. A Villeroy went to war. If he’d been a professor, he might have … No, voluntary return to the cavalry, like his ancestors. Then the Resistance. You calculate: end of 1939, 1940, except a little in the summer, but all of 1941, 1942. Three months with him and three and a half years without, plus two more years since his death. Henri’s widow says it all. He died for me. I rub my face with cold water. Take off my dress. Strip to the waist to finish reawakening my body. My heavy standard-issue knickers in coarse white cloth, baggy and fastened below the knee, make me look like a tart in a boulevard show. I throw them out. The water warm, almost hot. Soap. The real thing. My armpit and pubic hair is growing back after being shaved, feels filthy and bristly under my fingers. You don’t give a damn. No one to please. I look for traces of the cigarette burns. The one in the hollow of my left thigh forms a lump all the way to the labium. The Frenchman crushing the burning tobacco. “The next one will be guess where! Tell her to talk!! Your pussy will make you mew!” Klaspen, the head of the SS, asks: “Pussy? Ah! Mew? Miauen?” I jump naked out of the shower, pick up the towel. I feel like wood, but overflowing with unused love. The love-protection one feels for a child. I should have … A little five-year-old girl, already a flirt. Fussed over. I see myself as the mother of a girl. Because of what I wasn’t given. My mother, it seems, wanted

a boy, and my grandmother brought me up as a boy. The mirror shows me Gisèle arriving in a navy blue suit, too long, that in itself says old maid. I don’t move, as if I hadn’t seen her. She has a hard time keeping herself from inspecting me. We saw each other naked once a week, in the showers. “The old lady didn’t tell you to keep your prison clothes too?” “No, why?” “Because, on the roads, it’s better not to look …” I don’t say “like a woman.” The warden didn’t feel the need to warn Gisèle. Without her violin, she’s as much a widow as I am. I go back into the cubicle. I’m reluctant to put the coarse wool shirt back on, even though I’ve worn it for only two days. I slip on my panties from civilian life and, touching them, feel myself tremble as if in response to a caress. Prewar silk. Real, soft, tiny underpants, instead of the rough and old-fashioned garment I’d had. The bra, too big. One good thing about being in prison is that I haven’t worn them out. I’m annoyed at myself for not being wooden enough. Henri, after our life together was established, inadvertently opened the door to the bathroom, discovered me in my garter belt, and whispered, “Let me look at you …” I turned around, laughing. He took me … I was upset that the rig aroused him more than my nakedness. I still know just as little about him. About men, since he was the only specimen. I find the courage to go look at myself in the mirror again. I shouldn’t have. The silk emphasizes the lack of luster of my skin. I put my coarse cloth undershirt over it, then my black dress. I forge ahead. Thinking about intimate things has slowed me down. Lucette, in the yard, seems to be chatting at a provincial marketplace with the sturdy Norwegians. The only one in the group besides me to have kept her prison dress, she stands out with her lithe, studied, fashion model look. Only Claudine is missing. I spot a truck in front of the porch with a big red cross on the tarpaulin. So they’re really evacuating the Western women. Us.

Pierre Daix

The Return

The high black walls of the Zuchthaus, the penitentiary, seem less foreboding to me. You never thought you’d get out alive. Your heart’s beating too hard. For the first time, the Aufseherinnen aren’t screaming at us while they pace the yard with their mechanical walk, gray suits falling just below the knee over lisle stockings the same color. I didn’t find stockings in my pack. Arrested in April, I must have had bare legs. One had to be so thrifty with stockings at the time. I thought I was so sure of the future, I already saw myself writing my thesis, a doctor of science in ’44. Claudine arrives the very last, looking more than ever like a doll in her civilian clothes. A nurse with shiny, wavy blond hair, she avoided the general head shaving. A lightweight straw dress, knit green jacket, she observes the group with big bright eyes that take up her whole face. She is careful not to ruin her

high-heeled shoes. As a result, she seems to be paying a visit: “You obeyed the old lady. Not me. We have nothing to fear from the Soviets.” I brush her off. “You shouldn’t have put on your nice shoes. We’re starting out in the truck, but by the time we’re done we’ll be on foot!” She smiles at me to smooth things over. That’s her trick, when you explained to her that, though you have no reason to like Stalin, you appreciate that he fought the Nazis. She said: “We’ll always be like two peas in a pod.” In order to relax the atmosphere, I ask: “Which way can they evacuate us? Through Sweden?” No one answers. From what I know, the Zuchthaus is located in Saxony. Deep in the heart of Germany, then, near the quadrilateral of Bohemia. The one Norwegian who speaks French opines: “We’d have to go up to Bremen, passing west of Berlin. A good stretch, as you say.” The head guard appears, thin as a rake, mouth cut on the slant, garrison cap bearing the bars of her rank, atop a permanent wave of bottle blond hair, curls plastered down like in the movies. She takes me aside to whisper that she has made my stay in her prison as painless as possible. Flabbergasted, I find nothing to say, I nod my head. She takes the roll call, skipping only the order to remove our caps, only to shout at us to advance in step: Ein zwei, ein zwei. I find the escort. Reduced to the minimum: a lieutenant from the Wehrmacht, fairly young, tall, a rather handsome man, something of a blond Clark Gable, walks with a slight limp between two low-ranking Fritzes, one very young, a Cadum soap baby, and one an old man, very old by contrast. Next to them, an open car, a four-seater touring car with red leather upholstery. The radiator still has its winter cover on, fleece-lined, with an adjustable screen to regulate the air flow. I’ve never known of any car with a mechanism so elaborate as the one on the Delaunay-Belleville belonging to my father-in-law, the comte de Villeroy. Next to the truck, the driver, a tall, strapping man, a Daniel Boone type in a foreign uniform, with on the back a large KG, Kriegsgefangene: prisoner of war. The older of the Fritzes steps aside, goes with the driver to find a small ladder and sets it up so that we can climb into the truck bed. The young one arrives, bent under huge sacks for the food and a demijohn of water, which he sets down beside steel cups. He signals us to get in. The others step aside to let me pass, idiotically respecting the prison hierarchy. The head of the prison nods to me. I get in, lift my dress to step over the edge. Wooden benches perpendicular to the road. I take a place on the front one so that I can follow the route. The lieutenant approaches and confides that the evacuation will be through Sweden. Ein Vergleich. As if the word seemed odd to him, he clarifies in French: “As the result of an accord.” They were running late. Very late. We should have left on April 22. The orders had gone to Ravensbrück, a women’s concentration camp north of Berlin. Already evacuated. It’s the 24th. In short, he’s counting on our cooperation. Ihre Mitwirkung. The situation is beyond his control.

Orders from the SS command. From very very high up. “In-dis-put-able, therefore.” In good French, each syllable pronounced distinctly. He repeats, adding: “So long as they’re the ones who decide.” I shudder, wondering if that should be understood as a sign of opposition. I’m wary of the charm in his voice. The Germans have lost the war, the lieutenant knows it, end of story. I meet his gaze: blue eyes, very blue, a sharp, hard blue that bores into you. Kind, however. As if he had read my thoughts, he smiles. A real smile. How that smile warms my heart. Something comes through in his gaze. I feel myself blush; I’m annoyed at myself for yielding so quickly to the enemy. He speaks the German of a university professor, no local accent, perhaps a Rheinlander. He inspires my trust in spite of myself, and I tell him, in my most polished German, that I appreciate his attitude and assure him of our Mitwirkung. Using his word. Which means we won’t try to flee; to go where, in any case? The Norwegians give their opinion. I translate for Gisèle and Claudine. Lucette maintains her detachment. She understands every word, even if her German corrupted by Flemish is laughable. The heavy doors rattle. The truck immediately takes off. I arrived at the Zuchthaus by night. From the first turns of the truck wheels, a horizon opens before my eyes; wooded hills, awakened to bright green by the springtime, froth under an operetta sky. A pastoral poem: the fragrance of wet grass, rustic peace. The first village, a country market town, seems barely affected by the war, except that no men are to be seen. The sun is behind us on the right, which means we really are headed northwest. “Do you have any children?” asks the French-speaking Norwegian as we come upon a very tidy group of them, cheeks full and pink, no doubt a nursery school. I shake my head and almost add: And I won’t have any. “I’ve got three waiting at home for me. I wonder if they’ll welcome me with open arms after so many years. Recognize me. They may be angry at me for abandoning them. That frightens me.” We go through an even tidier little city. Except for the banners bearing swastikas and white inscriptions against bright red backgrounds that call for everything to be put into the army’s effort, life there seems as remote from the war as in the previous town. Claudine whispers to me: “My husband will come for me with red roses, like when he proposed to me. I’m sure he’s saved himself for me. Which means I’ll have it coming right away.” I hate that. It seems to me that Henri “saved” himself too much, was too reserved, and then, the word makes me sick. I’m annoyed at myself and even more annoyed at Claudine for her lack of modesty, her damn useless boasting, there’s no mistaking it. I’ve never experienced what she goes on and on about. Not made for it. Just as well. The truck leaves the asphalted highway for a stony road that tosses us around. An intoxicating forest smell. How many years since I’ve breathed the scent of nature? The sun, higher, plays among the young leaves of the trees, oak and beech. Suddenly I feel a tremendous desire to

Pierre Daix

The Return

Fatou Diome

Our Lives, Unfulfilled

Publisher: Flammarion Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Patricia Stansfield pstansfield@flammarion.fr Translation: Pascale Torracinta pascale_torracinta@bbns.org

live, to run till I’m out of breath, inhaling the pure air. You’ll know how to savor your freedom. Don’t get carried away. Why this detour, when we’re running so late? Soon we’re in bright light again. Only to see the beginning of a line of barbed wire hanging loosely from wood posts with peeling paint. They mark off something. The war has never come through here, though. The truck jolts harder. A sign in large Gothic letters reads: Gefahr! Danger! A high fence, also barbed wire, but straight this time, well maintained, bound by porcelain insulators. Electrified. I think “camp” even before making out emaciated prisoners in white and blue striped caps and dresses, bare feet in wooden clogs, dragging about in the mud. A big one with a red Kapo armband falls on them with a cudgel. Oh how lovely, this Mitwirkung! That bastard lieutenant! Like an idiot, you let yourself be taken in by his good manners! I cry out in spite of myself: “How awful!” The fascinated faces of my companions. At the Zuchthaus, people spoke with terror of the Lager, the camps, because of the prisoners who had come from them, Polish politicals. They claimed that the prison was a regular sanatorium. The outside air has grown heavy with the stench of burning. The truck jerks to a halt. The next instant, the young Fritz brings a ladder. I get ready to tell him off, even though he’s smiling just as kindly as the first time. The lieutenant arrives, smiling as well, and puts his hand on mine: “You’re going to get a new companion.” The fear I had just stored up vanishes in a relief that comes on too suddenly. He’s left his hand there and, when I realize it, I tremble, our eyes meet. Brilliant blue. It slips out of me: “It does us good that you take care of us.” I go from one extreme to the other. He’s the one who removes his hand, because a young woman as tall as I am arrives, but one with lovely curves, a regular Titian with abundant chestnut brown hair, very clean, with red highlights. Next to her I suddenly feel dull. I spot the location of the unstitched number when she comes level with me. She addresses me with a winning smile and I answer her, disarmed by her bright eyes verging on green, by the glow of her presence. “French? I suspected as much,” she says. I don’t like people to get ahead of me, but I make a place for her on the bench. Where did she come from? Such a womanly woman! The new arrival boldly examines the inside of the truck, introduces herself: “My name is Katie, Katie Mildraw. I have English nationality, but I’m French. Are you?” “Not all of us,” I reply, still on my guard. “Welcome aboard!” I make the introductions to indicate that I’m the leader of the group.

Biography

Born in 1968 in Senegal, Fatou Diome moved to France in 1994. She is the author of a collection of short stories and two novels. Her first novel, Le Ventre de l’Atlantique became a bestseller in France and was published in English by Serpent’s Tail. Publications Kétala, Flammarion, 2006 (re-ed. J’ai lu, 2007); Le Ventre de l’Atlantique, Anne Carrière, 2003 (re-ed. LGF, 2005); La Préférence nationale, Présence africaine, 2001 (re-ed. coll. “Poche”, 2007).

Betty, a solitary thirty-year-old, spends a great deal of time at her window watching the residents of the apartment building across the street. An elderly lady catches her attention. She calls her Felicity— because of her cheerful disposition—and becomes increasingly fond of her. When Felicity is sent, against her will, to a retirement home, a distraught Betty moves heaven and earth to find her. From that moment, a genuine friendship unites the two women. In the course of her regular visits to Felicity’s new home, moved by this process of aging that we somehow forget to respect, Betty becomes the residents’ confidante and carefully records their memories in a notebook. She also keeps Felicity informed about the lives of her former neighbors. But after hearing a certain piece

of news, Felicity stops talking and withdraws. Powerless, Betty tries to take a step back and leaves for a few days. When she returns, Felicity has passed away. Betty sinks into melancholy, which brings back painful and long-repressed memories, including the loss of her childhood friend at the age of ten. A new encounter, the “Friend”— loved “as we love a man we will never touch, because seeing him is enough,” saves her from depression. But life does its lace-work: one hole too many, and something snaps for Betty who disappears for an unknown destination. Only music—the African kora—brings an answer to her questions: life remains unfulfilled, and unfulfilled too, is the need for a peaceful shore.

Prologue Never satisfied, life consumes our hours without restraint—our hours of fir honey or sea salt. Leaning out of her window, Betty was whispering to herself: dusk, a carpet, a hatch, a drainpipe, a gullet—the throat of life waiting for night to come before turning into an ogre. Dusk? End of the day; end of work. A certain type of work, she thought with a smile. Why couldn’t night be the active time of life? The sun has to rise; I don’t have to. It has to go down; I don’t. And yet she could still put herself in the place of those employees who go home when shadows grow longer on the walls, after having asked from their bodies what they could no longer give. Weary, we drag our feet; we stagger; we slip; we straighten up and look ahead. Bits of human beings randomly scattered, sometimes uprooted, carved, nicked, cracked, or burnt, like some strange game of skittles—yet still impetuous enough to think they control this vertiginous movement that is living. Leaving the workplace, we are not just thinking about dinner. No. Sometimes we review a day, a week, a month, a year, a life. Yesterday? Wow/Oh. Today? Oh/ Wow. Tomorrow, we’ll do our best. Dinner always tastes like the day. To fill up one’s day, to perform one’s conjugal duties: we know exactly what it means. But to fill up one’s life? With what? Or whom? Looking at the journey, it’s easy to mistake the bumps for podiums. And so, like puppets, we hop on our little mounds of achievement, those few heaps of pride that cost us as much breath as the Mont-Blanc to alpinists. But we can also look back at the journey and, instead of ignoring its faults, take them into account to better move forward. We can dare to take the plunge and, speleologists of our own existence, probe those pits and crevasses that choice, chance, or circumstances have dug in our lives. When we think of Mount Everest and Kilimanjaro, what comes to our

mind is always the summit; no one ever marvels at the diameter of the base, this bedrock that lifts the mountain up to the sky. Let those who hang onto Einstein’s beard tell us: how deep are the valleys from which mountains arise? There are too many ravines to ignore the fact that nature empties as much as it fills. What are those dark pits that surround our peaks of satisfaction? To draw solids, we must take into account the gaps between them. What are the shadows that make our paintings so beautiful? Before our diluted mauves, there must be that black ink that gives solids their definition by tracing a sinuous line which flirts with the void and contains whatever wavers in us. Too much light! And the tightrope walker starts staggering, attracted by the object of his bravery. Vertigo! We catch ourselves just in time. We hold on tight. Any pause is fatal. To live is to hold on. We go on. Daily hassles, life’s toss-up, nothing else. Just a way for each fish to brave the currents. We swim; we struggle to keep afloat. In the surge of days that roll over us like waves, we take a deep breath, hold it for a while, and breathe again. It’s not will-power, just a fact. We are alive. That’s the way it is. Night follows day and day follows night. Light is as useless and illegible as darkness. Whether dazzled or blinded, we blink our eyes the same way. So where and how can we find the way? Living calls for a magnifying glass. Hills, like crevasses, impede our walking. For Betty, dusk wasn’t simply a vacuum cleaner that sucked up the hours of her existence, it was also a time-funnel that led her to the darkroom where she was able to develop and distort the scenes that her imagination had caught behind the windows across the street. In her eyes, night was only obliterating day to better expose the contours of life. Photography? Photosynthesis. Not just for plants: for everything. And because she had read, loved, and meditated on Baudelaire’s poem Landscape about the joy of living right under the roofs— I want to compose my poems chastely, To lie down close to the sky like an astrologer, And, while I dream beside the church towers, listen To their solemn anthems brought to me by the wind. My chin cupped in my hands, high up in my garret I shall see the workshop where one sings and chatters, The pipes, the belfries, those masts of the city, And the skies that make one dream of eternity (…) —Betty nestled on the fifth floor, in an apartment that reminded her of a boat turned upside down and moored to the rocks, its hull stroking the stars. There, when she could no longer look at the sky and wonder what it keeps from of our reach, of us mortals, she turned back to her fellow men. Human beings intrigued her; she knew of nothing more mysterious. Positioned at one of her windows, she would scan the façade of the luxurious apartment building on the other side of the avenue.

Fatou Diome

Our Lives, Unfulfilled

She asked herself: What is so special about those cubes, those squares, those rectangles and diamonds, those countless architectural fantasies that we call residences? What makes them different? What, besides their shape, makes them homes and not burial places? What happens in them that is so powerful, so real, so vibrant and so tangible, that it could not take place in a cemetery and justifies the fact we call them living spaces? How vast an area does living cover? What meaning do we give this word that reserves it for special places? Are we not alive when we walk through a forest, cross the street, or tense our muscles to propel our fishing boat on a lascivious stretch of the sea? Are offices and factories places of death? All these questions were absurd, of course, but knowing this wasn’t enough to stop the continuous flow of thoughts in her mind. Absurdity is no obstacle to thinking: it’s an opportunity to change direction, to cut across, to explore, and even to go beyond reality. It allows us to pass through walls, scratch the surface, break windowpanes, pierce through appearances and reach the place where, by superimposing themselves on their own reflection, things fill up the entire space of their existence. Things! How people encumber themselves with them, in fact, with such profusion. See how they move to a new place: like an army of ants, they march along with innumerable bits of furniture. What vacant lot is so threatening that we need to fill our living spaces the way we do? What are we trying to fill? Where does this need come from, the unfulfilled? Unfulfilled! This word howls, whispers or murmurs in our ears of so many misses and failures. It surely captures a good part of what we have to grasp in order to make sense of our joys and sorrows. How many friendships are destroyed or lost along the way, unfulfilled? How many loves aborted or buried without requiem and flowers, unfulfilled? How many dreams, despite our will to forget, continue to feed our sighs, never fulfilled? How many desires turned into disappointments? How many loved ones gone at the dawn of our affection? How many choices, or whims of fate, inscribe the unrelenting regrets of the unfulfilled? And because living is surviving, who or what is it that we give up— a humiliating defeat or a dignified amputation—unfulfilled in either case? But Betty had made up her mind. She was going to find out what lives were hiding behind the windows across the street. An obsession was born and it had taken hold of her. She did nothing to distract herself from it, quite the opposite. She was feeding it in the way we feed a fire in bad weather: meticulously, patiently. During the day, her gaze would run along the walls, stop above the frames, slide along the large windowpanes and linger on the wrought iron. At night, it followed the shifts of the light—left/right, top/bottom—and its variations, according to the vagaries of Ampere’s schedule. After a few weeks, her watchful eye had noticed and memorized the times when signs of life were most frequent. Thanks to an analysis of the lighting, she was certain she had identified

the different rooms and their respective purposes. The kitchens, the dining rooms, the living rooms: in them, several human shapes were often visible, usually seated for long periods. The toilets: there, the windows were smaller and the light was rarely on for more than five minutes. The bedrooms: the subdued and colored glow of the night lights left little doubt about what was happening. Behind the curtains, love’s charms were revealed with discreet modesty. Effervescence, vibrations, impatience, the soft brushing of bodies could only be guessed at. But no need to see anything: we know how it all ends. Hmmn! All sport ends in sweat. And after that? A cigarette for some, a glass of water for others, and then night-night! Yet all of this left Betty hungry for more, because it didn’t give her enough information about the nature or the content of lives that she had sensed. Racked with curiosity, increasingly agitated as she waited for details that didn’t come, the observer decided to become an embroiderer. Someone needed to imagine wool somewhere else than on the backs of sheep, or cotton outside the fields, for us to have shawls around our necks and beautiful sheets to cosset our loves. Betty had too much experience not to dream of lace. So she set herself to work. She would no longer be passive, pricking up her ears and glancing out the window. From then on, the rare signs she would perceive would become the raw cotton she would carefully spin to weave the clothes and dress the lives that she could only imagine. She had become a magnifier, reflecting and enlarging everything that caught her eye on the other side of the avenue. Glued to her post across the street, she smelled, gleaned, scoured, and captured what was needed to satisfy her voracious eye. Just as a cloud framed by a skylight is enough for us to conceive of the whole vast sky, a glass of water allowed Betty to apprehend oceanic depths. The cut of a specific dress told her the story of a meeting. A particular face suggested a blossoming romance or the cataclysm of a break-up, either imminent or already over. The brightness of a smile divulged a happiness set with diamonds or a thousand wounds, modestly hidden beneath the snow of an existence bearing the stamp of winter. Human nature revealed itself in its many nuances, depending on the day, a particular encounter or perception. The Magnifier wanted to zoom in on everything and strove not to miss anything. Curiosity killed the cat: like everyone else, she had grown up with that adage erected like a palisade between us and the truth by a moralist who must have had something to be ashamed of. But Betty needed more than suspension points to hang her mental pictures. Her take on this was very different: to stand in front of the abyss of the unknown and not try, by every means, to fill it—pointed to some obvious limitation, and was unworthy of a thinking human. The building across the street had become her equation with “x” unknown, the Tower of Babel whose multiple languages she wanted to decode. Oh, narrow-minded souls, don’t wag your spiteful tongues! Don’t talk about voyeurism! Or close this book and speak to us! What do

Fatou Diome

Our Lives, Unfulfilled

Mathias Énard

Zone

your favorite books feed on? It must have been sociological espionage, nothing else. Yes! This is how Betty looked at her favorite pastime. Because some well-pruned trees hid the first floor from her sight, she focused her attention on the upper levels. In the end, it suited her. She would start with the second floor and move up all the way to the fifth—since she herself had refused to live any higher and did not want to hurt her neck. Within that span, her gaze would move about at the right height. So, on a sunny Sunday, after sleeping late and eating a frugal breakfast, her coffee cup still in her hand, she took up her position at the window and began her new activity. She was about to become engrossed by other people’s lives, not yet knowing that she would soon be engulfed in them.

Publisher: Actes Sud Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Élisabeth Beyer e.beyer@actes-sud.fr

Translation: Charlotte Mandell cmandell@earthlink.net

Biography

Born in 1972, Mathias Énard studied Persian and Arabic and lived for long periods of time in the Middle East. He lives in Barcelona. Publications Bréviaire des artificiers, Verticales, 2007; Remonter l’Orénoque, Actes Sud, 2005; La Perfection du tir, Actes Sud, 2003 (re-ed. coll. “Babel”, 2008) (prix des Cinq Continents pour la francophonie 2004).

One fateful night a traveler weighed down with secrets takes the train to Rome, revisits his past and examines history, in one long tracking shot that mixes killers with victims, heroes with criminals of the Mediterranean wars: an Iliad for our time. Well-documented though it may be (since it is informed by history and also by the testimony of soldiers), Zone lays claim to the freedom to re-create—as evidenced by the true-false book Francis Servain Mirkovic leafs through that night at the end of which he wants to get rid of his weapons and his luggage. Literary

history has never been able to disentangle what is false from what is true in the Iliad, for the form is so trim that it seems to defy any hypothesis of improvisation. By “coincidence,” Zone has as many chapters as the Iliad has “books,” and each of them reflects an episode in the Homeric tale. Is the reader ever even aware of the trick being played on him? Between Milan and Rome there are the same number of kilometers as pages of text. Who now can claim that the French novel is short of breath?

I Everything is more difficult when you’re an adult, everything rings falser a little metallic like the sound of two bronze weapons clashing they make us come back to ourselves without letting us get out of anything it’s a fine prison, you travel with a lot of things, a child you didn’t carry a little Czech crystal star a talisman next to the snow you watch melting, after the reversal of the Gulf Stream prelude to the Ice Age, stalactites in Rome and icebergs in Egypt, it keeps raining in Milan I missed the plane I have one thousand five hundred kilometers on the train ahead of me I have six cents left, this morning the Alps sparkled like knives, I was trembling with exhaustion in my seat without being able to close my eyes like an aching drug addict, I talked to myself out loud on the train, or quietly, I feel very old I want the train to go on go on let it go to Istanbul or Syracuse let it go to the end at least let it know how to go to the end of the journey I thought oh I should be pitied I took pity on myself on that train whose rhythm opens your soul more surely than a scalpel, I let everything flow by everything flees everything is more difficult these days along rail lines I’d like to let myself be led simply from one place to another as is logical for a traveler like a blind man led by the arm when he crosses a dangerous street but I’m just going from Paris to Rome, and to the main train station in Milan, to that Temple of Akhenaton for locomotives where a few traces of snow remain despite the rain I turn round in circles, I look at the immense Egyptian columns supporting the ceiling, I have a little drink out of boredom, at a café looking out on the tracks the way others do on the sea, it doesn’t do me any good it wasn’t the time for libations there are so many things that divert you from the path, that make you lost and alcohol is one of them it makes the wounds deeper when you find yourself alone in an immense frozen train

station obsessed by a destination that is in front of you and behind you at the same time: but a train isn’t circular, it goes from one point to another whereas I am in orbit I gravitate like a pebble, I felt like a weightless stone when the man approached me on the platform, I know I attract madmen and deranged people these days they come and rush into my fragility they find a mirror for themselves or a companion in arms and this one is truly crazy priest of an unknown divinity he has an impish cap and a small bell in his left hand, he holds out his right hand and shouts in Italian “comrade one last handshake before the end of the world” I don’t dare shake it afraid he’s right, he must be forty no older and he has that keen prying gaze of fanatics who ask you questions because they’ve discovered an instant brother in you, I hesitate before the outstretched arm terrified faced by that screwy smile and I reply “no thanks” as if he were selling me a newspaper or offering me a smoke, then the madman shakes his bell and begins laughing in a big doleful voice and pointing at me with the hand he offered me, then he spits on the ground, moves away and an immense almost desperate solitude sweeps the platform at that moment I would give anything for arms or shoulders even the train taking me to Rome I would give up everything for someone to appear there and stand in the middle of the station, among the shadows, among the men without men the travellers clinging to their telephones and their suitcases, all those people who are going to disappear and give up their bodies during the brief digression that will take them from Milano Centrale to Fossoli Bolzano or Trieste, a long time ago at the Gare de Lyon a deranged mystic had also announced the end of the world to me and he was right, I had been split in two then in the war and crushed like a tiny meteor, the kind that don’t shine anymore in the sky, a natural bomb whose mass according to astronomers is laughable, the madman in the Milan station reminds me of the gentle screwball in the Gare de Lyon, a saint, who knows, maybe it was the same man, maybe we grew at the same rhythm each on his own side in our respective madnesses and find each other on platform number 14 in the train station in Milan, a city with the predatory and Spanish military name, perched on the edge of the plain like a glacial crust slowly vomited by the Alps whose peaks I saw, flint blades rending the sky and setting the tone of the apocalypse confirmed by the demon with the bell in that sanctuary of progress that is the Stazione di Milano Centrale lost in time like me here lost in space in the elegant city, with a patch on my eye like Millán-Astray the one-eyed general, a bird of prey, feverish, ready to rip to shreds vibrant flesh as soon as the light of flight and danger is discovered again: Millán-Astray would so have liked Madrid to become a new Rome, he served the Iberian Franco il Duce his bald idol in that great warring prelude to the 1940s, that one-eyed belligerent officer was a legionnaire he shouted viva la muerte a good military prophet, and he was right, the fugue of death would be played as far as Poland, would raise a tall wave of corpses whose foam would end up licking the shores of the Adriatic,

Mathias Énard

Zone

in Trieste or in Croatia: I think about Millán-Astray and his argument with Unamuno strict high priest of culture while travelers hurry to the platform to take off for the end of the world and the train leading them straight there, Unamuno was such a classical and noble philosopher that he didn’t see the massacre on its way, he couldn’t admit that the one-eyed general was right when he shouted long live death in front of his flock for that hawk had sensed (animals tremble before the storm) that the carrion would grow, that death would enjoy some years of plenty, before also ending up in a train, a train between Bolzano and Birkenau, between Trieste and Klagenfurt or between Zagreb and Rome, where time stopped, as it stopped for me on that platform lined with railway cars, furious, panting engines, a pause between two deaths, between the Spanish soldier and the train station with a similar name, as crushing as Ares god of war himself—I light a last cigarette mechanically I have to get ready for the journey, for moving like all the people pacing up and down the platform in Milano Centrale in search of a love, a gaze, an event that will tear them from the infinite circles, from the Wheel, a meeting, anything to escape yourself, or vital business, or the memory of emotions and crimes, it is strange that there are no women on the platform at this precise moment, so motivated by the memory of Millán-Astray and his bandaged eye I in my turn climb into the trans-Italian express that must have been the zenith of progress and technology ten years ago for its doors were automatic and it went faster than two hundred kilometers per hour in a straight line on a good day and today, a little closer to the end of the world, it’s just a train: the same goes for all things like trains and cars, embraces, faces, bodies their speed their beauty or their ugliness seem ridiculous a few years later, once they’re putrid or rusty, once up the step now I’m in a different world, plush velour thickens everything, heat too, I left winter by getting into this train car, it’s a journey in time, it’s a day unlike the others, it’s a special day December 8th the day of the Immaculate Conception and I am missing the pope’s homily on the Piazza di Spagna as a madman comes and announces the end of the world to me, I could have seen the pontiff one last time, seen the spiritual descendant of the first Palestinian leader the only one who got some result, but it wasn’t easy for that skinny broke whining Levantine who didn’t write a single line during his lifetime, outside on the next track a train is stopping and a pretty girl behind the window has intriguing eyes, I think she’s talking to someone I don’t see, she is very close to me actually a meter at the most we are separated by two dirtyish windows I have to be strong I can’t linger over the faces of young women I have to be resolute so I can gather momentum for the kilometers ahead of me then for the void and the terror of the world I’m changing my life my profession better not think about it, I placed the little suitcase over my seat and I discreetly handcuffed it to the luggage rack better close my eyes for a minute but on the platform policemen mounted on two-wheeled electric chariots like Achilles or Hector without a horse are

chasing a young black man who’s running towards the tracks rousing surprise and concern among the travelers, blue angels, announcers of the Apocalypse maybe, astride a strange silent azure scooter, everyone gets out to take in the scene, Pallas Athena and the son of Tydeus rushing at the Trojans, a few dozen meters away from me towards the train one of the two policemen reaches the fugitive and with a gesture of rare violence aided by all the speed of his vehicle he hurls the man at bay up against one of the cement posts in the middle of the platform, the captive flattens against the concrete his head bangs into the column and he falls, he falls on his stomach right in the middle of the Milano Centrale station just in time for the second angel to jump on his back and immobilize him, sitting on his lower back the way a farmer or a tamer ties up a fractious animal, then, back on his machine, he drags the criminal stumbling at the end of a chain to the admiring murmurs of the crowd, ancient scene of triumph, they parade the chained conquered ones behind the chariots of the conquerors, they drag them to hollow galleys, the black man has a swollen face and a bloody nose his head high a little incredulous everyone gets back into the car the incident is over justice has triumphed just a few minutes before departure, I glance at the suitcase, I’m afraid I won’t manage to sleep or I’ll be pursued as soon as I doze as soon as I lower my guard they’ll interfere with my sleep or get under my eyelids to raise them the way you open shutters or Venetian blinds, it’s been a long time since I thought of Venice, the green water by the Dogana, the fog of the Zattere and the intense cold when you look at the cemetery from the Fondamente Nuove, back from the war, hadn’t thought of the shadows that, in Venice, are made of wine and drunk in the winter starting at five o’clock in the evening, I see again the Slavic violinists who played for the Japanese, the French in full carnival masquerade, a rich hairdresser from Munich who bought himself a palace on the Grand Canal, and the train suddenly gets underway I lean my head back we’re off more than five hundred kilometers before the end of the world.

