Villa Bunker (French Literature) (9 page)

101.
You used to get so much pleasure from covering the pages of your notebooks with your writing, my mother had said; no one ever asked you to fill up those notebooks, which you would demand, kicking and screaming, scribbling away as soon as you got them. You used to lock yourself in your bedroom, carrying the notebooks under your arm, you would be quiet for hours and we wouldn’t hear a peep from your room, we knew you were studiously filling your notebooks, not quite sure if we should be thankful or not for having such a calm and quiet child. You’d decline to do anything else, and you’d refuse to play or leave your room, the sole objective being to continue writing without interruption. And as soon as you were finished marking up one notebook, you would demand another and immediately set to work, you would write more, and always without ever tiring. You used to spend hours cooped up in your room, you seemed to not need to run around like other children, you liked neither running nor playing with children your own age, you never showed any aptitude for sports—I used to often think you would never play sports, and that you would always be against physical activity. You used to copy down any and everything, my mother had said, in one notebook you’d copied out the “Second Preface” to
The Critique of Pure Reason
, while in another notebook it was the first forty pages of
Psychopathia Sexualis
, transcribed in its entirety without omitting a single comma. What could possibly have gotten into you to make you copy out the works of Krafft-Ebing, I still have no idea; I tried to imagine what a child your age could possibly get from Krafft-Ebing—until then, I had no idea such a book existed, and I wonder if your father even knew that this book was in the house. Until then, I knew nothing about Krafft-Ebing and his interpretation of sexual perversions, I hadn’t even heard the name Krafft-Ebing, but I was able to read the first forty pages of his book—can you imagine, reading Krafft-Ebing in your childish handwriting, take my word for it, no mother is prepared for that.

102.
Years later, my mother was standing in the vast ballroom, she’d opened a notebook at random, she’d seen me, and she’d recognized me right away. She was not so much looking at the words but seeing me, the child who had written the words, more or less straight onto the page, the child with the notebooks had suddenly resurfaced. You were once again there, she’d said, I’d shown up again, miraculously, or rather the way a jack-in-the-box pops out suddenly, I was standing there and my mother was unable to refute my childlike presence, this childhood wasn’t simply a memory, nor was it entirely a dream, it was present before her eyes, and my mother could actually look at the child, she was looking at her introverted and unreachable son, it was that same lonely, brusque child, the one she wanted to hold and ask forgiveness of, without exactly knowing for what, she wasn’t even sure she could speak to her son, was he at least able to hear her, she’d even stupidly wondered if he had ears to hear her with over there where he was standing, she’d thought for a moment she was dreaming, but the notebooks were there, they were bearing witness with their childlike scribble, and so she couldn’t stop staring at the taciturn child who was still saying nothing, seeming just as uninterested in her as he’d ever been, she was staring as though at a living and mute enigma, without so much as a reply.

103.
One morning, she heard a noise. It was strangely distinct, like the first time, three months earlier. He’d said it was a rat or a stray cat, but she was certain he hadn’t heard a thing, and that she was the only one who had heard the noise. He’d offered this explanation (a rat or a stray cat) probably in order to reassure her, but he’d only managed to make her worry. They were no longer able to experience the same things, they were each locked inside different worlds—this was now obvious to her. He was locked in the tower world while she was locked in the ballroom world, it was futile and pointless to try to communicate anything, there was no bridge, those two worlds were not related. He was spending most of his time in the tower, and he’d adopted a way of thinking that was both characteristic of and inseparable from it, she was convinced. We live in different and incompatible worlds, even when we’re in the same room we’re apart, standing light-years from one another, as far away as possible. Everything he was capable of thinking—just like every word he was capable of speaking—had to be put in relation to the tower’s atmosphere. He’d developed his own way of thinking in the tower, while she’d developed her own way of thinking in the ballroom, and there was no use trying to relate one mode of thought to the other. It couldn’t be an animal noise, she’d thought, but she couldn’t say anything more about the nature or source of this noise.

104.
She felt like it was a planned intrusion, like the noise was conveying some kind of intension, it couldn’t be an animal noise, she said. This had something intimate about it, like something is there, breathing the same air as you, a presence getting between you and the walls, floating in space. The noise gave you this impression, the impression that a body was there, disrupting space—she hadn’t said this to my father, she’d only thought it.

