Suicide (French Literature Series) Read online

  You didn’t go to Peru; you didn’t like black boots; you never walked barefoot on a rosy, pebbled path. The sheer number of things you didn’t do is dizzying, because it throws light on the number of things we will ourselves be stripped of. For us, there will never be enough time. You chose to eschew more time. You renounced the future, the future that allows for survival, because we believe it is infinite. We want to be able to embrace all the earth, to taste all its fruits, to love all men. You rejected these illusions, which feed us with hope.

  While traveling, a new destination would seem more desirable to you than wherever you were, right up to the moment you got there and found that your dissatisfaction had followed you: the mirage had shifted to the next stopover point. Yet your preceding stops would become more attractive as you got further away from them. For you, the past would be forever improving, the future would draw you forward, but the present would weigh you down.

  When you traveled, it was to taste the pleasures of being a stranger in a strange town. You were a spectator and not an actor: mobile voyeur, silent listener, accidental tourist. At random, you would visit public spaces, squares, streets, and parks. You would go into stores, restaurants, churches, and museums. You liked public places where no one was surprised if you stood still in the middle of the urban flux. The crowd guaranteed your anonymity. Property seemed to be abolished. Yet those buildings, those sidewalks, and those walls did belong to someone, though nothing forced you to acknowledge this fact. The opacity of local languages and customs would prevent you from knowing, or guessing, to whom it was that they belonged. You used to drift through a visual form of communism, according to which things belonged to those who looked at them. In the midst of this utopia, which only your fellow lone voyagers would perceive, you used to transgress society’s rules unknowingly, and no one would hold you accountable for it. You would mistakenly enter private residences, go to concerts to which you had not been invited, eat at community banquets where you could only guess the community’s identity when they started giving speeches. Had you behaved like this in your own country, you would have been taken for a liar or a fool. But the improbable ways of a foreigner are accepted. Far from your home, you used to taste the pleasure of being mad without being alienated, of being an imbecile without renouncing your intelligence, of being an impostor without culpability.

  You wanted to treat foreign lands as though they were friends with whom you could have a tête-à-tête in a café, as equals. When you traveled with company, the country would shrink away; your companion would become the subject of your voyage as much as the country itself. As for group travel, the country would end up being the silent host whose presence one forgets like one does an overly timid guest, the principal subject becoming the backdrop. At the end of an amusing trip to England with a very talkative group, you decided that that was the end of adult vacation camps for you. You had gone in the company of the blind. Henceforth you would travel in order to see. And you would travel alone, so as to dissolve into the spectacle of the unknown. The facts belied these decisions: you no longer traveled abroad.

  Sitting in a café, a few seconds looking at passersby would be enough for you to label them with a few incisive words. You would create an entire cruel category out of a person or detail. Fifty-year-old virgin, very tall dwarf, ogre in a smock, right-wing swinger, salesman with a flashy bracelet, little man on heels, pedophile accountant, hetero fag: your company would be struck by the appropriateness of these labels, eliciting from them a hilarity far more malevolent than your own. You were neither malicious nor cynical, just pitiless. After a session of panoramic crowd-gazing through the windows of a brasserie in the city center on a Saturday afternoon, after leaving you, one wondered how you would have described your own friends if they had passed in front of you a few seconds earlier. And shivered at the idea that your piercing eye might detect in each of them the incarnation of a type.

  You used to read dictionaries like other people read novels. Each entry is a character, you’d say, who might be encountered on some other page. Plots, many of them, would form during any random reading. The story changes according to the order in which the entries are read. A dictionary resembles the world more than a novel does, because the world is not a coherent sequence of actions but a constellation of things perceived. It is looked at, unrelated things congregate, and geographic proximity gives them meaning. If events follow each other, they are believed to be a story. But in a dictionary, time doesn’t exist: ABC is neither more nor less chronological than BCA. To portray your life in order would be absurd: I remember you at random. My brain resurrects you through stochastic details, like picking marbles out of a bag.

  Not one to believe stories, you would pay them only a floating sort of attention, looking for the hitch. Your body was there, but your mind would depart, then reappear, like an auditory form of blinking. You would reconstitute accounts in an order different from that which they’d been given. You would perceive duration like others would look at an object in three dimensions, moving yourself around it so as to be able to represent it in all its aspects at once. You looked for the most immediate impression of other people, the photograph that would, in a second, capture the unfolding of their years. You reconstituted their lives through a panoramic lens. You brought together distant events by compressing time so that each instant stood side by side with the others. You translated duration into space. You looked for the aleph of the other.

