Your wife didn’t use to speak when you were present. I don’t remember her voice. Her look would indicate her approval or disapproval of you. You were the person she would look at the most, no matter who you were surrounded by. Her shyness would reassure you. Her discretion would accompany your silence. The two of you smoked the same cigarettes. You used to carry a packet for two. She would drive the car and you the motorcycle. You didn’t have children. She worked. She earned money for both of you; you studied economics. She admired your theories and your language. What became of her? Has she resigned herself to your death? Does she think of you when she makes love? Did she remarry? In killing yourself, did you also kill her? Did she name a son in your memory? If she has a daughter, does she speak to her of you? What does she do on your birthday? And on the anniversary of your death? Does she put flowers on your grave? Where are the photographs she took of you? Did she keep your clothes? Do they still smell of you? Does she wear your cologne? What did she do with your drawings? Are they framed in a room of her house? Has she erected a museum in your honor? Which men followed after you? Did they know you? Do you, through her memory of you, make the existence of a successor impossible?
When you were awake, stretched out in your bed in the dark, shutters drawn, your thoughts would flow freely. They would grow obscure when you got up and opened the curtains. The violence of daylight would efface the nocturnal clarity. At night, your wife’s sleep lent lucidity to your solitude. In the daytime, people were barriers, dividing you up, preventing you from hearing what you listened to at night: the voice of your brain.
You monopolize my memories of sad rock music. When I hear certain songs, they are tainted with your nebulous presence. You didn’t use to read poetry, but you would sometimes recite it: the lyrics, without music, of the songs you liked. Rock was your poetry.
You used to say it was better to listen to rock in a foreign language that you knew poorly. How beautiful the words were if they were only half understood. What great stuff Dada would have brought to rock, if only the dates had coincided.
You didn’t see a psychoanalyst, but you spent a lot of time analyzing yourself. You read Freud, Jung, and Lacan. You reflected on psychoanalysis, but you didn’t practice it. You thought that treatment would normalize you, or banalize the strangeness you cultivated. You used to like listening to others. They trusted you. Quiet, attentive, and constructive, you helped those who placed their confidence in you more than you helped yourself.
You collected phrases spoken on the street by passersby. One of your favorites was: “A canine is just fine, but I do adore a dinosaur.”
You collected proper names. You framed an electoral list bringing together candidates with particularly disquieting last names.
You kept a tape of the messages left on your answering machine by mistake. One of them went: “We’ve arrived fine. We’ve arrived fine. We’ve arrived fine.” Uttered slowly by an old lady in despair.
We used to talk through the night, only stopping thanks to the dawn. One evening, you spoke for eight hours nonstop, about Freud and Marx, with some interspersed remarks about Kondratiev cycles. Your digressions grew longer in proportion to your consumption of your mother’s liquors, mixed at random. Upon daybreak you came up with the “Kondratiev cocktail” by pouring a shot of each of fifteen bottles into one large glass. The Ricard drowned out all other tastes and gave a milky appearance to the beverage. You drank all of it before going to bed.
You kept your day planners from previous years. You reread them when you doubted your existence. You would relive your past by randomly flipping through them as if you were skimming through a chronicle of yourself. You sometimes found appointments you no longer remembered, and people’s names, written in your own hand, which meant nothing whatsoever to you. However, you could recall most events. And so you worried about not remembering what happened in between the things you wrote down. You had lived those moments too. Where had they gone?
You refused to be prolific. You would do little, but well, or do nothing rather than do it poorly. You knew nothing of contemporary appetites. You didn’t demand to have it all, all at once. You liked to forgo eating, drinking, smoking, speaking, going out. You were able to dispense with light for days on end, happy in your room with the curtains drawn. You didn’t miss fresh air. You were thrilled by silence. You made a classicism out of this drought.
You had no taste for spectacle, but choosing death demanded you choose the place, the time, and the method. In order to achieve this, you were compelled to play the director.
You used to give yourself over to endless sessions of doubt. You would claim to be an expert on the subject. But doubting would tire you so much that you would end up doubting doubt itself. I saw you one day at the end of an afternoon of solitary speculation. You were unmoving and petrified. Running several kilometers in a deep forest full of ravines and pitfalls would have exhausted you less.
Your suicide makes the lives of those who outlive you more intense. Should they be threatened by boredom, or should the absurdity of their lives leap out at them from the curve of some cruel mirror, let them remember you, and the pain of existence will seem preferable to the disquietude of no longer being. What you no longer see, they look at. What you no longer hear, they listen to. The song you no longer sing, they burst into. The joy of simple things appears to them by the light of your sad memory. You are that black but intense glow, which, since the dying of your light, freshly illuminates the day that had become obscure to them.
You went alpine skiing with friends. The first day, you went as high up as you could, to the summit of a glacier that could be seen from the ski station. Your friends came down quickly; they were cold. You stopped, by yourself, in a small valley, to look at the fresh snow that had fallen the previous day. The sun was lighting it up from behind while the wind lifted a slight film from its top layer. In this little valley, the rocks, the shrubs, and the earth were covered by an even, cold whiteness. It was nighttime by day, a negative version of darkness. It seemed to you like sleeping an ideal sleep, awake, lucid, as in your best dreams.
The funeral Mass took place in a small chapel opposite your mother’s house. I only went inside it on this one occasion. It was a small gray building next to the road. To go in one had to walk around the back by way of a dirt path. There was no garden, just a tree. I never heard you, while you were alive, pronounce the words “Mass” or “church.” But you were on occasion drawn to speak of God, in the sense of an abstract entity, a conversational topic, a curiosity reserved for others. It was strange to hear the priest speak of you, when he didn’t even know you. You used to live across the road, but he had only recently been assigned this parish. He gave your eulogy. He said nothing true, nothing false. In his mouth, you could have been anyone. Even though he had prepared his sermon without knowing you, he appeared to be moved while delivering it, as if he was speaking of someone dear to him. I did not doubt his sincerity, though I did believe him to be moved more by death itself than by yours in particular. In mid-Mass, someone started breathing heavily. I didn’t see where the panting came from. It sounded like a wild animal trapped in a cul-de-sac after a long chase. Some people rose to their feet to pick your brother up and to lay him out on a row of chairs. His tears had turned into a panic attack. A few minutes later, while he went on sobbing, your sister also began to feel faint. She too was stretched out. Two creatures distraught by the sadness of your burial. Your mother was still upright, however. The priest, perturbed, pursued his sermon. At the exit, people didn’t dare look at each other, it was as if they felt guilty. Of what? Your mother, her head lowered, came forward slowly, supporting herself on the arm of your stepfather. Your father, standing back, felt most guilty. But his guilt was your final humiliation: he appropriated your death for himself by holding himself responsible.