Heredity
A grandmother who committed suicide, my father’s mother. She threw herself out the window at the moment her husband and his son, my father’s brother, were entering the courtyard on their way to take a walk. My father suffers from Alzheimer’s, as did his father before him. I suffer from the opposite disease, for almost fifteen days now, fifteen days on Wednesday, I can’t get Christmas out of my mind, I have cried every day because of Christmas. I can’t forget Christmas. I cry, I can’t forget, I want to, but I can’t. I cried, I broke up with her, I got myself strangled, I even slapped myself. Christmas Christmas Christmas. Memory loss is not what I suffer from. I don’t have amnesia, rather I suffer from hypermnesia, too strong a memory, if there is such a thing. Christmas Christmas Christmas. I have a six-and-a-half year old daughter, “you always have to bring in Léonore.” Nadine is just an intermediary, Christmas a trigger. I don’t want the legitimate family to take precedence over the unstable one. Paranoids cannot tolerate certain things, I can’t tolerate Marie-Christine not loving me enough to want my child to have a nice Christmas with her and going to celebrate Christmas with her godchildren. My child in other words my flesh in other words my body, what I am, my life, what I’ve lived through that makes Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, Christmas.
Now: to organize the mistakes I’ve made not by how I’ve made them but by why, things I’ll never recover from, “move on to other things” I’ll never move on to other things, the causes, suffering at its most ineradicable, I will be polite, because in the end it makes you very, very polite. It takes away all your aggression, all true hatred, the hatred we show, sometimes, it’s fake, it’s not real, it’s false hatred. It’s a pretense. I’ll try to talk to you. Just as I’m now trying to talk to Marie-Christine, to see if it can be any use. I’ll try to talk to you, here we go, there won’t be any plays on words, there won’t be any hatred, there won’t be anything, there won’t be any literary formulations, maybe this won’t be literature, there will be nothing; nothing, nothing, nothing, there will be nothing. There will be nothing but memories, each memory will be a wrenching that must be written down. Memory, a book of memories. I remember. I remember Ricola, Kréma candies, but something else too. I remember Vittel Délice soda, but something else too. A swing set, stitches in my head, near my eyebrow, my mother in a state, but something else too. I remember Marie-Hélène, the soft sand, my pleated tweed skirt with leather piping, the Nuts and Mars candy bars and Americanos when we got out of the swimming pool in Reims, but something else too. I remember my green skirt with suspenders, my wheelbarrow, my little friend Jean-Pierre, my neighbor Chantal, my grandmother, the rabbits and chicks at the Ligot’s house, Kréma candies, raspberry first, strawberry second, lemon third and orange to finish. I remember cookies with hazelnuts and all sorts of delicious things, I remember two-person swings, etc., etc., but something else too.
What?
Go on, spit it out, your Valda candy.
I was so happy to know him. Meeting him the first time was so much more than I’d hoped. And then, eight days later, not more than that, I swear, not more, I was so disillusioned, I couldn’t have imagined. Way beyond my expectations and eight days later, a disappointment I could never have dreamed of, never. I met him in Strasbourg with my mother at the Buffet de la Gare, he seemed so extraordinary to me. I, who had never had a father to introduce to my friends, all of a sudden I’d be able to tell them how extraordinary he was. I was charmed. I felt no desire for him, it wasn’t that at all. Charmed. Like you can be by someone you love. I found him intelligent, interesting, so much more cultured than your average person, so exceptional. My friends’ fathers could pack it in (this isn’t a quip, it’s not mischievous and impertinent, as I’ve said). Him, he spoke thirty languages, he was elegant. I don’t want to go into details, in short, he exceeded my expectations. By far. I told my mother, who was happy, she said to me “you see, I didn’t choose just anyone to be your father.” I agreed and then some, I said “no, you didn’t, you certainly didn’t.” And then eight days later, my mother and I were spending eight days at Gérardmer in a hotel, he came to see us. Dinner, a walk around the lake, bedtime. He came to say goodnight in my room, and there, he kissed me on the mouth. Already just the discovery of a kiss on the mouth, and that he kissed me like that. I didn’t understand, I understood very well, I didn’t believe it. I really did ask myself. He loved me, he said he loved me. I’m very sorry to tell you about this, I’d so much rather be able to talk about something else. But how I became insane, that’s it. I’m sure of it, it’s because of this that I became insane. This was the cause. In eight days I went from the ideal father, even more than ideal, unhoped for, a father I could never have imagined possible, and he was my father, and he loved me, and we looked like each other, and he was happy, and he found me extraordinary, me too, he was dazzled. There were so many promises. No, I repeat, I never felt any desire for him, no, I say it again. Never. I do know what desire is, after all. Pleasure, there may have been some, I don’t deny it. But never desire. I wanted to please him, of course. I am very sorry this has to be discussed. Very sorry. Why am I talking about it? Well, because I talked about it with Marie-Christine and she thinks it’s a good idea. I hope it’s not because it excites her, she says it doesn’t, that instead it makes her feel bad. It tears me up to talk about it. When I talk to her about it, it tears me up, fortunately I’m in her arms, otherwise I probably couldn’t. I shouldn’t write this. And I shouldn’t talk to her about it. What it will evoke, in her, and in you, will be the same thing, pity, you won’t be able to love me anymore, neither she nor you. She won’t love me anymore. We will no longer be able to make love. You won’t want to read me anymore. I think, well too bad, it’s a risk I have to take. We don’t like people who have suffered, we feel sorry for them, we don’t like the insane, we feel sorry for them. No one wants to live next door to an insane asylum. It’s normal, I understand. I’m the same. I’m a poor girl, no one falls in love with a poor girl. No one wants to make love to a poor girl, unless you’re a pervert. What else?
I didn’t talk about it to anyone. Not anyone. No one knew. Do you understand? From fourteen to sixteen. I talked about my father at school. All the things about him I could be proud about, the intellectual things, his knowledge, his culture, I was appropriating it, sometimes I shared it with others. I mostly talked about it to my friend Véronique. I would tell her what I’d learned over the weekend. She was interested, fascinated. All the things about him I was proud of. All the more since I hadn’t talked about my father at all for fourteen years, not to anyone. There were things I hid, things I was ashamed of, but there was plenty I could talk about.
And now, I tell myself the same thing, keep silent. If I talk it will be worse than before: it helps to talk, they’ll tell me. I hate having to write this. I hate you. I despise you. I don’t want to know what you’re thinking. I know what you’re thinking. Always the same thing and you’re all the same. Calf, cow, pig and I hate you. It’s that or the clinic. I have to. It’s the clinic or talking to you. To you. Writing is a kind of rampart against insanity, I’m already very lucky that I’m a writer, that at least I have this possibility. That’s already something. This book will be seen as a shit piece of testimony. What else could I do? What else? Orange Kréma candy, but also: