For Sure (17 page)

Terry wasn't sure what to make of this.

“You French?”

He did not wait for Terry to answer.

“Thought so. Wouldn't matter anyhow. All they've gotta do's play all day. The fill'em takes care o' the rest. You know, how they's behavin' 'n all that stuff.”

Terry was actually beginning to believe the man.

“
And it pays, you say
?” he asked in English.

“Sure does! Couldn't believe it m'self. May be worth the trouble, seein' this hotrod you'se drivin' . . .”

Terry laughed. He opened the car door to extricate Marianne from her seat.

“A pack of trouble, aren't they? Can't unnerstand m'self why anybody would have 'em!”

And with that, the mechanic slid under the front of Terry's car.

“I got three. Little buggers they are.”

He got out from under the car and stood up.

“Jess like their father, I guess.”

“Are they in the film?”

“You kiddin' me? Can't make 'em do anythin' excep' play baseball and trade dem baseball cards.”

He reached into a pocket and pulled out the shortest pencil Terry had ever seen. He searched a long time for a slip of paper, first in his pockets and then in the cab of his truck.

“I have a son too. He's a bit older . . .” Terry told him.

“Sure. Why not? The more the merrier, I guess.”

At last the mechanic dug up an old sales receipt. He scribbled a telephone number and handed it to Terry:

“This 'ere's the number. Sandra's 'er name. You figure out the money thing with her. But I'm warnin' you, she's some tease . . .”

Terry wasn't sure what the mechanic was implying, but he was too shy to ask him to elaborate.

Of all the titles listed in
La Bibliothèque idéale
, those beginning with the letter
c
are the most numerous.
C
alone accounts for 250 of the selected works, which is more than 10 percent of the 2,401 suggested books.
M
also does its part with 227 titles, or just over 9 percent.
P
, with its 200 titles, represents more than 8 percent of the total, whereas the
a
comes in fourth with 173 titles, or 7 percent of the books. Together, the four letters,
a, c, m,
and
p
begin 850 titles, or 35 percent of the books included.

Marianne did not know that her two weeks playing in an environment specially designed for approximately 30 children would earn her parents 1,000 dollars. Nor did the filming going on around her have much of an effect on her behaviour in the big room, which had been painted in vivid colours, so that, with all the movement, noise, bumping and bouncing back and forth, it looked something like a pinball machine. The filmmaker was hoping to demonstrate that small children will naturally find a healthy equilibrium in an environment free of constraints or coercion. At the audition, worried they might not choose her, Terry had underplayed the fact that Marianne was a rather happy and easy-going child. He was afraid the director would only select turbulent children. At the same time, he felt vaguely guilty about exploiting his offspring for money.

“'Tisn't any worse dan havin' kids so dey can help out on de farm.”

Terry told himself The Cripple was right.

Proof that Heaven and Hell have a lot in common:

Throughout his life, in his quest to uncover the secrets of the psyche, Freud not only treated a great number of analysands, but he also practised self-analysis. His observations led him to conclude that it is as perilous for humans to win their oedipal battles as it is to lose them. In this regard, he describes an experience undergone during his first trip to Greece: standing on the Acropolis, he had a strange feeling of derealization. Later, he concluded that he had experienced a kind of survivor guilt. The voyage had given Freud the impression of having surpassed his father, whereas the oedipal, in a sense, interdicts one from outdoing one's parents.

Initially signifying an incarnation or representation, the word
avatar
came to include the metamorphosis preceeding that incarnation. Its meaning later broadened to include the sense of misadventure, a meaning that also embraces the idea of transformation, but, in this case, an unfortunate transformation.

For Étienne, the script was anything but clear:

“Just play?”

“You can do wotever you like, even listen to music if that's yer fancy . . .”

“On account of?”

“On account of dey wants to film how children gets along together, when dey play, an' scuffle, you know, all de stuff dat goes on between kids.”

“Der's goin' to be scufflin'?”

Étienne's doubts about the proposition were only growing.

“Well, I'm not sayin' der'll be any. Only sometimes der is.”

Terry tried to think of something to say to make Étienne forget the potential disagreements between children.

“You could even draw fer the whole two weeks, if dat's yer fancy.”

Le Petit Étienne was silent. He was trying to figure out if two weeks was a long or short time.

“You'll see, de ladies are wonderful nice. You remember Miss Annette we met? She'd be tickled if you'd . . .”

“De one dat gave me a stick o'
thériaque
9
?”

“Yes b'y! Now wasn't she nice, eh?”

It was the
thériaque
that tipped the scales.

To speak, alright. But to be heard? In 1936, Lacan attempted to present his theory of the mirror stage to the International Congress of Psychoanalysis at Marienbad. But the chair of the session rang the bell after the regulation 10 minutes, Lacan's presentation having failed to garner sufficient interest to merit granting him additional time. The reception of his presentation of an amended version in Zurich in 1949 was scarcely better.

