notes at the bottom of administrative forms, “Cross out where not applicable” or “Check the appropriate box.” But when it comes to a father, does there exist such a thing as nonapplicable or an appropriate box? So I leave as is this improbable enumeration and supply neither birth date nor social security number. Nevertheless, here are a few specifications that will never appear on any administrative form:
Comfortably settled in front of the black-and-white television screen, a glass of cognac close at hand, a pungent Cuban in the other, my father never missed a rugby match or a night of wrestling (I would watch TV with him sometimes, after my mother went upstairs to go to bed, and I still remember the match between the White Angel and the infamous Béthune Executioner, in a balaclava and wearing all black: athletes dressed for the small screen even then). His usual disappointments because of the ORTF didn’t stop him from looking forward to the next sports broadcast. Often away for work, he would travel to India, Brazil, the United States, or, more modestly, to Marseille, for stretches varying from a few weeks to several months. He spoke English fluently and, in the 50s, was a fervent defender of all that came from America: checkered shirts with a button-up collar, Johnnie Walker “Red Label” whiskey with the swashbuckler in a redingote and shiny top hat on the label, LPs of jazz and that famous burgeoning music, rock ‘n’ roll, Reader’s Digest, plastic models of the B-25 bomber, of battleships and aircraft carriers, of dinosaurs and pterodactyls, cars with streamlined wing tips in shiny chromes (he owned a Versailles, then an Ariane, before buying an Ovni: the nauseating DS), he defended the dollar and progress, morality, technique, and work, but most importantly he displayed from morning to night an unwavering optimism. He flew in the Super Constellation and had a fondness for the multilingual flight attendants. Curiously, he did not like the cinema.
My mother, an Anglophile, made me read from a young age Somerset Maugham (I found it strange that she pronounced his name “Môme”) and Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, and Graham Greene. Sometimes on summer afternoons, lying side by side in the sun on two chaises longues (we called them “transats”), in the vast garden of the house we rented for vacation, she and I would read the pages of those novels in turn and out loud. Face protected by a large straw hat, dressed in a loose violet dress with a multicolored pattern or in a silk sari brought back from India, she would listen, a kind smile on her lips, to my hesitant and diligent voice. Then she would take over and each time I would admire her melodious accent, which enchanted me all the more because I had no other to compare it to: we rarely went to the movies and the babbling television was exclusively in French. Reading was how I learned English.
all of this passage is my own.
Scanning the horizon, I can already make out the dusty cloud of Freudians rushing over at a gallop.
Nevertheless I add with no remorse these personal confidences that evoke, through Abel Prote, his childhood and his precocious bilingualism. (Transatlantic Nubility)
*
* A recurring nightmare I used to have as a child also feels worthy of being added to my author’s text. In this nightmare, it’s neither day nor night and I’m freefalling through an undefined black space, in the grips of a violent vertigo and a complete loss of any sense of direction, between the walls of what I imagine to be a bottomless pit, a bit like the unlucky hero of “A Descent into the Maelström,” the story by Edgar Allan Poe. Then a fading into darkness, a terrifying blackout. An ellipse, a hole in the narration. Then I climb back up inexplicably, with no tether to any ground or gravity, I am weightless, levitating, or else a shell spurting from a cannon pointed to the sky. Soon I reach the summit of my trajectory, where I am immobilized for a moment in the grips of a retching that leaves me breathless, before starting on another freefall, more and more rapid, more and more panicked. Another fading into black, another loss of consciousness. This entire sequence repeats again and again, with no respite, an inexorable swinging motion. From high to low, then from low to high, given over entirely to this metronomic mechanism, whose purpose I do not know. In a certain way, I suffer like the condemned man of that other story by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Pit and the Pendulum,” but unlike him I have no means to change my destiny or save my life.
For several months of my childhood, I went to sleep every night with the obsessive fear of reliving what I believe today to be the very terror of torture: to know you are given over to an unfamiliar and evil will. But my nocturnal terror was not of a human executioner, merely—which is perhaps worse—of a relentless mechanism, unfamiliar, incomprehensible, absent. An inhuman machinery would launch me toward the black sky, then bring me back down to an unknown depth, again and again.
This repetitive nightmare reminds me of the Goya painting The Straw Manikin. I’ll describe it briefly. Four smiling, certainly cruel young women each hold a corner of a large square blanket over which hovers a puppet in men’s clothing, larger than a child, smaller than a man. Hard to say whether this dislocated mannequin is flying toward the cloudy sky or falling back into the blanket; he seems to float weightlessly, hands and legs sadly turned toward the earth, head curiously tilted toward his shoulder, like a hung man with a broken neck. Beneath his white face made up with blush descends a long black braid curved in the form of a flaccid penis, isolated, backlit, strikingly positioned in front of the most luminous part of the sky. The four young women’s arms are spread wide, as if to welcome the arrival of the stuffed puppet, and they seem delighted with their game, which recommences endlessly. They amuse themselves with the back and forth of the milquetoast who goes up and falls back down at their mercy, obeying the muscles of their arms. In the back and to the left, a massive square tower with a roof of red tiles is hidden in a haze of greenery. This large painting, it seems, is a cartoon tapestry, but it evokes above all a theater stage, and the décor—intangible sun, abundant foliage, half-hidden tower, stormy clouds—resembles a gigantic painted canvas stretched in front of actors, singers, or dancers. (Terrifying Night)
*
* “Doris again, Doris forever … In your name, I hear or, gold, dors, an order to sleep, Ulysses’s trip to the land of the Lotus Eaters, and also his departure and its groundwork—ho! hiss!—the wind that suddenly blows the sails before the boat has left the port to head for the open sea, adventure, the unknown; or else, the inverse, in one direction and then the other, the return to the mother land, reunion with the mother tongue after a long absence, or else the whalers of Pequod shut tightly in their fragile skiff, preparing their harpoons to stop the white monster, drive their banderillas into its milky skin covered with dreadful crustaceans, sprinkled with asterisks, like a negative of the sky. Doris, I turn to you as a ship reaches a port after a long absence, ailing Ulysses or pitiful Pytheas, reaching the end of a desolate wandering over the sea in the middle of land, from a hazardous arrival to a hasty departure. I had given up hope of ever seeing my motherland again, so afraid was I of losing everything in the liquid plains. But in a remarkable role reversal, you are the one who goes back and forth between Paris and New York, assistant to the devious Abel Prote, you the golden light to my translucent eye, my lucky traveling star, my transporter weaving invisible threads between the ancient and the new worlds, spinning her tapestry of love in the sky where I hope one day to see my person outlined in the interlacing of all those nocturnal flights, among the shimmering stars, above the Atlantic swell.”
I deem David Grey’s romantic temperament compatible with this declaration that I add shamelessly to his diary, which, once again, seems to me lacking in spirit, in lyricism. My timid author is quite the nuisance! (Tender Navigator)
*
* David Grey is translating Prote’s novel (N.d.T.),
