Hocus Bogus 9780300162974

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Hocus Bogus

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Hocus Bogus RO M A I N GA RY

WRITING AS

ÉMILE AJAR

T R A N S L AT E D BY DAV I D B E L LO S

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

E NEW HAVEN & LONDON

A M A RG E L LO S WORLD REPUBLIC OF LETTERS BOOK

The Margellos World Republic of Letters is dedicated to making literary works from around the globe available in English through translation. It brings to the Englishspeaking world the work of leading poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and playwrights from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to stimulate international discourse and creative exchange. Hocus Bogus first published in French as Pseudo by Mercure de France. ∫ Mercure de France, 1976. This translation ∫ David Bellos, 2010. Published by arrangement with the Estate of Romain Gary. The Life and Death of Émile Ajar first published in French as Vie et mort d’Émile Ajar by Éditions Gallimard. ∫ Gallimard, 1981. This translation by Barbara Wright first published as an appendix to Romain Gary, King Solomon. New York: Harper and Row, 1983. ∫ Barbara Wright, 2009. About This Book ∫ David Bellos, 2010. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Set in Electra type by Keystone Typesetting, Inc., Orwigsburg, Pennsylvania. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gary, Romain. [Pseudo. English] Hocus bogus / Romain Gary writing as Émile Ajar ; translated by David Bellos. p. cm. ‘‘A Margellos World Republic of Letters book.’’ ‘‘Hocus Bogus first published in French as Pseudo by Mercure de France. ∫ Mercure de France, 1976. This translation ∫ David Bellos, 2010. Published by arrangement with the Estate of Romain Gary.’’ Includes bibliographical references. isbn 978-0-300-14976-0 (clothbound : alk. paper) I. Title. pq2661.j3p75 2010 843%.914—dc22 2009024897 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

About This Book David Bellos vii Hocus Bogus Romain Gary Writing as Émile Ajar, translated by David Bellos 1 The Life and Death of Émile Ajar Romain Gary, translated by Barbara Wright 175 Bibliography David Bellos 195

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ABOUT THIS BOOK

Hocus Bogus is the first translation into English—or any other language, as far as I know—of Pseudo, by Émile Ajar. It appeared in French in 1976. It sold a modest number of copies and was not reprinted until 2004. But Pseudo was not what it seemed to be. And that was precisely its point. By dint of historical circumstance, talent, and energy, Romain Gary, born Roman Kacew in 1914 in Vilna (then part of the Russian Empire), learned Russian, Polish, Yiddish, German, French, English, and Bulgarian. After completing a degree in law, he became an airman (1938–1945), a war hero (1943–1944), a French diplomat (1946–1960), a famous novelist, a filmmaker, and an international celebrity. He won the Prix des Critiques in 1945 for Éducation européenne (A European Education) and France’s top literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, in 1956 for Les Racines du ciel (The Roots of Heaven). He then turned to writing fiction in English (Lady L, 1958; The Talent Scout, 1961; and The Ski Bum, 1964) while continuing to publish reportage, memoir, and fiction in French. By the early 1970s, although he was rich and famous, he felt bored with being ‘‘Romain Gary’’ and despaired of acquiring the cultural legitimacy he felt had always been refused him. In 1972 he began drafting a new novel vaguely indebted to Nikolai Gogol’s Diary of a Madman about a lonely statistician vii

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living with a pet python in a Paris apartment. As the language of this first-person narration reflected the unbalanced and tortured mind that was its fictional source, it occurred to Gary to allow himself even greater liberties as a writer by adopting another name. After all, ‘‘Romain Gary’’ wasn’t his real name anyway. The manuscript, La Solitude du python à Paris, was eventually handed to a Paris publisher under the false name Émile Ajar, in an envelope that made it seem it had come from Brazil. Against all odds, publishers’ readers immediately identified it as a work of great merit, and in 1974 the book came out under the title GrosCâlin—hereafter Cuddles, although no English translation has ever appeared. Romain Gary’s son, Diego, his ex-wife, Jean Seberg, his typist, his lawyers in Geneva and New York, and Robert Gallimard (an old friend, related to the owners of the publishing house of that name) knew the true identity of Émile Ajar. They kept it secret. Cuddles was short-listed for the Renaudot prize, traditionally awarded to a first novel by a new writer. Gary panicked: he didn’t want to deprive someone at the start of a career of the important boost that the Renaudot would give, and so Émile Ajar, in ways necessarily contorted owing to his nonexistence, withdrew Cuddles from consideration for any prize. The book sold widely nonetheless; journalists and editors wanted to meet the mystery author. Gary contracted his cousin’s son, Paul Pavlowitch, to act the part, with strict constraints on what he should and should not say. He also got down to using his new identity to write what would become his most successful novel by far.

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La Vie devant soi (Life Before Us) appeared in September 1975, and there was nothing Gary seemed able to do to stop it from winning the Prix Goncourt. (It subsequently became the highestselling French novel of the last century.) However, the rules of the Goncourt prize do not allow it to be won twice by the same author. Gary had scored a number of points over the French literary establishment, but he had also put himself on the wrong side of his own sense of honor. And in a tricky position. The winner of a Goncourt cannot just pretend to exist. In France, a literary prize, and especially this literary prize, is a news story, and it is covered by reporters as well as by literary critics. In November 1975, a nationwide hunt was on for the real Émile Ajar. By catastrophic coincidence, a journalist, Jacques Bouzerand, recognized the half-face photograph of ‘‘Émile Ajar’’ that Pavlowitch had allowed to appear in the press. With the help of relatives who had been classmates of Paul Pavlowitch during his student days in Toulouse (where he went by the nickname of ‘‘Alex’’), Bouzerand tracked the supposed author down to the farmhouse where he lived at Caniac-du-Causse, near Cahors, in southwest France. Within days, the family relationship between Pavlowitch and Romain Gary was revealed in the press. Gary was besieged by journalists demanding to know whether he had in fact written these works of genius that his younger relative had signed under a false name. One fib leads to another . . . and Gary lied outright, in speech and in writing, on radio and on television. He had cornered himself, and felt that he had to find a way of maintaining the deception forever or else suffer ignominy and dishonor. He fled to Geneva, where he had a small apartment, to escape

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the hullabaloo, and also to plot his way out of the mess. He decided to write a genuine confession that would put everyone off the scent for good. Pseudo, announcing deception in its very title, is a first-person narrative that purports to reveal ‘‘Émile Ajar’’ as the pseudonym of the real Paul Pavlowitch. This strange premise for a literary work means that Hocus Bogus is entirely fictional and yet contains almost nothing but the strict truth. The fictional Pavlowitch who is the book’s narrator is a psychiatric case with a weird obsession about an ‘‘Uncle Bogey.’’ With his signature homburg, his cigars, and a heroic war record, ‘‘Uncle Bogey’’ is a transparent caricature of . . . Romain Gary. The narrator’s constant harping on the likely fact that his Uncle Bogey was really his father—his ‘‘onlie begetter,’’ as it seems necessary to say in this context—is not so much an oedipal twist as a calculated provocation as to the identity of the book’s true author. Written at high speed and completed in January 1976, Hocus Bogus is one of the most alarmingly effective mystifications in all literature. It simulates schizophrenia so as to delude its reader into believing he or she has really understood what the novels of Émile Ajar are about. It must have been quite funny when read in its original context, that is, without knowing that it was written by Romain Gary, but also quite sad, for it bares the suffering soul of a man in great mental and moral distress. Yet it is absolutely hilarious when read with knowledge of its true authorship and intention. Almost every sentence of the book is a double take. Even the sketchy facts given in the preceding paragraphs allow the reader to see that Hocus Bogus is almost 100 percent true, despite its being entirely fictional, as Gary tells us, partly with the intention to

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mislead, in the posthumously published Life and Death of Émile Ajar. Writing as someone else pretending to be someone else and also quite mad, Gary was at last free to say what he had to say as himself, and as a result, there is as much reliable autobiographical information in this hoax of a book as in Gary’s three published memoirs. Under double, even treble cover, he felt able to talk almost directly about aspects of his feelings that he could address no other way. He also gives a pretty accurate account of how the mystification was conducted in the fall of 1975. Hocus Bogus was completely effective. No one dared ever again to suggest that Romain Gary was Émile Ajar, for it was perfectly obvious now that Émile Ajar was Paul Pavlowitch and that Pavlowitch was mad. The whole episode was put to one side by the literary world. Gary had now put himself into outer space. His hour as Romain Gary had passed, since the new voice of Ajar had quite displaced his old-fashioned, traditional, and humanist fiction. But his hour as Émile Ajar had been indefinitely postponed. This left him both miserable and free, unbelievably lonely and as happy as a lark. The last novels that he published, under both names, between 1977 and 1979, and that were barely reviewed, are the finest of his long career. In 1979 Romain Gary wrote his own account of the life and death of Émile Ajar and entrusted it to friends, leaving them to decide when it should be published. Romain Gary committed suicide on December 2, 1980. Not long after, Paul Pavlowitch revealed to the press that he was not the author of the works of Émile Ajar, and so Gary’s Life and Death of Émile Ajar was brought out to substantiate this amazing claim.

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Gary’s short text, included here in a translation by Barbara Wright, made instant fools of the entire literary establishment, and most especially of those critics who, like Michel Tournier, had spun elaborate fantasies about the documentary value of Life Before Us. Some of those who had been manipulated by Gary’s devious hoax actually refused to believe the truth and went on claiming for many years that they had actually met the real Émile Ajar. I undertook this translation in the first place for my own amusement, to see if it was even possible to simulate a rhetorical simulation of an imaginary psychological condition. I must admit to having been surprised when a highly reputable publisher agreed that it might amuse and entertain a wider readership. But I feel I ought to point out that the particular difficulties of translating this multilevel, madcap diversion are not what they might seem. First, there can be no question, in Hocus Bogus, of respecting all of the author’s original intentions, since they included the intention to deceive, to mislead, and to distract attention. Since Gary blew his own cover, his sly provocations can only be read and translated as wonderful jokes, not as effective deceptions. His posthumous confession of authorship also makes the literary context of 1976 completely unrecoverable in translation; and any attempt to produce on the reader an effect equivalent to the one it had for its initial audience would be self-defeating, since that would mean not telling anyone what this book is about. Hocus Bogus, for all its baroque linguistic complexities, actually liberates the translator from the traditional shackles of authorial intention, historical context, and equivalent effect.

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I therefore offer no apology for the many liberties I have taken with the text. I have larded it with my own bad puns, I have infiltrated anachronisms and literary allusions in some quantity, and I have exploited all the opportunities that English offered me to poke fun at police officers, politicians, publishers, psychiatry, surrealism, and good intentions. I like to think that Gary would have approved of such wholesale retargeting, especially since his own work as a translator (of himself ) is even freer. I hope Hocus Bogus does make some readers laugh and also cry, but I would like to insist that my translation seeks only to renew and reassert a triumph that belongs entirely to Romain Gary—a victory of literature over criticism, of wit over taste, and of moral outrage over social convention. David Bellos

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Hocus Bogus

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There is no beginning. I was begotten—just like you—and since then I’ve been lumbered. I tried to get out of it every way I could, but no one else has ever pulled it off. We’re all born the same way, statistically. Notwithstanding on my own two feet I devised an impregnable defense. In the game of checkmate it’s been named after me as ‘‘Ajar’s Endgame.’’ First I got into the hospital in Cahors; then I had several sojourns at Dr. Christianssen’s psychiatric clinic in Copenhagen. I was assessed, analyzed, tested, and laid bare to the point where my defenses collapsed. I was ‘‘cured’’ and put back into circulation. I managed to filch some of the cards from my medical file to see if they were any use for literature or recuperation. Simulation taken to such an extreme and pursued without interruption or slip over such a long period of time clearly constitutes obsessive-compulsive behavior and betokens an authentic personality disorder. Sure, I know that—but everyone else goes in for simulation to an amazing extent. I know a guy from North Africa who’s been behaving like a garbage collector for forty years and a ticket inspector who performs the same action three thousand times a day, 3

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because if you don’t fake it, they call you asocial, or not integrated, or perturbed. I could go further and assert that life itself is just a simulation in a hocus bogus world, but that would be seen as lacking in maturity on my part. Subject is an orphan who since childhood has nursed hatred for a distant relative; typical of father fixation. Uncle Bogey is a bastard, but that doesn’t have to mean he’s my dad. I never said he was, I just hoped so at various times, out of despair. After the appearance of my book Life Before Us, it was my detectives, not I, who insinuated he was my only begetter. Subject makes a complete muddle of his shoelaces when he tries to undo them. Then he tears or cuts them off to get his feet out. Transfer to shoelaces of psychological knots that he only manages to intensify when he tries to sort them out. The part about the laces is true, but the rest is crap. It is also true that I have a problem with my skin, because it’s not mine, I just inherited it. I was wrapped up by congenital means, including aforethought, premeditation, and prisoner be upstanding in court, especially at night, around four a.m., when apparently my blood-sugar level hits rock bottom, and there’s wailing and screaming inside. I don’t know when ‘‘clinical signs’’ of being lumbered—what they call my ‘‘symptoms’’—first arose. I’m not sure which particular massacre was involved, but I suddenly felt surrounded by pointing fingers and subject to unprecedented visibility. There he is! Guildenstern, belay him! I saw I had gone global with unlimited liability. That’s actually why the psychiatrists certified I was not

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responsible. Once you feel you’re a tyrant all over the planet, you get diagnosed as a victim. I did all I could to get away from myself. I even started learning Swahili, because I reckoned it was as remote as you could get. I swotted and sweated, but it was no use, I could understand what I was even in Swahili, and it was back to being lumbered all over again. Then I dabbled in Hungaro-Finnish. I was certain I would never bump into a Hungaro-Finn in Cahors and end up staring myself in the face. But I didn’t feel entirely safe. The thought that there might perhaps be a speaker of Hungaro-Finnish even in Cahors worried me hugely. Since we would then be the only speakers of the language in the whole Department, we might be overcome by emotion and fall into each other’s arms and pour our hearts out. We’d swap our crime scenes, and soon we’d be on to the great train robbery. I said ‘‘great train robbery’’ because it has no possible connection to the context and it was an opportunity not to be missed. I don’t want to have any connection to context. All the same I keep on looking for someone incomprehensible who won’t understand me either, because I have a terrible thirst for brotherhood.

I first had hallucinations when I was sixteen. I suddenly saw myself besieged by thundering waves of reality and under attack from all sides. I was very young, I knew nothing about psychiatry, and when I switched on the TV and saw Vietnam and kids with bellies bloated by death dying in Africa and soldiers’ corpses jumping out at me, I truly thought I had gone berserk and was having hallucinations. That’s how, without quite knowing what I was doing, I began to devise my gambit, which allows me to hole up in various medical establishments. It wasn’t done in a day. It took blood, sweat, tears, etc. I did not make myself. There’s congenitals of the mom’n’pop corner store, with alcoholism, hardening of the arteries, and, on a higher shelf, tuberculosis and diabetes. But you have to go much further up, because it’s only right at the top that you find the truly unspeakable. As soon as my first mythical book appeared people began to observe that I did not really exist and that I was therefore probably a fiction. They even assumed I was a collective. It’s true. I am a collective work, but I can’t yet tell you whether it was premeditated. On the face of it, I don’t consider I have enough talent to imagine that there could have been syphilis afore-

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thought or anything of that kind solely in order to squeeze a literary trifle out of me. There could have been, of course, because you don’t look a gift horse, but I can’t be sure. Subject writes under the pen name of Ajar, pronounced ‘‘Azhar,’’ meaning ‘‘most brilliant’’ in Arabic, revealing masochistic vulnerability which the subject probably cultivates on purpose as a potent source of literary inspiration. That’s wrong. They’re all bastards. I wrote my books in various hospitals on doctors’ advice. They said it would be therapeutic. They suggested painting first, but that was a bummer. Since I knew I was fictional, I thought I might have a talent for fiction. Subject engages in fantasies of invulnerability, taking on the physical appearance of various objects (pocketknife, paperweight, chains, key ring). Subject’s aim is to reach a state of unfeeling, and also to simulate appropriately cooperative behavior toward society, by which he constantly feels threatened. Turned down the Goncourt prize to avoid prosecution. I turned down the Goncourt prize in 1975 because of a panic attack. They had overcome my defensive gambit, got right inside it, and I was horrified by the publicity, which winkled me out of all my hidey-holes, and by my detectives asking questions at the hospital in Cahors. I was afraid for my mother, who had died of hardened arteries, and whom I’d used for the character of Madame Rosa in the book. I was afraid for the kid I was hiding, he was maybe between twelve and thirty-four years old, as I was, or maybe forty, or a hundred, or two hundred thousand years old or

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more, because you have to go right back to the start if you want to plead not guilty. So I turned down the prize—but that only made me more visible. People said I was after publicity. I have had treatment since then and things are much better, thank you. During my last stay in the hospital I even wrote my third book. On several occasions subject fancied he was a python to escape from his human predicament and thus evade the responsibilities, duties, and guilt that go with. Used himself to write a novel, Cuddles, based on his pythonism. Long-term effect of indulgence in masturbation. That’s correct. As such I was even invited to attend the National Congress of the Anti-Defamation League on November 29, 1975, because reptiles are always first in the firing line when it comes to hate speech. I couldn’t go because at that time I had been put back in my cage in Copenhagen. I take this opportunity of thanking the organizers. I shall refrain with hauteur from quoting one card in my medical file that is clearly anti-Semitic: it says I am Jewish. But I tried to find out if my feeling of unworthiness and guilt came from the fact that I was Jewish and had therefore not crucified Jesus, for which I’ve been blamed ever since by anti-Semites. Did I become a python to stop being Jewish? Dr. Christianssen said I jerked off too much. He wasn’t against masturbation—a little dialectics, cerebral animation, and intellectual satisfaction wasn’t a bad thing, it could even be helpful, but two thousand years of jerking off was going too far. He reminded me that because we now have blacks, Arabs,

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Chinese, and Communists, Jews are no longer strictly necessary for jerking off. Then I asked the good doctor if I hadn’t been led to being a python because Jews had been propaganded for two millennia as usurers and snakes in the grass, and he replied that it was perfectly possible, I was capable of anything, myself included, for the sake of a book. I thought of Uncle Bogey, because he is a notorious writer and has always had a knack for making a nice little bookpile out of suffering and horror. I started writing again. As you can see, I can’t get out of this tangle. I’m surrounded on all sides, and I’m lumbered. In the hospital I have a fellow patient who has deciphered the hieroglyphs of a pre-Columbian dialect of ancient Egyptian and can think and speak in this universally unknown tongue that’s got no attested inscriptions or health insurance. He even left some cuneiform enigmas unsolved to leave room for the future. Because while they remain undeciphered they still might be hiding a genuine revelation, an explanation, or an answer. He’s a lucky man, because that way he thinks he knows something that’s still intact.

I’m not respecting chronology or any order or rules in this document, because I’ve read enough detective fiction to know that a proper structure can bring the cops right to your door—and let me leave you in no doubt, that is not why I’ve holed up in Dr. Christianssen’s clinic in Copenhagen. I don’t speak Danish, but not well enough. When I go out, with permission, and have a walk around town, Danes start telling me about Argentina and Chile and Ulster, with accusations written all over their faces. Passersby mumble things in Danish about all the horrors they’ve found out about me. You may well ask how I can manage to understand what they’re saying in a language of which I know not a word. Don’t make me laugh. I am a born linguist. I can even hear and understand silence. That’s an especially frightening language, and the easiest to understand. Living languages that have gone dead and got forgotten and are spoken by no one anymore are the ones that have the most eloquent screams. Then there is the serious problem of aspiration. I was interned first of all when the environment noticed I’d begun to hold my breath again and again from morning to night. For starters they smashed my face in, because it was an insult, a 10

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crime against humanity, a besmirching of Pascal, Jesus, and Solzhenitsyn. Let’s put them in order of magnitude: Solzhenitsyn, Jesus, and Pascal. I was spitting in the face of humanity, that’s to say, uttering the gravest insult possible against literature. I was a Communist then, but later I resigned so as not to compromise the Party, because I’m a dissident. I was standing in the street, there were people all around, they could see I was trying not to breathe the same air. They called the cops for causing a disturbance of conscience. In the paddy wagon, when the cops saw I was keeping on not breathing and even blocking my nostrils, they smashed my face in for insulting the organs of respiration in the legitimate pursuit of their duties. When I stood before the duty sergeant at the station, holding my breath, plugging my nose, and doing my keep-fit routine, he foamed at the mouth and told me this wasn’t Argentina or Lebanon but Cahors. There was no smell of shit, or blood, or pus, or rotting flesh. I could breathe as the human race intended. ‘‘Don’t try kidding me.’’ But it wasn’t just Cahors. It was everywhere. Apparently that dimwit didn’t even suspect that Pinochet and Amin Dada are you and me. Don’t try kidding me—that’s supposed to be what the first egg said to the first spermatozoa that came her way, but the egg was caught on the hop and the semen got in first. Then I made more enemies in Cahors by trying to imitate an Arabian storyteller. I stood in rue Clemenceau on market day and told the story of my life. I got my face smashed in again. At the station, the Paternal Inspector gave me a stiff warning.

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‘‘But I wasn’t doing anything, Inspector. I was telling the story of my life, that’s all.’’ ‘‘Your life is disgusting, Pavlowitch. People get indignant when you pour out all that filth about them.’’ ‘‘It’s a life like any other, Inspector.’’ The Paternal Inspector turned bright red. ‘‘I’ll smash your face in, you dirty swine!’’ ‘‘That’s what I said, Inspector: a life like any other.’’ ‘‘Alright, alright, young man. You know people are fed up with this flood of pornography. So be careful. You could at least behave like a genuine nutcase. Then you’d be left alone.’’ So I started going hocus bogus and stopped getting picked on. Sometimes I got together with some mates at the Café de la Gare. There was a plumber, an accountant, and a civil servant. Obviously they weren’t plumbers, accountants, or civil servants. They’re altogether something else. But nobody notices, because they fake it, they go hocus bogus eight hours a day, and so they’re left in peace. They live inside in hiding and only come out at night in dreams and nightmares. Then came a fantastic piece of news. American scientists had managed to produce an artificial gene, the basic unit of heredity. Artificially. I felt such a sudden surge of hope that I ran out into the street stark naked, yelling ‘‘Hallelujah’’ at the top of my voice. I was taken forthwith to the station and when I told the Paternal Inspector that we were on the verge of an origin, that soon, at last, we would be able to give birth to ourselves, that we were going to be

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our own begetters and not whorespawn, that we would have a human race without original semen at long last, with no cops and no nuclear ideologies, I got my face smashed in again, unanimously. But that didn’t stop me hoping and running around town handing out fliers and yelling that old-style fatherhood was dead and done with. I was committed. You can check this out. It was reported in the local newspaper, Le Journal de Cahors, on May 25, 1972. I want you all to know, because it matters to me a lot: I am not responsible. When I was a kid I was ashamed of my older brother because he had stopped and was going to stay the same age for the rest of his life. I kept away from him. His eyes were full of nonunderstanding, like he was forever asking who had done that to him, and why. I didn’t yet know that nonunderstanding always goes further than knowledge, further than genius, and that it always has the last word. My brother’s look is much closer to the truth than Einstein ever was. I hereby declare in formal jacket and tie: I am against deoxyribonucleic acid, the vector of heredity. It’s got a criminal character. Then the nighttime telephone calls began. One night, to begin with, I got a call from Leonid Pliuch. At that time Pliuch was a Soviet mathematical star of wonder that other stars of beauty bright had had put in a psychiatric hospital in order to drive him crazy with the right injections. Nowadays, as this book goes to press, Pliuch is called Bukovsky because the same thing goes on changing name all the time. Soviet psychiatrists are sworn enemies of the Soviet Union,

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which they drag into disrepute in the eyes of the world. One day they’ll be put on trial because they are all working for the CIA. ‘‘How’s it going, Waterboarder?’’ I call myself Waterboarder when I’ve got nothing better to do. ‘‘I’m OK. Who’s that?’’ ‘‘Pliuch.’’ Unbelievable, I thought. Must be my human nature playing a dirty trick on me. ‘‘I don’t know anyone called Pliuch.’’ Then, in a voice I’ll never forget, he simply said: ‘‘Of course you don’t know me, Waterboarder. You are normal. There are hundreds of millions of people who don’t know me and have nothing to do with it. Sleep well.’’ And he hung up. You’re not going to believe this, but ten minutes later, Pinochet was on the line. There was a lot of talk about Pinochet then, because people hadn’t become accustomized. ‘‘How’s it going, brother? You still got your face, eyes, mouth, both hands?’’ ‘‘Fuck off. I’ve got nothing in common.’’ It went on like that all night long. I was on the phone until the small hours. There were calls from India, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Africa. The callers were mostly deceased. When you get a dead man on the line, it goes on forever. I bought an answering machine. A modern, civilized gadget specially designed for the purpose, which said I didn’t exist, there was no Pavlowitch, I was a mystification, a practical joke, not that

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sort at all. Clearly, I did betray some external signs of existence, but that was just literature. It did not work. Some consciences are fitted with automatic answering machines that work very well. But I never got the technology under control.

So that’s why I resorted once again to my system of defense and managed to get away from all that, especially the hallucinations. I turned back into a python that isn’t called upon to know anything or answer the phone. Pliuch can’t call a snake in the middle of the night, nor can Pinochet. They tried to talk to me through the door. Cops. I yelled: ‘‘Fuck off ! I don’t know what I’ve done next, I don’t read newspapers, but it wasn’t me. I’m not the sort to. I am a disgusting reptile. I am nothing human. I am not responsible.’’ They broke down the door, but I had taken precautions already. I’d bought mice and whole rats, and I began to swallow them, right in front of their eyes, to prove I was a python and that I had nothing in common with Pinochet. I was sent to stay with the nonconformists again. I was in clover. No more telephone calls. As a python I was entitled to incommunicado. That’s when my gambit really started to work. I have an uncle I call Uncle Bogey because he was in the air force during the war and slaughtered civilians from on high. Now and then he spends time at Dr. Christianssen’s clinic in Copenhagen to get weaned. He doesn’t drink or take drugs and I thought

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he came to get weaned from the civilians he’d slaughtered. I thought he was trying to come off himself. I was wrong. Uncle Bogey came to get weaned by Dr. Christianssen because he overdid it on cigars. I shall make no comment on the matter. None at all. I could tell you about him for hours on end, because he’s a real scream. He thinks he’s my father and that therefore I hate him like a good son, but that’s hysterical. So I could tell you that Uncle Bogey and I have nothing in common, he just my mother’s cousin, there’s no bloodline at all. It’s not all roses for him either, you know. Diabetes and cancer, and one step further back, tuberculosis, and the gas chambers for the rest of them. Trust me, I wasn’t going to get mixed up in that. All the same, I did have one insulin injection at the hospital in Cahors. But that’s not evidence, and my lawyer told me it wouldn’t stand up if I tried it on in a paternity suit. We have to keep on looking and stop badmouthing Pinochet and his ilk. We have to undertake genetic research to track back to the guilty party. It’s what’s called the fount of life. I respect life, because I’ve always been afraid of the police. So Uncle Bogey sent me to Dr. Christianssen’s clinic at his own expense. Three hundred kroner a day, just to get me out of the way. When I look him in the eye—he’s got six pairs of eyes, but sometimes I manage to catch one of them—I can see what’s going on. He thinks he left me in penury and that I’m desperately seeking Daddy, to get my own back.

18 Hocus Bogus

So it’s off to Elsinore with you, my lad, and damn the expense. At this point I have to share my suspicions with you. Explain why we hate each other despite the bonds of affection between us. Uncle Bogey never hid the fact that he’d been very fond of my mother, notwithstanding their consanguinity. I’m pretty much certain they slept together to piss me off, and I’m suffering the consequences. That would explain everything. It would also account for my vague resemblance to Uncle Bogey—not physically, because he was careful on that score, but morally. For if I am so consumed by the need of an Author, it is because I am the son of a man who left me wanting all my life long. You mustn’t forget that as a young man Uncle Bogey was killed in action, but he managed to get around that later on. So I often felt like a chip off the block, and it made me beside myself, metaphorically speaking—literally, you can’t do it. While you’re alive there’s no exit from the biological mess you’re in. I mentioned it to him once, and he nearly choked. ‘‘You’re completely crazy! I loved your mother like a sister!’’ ‘‘Sick and sicker! That’s even more incestuous!’’ ‘‘You are not my son! Slanderer! Scandalum magnatum!’’ Now he was perjorating, which was not very nice. He felt insulted when I said I was his son because my looks weren’t up to his standard. ‘‘Your mother was a saint!’’ Aha, I’d got him there! He’s as kinky as they come, and screwing a saint must have been the biggest thrill he could dream of. Keep on your halo and your raiments, honeybun, and let’s do it

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doggy-style. The man’s utterly disgusting. No one but he could have thought up anything like that. I don’t know if acquired characteristics can be inherited, but if they can, I’ve come into a real fortune.