105.
It was the umpteenth letter she’d written to me, I never wrote back, calmly and consistently rebuffing her numerous attempts to get in touch with me; I wouldn’t even so much as deign to open them, being content to nonchalantly glance at the handwriting on the envelope, throwing the letter just as nonchalantly in the basket as I would a leaflet or misleading ad once I’d recognized her writing, thinking: She’s fucking obsessed with sending me these letters—or else: Is she ever going to give me a moment’s peace—and a minute later, having forgotten about the crumpled paper at the bottom of the basket, I’d be trying as hard as I could to push her image further still into the folds of my brain. She had to be thinking the following: that I was beyond hope, that as far as I was concerned only one thing mattered (she was sure of this), that I finish my dissertation on Foucault, a dissertation begun years ago (it’s true), and which I was still unable to finish (indeed), an obsession that had snuffed out any curiosity, any interest lying outside the realm of my philosophical preoccupations, an idée fixe that had wound up killing any sympathy I might’ve had for the world, and which in the end had cut me off from the world, making me indifferent to everything actually, including and above all else myself, making me incapable as it were of being interested in anything other than Foucault—yes, I’ve been living with Foucault mania for years (as she liked to put it) and, like a drug, I was under the influence of Michel Foucault. I’d read and reread Foucault’s complete works, books that were no longer separate from me, were now a part of me; these works were a substance, solid and visible in the cramped space of my bedroom, and yet they’d somehow turned into mysterious, ungraspable entities whose contours and volume, whose surfaces, housed deep inside me, out of sight, made up an entire geography of confusion. I’d amass notes and scholarly remarks in the margins of these books, books that I could no longer distinguish from myself, I would fill folders with their recopied sentences, underlining Foucault’s key phrases with a heavy, almost angry stroke; these were books I’d read and reread dozens of times, sentences I knew by heart, because they were inscribed in me down to my last cell, sentences I could’ve recited to you for hours. Michel Foucault: French philosopher, born in Poitiers 1926, died in Paris 1984. She’d read these words somewhere, that was the day she was to learn everything she would ever know about Foucault, a collection of boring facts and more or less scandalous anecdotes, and she would never try to find out more, forever associating the philosopher’s name with motley masses of madmen, with perverts and the debauched, as well as with a suspect analysis of illness and human horrors; she’d felt a kind of detached curiosity as she read these few lines, which confirmed her suspicions, she was relieved finally as she read and reread, above all those two dates that seemed to suggest that the danger posed by his books had passed, that the corrupting powers of his mind had been neutralized. Perhaps she’d come across that strange photo of the philosopher in his bathrobe and wondered, seeing him there with his shaved head and ambiguous smile, what could have gotten into me to make me crazy about this intellectual in a dressing gown; 1926–1984 summed up like a tombstone everything she’d learned about him that day, thus allowing her to forget that photo—there was no longer any doubt, I’d fallen under the sway of a tyrannical mentor, my harsh master, the guru who had seduced and ruined me, the gay philosopher who had dulled my intellect and will. Not only would I never finish my dissertation, I’d also burned, one by one, every bridge along the way, depriving myself of any future, recognition, or greatness. I’d become a loser, really, or even some kind of monster (that much she’d gotten right), I’d lost touch with all my friends, I wasn’t dating anyone, I hardly ever answered the phone anymore, and I would probably end up a mere shadow of myself, having forgotten that I even had genitals, and that somewhere in my chest a heart was still beating, blood still flowing through my veins—those were her thoughts on the matter of me, as she anticipated my fall and fears. I’d already completed part of the assignment, I used to say to myself, I’d deserted the lecture halls, I’d insulted my professors, abandoning forever the university, its libraries and somber colloquia, organized in confidence in the bowels of shabby buildings lit by neon; I would be neither a university professor nor a lecturer, it’s as simple as that, I’d say to myself, I’ll never publish a single sentence on Foucault, I’ll never write anything at all; oh, perhaps I’ll begin a novel, which in turn I’ll abandon as well, leaving it to rot in some desk drawer—in a few years, I’ll be a disillusioned spectator at my own failure, I’ll be able to watch the shipwreck of my life, washed up on the other shore. And all this thanks to the genius of Foucault, she was surely muttering to herself, all this because of a philosopher who had died of AIDS, and had infected me with the philosophy bug in turn, encouraging me to make a desert of all that surrounded me, that’s what philosophy leads to, if you ask me philosophy is a mortal sickness—that’s what she was surely thinking, a sickness that isolates and destroys, she’d never really figured out what was contained in the works of this philosopher of prisons, hospitals, and barracks, she couldn’t know how vital Foucault’s work had become for me, but she knew my Foucault mania was tearing up her letters in my hands, preventing me from answering the phone, that same disease of thought which had made me cold and impervious to the stuff of emotions