The house was in Saint-Aubert-sur-Orne; it was a
hamlet dependent on Putanges, but it didn’t appear on every GPS, the owner
explained. He was in his forties, like me, his grey hair cut short, almost
shorn, like mine, and he had the air of someone quite sinister, the kind of man
that scares me; he drove a Mercedes G class, a point in common between
middle-aged men that helps a germ of conversation come to life. Even better
than that, he had a G 500 and I had a G 350, which established an acceptable
mini-hierarchy between us. He came from Caen; I wondered what he did for a
living, I couldn’t quite place him. He was an architect, he told me. A failed
architect, he said by way of clarification. Well, like most architects, he
added. Amongst other things he was responsible for Appart’City in the urban
redevelopment zone in Caen Nord where
Camille had lived for a week before really entering my life; that wasn’t
anything to brag about, he observed; no, it really wasn’t.
He obviously wanted to know how long I planned to stay; that was a good question, it could have been three days or three years. We agreed quite easily on a one-month lease, automatically renewable; I would pay him at the beginning of each month, a cheque was probably OK as he could put them through his business account. It wasn’t even to save on taxes, he added with disgust, it’s just that it was boring filling in the tax declaration – he never knew if he was supposed to put it under BZ or BY, so its was simpler not to put anything at all; I wasn’t surprised, I had spotted that casual attitude among independent professionals before. He never came back to the house, and he was beginning to sense he never would; since his divorce two years previously he had lost a lot of his motivation with regard to property, and lots of other things as well. Our lives were so similar that it was almost becoming oppressive.
He had few tenants, and anyway none before the summer months, and would see about taking the notice off the website. And even in summer ,business wasn’t very goods. ‘There’s no internet,’ he said to me, suddenly anxious, ‘I hope you knew that – I’m petty sure I mentioned it on the website’. I told him I did know and that I accepted the idea. I then saw a brief movement of fear in his eyes. There is no shortage of depressives who want to isolate themselves, spend a few months in the woods to ‘come to terms with themselves’; but people who agree to cut themselves off the Internet for an indefinite periods without even wincing are up to no good – I read that in his anxious expression. “I’m not going to kill myself,’ I said with a smile that I hoped was disarming, but which must in reality have been quite creepy. ‘Well, not right now’, I added by way of confession.
He groaned and concentrated on the technical aspects of the house, which were incidentally quite simple. The electric radiators were regulated by a thermostat and I just ad to turn a button to get the desired temperature; hot water came directly from the boiler; I had absolutely nothing to do. I could make a wood fire if I wanted; he showed me the firelighters, the store of wood. Mobile phones worked more or less, SFR not at all, Buoygues quite well, Orange he had forgotten about. Otherwise there was a landline, but he hadn’t put in a metering system because he preferred to trust people, he added with a wave of his arm that he seemed to use to mock his own attitude, he just hooped I wasn’t going to send my nights calling Japan. ‘Certainly not Japan,’ I cut in with an abruptness that I hadn’t premeditated; he frowned and I sensed he wanted to ask me some questions to try and find out more, but after a few seconds he gave up, turned around and headed for his 4 X 4. I thought that we would see each other again, that this was the start of a relationship, but before setting off he handed me a business card: ‘My address, for the rent . . .’
So now I was on earth, as Rousseau writes in his Reveries, without any brother, neighbor, friend, or society but myself. That was accurate enough, but the resemblance stopped there: in the following sentence Rousseau proclaimed himself ‘the most sociable and the most loving of humans’. I didn’t fall under that category; I have mentioned Aymeric, I have mentioned a certain woman, the final list is short. Unlike Rousseau, neither could I say I had been ‘banished from human society by unanimous agreement’; humanity was not in league against me; it was simply that there hadn’t been anything, that my connection with the world, which had already been limited, had gradually dwindled to zero, until nothing could halt the slide.
I turned up the thermostat before deciding to go to sleep, or to least to lie down on the bed – sleeping was something else – it was the heart of winter, the days had started to lengthen but the nights were still long, and in the middle of the woods they would be impenetrable.
