Lost Words Read online

  LOST WORDS

  LOST WORDS

  XAVIER HENNEKINNE

  WITH PRINTS AND DRAWINGS BY PHIL DAY

  ‘Only through reverie can unusual images be communicated.’

  Gaston Bachelard

  Contents

  Les choses de la vie

  Dinosaur

  The empires of the moon

  Mishima

  Imagination

  The lost world

  Almodóvar

  Potatoes

  The book of merit

  The bench opposite the school

  Betrayal

  Michel Piccoli

  Sleepless nights

  The death of Cioran

  Sleepless nights

  The reinvention of dreams

  The ink on our hands

  Dried heart

  Maud

  Charles Juliet

  I feel better when I feel bad

  La dentellière

  Pomme

  Isabelle Huppert

  The space between our kisses

  The Nietzsche symposium

  Phèdre

  Words

  LES CHOSES DE LA VIE

  Les choses de la vie. Romy Schneider. My mother adores Romy Schneider; that’s what she said once, J’adore Romy Schneider.

  Which films of this actress does she know, does she like? Would Sissi be the first one to come to her mind? The only one? Would she know the Claude Sautet films? She would know Les choses de la vie. Would she know that there was more to Romy Schneider’s life than her relationship with Alain Delon?

  A few years ago, during a visit to Paris, a publisher friend took me to the reading at the Mouffetard theatre of a new translation in French of a text by Selma Lagerlöf – from which work, I can’t recall. The reading was by an actress called Sarah Biasini. Her face, particularly when she smiled, seemed familiar. Had I seen her on stage before? In a film? Was she one of those actresses whose aura had touched me? When and where had I seen her perform? The way her face affected me had to come from an inchoate, more profound familiarity. Had I known her as a child? Had we gone to school together? Her name meant nothing to me. Had I forgotten her name? Which school would we have gone to together? She was not Elise Gomez, Virginia Thureau or Sophie Rédolfi. Why was her name not with the others in the pantheon of my school enchantments? Why could I not place her in a school yard, a line at assembly or a classroom?

  My friend introduced me to Sarah Biasini after the reading, but I dared not ask any of the questions which could have helped me determine why she was so familiar to me. As the group around her expanded and the discussions multiplied, I continued to ponder who she might be to me. I tried not to dart too many looks at her.

  My friend and I had agreed beforehand to leave shortly after the reading and not dine with Sarah and her group. He and I had a lot of catching up to do. So we left the theatre when the after-reading party hubbub had attained some sort of peak and walked together to a near-by restaurant. As we were about to enter the restaurant he said, ‘The resemblance to her mother is uncanny, isn’t it?’

  We took our jackets off and placed them on the backs of the chairs.

  ‘Who are you talking about?’

  He gently shook his head and smiled at me. We sat down.

  ‘Sarah Biasini.’

  ‘Who is her mother?’

  He looked at me with an air of surprise and his smile widened.

  ‘I guess you have been away for many years and she has only really burst out onto the scene in the past five or six years…’

  ‘So, who is her mother?’

  ‘Who do you think she looks like?’

  I must have lifted my shoulders, for he said, ‘You really can’t see? Don’t they know Romy Schneider in Australia?’

  Then I saw it. Her jaw was squarer but her eyes, her nose, her cheekbones, her mouth were almost replicas of Romy Schneider’s.

  There were things my mother always watched on television when I was a child: the Eurovision Song Contest and Romy Schneider’s films. And I often watched them with her when they were shown on weekends. I paid little attention to what went on in the films but it occurred to me after I met Sarah Biasini that Romy Schneider’s face, her voice too, had become to me seminal.

  As I watched Les choses de la vie yesterday evening, for the first time since my late teens, I had the sensation that I was remembering scenes of my own life. During the early scenes in the apartment, I was not merely witnessing Michel Piccoli’s character shaving, Romy Schneider’s typing at a type-writer, nude, asking Piccoli’s character what the French word is for telling lies, or rather telling stories, but sharing their intimacy, a third person in the scene.

  DINOSAUR

  You wake up and you’re tired.

