The truth was only marginally less unpleasant. Deranged by memories that assailed him now with greater virulence than ever, a dishevelled, unshaven Passolet wandered France for several months, sleeping rough, or in dosshouses patronised by alcoholics and low-lifes. Several times he was taken in by the police and spent the night in a cell. He entered numerous psychiatric institutions, staying for as long as a month before checking himself out to wander once more without aim or destination. He relapsed into alcoholism as he drifted further beyond the limits of respectable society. At one point, he found himself staying amid a community of gypsies who were travelling slowly across the rural north of France. The gypsies tolerated him, for a few days at least, due to the wine he shared, bought with his now-dwindling royalties. One of the gypsies, a mustachioed and sullen man who held a certain status in the camp, and wore a white vest that he never seemed to change, became the object of Passolet’s intense fixation. Every day, Passolet would watch him furtively, initially having no idea why the man exerted such fascin-ation. Then the answer came to him: this man was the tormentor of Passolet’s youth, the boyfriend of his mother who had sexually abused him so many years ago. It didn’t matter that the gypsy looked nothing like the abusive boyfriend, nor that there would have been a huge difference in their respective ages: Passolet knew it was him, either in a cunning disguise, or altered due to some other whim or sorcery. This insane notion, which Passolet felt with the force of a holy revelation, left him terrified. He wept that night as he lay under a few rags in a clearing between two caravans, appalled by the injustice of having his tormentor reappear in his life, no doubt poised to inflict yet more misery on him. But then Passolet hardened, willing his tears to cease. Now was not the time for weakness and self-pity, but for manliness and bloody vengeance. Passolet would prove that his role in life was not that of a mere victim: he decided he would murder the gypsy. The next morning, he stole a heavy knife and concealed it in his trousers. He knew that the gypsy slept in the furthest caravan out from the road, along with his wife and three of his children. Passolet would enter the caravan while the gypsy slept, and plunge the knife into his neck. If the wife or children tried to stop him, he would slaughter them as well. Then, either the other gypsies would lynch him, or he would slash his own throat before they had the chance. Passolet was surprised by how calm he felt, now that the intention was fixed. That night, however, having drifted off while awaiting the optimal moment to carry out the murderous act, he awoke in aghast lucidity: he knew his plan was madness; the gypsy had nothing to do with him; he had never even set eyes on him before arriving at the camp.
Passolet fled that same night, terrified by what he had intended to do, the madness that had possessed him. He hurried by moonlight along rural back-roads, imagining unspeakable forms pursuing him through the darkness. Eventually he reached a stream, which his intuition told him was a safe place — evil could not touch him here. He carved a cross in the earth with his stolen knife, then lay down and slept. When he awoke, the sun was shining in a clear morning sky. A faint breeze stirred the rows of corn growing alongside the grassy bank. Birds chirped, and the stream gurgled gently by his head. Passolet felt the warmth of the sun on his face; he knew that this warmth was the hand of the Lord, and that it offered solace, and deliverance from the devils within; he knew too that he had to prove his ardour to deserve this beneficence. Still lying on his back, Passolet took the long, heavy knife from out of his trouser pocket. With his left hand he unfreed his penis and stretched it out above him. He did not manage to sever the penis completely before he passed out; the damage, however, was enough to ensure he would be wholly impotent for the rest of his life. Passolet was found by a farmer’s young son who was out cycling by the river, a bloody patch spreading from his groin. Had he been left there much longer, he would have bled to death.
Passolet did not write about this shocking episode for many years. I had agonised, while preparing to interview him, about whether I would bring it up, finally deciding that to do so would serve no purpose other than to feed the salacious curiosity I detested in both the press and myself. After being hospitalised, Passolet was committed to yet another institution, this one in an affluent Paris suburb, his lengthy stay there paid for by the Bresson-Levaints. Thus began the years of Passolet’s long convalescence. Initially, he spent most of his days sitting out in the well-tended grounds of the institution, staring into space, or drawing childish pictures of obese cats with blank, circular faces. Silvia Bresson-Levaint often visited him, on occasion bringing Celine Begadour, who had recognised herself in the pages of Passolet’s book. One spring day in 1986, three years into Passolet’s stay, Celine brought along her young daughter, Beatrice. Passolet said little during the visit, but Celine would later recall, in conversation with a Belgian journalist, that tears had flowed down his face as the dark-haired little girl stood by his side, watching him curiously. Passolet later claimed that it was the sight of Beatrice, the trust and gentleness in her manner, which marked the beginning of his recovery. ‘I could have killed her with my bare hands,’ he said. ‘But she had no fear of me, only this miraculous trust. That was very moving.’ When Passolet finally left the institution a year and a half later, he sought out Celine to thank her for her visits. Discovering that Celine had been widowed some years previously, Passolet proposed to her. At first, she refused — Passolet was, after all, a man who had been institutionalised for years after committing a violent and inexplicable act. Moreover, he was impotent. Yet they remained friends, and Passolet persisted in his declarations of love. Seeing that he moved confidently again in his old social and literary circles (Cities in Crystal had grown in reputation during Passolet’s convalescent years), and was in a position to provide for her daughter and herself, Celine eventually relented. They were married, and lived together in an apartment in the ninth arrondissement.
Now in his mid-thirties, Passolet enjoyed the first taste life had granted him of a normal, uncomplicated happiness. Re-accessing the creative fount that had been blocked throughout the years of his confinement, Passolet completed Heaven, the book he had started so long before, and immediately began what for my younger self was his essential work, European Graveyards. Published a year after Heaven, a realistic novel depicting the rapture and disintegration of a young Viennese pianist, the later work did not enjoy the same commercial success, but that came as a surprise to nobody. European Graveyards is a strange, difficult, cold book, which casts its affectless gaze across the darkest regions of the twentieth century, weaving historical vignettes with chillingly neutral depictions of Passolet’s own madness and institutionalisation. (The penis-slicing episode is alluded to but not depicted; it would not be until his most straightforwardly autobiographical book, Eggshells, in 1999, that Passolet would write directly about it.) In one chapter, enclosed between essays on ‘rock’n’roll terrorists’ and the ‘eternal howling’ of the Dresden dead, the author Jean-Pierre Passolet has already died. In a suburban psychiatric institution — evoked as a Kafkan or Kunderan waiting-room to a sinister beyond — Passolet’s corpse is placed sitting in a chair, and various figures from his life — Celine, Beatrice, the Bresson-Levaints, the white-vested gypsy, his mother — enter the room to deliver monologues that touch on, but are not restricted to, their relationship with the deceased. A slender, faceless man in a tuxedo appears and announces that he has ‘no quotidian penis’. He undoes his flies to prove it, whilst insisting that the fingers of his left hand are ‘confident, slithering’ penises. Another visitor is an extremely old woman whose body is in an advanced stage of decomposition; she does not say anything, just stands before Passolet’s artificially shiny corpse for a very long time, as if waiting for him to speak. Finally the rotting woman mounts Passolet’s corpse and begins straddling him, fucking him slowly at first, but soon reaching a violent climax — at which point her head falls off, rolls across the floor, and bursts into flames.