I finally slipped into a fitful sleep, not without repeated recourse to the aged calvados from Centre Leclerc in Coutances. There had not been a single dream before it, but I was awoken abruptly in the dead of night by the sense of something brushing and caressing my shoulder. I got back up and paced around the room to calm down, and went to the window: the darkness was total, it must have been during that phase of the moon when it is completely concealed and not a single star could be seen, the cloud cover was too low. It was two o’clock in the morning, only halfway through the night, in monasteries it was the hour when vigils are held; I turned on every available light without really feeling assured: I had dreamt about Camille, that was certain, in my dream it was Camille who had caressed my shoulders, as she used o do every night a few years ago, many years ago in fact. I hardly expected that I would still be happy, but I still hoped to escape dementia, pure and simple.
I lay down and glanced around the room in a circle: it formed a perfect equilateral triangle, the two sloping walls met in the middle where the roof beam was. Then I understood the trap that had closed in on me: it was in a bedroom precisely identical to this one that I had slept with Camille we every night in Clecy during the first three months of our life together. There was nothing surprising about coincidences as such, all Norman houses are built on more or less the same lines, and we were only twenty minutes from Clecy; but I hadn’t anticipated this: the two houses didn’t look similar from the outside as the one in Clecy was half-timbered, while the walls of this one were rough stone- probably sandstone.
I got dressed hastily and went back down to the dining room; it was freezing and the fire hadn’t taken; I had never been good at lighting fires. I didn’t understand the assembly of logs and kindling you were supposed to build – so in many respects I was a long way from being the model of masculinity – Harrison Ford, let’s say – that would have liked to be; well, for now that wasn’t the issue and an excruciating pain twisted my heart while memories came back in a steady flow; it isn’t the future but the past that kills you, that comes back to torment and undermine you, and effectively ends up killing you. The dining room was also identical to the one in which I dined for three months with Camille after shopping at the artisanal boucherie-charcuterie in Clecy, at the equally artisanal boulangerie-patisserie, at various greengrocers’ shops as well, and after she had set to work at the stove with an enthusiasm that is so painful in retrospect. I recognize the row of copper saucepans, which gleamed gently on the stone wall. I recognized the massive walnut dresser, its shelves perforate to show off the Rouen porcelain, with its colorful and naive patter, to its best advantage. I recognized the oak grandfather clock, stopped forever at some point in the past at one o’clock- some people stopped them at the death of a son or a close relative; others at the time of France’s declaration of war on Germany in 1914; others at the time when the vote was taken for absolute power to be granted to Marshall Petain.
I couldn’t stay there like that, and picked up a big metal key that gave access to the other wing; it wasn’t very habitable right now, the architect had warned me, and was impossible to heat, but well, if I stayed until summer I’d be able to enjoy it. I found myself in an enormous room, which in other times must have been the main room in the house, and which was now filled with a stack of armchairs and garden furniture, but a whole wall was occupied by bookshelves on which I was surprised to discover a complete works of the Marquis de Sade. It must have been from the 19th century; it was fully leather-bound with various gilded flourishes on the boards and the edge – fuck, that must have cost an arm and a leg, I said to myself briefly, flicking through the book which was illustrated with numerous engravings; well, I lingered particularly over the engravings and the curious point was that I didn’t understand them at all: different sexual positions were represented involving varying numbers of protagonists, but I couldn’t locate myself among them, or imagine the place that I might have occupied in the whole thing; it got me nowhere and so I headed towards the mezzanine - it must once have been more funky and cool up there, but what remained was disemboweled sofas with moldy fabric, half upside-down on the floor. There was also a record player and a collection of discs, mostly 45s, which I identified after a few moments as twist records –you could tell by the postures of the dancers on the covers, while the singers and musicians had fallen into oblivion once and for all.
