Suicide (French Literature Series) Read online

  You used to smoke American cigarettes. Your bedroom was soaked in their sweet smell. Watching you smoke inspired the desire to do the same. In your hand, a cigarette was a piece of art. Did you like to smoke, or to be seen smoking? You used to blow perfect smoke rings, thick and dense. They would travel for two meters before wrapping themselves around an object and dissolving on it. I remember their trajectory at night against the light of a lamp. The last time I saw you, you had quit smoking, but not drinking. Stroking your belly, you congratulated yourself on having gained weight, though the difference was slight. You had kept your figure.

  Explain your suicide? No one risked it.

  You couldn’t have been said to dance, exactly. Despite the music sounding around you, bodies being carried away by the whirling bass, it didn’t get inside you. You used to trace out the steps, but you were mimicking dancing, rather than doing it. You would dance alone. When a look crossed yours, you’d smile like someone caught off guard in an absurd situation.

  Your suicide was not preceded by failed attempts.

  You did not fear death. You stepped in its path, but without really desiring it: how can one desire something one doesn’t know? You didn’t deny life but affirmed your taste for the unknown, betting that if something existed on the other side, it would be better than here.

  When you read a book, you would return over and again to the page headed “Other Works By…” You didn’t know if you would want to read the other works, but you delighted in imagining what their titles suggested. You never read Neruda’s Residence on Earth, for fear that the poems in that collection wouldn’t live up to their title. Being unknown, they were more real to you than they would have been if they had disappointed upon reading. During the week you sometimes thought it was Sunday.

  You didn’t like to travel. You rarely went abroad. You would spend your time in your bedroom. It seemed useless to you to travel for miles in order to stay in a place less comfortable than your own. To think up imaginary holidays was enough for you. You used to jot down in a notebook the things you would have been able to do by following contemporary tourist trends: Watch people at prayer in an Indian temple. Dive in Bali. Ski in Val-d’Isère. Visit an exhibition in Helsinki. Swim in Porto-Vecchio. When you were sick of your bedroom, you consoled yourself by rereading your notes on these imaginary holidays, and you closed your eyes to visualize them.

  One day I asked you why you seldom traveled. You told me the story of that writer, a friend of your mother’s, who obtained funding in order to spend a few months abroad. He wanted to do research in order to write a work of political fiction that would take place in an imaginary country, inspired by the real country he went to, which a dictator had brought to its knees thirty years earlier. Having arrived, he understood in a day how absurd his enterprise was: research would be of no use to him. His imagination was everything, but he needed to make the trip in order to understand this obvious fact. His six-month voyage was cut down to two days. He took the first plane home.

  I hadn’t known you spoke any foreign languages. One day, an Irish friend of your mother’s came by. She did not speak French. You addressed her in perfect English.

  Only the living seem incoherent. Death closes the series of events that constitutes their lives. So we resign ourselves to finding a meaning for them. To refuse them this would amount to accepting that a life, and thus life itself, is absurd. Yours had not yet attained the coherence of things done. Your death gave it this coherence.

  One day, you set off on your blue motorcycle to the coast. You were traveling at 180 kilometers per hour. A car fishtailed into your path. You lifted your arm and signaled your offense as you passed. Thirty kilometers on, when you got off the freeway, the car overtook you and blocked your way at a crossroads. You didn’t know what the driver wanted, but he revved his engine as much as he could without moving an inch. There were two men looking at you from the back seat, excited, egging each other on. You got off your motorcycle and headed toward the vehicle. They left before you could get to them. And then, later, at the beach, you ran into them by chance. When they saw you from afar, they believed you had followed them. Again you headed for them, keeping your helmet on. They were in their swimming trunks. They gathered their possessions at top speed and bolted, looking back over their shoulders while running.

  In public, your quiet way of observing others made them uncomfortable, as if you were a breathing statue, indifferent to all the frivolous movement that the stillness of a statue so underlines.

  Your choosing to erase the world exempts those surviving you from doing so. What you miss, they see. Their pains become pleasures when they think that you are no longer anything at all.

  In art, to reduce is to perfect. Your disappearance bestowed a negative beauty on you.

  In your mother’s house, there were an old watchdog and some passive, useless house cats. We used to repeat the old saw: feed a cat for a lifetime and it will leave you one day; feed a dog for a day and it will be loyal for a lifetime. You were the cat and I the dog.

  You succeeded in the few things you undertook.

  The last time that I saw you, you were wearing a white cotton shirt. You were standing upright with your wife on the lawn, in the sunlight, in front of the château, at my brother’s wedding. You shared in the enthusiasm of the ceremony. For my part, I felt distanced from it. I didn’t recognize my family in this mundane get-together. You didn’t seem put off by the bourgeois ceremony, or by my brother’s choice to have his love approved by third parties, even when these were distant third parties. You didn’t have the sad and absent look you normally took on at public gatherings. You smiled, watching the people, a little tipsy from the wine and the sun, chatting on the large lawn between the white stone façade and the two-hundred-year-old cedar tree. I often wondered, after your death, if that smile, the last one I saw from you, was mocking, or if instead it was the kindly smile of someone who knew that soon he would no longer partake in earthly pleasures. You didn’t regret leaving these behind, but neither were you averse to enjoying them a little longer.

  You did not hesitate. You prepared the shotgun. You put in a shell. You fired into your mouth. You knew that suicide by shotgun could fail when aiming for the temple, the forehead, or the heart, because the recoil throws the gun off its target. With the mouth keeping it steady, errors are rare. If you had wanted to announce your suicide, which is to say renounce it, you would have chosen a gentler method. Yours was violent, the result irreversible. You used to think things through before acting. Once you were decided on something, nothing would stop you. Your gaze was no longer fixed on the world around you, but sighted on your target. Once, your mother’s last dog charged at another dog a hundred meters off. It caught up with the other dog, trampled it, took it by its throat, and shook it like a mouse. It would have killed the beast if they hadn’t been separated. You had that same look.

  Your suicide was an action, but an action with a contrary effect: a form of vitality that produces its own death.

  Your wife didn’t use to speak when you were present. I don’t remember her voice. Her look would indicate her approval or disapproval of you. You were the person she would look at the most, no matter who you were surrounded by. Her shyness would reassure you. Her discretion would accompany your silence. The two of you smoked the same cigarettes. You used to carry a packet for two. She would drive the car and you the motorcycle. You didn’t have children. She worked. She earned money for both of you; you studied economics. She admired your theories and your language. What became of her? Has she resigned herself to your death? Does she think of you when she makes love? Did she remarry? In killing yourself, did you also kill her? Did she name a son in your memory? If she has a daughter, does she speak to her of you? What does she do on your birthday? And on the anniversary of your death? Does she put flowers on your grave? Where are the photographs she took of you? Did she keep your clothes? Do they still smell of you? Does she wear your cologne? What did sh
e do with your drawings? Are they framed in a room of her house? Has she erected a museum in your honor? Which men followed after you? Did they know you? Do you, through her memory of you, make the existence of a successor impossible?

  When you were awake, stretched out in your bed in the dark, shutters drawn, your thoughts would flow freely. They would grow obscure when you got up and opened the curtains. The violence of daylight would efface the nocturnal clarity. At night, your wife’s sleep lent lucidity to your solitude. In the daytime, people were barriers, dividing you up, preventing you from hearing what you listened to at night: the voice of your brain.

  You monopolize my memories of sad rock music. When I hear certain songs, they are tainted with your nebulous presence. You didn’t use to read poetry, but you would sometimes recite it: the lyrics, without music, of the songs you liked. Rock was your poetry.

  You used to say it was better to listen to rock in a foreign language that you knew poorly. How beautiful the words were if they were only half understood. What great stuff Dada would have brought to rock, if only the dates had coincided.

  You didn’t see a psychoanalyst, but you spent a lot of time analyzing yourself. You read Freud, Jung, and Lacan. You reflected on psychoanalysis, but you didn’t practice it. You thought that treatment would normalize you, or banalize the strangeness you cultivated. You used to like listening to others. They trusted you. Quiet, attentive, and constructive, you helped those who placed their confidence in you more than you helped yourself.

  You collected phrases spoken on the street by passersby. One of your favorites was: “A canine is just fine, but I do adore a dinosaur.”

  You collected proper names. You framed an electoral list bringing together candidates with particularly disquieting last names.

  You kept a tape of the messages left on your answering machine by mistake. One of them went: “We’ve arrived fine. We’ve arrived fine. We’ve arrived fine.” Uttered slowly by an old lady in despair.

  We used to talk through the night, only stopping thanks to the dawn. One evening, you spoke for eight hours nonstop, about Freud and Marx, with some interspersed remarks about Kondratiev cycles. Your digressions grew longer in proportion to your consumption of your mother’s liquors, mixed at random. Upon daybreak you came up with the “Kondratiev cocktail” by pouring a shot of each of fifteen bottles into one large glass. The Ricard drowned out all other tastes and gave a milky appearance to the beverage. You drank all of it before going to bed.

  You kept your day planners from previous years. You reread them when you doubted your existence. You would relive your past by randomly flipping through them as if you were skimming through a chronicle of yourself. You sometimes found appointments you no longer remembered, and people’s names, written in your own hand, which meant nothing whatsoever to you. However, you could recall most events. And so you worried about not remembering what happened in between the things you wrote down. You had lived those moments too. Where had they gone?

  You refused to be prolific. You would do little, but well, or do nothing rather than do it poorly. You knew nothing of contemporary appetites. You didn’t demand to have it all, all at once. You liked to forgo eating, drinking, smoking, speaking, going out. You were able to dispense with light for days on end, happy in your room with the curtains drawn. You didn’t miss fresh air. You were thrilled by silence. You made a classicism out of this drought.

  You had no taste for spectacle, but choosing death demanded you choose the place, the time, and the method. In order to achieve this, you were compelled to play the director.

  You used to give yourself over to endless sessions of doubt. You would claim to be an expert on the subject. But doubting would tire you so much that you would end up doubting doubt itself. I saw you one day at the end of an afternoon of solitary speculation. You were unmoving and petrified. Running several kilometers in a deep forest full of ravines and pitfalls would have exhausted you less.