  The private tennis court of a neighboring residence had been abandoned. Even in its heyday, it was only put to use for ten days of the year. Poorly maintained, it ended up being forgotten, the net sagging in the middle, the white lines darkened, the clay invaded by green mushrooms. You used to see it through the thuja trees, at the edge of the property’s grounds, surrounded by a rusty fence, abandoned by adults, rediscovered on certain Sundays by children, similar to a haunted house where ghosts in old-fashioned sports outfits would prowl about in broad daylight. It frightened you in the same way as it did to see a twenty-year-old vagrant or a beautiful lame girl: broken figures, half alive. Though you saw your own self-portrait in it, you did not avoid this modern ruin. Passing in front of it was like coming into contact with a memento mori. Metaphors of death troubled you, but you did not decline their spectacle. They were trials to be overcome in order to appreciate life, by remembering its opposite.

  You were not surprised to feel yourself ill adapted to the world, but it did surprise you that the world had produced a being who now lived in it as a foreigner. Do plants commit suicide? Do animals die of hopelessness? They either function or disappear. You were perhaps a weak link, an accidental evolutionary dead end, a temporary anomaly not destined to burgeon again.

  You used to forget details. You would have made a poor witness, if asked to reconstruct the order of events preceding an accident. But your slowness and your immobility allowed you to observe the collective action in slow motion, and to see things that, because of their urgency and the profusion of detail, would escape the notice of others. In a small provincial town, looking at a market from a hotel room above it, you grasped that the crowd moving below traced out a triangle that would swell and shrink in cycles. A futile observation? A useless sort of science? Your intelligence did not disdain gratuitous subjects.

  Facing your mirror, happy or carefree, you were someone. Unhappy, you weren’t anyone any longer: the lines of your face would fade; you would recognize what you habitually used to call “me,” but you would see someone else looking at you. Your gaze would sweep across your face as if it were made of air: the eyes opposite you would be unfathomable. To animate your features with a wink or a grimace would be of no help: deprived of reason, the expression would be artificial. And so you would play at miming conversations with imaginary third parties. You would believe yourself to be going mad, but the ridiculousness of your situation would end up making you laugh. Acting out the roles in a comedy sketch would let you exist anew. You would become yourself a
gain by embodying someone else. Your eyes would now rest on themselves and, facing the mirror, you could again say your name without it sounding like an abstraction.

  You used to believe in written things regardless of whether they were true or false. If they were lies, their traces would one day serve as evidence that could be turned against their authors: the truth had merely been deferred. Moreover, liars write less than they speak. In books, life, whether it was documented or invented, seemed to you more real than the life you saw and heard for yourself. It was when you were alone that you used to perceive real life. When you recalled it, it was made weaker by your memory’s many points of imprecision. But others had imagined life in books: what you were reading was the superimposition of two consciousnesses, yours and that of the author. You used to doubt what you had perceived, but never what others invented. You suffered real life in its continuous stream, but you controlled the flow of fictional life by reading at your own rhythm: you could stop, speed up, or slow down; go backward or jump into the future. As a reader, you had the power of a god: time submitted to you. As for words, even the best-chosen ones, they passed like the wind. They would leave traces in your memory, but your recollecting them made you doubt their existence. Did you reconstruct them as they had been spoken, or did you remodel them in your own style?

  One evening you were invited to dine at a friend’s house with other guests. To the host who, opening the door for you on your arrival, asked you how you were doing, you responded, “Badly.” Disconcerted, the host didn’t know what to say—all the more so because you were standing in his doorway, and because when you had rung the bell, an enthusiastic and impatient “Ahhh!” from the assembly of guests gathered in the living room had resounded through the walls. The two of you couldn’t simply engage there and then in a brief conversation about your suffering, but neither could you make the others wait without having to give explanations to them, all the more embarrassing since your explanations would be addressed to a group of friends gathered to have a good time. You didn’t want to disrupt the party, but you couldn’t make yourself lie in response to the simple question, “How are you doing?” You were more honest than courteous. Even though you were capable of it, it seemed unthinkable to you to put on a show of well-being for a close friend. Having arrived in the living room, you did not want to reproduce the unease sparked by your first response. To your friend’s friends, some of whom you didn’t know, you presented a friendly exterior. In this atmosphere, which made you feel foreign, you were surprised at your success in putting on the appropriate face, which, if it didn’t contribute to the general euphoria, at least didn’t destroy the mood with its indifference.

  Your pain died down with nightfall. The possibility of happiness began at five o’clock in the winter, later in the summer.

  You were surprised that your state of mind could be so variable without those around you noticing. Once you confessed to someone that you had been very depressed when dining with her several months earlier. She was stunned, discovering her blindness like a time bomb. And you, faithful, kept a straight face.

  You were such a perfectionist that you wanted to perfect perfecting. But how can one judge whether perfection has been attained? Why not go on and modify yet another detail? There always came, however, that terrifying moment when you could no longer judge the improvements you’d brought about: your taste for perfect things bordered on madness. You would lose your frame of reference; you would work in a blank, in the midst of vague and clouded visions. What was difficult for you wasn’t beginning or continuing, but finishing; that is to say, deciding, one day, that your project could no longer be reworked without suffering from it—that an addition would diminish it rather than improve it. Sometimes, weary of perfecting perfections, you would abandon your work without destroying it or finishing it. To look at these abandoned imperfections should have reassured you: you had at least worked, even if your attic only contained works that had been abandoned. But the sight of them caused you anguish: being pragmatic, you wanted to see what you had produced function. Your taste for abbreviation meant that instead of finishing the works you undertook, you finished yourself.

  You were a virtuoso on the drums. As a teenager, you were in three rock bands: Les Atomes, Crise 17, and Dragonfly. You also sang, and you wrote the lyrics to some songs that you would play in front of a few friends, at parties or in basements on loan from parents. Your bands split up in as much as the members left the high school or the town to go live elsewhere with their parents. You stayed put, and you stopped playing in bands. You continued to practice in your basement, accompanying recorded music played through a powerful amplifier, or playing solos that could last for hours. You would come out exhausted, but exalted, as after a long trance. Some years later, when you were twenty-two, Damien, the guitarist from Dragonfly, got back in touch with you to replace the absent drummer for a concert that his current band, Lucide Lucinda, was giving in Bordeaux. When buying your train ticket, you decided to stay in Bordeaux for three days to see the town, which you did not know. The concert took place on the night of your arrival, in a center for contemporary art, on the occasion of the opening of an exhibition with the participation of the guitarist who had in the meantime become an artist. There was a crowd of young art-and music-lovers. During rehearsal, you discovered that you had lost nothing of your gift for playing in a band. Lucide Lucinda’s music was simple and effective, like English rock from the 1960s, to which the group paid tribute. After the concert you surveyed the exhibition accompanied by the musicians and their friends. You spent part of the evening with a young, tall, thin, blonde Polish artist who was exhibiting giant sculptures in the shape of organs or stones, made out of fragments of plastic mineral-water bottles. You were surprised that her hands, which were so thin, had executed such monumental work. The tops of her hands were intact, but when she reached out to show you a detail on one of the sculptures, you discovered scars on the inside of her palm and on two of her fingers. Her patient and slow assembly work succeeded, through the accumulation of small fragments, in producing vast objects. You made the analogy with your solitary musical sessions: you used to spend hours producing sounds that would vanish in the solitude of your basement, where you were your only audience. She edified, you dispersed yourself. The night was spent in various bars in the middle of town and in a nightclub with high-tech Japanese décor where you watched people dance while you drank cocktails. The next day you woke up in the room reserved for you in a two-star hotel. The wallpaper was yellow and the carpet royal blue, ornamented with the motif of the logo of this particular chain of cheap hotels. The window looked out onto a narrow white courtyard, in which the sun cast a violent light. The silence of this anonymous place plunged you into a hazy anguish. You knew nothing about this town that you had barely researched. You were going to explore it at random, asking around for information from strangers about places to visit. Shaving, you believed you saw a stranger in the mirror. It was indeed your face, but the décor, which was alien to you, and the absurdity of the situation, made you think that you were someone else. Your self-pity would have made you cry had the telephone not rung.

  Who could be calling you? You picked up the receiver; it was your wife, who wanted to hear your news. Her voice, which ought to have reassured you, did nothing but reinforce, at a distance, your feeling of solitude. You told her that the concert had gone well, and you pretended to be enthusiastic about the idea of the two days of discovery afforded you. After hanging up, while you were preparing to leave the hotel, the telephone began to ring again. It was Damien, proposing you go with him to a techno-music festival on a beach at Biscarrosse. You were tempted to follow him there in order to make the most of his company and that of the musicians. But you had decided to go see the town, and the idea of hanging out with hundreds of strangers in an atmosphere of deafening music was off-putting to you. Despite his disappointment, Damien suggested some places to go see in town. Putting down the phone you would have
regretted your decision had you not known that wavering made you suffer more than deciding did. You went out into the street, map in hand. You were in the center of the old town. You took a big pedestrian road, which stretched out for hundreds of meters. You looked into the fashion boutiques, the pâtisseries, the succession of shops of all kinds. There were no surprises waiting for you in this commercial hub. You arrived at a small square dominated by the post office. Disoriented old people had beached themselves on benches. A fifty-something man, to whose belt were attached several plastic shopping bags containing all his personal effects, walked by lifting one shoulder, then the next, in rhythm with his steps. He pointed with his index finger at invisible objects and murmured incomprehensible words. Other than you, no one paid him any attention. You guessed from this that he lived in the neighborhood, and that this square was his living room. Other homeless people hung around, some sitting on the ground, others standing still, waiting for who knows what. They were indifferent to each other; the passersby didn’t know they were there. They had become invisible. You approached a street sign in order to know where you were. The plaque indicated, as if in ironic commentary, “Place Saint-Projet.” You headed in the direction of the Saint-André Cathedral. The size of this gothic building impressed you; you went inside, but the darkness and the cold immediately put you off. Aside from some foreign tourists following a guide, the church was solely occupied by old ladies who were praying, seated or kneeling. The paintings referred to by a laminated sign at the entrance were hardly visible, so bad was the failing light. You went back out and, after having walked alongside the city hall, walked in the direction of the Musée des Beaux-Arts. Workers were restoring the building and sanding the large stones of the façade. You made your way through the flood of dust that the wind was blowing onto the main door and the bordering lawn. Inside, the two caretakers and the cashier were the only human presence. You perused the halls, where there was a succession of old paintings of the Italian, French, English, Flemish, and German schools. You looked at them distractedly, despite the quality of some of the works. You had the impression of having already seen this museum dozens of times, in other cities. Religious and mythological painting would take you back to a past that was known and without surprises. In provincial museums, you used to look for the most unusual paintings of little-known local masters, the originality of which derived from their minor subjects or clumsy workmanship. This kind of originality was in short supply here, unless it was in the form of a monumental panorama of the Garonne quays. The image showed commercial and maritime activity stretched out for kilometers, with innumerable details. Dozens of characters, small relative to the represented space, brought scenes to life representing the entire social spectrum. The town, idealized by a warm glow, appeared to you in an entirely different light. Perhaps you needed the mediation of an image to appreciate the urban landscape. You stayed for an hour in order to itemize the scenes in the image, to scrutinize its works of architecture, to submerge yourself in this film painted two hundred years ago, a film whose scenario you could, in your own way, have recomposed today. A few footsteps behind you brought you out of your reverie. A bored caretaker was watching you from a distance. You finished your visit in a minute: your immersion in the panorama had prevented you from paying attention to the eighteenth-century portraits around you, despite their merit. You didn’t even linger in front of the one of John Hunter by Thomas Lawrence. Your footsteps echoed in the vast gallery through which no other visitor paced. You left the museum under a cloud of white dust and started down the straight, bourgeois, elegant streets of a residential neighborhood. You looked around, furtively discovering interiors you would not see again. Along the sidewalk, the terraces of restaurants received office workers in suits, tourists, retirees. You were hungry, but you didn’t want to eat alone in a restaurant. You preferred to buy a sandwich at a bakery and to eat it on a corner in front of a public square, watching the procession of passersby. A girl came up to you to ask for a cigarette. You gave her two; she looked at you, surprised, and exaggeratedly thanked you. On your map you looked for the coordinates of a photography gallery that Damien had suggested to you. It was situated on the other side of town. Judging by the distance, it would have taken you more than an hour to get there. You passed back through the old town, relaxed. Having a goal to your walk was soothing to you. You walked along the Garonne; the quay was closed for construction; they were building a tramway. The construction works disfigured the road and pavement; you had to skirt around fences, cross over piles of sand and avoid holes dug out of the sidewalk. The fronts of old dilapidated warehouses were being renovated one by one as the construction advanced. You paid more attention to the part of town undergoing mutation than to those parts fixed in old and beautiful neighborhoods. There you imagined the life to come: the cityscape existed less for what it was than for what would soon be.