  You won’t look in the mirror. The contour of your eyes will be greyish.

  The three boys are up. That is what woke you; you think you heard them get out of bed and, one by one, quietly go to the bathroom. They barely made a sound. They’re up and you have to be up too.

  One boy pushes another. You didn’t see who pushed who first but you see him push his older brother when you come into the living room. He roars at his brother and pushes him again, with unrestrained violence. Has he also scratched him on the leg?

  You shout, ‘Stop this! Now!’

  The older brother is now on the floor moaning and holding his right leg. There’s the mark of a long scratch on the thigh. The other boy stands there, his body tensed with fury. The quarrel is over, the damage done, the friction expiring.

  You snarl at him, again, ‘Stop this!’ Then, ‘You go to your bedroom! Now!’

  He refuses. With long, fast strides you go to him. Your arms surround his arms and torso. He kicks the air. You carry him to his room. You don’t want to throw him onto his bed; you’re aware your anger is exaggerated by your fatigue. You put him down at the foot of his bed. You say to him, with a finger raised, and a calm but imperious tone, ‘Five minutes in your room.’

  He looks back at you with your own anger.

  THE EMPIRES OF THE MOON

  In the beginning, there was a book.

  About the Moon. A Moon that was to Earth what Earth is to the Moon, an earth. And Earth a moon to the Moon. A book about a moon that since the beginning of time had evolved, had been corrupted by beings, some very much human.

  I had invited Thu Mai to see The empires of the moon at the Théâtre Déjazet. We had been spending our evenings and some of our nights talking on the phone. And at that time, during the long periods of indolence I spent lying on my bed or trying to write at my desk, I saw her face. I desperately wanted to occupy the same space, sit next to her, lie next to her, feel her breath when she spoke to me, inhale her scent… In class, we were almost always apart, sitting in different corners of the room. She and I liked sitting in our corners, at the back. Once we sat next to each other in Probability class but it didn’t fulfil the purpose of being close to each other. We implicitly avoided sitting next to each other afterwards, frustrated by the impossibility of talking to each other in class.

  One night I slept at her place, in the guest bedroom at her mother’s apartment in Châtou. Her mother had gone away for a few days. We listened to music and spoke until it was almost day. Thu Mai said she wanted to catch a couple hours sleep before we had to go to university so we went to our separate beds.

  But before that, one evening, we went to see The empires of the moon… I left the theatre elated, Thu Mai too. We went for a coffee and talked at length about the play. We talked about imagination. Thu Mai and I shared a deep sense of boredom. We had talked a lot about boredom in our phone conversations. Boredom defined both of us, we’d concluded early in our conversations. Boredom was the most exist
entialist of problems for me. I suffered it; everything and everyone bored me, starting with business classes and business students at university. Boredom was at the core of all vices; it was a disease making an individual’s life insufferable and a phenomenon as old as humankind bringing civilisations to the brink of self-destruction. Solve boredom and you eradicate most of humanity’s ills, I thought at the age of nineteen. I read anything that talked about boredom…

  For two hours at the Théâtre Déjazet, boredom had dematerialised. This is what Thu Mai and I talked about after seeing the play. We anticipated that these two hours at the theatre would later keep boredom at bay, when we would recall scenes, songs, tirades and lines, characters, decors. We were right.

  The play had contained an antidote to boredom. I told Thu Mai I would commit to my desk and continue studying the problem of boredom, conduct further research and write an essay that would tell everyone how boredom could be vanquished.

  Thu Mai almost disappeared from my memory of that period, the memory of her submerged by that vast and painful memory of Maud.

  At one point, I stopped talking to Thu Mai, I shut her out. I still saw her every day but I had transformed her into someone I had no interest in and I stopped talking to her at university and on the phone. She looked at me like any other classmate. She sometimes said hello, but then less and less. By the end of the school year, it was as if we had never talked to each other, as if we had not known each other, as if I had never wanted to kiss her skin and her lips. By the end of the year I had made her almost ugly. I imagined her old, when in class my gaze inadvertently passed over her face and I saw the dark around her eyes from lack of sleep, and I never asked myself who she was talking to on the phone now. Who she was fucking. It didn’t matter. Thu Mai was nothing to me.