I remembered the architect had seemed uneasy through-out the visit, he had stayed long enough to explain to me how things worked- ten minutes at the absolute maximum – and he had told me several times that he would have been better off selling this house if the legal formalities weren’t so complicated, and more particularly if he had a chance of finding a buyer. In fact he must have had a past in this house, a past whose outlines I struggle to define –somewhere between Marquis de Sade and the twist – a past that he needed to get rid of, even though it wouldn’t open up the possibility of a future; but in any case the contents of that wing evoked nothing for me that I could have encountered in the house in Clecy: it was a different pathology, a different history, and I went back to bed almost comforted, since it’s true that in the middle of our own dramas we are reassured by the existence of others that we have been spared.
He obviously wanted to know how long I planned to stay; that was a good question, it could have been three days or three years. We agreed quite easily on a one-month lease, automatically renewable; I would pay him at the beginning of each month, a cheque was probably OK as he could put them through his business account. It wasn’t even to save on taxes, he added with disgust, it’s just that it was boring filling in the tax declaration – he never knew if he was supposed to put it under BZ or BY, so its was simpler not to put anything at all; I wasn’t surprised, I had spotted that casual attitude among independent professionals before. He never came back to the house, and he was beginning to sense he never would; since his divorce two years previously he had lost a lot of his motivation with regard to property, and lots of other things as well. Our lives were so similar that it was almost becoming oppressive.
He had few tenants, and anyway none before the summer months, and would see about taking the notice off the website. And even in summer ,business wasn’t very goods. ‘There’s no internet,’ he said to me, suddenly anxious, ‘I hope you knew that – I’m petty sure I mentioned it on the website’. I told him I did know and that I accepted the idea. I then saw a brief movement of fear in his eyes. There is no shortage of depressives who want to isolate themselves, spend a few months in the woods to ‘come to terms with themselves’; but people who agree to cut themselves off the Internet for an indefinite periods without even wincing are up to no good – I read that in his anxious expression. “I’m not going to kill myself,’ I said with a smile that I hoped was disarming, but which must in reality have been quite creepy. ‘Well, not right now’, I added by way of confession.
He groaned and concentrated on the technical aspects of the house, which were incidentally quite simple. The electric radiators were regulated by a thermostat and I just ad to turn a button to get the desired temperature; hot water came directly from the boiler; I had absolutely nothing to do. I could make a wood fire if I wanted; he showed me the firelighters, the store of wood. Mobile phones worked more or less, SFR not at all, Buoygues quite well, Orange he had forgotten about. Otherwise there was a landline, but he hadn’t put in a metering system because he preferred to trust people, he added with a wave of his arm that he seemed to use to mock his own attitude, he just hooped I wasn’t going to send my nights calling Japan. ‘Certainly not Japan,’ I cut in with an abruptness that I hadn’t premeditated; he frowned and I sensed he wanted to ask me some questions to try and find out more, but after a few seconds he gave up, turned around and headed for his 4 X 4. I thought that we would see each other again, that this was the start of a relationship, but before setting off he handed me a business card: ‘My address, for the rent . . .’
So now I was on earth, as Rousseau writes in his Reveries, without any brother, neighbor, friend, or society but myself. That was accurate enough, but the resemblance stopped there: in the following sentence Rousseau proclaimed himself ‘the most sociable and the most loving of humans’. I didn’t fall under that category; I have mentioned Aymeric, I have mentioned a certain woman, the final list is short. Unlike Rousseau, neither could I say I had been ‘banished from human society by unanimous agreement’; humanity was not in league against me; it was simply that there hadn’t been anything, that my connection with the world, which had already been limited, had gradually dwindled to zero, until nothing could halt the slide.
I turned up the thermostat before deciding to go to sleep, or to least to lie down on the bed – sleeping was something else – it was the heart of winter, the days had started to lengthen but the nights were still long, and in the middle of the woods they would be impenetrable.
I finally slipped into a fitful sleep, not without repeated recourse to the aged calvados from Centre Leclerc in Coutances. There had not been a single dream before it, but I was awoken abruptly in the dead of night by the sense of something brushing and caressing my shoulder. I got back up and paced around the room to calm down, and went to the window: the darkness was total, it must have been during that phase of the moon when it is completely concealed and not a single star could be seen, the cloud cover was too low. It was two o’clock in the morning, only halfway through the night, in monasteries it was the hour when vigils are held; I turned on every available light without really feeling assured: I had dreamt about Camille, that was certain, in my dream it was Camille who had caressed my shoulders, as she used o do every night a few years ago, many years ago in fact. I hardly expected that I would still be happy, but I still hoped to escape dementia, pure and simple.