As soon as I got to Copenhagen my condition improved markedly. It was very foggy so you couldn’t see so much. However, I almost got into a fight at the airport when I tried to kiss a Danish customs officer. I was in a state correctly described as euphoric. In spite of all the evidence assembled around the world, particularly by Amnesty International, I had been medically certified not responsible for my actions and was therefore innocent of all the crimes I had perpetrated. How much internal trickery, denial, simulation, and hocus bogus that took can be imagined only by the journalists who unmasked me in November 1975, at the time of the prize, and declared me to be fictitious and collective, a lark and a jape. Danes speak a foreign language, and since we couldn’t communicate I was sure we would get on like a house on fire. They seemed very different to me, which augured well for mutual understanding. The customs officer didn’t even search my suitcase, although it was packed full of explosives under the effect of the news and the media, because women and children were getting blown up in Northern Ireland at that time. I am full of dynamite and I’m going to go off any minute now. I’ve placed several anony-

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mous phone calls to myself as a warning to allow the premises to be evacuated in time. How about that for a panic attack! When I saw that the customs officer trusted me and wasn’t asking me to open up, I was moved to tears. So I wanted to kiss him because I’m scared shitless of customs, searches, toothcombs, and I was overcome with relief and gratitude. Uncle had taken a break from weaning to meet me at the airport. I found the insinuation deeply humiliating. Implying that I am a harmful substance and that my presence automatically suspends the drying-out process is an unspeakable slur. I can’t stand misanthropy. Treating me like some kind of pollutant that destroys life on earth and even as far as the ozone layer that shields us from an overdose of ultraviolet is misanthropy pure and simple, or my name’s not Ern Malley. However, contrary to what the newspapers said the next day, it is not true that I started a donnybrook at Kastrup. True, I did feel insulted by my poisonous nature suspending the process of detoxification. But the airport fistfight was instigated by events outside my control. I told you, or maybe not, it makes no difference, that I studied linguistics to make up a language that would be quite foreign to me. It would have allowed me to cogitate while remaining sheltered from sources of panic and booby-trapped words, with internal and external aggression and solid evidence to back it up. I didn’t succeed because I was under close surveillance. The brain is well aware that if we ever managed to invent a language without precedent or relation, that would be the end of our

22 Hocus Bogus

insanity. To ward off this danger, the sources of panic have endowed us with the brain as it is, specifically designed to keep us wanting in a state of impossibility and caricature. So I had to give up looking for an original language of my own and settled for learning Hungaro-Finnish, with a drizzle of prenatal burbling to keep hope warm and spirits up. At the airport, when I saw I was surrounded by Danes, I jumped onto the Air France check-in desk and addressed the assembled multitude in Hungaro-Finnish, with the aim of establishing friendly and fraternal relations of mutual incomprehensibility and misunderstanding. It is wrong to believe that nations and people go in for hostilities because they do not comprehend each other. They smash each other up out of reciprocal understanding. That’s what happened. I was understood. I am unable to account in full for what occurred. I swear, cross my heart and hope to die, that I gave my speech in HungaroFinnish. In addition, it is a patent fact that Danes do not speak Hungaro-Finnish. Yet I was understood on the spot, and as I’ve just told you, as soon as comprehension arises, you get misunderstanding, fury, outrage, and shock. The cops came, they tried to get me off the Air France check-in counter, I kept on yelling in HungaroFinnish, and I held my own. Uncle Bogey weighed in, the ambulance came, and I must admit that because I could no longer hope to remain misunderstood and thus express brotherly feelings for my fellow men, I boiled over and threw a few punches around,

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because I despise nothing more than physical violence, and when I saw the hospital orderlies I grasped immediately that restraint was going to be used. In such circumstances the only way to prove you are normal is to smash someone’s face in.

Uncle Bogey was at my side in the ambulance, watching over me with a knowing smile. ‘‘You’ll never manage it, Alex. You know that.’’ I’m not called Alex, but I can’t bear people using my name. It’s too much of a giveaway. ‘‘Never manage what?’’ ‘‘Not writing. You’re going to be a writer, a real writer. You’ll become a pro. Like me.’’ ‘‘My ass,’’ I sputtered, thinking of Queneau’s Zazie in the Metro, since I’d long been looking for a cover. ‘‘I tried hocus bogus myself, you know,’’ Uncle Bogey confided, as he took the cigar out of his mouth for detox. ‘‘I even nearly got to be French ambassador but I stopped just in time, because you can go too far. I grant that you’re a sandwich or two short of the full hamper. But whether you like it or not the loose screw is always the one with the best thread. Genes don’t lie. Being slightly loopy is your human side. Don’t be an idiot, Alex. Do as I do. Like the all-time greats. Dostoevsky, Balzac, Solzhenitsyn. Eat shit. That’s where masterpieces come from.’’ ‘‘I’d rather not have Pinochet than have a masterpiece, Uncle. I’d rather not have Solzhenitsyn than have shit and blood. I’d 24

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rather Raskolnikov had never existed than read Dostoevsky. The production budget for War and Peace was way too high.’’ ‘‘Beware of hating Pinochet, the CIA, suffering, society, and so on and so forth,’’ Uncle said. ‘‘Hold back. Or else it could all turn into a work of fiction, and then you’d be, not just human, but even sicker.’’ ‘‘As long as I can keep my eye on you, I won’t write a word,’’ I said. Uncle Bogey seemed reassured, up to a point. He doesn’t like competition. Even so, he looked a little down. I think he’d become moody because he really liked my mother a lot and had never been able to get a book out of her. ‘‘What I don’t understand,’’ he said, ‘‘is why you hate me so much. After all, I never did anything for you. You don’t owe me any thanks. So why do you resent me?’’ I hesitated for a moment. ‘‘However hard you try, you can’t breathe without loving someone,’’ I said. ‘‘So it might as well be you.’’ In Denmark ambulances don’t wail as sharply as ours do. Perhaps it’s because there’s less suffering in Denmark and so they don’t need to scream so loud. They gave me a decent room at the clinic and Uncle Bogey paid for three months in advance, so he won’t have to remember me every month. I know he’ll think I’m a bastard when he reads that. Since I can’t bear the idea, you have to hang on to it. It’ll make the others more bearable.

26 Hocus Bogus

Dr. Christianssen welcomed me very graciously. He’s a great big man with the blond beard of an explorer who’s not got time to shave or a razor. I like Danes a lot because of the Vikings they’re not really related to and have nothing in common with, so they can be proud of their ancestors. We were chatting about Vikings because everything’s grist to a psychiatrist’s mill. ‘‘You know,’’ he said, ‘‘the Vikings who plowed the waves and discovered America, that’s just an allegorical myth. Real Vikings cross oceans of anxiety and discover new land. You’re a Viking, Rodolphe.’’ He called me Rodolphe because he knew, already. ‘‘What’s there to discover that’s true?’’ ‘‘The only possible answers are questions, Maurice. Real Vikings are questions. The answers are what the Vikings chanted during the voyage to keep their spirits up.’’ He got me some writing materials. No medicine. No treatment. Just pen and paper. Uncle came to see me that evening in my room. I’d lain on his conscience. I don’t know quite what he regrets, seeing that he says he didn’t beget me. He had no cause to be a good father. ‘‘I should have made you study medicine when you were twenty. But I didn’t think you were up to seven years without a break. Pity.’’ ‘‘It doesn’t matter. When I say I wish I had become a doctor nowadays, it’s not to care for the sick. It’s for understanding. Re-

Hocus Bogus 27

search. Biology, genetics, that sort of thing. So I can know where it all started.’’ ‘‘What?’’ ‘‘The brain. It’s obviously one of nature’s mistakes . . . Or else a lousy, hateful plot. Designing the brain as an act of revenge, that would take the cake.’’ ‘‘Goethe . . .’’ ‘‘Yes, I know, the treasures of art and the glories of medicine and so forth. It was the perfect crime, after all, so it had to have some pretty good alibis. Was my father syphilitic?’’ ‘‘No.’’ ‘‘Alcoholic?’’ ‘‘I don’t know. A bit.’’ ‘‘Adam should have been breathalyzed.’’ ‘‘Look, Fernand, that’s enough of your congenital anxiety. You’ve no need to worry on that score. The really atavistic or sociological side of it—they’re the same thing, really—is your problem. But this clinic charges a thousand dollars a day, so Pinochet, Pliuch, and Co. are costing me quite a bit. Stay a while, if it makes you feel safe, but try something new. Use a different defense. You wrote some very nice poems.’’ I won’t hear speak of those poems. Ten years ago I tried to get them back from a man who’d entrusted them to someone else. I wanted to burn them. But they told me the poems had been lost and I shouldn’t lose any sleep. My poems were bogus because in the absence of an Author they couldn’t be authentic. It seems to me that that should be obvious to everyone. Inexistentialism for Dummies, Lesson One.

I felt strangely calm during my first night in the clinic. All around me there was something like the end of the fetus. I had no reason to be at peace and that itself was reassuring. Maybe poetry was on my mind, like a silent, inarticulate chant well out of range of booby-trap words. But I’ll never write any more poems. All poems, not just mine, are lost poems. Dr. Christianssen had probably given me an injection without my knowing—truth serum, or Pentothal, or I don’t know what —but sometimes in the tightly shuttered night I muttered, ‘‘I love you,’’ and mutters are maybe the loudest things in the world. There was such silence all around that I could almost hear somewhere else someone saying something else at long last. I recall it as if it were true. Sometimes I even clearly made out amid the silence a first word said by nobody and that was not corruptible because it wasn’t one of ours. I could feel it so newborn and weak that hope sprang up anew. But maybe it was only my human character playing a swinish trick on me. All the same I went back to writing, because it was either that or chemotherapy. Injections of some unspeakable shit to make me normal. I wrote for a few hours every day without going home in or28

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der not to run into myself. You always go out to write, with your lunch box. I wrote in fear, for words have ears. They’re on the qui vive with people lurking behind them. They surround you, hem you in, do you favors, and the moment you start to trust them, wham! they’re on top of you, and you end up in slavery, just like Uncle Bogey, fawning on them like a masseur or a servant, putting about six of one and half a dozen of the other. I’ve already encountered stunningly good-looking words who supped at that ladle, swallowed their pride, and took the shilling, and because of that I had to have the Sakel treatment—a 500ml cocktail of acetylcholine bromide and folliculine—because I didn’t dare open my mouth. Uncle Bogey’s prints are on every one of man’s misfortunes. He turned them into best sellers. You have no idea how difficult my position is. Apparently I could stop writing and publishing, as a rejection of all that, but that would still be a poem, a confession of hidden lyricism. It would be a romantic gesture, oozing sentimentality and aspiration, which are typically literary attitudes. As a means of expression and an act of faith, there’s nothing more bleatingly poetical and bookish than not writing on principle, for the sake of dignity and conscientious objection. I was hugely relieved when on the appearance of my second book highly competent critics declared that Émile Ajar did not exist. I cut out the articles and glued them on the walls that surround me. When I have any doubts or suspicions or external or respiratory symptoms, including perspiration, panic attacks, and other signs of life that occasionally fool even me, I sit down in my

30 Hocus Bogus

armchair, look around at these brotherly book reviews, stuff my meerschaum with British phlegm, and read and reread these attestations of unbeing, which should have been written on walls for thousands of years. When by treachery and trickery my first manuscript was published while I was still in the hospital in Cahors, I raised my voice. I was sure it was Uncle Bogey who’d pulled it off, because he hoped the book would sell well and enable me to pay my own hospital bills, and also because he had always wanted me to turn into a collabo same as he was, on the payroll, because they’re good little earners, words are. I held my own. I screamed that I was writing only to have fewer problems with myself and to steer clear of chemotherapy. But in the end I thought it more prudent to publish in order not to be accused of wacky idealism and ‘‘messianic and utopian’’ heresies. In addition I made sure to have my first book contract signed by someone else, so as not to be picked up. There are invisible cops all over the place who’ll rush you at the merest sign of existence and stuff your fate up your ass. That would also allow me to use myself cunningly to move backward in the right direction— toward becoming a writer, which I did not want to be at any price, because it was my dearest wish. I had to jerk myself off to death until I managed to transfer guilt onto masturbation, which is officially certified as a Grade A guilt source and can thus serve as a first-rate alibi. The ghastliness of my position comes from the fact that I am cursed with lucidity. Any two-bit psychiatrist can tell you that lu-

Hocus Bogus 31

cidity is a particularly common symptom among the clinically depressed. But trust me, I lead them a lively dance. Most psychiatrists who have consulted me go away convinced that they are seriously paranoid and megalomaniac because they dare to identify themselves with man’s estate—dare to think they are humans worthy of the name, with four legs and a snout wavering between shit and blood. I put their noses in their folie des grandeurs and they trot away convinced of their human nature by the treatment I generously provide. Sorry for the shouting, but as I write this I am surrounded by police who have firemen’s ladders and they’ll be up here any minute now. Cops toting AK-47s, with panic sirens howling and telescopic sights, and I’m in danger of being caught in the act by journalists dispatched to Caniac for the sole purpose of. Apparently I won the Goncourt prize as an authentic. For starters, I didn’t even know the Goncourt prize existed. That’s Point One. Then I withdrew from the Goncourt contest the day before the decision was made. Point Two. Last, I was betrayed by Uncle Bogey, as I shall go on to demonstrate. That’s Point Three. Roger. TV cameras are on the prowl and disclosures are brewing. Tomorrow’s papers will say I took what I held most sacred, my mother, who died horribly and much too slowly from hardened arteries in hospital at Cahors, and that I got a book and a literary prize out of her. I’ve lost my head. I’ve gone to pieces from excess exposure, but I’ve got my right hand back and it’s holding the pen, as you can see, and I’m keeping on writing, because when I’m writing I get

32 Hocus Bogus

temporary relief from occupation by irresponsible items of my psyche. I didn’t have to try to get my head back—it’s not mine anyway. It’s a good disguise, but it’s not mine. I made up the grown-up face. I add that Uncle Bogey said he was sure that the confession I am writing here in the country or somewhere within my ken—that I’m going to rush it into print and pour my innards out, in a sense, and that’s something I’ll never do. He even said I could use his apartment to write in.

Long before Copenhagen I’d come across the antipsychiatry school of psychiatry, and I’d been approached with a view to. Psychiatrists of that variety assert that if a different sort of society were brought into existence, with different kinds of families, then cases ‘‘such as yours’’ (I quote verbatim) and millions of others of the same humankind would become impossible. I can see straight through those antipsychiatrists. They’ve had enough of cases like ours and they feel like a change of case. They need a refresher. They want to change society so they can change one case of shit for wine from a different butt. Here I burst into hysterical laughter —Tee! Hee! Hee!—for if there’s one thing words hate, it’s wordplay, because they might lose the match. If you deprive words of their solemnity, hollowness, and hocus bogus, they’re at risk of catching chubby pink cheeks. Words detest health because it makes them sick. If today’s fruit- and nutcases aren’t up to snuff and if we have to change society to get different flavors, well, we old-timers couldn’t wish for more. However, if that is so, I would venture to suggest that it would be only proper to convene a World Psychiatric Assembly to come to an agreement about the specific kind of crackpot desired, so that an appropriate society can then be designed to accommodate it. The General Assembly could also decide on the 33

34 Hocus Bogus

number of loonies needed for such a society to run smoothly, set guidelines for how they are to be used productively as well as for the jobs that would be set aside in institutions designed for that purpose, and lay the blueprint for the type of cultural, ideological, military, and economic activity that would encourage the sought-after type of insanity and would cause the correct species of meshuga to thrive and to multiply. You could call it a question of the quality of life. I sincerely thank today’s society for having favored my variety of pottiness over all others. I could almost shed a tear. Let’s now polish off the issue of the ‘‘practical joke’’: yes, of course, I am a joke, as so many newspapers and radio stations have guessed. You can tell us jokes by the rock-bottom crises we offer, by our trumpets hailing a future yet to come, and by the streaks of tears, sweat, and blood on our faces. But millions and millions of real jokes can only be told by their leaving no trace at all. Often they can’t read or write and they don’t even know they’re humorous asides. There are ninety-six million pratfalls in Bangladesh. In Chile and Argentina and most other places too, people who claim to have been reduced to a quip are being tortured and killed as I write. When you see kids in Africa with stomachs swollen by hunger, nobody tries to find the jokers who did it to them, because they don’t last very long and the punch line comes when they’re still quite short.

It began in earnest three years ago. They saw I was determined to struggle on to the end in order to come out on the other side. They put pressure on me. ‘‘Publish! It’ll be good for you. Use a nom de plume. And don’t worry! Nobody will guess you could do it. If it’s any good, they’ll say it’s got art and technique and that it can’t have been done by a beginner. That it’s the work of a real pro. They’ll leave you alone. They’ll say you’re just a straw man or a ghost. Or a whore.’’ I melted. I always melt when anyone says ‘‘whore’’ in my hearing. It’s that old need for authenticity that does it. ‘‘But if it comes out piss-poor?’’ ‘‘If it’s junk, it’ll be called nonfiction, or witnessing, or life writing. Life writing is always garbage because of the subject matter. If it were any good it would make its subject a good one, and South Africa’s not the only place, you know. It’s everywhere. We shouldn’t be unfair to South Africa. That’s life writing for you. Write us something along those lines of no value whatsoever, and that will make it an authentically human document.’’ I keep my wits about me. ‘‘I had an aunt who won a beauty contest in Martinique in 1926.’’ 35

36 Hocus Bogus

‘‘Look, Pavlowitch, don’t try making monkeys out of us. We’re the psychiatrists. You’re overdoing abjection. Write. A little more or a little less . . . it’ll clean you out. And stop badmouthing us. Don’t forget, we did produce Beethoven and Mozart.’’ ‘‘But Beethoven and Mozart can still add up to two hundred thousand corpses, if the Chinese take against them and we have to defend them both.’’ ‘‘Stop quibbling. You can’t spend the rest of your life going from one hospital to another, the health service and your uncle are fed up with it. Write. Nobody will hold it against you because you’ve been certified a nutcase ever since you started phoning emergency each time the sun came up.’’ ‘‘What’s that got to do with it? There are millions of people on earth who cry for help every time the sun comes up.’’ ‘‘Get real. Loonies, sure. But for the most part there are millions of people who stay stumm because they are in their right minds and know there’s no point calling for help. That it might even be dangerous, as it could prompt reprisals.’’ I shut up. It’s true, I do have a small problem. Every time a new day dawns, I open the window and shout for help. I grab the telephone, I dial the Red Cross, the Blue Cross, the chief rabbi and the Injun rabbi, the United Nations and the secretary general of the Sex Workers’ Union, but since they’re all perfectly aware of the situation and can see for themselves that dawn is risen and are even having breakfast because of it, I run into everyday life and it’s a big flop. So I turn into a python or a white mouse or a dog with a waggly tail, anything to prove I’m not connected. Followed by

Hocus Bogus 37

committal and therapy with a view to restoring normal service. I persist, evade, take cover. Paper, knife, stone. Anything that’s not guilty. Now do you call that insane? I don’t. I call it legitimate selfdefense. I don’t deny they tried to help. They went through my wastebasket and they came up with a provisional explanation. One of my detectives discovered that when I was four I killed a kitten I was playing with, and ever since then, I’d had guilt, remorse, and selfhatred. I had transferred it onto Auschwitz, Pinochet, the gulag, and all the other excuses I could find to whitewash myself. It wasn’t genocide and torture camps, it was the kitten. It didn’t help at all. It just piled the kitten on top of Pelion. ‘‘Will you get me out if I go into print?’’ ‘‘You can go home whenever you want. You’ll just have to come back every week for a checkup.’’ I only nodded agreement, on grounds of uncertainty. They often tape what I say for further study, but not what I nod. After all, I could not commit myself without asking Alyette.

Alyette had gotten a degree in literature so that she could get a job at the supermarket checkout and subsequently, at my suggestion, she became queen of Spain, which got her proper health coverage. For three months I gave her private lessons on Spanish history, because psychiatric hospitals have waiting lists and entrance examinations. At the time I was a plumber and bricklayer and bill poster because work makes you very hocus bogus and unnoticeable. You get by. In the meantime we waited, because I am sure the brain’s Bastille Day is on its way. On the basis of my prior experience and with my wholehearted support, Alyette thus became queen of Spain, but soon abdicated to be an ordinary princess. We’d learned that Spanish queens were obliged to follow an implacably rigid Grand Ceremonial, Protocol, and Etiquette, and it seemed crazy to go in for anything quite so complicated on purpose. When the health insurance got fed up or when Uncle Bogey went ballistic over our hospital bills, Annie would get a job in the cutting room, because that was show business, too. I did a dozen different jobs each as invisible as the other, and people took a good view of me. We had a baby daughter, but we didn’t show her off too much because she was a perfectly normal kid, which could have

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thrown a shadow of doubt over my hocus bogus and my princess. Uncle Bogey and I had come to an agreement: three weeks’ hospital per annum and not a day more. That was before Denmark and my major authenticity crisis. So I only had three weeks a year for training, observation, learning, and self-preparation. I’d bought a python and I watched it closely for my first documentary work, Cuddles, but the bastard slithered away into impossible places and disappeared in front of my eyes because he did not want to give birth to a work of literature. In spite of our agreement on those three weeks’ hospitalization per year, I managed to wangle ten days’ extension—thanks to my python, actually. At that time I didn’t have a dime and Annie couldn’t find any films to edit because the world was out of imagination and I didn’t feel at all like being a garbage collector or a plumber. I was sick and tired of a thousand years of taking pride in manual labor, and each time I earned my crust by the sweat of my brow the aforementioned crust made me feel so dyspeptic that I vomited it up and couldn’t keep anything else down either. It came to the point that Annie and I were back at Caniac so utterly broke that I had the distinct impression that reality was splitting its sides with its finger pointing in our direction, just to show it always has the last laugh. Annie looked at the whites of my eyes, reciprocally. We had to eat, it’s the law of the jungle, but we didn’t have a bean. ‘‘What are we going to do?’’ ‘‘You’ll go and stay with your relatives.’’ ‘‘And you?’’

40 Hocus Bogus

I struck my brow. I don’t know how the idea came to me. I think I was visited by my maternal grandfather’s genius though he had never done time seeing what a champion he was. ‘‘Good God! The python!’’ I shouted out loud. The next day I calmly took my python for a walk on a leash in the streets of Cahors. Cuddles slid along picking no bones with passersby, crossing at pedestrian crossings, obeying red lights—in a word, behaving like an upstanding citizen. But there was a cop around, and what did he do? He stepped on my python, that’s what he did, on purpose. He did it deliberately, the swine. Put his foot down as soon as he saw it was a python, out of distaste for alternative and marginal life-styles. I objected. ‘‘Damn! You did that on purpose!’’ He seemed surprised. ‘‘What did I do on purpose?’’ ‘‘You stepped on my python.’’ At that, he acted as though he really didn’t get it. Those guys are unbelievable actors. ‘‘What python?’’ ‘‘What do you mean, what python? That one.’’ I pointed at Cuddles. ‘‘Here I am quietly walking my python on its leash and you step on it just because it isn’t one of us.’’ The cop looked at my feet. He was blushing uncontrollably. ‘‘There is no python here,’’ he said, simulating certainty, because cops can be really slippery customers. Cuddles pretended to lick the bruise the cop had given him. ‘‘So what’s that, then? Is that not a python you see before me?’’

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‘‘Fuck that,’’ said the cop, because he was very fluent in the language. ‘‘There are no pythons in Cahors. This ain’t Africa.’’ ‘‘So that’s it, is it? Africans raus? As soon as you saw my python you put your hobnailed boot in it, you racist!’’ ‘‘Heavens above,’’ the cop said in all simplicity. You mustn’t believe their reputation, they have a lot of respect for higher things. So what does the bastard do? He gets a whistle from his pocket. However, the whistle hadn’t seen my python either, and said it loud and clear, bearing false witness. ‘‘There is no python here.’’ Whistles can’t speak, I know that. Such crude police provocation left me in no two ways. I’m not a violent man, but when whistles start denying the existence of pythons in Cahors—well, outlandish behavior of that kind, implying one is off the wall, is quite sufficient to make one lose one’s dishrag. So what does the bastard do, now that he’s got a black eye? He gets another cop out of his pocket, and that one fishes a third one out of his jacket, and before you can say Jack Robinson there’s nothing but demented policemen all over the place unscrewing their caps and hauling more cops out from inside and then came pythons galore all denying the existence of pythons, and everything swarmed and swirled and multiplied and surrounded me and took me on and I grew bigger and bigger until I felt I’d gone global and I got so scared that I started to scream and call Pinochet to the rescue, but no one ever answers your prayers. So there I was back at the station, and that’s where I had a stroke of luck. The Paternal Inspector knew me because of my prior genesis and that I was related to the great and the good.

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‘‘Listen, Harris, we’ve had enough of your subversive games. We don’t want any of that anarchist stuff in our own backyard down here. Cahors is a nice little town. Go demonstrate in Paris with your nutty friends, Harris.’’ ‘‘The name’s Pavlowitch, not Harris,’’ I said with great dignity and retention. ‘‘Harris was bomber command. Not me.’’ He blushed. ‘‘I am perfectly aware who is bomber command and who is not,’’ the Paternal Father said with a pronounced German accent. ‘‘Don’t make assumptions, because insulting an air marshal comes bloody damn expensive, don’t you know!’’ ‘‘I’m Pavlowitch,’’ I screamed faintly, because I wasn’t so sure anymore, what with flying all over the place, getting killed, being tortured and then executed. ‘‘Do not sneer! The name is Pavlowitch, not Harris! Harris is head of bomber command, and the head of bomber command is not I!’’ ‘‘I never said you were in charge of Dresden, for hell’s sake!’’ he bawled. ‘‘You’re the one who brought it up!’’ ‘‘I am not bomber command and I despise your insults and your tufted carpets! I am not bomber command, I’m quite certain of the fact, I am the same thing! Bomber command is him! I am not bomber command, I didn’t do it, I had nothing to do with it! i am not bomber command! I was granted ten days in the hospital, with free board and lodging and jerking off all paid for by the insurance because it was an incontrovertible fact that I was not bomber command, with the support of talking whistles, nested cops, and a python to boot. Helen (you have to keep on changing names if you want to

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stay off record) managed to get in with me by walking around Cahors dressed as a princess, with a viola as an accessory and her eyes on the far horizon. Her uncle knew a left-wing town councillor, and when the councillor saw a medieval princess with a viola and her eyes on the far horizon walking around Cahors he quickly grasped that a very senior politician was involved and that a change was on the way. So he did her a favor because you never know, and he got Agnes into the hospital with the utmost discretion.

I forgot to tell you that Alyette is very beautiful, but I know I can’t control my imagination and that I sometimes see beauty where others see only physical forms. I try to hide it, because I suffer comprehensible anxiety when confronted by the demands of ugliness. We have our favorite bench in the castle grounds and the sentinels leave us alone. Once you’ve been certified as a basket case, people are nice to you, because you’re not political. There was only one bother: the python followed me to the hospital. At night he would curl all around me and give me suffocations. Cuddles was my first attempt at self-therapy. As in DIY, do it yourself. From the very first pages my python began to fade, and when I had finished the book he’d vanished completely. Now I needed another subject to hold my own and get it all out of my system. But as is well known there’s a terrible shortage of topics. Not that there’s any real lack of them, thank God, but most of them have already been done. And there are some I won’t touch for all the coffee in China because they’re infectious. I won’t even mention Chile—how can you evacuate that in a novel, I ask you. Anyway there are very good writers in South America and they’re looking after it. There were the six million Jews that had been

44

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exterminated, but they had already been done. There were Soviet camps, the Gulag Archipelago, but I didn’t want to be too facile. There was the war in Bangladesh, with two hundred thousand raped women, and that would have given the book a perfectly legitimate dash of sex appeal, but it’s not in the news anymore, these things disappear so fast. There was the black problem in the USA, but black writers in America get uppity if you tread on their turf. There were famines, massacres, scandals, and madness in Africa, but that’s out of bounds because of racism. There were human rights all over the world, but that just makes people laugh. There was the nuclear deterrent, but since that’s the only thing the Soviet Union, the United States, China, and France have in common, I didn’t want to tear strips off international brotherhood. You have to hang on to hope. There were the genocided Gypsies, they haven’t been talked about very much, but all the documentation disappeared in the gas chambers. There was the UN, but that was just too sick. There was liberty, but René Clair had already made a comedy film about it. There were oceans of anguish, blood and horror all around, but thousands of writers were already on the job. Obviously there was silence, too, but there’s nothing more guilty than that. I needed an original subject. That’s when I first got the idea for Life Before Us. My mother had died here, in this same hospital, in Cahors, over a period of three years, from arterial sclerosis, with remissions and relapses, very slowly. It was as good as gold. It belonged to me. It was an original subject.

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I had a bout of depression with insubordination. But insubordination is no use when you are an authentic writer. Uncle Bogey is an authentic writer and he made a mint out of his mother. ‘‘How can I get rid of her? Stop thinking about her? Forget her?’’ ‘‘Turn her into a book.’’ ‘‘Stop it, Alyette, stop it . . . I know.’’ She gave me a sweet smile, just like in a Harlequin, and squeezed my hand without the slightest literary discretion. ‘‘I can’t do that. And anyway they’d soon understand I’m congenital.’’ ‘‘I know it’s hard. When I got my degree in literature I wanted to be a writer, too. I didn’t dare. I wanted to write about true things. But you know that we haven’t got the right to deal with true things anymore. They’re taboo. Love, children, mothers, hearts . . . it’s all considered yucky and lowbrow nowadays. Just melodrama, slummery, soppiness, sentimental and mediocre, not literature. And it’s not new. It’s permanent, and what goes on forever is reactionary, since it won’t change. It’s not original, it doesn’t sound like it’ll upturn new soil.’’ ‘‘Eating shit is not at the cutting edge either.’’ ‘‘Then it also occurred to me that we can’t even imagine true things any longer. To get at them, to unearth them, you have to cross unbelievable cultural barriers, you have to dig as deep as an archaeological expedition, and then they call you a fascist because what goes ever on never changes and is therefore regressive. I didn’t have enough imagination to find true things, Flopsy. They’ve been buried under a heap of hocus bogus nonsense made

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of their own ruins. So you should go ahead. The more sincere you are, the more they’ll applaud you for being a fraud. The more truth you come out with, the better you’ll hide it. Get on with it, Mopsy. Write. Publish. There’s no chance you’ll be discovered. Your mother and brother shouldn’t be worried at all.’’ ‘‘I’m frightened.’’ ‘‘If they track you down you can always come back to the hospital. I’ll be waiting for you. They’ll say: ‘Didn’t you realize he was a psychopath?’ ’’ ‘‘I’m scared.’’ ‘‘Fear is one of the things that are true.’’ ‘‘They’ll be merciless. They’ll be snide and sneerful. I’ll be hated and rejected. I don’t mean massacres and torture camps, Alyette. They know about that, they’re used to it, it’s familiar. But you don’t know everything I didn’t tell you . . . When I was four I killed a kitten. I don’t mean Pinochet and women with their breasts cut off in Beirut, they can cope with that. It’s the kitten. That’s what they’ll never forgive me.’’ ‘‘Alright, but you aren’t obliged to tell them everything.’’ ‘‘And what if they notice I’m normal?’’ For the first time since the heavens existed a flash of anger lit up her eyes. ‘‘Don’t talk rubbish. If you were normal I wouldn’t be here beside you. If you were normal I would spit in your face.’’ ‘‘When can we make love again?’’ ‘‘It’s not easy, Flopsy-mopsy. Major psychotics of our kind lose their sexuality. It would arouse suspicion. But I promise I’ll manage to get better quickly . . . We can meet outside.’’