and desires. Mothers will comment on their sons’ lives till the end of their days, and no one can do a thing about it, they’ll elaborate upon their endless commentary concerning their sons’ activities, their supposed feelings, and they won’t be able to help but think that this eternal fiction, woven by them out of whole cloth, is the truth of the matter regarding their sons’ feelings, given that a mother’s instinct is never wrong, they’ll always think. Commentaries we can make neither heads nor tails of, without any relation to reality, commentaries ceaselessly repeating inside your head, and which are nothing more than so many demolition projects, if you ask me. But it hadn’t deterred her to know that I would contradict any statement, especially one coming from a mother, and it certainly hadn’t stopped her from writing to me, to see how I was coming along with my Foucault mania. This extreme form of loneliness, which she’d dubbed Foucault mania, wasn’t much of a concern anymore, she never received replies to her letters, and still she kept writing to me, without expecting me to return the gesture, she would imagine me locked in my tiny student accommodations, I was well past the age to be a student, yet unlikely to ever move out of this room, I was acting out my own confinement, performing to perfection my Foucault mania, never once letting my attention stray from my starring role. She wasn’t expecting me to write back, she wasn’t writing to receive a response, she would write more than twenty letters without even being sure I was reading them, she’d talked about the indoor plants, and all those rooms that seemed to tense up as soon as you entered, as if they were angry at you, or else reacting to some age-old fear; she’d discussed the renovations and my father’s migraines, she could have easily found a thousand more things to talk about if she’d wanted to. Had it not crossed her mind to get in touch with my bes
t friend, asking that old buddy to snoop around under a false pretext, asking him to take notes on everything he observed, analyze my most meaningless gesture, the way I walk, committing to memory everything I say, as a lab technician would, nothing would escape the notice of this aforementioned friend, he would provide a quasi-scientific description of my behavior, how I spent my time, information regarding my opinions, my intentions, a complete inventory of my ideas dealing with the notion of family, that’s what she was demanding, did I speak readily about my parents, he would record the frequency with which I used the words “mother,” “father,” “parents” in conversation, describing in detail the expression on my face, the tone of my voice when I mention my mother, etc. Was he still listening to music, or had he thrown out all his records? He must have accumulated mountains of notes in the time he’s been working on that dissertation of his, the title of which she’d heard once, a crazy title she’d quickly tried to forget, because it sounded so arrogant and unhinged. She used to imagine impressive piles of notes on his desk, she would also see editions of Foucault’s works in the tiny bedroom, the complete works of the philosopher of prisons, as well as commentaries upon these works, fat annotated books gnawing away at the cramped space of his small bedroom, a bedroom that must resemble a paper mill, a closet is what she would like to say (more so than a bedroom), that’s what he lives in, an enclosed space dedicated to Foucault, a sealed space where the Foucault mania had been allowed to flourish freely for years, spreading its wings above his thin face, he’d never been a pudgy child, but boy, after these past few years on the Foucault diet, morning, noon, and night, skipping meals, never going out, drastically cutting back all of his contact with the outside world, he’d had to have lost weight, to the point of being unrecognizable, looking himself like one of those AIDS patients floating in their baggy clothes, now he must resemble one of those prematurely aged intellectuals, dried-up by sleepless nights and an unhealthy diet, taking too many pills as had always been his habit, would he sometimes at least take a break to play records, was he still listening to the
Goldberg Variations
, the Glenn Gould version, as before, perhaps he’d gotten rid of everything, his books, his clothes, his grandfather’s watch, his electric razor, maybe he’d taken down or shattered the mirrors, he’d maybe even thrown his computer out the window, but he’d likely kept the disc of the
Goldberg Variations
, yes he’d gotten rid of everything except the
Goldberg Variations
, she was remembering that his first impulse upon arriving in Sables (when he used to take advantage of our absence to hang out in the small apartment in Sables and catch up on his studies) was always to put on the Bach disc, before even turning on the heat and opening the shutters, he’d one day confided this detail to her about his time spent in that one-bedroom apartment in Sables, she’d never really known what he was up to when he used to spend weeks at a time there, the only thing she was sure of was that he used to shut himself up for days on end, and that his first reflex upon arriving was to listen to Bach played by Glenn Gould, the
Goldberg Variations
, he’d never have stood for another version, Glenn Gould or nothing at all he used to say (indeed), Glenn Gould now and forever (I’ll confirm). But maybe she was wrong. Perhaps he’d bought a large stock of darts and was spending his days aiming at the target, a map of France tacked to the wall at the other end of the bedroom, perhaps he’d become an all-round champion at darts, planting the darts precisely where he wanted them on the road map, after all wasn’t that better than imagining him under the influence of Foucault.