I lay down and glanced around the room in a circle: it formed a perfect equilateral triangle, the two sloping walls met in the middle where the roof beam was. Then I understood the trap that had closed in on me: it was in a bedroom precisely identical to this one that I had slept with Camille we every night in Clecy during the first three months of our life together. There was nothing surprising about coincidences as such, all Norman houses are built on more or less the same lines, and we were only twenty minutes from Clecy; but I hadn’t anticipated this: the two houses didn’t look similar from the outside as the one in Clecy was half-timbered, while the walls of this one were rough stone- probably sandstone.
I got dressed hastily and went back down to the dining room; it was freezing and the fire hadn’t taken; I had never been good at lighting fires. I didn’t understand the assembly of logs and kindling you were supposed to build – so in many respects I was a long way from being the model of masculinity – Harrison Ford, let’s say – that would have liked to be; well, for now that wasn’t the issue and an excruciating pain twisted my heart while memories came back in a steady flow; it isn’t the future but the past that kills you, that comes back to torment and undermine you, and effectively ends up killing you. The dining room was also identical to the one in which I dined for three months with Camille after shopping at the artisanal boucherie-charcuterie in Clecy, at the equally artisanal boulangerie-patisserie, at various greengrocers’ shops as well, and after she had set to work at the stove with an enthusiasm that is so painful in retrospect. I recognize the row of copper saucepans, which gleamed gently on the stone wall. I recognized the massive walnut dresser, its shelves perforate to show off the Rouen porcelain, with its colorful and naive patter, to its best advantage. I recognized the oak grandfather clock, stopped forever at some point in the past at one o’clock- some people stopped them at the death of a son or a close relative; others at the time of France’s declaration of war on Germany in 1914; others at the time when the vote was taken for absolute power to be granted to Marshall Petain.
I couldn’t stay there like that, and picked up a big metal key that gave access to the other wing; it wasn’t very habitable right now, the architect had warned me, and was impossible to heat, but well, if I stayed until summer I’d be able to enjoy it. I found myself in an enormous room, which in other times must have been the main room in the house, and which was now filled with a stack of armchairs and garden furniture, but a whole wall was occupied by bookshelves on which I was surprised to discover a complete works of the Marquis de Sade. It must have been from the 19th century; it was fully leather-bound with various gilded flourishes on the boards and the edge – fuck, that must have cost an arm and a leg, I said to myself briefly, flicking through the book which was illustrated with numerous engravings; well, I lingered particularly over the engravings and the curious point was that I didn’t understand them at all: different sexual positions were represented involving varying numbers of protagonists, but I couldn’t locate myself among them, or imagine the place that I might have occupied in the whole thing; it got me nowhere and so I headed towards the mezzanine - it must once have been more funky and cool up there, but what remained was disemboweled sofas with moldy fabric, half upside-down on the floor. There was also a record player and a collection of discs, mostly 45s, which I identified after a few moments as twist records –you could tell by the postures of the dancers on the covers, while the singers and musicians had fallen into oblivion once and for all.
I remembered the architect had seemed uneasy through-out the visit, he had stayed long enough to explain to me how things worked- ten minutes at the absolute maximum – and he had told me several times that he would have been better off selling this house if the legal formalities weren’t so complicated, and more particularly if he had a chance of finding a buyer. In fact he must have had a past in this house, a past whose outlines I struggle to define –somewhere between Marquis de Sade and the twist – a past that he needed to get rid of, even though it wouldn’t open up the possibility of a future; but in any case the contents of that wing evoked nothing for me that I could have encountered in the house in Clecy: it was a different pathology, a different history, and I went back to bed almost comforted, since it’s true that in the middle of our own dramas we are reassured by the existence of others that we have been spared.
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