Mathias Énard

Zone

Sylvie Germain

The Unnoticed

Who is Father Christmas? In an instant, he won the trust of three brothers and their funny little sister, Marie. He exchanged secrets with Marie who admitted to wanting “to be the Zoé tree when she grew up.” Their mother, Sabine, even got him involved in the family business, which she had been running alone since the death of her husband. Who is Pierre Zébreuse? A guardian angel? An adoptive father? Only Charlam, the terrible patriarch of the Bérnyx family rejects him. One day Pierre disappears, apparently without a trace except for the gap he has left in each of their lives. Despite everything, a vibrating yellow painting and lyric-loco texts prolong the charm for Hector and Marie.

Publisher: Albin Michel Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Jacqueline Favero jacqueline.favero@albin-michel.fr

Translation: Jody Gladding gladding@together.net

Biography

Born in 1954 in Châteauroux, Sylvie Germain studied philosophy at the Sorbonne with Emmanuel Lévinas. After earning her doctorate and working for a few years at the French Ministry of Culture, she spent seven years in Prague. She now lives in Angoulême. Translated into some twenty languages, Sylvie Germain’s work is the subject of university studies. Publications Published by Albin Michel: Magnus, 2005 (Prix Goncourt des Lycéens). Published by Gallimard: Chanson des mal-aimants, 2002; Tobie des marais, 1998; Éclats de sel, 1996; Immensités, 1994; La Pleurante des rues de Prague, 1992; L’Enfant Méduse, 1991; Jours de colère, 1989 (prix Femina); Nuit-d’Ambre, 1987; Le Livre des nuits, 1985. All these books have been reprinted in the “Folio” series.

Sylvie Germain traces these individual, branching destinies that she rescues from their obvious banality by focusing in on the mysteries that illuminate them: here, a lottery ticket; there, a woman’s hair in a box of childhood relics; a bouquet that declares its passion each season … Furtively the author passes from one life to another, collecting The Unnoticed, the intimate tragedies. The nest of the present is assembled from all her takings, which constitute reenchantments of the world as well. And if Father Christmas returns?

She was however wearing a very pretty dress, young Céleste Bergance, on the day of her marriage. Taking small steps, she had walked up the nave of the church on her father’s arm, his dark eyes bright with happiness and pride. Reaching the altar, her father had stepped aside and she had waited, straight and pearlywhite from head to toe, for her fiancé, escorted by his mother Jeanne Zébreuze, to join her before the chairs covered with red velvet that were reserved for them. And the ceremony had begun, with its songs, its readings, the organ’s swells and the priest’s homily. The great wedding ritual unfolded in perfect harmony; Céleste was at one with the atmosphere and with her name. But the countdown to disenchantment was approaching zero. At the moment of exchanging rings, as the organ resounded and the incense and flowers exhaled their perfume, her fiancé, on the point of becoming her husband, had leaned toward her and whispered in her ear—low enough for the priest and the choirboys facing them not to hear, distinctly enough for the interested party to understand every word— a little death sentence: “I don’t love you, Céleste, and I don’t think I ever will.” He had said it in a detached, slightly weary tone. Had a hornet dived into her ear to impale her eardrum with its stinger, Céleste could not have experienced a more searing flash of pain. Her hand recoiled just at the moment when Pacôme was slipping the wedding band over the ring finger, and to get the gold ring on, he had to force it, dislocating a finger bone. Under the dual effect of the horrid wake-up call and the pain in her ringed finger, Céleste had been seized with a fit of laughter. The priest, who had blessed more than one marriage in his time in the parish where he served, had never seen such a display of virginal joy on a wedding day, and he had been moved by it. He had concluded that the love that bound these two must have been strong and steadfast and would bear lovely fruit. Having entered the church radiant on her father’s arm, Céleste had left it shaking with laughter on the very uncertain arm of her husband, one finger

dented and bruised. She had recrossed the nave with faltering steps, head and shoulders convulsing, a fist pressed to her mouth, under the perplexed gaze of the assembled. Pacôme adopted an air of absence. He was not wicked, only a frustrated man, by nature indecisive to the point of weakness, which sometimes produces the same effects as wickedness. The idea had not occurred to him that declaring his non-love to his fiancée, very much in love herself, at the precise moment of exchanging wedding rings, was offensive and cynical. He had done it suddenly moved by a concern for frankness, a belated concern, but no less sincere and imperative. This confession relieved his conscience for a time. It was not that he felt animosity toward Céleste, he even found her rather compatible, but he felt no passionate love for her. Moreover, he was not in love with any other woman. Passion was foreign to him; women had never attracted him. He appreciated their company, the spirit and strength they alone possessed; he could admire their beauty, elegance, and imagination when in evidence, but they aroused no desire in him. Their friendship was enough. Only men attracted him. From adolescence, his first passionate feelings were excited by boys his age, which had immediately thrown him into great confusion. At seventeen, these feelings were concentrated on and blossomed into passion for one of his high school companions, but too scared to declare himself or to actually take action, he withdrew inward and applied all his energy to denying this attraction, generally considered an affront to nature, society, ethics, morality, and God, and thus condemned without appeal. In the end nevertheless, his parents had begun to suspect his scandalous tendencies, without ever speaking openly of them to one another, perhaps without even admitting it to themselves, and they had worked with increasing fervor over the years to pressure their son into marriage. So there it was, the deed was done, they could breathe a sigh of relief, their honor had been saved, and what followed was no longer their affair, that fell to Céleste. She now suffered from the curse of laughing fits to the point of pain and exhaustion. She would have an attack, more or less serious, each time she encountered some sorrow or affront. That was her experience when she lost her virginity, which was also Pacôme’s first time. She was so mortified by the awkwardness and repugnance that he demonstrated on this occasion that she laughed to the point that her body ached and her breath was short for hours. A child was nevertheless conceived following another attempt at sexual union. When he knew his wife to be pregnant, Pacôme decided that he had fulfilled his conjugal duty and he henceforth spared himself the torment of these wheezing couplings. In the end they slept in separate rooms and Céleste learned to live in semi-solitude between her elusive husband and the child growing in her belly. She welcomed this pregnancy as a kind of amnesty authorizing her to take her

place once again in the shared reality, in normalcy, and she no longer suffered the laughing disorder. But just as soon as her son was born, she had a relapse. Once again it was Pacôme who brought on the attack when he announced to her that he had officially registered the child’s first name as Éphrem, and not as Pierre as she had wished. Éphrem! Where had he come up with such a name? Where, if not from one of his male lovers? She felt betrayed, cuckolded once again, reduced to being his instrument, and she broke into long monotone laughter. The child at her breast began to cry, the milk in his mouth lost its taste, and the face of his mother leaning at an angle over him grimaced frightfully. The nursing infant had to be taken from her. She only calmed down many hours later, exhausted. From that day on, she was incapable of breastfeeding the little one who was entrusted to a wet nurse. She refused to call her son by the official name that Pacôme had forced upon him; she maintained the choice that she had made, Pierre. But the shadow of Éphrem, the great love of her husband’s youth, a love all the more alive for having never been consummated, burned between the child and herself, imposing a distance that she could not overcome. She was hard on him; she thought of him as a bastard who surreptitiously slipped into her womb, stealing his life at her expense. He looked so little like her, and so much like Pacôme—and perhaps, who knows, like the other one! How could she be sure that impossible loves did not avenge themselves through dark magical twists? She treated him harshly, often made fun of him to his face, but sometimes she took pity on him; the child was gentle and loved her unconditionally, without reserve. He lived only for those moments when his mother relented, forgot her unhappiness and anger, and held him close, cuddling him at last; the intensity of such moments was equal only to their rarity. Patience and affection he found with his father who did not look for, or suspect, any particular resemblance. Having a child was enough for him, filled him with wonder, but Pacôme kept his wonder hidden and hardly demonstrated his tender feelings except through the name he called his son when the two of them were alone, and even then he pronounced it in a hushed voice, Éphrem. Pacôme had built his son a tree house halfway up a linden tree in the yard, a tree house like the one he would have loved to have as a boy, a hut perched in the branches for withdrawing alone with one’s dreams, questions, and torments, away from the adults. He offered to Éphrem this leafy, wood hermitage that he himself had never had.

Sylvie Germain

The Unnoticed

One day, the child had asked his mother why she never called him Éphrem, as his father did. The only response he received was a slap across the face. He did not dare to bring up the subject again, with his father or his mother. He adjusted to this oddity, one among many on the part of the adults. For one of them, the name of Éphrem prompted the gentleness of a smile or a caress, for the

other, the brutality of a sudden slap. He played the game of splitting in two, sometime Pierre and sometimes Éphrem. He wanted to please each of his parents and struggled to become their hyphen, the mark of their union. But the two names remained separate, as painfully as the two who pronounced each of them alone. “My name is Pierre-Éphrem, my name is Pierre-Éphrem,” he repeated to himself in his tree house between earth and sky, whispered for his ears alone, for the three of them. For no one. His secret incantations were lost in the rustling of the leaves, the insects, in the interweavings of bird song, wood creaking, whistling wind. Silence fell abruptly over the conflictual part of his name when his father went away. War had come and established itself as imperious guest in the vanquished country; the guest had needed servants and slaves and gathered them in great number. Pacôme was taken away and sent to Germany to work there. The child felt maimed, orphaned by both his father and Éphrem. Now from the height of his refuge, it was his father he called, “Papa, Papa …”. He would invoke the war, absence, his fear. Gradually his mother proved less irascible, she offered him attention, even a bit of kindness, and Pierre experienced a joy as powerful as it was ambiguous—his mother’s love had a price: his father’s exile and Éphrem’s banishment. Céleste was the first to be surprised at her changeable feelings for Pacôme. Far from rejoicing over his absence, which promised to last indefinitely, on the contrary, she felt concern. She knew his health to be fragile, his nature unusual and solitary. How would he survive this captivity that went by another name, this imposed expatriation, the trials of punishing work and no privacy, the separation from his son? She did not wish him misfortune; there had already been enough of that in both their lives since the brutal exchange of wedding bands, and that was their business, no one else’s. Since there was misfortune, they could at least suffer it together, there under the same roof, united and apart, united and torn apart, united in the disaster. In Pacôme’s absence, their son was no longer a challenge, a wound, the shadow cast by a rival lover; he was nothing more than a lost child. Thus she showed him more solicitude than in the past, not because she could appropriate him—she still considered Pierre-Éphrem a child conceived outside of her, a foreign body maliciously deposited in her uterus, without roots in her flesh, without any true link to her, as the son of Pacôme and Éphrem—but because through him she could show Pacôme a little of the love he had so quickly destroyed and which, despite everything, had survived. Another surprising thing happened to her, a very pleasant one. She met a man with whom she rediscovered the delights of passion and finally experienced the taste of shared pleasure. Quite simply, she discovered physical love, as if, despite the birth of a child, she had, until then, remained a virgin. But her lover’s name was Johann Böhmland and he wore the uniform of the enemy. So what? Things

had not gone smoothly in Céleste’s life for a long time. Hadn’t her husband, in the midst of their wedding vows, issued a declaration of non-love, of definitive non-desire? Why couldn’t a man wearing the occupiers’ uniform reverse that declaration? Thing balanced out. Pacôme was conscripted to Johann’s country, Johann assigned to Pacôme’s. One loathed closeness, touch; the other proved smitten and attentive. One was taciturn, the other pleasant and warm. She was disarmed by this cheerfulness for which she had forgotten the meaning, the taste. In her eyes, Johann was not an occupier, not a soldier, just a man full of life, humor, and sensuality. While remaining discreet, she did not try to hide her relationship with him, and when she found herself with child, she bore her pregnancy with a serenity that she had not felt during the previous one. This baby was not an obscure organism transplanted into her body, reduced to a tool, but really and truly an offspring of her own flesh, spawned and growing in her entrails.

Sylvie Germain

The Unnoticed

She laughed often, but now it was a normal laugh that rang clear and brief. Alternating between anxiety and rapture, Pierre heard this new laugh that his mother emitted at any moment in the house, yard, or garden. She seemed more beautiful than ever to him, so much nicer than in the past, even if thoughts on the subject, sometimes vulgar and very harsh, filtered into his ears in the schoolyard and from the local shopkeepers. The happiness that had finally blessed his house thanks to the change in his increasingly radiant and affectionate mother came with an increasing price: his father’s disappearance, and outside the house, the mockery, insults, sidelong glances, and looks of disgust or commiseration. A little girl was born, to whom Céleste gave the name of her maternal grandmother who had died a few years earlier, Zélie. This choice earned her the permanent rejection of her family. The newborn, marked by a double shame— illegitimacy and patriotic dishonor—was not worthy of inheriting the name of a grandmother whom everyone had respected and loved. But Céleste stood firm; hers was no longer a state of submission to the order imposed by her family, of obedience to the tacit laws of propriety that fed so many lies and hoaxes, indulging along the way on suffering, resentment, and latent madness. She dared what Pacôme had never dared to do: to reject the duty of deception dictated by the tyranny of propriety and the fear of gossip. She no longer wanted it for him, this man forbidden to love according to his inclinations, this man forced into a role that he neither desired nor could maintain; right now she pitied him. She declared the times of sabotage and amorous evasions over, a thing of the past; she returned to her son the part of his name that she had refused him, Éphrem, thus recognizing and accepting the oblique filiation of this son, and in doing so, relieving them, the two of them, of the burden too long attached to that hidden bond.

But Céleste had overestimated her bravery and independence, or rather she had underestimated the power of resentment toward outcasts and the fallen. She had never imagined how resilient hatred can be among those who, having risked nothing in times of war, being content to wade in lukewarm shallows going unnoticed and thus more or less ensuring their survival, covet precisely their tepidness, their cowardice, and, when all danger is past, heap revenge for this humiliation on the backs of those with the impudence to dismiss war, fear, appearances: the very wide backs of the scapegoats. The moment of Liberation saw Céleste designated as such and treated accordingly. Circus animals are paraded about adorned in absurd, garish finery: pompoms, plumes, bells and necklaces, brocaded jackets or brightly colored capes, lace, wide-brimmed hats, pointed bonnets. Conversely, fallen women are displayed stripped of all adornment, beginning with what is most natural to them, their hair, especially if it is long and beautiful. And sometimes it goes as far as stripping them entirely naked. An entirely naked woman walks awkwardly, without the least elegance, head shaven, thrown into the streets of a town or village in broad daylight, streets packed with the well-dressed, their hair properly arranged under their hats, their dignity especially in evidence. Céleste suffered the shearing session without a word, although it was brutally done. She refused to undress herself; a few of the enforcers did it for her, ripping off her clothes. What did she know about modesty, a slut like her who would drop her drawers for a Boche, getting laid by him while her husband slaved away in Germany? Too late for modesty, she had no right to it anymore, let her show everyone the “truth” of her body, of her being: a cesspool disguised in pretty skin. Go on, no one was fooled any longer, they could look right through that lying skin, it was just wrapped around vulgar flesh, the cheap meat of a soldier—foul fucking enemy paunch. Besides, she had had a little brat with her Verdigris, well, let them parade together then, the slut and her little Kraut of a kid. And they had stuck small Zélie, then thirteen months old, in Céleste’s arms. She walked with faltering steps, head lowered, back bowed and knees pressed together, her arms wrapped around Zélie who clung to her neck. She had sunk lower than the state of submission, she had sunk to a state of servility, of a bestialized puppet.

struck the head and shoulders of the shaved woman with his cane, transformed into a conductor’s baton. He did not strike violently, did not intend to injure her, he was just beating the rhythm. It was a solemn moment, justice was rendered, an affront was avenged, the harlot was punished, that unfaithful, traitorous wife, the producer of a bastard. Aux armes, citoyens! Formez vos bataillons! Marchons, marchons! And suddenly she laughed. As on the day of her marriage, as at the birth of her son, but even better, more powerfully, more sustained. She uttered a sort of whinny, high-pitched and syncopated, that made her collapse inward even more; she advanced bent into the form of a Z, like an exhausted flash of lightening, spine and shoulders shaking with mad laughter. Zélie, in a panic from the surrounding racket and especially from the shrill noise reverberating from her mother’s breast against her ear, began to struggle and cry. The choir had shifted into cacophony: Amour sacré de la Patrie, Conduis, soutiens nos bras vengeurs! Liberté! Liberté chérie … Allons z’enfants … ! Rat-a-tat-tat on the head and back, bellowing laughter and bawling tears: Sous nos drapeaux que la victoire Accoure à tes mâles accents! Marchons, Marchons … ! Rat-a-tat-tat.

Sylvie Germain

The Unnoticed

And the other child, the son, relegated to a neighbor on this occasion, heard the tumult. He eventually made out in the midst of the racket both his mother’s laugh and his little sister’s cry, the sick, demented laughter of his mother, as before, worse than before, and Zélie’s cry that sounded like a wheezing saw. Allons z’enfants, le jour d’infamie est arrivé, the great obscene day. He saw his mother, her body white from head to toe, ravaged by the angry shouts, the spit flying about her, and curled up in her arms, Zélie, whose diapers hung loose from her small bottom. “It’s a disgrace! A disgrace!” shouted indignant voices in the crowd, without knowing if this exclamation was directed at Céleste as whore gone over to the enemy or as humiliated wife and mother, or if it denounced the horribly incongruous use of the national anthem in this charade of justice. “What are you doing here?” exclaimed a woman seeing the son of the shaved one. “This is no place for you, go on!” When Pierre-Éphrem did not move, she grabbed him by the sleeve and dragged him away from the scene. Another woman shouted that that was enough, and eventually many voices joined in to call off the dogs, end the pursuit. Returning home, Céleste continued laughing, to the point of passing out.

A man emerged from the jeering crowd following her. He took charge of the chorus of Furies by brandishing his cane and starting to sing: Allons z’enfants de la patrie-i-e … , le jour de gloire est arrivé … ! That produced a fine effect, very stimulating; the choir fell into the majestic step of the song, and the national anthem swelled, vibrant. Carried away by this fiery theme, the choir master

Jérôme Harlay

The Salt of War

The Camargue, winter, 1944. Louis Cerdan, a disturbed adolescent, is found by André Mourgue, dying in a marsh. Mourgue saves his life in extremis, but then mysteriously disappears. Soon after, the body of a prostitute is discovered buried in the salt. Amid the tensions of the Occupation, the investigation, which has been assigned to Inspector Simian, stalls. Louis is immediately accused of the young woman’s murder, and as he remains obstinately silent, certain questions arise: Why did André Mourgue flee the scene without identifying himself? What was he doing out there in country still haunted by the massacre of Italian immigrants a half-century earlier? In a police department embittered by the

Publisher: Belfond/Place des éditeurs Date of Publication: May 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Frédérique Polet frederique.polet@placedesediteurs.com Translation: Cole Swensen colesque@earthlink.net

presence of the Vichy government, no one wants to take on these questions. Except Simian, ready to do anything to prove Louis’ innocence. But from the salt marshes of Aigues-Mortes to the criminal underworld of Marseilles, revenge and treachery scramble the clues, multiplying the challenges of an investigation filled with new developments. Against the eerie and captivating backdrop of the salt-marshes, Jérôme Harlay’s brilliant first detective novel unfolds, full of mysterious and compelling characters whose pasts, as well as their decisions in the present, keep the reader on edge.

Biography

Jérôme Harlay was born in Marseille in 1968. He began his studies in sociology, and then transferred to the femis in Paris. He graduated as a sound engineer, and for the next fifteen years, he collaborated on various films for television and theater. Today, he devotes most of his time to his writing; The Salt of War is his first novel.

— At a time when this town, lulled by centuries of solitude, was stagnating in its greygreen muck, the horizon changed. Thousands of horses in embroidered trappings were plowing the distant grounds, scattering dust and foam on the only paved road through the marshes. The masons of Alès, alerted by the muted rumble, must have been the first in that district between the old Matafère Tower and Notre-Dame des Sablons to abandon their work. They jostled each other trying to see what no one could have seen: under the red and green banner whipping in the wind, rode the great king Saint-Louis, crowned in dust. The entire population must have rushed down, fast as an eclipse, caught between the quicksand and the tepid waters, stifling from its own smells mixed with the salty vapors marinating the whole region. The clamor must have carried all the way to the flimsy boats wallowing near the shore, ready to set out for the Genoese ships anchored the entire length of the Louis estuary. The screeching of armor blended with the tolling of bells, flying feathers and the cries of urchins running through the filth, scolding those who wouldn’t listen. The patriarchs, driven by vehement curiosity, must have scrutinized the waters of Aigues-Mortes. And they must have hurled abuse on the horse-dealers as they chased them out onto the empty sands, theys who expected nothing from their benefactor, from he who sought to replace the stagnant waters with proper walls, flocks of animals and fields. The noise must have gone on for days and days, for as long as it took the salt to crystallize in the Peccais salt-marshes, lasting well after the Montjoie set sail for the seventh crusade on the morning of August 28, 1248. Short of breath, the town councilor of Aigues-Mortes slipped his opus into his pocket and looked out at the audience, hoping that his tale, by marrying the hopes of a German conquest with the past bravery of a France today on her knees, would incite the respect of the enemy. But the sharp cold of the month of February 1944 constrained the smiles

of the Nazi officers lined up along a stone wall glittering white with frost. “The crusades ended in failure,” suggested the oberstlieutnant with an absent-minded politeness, his index finger pointed vaguely east where the ramparts foundered 100 feet away. He held the pose a moment, arm in mid-air, for as long as it took his mind to cross the seas, then suddenly shift back to the mist strung along the crenellations. “Die nacht … Heinrich?” A major, decorated with the oak leaf of the Chevalier’s Cross, stepped out from the line, received the orders delivered in a rough voice, and left the group followed by three soldiers, their marching feet hammering across the pavement. Off to the side, the town councilor re-tied the red cotton scarf that he wore in provocation. “Messieurs,” he declared, to attract their attention, “if you would like to follow me …” And, with an air of authority, he pointed the way through a shadowy arch. “The Tower of Constance, jewel of the low plains. Here is where they imprisoned the Protestants.” Murderers, bludgeons, and latrines … The description of the tower was brief, illustrated by a bloody anecdote whose traces still marked the walls of the keep. André Mourgue listened to the lecture that the Germans were getting. Like them, the old man visualized the setting sun from the ramparts, and the sparkling waters of the conquered plains. In reality, the day fizzled out in a dirty grey. It was threatening snow. Though no one could have seen him, he was reluctant to leave the safety of the shadowy porch into which he had slipped while the group was still filing into the old prison. In the past half-century, Aigues-Mortes hadn’t changed a bit. The narrow streets, as straight as the passageways of the prison that lay within its walls and towers, were neither more gay nor more grimy nor more flower-lined. They were frozen in time. This suspension, far from giving him the sensation of a preserved happiness, made Mourgue increasingly uneasy. He pictured his mother and father, embracing them for the last time on a colorless day in September, then suddenly appearing at a street corner, sadly waving to wish him good luck. The voice of the guide had stopped. What should he do? There was no more time to regret the hundreds of kilometers he had covered from the south of Italy, passing through lands that the war had devastated. There was no more time for anything, really, and besides … Anna was dead; why live? Tormented by the image of his wife, Mourgue focused on what was happening in the street, taking advantage of the comfort of anonymity for a few

more minutes. A Kübelwagen drove around the base of the Villeneuve Tower. The Germans left for duty in the bunkers built into the coast on either side of the fort of Peccais, leaving behind them a deserted town. He heard its engine stop and went out into the street. After fifty years of absence, it was finally time to come out of the shadows. Two old women hunched against the cold turned around as he passed, searching their hazy memories for the name. The name of the stranger betrayed by his eyes, desperately large and so purely green that they made his gaze magnetic. He heard them whispering behind him. It took him only a second to remember who they were, and, choking with hate, he turned around to confront them. Elbow to elbow, they rounded the corner, grey and silent as rats. The leaden day was followed by a thick night, streaked with the smoke rising up from the chimneys. The damp clung to the skin, glowing in the halo of the lamps that marched along the straight line of the street. Mourgue slowed his steps, wary of a delivery man going back and forth, unloading wood. He recognized his family home some, what, 100 yards up ahead … Rue Marceau. The name had not changed. The sundial still pointed to the top of the façade. Point rusty, numbers worn away. After fifteen years of negligence, the modest abode, now a modest ruin, was worthless. The whitewash was grey, the shutters wormeaten. He didn’t even cross the threshold, leaving what remained of the door to bang in the wind. Insisting on crossing town to see his childhood home had been a mistake; the thought of renting a room in one of these Spartan side streets, not to mention hoping to find some sleep there, seemed ludicrous. Mourgue started off for the south of town, the shrill voice of the councilor celebrating the gathering of the crusaders ringing in his ear. As if Aigues-Mortes had no other history but that proved by its stones … Had he given the Germans all the details? The floors of the jails so waterlogged that you couldn’t use mattresses, the physical abuse, the illnesses and fevers, the corpses abandoned to the dogs after they’d been run through the town naked on willow stretchers. Had he spoken of the others? Of those who, centuries later, did not come back alive from Peccais? Of those whose sing-song accent echoed the threshing of salt. Of those who killed themselves working hundreds of miles from home. Of those that the crowd had decided to finish off. Those that it had vomited up and hounded down. Those it had flushed out day and night, stoned or drowned under the powerless gaze of the gendarmes? Did he remember the beating of the drum, the shots fired, and the screams? Mourgue went out through the Arsenal gate and walked along the outside of the ramparts until he reached the ring where his horse was tied. The young Camargue pulled lazily at his tether. He gave the horse’s cold chest and neck a good rub, then climbed into the saddle and pulled the reins in the direction of the shadows.

Jérôme Harlay

The Salt of War

Régis Jauffret

Lacrimosa

Traveling along the coast, Salin-de-Giraud was a good two hours to the southwest. The old man shivered, rocked by the dull sound of hooves galloping across sand. Suddenly, he regretted not having put at least a few wildflowers on the graves, but in this season, where would he have taken them? The crosses had been broken and sharply tilted, giving the impression that the Mourgues, man and wife, were drifting toward the sea. That wouldn’t have bothered his father, who would go to sea at the drop of a hat, but as he thought of his mother, he felt some of the shame that distance had thus far spared him. The first snowflakes fell as he passed the Carbonnière Tower, abandoned for centuries in the middle of the marsh. Mourgue approached it on foot. The place was deserted, the doors and shutters locked. Not a single German helmet. And yet he decided to continue on his way across the lagoon, marveling at the sight of the snow twirling down onto the sea. It was already whitening the path, a glimmer of unexpected hope, infinitesimal bright spots reflecting the violet hints of the sky.

Publisher: Gallimard Date of Publication: September 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Anne-Solange Noble anne-solange.noble@gallimard.fr

Translation: Bruce Benderson bruxe@aol.com

Biography

Régis Jauffret was born in Marseille in 1955. He has published fifteen works, including a play and several novels. Publications Published by Gallimard: Microfictions, 2007 (prix France Culture-Télérama) (re-ed. coll. “Folio”, 2008); Asiles de fous, 2005 (prix Femina) (re-ed. coll. “Folio”, 2007). Published by Verticales, among the latest novels are: L’enfance est un rêve d’enfant, 2004 (re-ed. Gallimard, coll. “Folio”, 2008); Univers, univers, 2003 (re-ed. Gallimard, coll. “Folio”, 2005); Les Jeux de plage, 2002.

“You were in the arms of your mother. Virgin with Child, Pietà, but instead of someone crucified, this was only a young woman who had hung herself. When their daughters die, women become pregnant again until the ends of their lives. Their bellies are much heavier than they were the first time.” Lacrimosa means “she who weeps,” but also “she who makes others weep,” as it evokes the grief inherent in the Stabat Mater hymn. Part recitation, part novel,

this text for two voices unfolds in the form of an exchange of letters between a narrator and a young woman, Charlotte, who has just committed suicide. A strange and poignant dialogue with the hereafter, allowing us to focus on the moments of real life that are so rare in our existence.

Dear Charlotte, You died impulsively, from a long illness. Suicide flowed through your brain like a black tide, and you hanged yourself. You’d been living in Paris for fourteen years, but on June 7, 2007, you took the train down to Marseille. As if the human species had the memory of an elephant and it had returned to dig its own grave near the place where it had made its way out of its mother’s uterus and gone forth into existence. Your parents came to pick you up at the Saint-Charles station. You were wearing a blue dress, and you’d turned off your cell phone, which had begun to ring while your father was hugging you. A tanned father in his fifties who refused to dye his hair, yet was devastated that he no longer aroused even the smallest interest in the eyes of the young women walking cruelly through the streets, their field of vision erasing male admirers, who like a flannel beret from another age, wore their gray hair like dirty old men. “Mom made quail with olives.” A tangy dish whose first mouthful you probably swallowed with the milk of your first suckling. An old reliable with olives like strident notes dancing above the casserole, placidly bubbling like a bass continuo. You complained about the heat. “The city council never had the Old Port air conditioned.” Not the Old Port and not the rest of the city. One of those torrid afternoons, when the sweat pools at the base of the neck and drips all the way down to the crevice of the buttocks to lose itself God knows where. A sun as overbearing as a boor, seeming to be shining even in the shade of the cellars of old buildings, burning like Bedouin tents. Your father didn’t remember where he’d left the car.

“I think it’s on the fifth level down.” He didn’t listen to the objections of your mother, who thought it was parked in the street. And the more the elevator dropped, the more you felt it going back to the center of the earth, which, since funerals were invented, should have been connected to the surface by a large tube where they could throw the corpses so they’d burn more quickly than in a crematorium. The car fled as soon as you neared the area where your father thought he’d left it, dragging its carcass from floor to floor, finally reaching the first level, making it through the gate without a ticket by smashing it to smithereens, and landing out of breath on rue de l’Étoile, straddling the sidewalk bordering the church of Saint Théodore. Your mother sighed, since the car really was where she’d last seen it. “You never listen.” “Of course I got a parking ticket.” You told him that he’s always parking wherever he likes. “In the stupidest of places.” His mouth twisted into a good-natured pout.

Régis Jauffret

Lacrimosa

The car started up, and so did the heat. “The air conditioning’s been on the blink since yesterday.” That same smell of leather that always makes you nauseous, even though all four windows are open. Those memories of nausea during those endless trips to that godforsaken spot in the forest in the Vosges where you and your sister went biking in the rain to avoid shooting yourselves in the mouth with a shotgun—out of boredom, under the veranda in a setting green as the branches of conifers surrounding the windows, even breaking them when the wind rose. Even so, you missed your childhood and those moments of gentle melancholy, fleeting as the batting of an eyelash, with their aftertaste of bubble gum and Coke. Not at all like those dark dizzy spells of your teenage years, when you imagined that your skull was a box in which you’d been condemned to live, feet and fists bound amidst neurons fluttering around you like swarms of bats. “Last week Jérémia found out she was pregnant again.” “She collects kids like they’re stuffed animals.” Your sister lived with a menagerie of stuffed animals cluttering up her bed. You figured her husband would attempt to penetrate a teddy bear by mistake, surprised that your sister had become so small and furry, with a hymen as impossible to pierce as it was anachronistic on a woman who’d lost hers at thirteen. “If it’s a girl, she’ll have the choix du roi, a boy and a girl.” “She’ll keep the one that’s the least ugly and sell the other on Ebay.” Your father laughed. Your mother raised her head and rummaged in her bag with her fingertips, with that detached expression one assumes in philosophy

class when one is hoping to sneak a hand under a nearby skirt. “The radio said a storm is coming.” Your mother turned to tell you about the refreshing event the whole city had been hoping for since the end of last month. Some dreamed of improbable cataracts coursing down the Canebière. “Looks like it’s going to snow.” The joke made her smile, and your father burst out laughing, spattering the car windshield with a little spit that he wiped off with the cloth he used to clean his glasses. He might even have hit a young man in yellow shorts who was pedaling in front of him with his head down, if the kid hadn’t decided for no apparent reason to crash into an old dishwasher lying abandoned against a lamppost on the boulevard de la Libération. His water bottle rolled out onto the pavement and was clatteringly crushed by the wheels of the car. “You always drive like such a klutz.” “It was just a bottle.” You thought of those grasshoppers that you and your sister would chase in the grass to tear off their legs after putting them through a cruel lesson in gymnastics. You promised yourself that when you saw her you’d ask her if she still remembered the gray cat that you’d found run over by a tractor in a field of oilseed rape. You called it Marsoufle, rolled it up in your sweater and put it in a wheelbarrow, the two of you pushing it to a clearing where you held its funeral, which finished with a splash in a pond where you tossed its remains, dedicating it to the pikes and the carp. “Marsoufle.” “What?” “You are going to piss me off until I die.” “Stop it, Charlotte.” Your father getting kind of a kick out of it even though he’s yelling at you, and your mother with tears in her eyes, careful to blink so they’ll roll down her cheeks, hoping you’ll be mortified in shame. You tell yourself that she’s the one who should be ashamed. She took the risk of pulling you out of the void where you felt so good. After your father ejaculated, she might have even tightened the lips of her vulva to keep his penis inside her like a cork, keeping his sperm inside her and giving it a sporting chance to make it all the way to the overexcited ovum at the back of her womb, thrilled by the idea of marrying the first idiot to step up, hell or high water. Since then she has dragged you around like a millstone that isn’t very round and that has always refused to roll, and now she thinks she can get away with sobbing to make you feel guilty for finding yourself in such a fix—because of her. You would have liked to sue her for giving birth. However, you’d been happy for several months. Or at least somebody had

said you were, one evening on the couch in his living room as he was pouring your third glass of Muscat de Frontignan. “You’re happy, but you don’t know you are yet.” “It so happens I’ve always known I was.” Your mother, who’s worried about the future of your career. The fashion magazine where you worked as a graphic designer had let you go at the end of April before filing for bankruptcy in mid May. “I’m going to use my unemployment as a one year sabbatical.” A prospect that doesn’t particularly please your parents. They’re spry enough to work a week in one day, seventeen million hours a year, even after they die, if they find a business in Heaven ready to take them on despite their just-buried faces. “With your father, we don’t waste any time.” And it wasn’t as if they intended to spend their rare free moments standing around gaping. At fifty-five time becomes more precious, throwing it out the window amounts to throwing yourself out with it. Rather than spending it day to day like pocket money, you invest it in tried and true values with a high return in well-being and every kind of pleasure. Sports, even if they are tiring and trying, produce euphoric endorphins in your brain and let you better appreciate your trips to Italy, Quebec, and Guatemala, as well as sitting near the fireplace when the temperature is low enough to enjoy roasting in front of the fire, forgetting the central heating whose boiler is starting to belch, having grown so old before its time. Your mother is exaggerating. “I sent an email to Maya Coufin this morning to tell her that I’m really enjoying life.” “At your age, it would be better to go try out some of those coffins on sale at Leclerc, to get used to toeing the line inside a box.” “We could also do some races in a hearse.” Your father is already seeing himself skidding around on a snowy road in the Alps, driving a van in the colors of the Olympique de Marseille; they’re sure to agree to sponsor him since he was a junior player there at the Vélodrome Stadium when he was nine. He guffaws, hitting his head on the steering wheel while your mother gloomily rummages in the glove compartment, perhaps hoping to find a revolver so she can shoot you both. “You went past the rue Daumier.” A somewhat shaky backing up, then the rue Daumier and the gate closing behind the car. Your red canvas bag, which your father grabs and tosses into the entrance like an insufferable baby you get rid of before you’re reduced to strangling it as a way of shutting its mouth which is howling like a mildewed loudspeaker.

Régis Jauffret

Lacrimosa

“And now for some champagne.” “No, we’ll wait for Jérémia.” “We’ll open another one when she gets here.” Your father’s already in the kitchen, his arm deep inside the fridge. You lie down on the recliner. A pretentious chair you’ve always resented. You sink your nails into the fabric to enlarge the tear that you managed to make last winter after trying so hard to wear it down you had to take aspirin to alleviate the cramps in your Achilles tendons. You’re not thinking of anything else, know nothing about the planned ambush, the weapons that something in you is honing for battle, the armies being raised, the bombers whose bomb bays are loaded, the submarines carrying out their maneuvers and checking through the periscope at the surface of your consciousness. You don’t see that black spot on the horizon, you think it’s a speck of dust. You tell yourself that you no longer live in darkness, but in the light of dawn, with the sun showing itself sometimes to make you believe it’s rising. You’ve heard the cork pop. The glass swaying before your eyes in a veined hand covered with liver spots. You extend your lips, and your father lowers it to them. You straighten when your mother begins yelling to cut short this foolishness. She’s holding a knife. “You look like a butcher’s wife.” “I’m cutting off the stems of the strawberries.” You go upstairs. The toilet seat lid in the bathroom has taken on color, it used to be so black and now it’s a red you find obscene. And there is still that same lonely nail sticking in the door. You’ve always wondered if the game was to throw your underpants at it, scoring a point if it landed on the nail like a ring. The flush chain must date back to the invention of the toilet, with its wooden handle worn down in the middle by all those hands, giving it a sort of penis shape. You come to the entrance of your room. The window is open. The dresser drawers are gaping, sticking their tongues out at you. Obviously they think you’re actually going to fill them with your belongings, instead of leaving them in your bag and pulling them out one at a time, like Kleenex from its box. “I made your bed.” Your mother, behind you. She’s handing you a bathrobe and a towel. Her voice has aged since your last visit, you imagine her vocal chords grooved with fine wrinkles like the ones that look like a mustache over her lips. In thirty or forty years, you’re going to have to bury her, and your father, too. You’ll definitely have to get up at an ungodly hour. They always rush through funerals early in the morning so that the undertakers can spend the afternoon at the beach.

“I wiped your drawers out a little with a dish rag.” “You could have also given the ceiling a bit of a rinse.” “They must be dry now.” She crouches to feel them, and you suppress a desire to kick her. So that she’ll lose her balance, shrinking so she’ll take up no more room in the bottom drawer than a doll. A nice, well-behaved mother whom you’ll take to Paris between your tee-shirt and your skin, like a mascot. A mother compressed like a brand new sponge that you’ll only have to dip in water each evening for her to expand and take you in her arms. Of course, her hugs will be a bit damp. “Jérémia just called.” “Somebody must have taught her how to use the telephone.” “She left Pindo with Branton’s parents.” Pindo, a turkey’s name—your sister will always be able to roast her brat for Christmas if the poultry sellers go on strike. And Branton, a balding guy with a beard who cons his way through the humanitarian causes. A poor guy who— as far as you’re concerned—prefers others to himself, and probably thought of a tramp in rags when he thought of Jérémia.

Régis Jauffret

Lacrimosa

Your mother has been silent, suddenly she speaks. As if she wanted to get something off her chest. “Your father seems cheerful, but he’s depressed.” “You should get his prostate removed.” “I think he’s worried about Pindo.” She wept. He had been such a sweet child, yet so ugly. Kind, gentle, but with a look of desperation at the age of one. A wasted life, a closed future, a baby like a trashcan overflowing with failure, cowardice, servility, nights of sordid love like the guilt-ridden masturbation of the mystics—this was his existence, useless to others and harmful to himself. The story of his life was pacing back and forth like a sentry. Waiting for him. You could already read the scenario in his eyes, and if you stared too long at them, you would see every scene laid out like a storyboard. When production was finished, Pindo, at the very most would have the privilege of falling like a pebble into a statistic about the mortality rate in the West for those born in February 2006. “I’m worried sick too.” Your mother’s tears are absorbed by the straps of your blue dress except for a few which fall onto the skin of your naked shoulder, causing you to develop a rash. As if you were allergic to her sorrow. You have never run your hand through her hair. You’ve never felt her head with your fingers. You were doing it for the first time. You might even have consoled her, if she’d kept quiet. If you hadn’t realized that now she was speaking to you, about you. You tensed up, you resisted hearing her words. You thought that you were going to be able to avoid them, like you would bullets.

You shouted at her. “Shut up, I can’t hear you.” She stopped speaking. You would have had to leave the room. Because, shattering the silence, her words—which you’d managed not to hear up until then, and which seemed to have receded—now began resonating, piercing, turning into screams, and you pushed them away, plugging up your ears like someone caught in a bombardment. But it was in a soft voice that she demanded your happiness. She thought that if a child wasn’t happy, it was as if he was dragging his parents through the mud. “Being happy is a matter of will.” It would have been an insult. But she wouldn’t have understood. In reality, she may have stopped speaking several minutes ago. You would have tried in vain to explain that her commands had to travel before they reached you, like a radio message coming from far away. You go downstairs. It feels as if reality is collapsing in front of you. It’s a bad fall, a mortal one. Life no longer seems like itself, maybe you are already hanged up there. Hair keeps growing after death. But what about the brain, you wonder, does it keep on imagining? You tell yourself it doesn’t. But then maybe it does. You find your father downstairs. You recognize him, but something about him has amped up. He’s playing with the remote, doing his own comedy routine at all the faces that appear and disappear, shining like reflections on the screen of the cathode-ray tube of the old TV set built years ago by Japanese workers in a factory that has been relocated since 1999 to an emerging country. “Pindo’s lucky.” Your father is now nodding off, as if you’d told him about a crow that for the past year would wake him up three times a night by pecking at his eyes. “Mom is mourning him when he’s still alive.” “Might as well.” He begins to laugh, probably imagining his grandson tricked out in his desperate worker bee brown suit, being followed by an autonomous, diabolical foot constantly kicking him up his sad pathetic butt, like an ashtray stained by the thousands of cigarettes crushed into its face. “Some abortions really do go to waste.” “Maybe he’ll get lucky and be strangled by a maniac.” “Those people have too much taste to help out families in distress.” You think that your father is defeatist. You believe that in the name of equal opportunity, a progressive pedophile would agree to wring Pindo’s neck with as much hate as if he were a radiant child destined to become rich and famous. “And Jérémia, who’s on her way over.” “She won’t bring Pindo.”

“I don’t like your sister.” Loving two daughters at the same time would amount to stepping out on one with the other. A father has to choose among his children, he can no more love them all than he can sleep with all the women in creation. “It wouldn’t be reasonable.” Your mother appears. She has crept downstairs, holding her shoes in her hand. She pours herself a glass and sniffs the layer of froth fizzing on the surface. She empties it, gargling with the warm champagne, then swallows, bringing a hand up to her throat. “My throat was dry.” “Pindo made you thirsty.” “That child drives me crazy.” Her jaw has grown since a while ago. Now it juts out like a wacko’s. She gives the end table a kick. The peanuts jump around in their little dish and the neck of the bottle nods in agreement. You go back to the recliner, having definitely decided to work on it with your heel and rip out all its stuffing. The garden is still sunny, but for you night has fallen. An opaque night has smoked out the stars, so opaque that the electric lights can’t pierce it, turning your thoughts into an infinity of little abysses into which you will disappear forever. You’re lying on the recliner as you will be laid out on the day after your death, on the zinc table where the medical examiner will be checking the marks on your neck while repeating absent-mindedly into the mike of his Dictaphone: “Death by strangulation.” He almost lights a cigarette, but he remembers as he looks at the flame of his lighter that yesterday he’d gotten a note from the administration reminding him that smoking was now prohibited in any Medical-Legal Department. “Even in the dissecting room.” What if a corpse revived and died again immediately because it suddenly got lung cancer? Or if you returned their loved ones to the families with their hair stinking of nicotine, or with a little ash on their liver? “No autopsy, put her back in the fridge.”

Régis Jauffret

Lacrimosa

The light was restored to you with the blending of the voices of your sister and her husband rising into the air like two serpents in love, fascinated by the snake charmer’s flute from the place Jamaa Lafna. “Pindo smiled at us when we left him with Branton’s mother.” So the kid had become hypocritical enough to bare his teeth, although he was also anxious enough to bite the insides of his cheeks and swallow them so that his face reflected in three dimensions the misery inside him. Your mother sulked near the fireplace while your father was bitterly burping up all the champagne he’d drunk, slumped on the couch where he was mechanically punching the cushions.

Maylis de Kerangal

The Kennedy Corniche

You went up to your room, and at the bottom of your bag you found a scarf. Later they said that it is what you used to hang yourself. “Must have been a very strong scarf.” The detective was surprised by your determination. Make a slip knot, slide it over your head, firmly attaching the other end to the handle of the window. “Somehow getting enough momentum.” Launching into it the way you pull a trigger, the way you fire the shot. The cervical vertebrae snapping cleanly. “Her mother found her.” Your body in her arms. The scarf rips apart now, as if suddenly realizing that it should have done so before. Your body folding up, a large, dead, still warm fetus, which she will now begin to carry again. When their daughters die, women become pregnant again until the ends of their lives. Their bellies are much heavier than they were the first time.

Publisher: Verticales Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Anne-Solange Noble anne-solange.noble@gallimard.fr Translation: Michael Lucey mlucey@berkeley.edu

“You’ve grown some.” “Pindo, too.” Be that as it may, you found your sister more and more ridiculous for shooting up like that, despite her being twenty-two. Although she’d been a rather runty adolescent, she was now taller than the chandelier, and threatening to soon be able to repaint the ceilings of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde with her tongue, without needing a stepladder. As for Branton, he reminded you of a midget. A midget getting smaller and smaller while his humanitarian fury minimized him in his own eyes as he compared his minuscule existence to the millions of tons of earth dwellers who between now and 2150 would croak from starvation, pollution, or even hypothermia when the unregulated climate would pour down on them massive rainstorms mixed with hail, after three decades of a heat wave. The more he shrank, the more your sister seemed to tower over him. Your father made it clear to the young couple that he intended to go to bed early that evening. He took off his watch and pressed it against Branton’s nose, which sank into his face like a nail. “It’s after 7:10 PM.” “Pindo must be eating his baby food.” “Take some bread and ham, and you’ll eat it outdoors.” “Pindo loves ham.” Your father took a hundred-euro bill out of his jacket pocket. “It’s yours, if you’ll get out of here and take your Branton with you.” “I think Pindo’s going to love money later on, the other day he was sucking on a coin.” Your mother inhaled Jérémia’s face as if it were an oyster.

Biography

Born in 1967, Maylis de Kerangal has worked as an editor at the Editions du Baron Perché, and also worked for many years alongside Pierre Marchand on the Guides Gallimard and also on Gallimard’s children’s books. Publications Dans les rapides, Naïve, 2007; Ni fleurs ni couronnes, Verticales, 2006; La Vie voyageuse, Verticales, 2003; Je marche sous un ciel de traîne, Verticales, 2000.

It is summer in a coastal neighborhood of Marseille, and a group of teenagers with time on their hands defy the laws of gravity as they go diving along a stretch of the Kennedy Corniche. A police captain whose beat covers this part of the coast watches them carefully through his binoculars. The kids are caught between a policy of zero tolerance and their taste for the forbidden, and the situation soon begins to go south … In her fourth novel, Kerangal makes delicate use of suspense as she weaves together two stories: the first a chronicle of the contemporary lives of teen-agers in a world of enormous economic

disparity, and the second a pseudo detective novel with at its core a parodying yet deeply moving portrait of a policeman who resembles nothing so much as a cornered wildcat. Despite its classical structure, The Kennedy Corniche frees itself from generic expectation, creating through its language an imaginary geography and physical laws of gravity consisting of extreme sensuality, restrained savagery, and dizzying passion. A book both tender and cruel, its magic hangs by a single thread, that of a writing style with neither dead spots nor caricaturing realism, mixing into a single breath both metaphor and the spoken word.

They usually meet up just past the bend, after Malmousque, where the coastal road reappears above the shoreline, an expressway between the earth and the sea, an asphalt ribbon. Long and narrow, the road seems as much to hug the coast as to contain the city, holding in its excesses. Packed at rush hour, it flows smoothly at night—when it also glows, its fluorescent path meandering across the lenses of the satellites orbiting through the stratosphere. It acts like a magnetic threshold at the edge of the continent, a contact zone rather than a border, given that we know it is porous, crossed by passages and stairs leading up to the old parts of town or down to the rocks. Staring at it, you might think of it as a front line, its men detailed from all walks of life, a line of convergence, planetary, with no beginning and no end: when you’re there, you’re always in the middle of something, smack in the middle. That’s where it happens; that’s where we are. A billboard marks the spot for them. Behind its post there’s a break in the road barrier opening on to a flat sandy area scattered with wasp-loving thistles and dense, flammable undergrowth, through which you can scrape a path down to the rocks. You know they’ll begin coming once spring has arrived, has set, around June, a June still raw and airy, not yet summer vacation, but when school is fading, being slowly bleached out by the light. Afternoons, longer and longer, eat away at the evenings, leaping straight into the deep blackness of night. They come every day. The first ones arrive in those slack mid-afternoon hours, and then the rest of them after their classes are done. They appear in threes and fours, small groups; before you know it, there are twenty of them and suddenly they’re a whole gang, staking out their territory—a couple of the rocks, a bit of the shoreline—taking their place as one of the other groups established here and there along the Corniche. Most of them will have taken the bus, the 83 or the 19—the Metro for those

coming from the north. A few others, not too many, will show up on scooters or some other horrible motorized thing they will have cranked up with an oversized muffler. You hear them coming from a long way off, zooming along; they slow as they hit the bend in the road, speed up again towards the end of the curve, hang on for fifty meters, braking hard at the billboard, then comes the controlled skid, the squealing tires, then up onto the sidewalk, and vroom vroom, they’re racing the engine a couple times with a virile turn of the wrist, then CUT—riff-raff. As soon as they hit the dirt, they push aside the undergrowth blocking the path down, cursing loudly if they get scratched, the grey-green leaves are sharpedged. Once past the vegetation the slope is steep, and the sound of their sneakers resonates on the rocks, bam bam bam, slowly, then faster and faster until they hit their little platform, beneath the city so to speak, beneath the noise of the freeway forming a compact sonic background, a hollow rumbling, like the sound of a refrigerator whose door is opened in the middle of the night in an empty kitchen—and when suddenly the shriller sound of a Maserati, or the Flat Six of a Porsche 911 stands out in the noise, they all sit up in recognition. In a flash they all cluster together, touching, slapping, jostling, hugging and kissing in greeting (girl-girl or girl-boy), or giving hand slaps palm to palm, fist to fist, fingers to fingers (boy-boy), exchanging insults, curt, rude, and juvenile, making a giant pile of their backpacks, sneakers, sandals, flip-flops, clothes, and caps, laying out their towels one up against the other, or else in a ring with a cheap radio boombox in the middle, two or three big Coke bottles, a couple packs of cigarettes, and then the sound of their voices ricocheting off the rocks, bouncing back and forth, all mixed up, a huge din, a splendid ruckus that binds them together as much as it splits them appart, dull and sharp all at once; meanwhile, across the way, on the seafront, curtains are drawn back from the windows of the luxury hotels or the rococo villas, gleaming through the lemony foliage of their gardens—among them, one window belonging to a teen-age girl who has leaned her head against the glass to feel its icy touch, who pushes her whole face into the window as if she were trying to breathe the air from outside, and looks down, mouth open, nose twisted up, heart pounding—and a bit further away, beyond the highway, on the facade of a handsome white building, the blinds are moving a little in their slots—and among them is the office of a solitary man who has squeezed his stormy, velvety eyes between two slats in the blinds, who will in a moment come out and focus his high powered binoculars at the platform, a corpulent silhouette, observing, a dark mass lying in wait—there are mouths chewing things over, hmm, there’s that riffraff, so dirty; but still they spend hours at the windows, their faces hypnotized by the sweltering world where each shape is sharply cut, each shadow precisely outlined, a quick ink-stroke; stricken to the core by this chunk of life taking shape as it pulls apart and comes back together, like a frenetic constellation;

Maylis de Kerangal

The Kennedy Corniche

fascinated by this troupe where all the members are racing, yet are willing to follow, running their own shop, turning out their pockets to show what they have, distributing the spoils, each getting a turn, picking something up, adding stuff, catching something, unloading something else. The lowlife of the Corniche. The gang. No one knows what else to call them. Their bodies are sharp, their ages range from thirteen to seventeen, but they’re all the same age, and it’s the age of conquests: you refuse your mother’s kisses, you bite the hand that feeds you, you leave home. No one knows how this particular bleak, barren, and useless platform became their hangout, that magical point where they assemble and speak to their world. No one knows how they found it, chose it from among all the others, how they took it over. No one knows why they come back day after day, why they tumble their way down, panting, filthy, thirsty, their youthful exuberance overflowing, charging down the path as if they’re being hunted from everywhere, rejected, wounded, the latest prize incident thrown in their faces; they won’t have anything to do with us, they declaim, spinning around, throwing out their arms with an open palm to indicate the huge town churning along behind them, the maritime area where things mix and proliferate; they won’t have anything to do with us, they announce, forcing it a bit, boasting jovially, and finally they begin undressing, all of a sudden cautious and modest; they set up their base camp, and then the whole space is theirs. The platform—they call it the “Plat”—is a piece of land thirty meters long and around eight wide, a mixture of rocks crushed by a bulldozer, laid out and held together by a chalky, rough, crumbly kind of cement. In color, it’s an orangy deep purple or else a greyish yellow depending on the time of day or the season, dull in the early or later parts of the day, brownish like a plate of spring rolls at noon, when it will also burn your feet, retaining the heat so well that in the evening it’s delightful to lie down on your naked belly, with your cheek right up against the gently dimpled rock. Here and there, puddles of stagnant water stink of salt and piss, and in places where the sea laps up against the rock, it is covered with a topaz-colored moss, oil slicked so you can slide right into the water on your behind. Otherwise, there’s an old swimming pool ladder fixed into the rock, a trash can, a few clumps of sickly weeds growing out of cracks in the blocks, some cans, tubes of lotion, shards of glass, greasy bits of paper, and finally, behind the rocks, the mouth of a disused sewer pipe sticking out of the supporting wall, smelling of decomposing matter and sewage. There’s a metal pipe connecting it to the mire of the city’s underground, and it seems like a sudden exhalation onto the Plat, the blackest, most shameful of breaths. It’s stagnant and then it evaporates, but in any case it’s because of this hole that residents stay away from the place—it smells like a sewer, they say, it stinks of shifty men jerking off or of brats farting, in any case we wouldn’t be caught dead

there. But out beyond the flat surface there are rocks scattered in the sea, as if they had been catapulted past their target: engulfed, they’ve become hideouts for sea urchins and other fried fish to be, shelters for octopus; where they rise above the surface, those furthest out becoming lovers’ isles, rafts for private plotting, diving platforms for the show-offs. After all, showing off is precisely what they do, chatting, jumping, diving, strutting about, that’s what they come to do. The Plat is a stage where they perform, a playing field, a ground for various competitions. After all, between boys and girls, it’s a tournament: you have to throw yourself into it, without sidestepping the rituals. The prologue never changes: the girls set up near the ladder, on the edge of the Plat, while the boys gather together near the rocks, a way off—a sexual division of the space soon to explode. In order to stir up the boy or the girl on the other side of the divide, the most direct exaggerate their positions—girls act sluttier than they really are, boys are unscrupulous rakes—whereas the majority choose strategies of approach as old as time— ostentatious detours, avoiding the other, sending special messengers: theatre is an unavoidable part of life. Sometimes they’ll take a break, sprawling on top of each other in an elaborate web, or spread out like a water lily, forming a bizarre tree pattern on the stone, a secret map; lolling about in the sun, soaking up the rays for hours and hours, goofing off, laughing, chattering; they’re just there, frighteningly present, as if they’ve melted into the scenery, on the same plane as a cloud passing by; sensors that have picked up on the slightest linguistic slip-up, a memorable gesture—a crazy penalty shot made the night before at the Velodrome by some seventeen-year-old offensive player, a monster serve takes a match point in tennis, a breakdance move, a drum solo with invisible drum sticks held in nervous hands, a crazy ride on a beat-up skateboard or a brilliant surfing run in the tube of a giant wave at Mavericks, the mythical line drawn from their favorite film—attitudes which reveal their community, their youth, their energy—being present at this level is a joke that isn’t funny to everyone: they’re up to no good, those kids, lounging about all day, thinking only of jumping into the sea and rolling their joints, playing around with their cellphones, changing their ringtones every other minute, taking stupid pictures; what a waste of time, no direction, they don’t know how to apply themselves, a bunch of no-good layabouts, they need a good kick in the ass to get them moving, to show them what life is really about—and yet, sensitive princes, they’re still a pleasure to look at, no doubt about that. All of a sudden they’re on the move, and the mood has changed, something’s happened, something’s got them going, the lazy attitude is left behind, and they’re ready to respond in an instant, on their feet, wobbling, boisterous, the blood pumping in their thighs, fists clenched, teeth bared, and sometimes they even go after each other, trading insults and blows, antics verging on serious violence, ready to go bad, what did you say, motherfucker, what did you say, say it again and see what happens.

Maylis de Kerangal

The Kennedy Corniche

Philippe de La Genardière

The Year of the Eclipse

Reports, meetings, appointments, investigations, so the morning goes by. When he’s not involved in some operation, Opéra has lunch alone, a spoon in his mouth, his phone at his ear. The mess of papers on his desk is his tablecloth, there’s a plastic container on his lap, a beer wedged between his feet, firmly planted in the carpet. Around three in the afternoon the brakes of the first mopeds arriving at the Plat can be heard. Opéra gets up and goes over to the windows and then, without fail, the industrial metropolis for the safety of whose coastline he is responsible is suddenly reduced to an area of a few square yards, a stone surface illuminated by the sun where twenty kids whose hands, feet, and asses are dusty with salt and chalk are frolicking about. Immobile, his hand at his brow, warding off the glare of the sea, he inspects the Plat. He takes in the whole gang with his gaze, the acrobats, the loungers, the shadow puppets holding their breath at the end of the diving board. He follows their collective agitation. He accompanies the movements of the group. He delights in their leaps, their stomping, their negotiations. Their commotion sustains him, as does the way they use their bodies. Sometimes he extends the length of his observation, stepping out onto his balcony, his personal platform, in the center of which there’s a tripod supporting a pair of Zeiss binoculars. He plants his eyes in the rubber guides, and busies himself with dissecting the group. One by one, he distinguishes each member, the way a child would pull apart a captured fly, taking each individual in isolation, going over them in detail. He’s so good at what he does that in the end he knows the kids really well, he knows who is in with who, who are the lovebirds, who has broken up, whose allegiances have shifted. Then all of a sudden, finished for the day, he turns his back on them, and goes back into his office; he’s a busy man.

Publisher: Sabine Wespieser Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Joschi Guitton jguitton@swediteur.com Translation: John Cullen jocul@earthlink.net

Sylvestre Opéra arrives at the office at seven every morning. He parks his red hatchback—it looks like an aquarium that needs cleaning—in front of that elegant white building that rises thirty meters above the Corniche. He parallel parks in the same spot each day using one hand, and with one eye on the rear view mirror, the other reading a paper folded open on the passenger seat; a few seconds later he’s crossing the lobby, already smoking a cigarette and downing a cup of coffee that’s been spit out by a machine, then entering the dark, tiled stairway, a shadowy well that he climbs up like a blind man, slowly, very slowly, pausing at each landing, at every step listening for the echo of his uneven gait, making use of this climb as a zone where he gets himself in shape, reviewing his goals and obligations for the day, thinking over current puzzles and problems, and preparing his body—he adjusts his jacket, fixes his hair, clears his throat. Once he’s hoisted himself up to the top floor, he opens his door, finds himself blinded by the light, blinks for a second, and then he’s there, ready to go, concentrated, the captain in person.

Biography

Philippe de La Gernardière was born in 1949 in Salon-de-Provence. After a sojourn in Iran as a teaching assistant in French, he entered the publishing world and collaborated on various journals (Digraphe, La Quinzaine littéraire). He worked in residency at the Villa Médicis from 1984 to 1986. Today he works at the satirical newspaper Le Canard enchaîné, for which he writes articles of literary criticism under the pseudonym of Igor Capel. Publications Simples mortels, Actes Sud, 2002 (re-ed. coll. “Babel”, 2006); Le Tombeau de Samson, Actes Sud, 1998; Gazo, Actes Sud, 1996; Morbidezza, Actes Sud, 1994 (re-ed. coll. “Babel”, 1996); Legs, Stock, 1991, (re-ed. Actes Sud, coll. “Babel”, 2003); Scène primitive, Payot, 1988; Le Roman de la communauté, Flammarion, 1987; Naître, Flammarion, 1983; La Nuit de l’encrier, Flammarion, 1981; Battue, Flammarion, 1979.

Basile, a professor of philosophy, is at a critical juncture in his life: His wife, a fashion editor for a women’s magazine, has just left him; his daughter has likewise abandoned the family home; his weekly sessions with his psychiatrist have reached an impasse; and above all, his attempts to continue the general philosophical survey he’s been working on for years have resulted in nothing but sterile ruminations. And then, suddenly, love appears. Basile is erotically bedazzled by Shadi, a modern Mélisande whom he meets in the sweltering heat of the big greenhouse in the Jardin des Plantes. Life regains its enchantment for Basile, the real no longer eludes him, and by the light of this incandescent relationship, the philosopher tries once again to find order in the world ….

Through the fascinating character of Basile, his amorous philosopher, Philippe de la Genardière explores daily life as reinvented by himself: music, literature, philosophy, urban drifting in a phantasmagoric Paris, exploring the magic of the female body—these are the big subjects evoked in this novel. As the captivated reader follows Basile in his quest, a strange question gradually grows more insistent in his mind: Is it the world’s logic, or the narrator’s, that keeps eluding him? And indeed, therein lies the force of The Year of the Eclipse, which scrambles reason’s reference points and interrogates, through literature, the folly of our contemporary world.

Basile had had barely enough time to relish the sight of her in her Eve costume, barely enough time to catch a glimpse of the golden triangle crowning, like a capital, the summit of her long legs, which met in the delta to which, he knew, he was summoned, and barely enough time to fix in his mind the vision of her entirely naked body, before his beautiful Middle Eastern girl had suddenly broken off their embrace and fled, and he, without reacting, still completely occupied by the awakening of his desire, had watched her escaping before his eyes, had seen her bound swiftly out of the grove, where they had taken refuge after the announcement that the garden was about to close, and run skipping beneath the enormous leaves of the banana trees, leaving him, also naked, planted there on his two legs, like a male condemned to chase the lustful female amidst the invisible predators prowling around that jungle. He was stupefied, Basile was; it no longer sufficed to seduce, or even to let himself be seduced by, a young student whose as yet undetermined thesis subject might provide a ready pretext, no, this time the challenge hurled at him touched the deepest part of himself, his male nature, his virility, his life force. Yes, the female in question had just challenged him, she’d disappeared in the abundant vegetation, he’d seen the matte and moist whiteness of her nudity as she dashed through the foliage like a doe or a mare that leads the male on a breathless chase, raising his excitement to its peak and drawing him to some distant, previously chosen place where she will offer him her rump. He’d barely had time to fix the white image in his consciousness, and yet its power had paralyzed him, standing there on his two legs. Could flesh still have such an effect on him? Or was it that the sensation of nudity sent him back to some frightening, savage, archaic dimension of himself? Or to the evidence of his animal nature? And therefore to the animality of women, which he desired and feared at the same time? And when all was

said and done, was the knowledge that we’re beasts, despite all the stories that humanity has told about its own adventure—was that knowledge a source of delight, or was it, on the contrary, a truth best left unconfessed? For the dazzling vision of that feminine body bounding naked among the beds of ferns, orchids, or philodendrons had not only flummoxed him, it had also violently catapulted him into the world before culture, where man and woman were hardly distinct from animals, where he no longer entirely recognized himself in the skin that was now his own, or could no longer find words for the disorderly pulsations that were jolting him, and whose origins, he knew, were not solely sexual. But he had no choice, the girl must be pursued at once, or rather, scented, tracked as one stalks game, she must be hiding behind some giant banana or mangrove leaf, all he had to do was to start moving, to advance on his two legs, like a male chasing a female, it was still possible to do that in the year 2005, and in the winter garden of a contemporary capital. He therefore plunged forward, crouching under the leaves, like a rutting beast, a beast with only two legs, but a spear had pricked up between his thighs so insistently that he no longer had a very clear conception of who he was or what he was doing here, under this glass roof, amid this increasingly dense and disquieting vegetation, everything was jumbled in his mind, the impression of a naked woman disappearing under the trees, glimpsed as he might have glimpsed a doe in the forest, and confused with a vision of predator birds, swooping down upon him en masse while he cried out to his beloved Juliet, squeezing her hand in his, “Watch out, they’re attacking!” or a little later in the afternoon with the image of a psychiatrist, snapping at him in a frosty voice, “Nihilism is a dish one eats cold. Reread Dostoevsky!” He was advancing, naked, feeling his way through the foliage, looking for a woman who was no longer exclusively a woman, but rather a female, belonging to a species unknown and unimportant, the essential thing was that they were alive, both of them, alive and well-fed, that they had limbs for embracing, arms, legs, together with lungs for breathing and hearts tough enough to hold out, but what counted the most, if they were to encounter each other again under the glass roof, was that they should have (and this would be the assurance that they were human) the appearance of animals, that is to say, her rump should be well cleft under its fleece and his penis as tense as a bow, yes, now, and while he moved like a blind man through that unlikely Eden, the important thing was to perform the fatal and brutish rite, which remained, in Basile’s eyes, the only proof of reality, and within that reality, of a light accessible to the species called human. She had desired to couple with him in savage, ancient mating; by hiding she had obliged him to seek her out, in other words, to hunt her, to hunt her as one hunts wild game, and the simultaneously extraordinary and preposterous fact was that a chance encounter had just transformed Basile into a woman-hunter.

Philippe de La Genardière

The Year of the Eclipse

As he moved forward, naked, under the leaves, advancing very slowly on his two legs, the soles of his feet quite flat on the moist ground, he slipped back into primeval movement patterns, not only those of his early twenties, but also those whose origins preceded the beginning of time, or at least of human memory, when nothing distinguished men from beasts; something new had emerged in him, something that would perhaps be ephemeral, would endure for the time of a hunt, of a copulation, or, who knows, of a love affair; he had become, once again, physical. And the sign thereof was not merely the spear thrusting out from between his thighs, he was coming alive again as a man, as a male, and this was a feeling that surpassed in intensity all the death-dealing thoughts which had assailed him for more than a year, yes, a real feeling of happiness, mingled with a little fear, but triumphing over the recurrent urge to end it all that he brooded upon at night while sitting on his sixth-floor balcony and sipping strong alcoholic beverages. Finally, he was naked, and it was as if he were in the forest primeval, that is, exposed to danger, there were no birds in the greenhouse, but surely any number of cunning, cold-blooded reptiles were hiding under the bushes, their morphology still marked by eons past, and above all, there was a female hidden somewhere, a female who represented for him the greatest of dangers as well as the greatest of promises, and he was searching for that female, who after sinking her hook into his flesh had vanished into nature, she even had a name, she was called Shadi, and for a few long minutes he’d been able to feel the warmth of her breast in the palm of his hand, and he wanted her now, that Shadi, who perched on a rock and sang arias from operas, who was twenty-five years old, and who planned to submit the world to her will, he desired her indeed, and his desire, even if it should accompany his swan song, was in itself a victory. No, this wasn’t some work of fiction, nor was he at the movies, in one of the dark theaters he continued to frequent, where he saw exceedingly sentimental American productions that brought tears to his eyes and gave him the impression of sharing in the emotions of the common man, and he wasn’t at home, either, watching a DVD, which in the present case would have been a costume drama about the Garden of Eden, filmed in Hollywood and in Technicolor, wherein he could have seen a naked man moving through a jungle in search of his fateful Eve. No, he wasn’t at the movies, or if he was, then all he had perceived was a flash, a brief illumination, in which he’d seen himself accomplish, in the skin of an actor who looked like him in his younger days, what he feared to accomplish, even as he desired it in the deepest part of himself, but the illusion hadn’t lasted, it was indeed a scene from the life, from his life, a scene in which he was entirely involved, committed with the full weight of hisBiography, even though he could well believe, from numerous signs, that he’d been transported back to a former state, without culture, without memory. Except that the year was 2005, and a young woman had just drawn him into her snare,

and instead of abandoning the field Basile had played the game, and now he had to accept the challenge, as it were condemned to hunt the female under a vast glass roof and through a labyrinthine landscape, the doors to which were solidly locked, there was no doubt that what he was in was reality, and for the time being that reality was totally contained in an erect member (his), which protruded from between his thighs and whose point led him on as he looked for the woman. And he advanced, naked, like a prehistoric man, carefully placing the soles of his feet on the moist ground, yes, he could scent the woman, like a primitive man he could scent her, and it was both elating and humiliating, even though he’d summoned this metamorphosis in himself by wishing for it, he was troubled by the idea that man’s efforts to dominate nature and to work toward the advent of a more humane society had succeeded only in transforming him, on this red-letter day, into a rutting beast. Was that what you could call a victory, Basile wondered, even as he tried to clear a path through the increasingly dense and leafy branches behind which his beautiful Middle Eastern girl had hidden herself, but whatever the answer to his question, he was pressing on toward the female, that is to say, groping his way through the jungle, and the moment was not far off, the moment when he would cover her—at least, that’s how animal copulation would have been referred to in the old days. But the old days were long gone.

Philippe de La Genardière

The Year of the Eclipse

Bertrand Latour

A Billion and Crumbs

Jules is a limousine chauffeur at the “Palace,” one of the finest hotels in Paris. At the wheel of his gleaming Mercedes, he drives big bosses, high-end prostitutes, show biz stars, new Russians, warlords and vacationing billionaires. Discreet (a chauffeur hears and sees nothing) charming (but not overly, as a chauffeur must not look like he is having fun), available (a chauffeur has no schedule), able to drive through Paris at 100 km/h with a pack of paparazzi on his heels, to exchange smiles with a monkey while his owner enjoys himself at an orgy in Neuilly, be an attentive escort to an American nymphomaniac all night long and, of course, find the restaurant, museum, shop or zoo each of his clients dreams about. From the finest restaurants of Paris to the most improbable places of debauchery by way of the runways at Le Bourget where the private jets land, Jules has a front row view - albeit as a spectator who has difficulty making ends meet - of the lives of the very rich. He knows

Publisher: Hachette Littératures Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Virginie Rouxel vrouxel@hachette-livre.fr Translation: Jonathan Kaplansky jkaplansky@sympatico.ca

their habits, receives their confidences, accommodates their odd habits, shares their secrets and above all, awaits their generous tips. For Jules is at war. At war with his colleagues to drive the best tippers. At war with Paula, the woman of his life to whom he wants to give the “high life.” Or nothing. Jules is like that: he always sees things on a large scale. Just how far is he willing to go to land, one day, on the back seat of the limo? As far as his clients want him to, and even further, as he takes on a key role in a plot as lucrative as it is dangerous … Bertrand Latour plunges us into the intimacy of VIPs with his pulsating, supercharged prose. Scathing humor, precise and rhythmic sentences, Un milliard et des poussières / A Billion and Crumbs is not written by a chauffeur who has fallen into writing, but by a writer who has taken the wheel.

“Talk … Oh good Lord! I feel alone with you. Talk.” (Paula)

Wednesday May 31

Biography

Bertrand Latour is forty-five years old. He has worked as an accountant, a packer, a medical representative, real estate agent, and … a limousine chauffeur for a Paris luxury hotel. Publications Les Yeux plus gros que l’Amérique (novel), Flammarion, 2007; Comme un beau grand slow collé (short story collection), Denoël, 2004.

The goal of any sensible young man should be to quickly free himself from need by accumulating a large pile of money. As a young man, that had been my goal. But at thirty-seven years of age, a bitter truth had become obvious: my bank overdraft was chasing me all year ‘round and I had no inheritance in the offing except for the house I grew up in, where my mother, God bless her, was still living, and which upon her death would be shared by my brother, my sister and myself. The house had a yard with a solitary ping pong table, the roof leaked, a highway ran nearby and the neighboring housing project had received bad press; it would be amazing if we managed to get four hundred thousand euros from it all. Finally, here, in no particular order, are the only riches our parents ever gave us: the science of barbecuing (once the ping pong table was folded up), a passion for singing, a somewhat idiotic but not unpleasant capacity for wonder, a love for babies and animals, strange earlobes and bad backs (except for my brother), my mother’s penchant for spending, my father’s for saving, a certain way of shouting under pressure instead of speaking normally, a weakness for alcohol that really should have been psychoanalyzed by establishing a connection with the neurotic dissatisfaction all five of us shared, a mania for criticizing people and giving them nicknames, a holy horror of socialism in all its forms (except for my brother), an immoderate liking for pretty stories in books or movies, and an iron constitution: our family prided itself on including two one-hundred-year-olds, one on my father’s side, one on my mother’s. While my father did die well before the age of one hundred, it was due to a work accident. He was leading a motivational seminar for the

company where he was winding up a full career begun in household appliances, and continued in gardening tools. One of his salesmen, wanting to show off in front of the girls, sending golf balls every which way, bashed his head in with a glorious swing. The girls passed out on the green, one vomited into the eleventh hole, the guy was sent to jail and my mother, encouraged by my sister, registered with an online dating service, then quickly un-registered one day after returning from the cemetery. Since then, golf courses figure prominently in my nightmares. * I was mentally trying to calculate how much four hundred thousand euros divided by three were; it was something like one forty-five in the morning and the Egyptian I was bringing back to the hotel held out a hand in the dark. He handed over a purple bill - five hundred euros, for the information of minimum wage earners who will never see its color - on the armrest, you know, the leather-covered padded support that is also the glove compartment between the driver and passenger seats in the front of a limousine. The Egyptian asked me if I had change for two hundred. “No, Sir. Sorry, Sir.” “Just my luck … And the guy did not take back his bill. I ended up telling myself that he was going to let me keep it. Fantastic! Five hundred euros! Almost half my monthly loan payment in one shot! But nothing happened. The bill was still on the front armrest. I was afraid it would fly away, given that it was Wuthering Heights in the limo, given that the Egyptian’s window was down all the way, given that he was smoking a joint, good weed smuggled through by diplomatic pouch, he’d confided to me between two drags. At regular intervals, the Cairene held out the joint to the chick he had rented for the night: everything can be rented, villas, cement mixers, chauffeurs, girls. She was plump, but more escort girl than North African servant, more Wonderbra than burqa, a Syrian with an American passport or a Lebanese with a Canadian passport, I don’t really know, all that was only deduction on my part based on what my ears—that are always cocked—had picked up. And our five hundred euro bill? I didn’t dare look at the armrest, let alone grab the bill; I didn’t want to look like a penny-pincher. And what was bound to happen did: the bill arose, saw which way the wind was blowing, and disappeared into the passenger compartment. The Syrian chick, or perhaps Lebanese, began laughing, a laugh that was one third alcohol, one third nerves and one third disillusionment. Keeping my two hands on the wheel became a challenge: I wanted to let everything go, throw myself on the bill that was doing somersaults against the ceiling, floating back and forth on its own like Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, brushed against my right hand; my right hand left the wheel, missed the bill, and the limo skidded to the left. I almost forced us off the road, pulling a Dodi and

Diana for five hundred lousy euros. The Egyptian, unruffled, watched the bill come to him, as if magnetized. Money goes to money, and even though he was half high, he grabbed it just before it disappeared forever out the window. His chick stopped laughing. Silence. Noise of the engine. Then she began laughing again immediately, giggling, this time clearly more due to nerves than alcohol or disillusionment. I parked the car in front of the hotel. My client got out, moved away, the girl following him a good five yards back, very much slowed down by CH3-CH2-OH and THC. “Motherfucker! Another one who’s going to give me zilch. A plague on the Egyptians and the mercenary sluts who suck their cocks!” I said to myself. But: “Wait!” shouted my client turning back upon reaching the revolving door that then swallowed him up as greedily as my brother devours sushi. Two minutes later, the revolving door brought the Egyptian back. He had gone to ask the concierge for change and was returning to hit me with a yellow bill. A yellow, two hundred euros. “Thank you, Sir. Have a good night, Mr. Al Sawira.”

Bertrand Latour

A Billion and Crumbs

I took the Mercedes back to the second basement of the hotel parking garage. I hurtled down the spiral ramp, gripping the wheel. I wanted a cool glass of grenadine and a blues song that began with “Woke up this morning.” I turned on the radio; it was not blues, but harpsichord. Just my luck … I turned off the radio. Next limo job, I apply in Nevada. I passed the automatic doors that closed behind me. I parked the Mercedes between two others, black and clean like mine. I turned on the screen of my Smartphone, clicked on the dollar sign icon and filled in the empty spaces on my bill: client’s name and room number, number of hours spent with him, applicable pricing, total owed, license number, mileage upon arrival. I clicked on the car icon, a spreadsheet opened and I entered “84” in the salary column, “200” in the tip column and “1” in the meal column. “Do you wish to validate: yes/no?” Yes, I wished to validate. Today I had earned three hundred and eighty-seven euros plus two meals at eleven euros apiece. No complaints. Nevada could wait … After briefly cleaning out the crap the clients leave you with in the back - open water bottles, ashes from joints, screens not switched off, various stuff - from the trunk I took the novel I was reading and locked the car which greeted me with a beep different than usual, a depressing beep. I crossed the parking lot, giving the finger to the security cameras. I always did that, until the day when one of the security guys might say to me “Jules, you find that funny?” or, less cool, “Hey, you little shit, we’re gonna shove our fists up your ass, get it?” I punched in a digital code and entered the chauffeurs’ lounge. The chauffeurs’ lounge, painted lavender blue, was poorly lit and not well-ventilated, the ideal place to read Le Parisien and L’Équipe, sleep sprawled on four chairs, eat celery root salad with vacuum-packed cold cuts, improvise one-liner contests, burping and farting

(see vacuum-packed cold cuts), watching Serbian-Croat porn and Louis de Funès movies, get into arguments, make up and finally doublecross each other, describing our romantic difficulties at home, our aspirations for love on online dating sites, telling each other fibs about the astronomical tips we had supposedly just gotten from a client; it was Paris, it was the second basement of a parking lot, it was the chauffeur’s lounge and it pretty much resembled hell. “Still here?” I asked my colleague Robert, who was reading a huge volume on Kantian epistemology that he was only too willing to put down. Beside Robert, Sergei was sitting, asleep, head on his arms spread out on the table; next to Sergei, Louis was drawing a house. At fifty-eight, Robert was the eldest of us seven chauffeurs, a long, thin, solitary type, who cut a fine figure in his Italian suits and was only interested in philosophy, cooking and money, which isn’t so bad. But most of all money. Robert would get a major-hard at the prospect of a big tip. You should have seen him kissing ass for a few euros more. Before becoming a chauffeur, he had been an accountant, a backpacker, a roadie in America for the Grateful Dead - (compensating for his mediocre build with coke), second guru in a sect in the Var, a stallholder selling shirts in Parisian markets. Sergei was from Yakutsk in Siberia, from whence he bolted to Angola, then fled to the Congo, where he was a hatchet man for fellow Russians, colluding with local potentates, scarpering then to the Costa del Sol in Spain where he started a business with shady associates he fled for Milan where he married an old dealer from Moscow, whom he left for a young, rich and crazy Milanese, who later went bankrupt and got pregnant, so he decamped to bury himself with us in this chauffeurs’ lounge. There were legends about him, one had Sergei doing in four members of the Toutou Macoutes in a hail of Uzi fire, another in which he had two million dollars sitting pretty in a Swiss bank; sometimes it was five million in a bank in the Cayman Islands, all legends that could not be checked. At thirty-one, Louis was the youngest of us all. Louis was obsessive-compulsive: he was always drawing houses, no doubt a frustrated architect the way there are frustrated artists. Frustrated homos too. Louis told me he made love to girls. I willingly believed him. But he was a homo. Gay. A pansy. Or bi, if you prefer. A bisexual who would have liked us to move in together, have a legal agreement. But one thing has nothing to do with the other; he and I were very close. “The ragheads have booked us until three o’clock. We’re stuck here until three,” Robert says to me. “Which ragheads?” “The Saudi Arabian royal family. A goddamn princess and her mother.” “Are they good?” I asked “No. Yesterday her secretary gave us each a thirty euro tip for nine hours of availability.” During availability, the chauffeur or chauffeurs were available to the client as long as he or she wished, three hours or fifteen days.

