her name?”
“Julie. Do you have children?”
“A daughter too,” I say.
“How old is she?”
“She isn’t any age. She’s dead. Had she lived, she’d be twenty-one, like yours. Perhaps they’d have gone to the same university, the same nightclubs.”
Silence. This kind of revelation is always followed by silence. Silence, the only likely response. Someone tells you: “I lost my whole family in Auschwitz.” You maintain a dismayed silence. You would rather have been deaf. You don’t know where to look. Certainly not in this person’s eyes, certainly not. More likely at the tips of your toes. A woman confides in a quavering voice: “My children all died in the same accident.” A man tells you, his eyes filled with tears: “My wife has brain cancer. She’s entered the terminal stage.” All these are good reasons for remaining silent. But Claudine places her hand on my arm.
“Was it long ago?” she asks.
And I answer:
“Eighteen years.”
“You never forget, do you?”
And I answer:
“Never.”
Years pass and the scar is still raw. Never healed. Her hand remains on my arm. She asks, but her voice is sad:
“How did it happen?” And I answer: “An accident.”
Because the death of a child is always an accident. It cannot have been wanted, planned. Nothing can justify it, this gratuitous suffering. No explanation. No consolation.
She pours a bit more gin into our glasses.
“I don’t think I could have survived,” she says.
“I didn’t really survive.”
But that’s not true. I did survive. I travelled, ate, read books, smoked cigarettes, loved men, walked through the streets, stayed in bars till closing, I swam in the sea, I screamed, I threw up after drinking too much, caught cold, laughed till I cried, petted cats. I put on makeup, I took bubble baths. I bought dresses and jewellery, I cooked, I made love. And I translated for the Love Collection. Survived.
The comedy is over. The screens go blank. In the plane, very little movement. A few lights remain on here and there: insomniacs reading or doing crossword puzzles. Claudine asks me if I’m tired. I’m not, but all this gin is making my head spin. I tell her I’m going to try to rest.
Complete silence. Just a lulling kind of humming, black night beyond the airplane window. That feeling that is always so reassuring of floating above the earth.
Small white pillow for my head. I huddle up, cramped, uncomfortable. What’s the difference? To sleep for a few hours in this womb, like an anachronistic embryo. With the multitude of embryos, murmurs of sleep. Sleep.
Headphones on ears, inoffensive music with a civilizing influence. I close my eyes. My companion and I doze together, a blanket over our knees.
Chapter 2
I am afraid of death, which is why I love life.
Nijinsky, Diary
Here I am, naked and alone. Offering myself to the sea while she offers herself to me, face to face with her. Before life’s blessing, this immovable untamed beauty of the sea, movement, power, constancy. And this has been given to me, like a charm, to rejoice in with all my senses. Here I am at the end of the earth, at the end of myself. I could just as well be before death.
As naked as the sea. And as alone. Despite a multitude of beings living and moving inside it. In myself as well, a multitude of beings and thoughts. Monsters inhabit its depths like they do mine; they roar, claw and destroy.
The sea fans out today, calm and turquoise. Beneath the sun, millions of sparks dance, a starry firmament. Only a diver could notice these monsters, were he to explore her depths. They have tentacles and warts, emerge from crevices, float around in the muck. Mine also move underground, but I feel them tremble when I dive inside myself.
I am naked because I’ve found a safe hiding place. I walk down the rocks, spread out a towel on the shingles, remove my clothes. Only a few birds see me and pay no attention. They fly, alighting for a moment on the crest of the waves, then open their wings and fly away again, never coming close to me. Their wings spread out, they fly above the waves, seeking prey. Their keen eyes detect a fish venturing too close to the surface. I hear their cries, my attention absorbed by experiences both minuscule and majestic, the surf, the intensity of the sun, the flight of seagulls, these signs of life.
Not really alone, though, because this presence fills me. What a racket, when the sea throws herself on the rocks, and at the same time, what silence! A tumultuous silence. It pervades until it sounds as if nothing else exists. Does anything else exist here? Singing, roaring, moaning, the call of the waves. Oh, to throw myself in and be swept away! The temptation of sinking into the sea.
In French, some people, strangely enough, refer to children as “les flots,” which means “waves.” The first time I heard the expression, I was floored. “My flot, someone said. I have a flot” “Oh! Really? My, my. Personally I have a wave, a dune in my head.” He’d laughed. “What are you talking about?” I’d answered: “And you?” I sought the meaning of the metaphor, believing it a very poetic way of expressing one’s self. In truth, it is a very poetic way. A flotAfterwards I thought it was perhaps a deformation of the word fellow and the charm dissolved.
I am naked before the sea, beneath the sun. You could not be more vulnerable. But I am fearless. If the sea carries me away, so be it; let her engulf me. The sea is like life, like death. When you look at her, you always want to be swept away in her sublime movement. You want to touch eternity. The body dragged down, sucked up, disappearing forever. You think it would be painless. But you have to hold back, deploy all your strength to resist its call. Only your mind breaks away and goes adrift. It glides – it too – like a bird. I breathe in deeply the sea air.
It was already day’s end when I arrived here, three days ago, after two weeks of wandering. It’s strange how I felt no hurry to reach my destination. A kind of torpor enveloped me. I meandered from city to city, sleeping, according to my mood, in pensions or four star hotels. I swam in heated pools whose water was bitter with chlorinated staleness. In pensions, I rented a room furnished with a narrow, uncomfortable bed, a lopsided chest of drawers, a sink with only one tap, cold water of course, a plywood closet containing three misshapen hangers. Often my window would look out over a patio decorated with bougainvillea and potted geraniums. In the morning I’d notice birds pecking at the thick grass, quenching their thirst in the birdbath.
In the hotels I had an armchair, a table, a telephone near the bed; I would have my own bathroom, with small cakes of soap in their soft pink wrapping, a downy pile of towels, plenty of hot water. I revelled in it, I spent hours in the bathtub. I would lie down on the big bed and turn on the television to put me to sleep. The images flowed by, the music of foreign voices soothed me. I would sleep an hour, wake up, go back to sleep.
I would eat in my room: bread and cheese, green apples. I drank water and wine. I could just as well have let myself die from starvation.
