Not one to believe stories, you would pay them only a floating sort of attention, looking for the hitch. Your body was there, but your mind would depart, then reappear, like an auditory form of blinking. You would reconstitute accounts in an order different from that which they’d been given. You would perceive duration like others would look at an object in three dimensions, moving yourself around it so as to be able to represent it in all its aspects at once. You looked for the most immediate impression of other people, the photograph that would, in a second, capture the unfolding of their years. You reconstituted their lives through a panoramic lens. You brought together distant events by compressing time so that each instant stood side by side with the others. You translated duration into space. You looked for the aleph of the other.
The private tennis court of a neighboring residence had been abandoned. Even in its heyday, it was only put to use for ten days of the year. Poorly maintained, it ended up being forgotten, the net sagging in the middle, the white lines darkened, the clay invaded by green mushrooms. You used to see it through the thuja trees, at the edge of the property’s grounds, surrounded by a rusty fence, abandoned by adults, rediscovered on certain Sundays by children, similar to a haunted house where ghosts in old-fashioned sports outfits would prowl about in broad daylight. It frightened you in the same way as it did to see a twenty-year-old vagrant or a beautiful lame girclass="underline" broken figures, half alive. Though you saw your own self-portrait in it, you did not avoid this modern ruin. Passing in front of it was like coming into contact with a memento mori. Metaphors of death troubled you, but you did not decline their spectacle. They were trials to be overcome in order to appreciate life, by remembering its opposite.
You were not surprised to feel yourself ill adapted to the world, but it did surprise you that the world had produced a being who now lived in it as a foreigner. Do plants commit suicide? Do animals die of hopelessness? They either function or disappear. You were perhaps a weak link, an accidental evolutionary dead end, a temporary anomaly not destined to burgeon again.
You used to forget details. You would have made a poor witness, if asked to reconstruct the order of events preceding an accident. But your slowness and your immobility allowed you to observe the collective action in slow motion, and to see things that, because of their urgency and the profusion of detail, would escape the notice of others. In a small provincial town, looking at a market from a hotel room above it, you grasped that the crowd moving below traced out a triangle that would swell and shrink in cycles. A futile observation? A useless sort of science? Your intelligence did not disdain gratuitous subjects.
Facing your mirror, happy or carefree, you were someone. Unhappy, you weren’t anyone any longer: the lines of your face would fade; you would recognize what you habitually used to call “me,” but you would see someone else looking at you. Your gaze would sweep across your face as if it were made of air: the eyes opposite you would be unfathomable. To animate your features with a wink or a grimace would be of no help: deprived of reason, the expression would be artificial. And so you would play at miming conversations with imaginary third parties. You would believe yourself to be going mad, but the ridiculousness of your situation would end up making you laugh. Acting out the roles in a comedy sketch would let you exist anew. You would become yourself again by embodying someone else. Your eyes would now rest on themselves and, facing the mirror, you could again say your name without it sounding like an abstraction.
You used to believe in written things regardless of whether they were true or false. If they were lies, their traces would one day serve as evidence that could be turned against their authors: the truth had merely been deferred. Moreover, liars write less than they speak. In books, life, whether it was documented or invented, seemed to you more real than the life you saw and heard for yourself. It was when you were alone that you used to perceive real life. When you recalled it, it was made weaker by your memory’s many points of imprecision. But others had imagined life in books: what you were reading was the superimposition of two consciousnesses, yours and that of the author. You used to doubt what you had perceived, but never what others invented. You suffered real life in its continuous stream, but you controlled the flow of fictional life by reading at your own rhythm: you could stop, speed up, or slow down; go backward or jump into the future. As a reader, you had the power of a god: time submitted to you. As for words, even the best-chosen ones, they passed like the wind. They would leave traces in your memory, but your recollecting them made you doubt their existence. Did you reconstruct them as they had been spoken, or did you remodel them in your own style?
One evening you were invited to dine at a friend’s house with other guests. To the host who, opening the door for you on your arrival, asked you how you were doing, you responded, “Badly.” Disconcerted, the host didn’t know what to say—all the more so because you were standing in his doorway, and because when you had rung the bell, an enthusiastic and impatient “Ahhh!” from the assembly of guests gathered in the living room had resounded through the walls. The two of you couldn’t simply engage there and then in a brief conversation about your suffering, but neither could you make the others wait without having to give explanations to them, all the more embarrassing since your explanations would be addressed to a group of friends gathered to have a good time. You didn’t want to disrupt the party, but you couldn’t make yourself lie in response to the simple question, “How are you doing?” You were more honest than courteous. Even though you were capable of it, it seemed unthinkable to you to put on a show of well-being for a close friend. Having arrived in the living room, you did not want to reproduce the unease sparked by your first response. To your friend’s friends, some of whom you didn’t know, you presented a friendly exterior. In this atmosphere, which made you feel foreign, you were surprised at your success in putting on the appropriate face, which, if it didn’t contribute to the general euphoria, at least didn’t destroy the mood with its indifference.
Your pain died down with nightfall. The possibility of happiness began at five o’clock in the winter, later in the summer.
You were surprised that your state of mind could be so variable without those around you noticing. Once you confessed to someone that you had been very depressed when dining with her several months earlier. She was stunned, discovering her blindness like a time bomb. And you, faithful, kept a straight face.
You were such a perfectionist that you wanted to perfect perfecting. But how can one judge whether perfection has been attained? Why not go on and modify yet another detail? There always came, however, that terrifying moment when you could no longer judge the improvements you’d brought about: your taste for perfect things bordered on madness. You would lose your frame of reference; you would work in a blank, in the midst of vague and clouded visions. What was difficult for you wasn’t beginning or continuing, but finishing; that is to say, deciding, one day, that your project could no longer be reworked without suffering from it—that an addition would diminish it rather than improve it. Sometimes, weary of perfecting perfections, you would abandon your work without destroying it or finishing it. To look at these abandoned imperfections should have reassured you: you had at least worked, even if your attic only contained works that had been abandoned. But the sight of them caused you anguish: being pragmatic, you wanted to see what you had produced function. Your taste for abbreviation meant that instead of finishing the works you undertook, you finished yourself.