The Age of Reinvention (23 page)

A physical description of him is necessary because, that day, there is something scary about him. Is it the denim jacket spotted with black stains (grease? ink? soot?) or his jeans with the ripped knees or his T-shirt emblazoned with the image of a hard-rock band or his flashy high-top sneakers with their frayed laces? Or is it something in his blue-eyed gaze—a spark of insanity? You look at him and you sense that he is capable of
anything
. He is sitting on a brown velvet chair, tense as a loaded pistol with its trigger being squeezed. But Samir doesn't even give him time to speak: having closed the door and checked that there is no one around, he bombards him with questions:
What are you doing here? How did you find me? Who gave you my address? What do you want from me? Is Mom with you?
There's no lack of ammo.
How long do you intend staying here? Who have you talked to about me? Who told you you could say you were my brother? What the hell do you want?
“Whoa! Take it easy, man . . . Is this how you welcome your brother?” He has just endured eight hours in a piece-of-shit plane with a layover, his legs crushed by the seat in front, curled up like a sick animal—and he puked several times during the flight too—he's exhausted, he hasn't slept all night . . . he's done all this to come see his brother, and all his brother can find to say is: “What are you doing here?”

“What the fuck kind of way is that to talk to your brother? You asshole!”

“Calm down, please.”

“Oh, I should calm down? Well, how do you expect me to do that when you greet me like I took a shit on your carpet?”

“I just wasn't expecting you, that's all.”

“I wanted to surprise you . . .”

He's cut his hair since the last time Samir saw him, and in places you can see his white skull scattered with freckles. He's also lost weight, and there's something eerily skeletal about the way you can see his bones protrude through his corpse-pale skin, about the flint-sharp edge of his Adam's apple. A large, torn, green sports bag is lying at his feet.

You must never come to my office without telling me in advance
.

François stares at the carpet and plays nervously with a small metal chain that he's taken from his pocket.

I'm not moving my ass from this chair
.

Samir cracks open the blinds and thinks through the problem, going through various hypotheses. He needs to react quickly, get him out of here by any means necessary. Turning around, he suggests in a quiet and suddenly friendly voice that they meet in a nearby café: “It'll be more relaxed there. I feel tense here, I feel stressed.” He has no wish to be seen with this man, in his office, or to have a personal conversation here. He does not want anyone to knock at the door and say: “Hi, I'm X, Y, I work for the firm. And you?” Yes, he is probably a little paranoid—life has made him that way. He has two cell phones, never talks about his private life in his office. He fears revelation, fears transparency. François agrees and gets to his feet abruptly, his long legs surprisingly agile. Picking up his bag, he leaves the office first.
See you in a minute . . .

Relief and fear. Nothing more than a temporary reprieve before the inevitable defeat.

I'm fucked
.

The sweat that sticks to his skin is spumescent. It's the anxiety. His pulse speeds up, crackling and sputtering. Can a person die of fear? He is incapable of seeing past his confusion. When he walks toward the exit five minutes later, his secretary asks him who that man was, the one pretending to be his brother. And, smiling, without thinking, he replies: “A client who would do anything to make me represent him.” What assurance he has in moments like that, erasing doubts, forestalling questions.

He has a panic attack in the elevator and almost suffocates; his lucidity makes everything seem unreal. What does his brother want? He feels trapped, and that terrifies him. He feels vulnerable, and for a man who prides himself on never being intimidated, this is something new. He tells himself to calm down, but he can't hold back the wildfire of fear inside him. He stands in front of the mirror and adjusts his tie, combs his hair.
Come on, come on, just chill out
. He knows he must show no weakness. He has to win the battle of wills, maintain the balance of power between him and his brother, and send him back to Paris clueless, unsuspecting, happily distracted by the wad of bills in his pocket. (He manages to convince himself of this, until he
truly
believes it.) But when he enters the café where he had arranged to meet François, his brother is not there. Samir walks all around the café, even asks the waiter if he's seen “a blond man with a green duffel bag.” No, he's seen no one fitting that description. And yet, Samir wrote down the name and address of the café for him. For twenty minutes he sits and waits, incapable of concentrating on anything else. (He doesn't read the newspaper, doesn't touch the tea he ordered, doesn't answer his phone—it's his wife again.) He calls his secretary to ask whether anyone has left a message for him (“Yes, your wife called,” she replies. “She said she tried to get hold of you on your cell phone and she couldn't understand why you didn't answer”) and then finally gets up and leaves. End of round one—and he is losing on points.

Walking back to his office, he tries to think of a reason why his brother wouldn't turn up: he changed his mind, he couldn't find the café, he's dead . . . Oh, yes, how he would love to find out that François had died in an accident, never to hear his name again . . .

François did not return to the office, and at seven p.m. Samir went over to Nina's place to tell her what had happened. To lie down and talk. With her, he can be himself. Love and trust release the shackles on his words. He feels free to tell her whatever he thinks; he doesn't have to hold anything back or calculate or control what he says—all those defensive postures he adopts on a daily basis with his family and his colleagues, so that he always comes across the way they expect him to. He tells Nina that he doesn't know what to do: he feels paralyzed by this situation. All day long he has been in a daze, unable to concentrate, to answer his clients' questions. “You have to understand: I have no hold over him at all.” He has never gotten a real understanding of his brother's personality, and—he can admit this to Nina—he has never loved him. Nina listens, and tries to reassure him: “He'll leave in the end, don't worry. He's probably just come to ask you for money.” Yes, this is what he thinks too, and for a few minutes this belief is enough to calm him. Money, he can give him. But affection, friendship, any sort of brotherly love . . . no. He can't work out what his brother wants—François is a mystery to him—but he is sure of one thing: he needs to beware of him. “You think he's simple, but he's complex. You think he's harmless, but he's dangerous. He doesn't have the intellectual training, the language, the education to express the nuances of his personality, so his complexities sometimes express themselves only in violence. His father rejected him, and he'll never forgive that: he won't forgive his father, and he won't forgive us. And that's why he's here now: he wants to make me pay for it.” Nina feels sure that he found out Samir's contact details on the Internet and came, spontaneously, for a few days. “He'll go back.” If he does get back in touch, all Samir has to do is play along: hug him, kiss him. When he talks to Nina about all of this, everything seems simpler and clearer.

That evening, driving home, Samir calls his mother and asks about François. She is clearly upset, and it takes her ten seconds or so before she can speak clearly. That is when she tells him that François is gone—that he left their apartment with all his belongings,
and you know what he said to me?
No, Samir doesn't know, would rather not know—he should have broken off all relations with them, that's what he thinks—but his mother keeps on talking, her voice raw with hurt, the words coming fast: “He said he was never coming back.” Samir feels a sudden pain in his chest. The telephone slips between his fingers and falls to the floor. From the speaker, his mother's voice crackles, calling out his name. He steps ever harder on the accelerator and the engine roars and he feels a sweet lightness, a kind of innocence, that he knows he will lose forever if he stops, so he floors the pedal, overtaking other cars, freight trucks, a sign on the back saying flammable materials, the word
DANGER
in big white letters on red, and he thinks,
I could hit that tank and explode here, now, in the middle of the road
, but he swerves around it—he's the king of evasion—and continues at full speed until suddenly the car skids out of control, squeals to a standstill. Samir hangs on to the steering wheel and manages not to be thrown through the windshield. Blood is pouring from his nose, staining the leather seats. Samir raises himself slightly to look in the rearview mirror, but all he can see is his own terrified face.

Samuel's downfall has been violent and painful, but there is also something—he is able to see this himself—almost funny about it. Tragicomic, that's it. So here he is, waiting for something to happen, for a solution to magically appear—or perhaps simply waiting to be put out of his misery. He dreamed about it the night that those guys threatened him, in fact. He might die . . . well, so what? He's alone now. Let them kill him. Let them finish him off. He's losing everything anyway. Look at him—gap-toothed before his time. What does it matter if they smash all the rest of his teeth, his ribs too—why not, just for the fun of it?—his bones are fragile, it'd be easy. He can no longer feel his body. Everything is numb except his hand and his head—the only things that let him know the difference between nothingness and suffering, absence and solitude. He's all out of drugs, his bank account is in the red, and his laptop is gone. He has no choice: he calls Nina and begs her to send him cash—a money order, a bank transfer—because he's dying here. He won't call her again, he promises, swears, and she ends up agreeing: the price of her mental and moral tranquility. It's humiliating—the fact of being paid by her, the fact of having called her simply to obtain money—but it's nothing compared to the desperation/fear/tension he feels, nothing compared to the certainty he has lost. The only certainty now is that he is damned, that he won't last long. And yet he doesn't give in: he clings to life, to what he might still make of it. And the next day, he makes the payment—hands over the cash and is given his laptop. Everything's fine—no threats, no violence. They're quits. But he'd better not come back expecting a fix from them, because they won't give him anything. The drugs will go to those who stick to the only system that still works: consume/pay, consume/pay. He'll die alone, as he no longer has the means to be an active participant in this system. He'll have to make do with alcohol.

So now he spends his days drinking, reading, and taking notes, as if what he were writing is a manual on romantic despair and solitude, and all the time he thinks:
I'm not alone
. Other writers have lived, loved, suffered, and have been able to turn their ordeal into literature. He has never been as disciplined as he is now, working for hours on his novel, waking up in the middle of the night to write passages of shocking violence in a sort of trance, as if they were being dictated to him by some kind of inherent rage, as if he were intoxicated and asphyxiated by anguish and anger even while he was in his mother's womb. But in fact, the rage is just him. He is this writer with the wounded language, the chaotic sentences, the words pouring out of him with a power that sweeps away everything, wrecking all that was built, revealing all that was hidden, befouling all that was pure, convulsing all that was calm.

It is urgency, after years of reflection and waiting. It is mastery, after years of passivity. The moment when finally, at forty years old, he feels at the zenith of his intellectual maturity, in full possession of his powers. And for a man like him, whose life has been an exercise in renunciation, this is orgasmic. Nothing excites him now but the arrangement of words, the composition of sentences in rhythms that stir him, the invention and inhabiting of characters in a world that he created for them—a world that has to be virtual in order to bear that other world, the real one. He feels good, alone and writing. He knows his place now: in his office, laptop on, his dictionaries close by, always open, his black hardback notebooks scattered all over the desk and floor, his thousands of notes accumulated over the past twenty years—press cuttings, essays, book extracts, hundreds of handwritten pages that he has to decipher. Never has he felt so intensely the need to extricate himself from the world, not to marginalize himself—he sometimes has the feeling that his life up to now has been a slow process of social eviction—but to find his true place, which only writing can give him. Only writing offers a direct view of the world, without any distortion. He loves this life; he loves the state of extreme tension into which he is plunged during these moments of withdrawal, and he thinks again of that concept, born from Jewish mysticism, that his father once recounted to him: having created the world, God withdrew from it, leaving man to make of it what he would. Intellectually, he had been very close to his father, who had initiated him at a very young age into literature, both profane and sacred, into philosophy and exegesis. Since Nina's departure, he has been rereading and annotating all the documents and books he inherited from his father—essays about Judaism, essentially. When he met Nina, having discovered the truth of his origins, he had severed all connections not only with his parents but with their religion. But now everything he had assimilated during those long years of learning comes back to him: the prayers and sacred texts, the commentaries and mystical interpretations, the commentaries on commentaries and the questions that are answered with other questions, the commentaries on commentaries on commentaries, the Hasidic stories and tales. His novel is full of this glorious mysticism, full of biblical characters with unpronounceable names. Everything he had buried for twenty years now resurfaces, and he welcomes those words back into his life without attempting to filter them. He feels as if his eyes had been opened at last. He feels a great peace. As if, by leaving him, Nina had allowed him to reconnect with his true self. For a long time, he had been incapable of mentioning his origins, his parents, and now the opposite is true: this is what his book is about. He is writing this dual story—his, and his parents'—in the novel on which he is working now, and which he has entitled
Consolation
, because the truth is that he has been searching for this all his life: to be consoled. And even now, alone, all he wants is to be with Nina. He misses her terribly. When he thinks about her, he feels the most awful pain, as if the jaws of a pair of pliers were digging into his heart. And yet he has managed to convince himself that he is finally able to write because she is no longer there. He has reread Kafka's diary—the pages about the relationship between creation and solitude. He is writing well because he is alone, and he knows now that he will never give up this solitude, will never agree to live with a woman, to commit himself, and certainly will never have children. Social life, in spite of the useful observations it offers, turned him away from writing, and all he wants now is to write. For a long time, he has wondered what made him persist as a writer in spite of his repeated, endless failure to be published. Sometimes he felt as if he were a puny, inexperienced swimmer thrown in an Olympic pool and able to do nothing more than tread water, keep his head above the surface, while he dreamed of cleaving through the chlorinated water with a kick of his legs, holding his breath, eyes wide open, conquering the blue space around him—because this was how he saw literature: as a vast territory to be invaded, a territory that cannot be breached without perfect breathing, masterful technique, total determination, without the drive to advance, to continue, to dive in every day even when you would rather stay in bed, to swim underwater even at the risk of never resurfacing. Most of the time, this ended in drowning.