Yves puts down Hugues Léger’s first book, Definition. A litany of sentences, almost a thousand of them, in which the writer sketches a self-portrait in disjointed fragments. The previous evening, Hugues killed himself, at home, with a bullet through the mouth. Anna is in Berlin for a few days, she probably does not yet know. Yves immediately wrote an obituary for Libération, and managed to arrange through a journalist friend for it to be published, even though a different article had already been approved for the page layout. In it he said this did not mean that Hugues’s last book, Autolyze, which deals with suicide, should be seen as “a will waiting to be unsealed”; it was not “the cathartic book his friends would have liked to see him write, the book that would open up the creative field he still needed to open. But Autolyze, his most accomplished book, could exist in its own right without the dim reflected light of his death, which he need not have foretold.”
The dinner Anna wanted would never happen, today’s lover would never meet yesterday’s. But Yves feels a blossoming friendliness toward Hugues, whose resolute death tries in vain to forbid friendship. He has reread his books, hoping to find in them the man Anna must have loved, and has identified a dark intelligence of life in his sentences. One he found particularly touching, violently so, was the closing sentence of Definition: “The best day of my life may already be behind me.” Before meeting Anna, Yves also thought the best day of his life was already behind him. He also knows that the woman who caused Hugues to cut his mattress in two is Anna. She is the sort of woman you might want to sacrifice a bed for.
Anna harbored more than affection for Hugues.
“You know, Hugues,” she once reassured him, “if you’re ever having difficulties, you can always come and stay with us for a few days. It wouldn’t be a problem, we have a guest room.”
One evening — two years later — he rang their doorbell, suitcase in hand. He had had a row with his partner, he was out on the street. Anna was in Normandy and Stan opened the door. He did not know what to say to the man in the hallway: he did not know him, Anna had never mentioned any invitation and, since then, Karl had been born and the guest room was now his. Stan asked Hugues in before calling Anna. She explained the new situation to her old boyfriend. Hugues did not take offense but went and slept in a hotel, in spite of Stan’s offer to put a cot in his office.
When she told Yves this anecdote, there was nostalgia in her voice. She had grown apart from Hugues, she said with regret, it would have been an opportunity to know each other in a different way, to become proper friends. But she actually said this: “It’s a shame. If Hugues had stayed with us, we could have had a different relationship.”
Yves laughed at the ambiguity. He knows that when Anna talks about “having a relationship,” it almost always means a sexual one.
ANNA AND THOMAS
• •
ANNA HAS NEVER KEPT COUNT of her sessions with Le Gall, but Le Gall writes the number 1,000 at the top of the page. That’s a lot. You could have bought yourself a nice Porsche with some optional extras, Yves calculated. He is wrong: Thomas has paid off a small house in an Italian village near La Spezia.
Anna knows what she wants to talk about, Simon’s eyesight problem. The thought that her brother could one day go blind terrifies her. She talks about Simon’s wife, his children. Eventually, she confesses the fear she would feel if the man she loved could no longer capture her with his gaze, if she disappeared from his view, if that mirror she so needs were broken. The selfishness of this narcissism fills her with shame.
She also wants to talk about a Freudian slip she made the day before. She was out for a walk with Karl and Lea, and Yves was with them, they were all going out for lunch together for the first time. When she is with her children, Yves is never a lover, but a “friend.” Anna has not yet resolved to admit the position he holds in her life, Yves often doubts she ever will. She refrains from any affectionate gestures, any attentiveness. Karl ran on ahead, jumping from one paving stone to another, Lea slipped between the two of them, took one of their hands each and started to swing, screeching happily. The spontaneous affection Lea always shows for Yves unsettles Anna every time: her daughter could be consenting to this unavowed, unacknowledged union, granting her mother’s lover a role. Lea suddenly abandoned them to go look in a toy store window.
“We’re late and we’re hungry,” Anna scolded her. “Come on, Nora, hurry up!” Nora? Anna looked away, disconcerted, then pulled herself together: “Quickly, Lea!”
Nora. She cannot get over it. She called her daughter by her younger sister’s name, she was back in her childhood, in the days when she went for walks with her father, her mother, her sister, and her brothers. Lea did not appear to notice and hurried up.
Anna thought about this slip of the tongue all evening. She found an explanation, has already given it to Yves, and now produces it for Le Gall.
“I just can’t be a mother when I’m with Yves.”
“Mmm. But it wasn’t Yves you were talking to.”
“No.”
“It was to Lea, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“So,” he suggests, “it could also be that in front of Lea and Karl, you can’t be a woman. You won’t let yourself.”
Anna stays silent. Le Gall has just inverted her view of the scene, giving the slip the exact opposite meaning. She feels he has pinpointed it.
“Maybe I’m trying to protect them.”
“Or to protect yourself.”
Le Gall rarely intervenes. He does it every time he sees another plausible and equally productive association. He tries to banish the word “because” from his vocabulary. It is not up to him to determine what is cause and what is effect. He limits himself merely to stating facts. Sometimes, all he does is reiterate what has been said. During one session, she blurted, “If I stay with Yves, I’ll have the life I’m dreaming of.”
Thomas repeated this: “Yes. The life you’re dreaming of. You’re dreaming.”
“Stan made me a mother,” she told Le Gall, “Yves made me a woman.”
Le Gall calls this formulization: a technique for turning life into aphorisms, for fixing it in words. It has its uses. Anna so likes “finding the words.” But does finding the words mean understanding? Animals do not need words. Thomas Le Gall sometimes has his doubts about the philosophy of language, but having doubts about philosophy — whether or not it has to do with language — surely that in itself is truly philosophy?
STAN AND YVES
• •
CORPORATE SPONSORSHIP improves a company’s image, and the cost is tax-deductible. These two reasons explain why a water treatment corporation has raised the Pension Heisberg (what was once a private house, in the Marais district of Paris) to the ranks of a cultural venue. It finances concerts, discussions, and exhibitions there. On this particular evening, the Heisberg’s auditorium is playing host to three writers for a joint reading, on the politically correct theme of Foreignness. Their three original texts were specially commissioned and have been published as a limited edition by Carnets Heisberg, printed in twelve-point type on laid paper.
Stan is late, he had an emergency keratitis. He has not been to a reading for a long time, but the children are with their grandparents for the night, Anna has gone to the rue de Verneuil for her psychoanalysis seminar, and curiosity got the better of him. He locked his bike close to the Picasso Museum and ran all the way to the Heisberg. The young blonde in glasses sitting at the small book table replies almost in a whisper: “Yes, sir, it’s started. Yes, there are a few seats left. No, Yves Janvier hasn’t done his reading yet, he’s the last. You can slip in quietly through the upstairs door.”