Perfect tripartite equation based on the numeral 7:

The first day of filming went well enough: Marianne got involved easily in all sorts of activities and Étienne found sufficient distractions throughout the day that he had little time to dwell on his doubts. The two children were in fine form when Carmen picked them up at the end of the day.

“I'm hungry, Mum.”

“Sure, supper's ready. Yer dad cooked a chicken and potatoes.”

Carmen thought it was a good sign that Étienne was hungry. The licorice ploy had worried her that the children would be eating all sorts of junk food during the day.

“Did you enjoy your day, den?”

Carmen felt obliged to ask the question. She would have preferred to avoid providing Étienne with an opening to grumble.

“Der was water pistols.”

“Oh! You must've enjoyed that!

Étienne was a bit slow to respond.

“Yah, only mine got busted.”

“Awh, that's a shame. Did they fix it for you?”

Étienne thought a bit.

“Yes.”

Carmen did not pursue the subject. The money they were making from Étienne's and Marianne's participation in the project could not have come at a better time. Like Terry, she didn't like the idea of pushing the children into something merely for the sake of money but, as parents, they had agreed that two weeks of this couldn't really do any harm. They also agreed not to talk too much about it, so as to avoid the criticisms of right-minded folk.

“Are we goin' again tomorrow, den?”

Étienne's question was not without a trace of ambiguity. Carmen did her best to reply in the same spirit:

“The ladies seemed really nice, eh?”

And there matters stood.

Lacan's theory of the mirror stage pointed the way to the crucial role the self-image plays in a human being's life. To begin with, the very fact of assuming the existence of a self-image turned out to be revelatory, if only because it simultaneously establishes the possibility of misrecognition, illusion,
trompe
-
l'oeil
. In place of Freud's description of the murky components of the human psyche as a series of problematic relations between the id, the ego and the superego, Lacan proposed the structural trinity RSI — the real, the symbolic and the imaginary.

After three days of filming, Étienne began to grumble.

“I don't like just playin'.”

. . .

“Dey want us to play all de time.”

“Der's nuttin' else you could do, den? Der's no TV?”

This had to be the first time Terry had encouraged his son to watch TV. Étienne only sighed; he clearly had no intention of replying.

“Well, might be you'd be happier helpin' de ladies out?”

Terry figured he could always ask the crew to give his son something serious to do, something that could be equated with responsibility.

“Eh? Would you like to help out?”

Étienne said nothing, though he seemed to be considering the possibility; then he jumped up and ran off to play with his Lego.

Some titles from the
Bibliothèque idéale
promise a beautiful balance:
General History of the Things of New Spain
(Bernardino de Sahagún),
The Raw and the Cooked
(Claude Lévi-Strauss),
On the Motion and Immobility of Douve
(Yves Bonnefoy),
A Technical Embarrassment with Regard to Fragments
(Pascal Quignard),
The Journal of Montaigne's Travels in Italy by Way of Switzerland and Germany
(Michel de Montaigne) and
Six Records of a Floating Life
(Shen Fu), to name a few. Others cut to the quick. For example:
A Short History of Decay
(E. M. Cioran),
Monday Begins on Saturday
(the Strugatsky brothers),
The Faculty of Useless Knowledge
(Yury Dombrovsky),
Theory of Ambition
(Hérault de Séchelles),
In Praise of Folly
(Erasmus). Still others are brilliantly concise:
Things Seen
(Victor Hugo),
Against Method
(Paul Feyerabend),
Façon de perdre
(
Ways to Lose)
(Julio Cortazar),
Paper Collage
(Georges Perros). Several authors directly address the act of writing itself, as in
Writing Degree Zero
(Roland Barthes),
The Writing of the Disaster
(Maurice Blanchot),
The Flowers of Tarbes, or Terror in Literature
(Jean Paulhan),
Monstrous Masterpiece
(Yannis Ritsos),
although this last title could just as well refer to painting, much like
On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts
(Thomas De Quincey) and
Comments on Painting
(Shitao). Some titles take the form of puns:
Les Eaux troubles de Javel (The Troubled Waters of Javel)
(Léo Malet) and
Un coup de dé jamais n'abolira le hasard
(
A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance)
(Stéphane Mallarmé); while others promise revelations:
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World
(René Girard) and
Le Supplice des week-ends
(The Agony of Weekends)
(Robert Benchley); and still others seem to promise children's stories:
Joseph and His Brothers
(Thomas Mann),
The Ice Schooner
(Michael Moorcock); and finally, this title that Terry fell in love with at first sight, though he had no idea what it meant:
Castle to Castle
(Louis-Ferdinand Céline).