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She gave me a serious look. ‘‘Obviously someone will have to feed my unicorns while I’m away. I’ve got a hundred of them now.’’ ‘‘You’d better not mention your unicorns to them.’’ ‘‘Oh no, it’ll be alright. I told the doctor there was a unicorn on our Bayeux tapestry at home when I was little. It followed me around. He was very pleased. He interpreted it as regressive behavior, as a refusal to leave childhood behind.’’ I said firmly: ‘‘You had better not mention the unicorns, Alyette.’’ ‘‘Why not?’’ ‘‘It gives me the shivers. They’re mythological animals. Like humans. I can’t bear the idea. It sends me around the bend.’’ ‘‘Watch out, here’s Jeremy.’’ Jeremy was a decent kind of nurse. He used to play rugby for Montpellier with a weight of two hundred and twenty pounds all in muscle, but he was very gentle and needed fragile people around him to make him feel big and strong. ‘‘Shall we play piggy?’’ ‘‘OK.’’ Playing piggy is a classic among the deranged, it never fails and the wardens hate it. ‘‘Hello, Jeremy.’’ ‘‘Hello, friends. Time to go for lunch.’’ I held Alyette’s hand. We took a few steps, then she stopped and pointed to something at the top of a tree. ‘‘Look, it’s piggy!’’ ‘‘Where?’’

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‘‘Over there, in the tree . . .’’ Jeremy looked pained. I said: ‘‘How can you possibly believe there is a pig in a tree, Alyette?’’ She shrugged. ‘‘Oh, she’s really off her rocker. . .’’ ‘‘OK, OK,’’ Jeremy said. ‘‘I’ve got bad news for you two. I’ve heard they’re going to let you go home.’’ I went pale. ‘‘E.T. go home?’’ ‘‘No, not inside. But to live at your own place. Physically.’’ ‘‘Home? What’s that mean, phone home? Where is home, anyway?’’ ‘‘Nobody’s got a clue, but at least we’re all in the same ship on that score.’’ Alyette went to stay with her sister and I went to live with Uncle Bogey in Paris. He gives me a maid’s room on the sixth floor without an elevator. I told you Uncle Bogey was killed in the war and that he’s found a way around it since then. But to be fair you have to admit that cities are full of people who’ve died and managed to go on living thereafter. Maybe you’ll think me spiteful but I have loved so much and I go on loving to such a degree that I have to find a way of holding my own. It’s what they call mad passion.

I had another couple of turns at the python to escape from the species and the rules of the game and I have already said above, with all requisite lucidity, how, in order not to have a snake in his own grass, Uncle Bogey sent me off to Dr. Christianssen’s castle at Elsinore. It was the life of Riley. I’d finished my mother, I’d knocked her into shape and typed her up, and sent her in to the publisher. Dr. Christianssen often came to talk to me with his fine fair beard that was really lucky to have a father like him. He is high-flown in fluent French, by which I mean he’s eager to grab words by the throat. ‘‘I know, dear chap, I know. Genetics is no turn-on. But in your case it’s not mom’n’pop. It’s even more romantic. Your genes are no shittier than anyone else’s. Relax.’’ I might have managed to do that if next day the publisher hadn’t demanded proof of my existence. She said she was about to turn up. I had already made the acquaintance of Michel Cournot, who was my editor, two months previously, in Geneva, after I had got back from Brazil, where it seems I had never been. So would someone please tell me where I had been all that time? I hadn’t traveled to Geneva at Uncle Bogey’s expense for psychiatric rea50

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sons but to lose weight at the Lennes Institute, where they’d developed a new method. I had to stop dragging all that weight around, it was bad for my heart. Several million million pounds, I don’t rightly know just how many, as I’m not a geologist or a geographer. Nobody knows exactly how much the world weighs, it varies from individual to individual. Dr. Lennes helped me lose a few pounds. The editor was very kind to me. He just said once that ‘‘that hadn’t stopped Hölderlin from creating magnificent poetry.’’ I’m not sure what he meant by ‘‘that.’’ All I know is that Hölderlin was insane for nearly thirty years and that’s much too much for all the royalties he got out of it. No poetry is worth that much. Hölderlin died while the balance of his mind was disturbed because he never managed to lose weight. The Copenhagen encounter was much more dangerous for me, however, because Madame Gallimard said she was bringing a journalist with her: Madame Yvonne Baby, from Le Monde. She, too, was coming to establish my credentials. All the most reliable newspapers were still saying I wasn’t me. I couldn’t refuse. The best way of proving you don’t really exist is to show yourself openly, with a nose, a mug, and a bout of nausea. There’s no better token of being a nonentity. So my publisher and Madame Yvonne Baby came to see me in Copenhagen. Contrary to what Madame Baby later wrote, it was not at ‘‘the Ajar residence’’ because I couldn’t do that in the hospital. Dr. Christianssen’s wife lent me her house. It even had a garden and dogs. Saint Bernards. Notwithstanding their good reputation, Saint Bernards don’t bite. Alyette came all the way from Cahors to Copenhagen just to

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be at my side during the trial. It’s possible she wasn’t fully visible, but I am sure she was with me. ‘‘Your book seems a little baggy . . .’’ Tee, hee, hee. I may laugh now, but I didn’t then. I’m not baggy at all. I’ve been stitched up very tightly. It was a custom job and it took centuries. ‘‘Sorry, I’ve got hiccups.’’ ‘‘You know, it doesn’t read at all like the work of a beginner . . .’’ I almost peed in my pants from sheer joy. I always pee at the wrong moment. I dream of relief. I am not the work of a beginner. I am the work of ages and antediluvian genes who’ve been at it for thousands of years. There are no possible beginners. Alyette came to my rescue and served tea. I had some, with a lump of sugar. No rats, nothing. Tea with one lump. Quite human. ‘‘Didn’t anyone give you any help at all?’’ I was sorely tempted. I could have so easily stirred up shit for Uncle Bogey! If I’d just let it drop, he’d have started howling, and denying, and protesting, and refuting, in order to allow it to be understood—for the lag doth protest too much—that he’d helped me a great deal and added all the stylish touches. A pang of hatred made me want to lumber him with the whole job. To tell Madame Simone Gallimard that the idea of making a book out of my mother had come from him. But something inexplicable also happened simultaneously. For the first time in my life I wanted to be me. I didn’t want to be a

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python anymore, even though pythons had nothing to do with our charitable and literary endeavors. ‘‘Nobody helped me. Cuddles is entirely autobiographical.’’ My publisher smiled. ‘‘You have a wonderful sense of humor.’’ Screw that. Try spending six months in Paris as a python and then tell me about humor. As soon as monsters see anyone different, they call it a monstrosity. ‘‘I can see that for you the only thing that counts is literature.’’ I confirmed her surmise with a nod of my head. Alyette had put her hand on my shoulder to keep me calm. Anyway, it wasn’t any less true than unicorns or the pig in the tree, in Cahors. ‘‘I have to tell you that the issue of literary prizes has arisen a second time . . .’’ ‘‘I’ve backed out, as you well know . . .’’ It was true. On the morning the prize announcements were to be made, in 1975, Alyette had taken by hand to the publisher and to the panel members a letter in which I declined to be a candidate for any of the prizes. At the time I had good reasons for not wanting to be identified. I had always wanted to be a pediatrician because that’s where it all starts, and if you get at it early enough there might be a chance of change and remediation. But I wasn’t up to seven years without a break. So I began to perform abortions because that way I had the impression I was saving human lives. I was betrayed by real doctors for illegally practicing medicine without authorization. I had to go under cover.

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I looked for other ways of going straight and reconnecting with reality. That was my first major encounter with haloperidol and neuroliptox. Heloise had finished her degree in literature and I set her up in a brothel in the Goutte d’Or where there were three girls turning around fifty tricks a day. Because all the johns were Arabs they couldn’t get us for racism. With the help of Heloise I was able to research the lives of whores in the Goutte d’Or and that enabled me to write Life Before Us, which at that time was called The Quality of Despair. I had some trouble with the police because they were persecuting the girls and claiming a share of the royalties. In addition the inspector had gotten the clap during a raid on a brothel and he was furious with me because although it is true that syphilis may do wonders for human genius, with Heine, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and so many others to show for it, the clap has never done anyone any good and it’s just art for art’s sake. I didn’t want to be labeled as clinical or congenital and especially not as a fake, since I was well aware I was not a python. Neuroliptox induces moments of particularly horrendous lucidity when my human nature becomes irrefutable and hits me in the face. In short, it was no time to show myself. All I wanted was in a puff of smoke. Peace of mind. So I declined the prize, but a few months later I wrote a letter to my publisher saying that it wasn’t true, that I hadn’t declined anything, that the first letter was a forgery. I didn’t want people to think I was antisocial or had any principles. I’m a crafty old crow, I am. Trouble is, there are foxes about. My dear publisher seemed slightly put out.

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‘‘But I thought this letter was a fake . . .’’ If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s lies. They’re much too plain. ‘‘I am ambiguous.’’ That really got them. They were pleased as Punch, beaming with satisfaction. Ambiguity is in. They didn’t say a word. I was with it, swinging in the rain, out in front. Up to date. What’s more, my confession was obviously sincere. They were moved, and mooed. Coming clean like that, in front of all those people! It was self-sacrifice in all its naked beauty. Nonfiction sells much better than a novel. ‘‘Look, that can’t be so.’’ ‘‘What can’t be so?’’ But it wasn’t so. Love like mine always turns to hate. I shall never forgive. ‘‘Well, Mr. Ajar, we all have psychological troubles of our own . . .’’ I wanted to start sniffling but I was afraid of overdoing it. ‘‘Remember, your first book attracted a lot of attention and fifteen thousand readers have stayed with you . . .’’ That’s not true. They read my book and maybe they enjoyed it because it happened to someone else, and that’s a great relief. But they didn’t stay with me. The idea of fifteen thousand readers really able to stay with a book is frightening. You should be very careful even with books that tell you how to lose weight. I do not want people to stay with me. I swear by all that I hold sacred that I do not wish to lead anyone up the garden path. I’m just holding my own, that’s all.

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As for the rest of it, I raise my tiny mousy voice—ajar means ‘‘mouse’’ in Hungaro-Finnish—I raise my tiny voice only to scream that I am afraid and that we have to be even more frightened than fear itself and that in 1976, fear is, as it always has been, but never to this extent, the only absolute, profound, universal, and fraternal form of authenticity and as I write these lines the hair on the back of my neck tingles at the thought that I am sitting on a chair and that nobody, but nobody can be certain that a chair is not a hocus bogus undercover operative in charge of the scariest plot of all—to make everything around us look nice and normal and familiar. Beware of that wastebasket or that ashtray or this table. Standing stock-still like that is an elementary surveillance ploy. The balloon will go up, trust me, it’s all going to go up very soon. Beware. Enemy words are listening to you. Everything is pretending, nothing is authentic and never will be as long as we aren’t, as long as we can’t be our own authors, our own work. Believe me: I was already that when Homer was at his mother’s breast. Authenticity won’t emerge from the seed that we are. We have to change seed. Dr. Christianssen told me to shut my mouth at the right moment, but there is no right moment for shutting up.

I signed the new contract the same way I did the first one: Émile Ajar. I was worried, I’d used the same name twice, and I’m scared to death of dying. But Dr. Christianssen told me not to worry. ‘‘Go ahead. Fate won’t find you out under the name of Ajar any more quickly than if you’d called yourself something else. Fate doesn’t care. It swallows anything. Anyway, as far as fate is concerned, names don’t mean very much . . . They’re all pseudonyms anyway. When your python gulps down a mouse he doesn’t ask its name. Obviously, I know that when a Viking was near death, they gave him a ceremonial change of name . . . Fate was after Carlos, but he found Pedro. The Vikings believed that death would be cheated and Carlos would get better.’’ All the same I took some precautions. I’d had the first contract signed by a taxi driver in Rio. So if fate turned nasty on me, the Rio taxi driver would get it in the neck, and not I. Anyway, Rio was about as far from Cahors as you could get. That gave me a chance of getting away scot-free, given the distance, especially when you think of all the swine down there waiting for punishment, just like me. So I hadn’t signed the first contract myself and I started 57

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practicing for the new one in order to make Émile Ajar look convincing. I wrote it out again and again and found I couldn’t stop signing. I was bemused. I was a simulator and a paranoid mythomaniac—and now I was a megalomaniac, too! I had deep cover. Dr. Christianssen warned me, but I thought I was up to it. When I’d written out several hundred signatures—the floor was covered with sheets of hocus bogus slithering all over the place—I had a frightful scare. My signature was getting more and more assured, more and more like unto itself, identical, same, and settled. He had come. Someone: an identity, a lifelong trap, a present absence, an infirmity, a deformity, a mutilation that was taking possession and becoming me. Émile Ajar. I had brought myself into being. I was frozen, captured, immobilized, held fast, and stuck. Like, I was. Fear messes everything up for me. I capsize right away and there I am in a panic up on deck with an SOS and not a life raft in sight. He was swimming alongside me and trying to grab my sleeve. And I could see he was just as scared of being Ajar as I was of being Pavlowitch. And since we were both scared stiff of dying we were in deep doo-doo with no way out. He was struggling and trying to break free. He had six legs to help him manage, three wings of different kinds, very successful scales that were quite inhuman, and tiny little pink maternal nipples, because he was dreaming of love, despite everything. He was striving to extricate himself, to be something else, to become a spotted lily of the zoological sphere, but he didn’t get any nearer than I did, because you can’t drown a fish just because you’re a

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surrealist. But he was definitely Breton, rowing his pea-green boat with a howl and a scream about how lovely you are. You can’t get more schizoid than that, can you now, and he was just as genetical in the name of the Father, the Mother, and the Son. One side of him stank and the other radiated holiness, and from his bloodflecked mouth love poems spurted out in place of the profound bestiality that would have been considered normal service. Sometimes, in a tremendous effort of truth, he managed to put an asshole in the place of his mouth, but from where you would have expected to see only shit emerge, he managed, like a trick smoker, to blow rings of holiness, beauty, and martyrdom that he astutely used to cover his infamy. He made masterpieces from dying men’s gurgles, and from the foulness of his breath he fabricated larks that gave off a smell that could be called immortal if only that word had not so often served to lick the butt of death. The only things he never managed to change were his reproductive organs because the hocus bogus show must go on as long as the Author isn’t there. Ajar tried in vain to turn into alfalfa, asparagus, a nightstick, or an aquatic pleonasm so as not to be ashamed of himself and of his imposture. Poor bugger. The more he tried not to be a man the more human he became.

That night I had hallucinations again. I could see reality, which is the worst hallucinogen of them all. It was unbearable. A pal of mine in the institution has all the luck: when he hallucinates he see snakes, rats, bugs, all sorts of nice things. But I see reality. I got up and lit a hope, to make some light and see a bit less clearly. Sorry, a match. Never confess. I didn’t switch on because the electrics stay on permanently, whereas a match goes out quite quickly, so you have to take another one, which gives a second hope and a second dose of relief, and so on. There are fifty civilizations in a box of matches, it’s got fifty times more hope than a single flick of a switch. As soon as I lit the first match I stopped hallucinating and saw Christ. Beside him stood Momo, the Arab Jewish kid, Mohammed from the Goutte d’Or, good door, good whore—you know, the place in Life Before Us, that racist and antiSemitic work as it has been called by people who can’t tell racism and anti-Semitism when they see it because it’s the air they breathe and you never notice your own bad smell. Mohammed, called Momo for the benefit of the French, was standing next to the Jew called Christ, the guy they call love and salvation to persecute the Jews and punish them, because a Jew invented Christian civilization and Christians can’t ever forgive that, since it puts them under an obligation. It’s a clinical fact that Christians really 60

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hate the Jews to death for having made them Christian and lumbering them with duties they really don’t want to have. Momo was standing next to the first chosen Jew and they were both watching hope burning down and about to scorch my finger as it usually does, but this time it lasted a bit longer than an ordinary match because it had two supporters, which was a boost for the team’s morale. ‘‘You reckon he’s going to get his finger burned?’’ Momo asked, watching the match. ‘‘No,’’ said Christ, with a pronounced Russian accent in Jewish, though he kept away from the place now that they had psychiatric hospitals there. ‘‘No, I don’t think so. That match will not scorch his finger.’’ ‘‘So you reckon it’ll go out first?’’ The Jew tugged on his carrot beard. He had a hook nose for the benefit of anti-Semites. ‘‘Doesn’t matter. He’ll light another one.’’ ‘‘Is the one he’s holding now going to burn his fingers, dammit?’’ Momo asked. ‘‘It will only burn his finger if it goes out first,’’ Christ said, because he knew all about hope and civilization and had a Talmudic mind as well. ‘‘Anyway, it’s not going out that’s the issue. The interest is in whether it wears out or not.’’ He had a good laugh about that because Jews have always been accused of overcharging interest. ‘‘I reckon that match is going to burn his finger before it goes out,’’ Momo said with childish logic, because children take time to get over things. ‘‘You want to bet?’’

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‘‘No,’’ said Christ, firmly, because he was a weakling and still going strong. ‘‘I never gamble. For religious reasons.’’ ‘‘You’re just afraid of losing,’’ Momo said, since he was Muslim and in that capacity was also a Christian, a Buddhist, and a Jew. ‘‘Losers, schnoozers, who cares!’’ said Christ in a marked East End accent, because he often dropped in on slumming expeditions. ‘‘I always lose. I was born to lose. I like losing. I’m a weakling, that’s why I’m still around. The more I lose, the more I get at them. My weakness undermines them, inside. Gives them abjections of conscience. You mustn’t jerk off, Momo, it’s a hollow trick, because afterward you can’t remember what really makes you feel guilty. Of course I’ll lose. So what? When I lost the first time, it gave me two thousand years, and I’m still going.’’ I couldn’t stop staring at the match. I was shaking and perspiring. There’s no worse hallucination than reality. ‘‘So how much did you want to put on it?’’ Christ asked. ‘‘A Barbie doll,’’ Momo said quickly. ‘‘I bet a Barbie that that match is going to go out before it scorches his finger. Done?’’ ‘‘Barbie’s been done already. I’ll take Touvier instead,’’ quipped JC, because he liked crass puns and other kinds of camp. The match was about to burn my finger with crimes, pollution, Beirut, and bombs in all directions. But JC stared hard at it and it suddenly grew two or three times as long and could last for quite a bit more hope. ‘‘You owe me a Touvier!’’ Christ said. ‘‘As an anti-Semite, a racist, and a Jew, I demand my pound of flesh!’’

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‘‘Oh no!’’ Momo shouted. ‘‘I’m not having that. You done another miracle!’’ ‘‘Tee, hee, hee,’’ JC giggled, because he does let himself go now and again, seeing all the troubles he’s had with serious folk these last two millennia. ‘‘That’ll teach you to wager, Pascal my boy.’’ He looked at me sternly. ‘‘As for you, that should teach you to be sure about something!’’ he said to me, and then vanished, like he does every time there’s despair. It calmed me down a bit and I stopped being hallucinogenic. I couldn’t see reality anymore, just a table and a chair, normal everyday stuff. Totally hocus bogus. I was better, I suppose.

I remained in a difficult position because although Madame Yvonne Baby was staying at a hotel and wasn’t going to interrogate me to establish my identity until the morning, Madame Simone Gallimard, for her part, was staying in the little house with us, and Annie was worried she might notice something. It’s a fact that I’ve never managed to go hocus bogus eight hours a day, forty hours a week, with an hour’s journey each way twice a day between office and home, and I wanted to scream out loud. But things weren’t going too badly until, totally unexpectedly, a whole delegation came all the way up from Cahors. That was despite the fact that I’ve never had any trouble with the town council, which likes to have a nutcase or two to show off on the streets in order to prove its commitment to popular culture. Next day at two p.m. Saint Bernard barked and the bell rang and Annie went to open the door. She came back looking as white as a sheet, as well she might. ‘‘There’s a delegation from the Cahors town council asking to see you,’’ she said. ‘‘Blow me down with a feather,’’ I said. ‘‘Look, Paul . . .’’ She used my real name. It was a code between us. Identity. Danger! 64

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‘‘Here? In Copenhagen? What do they want me for, for Christ’s sake?’’ ‘‘Maybe it’s just about a fine,’’ she said unconvincingly. ‘‘Do you remember when you took a leak on Main Street?’’ ‘‘They can’t possibly have come from Cahors just because I had a piss. I know it was quite an event in Cahors, but . . . Well, OK, tell them to come in.’’ They came in. There were three of them, all deputy mayors. They looked overwhelmed. I didn’t know whether they were deeply moved by old acquaintance long forgot or by something else. The first deputy then said: ‘‘Mr. Ajar, if you will permit us to address you by that name . . .’’ He winked. I winked back, as a precaution. I shouldn’t have. It confirmed them. ‘‘We wanted to ask you whether you couldn’t do something for the fair city of Cahors and the surrounding region. We need a culture center, with a theater and movie screens and a concert hall for concerts . . . and we thought you might possibly be able to get factories to move into the area . . .’’ My jaw dropped. So little did I grasp the first thing about what they were saying that I almost began to feel unpanicked and pacified, because there’s nothing scarier than understanding. ‘‘I could consider it,’’ I said. The first rule of psychiatry: never contradict a patient. ‘‘The Department of Lot is fairly undeveloped, as I am sure you are aware, and bringing in factories, with new jobs . . .’’ I twiddled the ends of my handlebar mustache. I began to find the conversation quite natural.

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‘‘Indeed. But we mustn’t leave pollution out of account,’’ I said. ‘‘The only reason I haven’t yet built factories in the Department of Lot is the pollution they cause. I was thinking about electronics, maybe munitions . . .’’ I was happy as a lark. I was a billionaire and there’s nothing more distant and different from me than a man with megabucks. I was in clover, right? I’d disappeared. I offered them the cigars that Uncle Bogey comes to smoke here in my room out of sight during his detox. A pity he was in Mallorca. That brute never believed I could make anything of myself. He’d go green with fury if he saw me setting up factories in the Lot. A pause. I pondered. I would be the benefactor of the Department . . . then there’d be no stopping me. Prime minister. No, that’s insignificant. President of the Republic. I couldn’t become king of France because that was unconstitutional. I’d put Pinochet in charge of the quality of life, Solzhenitsyn at the Ministry of Defense and Atomics, to stand up for the West. I was sure to command unanimous support, from the far left to the outside right. There was just one problem that was beginning to bother me: the Arabs and Israel, because of their common interests. I began to shed great beads of perspiration because, as president of the Republic and an Illustrious Frenchman, I had no way of evading my responsibilities. ‘‘I don’t have a magic wand,’’ I told them sternly. ‘‘Maybe we could begin with the culture center,’’ said the deputy mayor in charge of. ‘‘Factories after. It would look more discreet doing it in that order, from the pollution point of view.’’

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‘‘Maybe . . . But you’ll have to do something about your ghastly hospital first. The food is dreadful.’’ ‘‘Agreed.’’ The deputy mayor put on a civilized smile. ‘‘It goes without saying that Your Excellency will be entitled to a commission, as is only proper when contracting with oil sheikhs, and since you are agreeable to speaking up on our behalf . . .’’ Oil sheikh? Your Excellency? I didn’t recall, but you never know. I was capable of anything. I said ‘‘mmm’’ as I chewed my cigar and put on an air of importance. ‘‘By the way,’’ said the deputy mayor in charge of, ‘‘we have been asked to transmit the apologies of the Paternal Inspector. He had a serious nervous breakdown when he understood it all . . .’’ ‘‘That’s normal,’’ I said. ‘‘When you understand it all, you always have a breakdown. Because of lucidity.’’ ‘‘In the beginning he didn’t understand your legitimate desire to remain anonymous.’’ ‘‘I simply have to insist on not being identified,’’ I said. ‘‘It would make my life impossible.’’ ‘‘Of course, of course. But you were dealing with a rigid personality who’d been shifted from Paris to Cahors because he’s so highly sensitive. He’d been posted to a country town for peace and quiet. That said, he’s a conscientious policeman. You made a strong impression on him. He studied your file with meticulous care after he met you. He really couldn’t see why you were so keen to hide your real name and be known as Pavlowitch.’’ I trembled. I can’t bear my real name. It makes me feel trapped right away.

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Careful does it. I kept quiet. ‘‘Our region is proud to have such a distinguished visitor,’’ said the deputy mayor in charge of. ‘‘We will be eternally grateful to Your Excellency for whatever Your Excellency might be able to do for the Department of Lot and we promise to respect Your Excellency’s incognito. We will take care of the Paternal Inspector and keep his trap shut. He did some research in the national database and he established that your real name is Pahlevi. Of course, it may just be a clerical error . . .’’ ‘‘It is not a clerical error, it is a calumny. I am not called Pahlevi, for heaven’s sake.’’ ‘‘Yes of course, sir . . .’’ ‘‘All I told them in Paris, when they interrogated me the first time, and did tests and so on, was that I am only half Jewish. I don’t deny my origins, I’m just being cautious, with an eye to the future. It is not true that my father was called Levi. My father was not Jewish, that’s a foul insinuation. I told them ten times over that I was not a Levi and that I had quite enough problems without that, thank you very much. Since I was speaking French at the time I shouted ‘pas Levi, pas Levi’ and the stenographer must have taken it down as ‘Pahlevi.’ But the name is Pavlowitch, gentlemen, Paul Pavlowitch, which is not what I’m called either.’’ They were satisfied. There was a mutual understanding. ‘‘You can count on our discretion. But when he realized he had insulted a relative of His Majesty the Shah of Iran living under cover at Caniac-du-Causse, the Paternal Inspector had a dreadful nervous breakdown, and . . .’’ I leaped to my feet in one go. I’ve got my honor, for shit’s sake.

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I mean, for shit’s sake I have my honor. For honor’s sake, I mean, I have still got my shit. ‘‘Wawawawa . . .’’ Such a wailing of human suffering had never been heard in the state of Denmark. ‘‘I am not a Pahlevi! I’ve got nothing to do with the goddamn Shah of Persia, not in the teeniest weeniest way! I may be mad, but the Shah of Persia is not me! They left quite persuaded on tiptoe, to keep me incognito. I bawled for a while longer because I needed to convince myself I was not head of bomber command. I couldn’t do it. Harris is me, too. Ajar was slithering around and trying to slip through the wall. Annie and I used a few drops of tincture of valerian to put him out of his suffering. Tincture of valerian is an analgesic that was given to overstrung individuals in the eighteenth century before they had the balance of terror.

Those local politicos’ whiffily suspicious attitude toward me and the shifty, vague answers I gave with my no confession as to my true identity—which, to judge by their ironical smiles, they had sniffed out anyway—subjected me to a long night of excruciating self-examination. At two in the morning—which is always the worst—I suddenly understood. I seized the telephone and woke up Dr. Christianssen. ‘‘Doctor, it’s disgusting. I now know the reason for all my attempts to escape my identity, the cause of all my panic attacks and pissing from fear, of my guilt and my refusal of heredity. I am Jewish, Doctor, and from that comes self-hatred and a racist attitude toward myself. Then I tie a double knot and mass-produce identities that didn’t bring Christ into the world and thus avoid the danger of persecution and resentment by Christians, because they can’t forgive us for having lumbered them with Jesus and all his requirements for morality, dignity, generosity, fraternity and all the troubles that brings. It’s not because I jerk off, it’s because I’m a Jew!’’ ‘‘Stop pissing me off in the middle of the night,’’ Dr. Christianssen roared back in Hebrew, because the tide of panic that was bearing me upward also raised primal antecedents and irrefutable evidence against me as well, with IDF elite units charging at me 70

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intent on recuperation—there couldn’t be a Jew left on earth who didn’t feel threatened by true belonging. ‘‘Don’t piss me off, Pavlowitch, with your perfectly Yugoslav name, I’m giving you unbelievably cushy conditions for living in Copenhagen on your uncle’s tab, and if you start waking me at two in the morning just to show me you’re lucid, I’ll certify you fit in mind and body and you’ll be back in the same shit as everybody else. If you keep on masturbating in the dark to dishonor jerking off by lumbering it with a guilt complex, that’s fine by me—masturbation has had to put up with a lot worse and it’s become quite accustomed to dialectics. But leave the Jews alone, will you? We Danes, and King Christian first among us, saved all our Jews under Hitler. Don’t try getting Jews involved in your financial support system. You’re right to be ashamed of your origins, but sperm goes back a lot further than Abraham! I’ve never seen a piece of spawn closer to the original than you. In that respect, I’ve never seen anything so authentic. Jews have been trying for centuries to get themselves certified nonhuman by anti-Semites, but they never made it and all it produced was Israel, and there’s nothing more human or patent that that, my lad. Israel is a nation worthy of the name, and there’s no more crushing proof of human nature than a nation, my cuddly little python who’s not the kind to, my darling ball bearing, ashtray, feather, asparagus, and all your other trashy attempts at transmogrification . . .’’ ‘‘Vive la France!’’ I shouted, because I didn’t want to be all on my own feeling ashamed. ‘‘I’ll tell you something else. You are the most antiracist bastard I’ve ever treated for lucidity among the right-minded, and that

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lumbers you with several billion little problems. Go get dressed. Then you won’t be able to play hocus bogus because the habit makyth the man.’’ And he hung up on me. I told Annie in a neutral voice devoid of all allusion: ‘‘He said I was normal.’’ ‘‘OK, but since normal isn’t normal anyway . . .’’ Annie has solid peasant roots in southwest France, and at times they get the better of her, so she stops fighting all the way and allows earthy common sense to take over. ‘‘You know, Paul, maybe we should settle down,’’ she said. ‘‘With two books out, maybe we could live on royalties and advances at Caniac. We don’t need a lot down there. We could manage on fifteen hundred francs a month for the three of us. There’s no point making yourself ill just to get a third book out of it . . . And anyway, despair has been squeezed to the rind already.’’ That’s true, I thought. But what if I tried hope? No, I won’t allow myself to peddle in such clichés. It’s just too vulgar.