  While we had talked every night, we had never talked about what it was we wanted from each other.

  I stopped talking to Thu Mai when, one evening, I visited her best friend Caroline. Caroline asked how Thu Mai and I were going. It was a question I didn’t know how to answer and before I could answer it Caroline started a long diatribe about how she could not understand Thu Mai. Her eyes endlessly went over the ceiling and the walls and avoided me. Why did Thu Mai spend her life talking with me, call me every night, spend her life talking about me to Caroline, avoid seeing her boyfriend because she preferred talking to me on the phone, and yet not wanting to sleep with me, Caroline said at length. She, Caroline, found me handsome, she said. How come Thu Mai did not, she asked me. I laughed, or perhaps I smiled.

  The following day, I stopped picking up the phone when it rang. Only Thu Mai’s calls had been of importance to me. And after a while – how long, I don’t know – the phone stopped ringing. It didn’t take long for it to stop.

  At university, I half smiled at Thu Mai when I saw her, then I stopped altogether. I had never smiled at other classmates because I didn’t see them. Soon, I had stopped knowing her, and she, me.

  MISHIMA

  Mishima killed himself at the age of forty-five. I am forty-five. To think that Mishima felt he had completed his oeuvre by the age forty-five.

  IMAGINATION

  Julian plays videogames three hours a week. An hour and a half on Saturday and an hour and a half on Sunday. He speaks about the games, their sceneries, his progress, what happens in them, what he’s earned or won, and about nothing else.

  The three or so hours a week seem to feed all his conversations and, after recently reading Richard Brautigan’s Dreaming of Babylon, I have been wondering if they have been feeding all of his thoughts too. If they have made him daydream in class, if they populate his dreams at night. He has told me of some dreams of videogames. Are there more? Are there only dreams of videogames?

  And so, I have been wondering about the effects of the videogames on his imagination. Have they taken over it? Have they monopolised his mind? Have they become his sole interest?

  I think of imagination as space. A space. A space where one is free to do whatever one wishes. Create whatever one fancies. And once this is done, once the space is filled by the creation, it becomes space again, virgin and available to once more do whatever one wishes. How exultant the vision of that space makes me!

  Have the videogames filled Julian’s imagination? Are they now occupying all of that space? Without ever vacating it?

  In the last few days, I haven’t been able to think of anything else.

  THE LOST WORLD

  The first book I read was The lost world by Arthur Conan Doyle. I was nine or ten. It might have been an abridged version because when I look at the book now, I wonder if I could have read it in its entirety. It must have been a Folio Junior abridged edition. It had black and white illustrations. Madame Cossée, who was teaching another class, had recommended it. How did I end up meeting Madame Cossée in her classroom after school had finished for the day, with my mother, to discuss books? Had my teacher, old Mademoiselle Alazar, suggested I read more books? Had it been in response to the constant lies I told her, the stories I made up in class for no particular reason?

  I remember precisely some of these lies. One, which I won’t retell, had to do with a Christmas midnight mass I had attended. Mademoiselle Alazar had dedicated her life to teaching in a Catholic school and was dismayed at the story I told. She puffed her cheeks and gave several incredulous oh la la s. She must have asked to see my mother to check the facts of my story and perhaps warn her of my propensity to uninhibitedly attempt to bamboozle people, teachers included, with far-fetched stories.

  Did she think, This boy needs an outlet other than me and his fellow pupils to allow his imagination to run wild?

  I had written a story in class one day and when Mademoiselle Alazar handed back the blue notebook in which it had been inscribed, she called me to her desk on the dais. She asked what I had meant by the words she had her index finger under and which had been circled in red. What did I say? What was my answer? Today I would say, Do not concern yourself, these words are just used as some kind of punctuation, an interjection that gives us a sense of the character’s emotion, following what has been said to him, a mix of surprise and unpleasantness. I actually didn’t mean to use the Lord’s name in vain. As a matter of fact, it was not used in vain, it was used to express an emotion.

