Marie-Christine won’t read this book, like Claude, she doesn’t want to. “It kills things,” apparently. Claude didn’t read Sujet Angot either. No one around me reads anymore. In fact, I’m Indian, one of the untouchables. I touch garbage and normally the dead. In India, the untouchables touch the dead. I only touch garbage. No one wants to touch it with me. My manuscript, I’m alone with it for months, months and months and months. Even after it’s published, people who care for me don’t want to read it, “it kills things,” apparently. After the article “Christine Angot Tells it Straight” appeared in Le Monde, 9/24/98), the Minister of Culture proposed me for the Order of Arts and Letters, the medal. Arts and letters, the letters are splitting, I tried to keep the letters straight, and I felt dizzy all day when I was writing this No Man’s Land. Well yes, of course, I know what you’re thinking: you say to write is to touch garbage, that you’re an untouchable, an Indian, but still, it has something sensational about it, but still, it’s finery. Being a writer is a kind of regalia. When I was little, I would wrap my arms around my mother’s neck and she would say “my most beautiful necklace.” Yeah, sure, a necklace of garbage. There was a game when I was little, when you had a golden bracelet “c’est de l’or?” – is it gold? If it was gold-plate, you said “non, c’est de l’ordure,” no, it’s shit, I don’t know if you know it. Which goes to show you what my father made of me and my mother, of our relationship, which was beautiful before we knew each other. Not dross at all, on the contrary. When Léonore was born, I had a premonition of all this. That two women were garbage showing itself. That’s why I called her Léonore, to be sure. Mon or, mon amour, mon or. My gold, my love, my gold. Lé-o-nore. Nonor, my golden love. To be sure. To be sure; sure, sure, sure. So that it would be a gold-plated bracelet and all you’d have to do is scratch it a little, with your fingernail, and it would give like butter when you stick your finger in it, it wouldn’t be gold at all. you’d have to answer “no, it’s garbage.” Stick your fingers in as if it were a lump of butter. “Penetrate the piano like a lump of butter,” Duchâble’s piano teacher used to say to him. In his adolescence, he found the image revolting. Léonore and I would be pure gold. I’d take her on walks in her stroller to the Peyrou park in Montpellier. Madame Gasiglia, the pediatrician asked, with an e or without the e. What do you think? With an e, because it’s a girl. For Christmas this year, Marie-Christine is going to Peru, to visit friends who have a mine, but copper. Last Christmas she bought me the Cartier trinity ring. One day, during an argument, I threw it on the ground and almost threw it in the Lez, a river. I still don’t know what I’m going to do for Christmas. Her, she’s going to Lima, then to the Andes with 4X4s and horses and chauffeurs and friends. She’ll cross the copper mines and mountain passes at five thousand meters. There will be endless hairpin turns. Among her friends will be Nadine Casta, NC, or Gisela Orjeda, GO, like I wanted to be instead of having to retire too young. But I’ll be a grandmother one day and it will be wonderful. And my granddaughter, if it’s a girl, Léonore can name her whatever she’d like, everything she touches is gold. By then maybe I’ll be a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters.