I heard you imitate an old peasant who used to live behind your mother’s house, and who condensed his polite greeting—“How are you doing?”—into “Owyiding?” You approached your interlocutor, taking him by the hand as if to greet him normally, but at the last moment you unleashed the peasant’s greeting on him. You gave no sign of your intentions. You didn’t repeat it for a second round of laughter. You didn’t entertain on demand.
You claimed to be smaller in the evening than in the morning because your weight had compressed your vertebrae. You said that the night returned what the day had taken.
You used to smoke American cigarettes. Your bedroom was soaked in their sweet smell. Watching you smoke inspired the desire to do the same. In your hand, a cigarette was a piece of art. Did you like to smoke, or to be seen smoking? You used to blow perfect smoke rings, thick and dense. They would travel for two meters before wrapping themselves around an object and dissolving on it. I remember their trajectory at night against the light of a lamp. The last time I saw you, you had quit smoking, but not drinking. Stroking your belly, you congratulated yourself on having gained weight, though the difference was slight. You had kept your figure.
Explain your suicide? No one risked it.
You couldn’t have been said to dance, exactly. Despite the music sounding around you, bodies being carried away by the whirling bass, it didn’t get inside you. You used to trace out the steps, but you were mimicking dancing, rather than doing it. You would dance alone. When a look crossed yours, you’d smile like someone caught off guard in an absurd situation.
Your suicide was not preceded by failed attempts.
You did not fear death. You stepped in its path, but without really desiring it: how can one desire something one doesn’t know? You didn’t deny life but affirmed your taste for the unknown, betting that if something existed on the other side, it would be better than here.
When you read a book, you would return over and again to the page headed “Other Works By…” You didn’t know if you would want to read the other works, but you delighted in imagining what their titles suggested. You never read Neruda’s Residence on Earth, for fear that the poems in that collection wouldn’t live up to their title. Being unknown, they were more real to you than they would have been if they had disappointed upon reading. During the week you sometimes thought it was Sunday.
You didn’t like to travel. You rarely went abroad. You would spend your time in your bedroom. It seemed useless to you to travel for miles in order to stay in a place less comfortable than your own. To think up imaginary holidays was enough for you. You used to jot down in a notebook the things you would have been able to do by following contemporary tourist trends: Watch people at prayer in an Indian temple. Dive in Bali. Ski in Val-d’Isère. Visit an exhibition in Helsinki. Swim in Porto-Vecchio. When you were sick of your bedroom, you consoled yourself by rereading your notes on these imaginary holidays, and you closed your eyes to visualize them.
One day I asked you why you seldom traveled. You told me the story of that writer, a friend of your mother’s, who obtained funding in order to spend a few months abroad. He wanted to do research in order to write a work of political fiction that would take place in an imaginary country, inspired by the real country he went to, which a dictator had brought to its knees thirty years earlier. Having arrived, he understood in a day how absurd his enterprise was: research would be of no use to him. His imagination was everything, but he needed to make the trip in order to understand this obvious fact. His six-month voyage was cut down to two days. He took the first plane home.
I hadn’t known you spoke any foreign languages. One day, an Irish friend of your mother’s came by. She did not speak French. You addressed her in perfect English.
Only the living seem incoherent. Death closes the series of events that constitutes their lives. So we resign ourselves to finding a meaning for them. To refuse them this would amount to accepting that a life, and thus life itself, is absurd. Yours had not yet attained the coherence of things done. Your death gave it this coherence.
One day, you set off on your blue motorcycle to the coast. You were traveling at 180 kilometers per hour. A car fishtailed into your path. You lifted your arm and signaled your offense as you passed. Thirty kilometers on, when you got off the freeway, the car overtook you and blocked your way at a crossroads. You didn’t know what the driver wanted, but he revved his engine as much as he could without moving an inch. There were two men looking at you from the back seat, excited, egging each other on. You got off your motorcycle and headed toward the vehicle. They left before you could get to them. And then, later, at the beach, you ran into them by chance. When they saw you from afar, they believed you had followed them. Again you headed for them, keeping your helmet on. They were in their swimming trunks. They gathered their possessions at top speed and bolted, looking back over their shoulders while running.
In public, your quiet way of observing others made them uncomfortable, as if you were a breathing statue, indifferent to all the frivolous movement that the stillness of a statue so underlines.
Your choosing to erase the world exempts those surviving you from doing so. What you miss, they see. Their pains become pleasures when they think that you are no longer anything at all.
In art, to reduce is to perfect. Your disappearance bestowed a negative beauty on you.
In your mother’s house, there were an old watchdog and some passive, useless house cats. We used to repeat the old saw: feed a cat for a lifetime and it will leave you one day; feed a dog for a day and it will be loyal for a lifetime. You were the cat and I the dog.
You succeeded in the few things you undertook.
The last time that I saw you, you were wearing a white cotton shirt. You were standing upright with your wife on the lawn, in the sunlight, in front of the château, at my brother’s wedding. You shared in the enthusiasm of the ceremony. For my part, I felt distanced from it. I didn’t recognize my family in this mundane get-together. You didn’t seem put off by the bourgeois ceremony, or by my brother’s choice to have his love approved by third parties, even when these were distant third parties. You didn’t have the sad and absent look you normally took on at public gatherings. You smiled, watching the people, a little tipsy from the wine and the sun, chatting on the large lawn between the white stone façade and the two-hundred-year-old cedar tree. I often wondered, after your death, if that smile, the last one I saw from you, was mocking, or if instead it was the kindly smile of someone who knew that soon he would no longer partake in earthly pleasures. You didn’t regret leaving these behind, but neither were you averse to enjoying them a little longer.
You did not hesitate. You prepared the shotgun. You put in a shell. You fired into your mouth. You knew that suicide by shotgun could fail when aiming for the temple, the forehead, or the heart, because the recoil throws the gun off its target. With the mouth keeping it steady, errors are rare. If you had wanted to announce your suicide, which is to say renounce it, you would have chosen a gentler method. Yours was violent, the result irreversible. You used to think things through before acting. Once you were decided on something, nothing would stop you. Your gaze was no longer fixed on the world around you, but sighted on your target. Once, your mother’s last dog charged at another dog a hundred meters off. It caught up with the other dog, trampled it, took it by its throat, and shook it like a mouse. It would have killed the beast if they hadn’t been separated. You had that same look.
Your suicide was an action, but an action with a contrary effect: a form of vitality that produces its own death.