But hope did keep tormenting me all night long—that’s what it’s for—and I didn’t get a wink. And in the morning, by sheer coincidence, or so it seemed, there was a sign. It was in the Herald Tribune. I’ve got it here, you can all see it. A wolf had escaped from the zoo in Munich and had been found by an old lady on page four. When the forces of law and order got there, the old lady was stroking the wolf ’s head and it was licking her other hand. I’m not sure of anything right now, but maybe wolves are evolving in the right direction. Old ladies, too, I guess. Or maybe she was just a bag lady. Trash is often where you find something new. I don’t believe in the reversal of alliances. Words are mixed up in all this because they all have histories: the expression ‘‘to harbor resentment’’ will surely never mean that resentment will thank you for sheltering it. Love is just a word with a prettier song than the others. That evening Alyette and I had a lengthy powwow. I haven’t yet described Alyette to you in words, but I want to keep her, and I’m afraid words might carry her off. I’ll say just this: Alyette has eyes that make you think they’re seeing things for the first time. ‘‘It might be better to give up, Paul. Stop screaming, there’s no 73

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ear to hear you. He’s not there. He doesn’t exist. He won’t come to finish work on you and to complete the draft. There is no Author. So you might as well take yourself as you are, because it’s got nothing to do with us. You could even get a job with distant prospects—like inspecting tickets at a departure gate.’’ The nurse, Frøken Norden (what a memory I have!), sat in the corner taking notes. They always do that when Alyette is talking to me. ‘‘Then there’s another way of getting out of it. You just need a good start, that’s all.’’ ‘‘What start? It’s always the same sperm that started it. You can’t ever get away from it, Alyette, because that’s where it all comes from. We need to change sperm. I know: in America they’ve managed to make an artificial gene, but maybe it’ll lose interest in us and go in for apricots. You can’t tell. I don’t see why it should do us any favors. It’ll go off somewhere else and give birth to someone else, but we’re here already. What difference will it make?’’ There was a tape recorder, too. They always switch on the tape when I’m thinking. It’s what they call my ‘‘delirium.’’ I call it spying. I actually wonder if they aren’t being paid by Uncle Bogey so he can steal my ideas. Then he’ll thump his chest and say it was he who saved the world. ‘‘In that case, Alex, there has to be natural selection. Like for prime fruit. You have to give purity a chance.’’ ‘‘Are you seeing anyone?’’ ‘‘We could get two unrivaled spiritual purities to couple, and begin again from there. It would be a start.’’

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‘‘Who are you thinking of ?’’ Alyette cast a glance of triumph at me. ‘‘His Holiness the Pope and His Holiness Solzhenitsyn.’’ I stopped to think. Ajar was crawling away, trying to hide under the rug, because he was a sincere believer. He was so scared of feeling belief despite notwithstanding and hereafter that the rug was turning white from sheer terror. ‘‘Listen, Alyette, you can’t get the Pope to couple with Solzhenitsyn, spiritually or otherwise. Nature will not allow it. Grafting the Pope onto Solzhenitsyn or the reverse in the pursuit of purity and birth might be technically possible, but all that would actually come of it would be a Gedankenexperiment.’’ The nurse was using shorthand to keep me brief. ‘‘Poor Birdy, you still think two and two make four. They don’t. Two and two are hocus bogus, thick as thieves, they’re just pretending to make four, on orders from above. They keep up appearances, but we don’t have to . . .’’ She was insistent. She stuck to her guns. ‘‘Solzhenitsyn has no eggs and cannot be impregnated by the Pope, and vice versa. It’s a mad idea.’’ I glanced at the nurse from the corner of my eye. I wanted to please her. ‘‘What’s more, Solzhenitsyn and the Pope aren’t of the same faith. They’ll quarrel about what religion they’ll give birth to, even if there is a miracle.’’ ‘‘So what are we going to do then, Paul? It can’t go on like this, it’s too good. Uncle will get fed up paying the hospital bills and Christianssen will stop cooperating sooner or later. You can’t go on

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much longer getting diagnosed, and the requirements for certification get tougher by the day because of inflation.’’ ‘‘Trust me, Alyette. I’ll pull it off. I’ll bunk off properly, I’ll take you far away, we’ll be unrecuperable, we’ll be definitive . . .’’ The recorder recorded and the cops were buzzing, the nurse had her electronic eye and Madame Yvonne Baby was still waiting at the hotel. I landed in Paris by airmail in the middle of the night, where I’d already settled Heloise in the Goutte d’Or brothel, among the Arabs, so as not to be a racist. I wanted to see how she’d been getting along during my absence. The CEO, Madame Dora, let me in and said Heloise was in fine shape, like the other two antiracist members of her team she’d been turning about forty tricks a day, but she’d come down with a bout of cops, because of the outbreak of lice in Paris in the newspapers. And when I saw her it was clear that Heloise was in good shape and she started telling me about the spy satellites overhead that record all our thoughts for the KGB and the CIA, then suddenly she gave a little scream, and what did I see? A cop crawling out of her private parts, where he’d been to give her a parking ticket. Nora, one of the other girls, was also scratching herself incessantly, because it was itchy, what with all those cops hiding in her pubic hair to keep a close watch. More of them were crawling up the wall but disinfection was out of the question because they wanted to disinfect the whores, not the cops. One of the girls, Lola, even got two of her ribs broken in the paddy wagon because they were so keen on the Year of the Woman. There was a huge, gigantic cop sitting on the sofa in all the force of law who’d taken off his shoes and was stuffing fines inside them. Then I heard a kind of mewing and the giant of law

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looks in his shoe and what does he see? Another tiny cop trying to rob him! He’d dropped down from the ceiling straight into the shoe, and was nearly squashed. The giant of law picked him up, scolded him just for show, then put him in his pocket, and off they went, but not before they’d called me paranoid, on grounds of it not existing. Dr. Christianssen said I was having another reality attack, and panic was only normal in the circs. He advised me to put off meeting Madame Yvonne Baby. Uncle Bogey permitted me to extend my stay in the clinic in Copenhagen for as long as necessary, despite all the money it was costing him. I knew he wasn’t doing that for me but for the memory of my mother, so I didn’t owe him anything. I was also having chronological problems, as you may have noticed, I’d gone back to the children of heretics having their heads smashed in on the walls of Albi and all sorts of massacres of the innocent that have been around such a long time they aren’t much use for an original work anymore. Shock therapy has been dropped as a treatment for reality in Denmark and I’d just been put on a homely pathetic dose of neuroliptox. I was afraid of the dobermen in the garden for they are dangerous, even among dogs. The world was waiting with bated breath which I couldn’t feel on my cheeks, so I breathed more calmly and had no further news of Madame Yvonne Baby. I was permitted to leave the clinic for an hour each afternoon, so I took advantage of it to make a quick dash to Barcelona to join

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the International Brigade, but I had a shock when I got there and found that insubordinate units had dug up nuns’ mummies from a convent cemetery and were parading them around on carnival floats to demystify atheism. I was quite unprepared for a welcome of that kind, so I began to scream and ran back to the clinic as fast as my legs would take me. I was still suffering from my humanitarian tendencies with hopes of birth and disgust for sperm. Every morning I wrote to Professor Wall in the United States (he’s the scientist who created a certifiably inauthentic artificial gene), but I never sent the telegrams asking him for news of his ward. Dr. Christianssen put me back on haloperidol, and my hallucinations, though they did not disappear entirely, took on forms that were less disturbing for everybody. I was allowed to go to a concert by the Mörq Quartet, and to begin with it all went very well, but toward the middle I noticed that the cello was visibly swelling until it suddenly burst and out popped a whole litter of tiny mandolins, only God knows why they weren’t baby cellos as it would have been much more logical, and they were all screaming ‘‘Help, Daddy! I don’t want to be born!’’ and then a cloud of clubbing cops started floating through the hall and swarmed around me and I began to yell from fear because I did have a blot on my conscience. I’d parked under a no parking sign.

That’s how far I’d got when Uncle Bogey announced he was coming to Copenhagen. He’d been told I was regressing and he came specially to see me. He looked older and more absent than last time. Even more like himself. He sat down beside me with his cigar in his mouth without taking off his hat or his coat, the way he sometimes does when he’s at home, maybe to comfort himself with the thought that he’s only passing through. ‘‘Not too hot, right?’’ ‘‘I’m really sorry I’m costing you money.’’ ‘‘Don’t mention it.’’ He seemed sincere. His mother was an actress. ‘‘I hear you’ve finished another book.’’ ‘‘Nothing, really.’’ ‘‘You’re very talented.’’ ‘‘Must be congenital.’’ He sucked on his cigar. ‘‘You got wonderful reviews.’’ ‘‘I didn’t get them, my book did. You can be a total swine and write fine books.’’ He didn’t even twitch. Impossible, distant and himself for so long now that he’s not even afraid. He’d come to terms.

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‘‘. . . sometimes I bleed, but that’s because I hurt myself when I write.’’ ‘‘I confess I’ve often had a lump in my throat when reading you . . .’’ ‘‘Of course you did, it was a python.’’ ‘‘I mean the new book.’’ ‘‘Do you think I’ll be . . . discovered?’’ ‘‘So what? I can’t see what there is to be ashamed of. We’re not in the Middle Ages anymore. We’re blood relatives, you and I . . .’’ I had a flash of hope. But he wasn’t going to confess. He’d had enough of responsibility. ‘‘That’s to say?’ ‘‘Same grandparents, on our mothers’ side. And just look at me.’’ ‘‘No point looking at you. You’ve designed your own TV face.’’ He laughed. ‘‘There you are, I said you were lucid and on the ball . . .’’ I don’t know why I kept on punishing him. Maybe because you have to settle for hocus bogus. The real culprit was noticeable by his absence. So you look for one nearer to hand. ‘‘And now, Uncle dear, say: ‘After all I’ve done for you . . .’ ’’ ‘‘I’ve done nothing for you. If I ever did do anything, it was for your mother . . .’’ I clenched my fists. The bastard was skirting around the issue, steering clear of the Big L. L for love, stupid. After all, we live in an age of transmission. I think I’d have needed him a lot less if I’d had a faith. I’d have had someone else to get back at.

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I was sure they had slept together. ‘‘You don’t owe me anything.’’ He got up in his navy-blue overcoat and gray hat. ‘‘I’ve never done anything for you,’’ he repeated ironically, remaining ambiguous to the end and as ever before. It wasn’t true. A Harvard education, a house in the Lot, various handouts . . . His excuse was that he didn’t want to give me too much help so I could be a self-made man. In Paris one evening he came up to see me. I was twenty-seven and in high dudgeon. I’d transferred all of it onto society. I wasn’t persecuting myself—society was persecuting me. That way I believed I’d stopped being genetic, atavistic, or psychological—I was sociological. But as I was incapable of doing harm even to a class enemy, I was useless. All I did was bawl. At the time Uncle Bogey had been to Amsterdam and he’d brought a DIY book back with him: ‘‘How to Make a Bomb at Home with Everyday Ingredients,’’ or something like that. So he came up to my place—his place, actually—on the sixth floor. He’d given me and Annie two maids’ rooms ever since we got married, when we came up to Paris, when we were twenty. He threw the book on my bed. ‘‘That’s for you. Make a few bombs. Throw them around. Kill. Destroy. Blow it all up, and prove you really believe in all that rubbish. Do something, for Christ’s sake! For the love of heaven, stop posing!’’ I could hear the Saint Bernards barking in the hospital grounds. The nurse came and made me take my five o’clock rat. Uncle Bogey’s hand was already on the door handle. He’d

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come to give a me a spot of human warmth. Mission accomplished. ‘‘Wait. I’d like to ask you for something.’’ ‘‘What?’’ ‘‘A token of love.’’ He’d never heard such a word on my lips. He looked worried. I was really ill. ‘‘Paul, you know I love you a lot. But as for gestures, well . . . ‘‘A token of love is always more than a gesture.’’ He’d once told me: ‘‘We come from a family of Russian hysterics, on our mothers’ side.’’ But I don’t care. I knew he was secretly very fond of me. It couldn’t be otherwise. ‘‘I’d like you to copy out by hand the first pages of my Life. The beginning, the start of it all. The genesis of the work . . .’’ He said, quite composed, as if the idea wasn’t all that crazy: ‘‘I can’t do that, my boy.’’ ‘‘You’re still denying it?’’ He shrugged, with his hands in his pockets. ‘‘There’s nothing for me to deny. But I do have a son, and he’s not you.’’ ‘‘A few pages of acceptance, just the first chapter, it’s not a lot to ask . . .’’ ‘‘I’m not going to encourage your fantasies, my boy. And I’m not absolutely certain you’re not having me on.’’ ‘‘Just chapter one. The origin of what I am and what I’m going through.’’ ‘‘No way. It’s morbid.’’

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At three in the morning I woke up in intensive care. I’d swallowed a tube of tetromazine. He wrote out all the first part of the book in a black ledger. But he’d done so at the request of Dr. Christianssen ‘‘because of the young man’s condition’’ and ‘‘so he won’t feel rejected.’’ It didn’t mean anything anymore. It wasn’t a token of love, it was just part of the psychiatric treatment I was getting.

I wasn’t allowed to go into town anymore. But every morning I had a walk in the little garden, saint bernard licked my hand and I wasn’t afraid of the dobermen any more—despite their name, they’re only dogs. In the afternoons I sometimes joined the Foreign Legion to toughen up. There was an earthquake in Turkey and I wept for relief because it was a natural disaster and I had nothing to do with it. I had a particularly nasty moment when Argentinean policemen came to chop off my right hand to establish my identity by checking my fingerprints. Street battles left so many dead that they gave up on the bodies and just chopped off a hand to take back for identification in the national database. They must have suspected for years that I was at the root of it. But Dr. Christianssen wouldn’t let them in because psychiatric clinics are sanctuaries and have extraterritorial status. People who are being persecuted can still take refuge in them. There were also hateful taunts and insults to my memory. The Chilean political police took the name of DINA. Dina was my mother’s name. Of course it was only a coincidence, and I’m not claiming Pinochet’s police adopted the name solely to torment me. I’m only mentioning it as a fact that is constantly in the news, but the result you can’t deny is that my mother’s name is being associated with atrocities 84

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and abjections that are intolerable to me. I can only bear them thanks to basic necessities of the chemical order, but they have an effect only on me and none at all on Chile. Very highly placed friends phoned me, they were trying to call a summit conference to leave me in peace. But the summit had gone missing. Sometimes Alyette slipped away and self-effaced under the pressure put on her by the CIA and the KGB. The CIA and the KGB were everywhere and I could hear a constant buzzing of cops. I’m no fool. I’m well aware that I’m wrapping myself in logos so that I won’t go under. The most all-pervading panic is fear of a thing that has no name—a pending potentiality that won’t coagulate into a perceptible horror. The heart jumps ahead of itself and rushes toward the worst in order to be done with it. But the unknown moves ever backward and my terror grows as I chase after it. The peril refuses to brand itself and to emerge from the absence that every object around me flaunts through its stationary connivance. That’s when I simply have to give a legitimate cause to my nameless fear—I put Pinochet’s face on it, or a murderer’s scowl, or I make it into a body rotting after torture to high heaven. I need human torment. Severed hands, the KGB, the CIA, and smoldering bomb sites rush to my rescue, and all our logos give grounds for my terror. It then stops being nameless, it gets an image. A hyena’s trick for feeding on common atrocity in order to be less fearful. At last I have legitimate reasons for panicking, so I belong to the world. I even begin to see through it all and wonder whether we don’t go in for our system of atrocities the better to vanquish

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horror. To free ourselves from fear. Maybe we create police states of unprecedented terror because they are entirely manmade and thus a source of relief: for we know what the laws, pretexts, and rituals are, we set the tariff of abjections and persecutions, we devise the code of dehumanization and submission, we invent the precise locations of evildoing in the flesh and the mind, and all so we can escape what bears down on us without warning or respite— an unknown, ever-nearer underwater potential—and thus reach the accomplishment, even the celebration, of a kind of certainty. I struggle with myself, I scream and call to the rescue the corpses of Good Samaritans and wheelchair-accessible crimes. They exorcize the unknown, they have human names, and in the time it takes to look at their material evidence I forget what isn’t there— there, right there, all around me, in all its terrifying menace. I would like to paste my walls with portraits of our great persecutors so I could always have before my eyes sources of horror that can be attributed. I nailed an icon over my bed, to make it more concrete. It leans over me and strokes my sweaty brow. ‘‘So why not write it down?’’ he murmurs. ‘‘It would be a pity, wouldn’t it, Ajar, to put yourself in this state and not get a few pages out of it . . .’’ But he isn’t there. All I’ve got at my bedside is a photo, to keep up resentment. On the windowsill pink satraps gorged on blood coo and peck. I recognized Annie at my side quite often but I knew it was only a slice of life growing restive and trying to recuperate me.

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Slices of ordinary life kept grabbing at me, getting into my eyes, up my nose, and by the balls, and made me swallow fifty drops of haloperidol a day to block off my attempts at escape. They shrank before no sacrifice, threw bombs and sat proudly on a pile of corpses with a pipe between their teeth and a machine gun in their hands. That slice of the kitchen sink was called Kalashnikov and wasn’t stingy with bullets. He was also potentially bacteriological and the destruction of the ozone layer to make it easier to get at Him Upstairs for purposes of mutual annihilation. However, although I, too, like Pliuch, was secretly infected with ‘‘messianic and reformist tendencies,’’ in the words of the diagnosis delivered by the psychiatrists who were enemies of the USSR, I was not subjected to insulin treatment and got no comatose relief. Dr. Christianssen encouraged me to write nine or ten hours a day to lessen the doses of reality by evacuating them. He said that for me literature was healthy defecation. I did so and he gradually stopped all other medication. I cooperated because all voluntary émigrés have some faint hope of returning and it’s a lamentably well known fact that even the most determined schizophrenics often agree to go back. I wrote. I write. I’m on page 77 of the manuscript. Of course, I play tricks. I don’t mention or and especially not because that would involve articulated, patent speech, which perpetuates the ways out and the emergency exits it seals and in place of absent windows builds iron bars called certainties. Take beetlebrocks, for example. They’re key parts of hitch-

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hiking with Sacco or Vanzetti and mean absolutely nothing. So there is hope. In the absence of ordinary import hope remains for something entirely different. I shall finish my book because the spaces between the words leave a chance.

I was getting a bit better. I learned that the special correspondent hadn’t come to Copenhagen, it was just my own panic and fantasy, so I wrote to Madame Yvonne Baby and apologized for disturbing her unnecessarily. I still sometimes had bad patches of statesman. At those times I dropped in on a famous compatriot who came to Dr. Christianssen’s clinic for treatment a couple of times a year. He had been a minister and probably still had a future as a man of the past. He suffered from recurrent panics, which Dr. Christianssen called his ‘‘periods.’’ Sometimes, he decomposed and fell to dust at the slightest disturbance. He also thought everything else was hollowed out and crumbling within and that the merest puff would blow him away and leave nothing behind. It had got a lot worst since Portugal, because he hadn’t understood the show at all. He wouldn’t take a bath because dust and water turn into mud. You had to step around him with great care on your tsipochkins and hold your breath so he wouldn’t collapse and disappear in a cloud of dust. According to him, when he was in one of his states, he should have been surrounded by the army and the police to stop people approaching or petitioning him. The nurse had to wrap him in strips of cloth, like a mummy, to calm him down and reassure him he wasn’t going to crumble. But his crises never 89

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lasted very long because opinion polls confirmed his credibility and the credulity he inspired. Then he knew he really existed in tangible form. His name was Mr. de Pussy, he has a fine face suited to voters and mass media and on screen he gives a realistic impression of life, with the right lighting. He’s got a good few years in him yet and that’s all he asks. Each time I see him I want to sneeze to give him a fright. But if I sneeze they’ll put the same back instead and I’ll be discovered and suspected of ‘‘messianic and reformist tendencies’’ like Pliuch. Did you know that the Norwegian Academy, in Oslo, is looking for an armless, legless deaf-mute who has made no contribution to the history of our times, in order to give him the Peace Prize? Mr. de Pussy welcomed us—I often use the royal ‘‘we’’—without batting an eyelash, hiding many a museum and work of art. There were all sorts of other objects around him but I was quite calm and not afraid. I’m not saying every object is a tiger in disguise about to jump on me. I’m not saying so because I’ve decided to be discreet and cautious. I want to go back to Cahors and the countryside, far away from the world. I feel better when I’m ill down there than I do here. ‘‘Ah, Mr. Ajar, apparently you’re going to give us another book?’’ Give us—do you realize what he said? I am a juicy pear who lives only to give them delight. ‘‘You’ve been here quite a while, Mr. Ajar . . .’’ ‘‘Yes, I’m writing. And I’m observing. I am under treatment, of a kind, but because I behave normally, when I’m outside it be-

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comes noticeable. I’m in with the nutcases so as to learn how to conform. That way they will at least give me back my driver’s license in Paris.’’ I’d just been working on Madame Rosa, because I didn’t want to leave her ever again. After Life Before Us she’d become like a mother to me with her hardened arteries. So I had just dragged myself up six flights without an elevator to be with her in her place and I was still out of breath. I was panting. ‘‘Careful!’’ Mr. de Pussy shouted out. ‘‘Hold your breath, for heaven’s sake! You’re blowing on me! I’m going to turn to dust!’’ ‘‘I have no grounds for respecting your constitution and your institution,’’ I said, ‘‘and I refuse to withhold my breath to allow them to go on. It’s a well-known fact that we leftists are going to huff and to puff and to blow it all down.’’ Alyette put her soothing hand on my shoulder. ‘‘Don’t say things like that, Alex, you’ll frighten the children.’’ Mr. de Pussy looked flabbergasted. ‘‘Are you on the left?’’ he asked me in a considerate tone, because he was on the right and thus needed my help. ‘‘I am not political,’’ I told him, ‘‘seeing as I’m not part of the domain.’’ I’m not a misanthrope either. There are no misanthropists among schizophrenics. Never been known. They are what they are out of love. I am incapable of hatred because wood-free stalks of my ilk never hate. I was so agitated by humanitarian thought that Mr. de Pussy

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began to give off little puffs of dust. I could see them clearly, which proves that he was even crazier than I thought. ‘‘Pardon me,’’ I said, because you must never contradict them. To change the subject of the conversation, I added: ‘‘Apparently the United Nations is going to have an International Year of Shit, from which Jews will be excluded, of course.’’ His face lit up with an expression suggesting he’d understood everything. ‘‘You’re a nihilist, are you?’’ I didn’t object. Obviously, it’s completely wrong, totally off the wall, and so it kept me well hidden. ‘‘Pardon me, but you’ve got holocausts on your sleeve,’’ I said, raising my hand as if I was about to. ‘‘Don’t rub me!’’ he wailed, and he must have been at the peak of his panic, because he began to give off more puffs of paranoid dust. ‘‘Don’t even whisk me, you dirty bath rail!’’ ‘‘Doesn’t matter, because the real game hasn’t started yet,’’ I declared with utmost brutality, because it was wonderful to see someone even more terrified than I was, it was most reassuring. ‘‘Help!’’ he mumbled, because he knew that when you mumble it’s six of one. ‘‘String ’em up!’’ I suggested, to put the blame on onions and thus save our honor. ‘‘I never set foot in Uganda!’’ he insisted, and he was telling the truth, because what’s the use, it’s everywhere else as well. ‘‘They’ll put it on your breakfast tray,’’ I promised him, because the way things are now it’s hard to see much difference between the apocalypse and herbal tea.

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That’s when I noticed what was going on in a corner of the room, to one side. Nini was trying to have sex with Ajar. Nini, as her name suggests, cannot bear there being a work of literature in which she is not somehow involved. Hope makes her ill. She has always tried to make it with every author, every creator, but she’s become increasingly eager for the act, so as to put a mark of nothingness, failure, and despair on every book. Among the snooty crowd she goes by the name of Nihilette, from Czech nihil, nihilism, but we call her Nini with a capital letter because she does not like being minusculed. Right then she was trying to get impregnated by Ajar so that she could bear us nonentical children. Ajar was fighting like a lion. But with Nini you’re always tempted to let her have her way so that you can get to the bottom of nothing, where you can find peace without mind or soul. The only chance Ajar had of escaping this fate was to really prove his inexistence, his fake and hocus bogus situation, his total absence of a human condition worthy of being infected by Nini, because ex nihilo nihil, as I told Cordelia. His only alternative was to find a safe house on the blasted heath, an impregnable redoubt from which, like a knight of the Round House, he could joust with Dragonass Nini, keeping himself safe from the hollows and voids where Nini goes to lay her eggs that will hatch and overcome everything with their rotten nothings. I was holding Annie’s hand in mine like in the corniest of all sentimental clichés that no de man can ever deconstruct. I thought of people who loved each other and Nini lay writhing on the ground racked by horrendous convulsions and quite unable to find her way to her hollow in

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the famous dark deep well that tolls in death the bell of life yet to come. I’d gotten out of it once before. This wouldn’t be the last time. Life and death is a struggle of literary formulas.

I was irritated because Uncle Bogey hadn’t been to visit, hadn’t called, and was persecuting me with indifference in Paris. I spoke to Annie about it, but the country lass had her feet firmly planted in the ground for family reasons. ‘‘He’s got his mind on other things.’’ ‘‘I know he has his mind on other things. Himself, obviously. Couldn’t he go back into the Resistance for a while? It’s the right time. But there’s not a word, nothing at all. I could die for all he cares.’’ ‘‘He loves you a lot.’’ ‘‘Pull the other one. I don’t understand what it is he holds against me.’’ ‘‘He doesn’t hold anything against you.’’ ‘‘Exactly. He doesn’t give a damn.’’ ‘‘You say terrible things to him every time he sees you.’’ ‘‘I always try to talk in opposites so as maybe to manage to express something true.’’ ‘‘He’s perfectly aware of that, he’s always encouraged you to write, to create a literary work . . .’’ I repeated my point word for word, book for book, bugger for bugger: ‘‘I say things backwards to try to say something authentic . . .’’ 95

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‘‘Sure, but since he doesn’t talk backwards—and anyway he believes that backwards and forwards are six and half a dozen—you ought to reach an understanding between the two of you. If you talk straight and he talks crooked, I really don’t see what keeps you apart, what the difference is, what stops you understanding . . .’’ ‘‘I’m not asking him to understand me, that’s the last thing I want. I don’t ask that of anyone. It would be the last straw. You don’t need to tell me horror stories.’’ ‘‘So what are you asking of him, then? ‘‘Nothing.’’ That was wrong, but not sufficiently to sound convincing. Annie smiled. ‘‘You make me laugh, the pair of you. You could be father and son.’’ That’s when I really lost it. ‘‘Holy mackerel, I forbid you to say anything so stupid!’’ ‘‘You haven’t got the right to forbid me saying stupid things. This is the International Year of Woman. We’ve got the same rights as you.’’ ‘‘If that guy really were my father, he’d be an inexcusable bastard. You shouldn’t do that to a dog.’’ ‘‘What shouldn’t he do? What did he do to you?’’ ‘‘Nothing. I know. He didn’t beget me and he didn’t adopt me when I was twelve. He’s got nothing to hold against himself. That’s what he makes me rather too conscious of. He’s irreproachable. But no one is really irreproachable. At some level, deep down, he’s a shit. Irreproachable guys are just short on self-knowledge.’’

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‘‘I don’t think he’s lacking in self-knowledge. He always looks a bit sad, or ironical.’’ ‘‘Ironical, in 1975? You’d have to be a Grade A turd.’’ ‘‘It’s 1976 now.’’ ‘‘Makes no difference. We’re just treading water.’’ ‘‘Stop it, Paul. The kitten is dead. It can’t be brought back to life. By you, by me, by him, or anyone else. ‘‘ I kept my mouth shut. She was right. All kittens die because they grow up. Dr. Christianssen also told me something I didn’t expect. He told my why Uncle Bogey came to his clinic in Copenhagen for detox. It wasn’t to stop smoking cigars. It was to stop writing. I was dumbfounded. I think it was one of the tiniest amazements of my life. I had been wrong. He wasn’t a window-dressed whore of a Don Juan of letters. He was struggling to be, he really was. He had aspirations like I did. He wanted the end of utopia. I held my own for a bit longer. I said to Annie: ‘‘The way he looks down on weed, on drugs, on drinking . . . He’ll do anything not to feel different or outside of himself . . . It’s egomania. Drink or drugs, don’t you see, would make him different, turn him into someone else, and that’s what he won’t have, at any price . . . He’s passionately in love with himself and he steers clear of any kind of separation.’’ ‘‘I’ve never understand your relationship to him,’’ Annie said. ‘‘It’s incestuous.’’

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I was still having pretty atrocious panic attacks. Dr. Christianssen said it wasn’t panic but anxiety, but I think he was only saying that to calm me down. That’s when Alyette would get up to stroke a chair, or a table, or the wall, to reassure me and to show me they were familiar and everyday tail-waggers and they weren’t going to jump on me and bite my throat. Chairs make me particularly afraid because their shape suggests a human absence.

The next day my dearest obsessive desire of which I was quite unaware, given my pathological character, was suddenly fulfilled in all its horror. My publisher called me from Paris. ‘‘Ajar, I’ve got good news for you. A special correspondent from the rest of the world, Madame Yvonne Baby, is going to come to Copenhagen just to interview you.’’ It took a moment for the penny to drop. ‘‘To Copenhagen? But I thought I was in Brazil. I read it in the papers.’’ ‘‘Listen, Ajar, Brazil is too far and it would cost too much. It’s not worth having Yvonne Baby make the journey to Brazil, where neither of you are at the moment.’’ I yelled with all the strength of my lungs, because in a work of fiction it is important for the protagonist to be consistent and spotless: ‘‘I refuse! Are you off your rocker? Are you going to let her land in a psychiatric clinic for an interview? Don’t you realize?’’ ‘‘Listen, my dear Émile, drop the act, will you? You’re not a psychiatric case, like you said. You are political.’’ ‘‘Political? Moi?’’

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‘‘Calm down. You are not a psychiatric case, you are a political case. The security services have got a file on you. It’s all in there. You killed a kitten when you were four years old.’’ I almost fainted. They knew. It wasn’t Auschwitz or massacres or poverty or horror or Pinochet or Pliuch. It was the kitten. Psychoanalysts are sometimes complete bastards. ‘‘I don’t want to see her!’’ ‘‘Alright, but I have to tell you what people are saying in Paris.’’ ‘‘What?’’ ‘‘That someone else wrote your books, or else helped you write them.’’ That was a terrible blow to my gutter-press. I cracked, I really cracked, I split in two, but humptied myself together again, and let out an absolutely horrifying bellow of wounded dignity and horror . . . ‘‘Wasn’t me? Wasn’t me? Wasn’t me? So who was it then?’’ ‘‘Raymond Queneau. Louis Aragon. People are saying you don’t exist.’’ I was suffocating. My authorial self-esteem was so wounded that I would have slaughtered a hundred kittens without a second thought if that could save my honor. ‘‘Alright then. The journalist had better come. I’ll take a bouquet to the airport, if I have to.’’ ‘‘Don’t overdo it. You have stay in character, Ajar.’’ ‘‘What character?’’ ‘‘Yours.’’

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I don’t know why I suddenly thought of Uncle Bogey with real despair. They have powerful witch doctors in Haiti. It’s a wellknown fact they can do anything. They can turn you into green mold in a twinkling. ‘‘You have your own legend already, Ajar.’’ ‘‘What legend?’’ ‘‘You’re a mystery, maybe a bit of an outlaw, maybe a terrorist, at any rate an awkward bugger, a bastard, or a pimp. You’ve got an aura and you have to keep it up. It’s what we call news value. It’s the best kind of advertising. You can’t buy it, and it really sells books.’’ I could hear myself saying, somewhere far away, for it was perhaps someone else: ‘‘In Haiti they have Uncle Bogies who are powerful witch doctors and who can turn you into anything at all at a distance by means of despicable tricks, like sticking a pin in your gutter-press on a photo, which is where you’re always vulnerable.’’ I could also hear myself saying from very far away, as if I was in Haiti: ‘‘How are the sales going? How many copies to date?’’ ‘‘Thirty thousand,’’ she said, and I was a bit disappointed, because, after all, and so forth. That night I became an orange tree in Tunis that was blossoming. I’ve always wanted to be a blossoming orange tree that stops in time and doesn’t make fruit, for instance. I was holding my own as best I could, my favorite author is Hans Christian Andersen. But I knew I wasn’t up to fighting all on my own, and that’s

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why I hired a lawyer, because I knew it could come at any time, though I didn’t know exactly what, given the quantity of accusations that could be made. I picked Fernand Bossat, who inspired confidence in me because I’d never met him, but we had to part, Mr. Bossat and I, because he said I hadn’t been charged with anything. He was one of the most stalwart punters I have ever met, and a submersible character like me shouldn’t have touched him with a barge pole. I hired another lawyer, and then another, but they kept on dropping me. Nobody wanted to take on defending me. Some were certain that I didn’t exist and were afraid about getting their fees paid. Others knew I existed and told me I didn’t need a lawyer but a psychiatrist. I was getting on their nerves with my stories about kittens beyond reasonable limits. There was even one who told me I didn’t have a case, my fingerprints were all over society. Madame Yvonne Baby was due the next morning. I’d lain down in the dark and I didn’t know which way to turn my throttle. I felt cornered, taken down in evidence, trapped in such a state of authenticity that I could already hear swords going clack! and about to slice me into salami. Reality was on the prowl and mortality was at the end of the tunnel. At one point I forged twenty ID cards in my attempt to cheat death. I did not want to be known. What I wanted was a hidden life with a hidden woman in a hidden corner of a hidden landscape, with a not-known love and a not-known family, surrounded by unimagined human beings who might manage to make an as yet entirely unknown new world.

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Writing that makes me feel scared. I am afraid of His Excellency the Minister of the Interior. All Home Secretaries end up in the interior, right inside you. At eight in the morning my new lawyer phoned me from Paris. ‘‘Your publisher tells me you’re going to give an interview to the world.’’ ‘‘Yes.’’ ‘‘I thought you wanted to remain anonymous.’’ ‘‘So did I.’’ He said with a tone of severity: ‘‘Ajar, you’re ambiguous.’’ ‘‘I am not ambiguous. I am congenital and that means heave and heave-ho to get away from my authors. Genetics is quite enough as far as the ineluctable is concerned. Didn’t you see in the papers that I’m a collective work?’’ ‘‘Do you want to be known or not?’’ ‘‘No!’’ I roared. ‘‘Absolutely not! But if I don’t show my face people will go on saying someone else wrote my books. And that is something I cannot tolerate!’’ ‘‘You’ll have the police on top of you! Don’t forget there’s an extradition treaty between Denmark and France!’’ I came out in a cold sweat all over. I couldn’t remember what I’d told that lawyer, but maybe it was true. I was as white as a sheet. I may lie my head off and simulate simulation, but the guilty party is me. It’s always me. There’s not the slightest doubt about it. There’s proof. There are my fingerprints. They’ve been there for thousands of years.

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‘‘Listen, sir, I was four years old when I killed the kitten. That was thirty years ago. It can’t possibly still be on my record. Isn’t there a statute of limitations? And I hardly jerk off at all these days, I swear it.’’ ‘‘Ajar, get yourself another lawyer. I’m declining to act. You already told me that the bomb at the café on the boulevard SaintGermain was your doing, that you’ve beaten up thirty-two retirees, that your real name is Hamil Raja, that you’ve performed abortions on Fathers unknown, that you’re a pimp, an undercover agent, that you’re responsible for the Ben Barka business, that you’re paid by the CIA and the KGB, so stop fucking me around with your kitten. You wouldn’t perhaps also be behind the atomic bomb, by any chance?’’ ‘‘That’s me,’’ I confessed determinedly, because there was not the slightest doubt about it, and he began to groan and foam at the mouth so profusely that he managed to get spit on my face all the way from Paris to Copenhagen by phone.

Madame Yvonne Baby was supposed to come at noon. At ten in the morning Uncle Bogey was on the line. ‘‘So now you’re seeing journalists from Le Monde, are you?’’ ‘‘So what? Are you the only person they ever see?’’ ‘‘At any rate could you please not say that you are my . . . er . . . nephew.’’ He always stumbles when he says ‘‘nephew.’’ Because, what is the right word for the son of a cousin? Or else because . . . ‘‘Why not? Are you ashamed of me?’’ ‘‘It’s not good for you. They’ll say I helped you.’’ Megalomaniac! What a megalomaniac that man is! I couldn’t even laugh properly, I just went ‘‘Quack! Quack!’’ Then I really stopped laughing. I cultivate memory lapses for my mental health and hygiene, but sometimes it doesn’t work. When I wrote my second book I came up with a title I quite liked: A Quality of Despair. One evening, Uncle Bogey came up to see me, for some reason I don’t recall. He does sometimes make token gestures of presence. He saw the typescript. ‘‘That’s right, I’ve finished it.’’ ‘‘Got a title?’’ ‘‘A Quality of Despair.’’ He looked thunderstruck. Like, really. Like he’d swallowed 105

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something. Then he smiled. Ironically. I should have suspected something. ‘‘It’s a very, very, very fine title,’’ he said with double underlining. Then he went. The book went off to be typeset. The proofs came back. Then the jacket. Even now you can see quality and design on the jacket despair . . . I was quietly settled at home at Caniac. Then what do I see through my window? Uncle Bogey’s Rover. I go out front to welcome him, shake hands, and we even kissed in the Russian manner, for family’s sake. His mother was Russian and so was mine. That much we had in common. He looked foul. ‘‘I was on my way to Spain . . .’’ He’s got a beautiful house in Spain, where Annie and I had been invited to stay once in a blue moon. ‘‘. . . so I said to myself, I’ll drop by, it’s not too much of a detour.’’ We had lunch. ‘‘Is the book in print?’’ ‘‘Yes.’’ ‘‘And the jacket?’’ ‘‘There’s a very nice design on it by André François.’’ He had his snout in the lettuce at this point. ‘‘Title not been changed?’’ ‘‘Well, no. A Quality of Despair.’’ ‘‘Listen, Paul, I don’t know whether you’re aware of this . . . I

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don’t really mind, for myself . . . But that title occurs in one of my novels.’’ I stared at him. ‘‘You’ve never written a book under that title.’’ ‘‘No, but in one of my novels, an American girl writes a book called A Quality of Despair . . .’’ I’ve read all his books. I think I knocked something over as I got up, a chair or something internal, and I rushed to check. There it was. Page 59. A Quality of Despair. And in the context it was ironical, too. The girl who wrote it was a dropout. I ran outside, I jumped in my car, put my foot on the floor as far as Labastide-Murat to phone Madame Gallimard. ‘‘Stop the press. Change the title. I won’t have it at any price.’’ ‘‘But the jacket is already . . .’’ ‘‘I know, I know.’’ That bastard had waited until it was too late to ‘‘warn’’ me. He wanted the cover of my book to bear the mark of his influence. What a bum. ‘‘Listen, Madame Gallimard, if you don’t change the title, I’ll kill myself.’’ ‘‘Alright then.’’ ‘‘What do you mean, alright then? You don’t care if I kill myself ? That’ll be one less writer to worry about, I suppose. Is that what you mean?’’ ‘‘I mean alright, we’ll change the title. Why?’’ ‘‘It’s a lousy title. Completely bogus. Whorish. Comehitherish . . .’’ ‘‘So what do you want it to be?’’

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I pondered. But I didn’t want to take any more risks. Haitian witches are very powerful and Uncle Bogey had maybe gotten inside. He would slip me another one of his ideas. The unconscious is full of Uncle Bogeys. That’s where they’re really at home. ‘‘Choose your own. I don’t want to know.’’ When I got back he’d already gone. If Annie hadn’t been there I’d have wondered if he really had ever dropped in. Maybe, for once, my unconscious had saved me. Then it came back to me: he was the one who’d first come up with A Quality of Despair. On purpose. So as to put his dirty paw print on it. To have a spiritual son. To compromise me. I had not been influenced by his books to the extent of borrowing one of his titles without knowing what I was doing. He had prompted the title himself. Annie says it’s not true. That he never mentioned it. But that country lass has no inkling of the diabolical tricks that macumbas get up to. And there’s no worse candomblé than your own psyche. Anyway, he’d already found marks of his literary influence in one of my books. In one of the two there’s a mention of a packet of Gauloises cigarettes. As there is in one of his, too. He’d used the words ‘‘python’’ and ‘‘elephant’’ and so had I. ‘‘Heavens above’’ and ‘‘candies,’’ and so had I. I also use the expressions ‘‘harrumph’’ and ‘‘literature’’ and so does he. We use the same letters of the alphabet. So I’ve fallen under his influence. It sticks out a mile. When he’d spoken to me on the phone and asked not to tell Madame Yvonne Baby that I was his nephew, I first thought he wanted to stop me from telling a lie. Maybe for once he really was

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ashamed. But beyond that Dr. Christianssen is quite firm: sexual relations with a cousin are not incestuous. There was no black spot to wash on the one hand. He had nothing to hide. ‘‘Don’t worry, I won’t mention your name.’’ ‘‘I’m saying that for your own good. Of course, it’ll come out sooner or later. But for now, it’s better that people don’t start hunting for influence.’’ That made me laugh, it really did. And a big laugh I had. ‘‘There isn’t any. There never was. You’ve always been good at keeping your distance.’’ We didn’t say good-bye before we hung up. At ten I went to see Dr. Christianssen. He drugged me to the eyeballs. Danish tranquilizers are more tranquilizing than others. I forgot to tell you that Dr. Christianssen died of typhus in December 1975 ninety kilometers north of Addis Ababa on a relief mission to a village afflicted by an epidemic. It’s not true but I’m saying it so you grasp that he was a really decent fellow and to express how much I admire him. When the Nazis required Danish Jews to wear the yellow star because they just get everywhere King Christian declared he was going to put on a yellow star, too, and go around Copenhagen on horseback with it. That’s one of the reasons I’m having treatment in the state of Denmark.

My nearest and dearest had gathered around me when Madame Yvonne Baby came in. My father, who was from Montenegro, died in Nice from bursting out laughing and a blood vessel. He must have been thinking of the joke he played on me. He was a man with the loudest and most terrific laugh you can imagine because he needed all the force of laughter to keep things in proportion. He was bald. In addition he drank thirty cocktails a day, and that’s not counting the rest. After cocktails he could eat anything. And after eating, there were the chasers to help him digest. After that, when he roared with laughter, I ran off to hide, because with him it was the other way around and upside down. First thunder and then lightning. My mother came, too, to greet the correspondent of the times, but I don’t need to say anything more about her here because I’ve already used her. There was Alyette, who’d dressed up as Annie, and she even made us some coffee to make it all more realistic. Ajar was there as well, looking like a six-foot-long ladybug trying to find the emergency exit. There were red fire extinguishers and alarm bells. There was Madame Simone Gallimard, who contributed more proof, for I could not easily deny in front of my publisher that I had exploited my mother down to her last breath to make a book. Nobody could now deny that I was a fully grown author. 110

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My maternal grandfather was a kind of Cossack giant and I have a treasured photograph of him dressed as fireman of the good city of Kursk. I grew a mustache just like his and I’ve always had a thing about fire extinguishers. My grandfather Ilya was an inveterate gambler. He spent all his days between a deck of cards and a roulette wheel by way of all the other games of chance you can think of and of which he drew up an inventory just before he died. My mother told me that when he was already half-paralyzed he spent his time reading and rereading the list to give himself a kick just from the magic names of games like ochko or pinochle; as was only proper, his last words were rien ne va plus. In Wilno he’d been in charge of a big oil firm, and he lost the company’s reserves at roulette, at Sopot, on the Baltic. But the family was very close and flew to his rescue, because there could be no question of accepting such a stain on its escutcheon. There were two brothers and four sisters, one of whom was Uncle Bogey’s mother, and they pooled their resources to come to the aid of the black sheep. One evening, they assembled at his place, tied him up, opened the safe, and left through the window and across the garden, to make it look like a burglary. One for all and all for one, parbleu. Grandfather Ilya got away with it, but the oil firm, though it had no proof, fired him all the same. He settled in Germany, took the bull by the horns, and opened a clandestine gambling dive where he made millions that he promptly lost in clandestine gambling dives run by others. He’d married a very pious Jew whose life he made a misery, accusing her of praying for him at synagogue, which really ruined his luck, because luck was always on the side

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of sin, since the rabbis didn’t approve of gambling. Grandfather Ilya was expelled from Germany after signing dud checks to pay his debts. He always paid his debts. He was a man of principle and always paid what he owed. He ended up in Monte Carlo with a little money and perfected a numbers game: he had a jewelry business in Nice, and each time he lost his shirt at roulette, he set fire to the shop and got the insurance money back. The game worked well enough but on his second throw—a jewelry shop on rue de la Buffa called Mascotte—he set such a good fire that he nearly died of suffocation. That’s when he decided to take on a partner. But the third fire set off a crisis of confidence in the insurance company, just at the time of the 1929 crash, so Grandfather Ilya lost all his chips. That was when my mother also opened a jewelry business of her own, Au Rubis, on the rue de France, also in Nice. But she never burned it down to get the insurance money, her father’s influence had turned her into a deeply honest woman. She gave him ten francs a day to go gambling. When he couldn’t gamble, Grandfather Ilya wrote psychological dramas in Russian that he forced his wife to read aloud. Grandma thus became more and more frum and as soon as she’d finished reading she would rush to shul to pray. So Grandfather Ilya wrote, in Nice, in Russian, fifty-three psychological dramas that were going to make him immensely famous when he went back to Russia after the end of the Bolsheviks, which was just around the corner. All the White Russian immigrants in Nice and the White Russian taxi drivers in Paris—there were more than two thousand of them—had exactly the same opinions as

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Solzhenitsyn does now, but they were reactionary in those days. Grandfather hated his wife, not because she was Jewish—he wasn’t anti-Semitic, even though he was a Cossack—but because he made her life misery. The more he tortured her the more he resented her. That’s psychology for you. I often think of the fifty-three dramas that Grandfather Ilya Osipovich wrote and I like to think they were brilliant, to be nice to him. I never knew him, that’s why I love him dearly. I also suppose he gambled to lose, because he couldn’t live without drama. He was completely bald, like my father, though one of them was Montenegrin and the other from Kursk, in Russia. I’ve got lots of hair, which goes to prove you can rise above your determiners. All my maternal family needed drama. One of my grandfather’s sisters got married at the age of seventeen to a young man who gave her syphilis on their wedding night. She went mad. Another sister, Olga, got herself raped by a Cossack, just like in Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry. Russians always have been fond of drama. That’s how what was left of the tribe ended up in the gas chambers in 1943. Pardon my shouting, it’s because I’ve no voice left. My mother’s great drama was honesty. That’s maybe the most dramatic of all dramas because it doesn’t leave you much leeway. I have proof. My mother lived as an honest woman, she brought up three children in all honesty, and she died disgustingly, from creeping sclerosis of the brain with deplorable remissions that gave her all her mind back so she could suffer even more. When she was twenty she shot herself in the chest. Dr.

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Kozhin, in Nice, saved her life, and that’s how I was born. Another misfire. I don’t know who my mother was in love with or why she fired a bullet somewhere near her heart. I can only guess. Uncle Bogey paid her a small monthly allowance. I feel obliged to say this. He’s got a photograph of my mother at the age of twenty in his apartment. Something else I feel obliged to say. He keeps her photo next to one of General de Gaulle. It takes all kinds. My father was manager of the Hotel Scribe and the Hotel Continental. I still come across people in Nice who look at me with respect because he was a legendary drinker. Nobody had ever seen him get drunk. At the age of nineteen he would begin the day with half a bottle of slivovitz. He left my mother without a bean but a legend. When the papers said that Émile Ajar didn’t exist and was a ‘‘fabrication,’’ they spoke the truth. I was put together right and proper, I swear it, and fiddled around with no end. We’re all children you get lumbered with. Madame Yvonne Baby asked: ‘‘Where did you get the idea of writing in Ajarian?’’ It didn’t get the idea from anywhere. It just came to me. Free and gratis. At school in Nice I had a mate whose mother was in a psychiatric hospital. And his father was an alcoholic. Kids in the class called him Jabberwocky. As for me, I went to Toulouse for my last years in school. Jabberwocky. You know, Christmas Carrolls.

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So I nicked the idea of writing in Ajarian from a schoolmate. One evening my mother took a cardboard box, stuffed it any old how with pieces of jewelry and a pile of watches (Au Rubis sold watches, too) and set off on foot from Nice to come and see me in Paris. She was picked up wandering along a country lane. She was quite lost, and couldn’t say another word. It went on for another eighteen months, with ups and downs. She used to say: ‘‘You’ll be a writer, like bo . . .’’ Or maybe she said ‘‘like both your uncle and your grandpa,’’ I don’t rightly recall. My mother is a Danish lady of seventy-five living quietly at Björko, where she raises good dogs and flowers. She has white hair and laughs a lot. I see her several times a day especially since I have been in Copenhagen. My father is Danish, too, he’s a distant ghost of Dr. Christianssen. I think my real father is Dr. Christianssen and that I’m Danish, too. The Danes aren’t anti-Semites. I made use of the last days of a lady I didn’t know personally to describe the dying of Madame Rosa, in Life Before Us. I don’t want to mention any of that ever again, which is why I’m talking about it. I can see Paul Pavlowitch standing in front of me. He is twenty years old. He writes poems under pressure from inside. But there’s always steam left inside, more and more of it screaming to get out. But it can’t get out and expands and starts to mutate. Only the whistle could find release and the crime stayed under the lid. Life went on, at unbeatable crises. So that’s when the scream became

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an Andean condor, spread its wings and managed to take off, and that’s when I got into trouble for the first time, because I landed on a roof and wouldn’t come down. I became a vegetable, an artichoke, but I didn’t stay artichoke for very long because people pick off the leaves and taste them, they also provide nourishment, it was the same as being a poet, people get a taste for you. Nowadays there’s lithium for depressions. There are some lucky devils who get depressions and know it. My case is a humdrum slice of ordinary life. I turned into a python and then another book, so as to be even less lumbered. But I caught myself at it, I recuperated myself, and then there were royalties. There were two characters struggling inside me: the one I wasn’t, and the one I didn’t want to be. But guilt lay on me with all its weight and all around things went on in familiar and everyday ways. I began to invent characters I was not every day so as to have less and less of myself. The Copenhagen interview took two days. I coped, with the help of basic necessities. Fear of being outed, of people learning that the kitten really died once and for all, and that I was liable, screamed inside me as loud as Bacon’s popes trapped in their blocks of ice. The thought that for the first time in the history of humanity I was being taken into consideration and interviewed, with nobody’s coat on the hook in the hall whose empty sleeves bore witness to a powerful, invisible human presence, all our antecedents and precedents not to mention acquired characteristics, and with Pinochet’s utter indifference toward me and his ignorance of the immense wrong I was doing him, the paltry insignificance of what I said, together with Annie coming and going in

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utter banality with cups of coffee as if there was a prospect of peace and quiet despite threats whose horrific nature cannot even be put in words, all that made Ajar scamper off to find a crack in reality where he could hide and evade the internal Inquisition with its water torture, rack and cant, that dark, deep, echoing cant whose hollow thud can be heard in works of art always announcing a world yet to come. When I read Madame Yvonne Baby’s interview on a whole page of Le Monde, it was so unlike me that I was sure I had told the truth. Such an absence of self was really me. At last I existed same as everyone else. It scared me so much that I had a relapse and when Madame Gallimard saw me in such a state with a knife for suicidal tendencies in my hand, she was scared, too. May I take this opportunity of thanking her for her kindness.

I must now go back over my tracks. I’m not happy about it, to be honest. I didn’t write the following when I should have, in the last chapter, because at that point in time I wasn’t quite up to snuff, chemically speaking. I am therefore making a separate chapter out of the material, in homage to my new medication, which Dr. Christianssen forbids me to mention by name because of medical ethics. I’m going to go the whole hog now, because I’m feeling unscrupulous and moderated. Maybe there will be a reader, and I won’t spare him anything. I’m not trying to spare myself, either, because on that score I’m an autodidact. I learned myself on my own, without any help from Uncle Bogey, and what I know about me I’m not going to spare a moment longer. What I have said about my genealogical tree is what my mother told me. She never lied and she loved me a lot, and lying for love is one of the oldest truths of the gutter-press. I do not know why she pulled the trigger on herself. But the bullet has gone on festering inside me. I am obliged to reveal that by some strange coincidence Uncle Bogey’s birth certificate and my mother’s are both missing. They were left in Russia, at the source of the evil, and I’ve had no success trying to get hold of them. The Bolshevik Revolution 118

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made a clean sweep. So I will never know if they were brother and sister or if there was incest. It’s surely just internal denigration—the psyche and the unconscious are dreadful gossips. Go on, throw mud, because some of it always sticks, and that’s what I am, in all probability. I feel I am the product of an intolerable and fraternal consanguinity, borne by a torrent of blood from one massacre to another, dying under torture, a victim and a torturer at the same time, a terrorist and his victim, a head-bashed head basher, I cut myself in two—hey schizo!—an exterminated exterminator, Pliuch and Pinochet—and then I get overcome by morbid humanitarian tendencies with acute outbreaks of ‘‘messianic and reformist’’ heresies, with psychiatrists and straitjackets. I become prone to the paranoid belief that all men are my brothers and all women my sisters, and that often has a detumescent effect. I even had to insist that Alyette get her comforting birth certificate from the town hall at Cahors, with name of father, name of mother, because Uncle Bogey was quite capable of having begotten her, too, as at all our beginnings, to make his own crime seem more ordinary by having it repeated, like father like son. On the other hand he might have been trying since the dawn of time itself to produce by genetic means and such highly premeditated breeding a being so vulnerable, receptive, and acutely aware of its own guilt that it might bring another sentimental literary trifle into the family along with a pretty outburst of mysticism. I thus have strictly no proof at all. And far be it from me to take up cudgels against God or any other irresponsible authority that prides itself on imaginary inexistence to oblige us to undertake fruitless paternity suits, far be it from me, as I was saying, to initiate proceedings whose sole result

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to date is a proliferation of lawyers who back off on the grounds that paranoiacs always get a lawyer when they need a psychiatrist. If I am paranoid, then the least that can be said is that the world is full of people who aren’t paranoid enough, and the net result is that only persecutions never get persecuted.

Every morning I put a letter in the mailbox at the clinic addressed to anonymous at address unknown, although I knew he didn’t exist and was therefore accustomed to such accusations. Moreover, the nurses told me that I was not the only inmate suffering from deprivation of the same kind. On the first floor there was a world-famous writer who was trying to create God from works of art. He had been receiving treatment for three months and sometimes I came across him in the corridor, accompanied by a rabbi in white stockings whom I pretended not to notice so as not to give the great writer the impression that I thought he was hallucinating. The rabbi’s name was Schmulevich. My mother had often mentioned him because he was on our family’s exterminated side, and in his time he had been famous for his wisdom. He’d been pogromed by a sword swipe at Berdichev, in 1883, and had ended up in Dr. Christianssen’s clinic because of the stress. It’s quite easy to explain and familiar to anyone who’s been sacrificed without a second thought: past anxieties springing from insubordinate elements go on causing stress for many years. As I was saying, when I passed him in the corridor I pretended not to see him, out of respect for neuroliptox, but on one occasion he came into my room, and taking advantage of an old Yiddish poem that my grandmother often recited when I was a child, he smiled and said: 121

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‘‘Spi maliutka, sleep my child. In another place there are quite different lullabies and each of them may give birth to better worlds.’’ But I wasn’t a baby and no longer had any excuse. I grant you, I know there are some very beautiful screams, but all those works of art we keep consigning to oblivion in museums and libraries are themselves only letters to persons unknown. I’m not a madman and I’m not going to set them on fire or slash them with a razor in the name of authentic life. So I answered the rabbi, off the cuff: ‘‘I’ve got no use for your consolations and your optimistic illusions. The fact remains that humanity is the only fruit that has fallen without a tree to blame. The only possible solution is to accept its fallen character, its lostness, incompleteness, and bruise marks, and to stop taking any notice of it. Psychiatrists are the people entrusted with this sacred mission, that’s to say, to help in the struggle against excessive lucidity. That’s why I’m here. Here, my dear rabbi, is a caricature of somewhere else. I’m having trouble accepting it. But I’ll manage in the end.’’ He tugged at his beard as he meditated on anonymous. ‘‘You could imagine poems that have taken on a heavenly body where happy families live,’’ he riposted. ‘‘Indeed, all sorts of tall hopes are storied,’’ I countered, ‘‘and I agree that we are not entirely devoid of lollipops. On the other hand, dear rabbi, if you add up all the prayers that have been prayed since the primal scream, you have to grant Mao that eight hundred million Chinese are more likely to get there first. The

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truth is that there was no pot of gold and that rainbows have remained what they always were.’’ He threw me a sad glance and faded away, because he wasn’t up to fighting my one hundred and fifty drops of haloperidol. I also got a call from my publisher. Madame Simone Gallimard wanted to know what I proposed to call my new book. When I told her that the title was hocus bogus she said nothing for a long while. I wondered if I hadn’t hurt her religious feelings. There were times when the glistening became unbearable and I was obliged to find excuses for us. I thought that maybe we were still in the shapeless, damaged, incomplete, and often abandoned state that was Faust’s during what must have seemed to him the interminable period during which Goethe was composing him. There are various eyewitness testimonies on that score, notably, a letter from Heine when he was still a mere boy. He called on Faust when the latter still had only half a face, no arms, and one testicle. It’s often forgotten that Goethe took more than fifteen years to complete his work. So maybe there really is an author, it’s just that he’s in no hurry, or maybe he’s got no sense of time at all. You have to give a creator leeway while waiting for the right flash of inspiration, even if in the intervening millennia your early drafts keep on getting put through the shredder. Now and then I entertained myself by imitating Uncle Bogey’s signature in red pencil on my midriff, before anybody started saying he was my author. Nobody had guessed our congenital links, at that time. I was getting better, my suicidal tendencies had vanished, I no longer wanted to put myself down and leave a note saying

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‘‘Authentic At Last.’’ I could see more clearly what was universal about the indifference I aroused and about my unfilial conflict with my not-father. But there were other times when the absence became unbearable and I began to struggle again. I gazed at the great tree in the garden and wondered: who is that? just like when I was a kid. I knew of course that it was what they call ‘‘regressive behavior,’’ to use their expression, but if you regress far enough, maybe you’ll come across somebody in the end. The clinic’s walls were soundproofed because of the fighting in Beirut but all around me I could hear the bustle of two billion tokens clocking in to keep the glitterdust production lines working. Above all, every night, hordes of words foregathered to go over every detail of how they would exercise their fraudulent powers next day. You even had to be careful about keeping silent, because the power had already got inside. To evade its grasp even poets allow themselves to die of silence. Now and then a word would manage to break through by stealth, carrying its empty can of worms, but neuroliptox soon plugged the breach. I heard someone whisper that I was a coward and that the only way of holding your own is with a gun in your hand, but I was at a loss as to know whom to shoot. Dr. Christianssen had lent Annie and me a pair of stethoscopes, so she lay down beside me and sometimes we talked until dawn.