“Thirty euros?! What mangy dogs!” I said, opening my locker. “The ragheads aren’t like they used to be. Before - I’m talking about ten years ago - they’d leave serious money, you didn’t know where to put it, you didn’t have enough pockets. There was so much that sometimes I would even forget some bills in the car.” Robert was off once more on his familiar refrain, “Things used to be better,” about how difficult the profession is. I shoved my novel in my locker. “Then the Lebanese middlemen turned up,” continued Robert. “They did …” “Then the Lebanese middlemen turned up, they negotiated prices, blah, blah, blah,” said Louis, rolling his eyes and blowing air as if through a straw. “Tell me right away I’m babbling,” said Robert, hurt. “Far be it from me …” said Louis rolling back his lower lip, shiny with saliva. “The Lebanese did turn up!” continued Robert. “They made the damn ragheads think the Whites only wanted their money.” “Which is not completely untrue,” I intervened, taking a piece of chocolate from my locker. Personally, aside from their money, I don’t have much to say to them, to the Arab princesses. “Is she pretty, your princess?” But Robert was not listening to me, naturally: “The Lebanese said to the raghead: “Tired of getting ripped off by a White? Leave it, Yvonne, I’ll take care of it.” They negotiated prices, took them for everything they could, like they know how to do, the scum. And who ends up getting fucked in this affair? We do, the chauffeurs, who are now working at cost. After the Lebanese vermin, we got caught by 9/11. The Arabs really began to think we didn’t like them. And personally, I never had anything against the towelheads, okay? I wanted Bin Laden to slam the Americans. The Lebs, 9/11, as that wasn’t enough, then comes the euro! And us, we lose on all sides: on one side, the cost of living increases, on the other, the Yanks see their buying power plummet by fifty per cent from one day to the next, buying power that inevitably they prefer to exercise elsewhere. In total, we have to spend more to eat while we bring in less. A great deal for us, the euro! After that, the war in Iraq. There, everyone hates us: the Yanks because we didn’t go with them, the ragheads because we’re white like the Yanks. To finish everything, seeing their occupancy rates hovering at the breakeven point, hotel owners are shitting themselves, it’s a wholesale sell-off, rooms at eight hundred euros, do I hear less? Six hundred to my left? Five hundred to my right! And us, at the end of the food chain, we’re taking nouveau riche Poles or middle managers from Osaka who still have the nerve to stick out their chests giving us redcap tips! To your generosity, ladies and gentlemen!” I offered my chocolate to Louis who threw himself upon it. “Ah, being a chauffeur is not what it used to be!” concluded Robert. “Well, my friend, we’ve had to pull down our pants, and not only to shit.” Robert’s favorite sentence … He shook his head to show his distress and,

Bertrand Latour

A Billion and Crumbs

Michel Le Bris

The World’s Beauty

Publisher: Grasset Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Heidi Warneke hwarneke@grasset.fr Translation: Constantina Mitchell constantina@videotron.ca

at the same time, refused my bar of Nestlé Crunch that Louis, good friend that he was, had offered him. Others drown themselves in alcohol or food; Robert drowned his despair in despair. I closed my locker and locked it. “Okay, I’m going to hit the hay,” I said. “I start at ten-thirty tomorrow. I’m taking my Egyptian back to the plane and afterwards, I’m up for the Richardsons at noon.” “The Richardsons from Tampa Bay?” Robert asked me. “Yes.” “That’s one hundred euros a day, minimum.” “I’m leaving. ‘Night, guys.” “A hundred for sure. Two hundred, maybe. You’ve fallen in but good. The Richardsons are good stuff.” “Okay. I’ve really got to get going. Ciao!” “By the way, how much did you make with the Egyptian?” “I’m totally disgusted. Zero,” I lied, as usual. “Zero, you’re serious?!” “Zero.” “Son of a bitch.” “Who’s a son of a bitch?” asked Sergei, yawning. Sergei stretched his giant shoulders. His fluttering eyelashes resembled a swarm of panicking butterflies. When he finished yawning, I saw his dirty Siberian mug emerge. “Jules’ Egyptian, Al Sawira. He gave him nothing.” “Son of a bitch,” confirmed Sergei. The room was bathed in green light, adding to the sadness that I was seeking with all my might. In this room were three men who were going to wait until three o’clock in the morning for a Saudi Arabian princess to decide whether or not to go to bed. Waiting: what else has humanity ever done? “How much do you weigh, Sergei?” I asked him. “What?” “What you weigh?” Robert said to him, rippling his chest to mime weight. “I think a hundred and forty-three kilos last time I weigh me.” “That’s what I thought …” “Got any chocolate, Jules?” “Louis ate it all, check with him, Sergei.” “Is that true, Louis?! You ate the whole Crunch?!” “Well, this time I’m really going, guys.” I returned upstairs to the Palace. I had it signed by the night concierge, who then came to close behind me the heavy glass doors of the finest hotel in the world, the most mythical, the most everything: the Palace.

Michel Le Bris was born in Brittany, in 1944. He became editor-in-chief of Jazz Hot magazine shortly before 1968, and was instrumental in introducing France to free jazz. In the aftermath of May ’68, he served as director of the newspaper La Cause du peuple and, with Jean-Paul Sartre, founded the collection La France sauvage. A guiding force behind the magazine J’accuse, he subsequently helped found the daily Libération. He is a world-renowned expert on Robert Louis Stevenson. Through his stories, novels, and essays, he champions the notion of literature as a journey, an adventure that is open to the world and that wants to say so without the affectations of postmodernism. In consonance with this view, he created the Étonnants Voyageurs festival in 1990 and in 2007, along with Jean Rouaud, Abdourahman A. Waberi and several others, came out with a manifesto calling for a “world literature” which was signed by 44 of the greatest writers of French expression. Publications Published by Grasset: La Porte d’Or, 1986 (re-ed. Éditions du Seuil, 2000); Le Paradis perdu, 1981. Published by Flammarion: Les Flibustiers de la Sonore, 1998 (re-ed. J’ai lu, 2000). Biography

In the 1920s, Martin and Osa Johnson were the king and queen of adventure. Martin started out by accompanying Jack London as a cook on the cruise of the Snark. He then tried his hand at cinematography, filming the headshrinkers in the New Hebrides islands and the Big Nambas tribe. As a couple, he and Osa were the most famous lovers and adventurers of their day. By 1938, Osa had become a widow. Her beauty had faded and she sought refuge in alcohol. When a young woman named Winnie is tasked with writing Osa’s memoirs, a disconcerting one-on-one encounter begins. Overstepping her role, Winnie slowly takes possession of her subject and conducts what is almost a police investigation into the shadowy areas of the couple’s past. But it

just might be Osa, a woman haunted by the mystery of the world’s beauty, who, through the secrets she confides, is actually in control … From the New York of the Roaring Twenties to the Kenyan jungle, from the Round Table at the Algonquin where Dorothy Parker and Zelda Fitzgerald were Osa’s New York godmothers to the suffocating jungles in the land of the Pygmies, from Harlem jazz clubs where prohibition was defied and jungle style jazz was coming into vogue to scenes of a primitive world that had somehow been preserved, Michel Le Bris conjures up an entire era. The spirit of exotic adventure is ever present in this superb and imaginative saga.

Kalowatt was whimpering beside Osa. Sounds of voices drifted through the air, punctuated by the puffing of the engines. Then she noticed a heady, pungent smell laced with human scents. “The smell of Africa,” one of the passengers on the Leviathan whispered to her just as the coast appeared on the horizon. The islands of swaying coconut palms meant they were reaching Kilindini, the port of Mombasa. Africa! A chill of excitement came over her as she hugged Martin, but he did not respond to her embrace. She reckoned in her disappointment that he was already imagining himself on land, counting the crates or perhaps arguing with customs authorities. John’s face was beet red beneath his pith helmet. He gave his son a nudge. “Relax my boy, you can think about all that tomorrow. You’ll damn well never see a day like today again!” Martin excused himself with that smile she could never resist, the smile of an impish child caught red-handed. Foam fringed the coast. Dugout canoes laden with bunches of bananas, papayas, and mangos, and squawking parrots perched on their prows were heading toward them. The ship doctor was already coming aboard while in the distance, little boats with red and green sails made their way toward faraway countries, indifferent, carrying gold and spices. And the suffocating heat slowly enveloped them. The pink palace of the sultan of Zanzibar and the ochre walls of Fort Jesus came into view on the horizon. Africa at last! Half asleep, she began to stir. No, the smell was not quite the same as in Mombasa: it was drier, with every now and then hints of thyme and burnt grass. And suddenly everything came back to her, the departure from Mombasa, the commotion at the station, the porters scurrying about, Martin storing his film in a refrigerated box-car. She sat up and choked back a cry of pain: the seats on the Lunatic Express may have been first class but they were made of wood just the same.

Leaning out the window, Martin and John seemed transfixed. With her eyes still half closed, she joined them as Kalowatt tugged at her impatiently. She was awe-struck. They had entered another world. Or more accurately they were floating in a bluish vapor that dissolved all contours. It was barely dawn. Trees with twisted branches were visible here and there, others, larger, came suddenly out of the mist like the riggings of unlikely ships. Shapes glided furtively in the underbrush or remained motionless, lifting their muzzles to watch the train go by. They stifled a scream when a herd of buffalos, horns erect and gazing intently, emerged from the last recesses of the night before vanishing like a dream. There was nothing more, no railway, no posts, no embankments that might suggest some point of reference. The train was drifting freely in a phantom world, had itself become a phantom. A whole fabulous universe was discernable and so near, yet hidden. Even Kalowatt was impressed and remained silent. Light suddenly flooded the horizon with layers of rippling gold, sweeping away the shadows, awakening the ochre hills, setting the bushes aflame, lighting the clusters of pearls on the still moist branches. A long shiver rolled across the expanse, soft as a sigh as if the curtain of some fantastical theatre had lifted upon their approach. The African savannah, stretching nearly to infinity … And in the sparse grass, among the thorny bushes, beneath the acacias, thousands, tens of thousands of animals in herds were grazing, playing, mingling, as peacefully as cows on a prairie. “Noah’s Ark!” murmured John. And at that moment, there truly was a kind of grace, a feeling of peace, of primordial innocence. The air was still and unbelievably weightless. Time itself had ceased to move forward. Round-buttocked zebras were grazing among the white-bearded, slender-legged gnus. They were being watched by hornbills with long red beaks standing like shepherds on the trunks of dead trees. Shy giraffes with huge dreamy eyes stretched up gracefully to the flat tops of the acacias and paid no attention to the thorns as they stripped off the leaves with their silky tongues. Grumpy horned warthogs covered in stiff hair and pustules were digging in the soil, indifferent to the comings and goings around them. A sudden fright sent the hartebeests and antelopes running in all directions with their white tails raised. Then calm returned. Curious ostriches stretched their pink necks toward the train. Topis with stag-like bodies and the heads of goats were drowsing at the top of a hill. In the nearby trees, barely visible clusters of monkeys that Kalowatt haughtily ignored were chattering, while birds trilled to the rising sun. For a split second, she thought she saw a group of lions asleep under an enormous baobab barely a leap away from some antelopes grazing peacefully. Noah’s Ark, or the Garden of Eden. That there could be so many animals on earth defied the imagination. Never, no never, would she forget this moment: Africa was welcoming them.

Michel Le Bris

The World’s Beauty

They had left Mombasa in the afternoon. In a cloud of smoke they had crossed the bridge that linked the island to the mainland, lined with banana, sisal, coconut, mango and papaya plantations. The train blared its whistle as it stopped at every village and the locals descended on it, anxious to sell their fruit and milk. The violent jolts had made the most stubborn passengers understand why there was a sign in the station advising denture wearers to remove them upon departure: most of the track had been laid directly on the ground, with no ballast. When had she fallen asleep? The train must have crossed the Taru Desert during the night and was now beginning its slow climb to Nairobi. Those were probably the Taita Hills in the distance. The bush would become scarcer and the sky ever more immense as they approached Voi and the wilderness of Tsavo. “Now I understand Carl Akeley better!” said Martin suddenly. With his body half outside the compartment, it looked as if he wanted to embrace it all, make the vastness that was unfolding before them a part of him. He turned around: “All this … this beauty. It’s frightening, don’t you think?” She gently squeezed his hand in reply. She, too had a heavy heart, at first without knowing why. This miracle was beyond the realm of men. It could not last. She grasped the enormity of the task that Akeley had entrusted to them. “At the very least bear witness to this miracle so that the world will know it existed.” Those were his exact words—but how could they convey such profusion, such overwhelming splendor? They knew nothing of Africa … She hugged Martin tightly. She could guess what he was thinking. John was right. Tomorrow would be another day. At that moment, they were alone at the center of the world. The sound of someone clearing his throat made them jump. A string of thick saliva shot right into the spittoon with a pinging sound. They had forgotten about the other passenger, an old bushman who had boarded at Mariakan. Kalowatt was indignant and protested loudly, her arm outstretched accusingly. “Well I’ll be a … she’s scolding me! Don’t tell me that critter of yours can talk, too!” The fellow had been eyeing her suspiciously from the start. Monkeys were supposed to swing from trees. They were confined to cages or got shot at if they made a fuss. They weren’t supposed to eat with forks. Shot? Osa was already showing her claws. Kalowatt was special! “Actually, you’re lucky. I’d have brought Bessie if I could … She’s my orangutan. Orangutan? The man shook his head in disgust: it was all very strange to say the least. After that, wedged in the corner, he observed the enthusiasm of his traveling companions with a cynical eye. “Did you hear that? He thinks we’re tender-foots!” grumbled John. The very

thought infuriated him. He, John Alfred Johnson, the buffalo hunter, a soldier in Custer’s army, a veteran of Little Big Horn. And here was this consumptive old bastard looking down his nose at him! Tender-foots! What next? He tested the waters, casually remarking: “Reminds me of the buffalo around Black Hills back in Custer’s day. Just like ocean waves as far as the eye could see. And when they stampeded …” But the man countered with a sly jibe: “So you’ve never been to Africa before.” John bridled, his cheeks brick red. “Do you have any idea to whom you are speaking? Martin and Osa Johnson! The king and queen of adventure! Good God! They’ve been around the world more than once. Why, they’ve faced the headhunters in the Salomon Islands and the jungles of Borneo! “That’s just what I said. You don’t know anything about Africa …” Martin intervened before his father started a fist fight with the man. He had taken a liking to the old-timer with the bushy beard, rawhide skin and seen-it-all attitude. He was so much like the men he had found so fascinating when we was a child—the last survivors of the frontier days who would turn the world into a legend for you in exchange for a glass of whiskey or a plug of chewing tobacco. “None too soon,” the hunter seemed to say, thrilled to finally have an audience. His name was Dirk Sanders and he was going back to Uganda. He should have done so long before: Mombasa was definitely not for the Whites. A putrid, fever-ridden city. The era of really big trading was drawing to a close. Islam was silently expanding its influence. One day, the British would be booted out without having seen it coming. Nairobi? A tight-assed city where everyone pretended to be worldly-wise. No. Uganda was the place to be. Where, as of yet, nobody had thought of going to give him a hard time. Were there as many animals there as there were outside the train? He shrugged his shoulders in disdain. A whole lot more! And big ones at that. There was money to be made! Ivory from elephants, crocodile skins, rhino horns to grind into powder for the men with limp willies who believed it would make them hard again. And all those rich jackasses who came for the thrill of it, thinking they were big shots if they killed a few dozen lions, elephants or rhinos! A total slaughter. Which just meant more money for him, so he could lead the good life. Not to mention that their wives were usually bored to death … Osa protested. Shouldn’t all this beauty be preserved? He looked at her in astonishment: “Preserved? Well! Just where do you think you are? In the Garden Eden, or some cockamamie place like that? It’s war out there, honey! Absolute carnage every night! The quiet this morning is just because the well-fed killers are taking their siestas! He was about to spit to show he was telling the truth when he made eye

Michel Le Bris

The World’s Beauty

Virginie Ollagnier

The Uncertainty

contact with Kalowatt and stopped. “I’m thinking if you want to survive here,” he grumbled, “you’d better wake up. And tell that damn critter of yours she’s not going to boss me around!” A true hunter. Every muscle, every neuron was perfectly adapted to Africa, thought Martin. He would destroy it all without giving it a second thought. And once he had converted all the wildlife in Uganda into liquor, cigars, and orgies in the brothels of Nairobi and elsewhere, he would leave. Go to Tanzania or the Congo. At that moment, Martin couldn’t say whether the old devil disgusted him or fascinated him. As for Osa, she had turned her back on him. No one was going to spoil the pleasure of her first morning here! She had the feeling she was being watched. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see that he was looking at her rear as she leaned out the window. She wanted to give him a piece of her mind, but hesitated. Then, as if in defiance, her heart pounding as she wondered how she could dare do such a thing, she leaned over even farther to accentuate the arch in the small of her back. An uneasiness came over her when she heard a sigh emanate from the depths of the compartment.

Publisher: Liana Levi Date of Publication: September 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Sylvie Mouchès s.mouches@lianalevi.fr

Translation: Jody Gladding gladding@together.net

Biography

Virginie Ollagnier, born in Lyon in 1970, is co-scriptwriter for the comic strip Kia Ora. Her first novel, Toutes ces vies qu’on abandonne, earned her wide public and critical acclaim in France (awarded the “coup de coeur”prize for a historical novel in Blois). Publications Toutes ces vies qu’on abandonne, Liana Levi, 2007 (re-ed. Points, 2008).

Nice, 1968. Zoltàn Soloviev, a New York writer, sixty years old, watches from a distance the funeral of his first mistress, Jiska, twenty years his senior. As the family withdraws, he waits to meditate one last time at her grave. Iéva, Jiska’s granddaughter, joins him and asks him about her grandmother, having been raised far away from her. He takes Iéva’s request to get him started writing his memoirs in his Paris pied-à-terre … We follow Zoltàn as he meanders through his life, guided by women, finding him in Yalta in 1920, a landowner’s son whose future is all mapped out. But History and the Russian revolution decide otherwise. He has not ever forgiven himself for not saving

his sister in an assassination attempt and flees with his mother to Constantinople. Surviving together as best they can, they arrive in Nice in 1928, at a villa owned by a friend of Zoltàn’s uncle, the famous Jiska, with whom some eccentric exiled artists have taken refuge. All of eighteen years old, he falls desperately in love with this forty year old woman , and they move in together in New York, in 1929. In Greenwich Village, they discover the lively world of the Roaring Twenties … And his sentimental journey does not stop there …

Madame Perrin Since everyone at the Esperis was strange, we were not at all surprised. They all had their habits and the Perrins had theirs. Very quickly, they arranged for their children to take piano lessons with Otìlia. They insisted that these lessons take place on Saturdays after lunch. My mother received Lisa, Gaps, and Thildé in our apartment in the early afternoon. As it turned out, despite herself, Otìlia was an even greater help to them still. On Saturdays, Jiska prepared a French meal for all her tenants. Grunting, Takéo followed her preparations, recording each step in his notebook. In the dining room, the Perrin children set the table, Otìlia played the piano, Inaam read the newspaper, Darina and I, hidden from view, necked appropriately. When Tocha passed through the kitchen, he lent an extra hand. During the preparations, the Perrins dressed. They were never as beautiful, fresh, and as well turned out as on those days. I remember my surprise at seeing them descend for our first Saturday lunch, so perfectly perfect that I felt embarrassed. I learned that they were right to honor this moment of sharing, of coming together in this way, and I regretted not having thought so at first. Then we would sit down at the table, always in the same order. Jiska presided, Norbert and Tocha on either side of her, then their wives, Zita to the right of Tocha and my mother beside Norbert, then Gaps and me opposite one another, switching mothers for the occasion, the impenetrable Inaam at my left across from Darina, the Perrin daughters framing Takéo who sat at the foot of the table. Now that I think about it, there must not have been a place for Liocha, Jiska’s surveyor husband, so absent all year long. During the meal, each of us spoke about our week, except for Inaam, about whom I knew nothing and who was content to smile at our stories, napkin

pressed to his mouth. I would have to wait to make his acquaintance. The first course, the main dish, the wine, the cheese, and the dessert dictated the crescendo of conviviality, the pleasure of being together and of lighthearted exchange. It is only on French soil that food takes on this dimension. It would last two hours, two hours of unbelievable stories, favorite dishes, gastronomic delights, wines to taste …. Then, following who knows what signal, by common consensus, we would leave the table and have coffee in the salon. The Perrins would present the digestif, a magnificent Hennessy cognac that arrived by train, in wooden crates lined with wood shavings that Zita burned in winter to scent the room. Ceremoniously, Norbert uncorked the bottle. With the glorious pop of the cork, the children proclaimed in unison, “Hennesy, the name that makes Cognac famous.” It would take another hour to conclude the meal in a very unusual grand finale. Madame Perrin would rub her hands together, as if anticipating one more delight. “Norbert, it’s time for the children’s lesson.” That was their code. My mother would comply, leading away the noisy ones. Then the Perrins would immediately excuse themselves, leaving us to our talk, racing up the stairs that separated them from their deserted nest. I only later understood the glances exchanged among the dinner guests. That very first Saturday, I followed Otìlia to help organize the piano lesson. From the very beginning of Lisa’s scales, incredibly powerful groans reached our ears. Otìlia, clutching the stone Saint Alexander III that hung around her neck in the family medallion, raised her eyes to the heavens. “Fortissimo Lisa!” Since the piano could not drown out Norbert’s groans, accompanied by Zita’s droning, Otìlia, still hanging onto her relic, would sing. Her clear, loud voice left the children speechless. Lisa would abandon the piano to listen, which annoyed my mother. From one look, I understood that she was overwhelmed by the cataclysmic orgasm vibrating under our feet. As silence returned, she smoothed her hair as if an indiscreet breeze was still blowing through the music room. The following Saturday, Otìlia was not caught off-guard. She encouraged our neighbors’ sensual journey with a twenty-seven minute rendition of the “Alleluia Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah. Three times! We sang it three times to make it last as long as the erotic duet. As the first notes prompted a mocking laugh from me, Otìlia shot me a Medusa glare, which froze my laughter. But the absurdity of the situation had me biting my lip. Nevertheless I tried to perform my role as part of the choir. And shortly afterwards, I would race down the stairs to explode into wild laughter in the garden. All the Saturdays following that one unfolded under similar auspices, promises of delights, pleasures, and Christian music. When, on their best

Virginie Ollagnier

The Uncertainty

days, a second assault came to distract Otìlia, she would turn to the child at the piano, repeating more quietly Zita’s pleas for the hard-working Norbert’s attentions: “Harder, you see, your mother can’t hear you!” “Faster, you see, even your mother realizes that’s too slow!” I think, in fact, that Chopin stands up quite well to an allegro agitato interpretation, that it gives him the flavor of a well-worn music box, absolutely delightful. I can no longer listen to Handel, whose music reminds of Zita’s cries of pleasure. What was touching about their willingness to expose their orgasms to all ears was the great modesty that dictated Zita’s choice of clothing. For as much as all the Esperis women embraced the so-called Roaring Twenties, Zita never displayed her legs or arms. Hers was an invisible, sonorous sexuality. Although my imagination might easily undress her, she remained by the side of the pool, under her old-fashioned parasol, in ankle boots and long sleeves. Zita’s sighs provided me with the most uncontrollable erections in my young male life. She gave my explorations of Darina’s body a ferocious, disturbed hunger. The memory of Madame Perrin’s tremolos sparked my libido as easily as a lit cigarette butt among the Parasol pine trees. I would have promised Darina anything, marriage, children, money, if she would just give in. That is, of course, what I did. I selfishly fondled her dreams of love. I described to her a life of serene happiness for fifty years to come, when even then I no longer loved her. I wanted to possess her body, certainly not to submit to her. Finally, after months of exertion, one day when Jiska and Inaam were at the theater, Darina opened her legs for me. I do not write this to humiliate her; that was how it happened. Neither she nor I really knew what to do, nor how to do it. Stretched out naked on her bed, petrified, burning with impatience to the very tips of my fingers, I tried, as best I could, to interest her in what we were preparing to consummate. She remained recumbent, offering herself. We were very far from the supplications that had echoed in my ears and I felt lost. I would have given anything to do an about-face, to back out of the room without a word, but at the same time, my fever did not abate. It was my decision; Darina was accommodating me and did not want to offer more. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and tried to forget her gaze fixed on the ceiling. Without seeing, I felt much more free. If I had been able to draw a picture of myself, I would have traced giant hands, an even bigger penis, endless skin, and a vestigial brain. This was my new topography, to which I would comfortably adjust. I looked at the parts I already knew, full of impatience, with the image of Jiska smoldering in the remains of my mind. What followed was not very glorious, no more than the beginning had been. I penetrated her, had hardly moved inside her before I felt the electricity run

down my spine and then throughout my body, in a spasm I died, to be revived exhausted and amorous. Consciousness returned with regrets there in bed beside Darina, but this sexual hyper-sensitivity would change my world. I understood that I was embracing a life, that sexual pleasure would never be absent from it, that there would always be a little voice inside me ready to cry out as loudly as Zita. Darina rolled toward me. She sought satisfaction in my face, a flood of feelings, a tenderness that I refused to offer her. It seemed disgraceful to leave her as I dreamed of doing, quickly, without saying anything. Had it been some other woman than her, some other body, it would not have changed anything. I might even have preferred it. It was the experience that mattered, not Darina. I scowled until she felt guilty, blamed herself, and then I left without a word: a naked man dressing quickly at the foot of the bed.

Virginie Ollagnier

The Uncertainty

I sent these pages to my editor. I would not, for the world, want Iéva to come across them. I will replace them in the finished book. For the moment I am hiding them. Scruples long overdue.

How I Fell in Love with Jiska Do we ever know where love begins? The discovery of Jiska’s armpit, that dark, warm hollow of curls, had awakened my appetite, but that was only an image of desire. It is so much simpler to write of death, not the act of dying but the pain that follows. Somehow death produces the same suffering in everyone. Love is so much more subtle, more delicate, and different every time. Ask around, ask anyone, to tell you about the death of a loved one, and you will hear about the pain, separation, remorse for what was never said, loss, and so on. Ask for the same thing about love, and the spectrum is marred with the unfathomable scents of individual memories. The hell with universality. I’ve spent days writing of Lana’s death, but I would never be able to explain on those pages the love that binds me to her forever. And that love is not at all like the one binding me to Jiska. Moreover, at present I love two women, Sue and Iéva, without either of these loves dissolving into some generic feeling. You will have lived if you have loved, said Alfred de Musset. There is the truism that would easily curtail my thoughts, a banality on which we all agree; unfortunately, if I say that I loved Jiska, and by the same token, that I lived, it truncates the unrivalled beauty of those years. I believe simply that one day I belonged to her. She had nothing to do with it. It happened despite me and despite her. In the beginning, I sought out her presence; to share the same place with

Jiska was enough to make me happy. A magnetic power emanated from her that made me follow her everywhere she went. Then I studied the details of her expressions to find the source of this attraction. If I had been able to film her then, I would have gone over the film a hundred times, because her beauty resided in the volatility of her gestures, in the depths of her looks. The photographic plate from the Avus de Tocha captured her charm, retaining only its pale, posed reflection. Jiska was movement. We had been at the Esperis for more than a year and she never suspected my feelings; only Takéo understood her hold on me. One morning he invited me along to the Friday fish market. In his way, Takéo was very good at making himself understood. He woke me about five o’clock by setting tea on my nightstand. Completely naked under my sheets, terrorized by his shadow in my bedroom, I rolled over, hoping to return to my dream. When he leaned ceremoniously over the foot of my bed and planted himself there, I understood that I had no choice but to go with him. If I wanted to retain a semblance of dignity and not show him my white backside, I also had to throw him out. “You’re crazy, Takéo. You scared the hell out of me. Is this really important?” “Yes.” “What time is it?” “Fish market.” “But I only said I’d go with you one of these days …” I was trying to negotiate for my last hour of sleep, but without much hope. “Fish market.” “Give me ten minutes …” He didn’t leave me time to finish my sentence, to which I had hoped to add a few conditions. He turned on his heels. “Garden.” “I’m coming …” Outside at sunrise, an hour I was very unaccustomed to, I found Takéo Kuwabara, sword at his side. After greeting me, he pulled out a notebook and drew some Chinese characters, two to be exact. “Hôhai.” He indicated the sea and imitated the noise of the breakers. “Wave?” He grunted his approval. He drew the next one. “Yami.” I waited for a description, but he made a face. It seemed like he was afraid or in pain, or something like that. He sighed at my incomprehension and then gave me a clue. “Night.” And he began to grimace again.

“Nightmare?” He kept grimacing, as though afraid this time. “Darkness?” “Restless night?” “Yes, darkness.” “Yes. You wave-darkness.” That stopped me in my tracks. I could not tell how, but it was as if he had seen through me. Jiska avoided me and I sometimes felt Hôhai and often felt Yami. “Zoltàn. Kendo.” He detached the sword from his waist and extended it toward me in its sheath. Mimicking him, I leaned forward to accept it, which delighted Takéo who nevertheless immediately took it back from me. He picked up two long bamboo rods, which he had placed on the ground beforehand, and he dropped the sword. I had hardly seized mine when he saluted me and attacked. “Tama MigaKaZaReBa Hikari NaShi!” Seeing me trying to defend myself without much success filled him with joy. After touching me on the head and sides, he saluted me once again, and positioning himself at my right side, began to teach me. “Shinai.” “Bamboo?” “Kata.” “Kata?” We never went to the fish market together. Each morning at five o’clock, Takéo would bring me tea and we would practice kendo, rain or shine. He had found a tool for helping the poor lovesick boy clear the fog from his head.

Virginie Ollagnier

The Uncertainty

That is the story of my whole life. I beat around the bush, or you might say I sidestep the question. Not giving in to emotion. Not confronting it either. I love Ièva and still I do not know the taste of her lips. I love Sue and I no longer pay attention to her tongue. I am going around in circles …

Christian Oster

Date of Publication: September 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Catherine Vercruyce direction@leseditionsdeminuit.fr Translation: Linda Asher lindaasher10024@hotmail.com

Three Men with a Chair

Marie invited me to spend a few days in Corsica. I could bring anyone I liked. So I mentioned it to Marc, whom I had been seeing over the past three weeks for tennis at a court near the Porte de Clignancourt. He mentioned it to another fellow I didn’t know. In the back seat I managed to load a chair Marie had left behind when she took off two years earlier and which she’d asked me to bring along to Corsica. Then, figuring we would get to know one another during the trip, the three of us set out.

