I love this child who will emerge victorious, always angling for a smile, the slightest sign of affection. He is reaching for the sky where he can forget the world and start all over.
I love this man who keeps the world at a distance: never give anything to those who betray you.
Little, so little, so wild that I am.
Silent witness of out of control gestures.
I use silence as a voice without using words.
And wait for the spring to surround me.
What is the world? A bed on four legs.
What is a hero? A child on an island of cotton and sheets.
What is a man? A child who closes his eyes and sees his past.
And you, the crowd cheers you on, gold glints in your hand and you take refuge in the glory that maybe forgets but never forgives.
The trees envelop us, arching low and green over the avenues of the park. You speak in a whisper. I think I hear you say you’re just back from several months in California, where you’ve been playing the part of a psychiatrist.
Under your arm, a big photograph album from your childhood: a stout, yellowing volume annotated by your mother. It had been in storage in South London, in an iron trunk. A street in Fontainebleau. Dunes where two little girls are playing. Forgotten images. Handwritten captions.
You see, Christophe, people say you have to create a mystique. So I hid away here.
In a pastel profusion of satin and lace I fall onto a soft bed and disappear into a velvet world of sensation. Coloured silks moulding the bodies of her princesses, my mother relishes her daughters’ transformation with every fibre of her being. Her scarlet mouth kisses the colours, her hands run sensually over the materials. Ecstasy every time the party begins. Peals of delighted laughter. Two picture perfect little girls.
Is it going to go on like this, my life as a river, the river of my life? What am I meant to do? The contrasts are so strong. I can’t see my face anymore.
But Charlotte: storytelling is a wonderful thing and this is not play-acting.
One day my mother can no longer leave her room. My father dresses her, feeds her, listens to her. Pushes her wheelchair. He plays her husband and her whole world. He becomes the guardian of her life.
The years go by. The notebooks in purple ink fade away. Growing old is difficult. She is like a small bird on a branch, gently swinging, sweetly smiling.
Sitting at her bedside, my father and I finally talk. I think of my sister Sarah, whose beautiful face still seems close enough to touch.
My father, who had never written a diary or a memoir, who had always kept his joys, sorrows and thoughts to himself, didn’t want to die before his wife. He didn’t want there to be a chance she could be left on her own.
While preparing to move to their last home, he did a strange thing: he took his wife’s writings and the diaries she had kept since she was twelve, along with all her photos and hundreds of letters, stuffed them into big plastic bags and… put them all out on the pavement, without saying anything to anyone.
You laughed as you told me this, Charlotte, and I felt your sadness. Freud loved the story of Gradiva, who walks through sun-scorched Pompeii in a white toga: alive, dead, a figure from a dream, she wakes us from our sleep. We should find an equivalent deity for your father, Charlotte. A name for this enigma: this young man who runs in the stadiums, powerful, winged. The sun transforming everything.
But did you love him?
You look down. It is neither a yes nor a no. Silence falls, overwhelms you.
Then you look at me for a long time before you break into a smile. This is to be your answer. I feel as if I already knew it. The secret is not in melancholy, but maybe in its vital essence, in its silent beauty that never ceases to intrigue and remains still at the heart of everything.
Through the window I look out at the trees etched against the sky. Skeletal forms waiting for the transformation to begin. They lend themselves to the cycle of life that man, in his uncertainty, refuses. I close my eyes before nature’s truth. I wait for words to come. Inspiration glides in on a breath.
A little man in a hat rings the bell of my house in London. I open the door to a character straight out of Dickens. He quickly explains that he is in possession of certain items that might be of interest to me.
I wrote that the heart is a safe, but no, the heart is a bag. To prove he is serious, he takes a sample from his satchel, ‘but I have much more’: a twelve-year-old girl’s exercise book, photos of my mother in evening dress, a certificate for good behaviour, newspaper articles, letters. A life snatched from the dump.
I ring my father. Why have some London dealers got their hands on our family treasures? I want to know. I insist. I beg him. But he doesn’t answer, he refuses to say anything until suddenly, in a violent voice, he shouts, ‘I THREW THEM AWAY!’
I’m devastated. I picture the overflowing bin bags being carted off by the rubbish van, impacted and stacked in piles before disappearing forever into the flames. But there is a god of thieves.
The little man in the hat started talking money. His friends were asking for an insane amount. He claimed vaguely to be a collector, a dealer. He specialised in things connected to the Olympics, certificates, photos, documents. I imagined him at his stall in the East End hawking stolen medals, guns and trinkets.
We did the deal, he counted the money twice and we shook hands.
And that was how I bought back my mother’s youth.
After the war, my father was broke. He tried to sell his gold medal or have it melted down. He went to a jeweller’s in London and discovered it was made of steel. Hitler had tricked the athletes, palmed them off with fakes. The medal simply disappeared after that, possibly lost in one of our moves. It mattered and it didn’t matter to my father, who was engaged in a desperate quest which took him far beyond.
I sealed the boxes away in an iron trunk. All that life, virtually within reach. I never reopened it.
A young girl in a crêpe dress is sitting on the backboard of a caravan. She is barefoot in this paradise of graceful black and white flowers. Some sort of poison hangs in the air, I don’t know what it is. Was she thinking of something when the photograph was taken? She looks at me so sweetly.
I was ready to ride away into my dream of woods and wind, the daughter of melancholy and laughter, but in the end I stayed.
Well, this photo without an album is for you, Christophe. For you who were looking for a legend and found a child.
I wish I could touch Tessa Charlotte Rampling’s beautiful face as she waits on the threshold of adulthood. I would like to tell you not to worry, that it will often be difficult and opaque, inhuman even, but you will give us so much – all of us – and this book will be part of it.
I listen to a director discussing his film. He laughs mirthlessly, dread is in the air, in his films, in his strange, muffled voice. Suddenly he says my name followed by these words: ‘a sense of ghost’.
Yes, Charlotte, that’s it: a sense of ghost, appearing and disappearing, talking to the living, cherishing the departed, searching for your name, your face as you glide light-footed through cinema and literature. I see your hand on the page and screen, slender and pure, pushing it away and grabbing hold of life.