  She was astonished when I adamantly argued with her that dogs had a soul. My family had a dog, Rocco, and my brother and I played with him, fed him, sat with him to watch television; he chased us, he and my brother chased me, he and I chased my brother, then after having run for a while, he would sit and pant and look at my brother and me with satisfaction, his tongue hanging out of his mouth. Who was the liar now? Wasn’t it evident that dogs, animals, had souls? You just had to look at them to know. Had she ever looked at a dog, made eye contact with an animal? Mademoiselle Alazar wasn’t lying. Yet her statement was more pernicious than any of my made-up stories. She was not embellishing a story – affabuler, Michel Piccoli told Romy Schneider – to capture our attention, she was deceiving us with a conviction, her own conviction for which there was no fact that could be checked.

  I am sure I was sent to the corridor. In the corridor, you dreaded the probability of encountering Madame François doing her round. You were leaning against the wall opposite the classroom with the coats hanging from hooks, in your mind pairing the coats with their owners and nervously looking right and left, wondering what to answer the principal’s and why are you here.

  I read The lost world in a French translation. Le monde perdu?

  ALMODÓVAR

  Had you met my mother thirty or forty years ago, or glanced at a photograph of her from that time, you might not have seen the resemblance with the Spanish actress Penélope Cruz. But to me, she was then the carbon copy of Raimunda, the character played by Penélope Cruz in Pedro Almodóvar’s movie Volver (2006).

  Adolescent, I often went to sleep fantasising about Victoria Abril. I hid photos of Victoria under my mattress. My friend Charles had p
hotos of Samantha Fox and François had cut-outs from his older brother’s Playboy magazines, or the French equivalent, Lui. I had Victoria, not in the nude, not in suggestive poses, but from the TV guide my parents bought every week. TéléStar, it was called.

  Penélope Cruz wasn’t in Almodóvar’s movies back then. She is about my age, and was probably attending school in Madrid.

  POTATOES

  Someone – who? – ate something that that someone had found in the dirt.

  That someone may or may not have brushed the dirt off that something, may or may not have washed that something. In any case that someone felt rather full after having eaten that something, and very much satisfied with having found that something. That something, what you and I would recognise as a potato, became that someone’s favourite thing to eat. That someone, from now on, kept looking in the ground for potatoes, and when that someone found one, that someone ate it, and felt satisfied with having found the potato and how full that someone felt after eating it.

  That someone started telling others of the potatoes, in whatever way that someone communicated with others, and others started to look for potatoes too. To eat them.

  Later, much later, long after that someone had gone and left that someone’s world, someone else – who? – somehow, after deep reflection about whether to do it or not and in what way to go about it, picked a potato up from a fire. That someone else used a stick to laboriously roll the potato out of the fire. That someone else knew the potato would be hot as fire was hot and therefore something that had been found in a fire was hot too. That someone else had been told as much by someone that someone else trusted, in whatever way people then and there communicated amongst themselves. While that someone else – who was not particularly intelligent, nor particularly stupid, someone others would perceive to be of an average intelligence, with a discreet presence, compared to that of others in that someone else’s group – waited for the potato to cool. That someone else wondered at length how and why that potato happened to be in the fire. Did someone from the group drop it there? Had it rolled there from somewhere nearby, since placing a potato in the fire was not something one did? Had it come out of the ground from directly under the fire to be warm? Did potatoes feel the cold? That someone else, after a safe period of time, cautiously grasped the potato. That someone else noticed the potato felt different, the skin peeled off under that someone else’s fingers, the potato under the skin was soft. Hesitantly, slowly, that someone else took the potato to their mouth. A feeling you and I would recognise as anxiety took over that someone else. As the potato was almost in front of that someone else’s lips, that someone else’s fingers became rather stiff and, in their hold, the potato fell apart. That someone else let out a cry. What had they done? What had happened to the potato? Such a solid thing had become soft and had now been destroyed. That someone else, embarrassed, scared even that others would be angry with them, stood up and went away.