Publisher: Éditions de Minuit

Biography

Christian Oster was born in 1949. He studied literature. Worked at charmless little jobs before becoming a copy editor in book publishing. His first novel, Volleyball, appeared in 1989 from Éditions de Minuit, where he subsequently published twelve novels. Along with his literary works, he writes children’s books for L’École des Loisirs. Publications Published by Éditions de Minuit, among the latest novels are: Sur la dune, 2007; L’Imprevu, 2005 (The Unforeseen); Les Rendez-vous, 2003; Dans le train, 2002; Une femme de menage, 2001 (A Cleaning Woman) (re-ed. coll. “Double ”, 2003); Mon grand appartement, 1999 (prix Medicis) (re-ed. coll. “Double ”, 2007).

I had just hung up my telephone twice and was standing in the middle of the hall facing the bathroom door, with my mind wandering in the opposite direction over to the sliding door of the closet, where I kept my suitcases on the floor. I had several different bags for different kinds of trips, none of which I had taken, and I didn’t know which bag would be best for the trip I was planning the following week. The second phone call was from Marc, with whom I’d been hanging out for just the past three months, and only on a tennis court we reserved on Tuesday nights. The first call was from Marie, whom I had not seen in two years, except in the epistolary realm, which consisted of postcards we sent each other sporadically. Marie and I had said our goodbyes, and our spatial separation made things easier. I’d stayed in Paris. So I would have to take a plane or a boat to join her where she was living, in Barretona, Corsica, as she was inviting me to do for ten days, bringing also the chair she wanted back. Recognizing her voice on the telephone, I immediately felt the need to sit down, and when scarcely a moment later she mentioned the chair, it took me a few seconds to understand what chair she was talking about and that it was the one I was sitting on. This was a wooden chair I barely used that stood near me when I had picked up the phone—very low, heavy, with a back that was stiff though properly slanted, it had belonged to her father and she had not taken it when she left. Marie didn’t mention the chair right away, though; first she asked me my news—but news was not what we were sending back and forth on our postcards—and I was taken aback by her question, because for me to talk to her about myself I would need her to tell me about herself first, knowing that if

she was doing all right and keeping in touch with me that would be enough to make me all right too—at least, that was how I saw things. I had not, as the saying goes, made a new life for myself, I just went on with the memory of Marie, which stayed with her in the place she occupied at a distance, which I did not want to give up. I had answered her that I was doing as well as possible, whereas I was still dealing with hearing her voice, which together with her name—“It’s me, Marie,”—had instantly knocked me for a loop and made me sit down on the chair she hadn’t yet mentioned. I wasn’t prepared for her call. So I was startled, defenseless, worrying that I would have to restart all my efforts since she left, knowing that I had to either accept or reject the overture that she was making by calling me, and I was at just that point in my anxiety and the ambivalent pleasure I felt at hearing her voice when she brought up the question of the chair—a little fast, in fact, as if the few words we’d exchanged had been enough to restore a familiarity that I absolutely did not feel, on the contrary, I was gripped by a sense of strangeness, Marie’s voice seemed to be coming from so far away that, although I could identify every last intonation, hearing it again affected me the same way it had the first time we met. In short, it hit me hard. Still, I was pleased that Marie was asking me to come visit her, asking me to bring along the chair, suggesting the possibility that, once I was there, we’d talk more—now she had to take a call, hang up, excuse me, bring anyone you want, of course, the house is big, there are three empty rooms right now, good, we’ll talk to firm things up, but do come, OK?— she sounded very busy, altogether, in this period of her life, and it was hard for me to gauge the implication in her invitation, whether it was more the chair and the memento of her father that interested her or my visit, so that, when we had hung up, I felt a mixture of uncertainty and urgency, still, I soon understood that what I wanted was to go to clear things up, figuring I would soon find out, since I was free, or maybe not, and that in the circumstances there was no point staying put in Paris with summer coming on—it was very hot that evening, I was waiting for nightfall before I opened the window. Then there was the matter of transport. I had first ruled out taking a plane, deciding (probably wrongly) after a few moments of thought that you don’t take a chair on an airplane, I can’t think of any examples, and I imagined, that even if I got them to put Marie’s chair in the hold, properly packed, it was likely that when I got to the check-in counter I’d face too many questions, even though a chair obviously cannot conceal anything illegal, at least not Marie’s chair, with its solid feet and seat. Of course, I could have picked up the telephone and asked the right questions, but I had already opted for going by car-and-ferry, in fact, when Marc called, fifteen minutes after Marie, to ask what I was doing in July—this was June 29th—I said, “Well, I don’t know, why, what about you,

what are you doing?” We didn’t know each other well, as I said, Marc and I; we’d only spent a total of twenty-four hours of tennis together at the Porte de Clignancourt and a few more over drinks at the bar there, telling each other a bit about our lives, he being separated from his wife and me from Marie, no particular friends on my side, a few on his, scattered, the sort of scattering that doesn’t quite make for a circle. Right off, I liked what—for lack of a better word—I’d call an openness about him: “I live up near the Mairie de Clichy stop,” he told me as we left the court after my first win, “there’s a woman I always see when I transfer at Miromesnil, she looks really nice, problem is I don’t think she’s ever noticed me.” Myself, I haven’t told him anything, maybe because we were too much alike, or not enough, for whatever reason I tend to say as little as possible, not catch myself up in my own words, I don’t trust myself. But I do appreciate when people tell me things. So I had begun to appreciate Marc, especially because once he’d told his story, he didn’t repeat it, didn’t go back to it, to the point that, what with knowing so little about him, I sometimes wondered if I knew him at all, it even occurred to me that his silence about himself constituted a kind of retraction, although the impression of transparency persisted, as if, once he’d authorized me to read into him, he would leave me in charge to fill out the picture I’d constructed on the basis of those early confessions. Aside from that, Marc was a fellow of average height, muscular, with a good forehand and a sense of humor but not humorous himself, who laughed more than he made others laugh, a pretty good companion, actually, it was probably just that we hadn’t spent enough time philosophizing for me to consider him a friend, who—on that June 29th, at about 9:30—was proposing I should go with him the next week to the Ardeche, around the Gorges, to do some canoeing, to which I promptly said it wasn’t possible, keeping to myself what I thought of a week’s canoeing in the Ardeche, so as not to hurt his feelings. Instead I mentioned, which had nothing to do with it, the fact that my ex-wife had invited me to visit her in Corsica—I didn’t mention the chair—a piece of news that Marc, clearly, did not take lightly. And, because I also quickly added an extra element, an invitation to him to drop the Ardeche canoeing idea and join me on my trip, he asked me for details. I was, I admit, happy enough to have made him doubt the necessity of his plans, a doubt which he initially expressed in a careful investigation of the conditions of my trip: a big house, freedom of movement in a loose, friendly situation, rough landscape and nearby beaches, possibly a little boating, all of which, compared to canoeing in the Ardeche—which I was astonished to learn he had planned to do by himself if I did not go with him—seemed to him worthy of interest. To set him completely at ease, I made it clear that I did not expect to be getting back together with my ex-wife, to whom incidentally I would be

Christian Oster

Three Men with a Chair

returning a chair. Marc, who did not comment on this detail of my luggage, did however ask whether, if he were to accept my proposal, I would object to his also inviting along Cyril Kontcharski, an old friend of his who used to work as a tightrope walker and had since gone into banking, since I had described a big house and an apparently flexible hospitality. “Just in case you should find yourself too busy,” he explained, which I would understand, you know?” “But I don’t expect to be,” I insisted. “Marie does have a man in her life,” I added. “Oh, that I hadn’t caught,” he said. “And that’s why I am inviting you to come with me,” I went on. “Still,” Marc said, “would it be a problem if I asked Cyril Kontcharski to come? He’s hideously bored in Paris at the moment and he’s a really good guy, I would have introduced you two at some point anyway, but would that make too many, what do you think?” “No,” I said, “that won’t be too many, at least I don’t think so, Marie won’t care about one guest more or less, and I think it would suit her fine that I don’t come alone, it suits me too, I’m not saying four people, but three, I imagine that’s the maximum, but of course for me the question is more that I don’t know this Kontcharski guy, doesn’t he like canoeing?” “He doesn’t do any sports anymore,” Marc told me. “He had a fall ten years ago, but he’s got tons of circus stories, and even some about banking, he’s an amusing, easy-going guy. I think you’ll like him,” he said again, “I wouldn’t have been taking him with me to the Ardeche, of course, but with this business, I thought—” “Listen,” I told him, “I don’t know you very well, Marc, and I don’t know this Kontcharski at all yet, but I’m not against going down there as a little group, I even kind of like this solution.” “Good, if that‘s the case, I‘ll call him right away,” Marc declared without further ado. “I’ll try to arrange for you two to meet tomorrow, around seven, okay?” “All right,” I said, “seven o’clock if that works for you, where?” “At your place,” Marc proposed. So I hung up and there I was standing in the middle of the hallway, finally abandoning the closet in favor of the bathroom, which I entered, thinking it was a little early to go to bed even with a good book, although I have a good one, luckily there are books and my memories of Marie. All of a sudden I was really glad to be going, to be meeting Marie with these two men in tow, although I imagined Marie would rather see me coming down with a woman, which was actually, I thought, the intent of her invitation, well so what, it suited me to go with Marc, especially, whom I had the good fortune to not know well, which left me a little leeway, in case of any misunderstanding I could re-think, and he could always go home, I told myself, fall back on the canoeing trip or something. As to Kontcharski, he was obviously a total unknown (both as a person and the situation)—but there too I was comforted by the idea that our joint visit would turn out probably to be interesting enough, that it would cost me a minimum of energy and organization, along with the afterthought that, flanked by these two guys, recruited at the last minute, after all, on a volunteer basis, I would be traveling with backup.

Marc and Kontcharski arrived at my apartment the next night at seven exactly, I had put out some bottles and glasses. Kontcharski came in first, pushed along from the rear by Marc, who stood a few inches taller. Indeed, Kontcharski was not very tall, though not excessively small, square-shouldered but slightly stooped, his right eyelid half-closed, yet his grip firm, as if he had developed the muscles in his upper body, the lower part seeming slighter inside the thin canvas pants floating around his calves. “This is Cyril Kontcharski,” Marc told me, then pointing to me, Serge Gans, he said as he looked around the room, “This is nice, your place,” he said, “it’s so light.” “Yes, I said, it faces south,”—then I added, to Kontcharski, “Marc told you about our plan? Would you like something to drink?”

Christian Oster

Three Men with a Chair

Emmanuelle Pagano

Childish Hands

At first sight this pleasant, quite charming title appears to promise a fine poetic, childhood-filled tale. However, the story of Childish Hands is nothing but horrifying. It is the story of a girl who, throughout an entire school year, is daily and systematically raped by all the boys in her class—all but one. Time has passed and now she is the housekeeper of one of her former torturers. She writes a journal to help her overcome this history that is at the same time a collective secret, but she doesn’t succeed, always comes back to it, and even goes so far as to suggest to her employer that he give a party for all their former class mates.

Publisher: P.O.L Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Vibeke Madsen madsen@pol-editeur.fr Translation: Marjolin De Jager marjolijn@igc.org

One by one, four characters who, consciously or not, carry the secret are going to let us assess its implication. They are all women, women who have kept silent although they should have spoken up, or who don’t know but are suspicious, understanding especially inside their bodies, through their bodies, that something, some unmentionable presence, surrounds them. Through very skillful and deeply moving streams of consciousness, Emmanuelle Pagano reveals the secret and at the same time describes its concealment, which she does in a marvelous and implacable language that is both precise and sensual.

The journal No … that’s not right … start over.

I reread it from the beginning. I shouldn’t make a single mistake. I’m not his secretary but it’s the middle of the night and she’s not here, so I need to do the work. It’s always the same story when he prepares his files, last minute like this, at midnight or one in the morning. He wakes me up. There are no children so there’s no excuse. There are no children, how convenient. I type, badly.

Biography

Emmanuelle Pagano was born in 1969 in the Aveyron. Mother of three, she now lives in the Ardèche where she teaches plastic arts. Publications Les Adolescents troglodytes, P.O.L, 2007; Le Tiroir à cheveux, P.O.L, 2005; Pour être chez moi, Éditions du Rouergue, 2002 (under Emma Schaak); Pas devant les gens, La Martinière, 2004.

It’s addressed to the the Departmental Director of Facilities and I don’t know the proper business format. He ends with ‘I am … yours sincerely … bla-blabla,’ which I must somehow translate. Perhaps I should write the same thing as I did to the French Commission for the protection of the historic and rural heritage. How should I know. His files all look alike. Same goes for what he writes. One after another, and I am so bored. I don’t know how to be polite. I don’t know the aloof language of distant relationships. I feel like writing ‘blabla-bla’ but I fear his reaction, his contempt. He might become quite angry finding me so familiar, as usual. True enough, I never know the appropriate distance to keep, not in words, not in meters. Distance between people. Apparently people have to be kept at a distance. Domestic help in particular, otherwise they’ll take liberties. How I’d love to take some liberties. “Start over.” I smell his sleepless breath, replete with coffee and ill-digested resentment. Or maybe it’s me. Perhaps I’ve become so embittered that everything disgusts me. I look up, he’s right above me, his hair encrusted and disheveled.

His head is dirty. Not dirty with dirt. Dirty with men’s products. I’m beginning to find him intolerable. Lotions, colognes, things to make his hair grow, get rid of the dandruff. And yet, I used to love him, I do love him, but sometimes something about him lingers with me, smarting. I already have an incredible ear ache in my right ear. Her, I look at her with words that won’t come to me. I’d like to. He forbids me. I’d like to help her, no, not even, I’d like to be in her place. I’d like to be her. But for him, impossible. He snickers. My ear hurts, a grinding pain now. It hurts constantly. I hurt everywhere I am. Inside, outside, wherever I go, even with headphones and music to calm me down. It’s almost as if it grates at my every motion. Sometimes an amplified buzzing, depending upon my position. An unbearable murmuring sound inside the grinding. Within the pain there exists a noise. A cyclical, deep noise. And I feel something clawing at the murmur, clawing at the inside of my ear. I watch her go with a toothbrush from one faucet to another. She scrubs and smiles to herself. Every now and then she watches me watching her and smiles again, but more broadly, for me. I feel awkward and prepare to leave but she says, no, stay, there’s no harm done in watching. I don’t want to, no, that’s not it, I don’t want to check up on you. She smiles again, it doesn’t matter, she understands. He forbids me to do any housework. I’m not allowed. No laundry, nothing, barely any cooking, only when company is coming. Because that’s how it’s done, the lady of the house lays out the menu for distinguished guests. A master’s house. My husband is the last proprietor of the most important vineyard of the canton, maybe even of the administrative department. Anyway, I don’t know anything about it, he despises me enough for that. After him, no one, end of the line. Eighty-four hectares, a long line of curves, hills, some that I’ve yet to walk across. I see the pines in the distance, assume there are chestnut trees, too, even farther away. I don’t know where the boundaries of the property are. The Pierre Mauve domain, mauve stone because of the glow of the rising sun in autumn with its strange colors everywhere, on everything, on the stones, the people, the workers’ cars at dawn, the veins of the vine leaves, and the wrinkles of the seasonal farmhands; a rising sun reserved specifically for the fields right here, which doesn’t exist outside the village, you’d almost think the sun doesn’t rise the same way anywhere else.

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I always get up too late to see it. I’m ashamed of being here without any children, any chores, in a clean and empty home. Irritated, he reminds me that I am running the house. To me, running the house means nothing other than pressing myself irreverently against a load-bearing wall and irritating him even more, he who’d like to see me going after the staff, restricting, even insulting them. He talks to me about his mother’s iron grip. He talks to me about the distance that must be observed.

Emmanuelle Pagano

Childish Hands

Besides the employees of the estate and the seasonal workers who are outside, I have only her. Inside I have only her as a servant and I can say nothing bad about her. She is beyond reproach. I would like to be her. He endlessly repeats that he doesn’t ask much of me, saying I should just run the house, but that I can’t even manage that. I steady myself against a wall. It’s not the house I keep, nor does it support me. I know what he means. He wants me to uphold my status, my status as wife, my status as the wife of a great property owner. Status and name. My husband is extremely attached to the name, to the passing on of knowledge, to the winegrowing tradition, but also to the mastery of new technologies. Status, name, land, science and technology. Prestige, color, I should carry them in the manner that I walk, hold myself, talk. I should keep what he calls my distance. I have taken his name. The expected name. But the attitudes, the postures— I have such trouble embracing them. I don’t use make-up except under threat, his threat. I dress poorly. Women’s magazines bore me. I don’t dress badly, it’s just that I dress without thinking about it. He would like me to spend my days thinking. No, not thinking. Just paying attention to my thickening waist size, counting calories, taking care of my appearance, rather than thinking about nothing, as he says. What he calls thinking about nothing is my musing over a thousand things by the French window. When I spend hours without any visible activity. When I wind and unwind and rewind thoughts he can’t make head or tail of from afar because they are serpentine, they’re digressive. But I no longer confide in him. I’m done. I keep my serpents to myself. I would like to stretch them out, jot down phrases to keep them from endlessly rewinding but I don’t really know how to go about that. I’m at loose ends. I often use a walk in the vineyards as a pretext to stroll for as long as the knotted thread of my thoughts needs it. Walking for a long time keeps my thoughts from whirling back on themselves, allows them to be fixed through some

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unknown ink-less writing mystery. As if walking were writing. As if my steps were printing words somewhere, but where I don’t know, not in the soil of the vineyards, but in some invisible matter around me that is strangely supportive of my memory. Something inside me must go outside. I walk, the rosebushes at the end of the rows flutter in the autumn wind, I lay out my thoughts, they no longer rewind, they have been written, inscribed, and I remember them. Coming and going through the rows of vine stocks, changing lines and colors, toward the west on one side and toward the east when I go back, sun before me, sun behind me and, like swimmers doing laps, I turn after I’ve made the rounds of the rosebushes cooled down by the wind. Coming and going inside its colors, rows of scent that changes with the season, the hour, and the wind, thinking like back-and-forth thinking, in the air, outside. Besides, everything outside is so much more comfortable. I’m not supposed to budge inside. I’m supposed to keep my distance inside, as my husband says, sit straight, motionless, and above all not talk too much. Not think too much. Not do too much. Don’t do too much, please, my overwrought husband often requests in a very low, extremely tight voice, as if held on a leash by its desire to crack. I cannot take care of my own space, in my own home, since he forbids me to do it. I cannot occupy my own space, my own body, since he forbids me to clean. She does that.

She conscientiously scrubs the handles of the faucets with a toothbrush, she has all the time in the world, and in that conscientiousness, that time, she picks words, picks meanings, strange meanings, foreign meanings even. She arranges them. They make folds, tightly packed, un-ironed, in the back pocket of cheap jeans.

Kind of hard-core porn poems is what they were.

She comes two or three times a week, depending on the need, depending on my husband’s demands. Since I, he says repeatedly, can’t even be bothered making any demands.

I sat down with the notebook in the shady hollow of the maple trees. The shade was disrupted by rays of sun that fluctuated with the wind. The sun really irritated me enormously, but in the notebook it was darker, at least. These were not romantic schoolgirl poems about sunsets or assorted flowers. The words were as dense and harsh as her unappealing face, as moist as her blue eyes. Slopes, stones, dirt paths, a separate, entire world inside her notebook. Little paths, footpaths almost, which smelled bad, smelled of bad memories. Deletions and corrections, and a language and grammar, newly invented with each sentence, that talked about insistent hands, childish hands, and genitals with close-stitched labia, a very young girl’s genitals, with spiky hair, a chestnut husk protecting its much too immature fruit, tiny labia buried under silk threads, woven through the pubic hair by tamed caterpillars.

The old people must love spying on the school’s playground, hunching in armchairs in the lounge—overheated in the winter and too sunny in the summer—in front of the bay window that looks out over the playground where the little ones spray their disorderly mood around and occasionally turn to make

Emmanuelle Pagano

Childish Hands

I read the notebook last week. She’d taken it out of her pocket to make room for the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner before going to the next floor. It was in the cupboard with the rest of the household materials. I read it because one day I happened to ask her whether she used it to keep the house organized, our house being quite large, and that made her laugh so uproariously that it intrigued me. She disappeared on the stairs and as I rummaged through the cupboard, since my husband asks me to check and make sure she doesn’t put things aside in her bag (to steal them later), I found the notebook. I started reading, read through it, and it was so unexpected that I clutched it against me, took it away, and so it was I who stole from my housekeeper.

I don’t know if cleaning for other people is the same thing. I watch her and she continues to be an enigma in jeans. I’d like to be like her. Wearing jeans she doesn’t change for a whole week, with a filled notebook in her back pocket. So, doing housework is writing, too. I knew it. Taking care of the time and space around you, being aware of the body and space and time it occupies. Having a place.

The rest of the week she puts in hours at the Ensoleillée, the village retirement home. It’s a semi-nursing home in the renovated former middle school, completely done over for the elderly, overlooking the elementary school, still the same one and barely renovated in twenty-five years. My husband’s school.

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faces at them from a distance. Between these two generations is a forty-year old staircase of reinforced cement that, nevertheless, is threatening to fall apart.

I took them into the garden. I had a terrible ear ache and thought that maybe a bit of fresh air and some reading …

Sheer madness.

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Martin Page

Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Martine Heissat mheissat@seuil.com Translation: Armine Mortimer armine@illinois.edu

Perhaps a Love Affair

Returning home from an ordinary day at the office, Virgil finds a rather disturbing message on his answering machine: Clara informs him that she is leaving him. Virgil is used to women leaving him, for him it is even “more of a certainty than gravity,” but he has no recollection of this so-called Clara. He panics, wonders if he’s seriously ill or amnesiac, runs to his shrink, thinks again about one of those “reality accidents” that are always happening to him and asks his good friend Armelle, a fortune-teller in real life, for advice. Failing to get a satisfactory answer, he ends up making an unexpected decision: to win back this woman he doesn’t know …

Publisher: Éditions de l’Olivier

Biography

Martin Page was born in 1975. Before publishing his first novel, he went to college for a few years. A dilettante student, he changed majors every year: studying law, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, sociology, art history and anthropology. He also worked as a night watchman and a janitor at festivals, and as a monitor in middle and high schools. Nothing particular happened in his life, which left him free to write novels. He wrote the prefaces for Balzac’s Traité des excitants modernes, Oscar Wilde’s L’Âme humaine and Horst Hamann’s Paris Vertical. He likes the rain, walking in Paris, movies, jazz, cooking, Woody Allen. Perhaps a Love Affair is Martin Page’s fifth novel. His previous novels have been translated in dozens of countries. He is also a writer of books for young audiences. Publications De la pluie, Ramsay, 2007; On s’habitue aux fins du monde, Le Dilettante, 2005 (re-ed. J’ai lu, 2007); La Libellule de ses huit ans, Le Dilettante, 2003 (re-ed. J’ai lu, 2004; Une parfaite journée parfaite, Les Éditions Mutine/Nicolas Philippe, 2002; Comment je suis devenu stupide, Le Dilettante, 2001 (re-ed. J’ai lu, 2002).

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Perhaps a Love Affair is a romantic comedy whose charm rests entirely on the character of Virgil, an off-kilter, scatterbrained hero, an elegant and comical lover, a model employee but a closet rebel. He resembles the character Antoine in How I Became Stupid, although he is perhaps ten years older. Martin Page channels Boris Vian in his witty, poetic writing with a hint of Brit humor. The stories he tells, miles away from the stuff of ordinary life, are fables transporting us into reverie, humor, and constant twists and turns.

Virgil’s shoes made a clackety-clack sound on the wet pavement. He had left the Svengali Communications building later than usual. It wasn’t until the sun was setting that he noticed that the clock hung above the doorway had stopped. Situated between the Louvre, the Council of State, and the Theatre of the Comédie Française, the offices of the advertising agency where Virgil worked were in good company. The Metro station, festooned in multicolored pearls like a child’s construction for Mother’s Day, fascinated him. But Virgil did not feel any intimacy with the neighborhood. They each kept their distance and stayed on their guard, each of them aware that things could end badly. The young man claimed only two spots in this gilded section of the first arrondissement: the Delamain Bookstore and the café-restaurant À Jean Nicot, the last joint safe from the chic local clientele. He got on the bus and put in his ticket. He had stopped taking the metro in the last six months, weary of a constant feeling of oppression and occasional panic attacks. The body’s movement keeps company with the mind. Little by little, Virgil left his workday behind. Leaving the office, taking the elevator, and passing through the doors of the building were not enough. A transition was necessary. The race through traffic, the movement of the wheels of the bus and of his eyes across the panorama of pedestrians, cars, and bikes freed Virgil from his work and his colleagues. The closer he got to home, the more he felt like himself. Virgil was not always his own best company, but the cohabitation between what he thought he was, what he wanted to be, and what he really was—happened without too many fights. The bus, almost running over a bum, stopped in front of the Gare du Nord. Armelle was not at her usual table on the terrace of the Terminus Brasserie. Virgil would have liked to see her, a touch of red on her lips, a book in her hands. He would join her after dinner for a glass of wine.

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He greeted two prostitutes in front of his apartment building. They smiled and waved. His mailbox was empty. He took the stairs two at a time up to the fourth floor, opened the door of his apartment and threw his keys into the fruit bowl between the bananas and the apples. The red LED on his old cassette answering machine was flashing. Virgil liked getting messages; whether they were from friends or from kitchen equipment salesmen, they reminded him that he existed in society. But first of all, he wanted a snack. He checked the fridge: eggs, a partly empty can of peeled tomatoes, and a large population of yogurts. He broke two eggs into a frying pan, set the table, and finally pressed the play button on the answering machine. “Virgil,” said a female voice. He moved closer to the speaker the better to enjoy the enchanting melody. God had a woman’s voice, thought Virgil. The message continued: “This is Clara. I’m very sorry, but I would rather put an end to it. I’m leaving you, Virgil. I’m leaving you.” He listened to the message five more times. The eggs were burning in the frying pan. Throwing some cold water on his face, he looked at himself in the medicine cabinet mirror. He closed his eyes and opened them again after several seconds. He swallowed a tranquilizer. He went back to the kitchen and turned off the gas. The eggs, looking like two lumps of coal, gave off a pungent smoke. There are few events as painful as a breakup. The separation is lived like a meticulously planned attack, because the bomb has been placed in our heart— no way to escape the violence of the detonation. But in the present case, Virgil found out he was being left by a woman he didn’t know and with whom—as you might expect—he had no relationship. He was taking a direct hit, shocked to find himself the object of a lover’s rejection, at the same time as he understood the unreality of it. The Earth had never been a very stable heavenly body in Virgil’s mind. Certainties were few, so it mattered to him. He was a bachelor. That was obvious. He had a bachelor’s fridge, bachelor’s habits. His single status was more of a certainty than gravity. He turned his attention to the reassuring items in the room: his collection of LPs, the red and yellow poster of his parents’ circus above the couch with the sagging armrests, the can of chicory, a telephone bill stuck to the fridge by a magnet in the shape of an African elephant (its wide, triangular ears open like the wings of a butterfly, his trunk raised between his tusks). He unplugged the answering machine and left the apartment. Concentrating on each step, he descended the Boulevard de Magenta. His body was working fine; no damage to joints or muscles, blood was flowing in his veins. His brain, on the other hand, was on the verge of overheating. *

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The big black rectangular telephone answering machine remained flat against his chest during the trip to the Passage des Petites-Écuries where his psychoanalyst’s office was. The only thing in common between this neighborhood and the neighborhood of Virgil’s office was the large number of passages which gave one the possibility of escaping the busy streets. The inhabitants of the Passage des Petites-Écuries had set up chairs and a white garden table; a retired couple was tending some rose bushes, a child’s bicycle lay on the ground. Dr. Zetkin’s lair was perched on the fourth floor of the building at the corner of the courtyard. Vertical, horizontal, and diagonal beams stood out on the surface of the facade, forming a kind of web with thick brown threads. At the top, one could make out gargoyles which prevented the rainwater from soaking the wood and the plaster. In the waiting room, a young woman (in black cotton pants and jacket, her hair in a pony tail), the last patient of the day, was turning the pages of a magazine. Seeing Virgil holding a telephone answering machine to his heart seemed to make her anxious. She buried herself in her magazine. The door of the office opened; Dr. Zetkin’s hand appeared and invited the young woman to enter. Virgil hummed the latest ad slogan heard at the agency. The notes of this spot praising the health benefits of an applesauce soothed him. Usually he would review his current anxieties. He would list the subjects to bring up, put together an infallible rhetoric and prepare his reasoned rebuttals to the probable objections of Dr. Zetkin. But in the present situation he preferred to abstain from using his brain. After twenty minutes, the young woman came out. Dr. Zetkin was a woman of about 50, with salt-and-pepper hair and green tortoise-shell glasses; she was wearing a vest in fine mauve-colored wool over a cream-colored blouse, a pearl necklace, and rings set with jade and amber. The scent of Lapsang souchong impregnated the air in the office. This tea was too strong for Virgil’s taste, but he associated it so completely with his sessions that it sufficed for him to come upon its aroma for him to feel an immediate well-being. “Hello, doctor.” “You didn’t have an appointment.” With a gesture, she invited Virgil in. They sat facing each other across the desk. A teapot in red cast iron was steaming on a sideboard near the bookcase. The large, black bound calendar open in front of the doctor suggested the shape of a bird of prey in full flight. That day’s page was full of names, and Virgil’s was not among them. Monday was not his appointment day. Virgil had got beyond the period of transference, so he was not jealous of Dr. Zetkin’s other patients. On the contrary, he thought, her large number of clients should allow her to see how much more interesting he was than the horde of ordinary neurotics. The relationship you maintain with a shrink should not go off track; if she is a good professional, she will not accept the invitations to exhibits which you send her. She will be neither your friend nor your enemy.

