You directed toward yourself a violence that you did not feel toward others. For them you reserved all your patience and tolerance.
You used to tick the wrong boxes on administrative forms to fabricate a new identity for yourself under your own name. Sometimes you would tick “Yes” for “I am on maternity leave,” write “3” for “Number of children,” and write “Australian” for “Nationality.”
You thought that beautiful music was sad, and that sad architecture was ugly.
You didn’t vary the registers of friendship. You were predictable and reassuring, like a large stone on the edge of a path. You recounted, with a hint of a smile, the flip-flopping of that cousin of yours who complained to an old friend of recurring back pain and then, fifteen minutes later at the same cocktail party, exclaimed to another that he hadn’t felt so good in years. What logic underlay such behavior? Loss of self? Unconscious contradiction? Calculated lie?
The phrase “A long, black song” resurfaced in your consciousness unexpectedly. Where had you heard it? No memory came back to you: the effacement of its origins accentuated its ghostly character.
You marveled at the story of the Parisian entrepreneur whose obsessive hobby consisted in documenting his daily existence. He saved letters, invitation cards, train tickets, bus tickets, metro tickets, tickets for trips by planes or by boat, his contracts, hotel stationary, restaurant menus, tourist guides from countries visited, programs from plays, day planners, notebooks, photographs…A room in his house, lined with file cabinets, served as the receptacle for his archives, always being expanded. At the center, organized in a spiral, a chronologically oriented plan indicated Paris, France, or abroad, continents, seas, months, days in different colors. With a glance, the man could visualize his entire existence. He had made a collection of himself.
In front of an object whose function you did not know, but which you knew you could understand if you made the effort, you sometimes preferred to remain at the stage of speculation and spectacle, as when you basked in front of a beautiful landscape: to see it from a distance was enough for you; you didn’t need to walk through it. To catch sight of an island from a boat could be more pleasurable than ever setting foot on it.
You undertook the project of designing your own tomb. You didn’t want to leave the delicate choice of your most enduring residence to others. It would be made from shiny, flat, and unadorned black marble. In front of it, a stele would indicate your name, your birth date, but also that of your death, at eighty-five years old. It would not be a family tomb: you would occupy it alone. The dates would be engraved during your lifetime.
You imagined the reactions of those walking through the cemetery, seeing a date of death in anticipation, located several decades in the future. Many scenarios could follow.
Before your death, its date, set in advance, would turn your grave into a joke, or else a troubling prediction. If you died before the planned date, you could be buried, and the indicated date could be replaced with that of your actual death—which, in giving the lie to the original inscription, would trivialize your grave. But, you could also be buried without changing the inscription. Visitors, believing it to be a joke, would laugh in front of a tomb which nonetheless would contain a corpse. The stele would carry this joke up to what would be your eighty-fifth year. After this date, those who walked by would no longer have any idea of your eccentricity: who would imagine that the inscription was false, and that the man in the tomb had not died on the date indicated?