Tough luck
Kréma candy, public garden, chocolate cookies with hazelnuts, whole ones, Rue Grande, my childhood friend Jean-Pierre, Chantal Ligot, my wheelbarrow, our store, which we made in the cellar, not the cellar, some abandoned house next door, with broken windows, the turret, the big wooden door we didn’t open. But something else too. Later. From the time I took the name Angot. Do you think it would have been better in the end if you’d never taken the name Angot. Philippe Sollers: Angot, in the eighteenth century, a woman who was prepared to do anything to succeed was called an Angot. The Codec is done. I’m going to get to Le Touquet, I don’t enjoy it. Or sodomization either. I don’t enjoy any of it. The car, giving him blow jobs in the car, eating clementines off his cock, stiff, the pharaohs of Egypt, the day we didn’t go to Carcassonne. Nancy. I’ve already said a lot about it. What else is there? I’m thinking. There’s the adret and the ubac. With Mozart playing in the car, in Isère, where we’d rented a house in a small village for a week or two. He showed me the adret and the ubac on either side of the road, with a cassette tape of Mozart, or Albinoni. It was hell. The clementines, that was there. To hear him push, that was in London in a hotel, around Easter, near Marble Arch. The restaurants, too many restaurants. Too many restaurants and hotels, an enormous number of churches visited, points of interest, including physical, geological, geographical, precisely in Isère a resurgence. Do you know what a resurgence is? And we went to see the resurgence. The guide to Isère is something his father concocted when he worked for Michelin. Not hatred, nor love, nor indifference, acknowledgment. It’s not in my shitty Châteauroux that I ever would have seen a resurgence, not in my mother’s milieu, at least the milieu into which my mother was born. I wouldn’t have learned to speak German sitting at a café table there or gotten 19 out of 20 in Latin on my bac after studying in depth the first two sentences of variant translations.
Le Touquet
Easter vacation. Often at Easter. It was in Le Touquet that he ventured to my genitals. Until then we were restricted to mouths, arms, thighs no doubt, I imagine, to kisses, lots of kisses. Caresses in the largest sense. In Le Touquet he has severe migraines. We’re staying in a hotel in the center of the village, which he had no doubt found in the Guide Rouge. Which I still use myself, by the way, it’s great. Acknowledgment. I don’t know what’s up with him but he insists we go see My Name is Nobody. With that blue-eyed actor, whose name escapes me, Terence Hill? Terence Hill. Of course he was always the one who chose the movies. That’s how I ended up seeing Aguirre, the Wrath of God even though it wasn’t at all appropriate for my age. Or a film with Alain Delon and Senta Berger, she was shown naked, you could always see her breasts, I remember how awkward it was for me. And that he found her pretty. And I was jealous, I was a real idiot. I deserved what happened, I was an idiot. An idiot, a fuckwit, from the cunt, all to explain that I shouldn’t use those words, out of respect for women, that it’s necessary to be polite. Aguirre, the Wrath of God, I can’t think of Klaus Kinski without thinking of my father, I can’t. We go for walks, we go out to dinner, out to lunch, one Sunday midday he points out some homosexuals and explains how they do it, anal sex. I was learning all this at once. I didn’t like My Name is Nobody, I didn’t understand why he had taken me to see it. He read the news. Every day we had to find Le Monde. Every day. He read it every day. He counseled me to do the same. Sometimes he read it in restaurants sitting across from me. He’d offer me a page. Surely I wasn’t always as interesting. He had seen me up close an hour before that was enough, and he would see me again. When I wasn’t bored, it was exhausting. The interesting conversations were exhausting. At home, it was a completely different world, in Reims, Champagne. In Le Touquet he had a lot of headaches. He’d wanted to go back to the hotel so he could rest, in the dark. (When Marie-Christine told me that she wanted to go home after the movie on Sunday, it must have been that, I had another breakdown. Because she was tired and wanted to go home and I would rather have gone for a walk. She cannot understand and today, Tuesday the 22nd, she’s leaving for Paris to stay with Nadine, we separated last night on the phone, it wasn’t definitive, the definitive break happened a little later.) He asked me to come with him, told me it would be nice of me. I wanted desperately to be nice, I really wanted to please him, I wanted him to approve of me. He didn’t protect me at all, I can’t remember him being gentle, not once, for example. For example, if I hurt myself somewhere, would he take my arm and kiss the spot? No. Or would he pull the covers up over me so I wouldn’t be cold? Never. My mother was the exact opposite. She never told me I was extraordinary, I never was extraordinary (Sujet Angot, the narcissism I’ve been accused of, it’s not my fault), but she did pull the covers up over my shoulders, yes. Often. She took wonderful care of me, as a mother. He had headaches, and he wanted to rest in the dark, in his room, shutters closed, as little light as possible, and if possible my hands, my hand on his forehead. I was very, very nice. I was really very nice. He appreciated it very much, it did him so much good, I had no idea how much good it did him. I did him an enormous amount of good. Thank you. Thank you. It did him so much good, so much good, how nice it was of me. There was nothing unusual, nothing complicated, I was lying next to him on the bed, the shutters were closed, I didn’t like it. It was nice outside, I thought it was awful to stay shut up indoors on Easter vacation with my father. And then, I guess, I had to get under the sheets, at some point he must have suggested it. Things went further, he touched my sex at Le Touquet. He said: you know why it’s wet? Because you love. I regret having discovered wetness in circumstances like those.
We went on a walk. We’d arrived by airplane. We didn’t have a car there. He had just gotten his pilot’s license. He had rented a plane and we flew there from Reims, he from Strasbourg. I was going to be able to tell Véronique at school. He asked me what Véronique’s family name was, how it was spelled, and explained the etymology, where she lived, her father’s profession, viticulturist, Foureur champagne. We’re taking a walk in the forest surrounding Le Touquet, the pine forest, the area is filled with beautiful houses. He writes articles in his field, linguistics, he has a book in progress. He’s an admirer of Champollion, he’s very interested in the Iberian language, it will be his major work. He wrote an article on the pronunciation of w in French. People think it’s v, because of they way wagon is said with a v sound, but it’s oueu according to French rules of pronunciation. Wagon is an exception, from German, Wagen, der Wagen. We pass the houses, each more beautiful than the last, he makes jokes, he’s in a joking mood: that one is fifty thousand copies. That one there, oh, that one, it’s at least one hundred thousand. I’d have to write a detective novel to get that one, he jokes. I, who have never seen anything, I laugh, fascinated. My book might not sell many copies, it’s a difficult subject, linguistics, which doesn’t reflect on its quality. That one, oh two hundred thousand. A million. One and a half million. That one, fifty thousand. One million. Two million. One hundred and fifty thousand. We laugh. We had just been to see the airplanes.