Martin Page

Perhaps a Love Affair

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Properly speaking she is not human. “Give me a fulcrum and I will lift the earth,” said Archimedes, challenging his friends from Syracuse. In the present instance, for Virgil, it was a matter of lifting himself above his neuroses, with his psychoanalyst, the only stable element in his universe, serving as fulcrum. “I just had an accident,” said Virgil. “Oh? What kind of accident?” “An accident with reality.” More than aggressions, illnesses, and automobile accidents, reality is the great purveyor of wounds, harms, and suffering. Virgil laid the answering machine on the desk. Dr. Zetkin blinked her eyes and crossed her arms. Virgil was not following the rules. He should have stretched out on the couch. Not sat down. Not disturbed the geography of her desk. Virgil knew that Dr. Zetkin took his behavior for a symptom. He couldn’t blame her for it, because he himself was always saying that any human action (for instance, breathing) was a symptom. “Oh,” she said. As usual, her face had no expression. Virgil was able to detect nuances in her facial neutrality. There was curious neutrality, cold neutrality, and reassuring neutrality. Moreover, Dr. Zetkin had a great talent for the “Oh.” It formed the basis of her vocabulary. On occasion she would use other words, like “Fine,” “In what way?” “Yes,” and “You have forgotten to pay me.” This woman survived in society and excelled in her profession with a total of ten expressions that she used parsimoniously. After having pulled out the plug of the desk lamp in order to connect the answering machine, Virgil pressed the play button. The message played. “So this woman left you,” said the psychoanalyst. “Not exactly.” “She says so very clearly. You don’t accept it.” Dr. Zetkin thought she had put her finger on the problem. After all, they each knew as well as the other what the state of Virgil’s love life was. It was perfectly possible for him to be cast off. Like tides or the migration of wild geese, it was in the natural order of things. Virgil was almost happy to contradict her, and be right for once. “We weren’t a couple. I don’t even know her.” Dr. Zetkin took her glasses into her hands and began to clean the lenses. This case interested her. After a day of listening to classic neuroses, she had nothing against a bit of fantasy. She put her glasses back on and spread her hands to indicate interrogation. “And how do you interpret that?” “I don’t want to interpret, I want to understand.” “Oh really?” Virgil was in a safe environment. The major works of psychoanalysis occupied the shelves of the bookcase; a photo of Freud pointing his finger at the window of a train arriving in Paris in 1938 was hung behind the desk; a copy of the first

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manuscript page of his study on the Gravida by Jensen was framed on the wall; scattered about the desk were specialized journals in French and in Spanish. It pleased Virgil to think that the animistic spirits contained in these relics made the place a sanctuary. With nothing to fear, he could lift the lid off his brain. “It can’t be a mistake,” he said. “She said my first name.” Virgil’s first name was not common, he had had occasion to notice this in the schoolyard. “It might be a joke,” he continued. “And why would a woman you don’t know want to play a joke on you?” Virgil’s cell phone rang. Far too preoccupied with the present matter, he had forgotten to turn it off. Given his already high level of disobedience to the rules of his analysis, he answered the phone. It was Faustine, an old friend. “Faustine, I can’t talk to you, I am with my shrink. What? I’ll call you back.” He hung up. Things were not going well. He stared at the photograph of Freud. His hands were damp, his ears were clogging, his saliva began tasting like iron. He was having difficulty catching his breath. He felt as if he had had an accident, the victim of a pile-up with an invisible force. “I’ve already told you about Faustine?” “She is one of the women you fell in love with and who is now a friend.” Virgil had no idea why, but to become friends with a woman, it was first necessary for him to fall in love with her. “She’s just found out that Clara left me. She’s inviting me out to dinner to cheer me up.” “Think hard. Are you certain that you have never encountered a Clara?” The doctor observed Virgil, her eyes half closed. Had the narrow boundary between reality and fiction been breached? Virgil concentrated on a breathing exercise learned in his yoga class. A memory surfaced. It was a month ago, at a party at Maud’s. Each weekend, Maud would take over her parents’ immense apartment for her parties. Their chief quality was their decibel level, preventing the too many guests from hearing the banalities they were trying to exchange. Virgil had been drinking. Faustine had grabbed him by the sleeve, she wanted to introduce a girl to him. He could see his friend saying her first name while waving around a large cocktail glass: Clara. But Virgil didn’t remember her face or their conversation. In any case, nothing happened. Virgil told Dr. Zetkin about the episode. “Maybe you kissed her and she misinterpreted your gesture.” “I shake hands with women. Especially when I’m drunk. Otherwise my lips tend to wander all over their faces. Could I have had a love affair with her without realizing it?” “You are not crazy.” This assertion floored Virgil. All of a sudden, without any warning, his psychoanalyst, a woman he had been seeing three times a week for five years, was snatching him away from one of his anxieties.

Martin Page

Perhaps a Love Affair

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Gisèle Pineau

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Morne Câpresse

Publisher: Mercure de France Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Bruno Batreau bruno.batreau@mercure.fr Translation: Linda Coverdale ljcoverdale@aol.com

“You’re not saying that to reassure me?” “You pay me for my objectivity.” Virgil’s telephone rang again. It was Nadia. The conversation was quick: Faustine had brought her up to date on the breakup. A beep signified another call. He put Nadia on hold. It was Faustine again. He promised his friends that he would call them back later. Dr. Zetkin was taking notes. “I don’t feel very good,” said Virgil, after having turned off his phone. He felt like vomiting and fainting at the same time. Something was wrong and he didn’t know what. His intuition told him it was serious and that his life would be radically changed. “Go home and rest.” “That won’t solve anything.” “Not everything gets solved.” There was no urgency. Dr. Zetkin guessed that time would bring explanations. Virgil was also anticipating the next installment of these events, but not as a spectator. The psychoanalyst tapped her fountain pen against the edge of her desk. “I don’t know if there is any connection,” Virgil hazarded, “but I have been feeling dizzy lately. And I feel nauseated.” He needed to find the meaning of what was happening to him. Illness had always been his refuge of choice when he felt overwhelmed. “Do you really want to be sick?” “I’m trying to understand what is happening.” “You think so?” Virgil had the impression that his blood had coagulated in his veins. Spots of light floated in front of his eyes. “As a precaution,” he said, swallowing with difficulty, “you could prescribe some tests.” “If that’s what you want.” The doctor put down enough words on the prescription page that it didn’t look like “some tests.” Among his many talents, Virgil possessed the rare gift of reading “scanner” upside down. “A scanner?” said Virgil. “Don’t worry.” “Don’t worry” is certainly the most worrisome phrase in the entire French language. Virgil glanced out the window. The Passage des Petites-Écuries was now plunged into darkness. He had no desire to leave, he wanted to stay in this room and snuggle into the plaid blanket on the couch. Dr. Zetkin opened the door. Virgil left, his arms pressed against his torso. He took the best lit and busiest streets; he walked by the snack bars on the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis to take advantage of the lights from the shops and the smells of frying from the kebab stands. The least manifestation of human life was precious to him.

Biography

Gisèle Pineau was born in Paris in 1956 but spent much of her youth far from Guadeloupe, her parents’ native country. For her, France was the country of her exile, and the racism and intolerance she experienced in France as she grew up would later inform her work. In 1975 she attended the Université de Nanterre, where she studied modern literature, which she abandoned for a career as a psychiatric nurse. She married and went to live in Guadeloupe, where she worked as a nurse at the Centre Hospitalier de Saint Claude for almost twenty years. Gisèle Pineau brings her style and her perspective to the condition of women in the West Indies, and she writes eloquently of their suffering, the violence they endure, and their secret hopes. Publications Fleur de Barbarie, Mercure de France, 2005 (prix Rosine-Perrier) (re-ed. Gallimard, 2007); Chair Piment, Mercure de France, 2002 (prix des Hémisphères-Chantal Lapicque) (re-ed. Gallimard, 2004); L’Âme prêtée aux oiseaux, Stock, 1998 (prix Amerigo-Vespucci, 1998) (re-ed. LGF, 2001); L’Exil selon Julia, Stock, 1996 (prix Terre de France, 1996) [Trans. by Betty Wilson as Exile according to Julia, U. of Virginia Press, 2003] (re-ed. LGF, 2000); L’Espérance-macadam, Stock, 1995 (prix RFO, 1996) [Trans. by C. Dickson as Macadam Dreams, U. of Nebraska Press, 2003] (re-ed. LGF, 1998); La Grande Drive des esprits, Le Serpent à plumes, 1993 (prix Carbet de la Caraïbe, Grand Prix des lectrices de Elle, 1994) [Trans. by Michael Dash as The Drifting of Spirits, Quartet, 2000] (re-ed. coll. “Motifs”, 1999).

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About a quarter of a nautical mile from Pointe à Pitre, high atop Morne Câpresse,1 a mysterious community lives in a Garden of Eden created as if out of thin air. Founded and led by Sister Pâcome, the Congregation of the Daughters of Ham2 is a community that shelters and cares for women wounded by life: alcoholics, drug addicts, prostitutes, murderers … In a soothing atmosphere of peace, dozens of sisters are working, all accomplishing specific tasks imposed by an inflexible hierarchy.

Searching for her sister Mylène, who has disappeared, Line turns in desperation to the Daughters of Ham, but has no idea what awaits her when she arrives at the summit of Morne Câpresse. Deaf to her pleas, obsessed with the observance of their order’s rituals, the sisters hardly lift a finger to help Line, who disturbs the calm discipline of the community, badgering the sisters relentlessly with her unwelcome questions. Behind the idyllic facade, it’s just possible that all these women are not as pure as they seem …

I 1. A morne is a steep hill or small mountain of volcanic origin; a câpresse is the daughter of a mulatto and a black woman. 2. Ham was the son Noah cursed in the Bible as the father of a race of slaves.

3. A chabine is a woman of mixed race with “high yellow” coloring: light skin; sometimes green, blue, or gray eyes; and often wavy or curly reddish or blond hair.

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They’ve been like that for as long as I’ve known them, fighting over the slightest thing. Those two dogs, Faith and Hope, they belong to the Mother Superior, Sister Pacôme. Don’t you fret: they growl and flash their fangs, but they’re hardly mean at all, really. Just grumpy, those animals, and no more dangerous than humans. You may call me Sister Lucia—that’s what everyone’s been calling me for almost eighteen years now. Ever since the day I met Pacôme. Oh, long time ago. Back in the nineties. You remember, those years when people were starting to talk about slavery again and getting so wrought up. When that whole past heaved back to the surface like filth we thought was buried forever. But maybe all this means nothing to you. These days, talking about our slave ancestors is a common enough thing. No one gets hot and bothered over that anymore. You were probably too young, tangled up in your mother’s skirts, clinging to her breasts. Nowadays it seems natural to link the horrors of the past to the torments of the present. At the time, I swear to you, folks didn’t see that relation between cause and effect … To tell the truth, Pâcome—it was she who found me. When she returned to Guadeloupe, she set out to locate everyone in her family. I’m only her half-sister, you know. It’s Faith that’s the oldest of the two dogs. They’re males. The only ones you’ll find around here. Us, we take in only females, fallen women, girls who are lost, blacks and chabines (high yellow women)3 and even mulattresses. One time, we had a Métropolitaine, a woman from that race of messed-up Whites who fetch up down here in Guadeloupe from the home country. Too much looking for paradise on earth, and they wind up in hell instead. We are not racists in the Congregation. We don’t make any distinction between Blacks and Whites, don’t judge just by eye. Don’t look at the color, only at the depth

of distress. Our arms and hearts, they’re wide open, here. Didn’t stay long, that white girl. One day she packed her stuff into a bundle and took that road back to France. She’d promised to send news and to return, just a question of settling some things in Besançon. She was from over there, yes. ‘Las, we never heard from her again. Not even a postcard. If I remember correctly, her name was Jennifer. Yes, that’s it. Jennifer. Pâcome had rechristened her Sister Jenny, from the Genie of the lamp, you know. Genie … because that Jennifer, she had ideas about everything and stuck her opinion in everywhere. Oh, I’ve seen a parade of women through here. Too many to count. In the early days of the Congregation of the Daughters of Ham, I kept the book. A kind of register in which I noted each new arrival. Wrote down everything: family name, first name, date of birth, reason for the request for shelter. There were so, so many … Sister Jenny had taken over this task after me. When she went off, another one, I forget her name, kept the book. I could have taken it on again, but something like a thread had been broken, seemed to me. And then I didn’t have the time. It’s Sister Regina who keeps the records now. She’ll ask you for your names and dates and all the trimmings. No, I hadn’t the time anymore … A whole lot of girls would arrive pregnant. It was my job to look after them. No, I can’t say how many women we had staying here. Some days, there’d be four or five turning up all at once. Had to delouse them, bathe them, feed them, take care of them. Many came straight from the mangrove swamps, stinking of stagnant water, reeking of rotting crab. People would drop them off by the side of the road with a letter to Sister Pacôme. Please, Holy Mother Pacôme, kindly take in this poor creature. A few sous in an envelope, now and again. No, we’ve never run out of work around here. No, we are not a mendicant order. Oh, yes, I was telling you: we’re only half-sisters, Pacôme and myself. By the same father. Charles Débaury … When she left France and landed here, at the end of 1990, it was to attend her dying mother in her very last days. After the funeral, she did nothing but look for her brothers and sisters, the ones our father had sown the length and breadth of Guadeloupe, between our mamas’ thighs. He was still on this earth at the time. Almost eighty, the old bugger. To look at him, you’d never have guessed he’d been a lady-killer in his salad days. Diabetes had robbed him of one eye, and his sight had suffered some. He was still well-built, but bent with age. And along he went, bowed as if crushed beneath the whole mass of hatred from the men he’d cuckolded and the women he’d taken and abandoned. Pacôme and I, we figured he’d been partial to married ladies. He certainly did have children with a few girls off on their lonesome, but most of our brothers and sisters are bastards bearing the name of a man who’s not their father. He walked with a cane, the rascal. And he looked pitiful. So much so that folks would give him their place in line at the post office, bring him a chair, treat him with respect,

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simply because he had white hair and the gentle eyes of a sheep. Yes, that’s the custom in our country. We respect old people, without really knowing why. It’s traditional. And it’s what we teach the children. To respect oldsters. And we don’t try to learn what their younger days were like. We don’t fuss over finding out if those old guys lived a dog’s life, if they chased down women for the fun of it, if they had sheathed their swords in places they shouldn’t have, if they stole, killed, plotted with witch doctors in the happy times of their youth. No, without even imagining that they might have had vices, we rush to grant them absolution. All that, because they are walking around like the living dead, with their stumbling lil’ steps, their white hair, and their eyes that don’t see too well anymore. Pacôme, when she got back from France, she plagued him till he gave up the truth. At first, she used to sit next to him, all nice, on a stool. She was forty-one years old and called him Papa Charles, to soften him up. Asked him to recite the litany of his memories. You know, like those Negropolitans who discover the land of their roots, eyes wide with wonder at every tiny thing. Pacôme smiled her smile of the good girl so pleased to have found her father, who’s like a god in her eyes. So, old Charles believed there was no bad blood between them, and he told her his life story, as she’d asked, her swearing that it was so’s she could get to know him better, make up for lost time. That’s how he walked into the trap. Starting off warily, Papa Charles was stingy with words, releasing lil’ no-account stories, short ones that hid the whole point, disguised the essential part, children’s fairy tales where the ogres are Prince Charmings and orgies become picnics. She flattered him about his conquests and encouraged him to speak freely. From what she told me, it livened him up considerably. After not too long, something woke up inside him, like something from his youth. And he straightened up, threw out his chest, opened the floodgates. And while he was going on and on like a Creole Don Juan, Pacôme was thinking about Clémence, her black drudge of a mother who’d worn herself out working on a sugar-cane plantation. She thought about those crack-of-dawns when she’d see her mother leave looking worse than a beggar woman in her threadbare clothes. She thought about the debt ledger in the store. About the debt that never went away. The debt that had eaten up Clémence’s insides. The debt that had twisted her entrails. The debt that had outlived her mother. She thought about the pine coffin where Clémence was boxed up. About the coffin buried deep in the cemetery dirt. Pacôme, she had rage in her belly. But Papa Charles took her for a simple soul. After all, she was his flesh and blood. A woman grown, now. A good sort of daughter who’d just buried her mother, who could understand her old father’s youthful mistakes, who could forgive. That’s how Pacôme lured him into her net. Old Charles, after three days he gave up sugarcoating-talking his tales. He stopped lying to himself. It was as if he’d been waiting for that moment for a long time, as a kind of deliverance,

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you understand. You’d have said he was talking to himself all on his own. Alone, in front of a mirror showing him that dog’s life of his. And it reinvigorated him to roll around in the mud of his youthful amorous exploits. He saw himself once more, his dick standing at attention, always ready to serve his life of debauchery. According to Pacôme, his eyes glittered with the gleam of vice. The last times she saw our father, he was in worse shape than a crab without claws. She’d stand before him like a judge in a court of law. And he would tremble when she questioned him. His whole body would quiver beneath Pacôme’s condemnation. He would swear that Clémence had been his favorite, even the love of his life, even that he’d thought of her with longing every day, even that he’d tried to find her in every woman he’d possessed after her. But Pacôme wouldn’t fall for that. She would stamp around glaring belligerently at him as if at any moment she might leap at his throat, beat him up, stick a knife right in his heart. No, she wasn’t there to chat with her dear papa. She had no time to lose, Pacôme. And he figured that he’d best give her some names, rummage through his memory to satisfy her. Then he would grip his cane like someone who has fallen into a raging river, who grabs a rotten branch already knowing he will not escape death and that his body will be swept away by the water, will fill up with all that water. No, Pacôme was pitiless. But what do you expect, the old man was simply reaping what he had sown. Took her ten days to wrest from him the names of the women he’d impregnated. All of them. Especially the married ones who’d deceived their husbands. And brought children of adultery into the world. And found religion, turned into church hens, choir ladies, the servants of priests. That’s how she found us all, after having found him, Charles Débaury. You understand, Pacôme, when she’d returned from France to bury her mother, she had no one left. Before dying of intestinal cancer, as if to relieve herself of a great weight, Clémence had given Pacôme her father’s name. For the first time. You should know that Pacôme had grown up with the mystery of this father. At the time, you weren’t supposed to ask grownups questions like that. To ask for explanations. Wasn’t polite. You risked getting a slap that would unscrew your head from your neck. Clémence Échard, Pacôme’s mother, had been sixteen when her path crossed that of old Charles. I think he was well on the far side of thirty. Already had a reputation as a great cocksman. But you know what women are like—they always fall for those honeyed words that lulls good sense to sleep. Clémence quickly succumbed to the charms of father Charles. She didn’t have any other men in her life, Clémence. Didn’t go with other smooth-talking males after handsome Charles. Many did turn up. Stalking her like wild animals smelling fresh meat. But Clémence never noticed them. For her whole life she lived like a creature beaten down by a curse. A woman stunned by what’s happened to her and who can’t get out from under her bad luck. She raised Pacôme on her own. Never even tried to put herself

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Olivier Rolin

A Lion Hunter

back in the glib philanderer’s path. Never tried to wheedle three sous for her first Communion or back-to-school supplies. Never had the strength to call him to account or pay him back in his own coin. And yet she knew which shanty was his. They lived in the same district. But it was almost as if that piece of her life had never existed. As if she’d dug a hole in her memory. Laid that time to rest. And then rolled a big rock over the mouth of that hole. She hadn’t been able to leave this world with her secret, though. In the end, she’d had to open up to Pacôme. She’d had to set herself free. And when she’d gone down into the hole to unearth the name of Charles Débaury, you’d better believe the wind shifted and a new day dawned. It was there, at her mother’s bedside, that Pacôme had the vision of the Congregation. All at once, she saw her future in that just-discovered past. She already had her voices, you know. The voices of angels, and of our ancestors’ spirits … That day, the angels whispered to her that her mission had begun. From that moment on, she was called Holy Mother Pacôme. No, she would not be leaving again for France. She hadn’t purchased a return ticket, I might add. There, before her dying mother, she vowed to remain in Guadeloupe to carry out the work commanded of her by God. You know, she was touched by grace, Pacôme. Believe me, it’s not for nothing that people worship her.

Publisher: Éditions du Seuil Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Martine Heissat mheissat@seuil.com

Translation: Bill Cloonan bcloonan@fsu.edu (bio/biblio/argu) Jane Todd fmost@aol.com

Biography

Olivier Rolin was born in 1947. He studied classical literature in Senegal, then in Paris. He earned a master’s degree in philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure on rue d’Ulm. From 1967 to 1974, he was involved in the Gauche prolétarienne (Proletarian left) movement, becoming its “military chief.” He devoted a novel to that period with Tigre en papier (2002), which was very well received. He has been an editor at Éditions du Seuil since the late 1970s, where he is a member of the review board. In the 1980s and 1990s, he wrote for various newspapers, either as a literary critic (Libération and Le Figaro) or as a reporter at large in Argentina, Poland, Colombia, Chad, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and other places (Le Nouvel Observateur, Libération, Le Monde). His writings figure among the most important in French literature and have been translated into some fifteen languages. publications Published by Éditions du Seuil: Suite à l’hôtel Crystal, 2004; Tigre en papier, 2002 (prix France Culture); Méroé, 1998; Port-Soudan, 1994 (prix Femina); L’Invention du monde, 1993; Bar des flots noirs, 1987; Phénomène futur, 1983. All these books have been reprinted in the “Point” series.

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In 1881, two years before his death, Édouard Manet did a portrait of a colorful contemporary figure, Eugène Pertuiset, a lion hunter in Algeria when the mood struck him, but also a mesmerizer, explorer, inventor, and arms trafficker, activities that would lead to many journeys in South America and to his first attempt to explore Tierra del Fuego. That Portrait of Pertuiset, the Lion Hunter, earned the artist a Salon prize. The two men were close, and the adventurer had the good taste to be a collector of Manets. It is the adventures of Pertuiset, fantastic and rather farcical, that Olivier Rolin recounts, combined with various episodes from

Manet’s life. It is also a journey through space (colonial Algeria, Lima, Valparaiso, Tierra del Fuego), time (the Paris of Napoleon III, the war of 1870, the Commune), and literary memories (Baudelaire, Zola, Maupassant, and others). A novel that moves along in a very rhythmic series of colorful scenes or tableaux. Rolin has not written a classic novel, but rather intercuts his narrative with evocations of personal memories that take him back twenty-five years to when, as a journalist, he surveyed the Latin American continent. “The lion you hunted, the Tierra del Fuego you explored, the treasure you sought was, as always, lost time.”

I The taste of monkey flesh The vast, ruddy Pertuiset had been in business with a certain Jules Gérard, an ex-officer in a spahi regiment whom the local yokels had adorned with the title “lion slayer.” He was a little Provençal (born in Pignans, in the Var), rather slight, but full of sang-froid and imagination. Together they resembled Laurel and Hardy or a miniscule Don Quixote next to a colossal Sancho. Together they conceived a project for an “International African Society” (all his life, Pertuiset came up with these fabulous schemes which would never amount to anything. There was a little Courtial des Péreires in him—the inventor in Céline’s Death on the Installment Plan. Maybe it was this naïveté, this childish facility to get excited about nothings which touched Manet). The essential idea was to recruit local hunters to eliminate animals whose ferocious lifestyles gravely damaged colonial enterprises (particularly stockbreeding). However the company also touted more sophisticated and educational goals, for instance, “to make easy and attractive excursions in North Africa and the Sudan,” and capture a certain number of wild beasts with nets, traps with springs and counterweights, cages on wheels, etc., in order to sell them to zoos or exhibit them to the idle rich in spas or other vacation spots, and finally “to offer naturalists subjects for study, and to painters, sculptors, architects and engravers, good models of the great cats”: all this is written in the statutes of the International African, which will never see the light of day. Jules Gérard, who prided himself on contacts with the English court, had appeared in a spahi uniform at the Royal Geographical Society. He was hoping to collect money and prestigious patrons, but he was taken for a clown, and he left London provided with some vague promises after having wasted his

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associate’s money. When Pertuiset got weary of coughing up money, the “lion slayer” came up with the nutty idea of getting himself named generalissimo of the armies of the king of Dahomey. This phantasmagoria had it epilogue in some backwater in Sierra Leone, into which his negro escort had thrown the native of Pignans (Var), tied hand and foot. “His corpse was transported to Freetown,” writes Pertuiset in his eulogy, itself rather ambiguous, in honor of his associate, “where everyone was eager to pay the ultimate tribute to this intrepid traveler; the funeral service was very moving, and the entire consular corps, accompanied by officers from the naval station, and followed by a large crowd of Europeans and locals, escorted the convoy”: a sentence worth being cited in so far as it brings together all sorts of pious lies and commonplaces: the tribute is “the ultimate,” the traveler “intrepid,” the funeral service “moving,” etc. Throughout his multi-faceted career, Pertuiset would experience an irresistible inclination toward the emphatic cliché. The “large” crowd consisted of the French Consul himself, a gendarme, two “boys” and two prisoners, pulled out of the local slammer to serve as pallbearers. The consul and the gendarme wore pith helmets with chin straps, and large mustaches, the boys and the pallbearers were hatless and clean-shaven. Everyone staggered along under the effect of the sun and palm wine. The assassins were caught, or in any case some bums who could pass for assassins and received a punishment that was naturally, “exemplary” (the boy of one of your seven uncles had apparently assassinated him by spreading in his cassoulet flecks of finely cut lion mustache—as if they were chives: the result, fatal peritonitis. That was supposed to have happened on the banks of the Niger River, about twenty years before you were born. The boy had been executed. Now, you never knew what your uncle had done to merit such a seasoning by his boy—you have to think he went over the limits, as wide as they were, which colonial society established for Whites. You don’t even know what he was up to on the banks of the Niger River, the mustached-up uncle—business, to be sure. In any case, he wasn’t a soldier. It’s one of the poetic consequences of the passing of time: the witnesses die, then those who heard the stories told, silence reigns, lives fade into oblivion, the little not lost turns into a novel which has, thus, to deal with death). Before embarking at Marseilles for his last voyage, the unfortunate spahi had sent Pertuiset a letter in which he bequeathed to him, in the event something went wrong, his title of “lion slayer.” This is strange, a little as if Manolete had transmitted to his barber the honorific of matador de toros, just in case, but that’s the way it was: Pertuiset suddenly discovered himself to be the “lion slayer,” without ever having seen one (Jules Gérard, before his regrettable demise, had knocked off dozens). He was not, however, the sort of man to allow the rights to his title to lapse, all the more since others would be happy to rip it off. The fellow named Bombonnel, for instance, an adventurer from Dijon whose vaudeville name in no

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way foreshadowed a career of terror in the savannahs, yet who flattered himself to be “the panther slayer.” As everyone will tell you, from panther to lion is just a small step: he had to beat out this guy from Burgundy quickly. He sets sail on the Mersey, a liner belonging to the Imperial Freight Transport Company, providing service between Marseilles and Algiers, then, once at Algiers, it’s the corvette Gorgone, bound for Philippeville. It’s the very beginning of 1865, January or February. From Philippeville, it’s a trip to the little city of Jemmapes, whose outskirts, he is assured, are teeming with marauding lions. A little while ago the stagecoach from Philippeville was blocked by two big cats lying across the road and taking obvious pleasure in frightening the horses and travelers (the idea of a stagecoach on Algerian roads seems strange, just like the fact that there did exist over there a city with such a French name as Jemmapes—today it’s called Azzaba. A country one can call one’s own, maybe that’s it: a country where images from the past can be conjured up without too much difficulty from the recesses of those of the present. Where the landscape can evoke the past. You will go as far as Tierra del Fuego to witness the acting out of the lion slayer’s other muddleheaded adventures, but not to the other side of the Mediterranean: Algeria seems to you farther away than Patagonia. The physical world is a sphere, not the human world. Fortunately there’s the Internet and a site which offers post cards from colonial Algeria. Houses with tiled roofs run along streets cut at right angles, with sidewalks filled with turbaned djellabas and jackets with straw hats, all under the curving arch of palm trees: that’s what Jemmapes looked like at the beginning of the last century, about forty years after Pertuiset killed the lion that Manet would paint, spread out on the blue earth of a Montmartre garden, a hole behind the left eye. The Grand HôtelTerminus, where he doubtless stayed, is a sort of Provencal farmhouse, with no upstairs, extended by a rustic veranda, with an arbor, under which you can barely make out individuals wearing hats and white shorts. Rue Sidi-Nasar, place de Bône, rue Combes, rue Nationale, rue des Vétérans 1870-1871, under a white sky across which flies the female sower on the five centime stamp. On the “panoramic view” someone wrote: “Receive from your beloved who will love you always the gentlest, most sincere kisses, which he sends to you from some godforsaken hole in Algeria.” It’s mind-boggling to think that this guy, who makes no spelling errors and who forms the “d” like the letter “delta” in ancient Greek (a prof?), actually existed in flesh and blood, along with the girl to whom he sent kisses). Pertuiset sets out on the hunt without delay: that means attaching a cow to a stake in one of the cork oak forests which cover the hills around Jemmapes, then wait nearby, hidden in the bushes all night. Thus begins an incredible series of failures, mistakes, screw-ups, disasters, missed chances—an extended fiasco, one episode after another. One evening, he sets out accompanied by a colonial, Baron S. The baron, lacking confidence clambers up a tree, turning

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himself into Calvino’s “perched baron,” wiggles about and makes noise, because he takes the hooting of owls for the cries of a gang of Arabs getting ready to off them, he’s so scared he takes a shit in his pants, it’s the beshatted baron. On another occasion the guide, Salah, accidentally injures himself and dies. Result: village riot. The lions play with him, neglect his bait, and are going to be calmly munching on the colonials’ cattle while he is hiding in the rain, in the event he has one in his sights his carbine misfire, he gets lost all night long in a prickly thicket from which he is extracted by his dog, clothing in tatters, an event to which we are indebted for this glorious pronouncement: “Dogs are worth more than most men. They are intelligent and grateful.” (Vialatte will remember these words when he writes: “What’s best in a man, a moralist used to say, is his dog.”) He goes and finds a Moslem hermit who, after consulting Allah, gives him a tip worth its weight in gold: “tomorrow night the lions will come to drink at a spring called the “Fountain of the Kabyles.” He gets there and falls sound asleep in the middle of the hunting blind. In the morning he cannot count the numerous animal tracks. He winds up wounding a lion, but the injured beast flees, he only manages to find his remains several days later, putrefied and torn to pieces by vultures. He shouts into a watering can trying to imitate the roar of the king of the beasts, a waste of time, no lionesses in heat are turned on. The local villages laugh at him, each of his evening outings is greeted by a chorus of hoots, he gets angry, the laughter increases, as do the jibes in Arabic which he does not understand, but whose general sense he grasps. He turns crimson. His enormous bulk prevents people from throwing rocks at him, or if they do, it’s from a distance, from behind the safety of a low wall. Every evening, when the blue of the night begins to wash away the puddles of blood from the setting sun, he sets out, accompanied by jeers he pretends not to understand, from kids cutting up whom he affects not to see. A faint pink light filters through the darkness of the leaves. He’s wearing baggy pants squeezed into his boots or leggings, a jacket pulled tight by a large belt with pockets filled with shells, little cigars, and cough lozenges, he has the rifle on his shoulder, on his head a felt hat with a jay feather. His shadow is immense. A villager accompanies him, pulling at the end of a rope an emaciated cow, who stops from time to time to snap up a tuft of grass. After more than one hundred nights of lying in wait in vain, he goes back to France, but he’s an obstinate guy, and he returns the next November. A pride of four lions have just taken care of eight steers belonging to a rich colonial on the Soukaras road. The gang of four was led by an enormous “black lion,” that the peasants have feared for about thirty years (you didn’t know that lions can be black or gray, you thought they were all yellow, or rather yellowish. But Pertuiset is categorical: the black lion is the aristocrat of lions. Top of the line, as they say these days. Besides, you remember that during your childhood there was a shoe polish called, “Black Lion,” sold in round tins you opened with the turning

Olivier Rolin

A Lion Hunter

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key on the side; in your grandmother’s house it was packed together with other “cleaning products” among which, who knows why, “Miror”, with its growling name, seemed to you the most prestigious, in a place under the stairs called “the vault” which frightened you, because it was dark and haunted with spiders, and you were forbidden to touch anything there. Did anyone threaten to lock you in that thing? Maybe, but you can’t be completely sure). One day, a colonial named Faufilet tells him that the gang of four killed and half devoured a horse. He takes up his post there off to the side, with a handkerchief soaked in vinegar over his nose because the carcass stinks terribly. “Baudelaire himself,” he writes to Manet, “would not know how to even give an idea of the stench emanating from this rotting corpse”: he’s slightly lettered. And then finally, fortune smiles on him: around midnight the black lion shows up for dinner, crushing the bones, sounding like a millstone, groaning with satisfaction. Without an instant of hesitation, he shots the lion behind the left eye, a little underneath. Jumps, convulsions, terrible roars, earth churned up by claws, branches broken, the wounded big cat throws itself into the thicket, but could not go far. Pertuiset returns to the village, busts up a new cot (he has already broken about a dozen) in the Grand-Hôtel-Terminus, or somewhere else. He falls asleep like a rock, his enormous boots still on his feet, his hat thrown under the bed, he’s happy, when he will have skinned the beast, which he will do shortly, he will finally be able to claim the inheritance of the Pignans (Var) native. Bombonnel can eat his heart out, dare I say! Soon, he dreams of lions. His prodigious snores awaken, in the room next door, a white father recently arrived from Marseilles, who has no recourse but to read his breviary. Except that, when he arrives at daybreak with a cart at the scene of the crime, nothing’s there. No more lion. Pools of blood here and there, that’s it. He looks all over, searches the surroundings, cuts himself to pieces going back and forth through the thorn bushes, nothing. Nada. The next day a villager comes forth to denounce two others who skinned the carcass at night, in order to sell the pelt. They are summoned to the Arab Bureau at Bône, at first they deny it, then confess they have already sold the skin to a little sheikh; some threats and a little money take care of everything, and Pertuiset can entrust his trophy to a certain Caesar, a part time taxidermist at Jemmapes (this asocial guy, who spends most of his time in the woods, nourishing himself from the harvest and the hunt, is an exiled Republican; Pertuiset suspects he’s a cannibal, not due to his political convictions, but because one day he asked him what monkey flesh tasted like, and he responded without missing a beat that it was like human flesh). Manet will be able to paint the pelt fifteen years later when it is stretched out in the garden of the former rectory for the church of SaintJean-l’Évangéliste, in the tiny street, L’Élysée-des-Beaux-Arts, where the lion slayer lives. It measured four meters, forty centimeters from the snout to the tip of the tale. Mr. Godde, director of the newspaper, Le Jockey, measured it.

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(l’Élysée-des-Beaux-Arts is called today rue André-Antoine. The former rectory, at number 14, is a large white house, crowned by a pediment flanked by two skylights, and right up against the incline, quite abrupt at this point, of the Montmartre hill. When you go there, a fat broad was just coming out, closing the door behind her. You approach her as suavely as you can to ask her if there is a garden in back. A what? A garden? She doesn’t know (with a very suspicious look). Bitch. On the rue des Abbesses side, behind the house, the slope is such that the street is a little above the roof. A concrete stairway with a metallic framework descends to the bottom of a sort of very deep well, you manage to get down there thanks to a less paranoid resident. At the bottom, this little paved courtyard overhung by the concrete stilts of the church of Saint-Jean de Montmartre was undoubtedly the garden where, one day in 1881, Manet had the black lion skin arranged on the blue earth under the trees with violet shadows). Let’s go on.

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Caroline Sers

Small Sacrifices

Spanning the period from 1914, the end of the Belle Époque, to 1950, a postwar era where nothing would ever be the same, Small Sacrifices recounts the story of the Dutilleuls, an affluent middle-class family proud of its position and standing. Charlotte Dutilleul is only a child in 1914. She grows up haunted by the memory of what transpired at a reception hosted by her parents the very day Jaurès was assassinated. The double tragedy that evening will forever tarnish the Dutilleul name. When she reaches adulthood, Charlotte is “sacrificed” for the sake of the family—married off to Alain Bouillard, the son of a wealthy

Publisher: Buchet-Chastel Date of Publication: September 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Christine Legrand christine.legrand@buchet-chastel.fr

Translation: Paul Raymond Côté prc@videotron.ca

Biography

After studying literature, instead of taking a trip around the world, Caroline Sers began working in publishing (at XO, Cherche-Midi, Omnibus, and Albin Michel). Publications Published by Buchet-Chastel: La Maison Tudaure, 2006 (re-ed. LGF, 2008); Tombent les avions, 2004 (prix du Premier Roman).

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businessman. It is a terrible match, but it enables the Dutilleuls to keep their property, which is about to be seized. Years later, Charlotte is distraught, forced to make a painful decision in order to avoid abandoning everything she believes in. Small Sacrifices is a novel of suspense built around a family secret. The more they are exposed to History’s twists and turns, the less the characters can maintain the illusion that renders their survival possible. This novel confirms Caroline Sers’ longstanding fascination with family relationships and the tragedies they sometimes spawn.

“Papa! Papa! Come see. Quick! I found something!” The little girl who was yelling must have been around eight and was holding her shoes in her hand as she ran toward the house. A few strands of hair had escaped from the brown braids framing her face. Her rosy cheeks were an indication of her good health. She was coming out of a grove of various kinds of trees at the far end of the grounds. Pulled away from his work by his daughter’s shouting, Henri watched her approach lovingly. Marie had better not see her in that state! The little girl would surely be subjected to a lesson on behavior that would make her as unhappy as could be. He sat up straight in his chair and squinted to have a better look at his youngest child. From his vantage point in front of the house, he could see the whole yard, extending all the way down to the river. He loved this spot, shaded by the long narrow building and bathed in the sweet smell of vegetation. White rose bushes were growing at the front of the building; their elegant simplicity enhancing the peacefulness of the house. Its monotony had been broken by the addition of a little steeple and seated dogs. Henri had insisted on adding his own touch, but avoided making any drastic changes. He had a pergola built on the south side, surrounded by mock orange trees whose fragrance in the spring he found delightful. And, to the cook’s joy, he had a new stove installed in the pantry. Then, once he decided he had left his mark on the house, he stopped making alterations. Marie was constantly after him to get this or that change made, arguing that they had to keep up with the times and show off their social status, but she was never able to persuade him. It was the only thing he was intransigent about and his wife concluded that it would be wiser not to carry it as far as making a scene, preferring instead to save her energy for more important issues. After all, the house was magnificent and the changes she wanted were minor. And so, each day Henri reveled in the joy

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of being master of a home he had always known and loved. As he watched his daughter run, he was enveloped by the pleasant scent of roses, giving that moment a sense of tranquility that nearly brought him to tears. He loved seeing his daughter like that, her hair in disarray, jubilant, happy, and not at all like her mother wanted her to be. She was so funny when she would tell him her little stories, her discoveries or her schemes for getting out of her lessons. But Marie didn’t view things the same way. “She’s a little animal,” she used to say, “and she needs to be trained.” Henri would sigh and not answer, preferring instead to go back to his workshop. Marie had done an admirable job of raising her first two children, Pierre and Jean, and although Geneviève was just fourteen, she was already beginning to look like a young lady. She could spend entire afternoons hunched over her work next to her mother without thinking about gathering turtledove eggs or admiring anthills. Henri had realized he was not equipped to mold his sons’ character, just as he was not capable of turning his daughters into respectable individuals. His wife was constantly criticizing him, saying “You give them everything they want.” And he had to agree. Besides, there was no way he could explain to Marie how, on the one hand, he wanted his children to honor their station in life—a perfectly normal desire—yet, at the same time could feel such affection for their youngest’s mischievousness. “She’s going to grow up, Henri,” Marie would always tell him, “and soon she’ll be nothing more than an uncontrollable savage. You’ll see, the day you find out it’s impossible to find her a suitable match!” There was nothing he could say in retort so he let his wife scold the child yet again. “Papa! Look what I found!” Charlotte was now standing before him, her hand extended. She was out of breath and ecstatic. There was a tiny fledgling bird in her palm. “Look, he’s so cute! I still don’t know what to name him. I have to get to know him better …” In uttering her last sentence, Charlotte had taken on a serious look and her father was unable to keep from smiling. The little girl saw in it a sign of encouragement and became bolder: “Will you help me build him a nest? He’ll catch cold if he stays like this.” “I have a lot of work, dear. I don’t know if …” The echo of footsteps on the gravel path caused him to stop. “Charlotte! I’ve spent hours looking for you everywhere!” The child’s face hardened when she recognized her mother’s voice. She stared at her father, looking for support, with the hopelessness of someone who knows it will never happen. “Charlotte! I’m talking to you! Answer me!” Despite the growing irritation she detected in her mother’s tone Charlotte

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remained silent. She felt as if she was wrapped in a lead coat preventing her moving, even a little. When Marie grabbed her firmly by the neck, she tucked her head into her shoulders, closing her eyes as tightly as she could. “How horrible!” From the quiver in her mother’s voice, Charlotte knew the woman was genuinely disgusted. She felt the grip on her neck loosen, but was not quick to celebrate. Abdication was not necessarily always a good sign. “Throw that away this instant! It’s hideous! “But Mama … “And stop calling me ‘Mama.’ You’re much too old for that.” Charlotte looked desperately at her father, but the expression on his face squelched any hope she had. He looked at her for a moment and then turned his eyes away in surrender. So she took refuge in contemplating the tiny bird trembling in the palm of her hand. He was so scrawny. It was a miracle he was still alive. She had found him at the foot of a tall oak tree, alerted to his presence by a cat’s movements. The predator was extending a limp paw to give the tiny creature a nudge. Charlotte had often observed the feline’s tactics, taking pity on the prey that must have thought for a fleeting second it was still possible to escape. But as soon as the little cat saw its toy edging away, it would jump on it ruthlessly, inflicting a wound that would disable it further but not kill it. And so the game would continue until the executioner tired of the game and decided to put an end to it. When she saw the fledglinglying under the tree she liked to climb to reach an exceptional observation post, it didn’t take her long to rush to the aid of the poor bird the feline was torturing. “Charlotte, I’m not going to tell you again! Do as I say or you’ll be punished.” “Yes, Mother.” Charlotte lowered her head to show she was sorry. She was about to go to put the poor bird down at the end of the garden when she was interrupted by an angry shout. “What on earth are you doing?” When she looked up at her mother, Charlotte could see the rage in her eyes. They seemed blacker than usual and her round face was such a deep purple it looked painted on. “I’m doing what you said,” Charlotte tried to explain in a voice devoid of expression. “I never told you to leave. I told you to throw that horrible thing away. Go stick it on the burner in front of the stables. Joseph just lit the fire. “But Mother … “And stop talking back! I have a good mind not to let you go to the summer party, just to teach you to obey.” Hearing her mother’s words, Charlotte broke down. The summer party was

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by far the most entertaining event of the year. Her parents were too busy tending to their responsibilities as hosts, and the wild enjoyment running through the festivities made it legendary. The summer party had been instituted years earlier and was held in two places: the main lawn was reserved for important guests and marked the height of the summer season, whereas everyone who worked at the estate danced in the yard in front of the stables. The simultaneous parties lent a certain liveliness to the evening; some even went so far as to allege they had seen guests from the lawn in the stable yard … The party was scheduled to take place in three days, and the thought of being confined to her room, hearing the sounds of the merriment from afar put Charlotte into a state of despair. She kept her head lowered, watching the fledgling whose vitality was beginning to wane. She needed to give him something to eat, like his mother would have done. But what? Perhaps some breadcrumbs soaked in milk … “So, are you going to obey or not?” With her shoulders drooped, Charlotte muttered: “Yes, Mother.” She didn’t want to see the look of satisfaction that was probably showing on Marie’s face. The girl walked slowly over to the gardener, who was standing near the open burner. It was time for her to execute the sentence. Glancing over her shoulder, she could see that her mother wasn’t taking her eyes off her. “What’s that you’re bringing me?” Joseph had paused from his work and was bending toward her. Charlotte extended her hand without saying a word. “That’s not something your mother would like for sure!” Leaning on the pitchfork he was using to throw vegetable scraps into the burner, he rubbed his moustache in a gesture of hesitation. He would have liked to have been able to lessen the child’s suffering, but the lady of the house was watching and he knew how much she hated it if anybody sided with her daughter. He had learned that bitter lesson several weeks earlier when he let Charlotte help with the planting in the small garden patch where he had already tilled the soil. Madame Dutilleul flew into a cold rage when she saw her daughter planting some flowers. She slowly trampled the shoots her daughter had put in, despite Charlotte’s pleas. The child kept repeating in a pitiful voice: “But these flowers were for you, Mother …” Poor Joseph was stricken. Seeing Charlotte’s pathetic look, he tried desperately to find the right words. Finally, he said as gently as he could: “You know, at that age, there’s no hope for him without his mother …” “But I could have fed him.” “No. You’d have to chew insects to give him to eat.” Charlotte quickly pulled herself together. Noticing her disgust at the thought of such a thing, Joseph could not help but smile to himself.

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“In saving him from being eaten by a cat, you already did him a favor.” “Do you think so?” The sudden ray of hope he saw on the child’s face comforted him as he went on to explain. “Of course I do. You know what cats are like. It would have played around with him and made him suffer for nothing. And if you had tried to feed him yourself, he would’ve died of indigestion.” Charlotte didn’t answer. She stroked the fledging gently with her finger. He was all huddled up with his eyes half closed. When the child looked up at Joseph, two enormous tears were streaming down her cheeks. She held out a trembling hand and placed the tiny bird in the gardener’s hand. On her way back to the house, she thought she heard a dull thud and was grateful to Joseph for having knocked his victim unconscious before taking him to the fire.

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Samuel Zaoui

Date of Publication: August 2008 Foreign Rights Manager: Lucie Poisson agence.luciepoisson@gmail.com Translation: Trista Selous trista.selous@btinternet.com

Saint-Denis back of beyond

Souhad is a highly qualified young woman, wealthy and fully integrated. Then something happens to disturb her smooth, rapid social rise: her father leaves for his home village and she must go and water the plants in his little house in the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis. She goes reluctantly, assailed by the poverty and misery—no, the “miserabilism” of a life she has left behind with fierce determination. And suddenly she is overwhelmed by her past, her “Arabness” and reminded who she is—also. A few hours and meetings later, Souhad sets off with some old friends of her father’s

Publisher: Éditions de l’Aube

Biography

Samuel Zaoui was born in Paris in 1967 to a Sephardic Jewish father and a Kabyl mother. During his time as a law and sociology student, this dual background saw him dividing his holidays between Algeria and a kibbutz. He was fascinated by motorbikes and machines (the two often go together!) and dreamed of training as a welder, turner and boilermaker. He teaches economics and social sciences in Saint-Denis. Saint-Denis bout du monde is his first published novel.

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in a truck driven by a large, silent black man on a very unlikely journey. Not a word is out of place in this masterfully-written novel that tells the terrible, beautiful story of a daughter’s love for her father, for people like her father and for her father’s native land. In reminding us that the ends of the earth are often very close to home, Saint-Denis bout du monde tells an individual story that also speaks to, and touches, us all.

For three days now I’ve been seeing old Arab men everywhere. Just the old ones, everywhere. Nothing has changed in Saint-Denis since you left, there aren’t any more of them than there were before, they don’t make any more noise. Nothing has changed and yet here they are. With their twisted bodies, their empty eyes. Their long faces and dragging feet. Their winter clothes all year round. Their dirty handkerchiefs and gobs of spit. Slowly, silently, they’ve invaded the whole place. You practically bump into them and they don’t even look up. Now I understand the French—when they go by you just want to hurl racial abuse: “Crouillat!’ you want to shout, “Go home!” And meanwhile they’re stepping off the pavement, walking in the gutter to let you pass. I see them and I miss you. I miss your silence that’s like theirs. I never expected that. I’m sitting by myself in Légion d’Honneur Park. I look at the shoes of the old “bicoot” pecking at his bread like a bird. “Bicot!” The insult is “bicot” and you’re perfectly capable of saying it, but you keep on saying “oo” instead of “o”. It drives me crazy—but then if it’s to say “bicot” it’s fine. His shoes are just like yours, all cracked along the folds. The toecaps are rusty. Brown laces; smelly, checked woollen socks; just the same. And inside them the smell of your feet. Trouser hems sewn with big white stitches, dustcaked fabric, moth holes and a hanging belt—maybe I’m exaggerating, he’s worse than you. Now he’s eased his shoes off a little. His socks are transparent over the heel. Disgusting. I hate that. His socks and my disgust, at exactly the same moment. My little designer flip-flops disgust me too. A hundred and fifty euros the pair. I’ll give them to him. He won’t do anything with them, but at least they won’t be on my feet any more. I look at what he’s looking at and see nothing at all. He’s staring at the ground

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in front of him, elbows resting on his knees, eating his bread. His gaze sinks into the gravel, a few metres in front of him, no further. Certainly no higher. A stroller wheel enters his field of vision and I’m overcome by fury. Look up, dammit! Look at the chubby little girl in the stroller, the pigeon flying into the air, look at me! He’s so still you’d think he was dead. What’s your name? Ali? Mohammed? Well I’m not moving either till you get up. He starts pecking at his bread again. Tears run down my cheeks and it’s then that he looks up at me. As though he heard them fall. As though he’d seen me perfectly clearly from the start. As though he can see without looking, in a mirror hidden in the gravel. As soon as I started to cry he looked at me. I’m scared and he can see it. His eyes are saying something to me. He knows what I’m afraid of—there are so many reasons. He can’t do anything for me. That’s what your eyes are saying. He looks at me as though he’s looking through a window that mustn’t get dirty. Does he think I’m French or something? Is it because of my sandals? My clean hands? The colour on my eyelids? I look down, my turn now. I look at my feet. The varnish is all chipped. There’s dust caked between my toes from my toenails rubbing against the ground. The skin on my toes is all scraped. The canvas of the sandals is starting to fray. Real feet. Do you recognise me now, bicout? He’s gone. Vanished, Mohammed. Without a sound, Ali. Without raising a single grain of sand. The little old lady pushing the stroller slows down; she hesitates, I think she’s thinking of coming over. She looks at me. I look like an OK kind of person, but my feet are dirty and my hair is black. Her brain works so slowly I have time to decipher the hieroglyphs of thoughts in her eyes. Yes, madam, I’m one of them! Don’t come any closer, my name is Souhad … For the first time in ages I start thinking in Arabic. The words are heavy and rough in my throat—in my mind’s throat. Suddenly it all comes back, in a flood of insults. Screw the lot of you! Go and scrub the filth out of the folds of your ancient skin! Take your fat turd of a baby for a walk somewhere else! It goes on and on in my head, it won’t stop, a torrent of barbed bicot words. The old lady must see something in my eyes too, because she starts moving again and walks on without a word. I’m alone in the garden. The old lady and her little sausage in a stroller have gone squeaking on their way. Mohammed-Ali has disappeared without a sound. I’m scared. Baba. What if he comes this way? What if his round brings him into this bit of garden? What if he sees me crying? And comes over? Is anything the matter, madam? Has someone been bothering you? You mustn’t stay here in the garden all by yourself. He’d put his big hand on my shoulder. I’d be paralyzed. I mustn’t come into this garden again. That’s what I told myself yesterday. And the day before. For three days I’ve been seeing old Arab men everywhere, Dad, and I spend

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my afternoons sitting on park benches. I’m a hundred metres from your place. Him too then. And you want me to believe you never saw him again? How are you, otherwise, thanks be to God you’re OK? Don’t change the subject! I’m asking if you know that he’s there. Yes of course. Of course you know. Is that why you left, because of Mr Wind? Samuel Zaoui

[…] The old Arabs walk like snails but they don’t like the rain. Today I’ve not seen a single old man. I’m outside though. I’ve always liked the rain. Always persuaded myself I liked it. One day I must have decided it was French to like the rain. And to play in puddles. I like cheese, rain and pork. I eat pork but I don’t really like it. I don’t like this park but I come here every day. I don’t like my nose, but I don’t like people thinking I’m Jewish. I’d have liked to be called Sarah. You couldn’t decide which name, you told me so yourself. These days I don’t mind being called Souhad, but I still don’t know why you chose that name instead of Sarah. You don’t even know yourself. You never know anything when I ask you. That’s how it is. I love you, but I’ve never thought it. I don’t really like the rain, but I do like umbrellas. I’m pleased when it rains because I can get them out. I’ve got a whole collection. In fact I’ve got collections of collections. Scarves, shoes, necklaces, glasses, collections of handbags. Mom only had one bag, for the shopping, one pair of slippers and no umbrella; she never went out on rainy days. I’m not really a collector, I just buy things I want. It’s you that calls them collections. Whenever Mom’s sisters came to our house and saw my little library, they’d say, “Is your daughter collecting books or something?” Thirty books is too many. Mom used to roll her eyes to the ceiling and jab her chin in your direction—it’s all his fault. Meanwhile you’d be staring at the TV, concentrating hard on the images so you wouldn’t have to talk to them. You didn’t like those women. You wanted me to read. You didn’t like having Arabs in the house. Off you go my girl, go and read your Schoolbooks. We didn’t have visitors very often and you always used to send me off to work. You always saw to it that we lived in French neighborhoods. There were never any Arabs apart from us and as far as the French were concerned we didn’t exist. Which meant we had no neighbors. I used to be ashamed of you, Dad, whenever we passed a white man from our block. You’d greet him like a brother and he’d avoid you like a puddle. Then, when you’d worn one of them down with your politeness and, weary of ignoring us, he’d finally, grudgingly answer your hello, you’d be proud, you’d almost

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thank him. Sometimes you even did thank him. You’d smile and look at me to see if I had picked up on the full extent of your success. But I used to look away. How could you so quickly forget all the greetings that had sunk into the scornful silence of well-cut lawns? What’s all this about lawns? It’s an image, Dad, a manner of speaking. In Arabic I might say … No, I can’t. We don’t speak the same language. It just means we were on our own, Dad. One day you’ll have to explain to me where you got that crazy idea of going to live with the white people. As though that was the normal integration procedure. That suicidal strategy of immersion in hostile surroundings, as the people watching us from afar might say. Where did that intuition come from? Why did you, with your ordinary history, your everyday immigration straight from the village to Algiers, the boat, Marseille, Dijon, Saint-Denis, without accidents but also without qualifications or money, with nothing but a tattooed wife and four dark-skinned children, why did you want so much for us to be different? Just like that? I don’t get it; but I know that’s where it all started. All of it. My life, my brothers’ lives, the life of my brother Jaouad, my mother in Algeria, Mr. Wind waiting to ambush us by the door, all of it. Death and your children’s successes, higher diplomas, Greek and Latin, the Arabic we no longer speak, umbrellas, handbags, all of it I tell you … Right down to these old Arabs now throwing themselves in front of me. And the Mr. Wind that I’m looking for in the rain. It all starts there. I was wrong about the French, they don’t like the rain any more than we do. Mr. Wind doesn’t go out in the rain, though he’s supposed to, but he doesn’t want to get his big belly wet, his big pork-eater’s belly crammed into his parkkeeper’s uniform. There’s no one in this park. I’ll wait a bit longer. I don’t want to go home. Am I alone in this park or what? If he comes over to me I’m going to stay planted here like a tree. Well a sapling really, because for a few days now I’ve been trembling at the slightest breath of air, the slightest sound. The slightest Arab. Did you hear what I said? No, of course not. You do what you’ve always done, you say nothing. Your wife has gone back home, your daughter doesn’t speak your language any more, your two oldest children have moved away forever and then there’s the youngest … But you say nothing. You only speak when you’re alone. Coming home from work, I see you coming up the street twenty years ago, your footsteps heavy as though you’re bringing home the tons of cinder blocks you’ve handled throughout the day. You walk with small steps and your lips form small words. I can’t hear a thing. You’re talking to the wind.

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