  Your suicide makes the lives of those who outlive you more intense. Should they be threatened by boredom, or should the absurdity of their lives leap out at them from the curve of some cruel mirror, let them remember you, and the pain of existence will seem preferable to the disquietude of no longer being. What you no longer see, they look at. What you no longer hear, they listen to. The song you no longer sing, they burst into. The joy of simple things appears to them by the light of your sad memory. You are that black but intense glow, which, since the dying of your light, freshly illuminates the day that had become obscure to them.

  You went alpine skiing with friends. The first day, you went as high up as you could, to the summit of a glacier that could be seen from the ski station. Your friends came down quickly; they were cold. You stopped, by yourself, in a small valley, to look at the fresh snow that had fallen the previous day. The sun was lighting it up from behind while the wind lifted a slight film from its top layer. In this little valley, the rocks, the shrubs, and the earth were covered by an even, cold whiteness. It was nighttime by day, a negative version of darkness. It seemed to you like sleeping an ideal sleep, awake, lucid, as in your best dreams.

  The funeral Mass took place in a small chapel opposite your mother’s house. I only went inside it on this one occasion. It was a small gray building next to the road. To go in one had to walk around the back by way of a dirt path. There was no garden, just a tree. I never heard you, while you were alive, pronounce the words “Mass” or “church.” But you were on occasion drawn to speak of God, in the sense of an abstract entity, a conversational topic, a curiosity reserved for others. It was strange to hear the priest speak of you, when he didn’t even know you. You used to live across the road, but he had only recently been assigned this parish. He gave your eulogy. He said nothing true, nothing false. In his mouth, you could have been anyone. Even though he had prepared his sermon without knowing you, he appeared to be moved while delivering it, as if he was speaking of someone dear to him. I did not doubt his sincerity, though I did believe him to be moved more by death itself than by yours in particular. In mid-Mass, someone started breathing heavily. I didn’t see where the panting came from. It sounded like a wild animal trapped in a cul-de-sac after a long chase. Some people rose to their feet to pick your brother up and to lay him out on a row of chairs. His tears had turned into a panic attack. A few minutes later, while he went on sobbing, your sister also began to feel faint. She too was stretched out. Two creatures distraught by the sadness of your burial. Your mother was still upright, however. The priest, perturbed, pursued his sermon. At the exit, people didn’t dare look at each other, it was as if they felt guilty. Of what? Your mother, her head lowered, came forward slowly, supporting herself on the arm of your stepfather. Your father, standing back, felt most guilty. But his guilt was your final humiliation: he appropriated your death for himself by holding himself responsible.

  Your taste for literature did not come from your father, who read little, but from your mother, who taught it. You wondered how, being so different, they could have formed a union; but you noted that in you there was a mixture of the violence of the one and the gentleness of the other. Your father exerted his violence on others. Your mother was sympathetic to the suffering of others. One day you directed the violence you had inherited toward yourself. You dished it out like your father and you took it like your mother.

  You liked old things, but not the ones that could be found in flea markets. To know that an object had belonged to others bothered you less than to be ignorant of the identity of its previous owner.

  The surface of your body displayed no fat to bear witness to former gustatory excesses. You were thin, muscled, sinewy. Your face used to seem tense, but I understood one afternoon seeing you asleep on a chaise longue, nerves at rest, that the impression originated from the sharp and angular morphology of your features.

  You used to speak without gesturing. When you were silent, rather than your body, it was your eyes that were expressive. Your face was so ra
rely animated that you could incite laughter or intimidate someone simply by pursing your lips.

  Your life was less sad than your suicide might suggest. You were said to have died of suffering. But there was not as much sadness in you as there is now in those who remember you. You died because you searched for happiness at the risk of finding the void. We shall have to wait for death before we can know what it is that you found. Or before leaving off knowing anything at all, if it is to be silence and emptiness that awaits us.

  The way in which you quit it rewrote the story of your life in a negative form. Those who knew you reread each of your acts in the light of your last. Henceforth, the shadow of this tall black tree hides the forest that was your life. When you are spoken of, it begins with recounting your death, before going back to explain it. Isn’t it peculiar how this final gesture inverts your biography? I’ve never heard a single person, since your death, tell your life’s story starting at the beginning. Your suicide has become the foundational act, and those earlier acts that you had hoped to relieve of their burden of meaning by way of this gesture, the absurdity of which so attracted you, have ended up simply alienated instead. Your final second changed your life in the eyes of others. You are like the actor who, at the end of the play, with a final word, reveals that he is a different character than the one he appeared to be playing.

  You are not among those who ended up sick and old, with withered ghostly bodies, resembling death before they’ve stopped living. Their demise is the fulfillment of their decrepitude. A ruin that dies: is this not deliverance, is it not the death of death? As for you, you departed in vitality. Young, lively, healthy. Your death was the death of life. Yet I like to think that you embodied the opposite: the life of death. I don’t try to explain to myself in what form you might have survived your suicide, but your disappearance is so unacceptable that the following lunacy was born along with it: a belief in your eternity.