A French Novel

5

FRAGMENTS OF AN ARREST

You are the one I have been searching for all this time,

in the throbbing vaults, on the dance floors where I never danced,

amid the forest of people,

beneath the light bridges and the sheets of skin, at the end of painted toenails hanging over the end of blazing beds,

in the depths of these eyes that hold no promises,

in the back yards of ramshackle buildings, among lonely dancers and drunken barmen,

between green rubbish bins and silver convertibles,

I looked for you among fractured stars and violet perfumes,

in icy hands and syrupy kisses, at the bottom of rickety staircases,

at the top of brightly lit elevators,

in pallid joys, in seized opportunities, in fierce handshakes,

and in the end I had to stop looking for you

under a starless vault,

on white boats,

in downy necklines and dark hotels,

in mauve mornings and ivory skies, among marshy dawns,

my vanished childhood.

The police wanted to confirm my identity; I did not protest, it was something I too needed to confirm. ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ asks Lear in Shakespeare’s play.

I haven’t slept a wink all night. I don’t know whether the day has dawned: my sky is a crackling white fluorescent tube. I am squeezed into a lightbox. Deprived of space and time, I occupy a container of eternity.

A custody cell is the part of France where maximum pain is concentrated into the minimum square footage.

It is impossible to cling to my youth.

I have to dig deep within myself, like the prisoner Michael Scofield digging a tunnel in Prison Break. To remember in order to go over the wall.

But how can someone take refuge in memories when he has none?

My childhood is not some paradise lost, nor some ancestral trauma. I imagine it more as a slow period of obedience. People have a tendency to idealise their childhood, but a child is first and foremost a bundle that you feed, carry and put to bed. In exchange for bed and board, the bundle conforms on the whole to policies and procedures.

Those who are nostalgic about their childhood are people who miss the time when they were looked after by others.

In the end, a police station is like a day-care centre: they undress you, feed you, keep an eye on you, stop you from leaving. It’s not illogical that my first night in prison should take me back so far.

There are no more adults, only children of all ages. To write a book about my childhood therefore means talking about myself in the present. Peter Pan is amnesiac.

It’s curious that we say someone ‘saved his own skin’ when he runs away. Isn’t it possible to save your skin while staying put?

I can taste salt in my mouth, just as I used to at the beach at Cénitz when I accidentally ended up swallowing seawater.

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