Dr. Christianssen behaved like an utter bastard. It was his turn. I shouldn’t grumble, but Denmark has bastards like anywhere else. It’s part of their democratic system. Every year the Danes hold elections to choose which among them will play Claudius, in avuncular fashion, turn and turn around. The Danes are very aware of things and cooperate fraternally with the rest of us, since they don’t want to break off relations. So Dr. Christianssen played the bastard when it was his turn and refused to let me stay in the clinic in October 1975. He knew my third book was nearly finished and he told me I’d already benefited from my condition and from my stay in Copenhagen. He decided I had succeeded in recuperating myself to my own advantage and declared me normal and cured. To soften his heart I said I was going to go back to Cahors to look after my older brother and retarded children. But he refused to help me. ‘‘I know your system of defense, Ajar. Your brother is you as a child. The other person is a perfectly mature adult. The retarded child who never grows up beyond the age of twelve, however old he may be, is inside you. You hide it as best you can, you even grew a thick mustache for camouflage. I admit that you’ve got a difficult position, but it’s very productive. The need for making up stories is 125

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a sure sign of a child who won’t grow up. Keep on writing and maybe you’ll win a prize.’’ And he threw me out because he was performing a social function. I was afraid of going to Paris because of the pedestrian crossings. Given the nature of the motor car, pedestrian crossings are the places you’re most likely to get run down. They’re narrow and well defined, and the guy with his foot on the pedal can aim straight at you. Then there are green lights trying to mislead you all the time. They beckon you to cross in order to trap you in the middle of the road. As for me, I always cross on red. But I stopped over in Paris all the same to see Uncle Bogey. I had nothing to say to him. So we could have a normal conversation. He was wearing a blue dressing gown with elephants on it, to advertise one of his books . . . He put out his hand. ‘‘How are things?’’ ‘‘Tick-tick.’’ ‘‘Finished?’’ ‘‘Yes. I’ve even got an idea for another book.’’ ‘‘Ah?’’ I waited. He didn’t give a shit, tactfully. ‘‘You want to know what it’s about?’’ ‘‘I’d rather read it.’’ ‘‘I’ll need your permission to publish it.’’ ‘‘What?’’

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He’s got veins that stand out on his forehead because of the pressure from inside. ‘‘Paternalistic, am I? Since when did I ever exercise the slightest authority over you?’’ ‘‘Never, absolutely never. You’ve never done me the slightest favor of the kind. But that’s not the point. It’s just that I write about you in this book.’’ He laughed. ‘‘I’m a good subject.’’ ‘‘I say everything.’’ ‘‘Everything doesn’t exist in literature. You only get fragments. The idea you can say everything in a book is a beginner’s delusion. Amateurish.’’ ‘‘I say how you slept with my mother and how you never wanted to recognize your responsibility for me.’’ Dr. Christianssen put a friendly hand on my shoulder. Alyette was at my side. Annie, invented by reality when it’s got nothing else to deal with, wasn’t there. Uncle Bogey was far away. Humdrum slices of life were stacking up around me. I was lying down with my eyes open but I didn’t feel like screaming because I am not afraid of dreams. They are a man’s best friend. And I held my own. Ringling styrofoam merged with peonaria to make no sense out of it all. Massicles vied with each other to excelsify insignificance. Toves jiggled to nogle birdies and keep words down. Viaducts glossipped with undertapes and wolfed offal to keep out of any recognizable shape. Granted, daffodils kept up their stalk, but they gave off an unmistakable odor of Eliot. Gerties

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got under the sheets with jabber to head off any possible leaks. Now and then snaps of Yeats managed to wade across and came close to, what with pen in hand. I repulsed the poem for lack of. Under crimson lamp shades galleons laden with empty words sank in search of the ocean floor, and came back up to the oily surface under the weight of their load. Despite all my unnatural efforts, eyespeak coagulated nonetheless, and wordiwords began to wander around in search of someone to cheat. He was sitting there right next to me, at my bedside. He didn’t give the slightest sign, not a twitch, nothing. Like unto himself, as ever. Then he stared at me from Paris. With his blue eyes, a bit bloodshot, but only from overwork. Not a trace of sympathy. Blue has been overvalued for a long time, like so much else. ‘‘Shucks, young fellah, there ain’t no subject as is better than ’nother,’’ he twained. ‘‘It’s the way you ride your horse that matters, specially if you don’t fall off. Guilt, hatred for the Old Man ’cause he ain’t in heaven, incest most foul and brotherly with nuttin’ unusual ’bout it so as to let love arise, the curse of genetics, a whole heap of congenitals . . . They’re all OK, storywise, as long as you make a good book out of ’em. Feel free, young fellah, write about me, write about yourself. As Radek used to say to Stalin: ‘A really good cook knows how to use the bits other people throw away.’ I trust ya, young fellah.’’ He stared at me with eyes basking in his own reflection. Selfdenial held out the promise of art achieving redemption through purity.

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‘‘Because nothing exists, nothing matters . . . except literature?’’ It wasn’t true, because he liked cigars, too. ‘‘You know, in the end, somehow or other, if it’s a work of real talent, literature flows back into life and renews it . . . I explained all that in . . .’’ He smiled. ‘‘. . . in a book, as a matter of fact.’’ ‘‘So tell me, Uncle Claudius, what’s the difference between a complete bastard and a benefactor of humanity?’’ ‘‘Well, there have been people who in real life were absolute shits and whose works made them benefactors of humanity . . . As far as I’m concerned, I’m not absolutely anything. Nor are you. Nobody is, really. There’s always room to do better . . . or worse.’’ And he’s a humanist to boot, I thought to myself. I must have even said it aloud, because ten thousand padres rushed to my side right away vying with each other to absolve me of my crime because of the pure moral suffering it caused me and because of the admirable works of art to which it had given rise. ‘‘Auschwitz hasn’t yet given us much by way of art, maybe we should try again,’’ I suggested. ‘‘The decline of syphilis explains the increasing shortage of genius. It’s time to put down some fresh horrors as fertilizer, so we can have another Dostoevsky or Goya. You’re not a holy cow, just a steer. And I hate for you for making me look so ugly in this mirror.’’ ‘‘He will come to see you, I had a word with him,’’ said Dr. Christianssen. ‘‘You can’t cling on to the hospital, trying to get through to the other side, Pavlowitch. You won’t manage to escape.’’

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I was thinking about the German cities Colonel Bogey had bombed. Thousands of civilians smashed to pieces. In the buildings he blew up there were canaries, dogs, and cats. Hundreds of kittens. He must have killed thousands of innocent little beasts. Nini, I thought. That was one of Nini’s ideas. You can’t trust cynicism because it helps you to carry on. Uncle Franz got up. He seemed enormous, he filled the whole room. I said: ‘‘I know I have an unhinged and morbid literary imagination, but I am as sure as sure can be that you are my dad.’’ ‘‘I wonder why?’’ ‘‘Because sometimes I hate you so much it can’t be true.’’ I thought his face showed a sign of pain but maybe I’m just boasting. Anyway, God has always protected himself from hatred by spawning uncountably many little fathers of people.

I don’t know if Dr. Christianssen was right or if it really was the fact of seeing myself spread out in plain sight all over the newspaper that set off my next panic attack. It was the first newspaper I had been allowed to read for months. I read every word of it, from top to bottom. I had an attack. I had my radio and newspaper perks withdrawn but it kept on inside, with a huge yearning for another species. Monkeys gathered around me in inhuman clumps and humped each other, bringing tears to my eyes at the sight of such innocence. Unprecedented backsides crossed the sky and I wept from gratitude at their absence of crime. Sometimes it started raining heads, and some of them were still dreaming. God had been lassoed and dragged back to the O.K. Corral, he’d turned into a horse to get off the charges. Horses aren’t believers and didn’t mix Him up in their shit. God neighed from shame. The other horses bolted in legitimate et cetera, because they know how lucky they are. Now and then I was aware of language temptations hovering over me, but terminator words soon got the better of the situation. 131

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It was all there: alphabet, grammar, vocabulary, syntax, civilization, rhetorical turns of phrase, the order of things and repression. Haloperidol has no taste. You could get a Soviet dissident to drink it without even noticing. That was a month ago on page 3 of the time. Haloperidol is a hallucinotic that quietens reality and makes it less aggressive. Reality is best treated with fifty drops three times a day. If you’re raving, haloperidol won’t have any Parkinsonian effect on you at all, you won’t get as stiff as a plank. But if you’re well adapted to reality, in a state of normality, then the drops will Parkinsinuate you right away. Which proves that schizophrenia has a physical basis and congenital hope. QED. I listened to Dr. Christianssen’s comforting words. I screamed out loud: ‘‘Your haloperidol is fascist stuff ! It’s on the far right! It’s repressive. It lessens indignation, heads off revolt and revolutionary anger. It is against imagination.’’ The great Dane wagged his tail. He lay his good head on my lap. ‘‘That’s right,’’ he barked. ‘‘Anafranilium is the only leftwing drink. It’s a stimulating, irritating, infuriuriating, electrifying rocket booster. Haloperidol is fascist, anafranilium is Maoist.’’ And he kept on barking and wagging his tail because dogs aren’t devoid of hope. I squeezed through the window to dash to the Middle East to work miracles but I couldn’t find a taxi. They brought me back to the hospital. Dr. Christianssen asked me if I wasn’t getting a little

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tired of being crucified, and he let it slip that I was pretty good at doing it to myself anyway. God knows what they’d have given Jesus by way of insulin injections to treat his ‘‘messianic tendencies.’’ Once I’d been put under control I noticed there was an extra chair in my room. There was usually only one plus one for Dr. Christianssen, who never sat down. Now there were three. At first I was in a panic, because I have enough enemies as it is. Then I grasped that Uncle Bogey had rushed to Copenhagen and must have spent many a long and worried night by my bedside before leaving. It was the only possible explanation for his not being there. I stopped off in Paris to say thank-you to him. He was wearing a blue dressing gown with elephants on it, to advertise one of his books . . . ‘‘I have already used the device of hallucinatory repetition in one of my novels,’’ he snapped. I gave him some letters. I was withdrawing myself from all the literary prize contests, as I had done in 1975 when I was still in one piece. ‘‘I don’t want any of that stuff. And I’m in no condition. I don’t want to be exposed to the glare. They’ll just say: he’s a psychopath.’’ ‘‘Alright. I’ll have them delivered the day before the Renaudot and Goncourt panels meet.’’ ‘‘I don’t want to be identified. Nobody has a real photo of me, and nobody knows where I live. All loose ends have been hidden. I’m supposed to be a wanderer living abroad. I’ve got a police record and I can’t reenter the country. I’m not out to be

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‘‘recuperated’’ by society, but that’s not the issue anyway. What there is, is self-recuperation to one’s own advantage. Not only does that exist, but it’s the real triumph of existence.’’ He nodded approval. ‘‘That could make an interesting novel. A very topical subject.’’ What I didn’t understand in those days was why the only man alive for whom I had any affection aroused such profound selfdisgust every time I saw him. Maybe there was nothing personal or even familial about it. The real reason is that I cannot accept the use of suffering in the service of art. I cannot accept the idea that only masterworks live happily ever after. ‘‘So why do you write, why do you call?’’ nobody asked me. Questions without askers are always gun toters and occupying forces by undisciplined psychic units. They can be silenced temporarily by chemical blanket treatment, but you can also try to let them come right through on high-tension wires earthed into a sheet of paper so as not to cause an explosion. I display my innards for lack of a municipal tip. I didn’t need the help of psychiatrists to grasp that there is something megalomaniacal about such a colossal preoccupation with my own insignificance and my limitless and lunatic need for genesis and salvation—but it was not I, but my invalid, canceled check that got out of hand to such a degree. I also know that my squeaking like a chewed-up mouse is too clinical for most people’s taste, but literary intentions are not the only things that give you stomach cramps. What I want is happily ever after utopia with no need for art. Dr. Christianssen says that in my case it boils down to an

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inhuman fear of death, and he’s probably right. Nothing mortal can be authentic. My hatred of masterpieces was a mortal jealousy. Uncle Bogey looked sad. ‘‘They’ll find you out in Caniac, you know. But I confess I don’t know what you’re trying to hide.’’ ‘‘Nothing,’’ I replied. ‘‘Nothing. You must admit that if there’s anything that really should stay hidden, that’s it. I don’t want to infect anybody. So I keep nothing to myself. Otherwise I would have to go hocus bogus and bring religion and ideology into it. Keep under the cloak of darkness the nothing that offends thine eye. I’m not a sociologist: I have no alibi. I’ve been congenital for three million years and remain so to this day. Not without hope. It’ll come. An end will come to the congenital world.’’ ‘‘I agree about nothing, except that there has never been and can never be a masterpiece of nothingness . . .’’ We were on the same wavelength, to put it in a nutshell. He did not want to see that art was only another kind of nothing, because he was still full of self-confidence.

I went back to Cahors. Annie was waiting for me. I’ll say something about women one day. But before I do so I have to wait until there’s even more nothing inside me, in order to leave room. One day I’ll manage to create an immense void inside me, and then I’ll be able to give women the space they deserve. But books have a beginning and an end, and I don’t want to talk about women with a beginning and an end because I wouldn’t be able to do them justice. When I got to our home at Caniac I touched the ground just to be sure. There’s bread, too, but you would have to bake it yourself if you wanted proper reassurance. The grand duke dressed all in white was in the attic, he was always a welcome visitor and he came back every night for the kid inside. The nights were really quiet because Dr. Christianssen must have sent them a message. I stepped on windfall walnuts, it was that time of year, and the big walnut tree by the front door was following the rules and had nothing else on its mind. I slept well and when the cops came by to ask to see my ID I

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wasn’t afraid because it’s not the police who are likely to find the guilty party. When the sun rose I wasn’t afraid of going outside and I looked on slices of everyday life without quaking, because I had been well treated. Now and then I had short panic attacks, but I now believed they were groundless. I was no longer subject to lucidity and I was with good cheer. Annie had taken Alyette’s place. Alyette had left me because she was incurable. I had forgotten Ajar. I knew I wouldn’t need him again, that I would never write another book, because I was no longer ill from being me. Nobody came by. Nobody called. The world wasn’t in pain anyplace at all. I was better, absolutely better. I was standing in front of the house with a shovel over my shoulder when I saw a gray Renault drive up with human nature at the wheel. I knew the human in question. It was Bouzerand, a friend of Annie’s, from way back, in Cahors. I was so much better I almost kissed him. He was gray in the face. Or maybe the gray bodywork of the Renault had run. He told me this wasn’t a friendly visit but a professional one. He was a journalist and his paper had sent him down from Paris with a photographer to nail me. ‘‘You are Ajar.’’ I was so much better that I didn’t beat about the bush. I didn’t even throttle him. I’m not lying, I can prove that I killed neither

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the journalist nor the photographer, because they are both still alive, and if they deny it I’ll insist on an autopsy because if they claim to be dead that means they’re more alive than they know. I asked them in and went to get my blunderbuss. But I was entirely in my right mind and I knew it would just make another cause célèbre and nothing more. I didn’t want to collaborate with causes célèbres because they are always the same one, actually, and have been so for the last hundred thousand years, and as a result we’ve all got celebrity fatigue. The photographer was called Rolland and he understood, because he was still young. Bouzerand also understood, but that was because he was bright. All things considered, they were quite nice about it, because they had a pistol at their heads. Everybody has a pistol and a head. Alimentary, my dear Watson. The photographer asked to shoot my eyes only, because what he wanted was the eyes of Momo, the guy who was twelve or maybe a hundred thousand years old in my autobiographical novel. Bouzerand said yes because he wasn’t completely dead. They phoned their boss, Imbert, the editor of the weekly they worked for, and he said yes, too, because if I turned it into a cause célèbre by killing his special correspondent, the daily papers would make hay for four days and leave his weekly without a story. I was so utterly normal that when the pistol at my head asked me to go to Paris, I said yes like everybody else, I went with them freely and of my own accord and they did not even handcuff me. I spoke to Dr. Christianssen on the telephone and he didn’t

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seem worried, he told me I would cope very well, all I needed was some Tranxene, like many other writers. ‘‘The only risk you’re running now is another book. You’ve recuperated, dear boy, and you’ll keep on recycling. Good luck!’’ In Paris they made me eat in fancy restaurants. I couldn’t eat a thing because I felt well and quite unstressed, and it tied my guts into a knot. They kept their word. They only shot my eyes. On the photo you can’t see the rest of my face. They didn’t reveal my real name. That killed me. I lost a chance of becoming famous. I didn’t know where I was up to as far as my convictions were concerned. I rose to the circs, all the same. During dinner I lost my head, but they didn’t notice a thing. I’m very attached to the head on my shoulders, as I’ve said before, because it isn’t mine. Every time I see my own face in the morning, I get frightened, and that gives me the strength to go out on the town and to speak to grown-ups. Meanwhile the Dépêche du Midi, the local paper in Cahors, had made inquiries at the hospital and had discovered I was an authentic case. And that my mother was an authentic case, too. And that my brother was authentic. Suddenly I was surrounded by authentic cases on all sides. The practical joke was at an end, the mystification was over. Queneau and Aragon hadn’t written me, and that was final. They stopped saying I was a collective work, but on that point, they were making a mistake. I am a collective work, the fruit of collaboration over several generations. If they still suspected I had a different Author behind me, they kept quiet about it, because some of their readers were believers

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and they didn’t want to upset their religious convictions. Franco died in the bosom of the church and nobody thought that a sacrilege. I think Pinochet will go straight to heaven.

When I left the last restaurant I rushed over to my last lawyer. Since I was now bathing in authenticity I might as well go the whole hog, or so I thought. I laid on his desk a document signed by my own hand attesting that I was a congenital defective by historical consensus supported by national libraries and human science, a descendant of defectives who were the offspring of a universal flaw and that I authorized the document to make my lawyer public and thus put an end to the ajarstory enigma. I had even signed it as ‘‘Émile Ajar, mental defective, inveterate liar, mythomaniacal fantasist, cheat, fraud, impostor, hocus bogus megalomaniac, with the incontrovertible evidence of history to prove it.’’ He looked at me suspiciously. ‘‘Ajar, you are deliberately trying to get another literary prize.’’ ‘‘How come?’’ ‘‘You are indulging in the creation of your own legend.’’ Fuck. I tried to think. It was true: they all had legends. Villon was legendary because of his hanged men. Lorca had a legend because of the firing squad. Malraux had a legend because of wars and revolutions. Hölderlin had a legend because of his madness. Solzhenitsyn had a legend because of the gulag. All men have a legend because of death. Humanity wasn’t legendary any longer: it was a myth. 141

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‘‘Do you think I should kill someone?’’ I asked. ‘‘You don’t need to go that far to get a prize.’’ ‘‘I don’t want a prize, I withdrew. But look at Raskolnikov—he killed the old lady with a hatchet for purely literary reasons.’’ ‘‘Dostoevsky was a genius, old man. You, on the other hand, haven’t really got any literary talent. You’re just telling your own story, you’ve written a nonfiction classic.’’ ‘‘So what do I have to do to get a legend?’’ ‘‘Stop it, Pavlowitch. We’re not going to discuss Jesus Christ in 1975, there has to be a limit. Nobody’s going to crucify you. And for why? Because we can all see you stringing yourself up. In style.’’ ‘‘It’s not the same.’’ ‘‘Are you really sure you don’t want a prize?’’ ‘‘Absolutely.’’ ‘‘It’s a lot of money to throw away.’’ ‘‘I’m not defending sacred values. And I don’t give a damn about littering the environment.’’ The lawyer gave me hard look, eyeball to eyeball. I’ve got two of them at present, one for inside, one for outside. When I’m not well, I have a score of them, they make me see the familiarity of everyday life, and I get into a panic. ‘‘Well then, that’s all cut and dried.’’ ‘‘Cut and dried? Me?’’ ‘‘Don’t overplay your hand, Pavlowitch. You’ve already pulled off enough tricks. No full-face photo, only your eyes, to keep it a bit secret. No blurb. You haven’t denied the Lebanese terrorist, the abortionist, the occasional pimp wanted by the French police,

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who sets up meetings in Elsinore. It’s perfect. There’s no better legend for a writer than a Danish mystery.’’ I phoned Uncle Bogey before leaving Paris. I told him about the interview in the weekly. ‘‘They didn’t ask you if I’d helped you write your books?’’ ‘‘No. Why do you ask?’’ ‘‘Well, you do happen to be my second cousin, or something of that ilk.’’ Or something of that ilk . . . ‘‘OK, they know that.’’ ‘‘They didn’t ask if I hadn’t given you a hand?’’ ‘‘No.’’ Never have I heard such a meaningful silence on the phone. Then he made a confession of such beauty that I transcribe it below, for posterity, as one of his masterpieces. ‘‘It never ceases to amaze me how little I am appreciated in France. They suspected Aragon and Queneau, but not me, and yet I am so close to you.’’ ‘‘They didn’t point the finger at Henri Michaux either, you know, even though he’s even closer to me and the greatest of all.’’ ‘‘That’s true,’’ he said with audible pleasure, ‘‘but all the same . . .’’ ‘‘I could call them and ask them to add your name to the list.’’ ‘‘No, thank you. I don’t care. If they aren’t up to figuring out who France’s greatest writers are by themselves, that’s France’s problem. I was just talking off the record . . .’’ That really switched me on. The word’s out of fashion these days, like he is.

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‘‘Look, don’t worry about it. You’re above all that.’’ ‘‘Of course I am. I was just wondering whether you remembered to reserve the film rights . . .’’ ‘‘Yes, of course I did, just like you told me, daddy dearest.’’ ‘‘I’ve already told you not to call me daddy, for fuck’s sake, I’ve had my bellyful of psychobabble.’’ ‘‘But I am sort of a spiritual son, aren’t I? With just a bit of influence . . .’’ ‘‘Fuck off.’’ I was happy. I was doing him good. He was being rejuvenated, and even on the telephone he was recovering some of his youthful vigor. ‘‘To come to the point: I have kept the rights. The real money is in the movies.’’ ‘‘You think about money too much.’’ ‘‘I think about money?’’ ‘‘Yes, you. When you constantly have thoughts against money, then you’re obviously thinking far too much about money.’’ ‘‘Dialectics mon cul. But I took my precautions.’’ ‘‘What precautions?’’ ‘‘I’m going to make a gift.’’ ‘‘To whom?’’ ‘‘To the Committee for the Support and Protection of Whores. Prostitutes, as they call them nowadays. I’m going to take advice from Ulla, mother to us all, and Jackie, and Sonia and a few others. I’m even going to set up a fighting fund for the Defense and Illustration of French Whores, with legal consultants on a leather retainer and 10 percent of royalties per blowjob. It’ll be truly repre-

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sentative. Our holy mother and sister whores are what’s least hocus bogus in the world today. Hookers are the most authentic things around. That’s why all the hollow men are against them. Out, foul spot! They’re persecuted because they tell the truth with their quims, which is where truth has gone to hide and keeps itself more or less intact. Whores are representative to such a degree that they don’t have the right to stand for election. That’s why there aren’t any in parliament, do you see?’ ‘‘Alex, I thought all you really wanted was to live unseen behind the arras . . .’’ ‘‘We all live in the dark.’’ ‘‘. . . and that you didn’t want to be thought a hidden idealist or moaner. To be taken for an aspirer, as you called it. But if you give your money to the whores, then it’ll be easy to see you’re just another desperate idealist, another aspirer.’’ ‘‘Oh, and on a connected matter: I forgot to tell you that in the article that’ll be out on Monday they added your name to Aragon and Queneau as my putative author.’’ ‘‘Connected to what matter?’’ ‘‘You can’t see the connection? I thought it was obvious. Whores, Uncle Bogey.’’ I hung up. I spend my life hanging up but I never manage. I left. The guy from La Dépêche, back in Cahors, was really decent. He’d found out that I came from an authentic family, but he didn’t print it. He even called Paris to stop them from publishing details of my authenticity. The guy in Paris asked him: ‘‘Didn’t you realize you were dealing with a psychopath?’’ In a word, my legend was settling down and putting on weight.

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Out of human respect they would soon leave me in peace. I felt like going down to the Café de la Poste and swallowing a live rat in public, but the python was my first book and people would say I was repeating myself.

We got into the VW that Uncle Bogey had left me a few years back, I put on my severed head with a black bandana to keep road hogs at bay, and off we went, just the three of us, Annie, Nini, and me. Nini never really leaves me because she’s still hoping. She’d like to believe that she’ll end up inspiring me to write an inexistentialist book. What’s absurd about nihilism is that it never gives up hope. Our country escapade lasted three days. We got back home on Tuesday, November 18. The first thing I heard on the radio was that I had won the Goncourt prize for Life Before Us and people were out looking for me. I was very calm. I am always very calm when I lose my head. That’s because it’s my head that stops me from staying calm. I called Uncle Bogey, quite calmly. He seemed delighted. ‘‘Congratulations, Alex. All this mystery stuff has turned up trumps. Well played! Your mother would have been so happy.’’ ‘‘You can leave my mother out of this. You already got the Goncourt for yours . . .’’ ‘‘You’re wrong about that. I got the Goncourt for the book before that . . .’’

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‘‘You’ve got some explaining to do. I gave you letters of withdrawal, which you promised to have delivered to the panels the day before the prize decision. You did not keep your word. You kept the letters in your pocket, on purpose. You did it on purpose, to get me to win a literary prize, to put me on the right path . . . the only true path—your own!’’ ‘‘What letters? What are you talking about? Suppose you stopped telling whoppers, for once? Or are you truly and totally off the wall? You never gave me any letter. You never did!’’ Cold drops of perspiration beaded my forehead and I could feel icy shivers running down my spine. I looked at Annie to get a dose of reality. ‘‘I gave you the letters, you bastard! You did it on purpose!’’ He suddenly relaxed, like a man who has understood. Yes, he looked understanding, all of a sudden. ‘‘Alex, please. You never gave me any letter. I’m sure you’re sincere, that you believe you gave them to me . . . but you must have dreamed it in Copenhagen, during your spell of . . . detox.’’ I said nothing. He had me by the throat. I was defenseless. I’ve never taken heroin, it’s not true. He had me cornered. I tried to bring up the lump in my throat but it was beyond my capacity. ‘‘I assert and affirm that you never gave me a letter.’’ I managed it with a roar. ‘‘So what you’re saying is that I am an acknowledged and certified lunatic, that I have hallucinations and can’t tell the difference between fantasies and realities? Is that it?’’ ‘‘Maybe you gave them to someone else. But it wasn’t me. I

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wouldn’t have taken them, anyway. I think you deserved a literary prize and I am glad you got the Goncourt.’’ ‘‘You didn’t have them handed to the panel members because you wanted to teach me a lesson. You wanted to prove that we’re both made of the same shit.’’ He started bawling. ‘‘I forbid you to talk to me in that tone of voice! I’m fed up having you on my back, do you understand?’’ ‘‘You mean that I’ve cost you enough money already and that you let me go forward for the Goncourt so you could get me off your back financially?’’ He quieted down. ‘‘You’re a bastard, Paul.’’ ‘‘For Christ’s sake don’t call me Paul! It’s something true, so leave it alone!’’ ‘‘You are a piece of shit. You’ve never been mad. You invented the whole thing to get another book out of it. You’ve always gone hocus bogus because it was a ploy that allowed you to evade your responsibilities.’’ ‘‘Sure, sure. Elsinore, the nunnery, and so forth—just playacting, was it? Money down the drain?’’ ‘‘I wanted you to be able to write your book in peace. Christianssen was agreeable to the plan.’’ ‘‘Christianssen gave me irrefutable medical certificates!’’ ‘‘The Danes have always helped and hidden Jews. And let me say this. I believe you. You are probably convinced you wrote those withdrawal letters and gave them to me. But since your subconscious really wanted the Goncourt, had really set its heart on . . .’’

