In the days, I would spend long hours walking through the streets; I’d slink into the metro, emerge somewhere in the city and walk again, repeating to myself that no, I couldn’t go on like this, translating sentimental novels, when life is so dark and children are being murdered, could not go on holding up a macho man ideal, smiling sardonically to readers while macho men beat and strangle their women, stab and shoot them, abandon their tortured bodies in the underbrush. It’s there, in the newspaper every day an item appears that journalists call another family drama, the thirteenth of the year in the urban community. In describing macho men, I became an accomplice; this was how I became responsible. I passed in front of anonymous dwellings, tall apartment buildings that rose, all alike, along the sidewalks, and told myself it was perhaps behind one of those innocuous-looking facades that the horror was hidden. The city is full of those places that appear to be oases and are really pockets of despair.
“Why talk about it?” Claudine asks in an alarmed voice.
“You’re right, why? Let’s talk about love instead. Let’s talk about Spain. About the sea.”
“I’ve only been to the Atlantic,” she says. “The eastern coast of the United States, the Maritimes. And the Caribbean.”
“So turquoise, the Caribbean. The Mediterranean is mostly blue. It suggests something more… maternal. It always moves me. It’s so old.”
“I thought all seas were the same age.”
“The age of the planet. But it’s as if the Mediterranean has cradled humanity for a longer time than the others. Spain is old, too.”
“Even the name makes me dream.”
“The music, the matadors, the flamboyant colours. As a child I liked to imagine myself as Spanish.”
“I was more ordinary. I dreamed I’d meet Prince Charming, that we’d get married and have a flock of children.”
“And?”
“And no prince, I had to reconcile myself. But a part of my dream came true: I have a daughter.”
I avert my eyes. They are filled with tears. Too much gin.
“She’s twenty-one,” she continues. “I would have liked her to come with me. But she couldn’t miss three weeks of university classes… She’s doing her Master’s in psychology. Had we been able to predict Florent’s accident, I would have settled for the week they pay for and taken her away with me.”
“What’s 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