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I began to wail in a manly voice. I hung up but as I’ve said before that’s only a figure of speech. There’s no way of hanging up and I’m far too scared of dying. I phoned my publisher to tell him I was turning down the Goncourt. He required a handwritten letter. That took two days more. Meanwhile, the publicity campaign around the Goncourt was going full tilt. A friend called me: ‘‘That’s a real coup, turning the prize down. It’ll get fantastic coverage. You got a bull’s-eye with the prize, and a hole in one by turning it down. Great! You’re a crafty sucker, Alex.’’ I tried to turn into a wood-free flower stalk, but I’d recovered for good. Anyway, it boiled down to the same thing. If Uncle Bogey was right and my subconscious thirsted for literary prizes, then that’s what I was: a wood-free flower stalk and a flabby prick. The house was besieged by journalists. At night I took my blunderbuss and shot at the crowd at random. But I’m incapable of killing anyone. Life isn’t something I’d take off anybody’s shoulders. I must also confess that I have slandered Pinochet in these pages, because I am also incapable of submitting anybody to torture, as is almost always the case among people who are supremely skilled in the art of torturing themselves. I was defenseless, visible to the naked eye, and I had fifty pairs of them that I could not close to stop seeing clearly into myself. As soon as I closed any two of them, the other forty-nine pairs opened wide and glared at me without pity. The less I tried to be the more I was. The more I hid the more I got covered by the media. All my secret deformities became visible to the naked eye.

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What the doctors called my ‘‘schizoid fractures’’ had been healed and sutured by chemical substances, but although this now prevented the familiarity of everyday life from invading me, it also plugged me up inside. The obvious equation Ajar = Pavlowitch gave the outside world a single, circumscribed, and concentrated target that the press magnified and made more visible by the day. I was at the mercy of. Identity in all its horror. When the Dépêche du Midi revealed my name on page one, the very next moment I was on every plane leaving Caniac-duCausse for Cambodia, because the Khmer Rouge who were fighting over there for the right to be nobody had expelled the whole population of Phnom Penh and sent them into the countryside, then changed all their names so they became anonymous and untraceable. That’s where I wanted to go, to be dispersed and relieved of my state and condition. Not known, of father unknown and certified lost. The citizens of liberated Phnom Penh who’d been sent to the country had been freed of their identity, relieved of their origins and antecedents, and of speaking honestly and from the heart. Over there the son just can’t look for the guilty father, it was fortunately quite impossible and no fault of one’s own. All the Pavlowitches of Cambodia were called something else. But I’d been seen to very well. Chemistry had sealed off all the ways out and the planes to Cambodia left without me. I grew even more visible from the photos released by the Secret Service and I didn’t even dare drive any more because I realized that Fate had woken up and could start to get interested in me. Fortunately the top shelf of Paris society, which I had once

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served in a menial capacity, guaranteed that I was a complete nonentity incapable of stringing two sentences together and that Uncle Bogey was my true begetter. It was a very sweet little thing, almost the beginning of an illusion of paternity by feminine intuition, like a faint foretaste of a birth certificate with an end of psychiatric and alcoholic congenitality on the far horizon. Admittedly, that left diabetes, tuberculosis, and cancer, but paternity suits can be won only at some cost. The rumor got around, and once again I slipped toward nonexistence, with less and less identity to my name, which made it less easy for Fate to trap me. I was now no more than a mask or false mustache. Uncle Bogey was rushing around issuing denials and indignant disclaimers and swearing he had nothing to do with it. He was in full spate, as if he was ashamed of what I wrote and what I was: not worthy of his name, and he renounced all and any paternity. I was on thymergil, but no tranquilizer was strong enough to suppress me and in any case, as an antifascist, I did not consider I had any right to a final solution. The Nouvel Observateur published a half-photo of me with the legend: Ajar? Despite the doubt, that was half an existence all the same, like for everyone.

That was when in a state of euphoria in the middle of the night induced by pills I thought: I might as well get away from myself by taking things to caricatural lengths. Build my own pyre. Clown around until I’m dizzy with parody so that all that’s left of resentment, despair, and panic is the fading guffaw of futility. I waited until morning and phoned Uncle Bogey. ‘‘Well, well.’’ ‘‘OK, OK, OK. What’s it about this time?’’ ‘‘Don’t get in a temper, daddy dearest.’’ ‘‘Paul, you’ve flogged ‘daddy dearest’ to death already. Try a new tack. Be original.’’ ‘‘I’m calling to tell you I was wrong. I didn’t give you a letter withdrawing from the prize contests. There was no reason . . .’’ ‘‘That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you from the start.’’ ‘‘. . . there was no reason to do that, because you wrote my second book. Not the first one, but the second. That’s why it sold better. You wrote in your own hand.’’ I could sense I had really floored him. ‘‘What demented nonsense is this? Incidentally, do you know what the satirical weeklies are calling you these days? The Crackpot of Cahors!’’

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‘‘You are the author of Life Before Us. It’s been in the papers and I have a draft in your own hand.’’ ‘‘Paul, listen. Alex . . . I mean, Émile. That’s enough of that. I never wrote any draft. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’’ ‘‘In Copenhagen.’’ ‘‘What about Copenhagen?’’ ‘‘The token of love?’’ ‘‘What token of love, for fuck’s sake?’’ It’s his favorite expression, ‘‘for fuck’s sake.’’ He knows what he’s talking about. ‘‘You remember when I had my ‘rejection’ crisis? When I felt rejected by everybody and by you in particular?’’ ‘‘I don’t recall every one of your episodes, I don’t watch the program every goddam night.’’ ‘‘Think back. Copenhagen. You agreed to copy out the start of the manuscript by hand. In a black exercise book. The token of love and acceptance, remember? I knew you were run down, worn out, empty . . . That was actually why you were at Christianssen’s clinic. You couldn’t write any more. I did it for you. I’ve had enough of being messed around with. I’m going to issue a press release saying you are the author.’’ I didn’t leave him enough time to have a cardiac arrest and hung him up. They hadn’t gotten me yet. I started to look for the exercise book with his handwriting in it. I could not find it. But it must have been there somewhere. That was when I nearly had the cardiac arrest I intended to be his. He’d hung on to the exercise book with his manuscript in it!

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He’d meant to steal my work, my Goncourt! He’d stolen it vilely like some mere Sholokhov, who’d ripped off the first volume of Quiet Flows the Don from the belongings of a dead white Cossack, according to Solzhenitsyn! May Solzhenitsyn be my witness! That’s what he’d had in mind all along, when he offered to transcribe the early chapters by hand! Because the idea came from him, I remember it quite clearly now! A devilish ploy typical of voodoo and Uncle Macombo! He was going to grab the Goncourt, the celebrity, the money . . . All that money! ‘‘Help! Over Here! Stop Thief !’’ I jumped on the train and got to his place in Paris that evening. He was out. He’d jumped on a train and was at my place near Cahors. We tried to call but the lines were busy because each of us was phoning the other. We got through eventually. We both screamed the same thing down the line at the same time: ‘‘You slimy turd!’’ Or else: ‘‘This is not the end of the story! I shall sue!’’ Or even: ‘‘You are impugning my honor!’’ Then we hung up. I rushed over to see my new lawyer. I told him my father had stolen my manuscript, that he was trying to pass himself off as the author of my work, that he was spreading the rumor while appearing to deny it, by protesting too much, and that I wanted to sue.

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He was even intending to have me murdered to make things easier, just like he’d had that Cossack officer put away. My lawyer said he was resigning from the case. He was not prepared to act for a mythomaniac of my ilk. I was, he said, ‘‘ghoulish.’’ And nasty as well. Uncle Bogey was not a man to rob the dead. I screamed at him that all great novelists, from Tolstoy A to Z, were men to rob the dead, bloodsuckers all who made hay from human suffering. ‘‘I am Émile Ajar!’’ I roared, pounding my hairy chest. ‘‘The one and only! I am the child of my works and their father likewise! I am my own son and father too! I owe nothing to anyone! I am my own author and I am proud of it! I am authentic! I am not a practical joke! I am not hocus bogus: I am a man who suffers and who writes to suffer more and thus to give yet more to his work, to the world, to the human race! When my work is at stake, no feelings or family ties can bind me! The only thing that matters is my work!’’ He gave me an injection. I called Dr. Christianssen. He was out. It was a conspiracy. I hurried over to another lawyer and explained that my uncle wanted to murder me to steal the first volume of Quiet Flows the Don from my corpse. ‘‘Aren’t we getting just a teeny bit paranoid, Pavlowitch?’’ ‘‘Do not call me Pavlowitch, I am the great, the one and only Émile Ajar!’’ He gave me an injection.

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I managed to get hold of Dr. Christianssen the following morning. He’d gotten killed three days previously in an attempt to save an infant on a burning bridge, that’s how admirable he was, but I needed him. ‘‘He’s trying . . .’’ ‘‘I know, I know, he phoned me.’’ ‘‘Aha! So he’s confessed?’’ ‘‘He told me you were as mad as a hatter and needed to be committed instantly.’’ ‘‘You see? You see? He wants me shut away to leave him free to act. Doctor, after all, that prize, doctor, do you realize what it means to me?’’ ‘‘It means a lot, I know.’’ ‘‘It means respect! Fame! Freedom!’’ He said nothing at the other end of the line. He was enjoying. ‘‘Émile Ajar, I’ve got good news for you. You were already cured a while back, but now your cure is complete. You are absolutely normal. You no longer have any personality disorder. Not a trace of guilt. From now on, in your mind, the guilty party is the other guy. Guilt is other people. It’s got nothing to do with you. On your way, Ajar. I declare you sane and of sound mind!’’ I was paralyzed with horror, but who cares, since it can’t be seen on the phone. ‘‘Doctor,’’ I said in a calm and dignified tone. ‘‘This isn’t about me. Money and celebrity don’t mean anything to me. All I want is for the whole world to read my book.’’ I had a good line there. I don’t count, only my book counts. Authors are nothing. All that matters is the gift of the work.

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I felt well. I felt kosher. I felt in order. I was laying myself down for the greater glory of Gaul, France, and humanity. Humanity had brought me its woes and in return I had given it a book. Fair deal dinkum. Literature is greater than any of us, dammit. I’d never felt so much at ease with myself. I felt so well, in fact, that I became a little scared. I wasn’t suffering in the slightest, not even under Pontius Pilate, and maybe I had come to the end of inspiration. I’m running out of topics, I suddenly thought. I must start reading the papers again, maybe something is around to act as a source of creative anguish. ‘‘You’re as fit as a fiddle, Ajar. That’s great. Keep it up! And give us something new.’’ ‘‘But what about that bastard Uncle Bogey?’’ ‘‘I swear to you that he never copied anything out by hand. Go see him. You were made to get along.’’ ‘‘What are you telling me? Are you serious?’’ ‘‘You were made to get along.’’ And he hung me up. Uncle Bogey broke into my hut at five in the morning with daggers blazing from both eyes. ‘‘Give me back the manuscript.’’ ‘‘Haven’t got it.’’ ‘‘Give it back or I’ll kill you.’’ ‘‘Nuncle, we’ve got few enough writers as it is.’’ ‘‘I’ll flay you alive.’’

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‘‘Sure, with my skin you’ll able to keep on insinuating you’re the author.’’ ‘‘I have denied it.’’ ‘‘Only too often.’’ ‘‘Give it back, Ludovic.’’ Ludovic. That was sweet of him. He was trying to get pally. He looked so distraught you couldn’t tell his age any more. That took us back a long way. It must have all begun at the dawn of authorship. ‘‘Listen here, Valentine. I hold the rank of commander of the Legion of Honor. I do not snatch stories from stiffs . . .’’ Well, well: so he’d been thinking the same thoughts as me. ‘‘I don’t masquerade as the author of books I haven’t written. I have a whole set of works to my name and I’m proud of what I’ve done.’’ Confession time is here again. Full and frank. This corpserobber was proud of what he had done. ‘‘When are we going to see your remake of Guernica?’’ As a subject it’s still going begging. ‘‘I want the manuscript, Valentine.’’ I tried to be sweet with him as well. ‘‘I don’t have the manuscript, Anatole, I swear on all that I hold sacred . . .’’ I really shouldn’t have said that, seeing as we were both writers. ‘‘At any rate, I state it quite firmly. Maybe I was hallucinating, Fernand.’’ ‘‘Shut up, Moishe. When I was in Copenhagen to stop writing, I was given a sleep cure and a detox, because I’ve been at it for

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forty years. I wasn’t myself. They gave me a substitute drug to ease the transition and ward off cold turkey. I’d been getting high on literature all my life, so it was too dangerous to expose me to reality all at once.’’ ‘‘The familiarity of everyday life,’’ I muttered, and the mere thought of it brought me out in a cold sweat all over. ‘‘Yep. Christianssen gave me a substitute drug, decreasing the dose day by day. It was chrotopromate. I was drugged to the eyeballs. I really don’t recall the ‘token of love’ you’re talking about, but it’s perfectly plausible. Since I’d been taken off my drug, maybe I did grab hold of something or other without Christianssen knowing, and copy out pages of tripe, or of your stuff, just to satisfy my old craving . . . I don’t remember.’’ ‘‘You wrote it out in a black exercise book. In your own hand.’’ ‘‘Give it back. I shall destroy it.’’ ‘‘I haven’t got it. If I had, I’d have gotten rid of it long ago, trust me. I’m better, Uncle. I am my own author now, and I’m proud of it. I have not got the manuscript.’’ ‘‘Then who has got it?’’ We stared at each other eyeball to eyeball and as one man we screamed: ‘‘No! It can’t be! He can’t have!’’ We were both on the plane next morning. Dr. Christianssen greeted us most amiably. ‘‘So how’s the family keeping these days?’’ We said nothing. Then Uncle Bogey, who is more human than I am, said: ‘‘Wieviel?’’

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The good doctor smiled into his giant’s beard. I wrote ‘‘giant’s beard’’ because it hasn’t been used before, as an expression. It’s original. He said nothing. I tried to put an oar in, tentatively. ‘‘Denmark is the most honest and bravest country in Shakespeare. It is the only nation worthy of the name of civilization. I love the rotten state of Denmark. I shall sing fulsome praise of these bonny braes in my next book.’’ ‘‘Denmark says, fuck you,’’ Dr. Christianssen said with great self-assurance. Uncle Bogeyman tried to play on feelings. ‘‘You know he turned the prize down. It’ll have a bad impact on sales. Anyway, he’ll not have a runaway success of that kind ever again. Then there’s the income tax liability to think about . . .’’ ‘‘And the film rights,’’ Dr. Christianssen said. I started bawling. ‘‘So you think there’s no pornography or prostitution in Denmark, do you?’’ He looked even smugger. ‘‘In this country prostitution and pornography stay below the belt. Only exceptionally do they affect the head.’’ ‘‘Alright then, how much?’’ Uncle B asked. ‘‘We have a charitable institution to help prostitutes in need,’’ Dr. Christianssen said. ‘‘A small donation would seem to me appropriate.’’ ‘‘I’ve already promised to make a donation to a similar set-up in Paris,’’ I said.

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‘‘Fine, but I don’t see why that stops you from doing something for the hookers of Denmark as well,’’ the good doctor replied. Uncle B got out his checkbook. ‘‘I can’t do much,’’ he said. ‘‘Because of exchange control.’’ ‘‘Make the check out to New York,’’ Dr. Christianssen said. ‘‘In any case, it has to go through the United Nations.’’ Uncle Bogey did as he was told. ‘‘I’ll cover that,’’ I said to him. He looked askance. ‘‘Write me an IOU,’’ he said. I did as he asked. Trust was in the air. ‘‘And now for this famous manuscript,’’ Dr. Christianssen said. He took a black exercise book out of a drawer and held it open. Uncle B went pale with relief. ‘‘It’s not my writing,’’ he said. ‘‘Give me back the check.’’ ‘‘Of course it’s not your handwriting,’’ the great Dane said. ‘‘I copied the whole thing out by hand myself. Because, when you think about it, the real author of Émile Ajar is me. Without my psychiatric arts . . . See what I mean?’’ ‘‘Surely you’re not going to steal my work?’’ I yelled. ‘‘I don’t think so,’’ he said. ‘‘But I won’t make any promises on that score. And I’ll tell you why, Dopey . . .’’ ‘‘Don’t call me Dopey. My name is Émile Ajar and I am proud of it.’’ ‘‘Excellent, excellent,’’ Dr. Christianssen said. ‘‘You’ve just about gotten rid of all your angst, Ajar. Only without it you’ll never write another word. You’ve still got your kitten Pinochet but you’ve

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sucked it pretty dry by now. You feel calm, sure of your identity, devoid of anxiety. You’re on the brink of not needing to create. But knowing that this manuscript is in my hands, hanging over you like a perpetual menace, as the tangible proof that the real author of Life Before Us is the world-famous psychiatrist Dr. Hans Ander Christianssen should keep you just a bit unstable for ever more, my dear Milly, and so maybe you’ll keep on writing . . .’’ I started to weep. ‘‘I’m not crying for myself, doctor, it’s for the state of Denmark. What you’re doing to me is rotten. Psychiatrists are supposed to cure angst, not foster it.’’ ‘‘That’s where I differ from other psychiatrists,’’ Dr. Christianssen said. ‘‘No angst, no creativity. And I would even say, no humanity. Crime would be imperceptible.’’ ‘‘I’d rather be free of angst than a creator,’’ I said. ‘‘Sorry about that, but I’m a socialist,’’ Dr. Christianssen said. ‘‘I want more riches for the working man, and as for you, well, personally . . . I won’t say I don’t give a damn, but I want you to be a creator. Socialism exists to worry you, distress you, to wake you up and make you fertile through self-awareness, which is always fearful and ghastly, and gives society its finest works . . . Anguish, Milly my boy, is creation, progress, and fecundity.’’ He got up and shook Uncle Bogey by the hand as he looked him straight in his six pairs of eyes. ‘‘If ever you feel like having your manuscript back, sir . . .’’ ‘‘So there’s another manuscript?’’ Uncle Bogey asked in a tone so full of angst that all of a sudden something like an intimation of art began to waft through the air.

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‘‘I’m trying to help you, sir. Contrary to what you say, you do not have nerves of steel. But you control them too firmly, which gives you writer’s block. Let yourself go. The three notebooks you filled while you were here, in your own handwriting, are a real confession, where you spill all the beans about yourself, and which I keep in this safe . . .’’ ‘‘The kitten!’’ Uncle Bogey screamed out loud. He threw himself at the safe in the corner of the office like a real madman and began to pound it with his fists. ‘‘The kitten is dead!’’ Dr. Christianssen said as he gave him a cruel stare in all his eyes. ‘‘It wasn’t I, it was he!’’ Uncle B yelled, wagging his shaking index at me, with no respect for the disjunctive. ‘‘Not true, it was Pinochet!’’ I yelled back, because I needed a break before I could find anyone else. ‘‘My turn now,’’ the great Dane said as he began to go spotty and black and white all over, for he’s been this man’s best friend for three years now in Cahors. When I got back to the Grand I went up to my room and asked for God, for it was a first-rate hotel with every convenience. ‘‘Was it you or not? I can’t go on without knowing.’’ ‘‘You’re getting on my nerves with that father fixation of yours, Pavlowitch. You’ve wrung it dry already. People have been yanking my chain with the same story for five thousand years and not one of them has managed to get a civilization out of it that’s worthy of the material.’’ ‘‘Was it you or not?’’ ‘‘Of course it was me. I slept with my mother and it came out

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all incestuous, congenital, degenerate, and loopy, in the sole and exclusive service of art. Greek tragedy made it all worthwhile, don’t you agree? You’re not going to tell me you’re surprised to discover that the Creation was an artistic performance. Without horrors, without a wonderful variety and wealth of suffering, without death and therefore without perpetual renewal of subjects and stories, there wouldn’t have been any literature—and then where would we be? The creation of the world was undertaken solely with art in mind. It was a complete success, as has been proved by the amazing proliferation of works of art.’’ It was Uncle Bogey all over. ‘‘What about the rest of it?’’ ‘‘The only things that matter are the masterpieces, Pavlowitch. I constantly reread Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky with unbounded delight.’’ ‘‘And what about me? Have you read me?’’ ‘‘Of course I have. I try to keep abreast of the latest trends. I created it all because I am a real fan of literature, music, and painting. As you can well imagine, I’d have gone about things differently if I hadn’t been a culture vulture. But don’t worry about the future. I’ve already taken care of it. Yes, there will be some more very fine hymns. You’ve got the makings, Ajar, but you’re too fascinated by your own navel. Pay more heed to the suffering of others: there are some wonderful books still waiting to be written about them. People mustn’t be allowed to suffer for nothing, my lad. Scriptor, morituri te salutant . . . Leave yourself out of it and make do with the sufferings of others. We need an epic, Pavlowitch, an epic work. ‘‘Me’’ is just too cozy and narrow, the

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subject’s quickly exhausted. But humanity, Pavlowitch, humanity! It’s a gold mine for a writer, a real gold mine. Look at the world around you. With another couple of Chiles, a few gulags, some more massacres and persecutions that make a real impact on you, Ajar, you’ll turn into a great writer. They will not have perished in vain.’’ ‘‘I’m going to go and live in China.’’ ‘‘Yes, it’s true, they’re kind of low on literary energy at the moment.’’ He spoke English a bit. Danes are very talkative. He served me a glass of whisky, left the bottle, I signed the tab, and he left. I thought of calling room service to make sure it really had been Him, but I dropped the idea, because it’s always someone else. I’ve almost finished. The great dane is running among the trees and barking because of the squirrel. My God, my God, there’s not a true word any more, anywhere, except the word God, which is a genuine item of vocabulary. Ajar, stop looking for olomites in the tiffintrees because the alphabet is quite capable of sealing all the exits and is a first-rate jailer. There’s music, of course, but it works for the other side—it helps people live. There’s children’s laughter but its ignorance is heartbreaking. There are unmistakable signs all over the place because it’s all alright the way it is. Immortal horsemen charge across the sky but they’re only clouds, because myths are none. Broken religions lie rotting at my feet, beneath the old chestnut tree that doesn’t even know it only drops hollow fruit. But it keeps on making nuts because that’s what it was designed to do. It’s all premeditated and persecuted. Smoke rises from chimneys to comfort the divine spark and deceive us

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into ignition. Birds, bees, and flowers which make it all familiar. On the far horizon not a soul stirs, because reason has swept all away. New roads neatly laid out to go ever further toward nowhere. Cataclysms hold themselves back to provide a little more pleasure. You can accept yourself as far as the eye can see. Accept yourself to the point where the world and the sufferings of others are entirely lost to sight. Or else: accept yourself on the funereal pyre, and create a vacancy at the asylum. ‘‘Paul, your eyes are at it again!’’ ‘‘Don’t worry, darling, it’s just the pyre. I don’t know if I’ve been beaten, or if it’s from cowardice, submission, and resignation, in short, I don’t know if it’s a ‘‘cure,’’ but I feel I’m ready to accept myself as a caricature so as to finally become mon semblable et mon frère. A draft, pending the eraser and a new author. We could love each other, as the vulgar expression has it, and nobody would raise an eyebrow at such a cliché: love is still permitted for caricatures, because they’re allowed to exaggerate.’’ She stroked my hair tenderly, without any literary modesty. ‘‘That’s true. We could even live happily ever after, because caricatures aren’t supposed to be realistic.’’ ‘‘We could talk about the people’s voice without being accused of artistic mediocrity, because caricatures can get away with anything.’’ ‘‘The sun could even shine without a care for originality . . .’’ I quickly put my hand in my pocket. I’d almost forgotten it, from the habit of being, but what I had there was a huge hope peeking out from underneath. I’d cut it out that very day, January 24, 1976—let me inscribe that historic date here, for it is

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perhaps when understanding began—from the American newspaper I read because it is after all in a foreign language. It was on page one. ‘‘Listen to this, Annie. And if you don’t believe I’m cured or that I’m having a relapse, read it yourself: ‘Until recently scientists believed they knew why the sun shines. However, recent advances have changed our understanding entirely. The cause remains unknown, but according to reports from English and Soviet scientists, the sun beats and throbs like a huge heart . . .’ ’’ She looked at me with concern and I knew she was afraid I was relapsing. But she didn’t dare say anything for fear of damaging hope, because words are merciless hunters when tracking down their favorite prey. Dr. Christianssen appeared for the last time when I was about to get onto the Paris express at Cahors railway station. I saw him approaching in his Danish mist when the train was already on the track and if it was less punctual than usual it was only because cardiac rhythm in moments of sudden panic always clouds the vision of people who are simulating as hard as they can to evade recapture. All I had to do was move to one side to let a detachment of SS troops go by, but that was probably only a memory lapse. What I grasped, in fact, was that my inquisitor had new orders from the torture office, and was there to ascertain that I was ready for reissue as a dud token to stick back into the time-clock, and that I was no danger to other hocus bogus aliases or to myself, because he’s paid to know that what is called ‘‘recovery’’ in the conventions of psychiatry is nothing other than scrupulous obedience, and an exemplary, humble dissimulation of symptoms. It was groundless

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because the human beast hadn’t started to move and couldn’t have crushed anybody yet. Its fearful immobility was pregnant with the distress of Anna Karenina about to throw herself on the track, but that was perhaps just a literary reminiscence. Christianssen, whom I shall now call thus, without his ‘‘doctor,’’ because I didn’t need one anymore, stopped in front of me, putting on that deliberately relaxed and agreeable stance that seeks only to give reassurance. He made my throat go dry. Yet there was nothing diabolical about him, he was smiling, he had his hands in the pockets of his gray overcoat with velvet-edged pockets, he had his blond beard that never hurt a fly, and his frameless spectacles and his slightly slant eyes. He looked a bit like Zola and a bit like Verlaine, but I knew he was rotten with literary allusions and for the first time since we’d met he’d hidden his bald pate beneath an Astrakhan fez. I walked up to him and stretched out my hand, to make his sudden apparition at the Cahors railway station seem more natural. ‘‘I’ve got fantastic news for you, writer Ajar,’’ he announced. ‘‘Pinochet is going to be sacked and Pliuch has already been released. You’ve won, scribbler boy. Pliuch has just arrived in Paris, where he’s been greeted by flowers and mathematicians. Well done!’’ ‘‘I didn’t know I had such influence,’’ I uttered modestly, noblesse oblige. ‘‘You have scored a famous victory, Generalissimo Ajar! You can be proud of your work. ‘‘Especially since it’s not out yet,’’ I said, suspecting a trap. ‘‘Pinochet knew what was in it through his secret police,

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and he panicked. He’s going to flee. And the KGB, which gets everywhere, knew your powerful book was about to appear, and since they weren’t able to modify you as they wished despite the chemical treatment they gave you in Copenhagen, they let Pliuch out as soon as they could, mon général.’’ ‘‘I cast my seed where I can,’’ I said ironically, because irony is excellent evidence of mental hygiene. Standing right behind Doctor Christianssen was Rabbi Schmulevitch with his white stockings, who wasn’t there, and the fact that I couldn’t see him proved once and for all that I showed no sign of. ‘‘How much do I owe you, doctor?’’ I asked, because there were royalties piling up already. ‘‘Don’t get defensive, pious Ajar. The proof is in the bag: Pliuch is free, Pinochet is on his last legs, there’s no more killing in Argentina or Lebanon, fraternity has broken out, and all because your book has given immense relief to distraught humanity. Carry on, write more, the oppressed are waiting by the million. Save them, liberate them, give them some more literature, prizewinner Ajar. Getting cured was only the start, you must now cure the whole of humanity . . . Write!’’ ‘‘But that would mean I was still suffering from messianic, reformist, and schizoid tendencies, doctor. Nothing doing.’’ My investigator looked at me with respect because he knew I was determined to climb victoriously aboard the 8:47, because it’s the only one, still standing at the platform because Christ was late at Cahors and patience is a virtue.

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But the brilliant inspector tried again, because he knew all the tricks of his trade and also that most ‘‘normal’’ people are just good at simulating. ‘‘Well done, o thinnest-skinned of men, my hero Ajar! You have demonstrated the omnipotence of the voice of the people that lifts mountains, opens prisons, grants wishes, wipes tears, heals wounds, cares for lepers, eats shit, kisses asses, shines boots, orders executions, shoots at random, wipes towns off the map, blesses crowds, rapes widows, kills orphans, perpetuates horror, strokes dogs, rebuilds ruins, saves the peace, makes blood flow, causes the desert to bloom, lights the world, takes Jesus down from his cross and Joan of Arc off her bonfire, gnashes teeth, tears its hair, commits hara-kiri, massacres the innocent, shoots hostages, murders victims, finishes off the wounded, give him a drop to drink said my father! Full steam ahead, poetaster Ajar! Scribble on! Think of the millions of the persecuted just waiting, think of the sales potential! Take hold of your Holy Stylus, and save, liberate, nourish, raise up, and write! Yes, just one more literary effort! And another! And again! More ink! More encore! Push on! Take to the air! Up with inspiration! Let the muse amuse! Don’t pretend to deny how much Tolstoy and all the other saviors of the human race did to bring happiness, justice, and redemption to us all! Ajar the Savior! Ajar the Samurai! Lancelot Ajar! GI Ajar! ‘‘My backside is not King Nebuchadnezzar,’’ I answered with composure, to show him I didn’t take myself for and that I had a sense of proportion, and, more generally, to hang on to something solid and to strike a note of hope.

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‘‘Don’t hide beneath cynicism, Ajar, you idealist . . .’’ But the grand inquisitor was beginning to fade because he’d understood I was past treating. ‘‘I think you’ll never have any news of me again, my friend,’’ Dr. Christianssen said in a faraway voice and it was a sad moment because I’d gotten to like him a lot and owed him quite a pile. ‘‘Farewell, Ajar, my recovery. Fake it properly. It’s what this kind of work calls for.’’ ‘‘Farewell, Christianssen, my friend. But I’m going to take a risk and point out the limits of my recovery. Here remains and for me will always remain the fallen parody of somewhere else. Nonetheless, thanks to your excellent, persuasive care, but also because I have a wife I love more than the rest of the world, I accept your conditions, I accept our condition. Yes, I the undersigned Paul Pavlowitch hereby accept to be a caricature of Émile Ajar, the caricature of a man in a caricature of life in a caricature of a world. Even at that price, I choose fraternity. Oh, of course, I know, how could I not: I’ll be accused of capitulation and cowardice by those who are struggling to escape from ersatz and caricature, but I can’t help it, as I’ve already explained: I am incapable of choosing my victims. I therefore agree to parody myself and to build my own pyre and I will never try to burn masterpieces in museums in the name of life, to make it come into being . . .’’ Next morning when I was on the telephone trying to find out how far the sale of the film rights had gotten, Uncle Bogey climbed the six flights without an elevator and knocked on my door. He was speechless rather than breathless. ‘‘I don’t get it,’’ he said. ‘‘But I guess this is your doing again?’’

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He gave me a printed invitation card. Kiki and her sisters had invited him to take the chair at the World Assembly of Whores that was due to meet that very evening in Paris. I’d gotten an invitation as well, but I’d had to move heaven and earth and wave my declined Goncourt prize in their faces before they had given me one. ‘‘What does this mean?’’ ‘‘Well now, Uncle, you’re a respected, decorated official monument, so the girls need your moral support. Shall we go?’’ ‘‘Out of the question. Screw that, I even turned down the French Academy. I’ve got enough distinctions.’’ ‘‘Come on, old man. We’ll go together, and make peace.’’ Then I added as if it was only an afterthought: ‘‘It’ll be good publicity.’’ He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. ‘‘For whom?’’ ‘‘For the whores, obviously.’’ ‘‘Won’t go.’’ ‘‘They’ll call you a stuck-up, narrow-minded, hypocritical . . .’’ ‘‘OK, I’m coming,’’ he interrupted. So we went. They wouldn’t let us in. There was a cordon of real whores barring the entrance. ‘‘This is for sex workers only,’’ they told us. ‘‘Headworkers are wherever you like, but not here.’’ I’d foreseen that trick. I told them I was the guy who had turned the Goncourt down. When they realized I was sincere, they let us in. It was quite a job just getting to the platform. The United

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Nations had sent a delegation and that made a lot of people. Ulla wasn’t there. Kiki was in the chair. We went up to her. We shook her hand and she accepted without false shame. I asked if I could wash her feet, but she said I was giving myself airs and that I wasn’t the pope. I hadn’t seen Uncle Bogey so happy for years. It was as if the ice had melted and he was no longer trapped inside the transparent block of Bacon’s portrait with his mouth open in a silent scream. We posed for the photographers. Before we left I asked the hooker who showed us out: ‘‘What can we do for you?’’ ‘‘Keep on writing,’’ she said. This is my last book. Paris, January 27, 1976

The Life and Death of Émile Ajar

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I am writing these lines at a moment when it has become increasingly obvious that, given the way it has been evolving during this last quarter of the century, the world now confronts a writer with a question that is mortal for every kind of artistic expression: that of futility. Not even the lyrical illusion remains of what, for so long, literature wished and believed itself to be—a contribution to the development and progress of mankind. I am therefore fully aware that these pages will no doubt seem derisory at the moment of their publication, for whether I like it or not, since I am here explaining my actions to posterity, I inevitably assume that it will still attach some importance to my works and, among them, to the four novels I wrote under the pseudonym of Émile Ajar. Nevertheless I do want to explain myself, if only out of gratitude toward my readers, though also because this adventure I have lived through has been, with one single exception—that of Macpherson inventing the poet Ossian at the end of the eighteenth century, that mythical Ossian whose works were acclaimed throughout Europe but were in fact written by Macpherson—this adventure has been, so far as I know, on a scale unprecedented in literary history. I shall here, without further ado, quote an incident that shows 177

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—and this was one of the reasons for my endeavor, and also for its success—the extent to which a writer can become the prisoner of ‘‘the image he has been lumbered with,’’ as Gombrówicz so aptly put it. An ‘‘image’’ that has nothing to do either with his work or with himself. When I was working on the first Ajar, Cuddles, I still didn’t know that I was going to publish that novel under a pseudonym. So I didn’t take any precautions and my manuscripts, as usual, were lying around all over the place. A friend of mine, Madame Lynda Noël, who had come to visit me in Majorca, had seen the black exercise book on my desk, with the title clearly marked on the cover. Later, when the name of Émile Ajar, that mysterious unknown writer, created the stir whose measure can be gauged by consulting the newspapers of the time, it was in vain that Madame Noël went everywhere, telling everyone that Romain Gary was the author of the book, that she had seen, seen with her own eyes. No one wanted to know: and yet, that kind lady went to so much trouble to get me given my due! But the thing was: Romain Gary was quite incapable of having written such a book. This, word for word, is what a brilliant NRF essayist declared to Robert Gallimard. And another, to the same man, who was a dear friend of mine: ‘‘Gary is a writer who has come to the end of the line. It’s unthinkable.’’ I was an author who was classified, catalogued, taken for granted, all of which relieved the professionals of the task of really studying my work and discovering what it was about. Just imagine—for that, they would have to re-read it! And then what? I was so well aware of this that, during the whole Ajar adventure—four books—I was never afraid that anyone would make a

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simple, cursory, textual analysis that would wrest me from my anonymity. I wasn’t mistaken: none of the critics recognized my voice in Cuddles. Not one in Life Before Us. And yet this was exactly the same sensibility that had been displayed in A European Education, The Company of Men, Promise at Dawn, and the books often contained the same sentences, the same turns of phrase, the same human beings. It would have sufficed to read The Dance of Genghis Cohn to identify the author of Life Before Us immediately. The young men who are the friends of the young hero in King Solomon are all out of The Ski Bum; the character of Lenny in the latter novels speaks and thinks exactly like Jeannot in King Solomon: this was what my son was told by Hugues Moret, who was then seventeen and a pupil in the top class at the Lycée VictorDuruy. All Ajar is in Tulipe. But which of the professionals had ever read it? You can imagine my profound joy. The most gratifying experience of my entire writing life. I was taking part in something which, in literature, usually happens only posthumously, when, as the author is no longer there and no longer getting in anyone’s way, he can be given his due. It was only a year after the publication of the first Ajar, after I had asked my distant cousin Paul Pavlowitch to appear on the scene and our relationship had been discovered, that, in my dealings with the publisher, suspicions began to focus on me. I disposed of them with the greatest ease: I knew that those ladies and gentlemen were not going to do their job and study the texts. But it was with the publication of Hocus Bogus that my temerity was truly recompensed. Seeing that I had stuck myself into

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the book in the guise which had been invented for me, and that all the critics had therefore recognized me in the character of Uncle Bogey, it never occurred to any of them that instead of Paul Pavlowitch inventing Romain Gary, it was Romain Gary who was inventing Paul Pavlowitch. The critic of L’Express, relying on an indiscretion on the part of a person who was nevertheless bound by professional secrecy, having declared that in his preceding works Ajar had had some ‘‘collaborators,’’ one of them no doubt being me, added that Hocus Bogus had obviously been written by Ajar alone and unaided. A hastily ‘‘vomited’’ book, he declared, and he explained that this young author, having become famous and swollen-headed, had repudiated his ‘‘collaborators,’’ refused to listen to their advice, and gone ahead regardless, at random, on his own. Hence, said our critic, the absence of the ‘‘artifice,’’ of the ‘‘professionalism,’’ which, according to him, were to be found in the two previous works, and the ‘‘slapdash,’’ ‘‘vomited’’ character of the book. Mother of God! If ever there was a book by an old professional, that book is Hocus Bogus: the ‘‘artifice’’ consisted in the art that conceals art. For the fact is that this novel of the anguish, the panic a young man suffers at the thought of his whole life ahead of him, was one I had been writing ever since the age of twenty, forever abandoning and recommencing it, taking pages of it with me through wars, cataclysms, and continents, from extreme youth to maturity; so much so that forty years later the friends of my adolescence, François Bondy and René Agid, recognized in Hocus Bogus two passages I had preserved from my (unpublished) Le Vin des morts: that of the policemen/insects buzzing in the brothel, and that of Christ, the child, and the match, which I had

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read to them in the room I lived in as a student, in rue Rollin, in 1936. I may add, for amateurs of perversity, that this M. Galey, to disparage Ajar even further, for he led the field at that time, reminded his readers that it was I, his uncle, who had written ‘‘that fine book,’’ Promise at Dawn. On its publication, however, he had slated this ‘‘fine book’’ . . . The whole of Hocus Bogus, with very few exceptions, is a novel. The character of Paul Pavlowitch, his neuroses, psychoses, ‘‘psychiatric states,’’ and hospital misadventures, are entirely invented—and this without his consent. I wrote the book in two weeks in my Geneva hideout and then telephoned him. ‘‘I’ve invented a totally fictitious Paul Pavlowitch in a novel. A crackpot. I wanted to express anguish, and I’ve saddled you with that anguish. I’m also settling accounts with myself—more precisely, with the legend I’ve been stuck with. I’ve totally invented myself, too. Two characters in a novel. Is that all right with you? Nothing against it?’’ ‘‘Nothing against it.’’ I admire the moral strength—the word ‘‘fortitude’’ would be more appropriate—with which my first cousin once removed agreed to pass as a ‘‘nutcase.’’ The only true details are those I extracted from our common ancestry—my maternal uncle, in particular, who was Paul’s grandfather, Ilya Ossipovitch Owczynski. This part of the text had been written in 1959 and was intended to appear in Promise at Dawn. I had mentioned this at the time to Paul’s mother, my cousin, but she was offended when I confessed that I had spoken about her

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father in a humorous vein. And I myself recognized that the publication of certain facts was not then possible. So I put those few pages to one side and incorporated them in the ‘‘family tree’’ in Hocus Bogus. I acquired my information on chemical psychotherapy from Dr. Louis Bertagna, in the same way as I had learned about aphasia, for Clair de femme, from Dr. Ducarne, of the Salpêtrière Hospital. It was only after I had finished Cuddles that I decided to publish the book under a pseudonym, without telling the publisher. I felt that there was an incompatibility between the notoriety, the weights and measures according to which my work was judged, ‘‘the image I had been lumbered with,’’ and the innermost nature of the book. In my endeavors to escape, I had already twice tried my hand at a pseudonym. Fosco Sinibaldi, for L’Homme à la colombe—five hundred copies sold—and René Deville, for Direct Flight to Allah, which only got off the ground when I allowed myself to be identified as the author. I knew, then, that Cuddles, the first book of an unknown writer, would not sell well, but anonymity was more important to me than anything else. So the publisher couldn’t be told. The manuscript was sent from Brazil, through the good offices of my friend Pierre Michaut. The author was a young wanderer he had met in Rio; having had a brush with the law, he could no longer set foot in France. The report of the Gallimard reading panel was so-so. It was the passionate insistence of the woman who first read it—before the manuscript came before the august panel—that finally de-

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cided the publisher, if not to take it himself, at least to recommend it to Mercure de France. Michel Cournot’s enthusiasm did the rest. However, because Pierre Michaut couldn’t consult any valid ‘‘authority,’’ he had to accept cuts. A chapter in the middle, the odd phrase here and there, and the last chapter. In my eyes, this last ‘‘ecological’’ chapter was important. But it is true that its ‘‘positive’’ side, its ‘‘message’’ side, when my character, transformed into a python, is brought up to the platform at the ecological meeting, was not in keeping with the rest. So I should prefer Cuddles to remain as it was when it appeared before the public for the first time. The ‘‘ecological’’ chapter can be published separately, if there is any continuing interest in my work. The book came out. I was not expecting anything. All I wanted to was to be able occasionally to lay my hand on Cuddles. Men need friendship. As for the Parisian critics . . . I am not the only person to have spoken of the ‘‘literary terror,’’ of the coteries, of the cliques with their claques, of cronyism, of ‘‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours,’’ of debts repaid or accounts settled . . . But what is in question, in actual fact, is not criticism, it’s Parisianism. Outside Paris there is no trace of that pathetic little will to power. Here, once again, let us dream of decentralization. In the United States, it isn’t New York, it’s the critics of all the big and small towns, from one end of the country to the other, who decide the fate of a book. In France, it isn’t even Paris, it’s Parisianism. One day a daily newspaper treated me to a whole page of

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praise: the work in question was my novel Europa. Fine. A year later, I published The Enchanters. A venomous, whole-page slating in the same daily by the same ‘‘critic.’’ Fine. A few weeks or months later, I met this person at a dinner given by Madame Simone Gallimard. She seemed embarrassed. ‘‘You must have been surprised by my harsh criticism of The Enchanters?’’ ‘‘Mmm.’’ ‘‘I wrote you a very favorable review of Europa, and you didn’t thank me . . .’’ Charming, isn’t it? You will understand why, after such experiences and many others, I developed a profound disgust of publishing anything. My dream, which I was never able to realize, for economic reasons, was to write to my heart’s content and not publish anything else during my lifetime. I was at Cimarrón, my house in Majorca, when Jean Seberg telephoned and told me that Cuddles had been so well received by the critics that Le Nouvel Observateur had named Raymond Queneau or Aragon as the probable author of the novel, for it ‘‘could only be the work of a great writer.’’ Shortly afterward I learned from the papers that Émile Ajar was in reality Hamil Raja, a Lebanese terrorist. That he was a quack doctor, an abortionist, a common law criminal, or Michel Cournot himself. The book was the product of a ‘‘collective.’’ I met a young woman who had had a liaison with Émile. He was a terrific fucker, she said. I hope I didn’t disappoint her too much. I had to consult Maître Gisèle Halimi in order to change the

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Ajar contract with Mercure de France. This contract had been drawn up for five books, and even though signed by me in a fictitious name it still committed me, Romain Gary, for five volumes. I had chosen Maître Gisèle Halimi because her past activities as a barrister at the time of the Algerian War gave some apparent substance to the myth of Hamil Raja, the Lebanese terrorist, which had appeared from goodness knows where, but which suited me perfectly. My name was only mentioned for the first time after Life Before Us, a year later, with the entry on the scene of Paul Pavlowitch, his identification by the magazine Le Point, and the discovery of our relationship. And now I have to try to explain myself ‘‘in depth.’’ I was tired of being nothing but myself. I was tired of the Romain Gary image I had been stuck with once and for all during the previous thirty years, ever since the sudden fame that had come to a young airman with A European Education, when Sartre wrote in Les Temps Modernes: ‘‘We shall have to wait a few years before we know whether or not A European Education is the best novel about the Resistance . . .’’ Thirty years! I’d been ‘‘saddled with an image.’’ Perhaps I even went along with it, unconsciously. It was easier: the image was ready-made, I only had to adopt it. It meant that I had no need to reveal myself. Above all, there was the nostalgia for one’s youth, for one’s début, for one’s renewal. To renew myself, to relive, to be someone else, was always the great temptation of my existence. I read, on the back-panel blurbs of my books, ‘‘several well-filled lives . . . airman, diplomat, writer.’’ Nothing, zero, straws in the wind, and with the taste of the absolute on

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my lips. All my as it were official, labeled lives were doubled, tripled, by other, more secret ones, but the old adventure-seeker that I am has never found total satisfaction in any of them. The truth is that I was profoundly affected by the oldest protean temptation of man: that of multiplicity. A craving for life in all its forms and possibilities, which every flavor tasted merely deepened. My impulses, always simultaneous and contradictory, constantly urged me on in every direction, and the only things that enabled me to survive them with my mental stability intact were, I think, sexuality, and the novel—which is a prodigious means of ever-renewed incarnations. I have always been someone else. And whenever I encountered a constant—my son, a love, the dog Sandy—I pushed my attachment to this stability to the point of passion. In such a psychological context, the coming into the world, short life, and death of Émile Ajar are perhaps easier to explain than I myself first thought. It was a new birth. I was renewing myself. Everything was being given to me one more time. I had the perfect illusion of a new creation of myself, by myself. And this dream of the total novel, character, and author, which I spoke about at such length in my essay Pour Sganarelle, was finally within my grasp. As I was simultaneously publishing other novels under the name of Romain Gary, the duality was perfect. I was giving the lie to the title of my Your Ticket Is No Longer Valid. In the French title, Au-delà de cette limite votre ticket n’est plus valable, you will notice the word ‘‘limit,’’ and in this book I was triumphing over my old horror of ‘‘limits’’ and of the ‘‘once and for all.’’

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Those who are still interested in all this, now it has long been over and done with, will easily find in the newspapers of the time the curiosity, the enthusiasm, the sound, and the fury that surrounded the name of Émile Ajar on the publication of Life Before Us. And I, who in a way had come back to earth once again, unknown, unseen—I was a spectator of my second life. I had at first entitled my second ‘‘Ajar’’ A Quality of Despair, having completely forgotten that I had used this title in the text of The Ski Bum. It was Annie Pavlowitch who pointed it out to me. I thought all was lost. It was to create a red herring that I deliberately mentioned this lapse of memory, transposing it, in Hocus Bogus. It seemed to me then that I had only one more step to take in order to arrive at that ‘‘total novel’’ I had envisaged in the four hundred and fifty–odd pages of Pour Sganarelle, and, pushing fiction even further, to give life to this picaro, who was both a character and an author, just as I had described him in my essay. It also seemed to me that if Émile Ajar were to allow himself to be briefly glimpsed, in flesh and blood, only to disappear once again into mystery, I would revive the myth, by conclusively ruling out all suspicion of the ‘‘great writer lurking in the background’’ that the press was doing its utmost to find, and be able to continue my ‘‘Ajar’’ work in all tranquility, laughing up my sleeve. So I asked Paul Pavlowitch, who looked the part, to assume the character for a short while and then to disappear, giving a fictitious biography and observing the strictest incognito. It will be up to him, if he one day feels like it, to explain why in the interview he granted Le Monde in Copenhagen, he gave his real biography and why, in spite of my opposition, he gave his photo to the press. From then

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on, the mythological character I was so keen on ceased to exist and became Paul Pavlowitch. It was easy to identify him, and our relationship was revealed. I defended myself like the very devil, multiplied my denials, played to the hilt on my right to preserve his anonymity, and succeeded in convincing everyone, all the more easily in that people had seen enough of me and needed a ‘‘novelty.’’ To protect myself even further, I invented an ‘‘autobiographical’’ Paul Pavlowitch in Hocus Bogus, and thus succeeded in writing the novel of anguish I had been dreaming of since I was twenty, since Le Vin des morts. But I knew that Émile Ajar was doomed. I had already written sixty pages of King Solomon, but I put them to one side and only resumed the novel two years later; my urge to create was stronger than all the discouragements. Why, people may ask, was I even tempted to let the source dry up, when it was still pouring ideas and themes into me? But good Lord! because I had dispossessed myself. There was now someone else living in the phantasm in my place. By materializing, Ajar had put an end to my mythological existence. A just reversal of things: the dream was now at my expense . . . Paul Pavlowitch fitted the character. His very ‘‘Ajar-like’’ physique, his shrewdness, his temperament, succeeded, in spite of the evidence, in diverting attention from me, and in convincing people. To be honest, I don’t think a ‘‘dual personality’’ is possible. The roots of works go too deep, and even when their ramifications seem varied and very different from one another, they couldn’t stand up to a real examination or to what used to be called an explication de texte. Thus, when I was preparing a collection of my

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short literary pieces, I came across the following tale, which was published in France-Soir in April 1971: Speaking of age . . . My friend Don Miguel de Montoya lived in the shade of the Alcazar in Toledo, in one of those narrow little alleyways where long ago the steps of El Greco had reverberated. Don Miguel is 96 years old. For three quarters of a century he has been carving chessmen and those statuettes of Don Quixote that are the Eiffel Tower of Spanish tourist kitsch. I solemnly swear before God and man that Don Miguel is the most profoundly optimistic person I have ever met . . . At 96, he goes every month to consult a celebrated clairvoyant to have his future read in a crystal ball . . . I spoke to this good woman after one of these sessions. She was on the verge of tears. ‘‘What do you expect me to predict for him at his age? A new love? Money? Happiness and prosperity?’’ ‘‘Why don’t you tell him the truth, Madame? Why don’t you tell him that you see nothing?’’ Last Sunday I went to Toledo to see Don Miguel, who resembles one of his own Don Quixotes, whose face he has carved more than a hundred and fifty thousand times during his lifetime . . . He had just been to consult his clairvoyant. His children and great-grandchildren looked shattered, but Don Miguel, sitting on a brand-new green leather suitcase that he had just bought, was delighted. ‘‘It seems that I’m going on a long journey,’’ he said to me . . .

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This was exactly Chapter Fifteen, in which Solomon goes to consult a clairvoyant! It must be added, though, that people were beginning to examine my work in more detail. For there are not only the Parisian critics, who have other things to do than study texts seriously, there are also all those who have time to read and who do not limit themselves to skating over the surface of reality. One day I received a visit from a beautiful young Paris-Match journalist, Laure Boulay. It was for a few photos and an interview apropos of Clair de femme. When the interview was over, this young and apparently shy person demonstrated to me, in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, that Romain Gary and Émile Ajar were one and the same person. Her textual analysis was as brief as it was implacable, starting with the refrain: ‘‘I lose my heart very easily,’’ which she had spotted in both Cuddles and Promise at Dawn. And she went on, very calmly: ‘‘Madame Rosa’s phrase, in Life Before Us, which the critics are always quoting, ‘You don’t need reasons to be afraid’—you’d already used in The Guilty Head, where Mathieu says: ‘And since when has a man needed reasons to be afraid?’ ’’ I suddenly remembered that that accursed phrase had also been said by the character played by Jean-Pierre Kalfon in my film, Birds in Peru. I didn’t turn a hair. I had a defense mechanism ready and waiting. I had already used it against the demonstration of a young French teacher, Geneviève Balmès, whose mother was a friend of my youth, who had pointed out to me that Momo’s relations with Madame Rosa in Life Before Us, those of the young Luc Martin

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with the unfortunate Théo Vanderputte in The Company of Men, and my own with my mother in Promise at Dawn, were exactly the same, and who, when I had invited her to lunch, had spent the whole time pointing out the similarities of theme and detail in the two works, down to the minutest verbal mannerism. I played the part of the conceited author, which is always very convincing. ‘‘Of course,’’ I said. ‘‘No one has noticed the extent to which Ajar has been influenced by me. In the examples you so justly quote, it would even be possible to talk of out-and-out plagiarism. But, well, he’s a young author. I’m not going to make a fuss about it. And in general, the influence my work exercises over young writers has not been sufficiently stressed. I’m very glad that you have realized it . . .’’ Laure Boulay’s beautiful eyes studied me attentively. I hope that by the time these pages appear she will have realized her dream: to become a special correspondent. During the whole of our conversation I was madly in love with her. I lose my heart very easily. I don’t think she was taken in. I believe that, out of kindness, she spared me . . . This sort of thing began to rain down from all sides. A retired French teacher, M. Gordier, pointed out to me that Momo’s fetish, ‘‘Arthur the umbrella,’’ had already belonged to young Josette, in The Company of Men . . . And that the whole of Ajar was already contained in The Dance of Genghis Cohn, down to the ‘‘Jewhole,’’ which plays the same role there as it does in Life Before Us . . . And that in this novel, the passage where Momo gives his dog to a rich

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lady so that the animal can have a happier life than his own, is a precise example of ‘‘recidivism’’ to the pages in The Company of Men where Luc gives his dog to a GI so he can take him to the Land of Cockaigne with him . . . Once again I replied that one mustn’t be too resentful toward a young author . . . ‘‘You must understand, dear sir, that it’s quite natural for a writer of my stature to influence the young . . .’’ I could cite many other passages whose identification would never have escaped any real professional. Including the python Cuddles, who appears under the name Pete the Strangler in my autobiographical tale, White Dog . . . I had made friends with him in Los Angeles. It would have been enough to read . . . I don’t want to indulge in an exegesis of my work, here: days and days after my death, I have other fish to fry. I simply want to say what my son, Diego, had already realized at the age of thirteen when he read Life Before Us: Momo and Madame Rosa were himself and his Spanish governess, Eugenia Muñoz Lacosta, who lavished such affection on him. Although suffering from phlebitis, which deformed her legs, she was forever climbing up the stairs leading from my son’s apartment to mine. Like Madame Rosa, ‘‘she deserved an elevator.’’ However different the two books may seem, The Roots of Heaven and Cuddles are one and the same lament about solitude. ‘‘Men need friendship,’’ says Morel, and if Cousin finally identifies himself with that underprivileged creature, the python, it is because in both The Roots of Heaven and Cuddles the question of the ‘‘protection of nature’’ is posed above all in terms of hu-

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193

man fraternity, so that no one should ever be either despised or humiliated . . . I still have to speak about my ‘‘second Goncourt Prize,’’ the one that was awarded to Life Before Us. When Cuddles appeared, it was one of the top favorites for the Renaudot Prize. Fearing the effect of the publicity on my anonymity, I withdrew my candidature in a letter supposed to have come from Brazil that was sent both to the jury and to Mercure de France. I regretted it at once. I’d clipped the wings of my book. My Cuddles had such need of friendship, and I had thrust it back into solitude. The following year, when it was a question of the Goncourt, my relationship with ‘‘Ajar’’ was already known, and if I had started the same maneuver no one would have doubted the reason: I had already won the Goncourt for The Roots of Heaven. But the decisive reason why I didn’t budge can be summed up thus: So what! Hell! It was on the urgent insistence of Maître Gisèle Halimi that I asked Paul Pavlowitch to ‘‘refuse’’ the prize. I owe a great debt of gratitude to my family and friends. For very many of them knew the secret and kept it to the end. Martine Carré, first and foremost, who was my secretary, to whom I dictated all the Ajars, or who copied them from my manuscripts. Pierre Michaut, of course, and his son Philippe. The friends of my adolescence, René, Roger, and Sylvia Agid. Jean Seberg, my exwife, and her husband, Dennis Berry. The people who, naturally, observed professional secrecy and took charge of the manuscripts and legal documents: Maître Charles-André Junod, of Geneva, Sydney Davis and Robert Lantz, of New York, Maître Arrighi, one of whose last cases this was, and his young partner, Maître

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Repiqué. My son, Diego, who, in spite of his youth, was content to wink at me when, in a television program, a critic from Lire, after having angrily demolished the work of Romain Gary, which was being defended by Geneviève Dorfmann, exclaimed: ‘‘Ah! Ajar— now there’s a talent of a quite different order!’’ There were some comic moments. In particular, when Paul Pavlowitch demanded the manuscripts from me, so as not to be at my mercy, and when I merely gave him the first drafts, and even that only after having had them photocopied, so as not to be at his. The scene where Jean Seberg wrapped up the said manuscripts, which I took to the safe as soon as they were ready, was worthy of a Courteline farce. And the gossip that came back to me from fashionable dinners where people pitied poor Romain Gary, who must be a little sad, a little jealous of the meteoric rise in the literary firmament of his cousin Émile Ajar, whereas he himself had acknowledged his decline in Your Ticket Is No Longer Valid . . . I’ve had a lot of fun. Good-bye, and thank you. Romain Gary March 21, 1979

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books, articles and interviews referred to in The Life and Death of Émile Ajar, which was published posthumously, are as follows:

Ajar, Émile. 1974. Gros-Câlin. Paris: Mercure de France. New edition by Jean-François Hangouët, with the missing chapters restored. Paris: Mercure de France, 2007. Referred to in this work as Cuddles. ———. 1975. La Vie devant soi. Paris: Mercure de France. Prix Goncourt. Published as Momo, translated by Ralph Mannheim, New York: Doubleday, 1978. Published as Life Before Us, New York: New Directions, 1986. ———. 1976. Pseudo. Paris: Mercure de France. Referred to in this work as Hocus Bogus. ———. 1979. L’Angoisse du roi Salomon. Paris: Mercure de France. Published as King Solomon, translated by Barbara Wright, New York: Harper and Row, 1983. Baby, Yvonne. 1975. Interview with Émile Ajar. Le Monde, October 10. Bogat, Shatan. 1974. Les Têtes de Stéphanie. Paris: Gallimard. Published as Direct Flight to Allah by René Deville, translated by J. Maxwell Brownjohn, London: Collins, 1975. Boulay, Laure. 1977. ‘‘Romain Gary, un écrivain très heureux.’’ Paris-Match, June 24. 195

196 Bibliography

Bouzerand, Jacques. 1975. Interview with Paul Pavlowitch. Le Point, November 10 and 17. Freustié, Jean. 1974. Review of Gros-Câlin, by Émile Ajar. Le Nouvel Observateur, September 30. Galey, Mathieu. Review of Pseudo, by Émile Ajar. L’Express, December 20, 1976. Gary, Romain. 1945. Éducation européenne. Paris: CalmannLévy. Published as Forest of Anger, translated by Viola Garvin, London: Cresset, 1944. Published as A European Education, New York: Harper and Row, 1960. ———. 1946. Tulipe. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. ———. 1948. Le Grand Vestiaire. Paris: Gallimard. Published as The Company of Men, translated by Joseph Barnes, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950. ———. 1956. Les Racines du ciel. Paris: Gallimard. Prix Goncourt. Published as The Roots of Heaven, translated by Jonathan Griffin, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958. ———. 1964. The Ski Bum. New York: Harper. ———. 1965. Pour Sganarelle. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1967. La Danse de Gengis Cohn. Paris: Gallimard. Published as The Dance of Genghis Cohn, translated by the author with Camilla Sykes, Cleveland: World Publishing, 1968. ———. 1968. Birds in Peru. Film. Universal-Production, France. Released in French as Les Oiseaux vont mourir au Pérou, 1968. ———. 1968. La Tête coupable. Paris: Gallimard. Published as The Guilty Head, Cleveland: World Publishing, 1969.

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