Black Forest Read online

  SHE ATTENDS CATHOLIC SCHOOL AND lives in a residential neighborhood in a nearby suburb of Paris. On her daily walk home along shaded streets, she befriends a whimsical, outspoken girl in her grade, she who has always tended to keep in the background, preferring not to attract attention. During a class trip to England, the students who’ve stayed behind in France learn of her accidental death on the corner of a city street, and all they retain of the story is that the shy little girl had neglected to look in the direction from which cars never came at home, and been hit by a bus while riding her bike. There was also the image of an arm caught in the spokes of a wheel that had been described by a witness and remained frozen like a monstrous and incomprehensible collage in the mind of her boisterous best friend and neighbor, just as it did for her mother, an Englishwoman who wept bitterly over the news.

  WHEN SHE DISCOVERED JACQUES BARATIER’S short film Piège, made just before she was born, the thirty-two-year-old woman couldn’t help but reflect on the connection between its two actresses, both of them filled with imagination and vitality as they run in costume through a black-and-white château and throw eggs at each other’s faces. She couldn’t help thinking of how these two young beauties—one blonde and the other brunette—would each lose a daughter—one brunette, the other blonde—at about the same age, under dramatic circumstances that would be reported in the newspapers.

  WE’D FEEL MORE AT EASE in this tiny square than in the middle of the wide, busy thoroughfare, since here, people walk through the iron gates as if opening a parenthesis: unhurried, their gazes meandering, slowly taking each other in, acknowledging a new proximity that would give us all the false impression of having known one another, however briefly. We’d form an ephemeral group, bound merely by chance, yet nonetheless existing together at a particular moment. These faces would grow familiar in the space of an afternoon spent seated on a bench before returning to an anonymity that evoked nothing in us once we’d fallen back into the rhythm of the street, our foreheads once again furrowed with frowns, our steps hitting the pavement with determination.

  ON ANOTHER DECEMBER 31ST, THE nearly forty-year-old woman receives news from Berlin that a baby has been born and remembers that it’s also the anniversary of the death by overdose of a radio journalist she’d known, of whom it was said, at the time, that he’d been retreating more and more often into studio restrooms or café basements to snort cocaine, and that the nightlife of parties and openings had stealthily led him astray, revealing in him a certain fragility or, perhaps, a desire for oblivion. She recalls something the brother of this friend had written in early January, following an exchange of messages in which the word heart had appeared once or twice: it’s bleeding, but it’s beating.

  ONE DAY, A YEAR OR two earlier, the thirty-eight-year-old woman accidentally came upon some letters stashed in a drawer of her desk, an ancient roll-top secretary inherited from her mother, while hiding her boyfriend’s cigarettes to keep him from smoking. She had to constantly change her hiding place since he always found them in the end, whether by turning the apartment upside down or threatening her into confessing. This time, she’d tried to hide the pack in a secret compartment of the old family heirloom: in addition to the six drawers, there was an undetectable sliding panel beneath which you could safely store a few small objects. As she stretched out her arm toward the back of the compartment, the woman felt a stuffed, folded envelope and promptly removed it. Inside were a dozen or so small sheets of paper, all covered in blue ink: letters written by a certain Pierre O. (psychoanalyst, rue du Val-de-Grace), from the time when her mother had begun to question her future as a housewife and decided to “see someone”, with whom she’d apparently fallen in love. The whole family thought that this correspondence, of which they’d become dimly aware in one of those hazy moments when things are guessed at without being named, had long ago been burned to ashes or torn up in an instant by the furious, jealous father. It was, in fact, at the beginning of her analysis that the mother had decided to leave him and to establish her own private practice, among other things. As she stared at the return address, the thirty-eight-year-old woman thought of a friend she’d met after high school who had lived on that same street. To confirm, she took out an old address book from another drawer and noted with astonishment that the friend in question had lived in the same building. She called her straight away to ask if she’d known this Pierre O. But of course, of course, he was our downstairs neighbor. This is how she learned that in those years, she had unwittingly spent hours—entire evenings—in the apartment one floor up from her mother’s great forbidden love.

  HE’S YOUNG, ITALIAN, AN AVID photographer, and, while on vacation, meets a Frenchman who shares this same passion. They become fast friends, keep in touch by letter and talk for hours at a time on the phone, discussing their work and their shared desire to follow an artistic path in life. They try to see each other at least once a year, when one or the other finds time to travel, but it’s usually the French friend who gladly goes to spend a few days in Rome, most often in the summer. One day, he learns that his friend suffered a stroke while leaving his house, that he’d keeled over on the landing when he was on his way out to buy a loaf of bread or some other such thing.

  HE RIDES LIKE A FIEND, always gunning the engine of his huge motorcycle and trying to break his latest record. Flying down the highway one day at top speed, he loses his balance or hits an object and is dragged a great distance before he’s finally catapulted like a mortar shell—the engine flying in the opposite direction—and lands, miraculously intact, in a green field of wheat. He’s not dead: he manages to get up and walk, takes one step after another through the tall grass and staggers to the edge of the highway, totally disoriented by the violence of the shock. Too stunned to realize what he’s doing, he begins to cross the smooth, dull strip of tarmac his footsteps seem to float over as if cushioned by a layer of cotton, freed from the effort of only a few seconds ago when his feet sank heavily into the freshly turned earth. He does not, let us hope, have time to see the truck coming.

  ON RETURNING HOME FROM A trip to Peru, he starts feeling ill and decides to have a few tests done. Over there, an indigenous man had read his fortune in some coca leaves and thought he’d seen a bad omen. Now he faces therapy, radiation, an endless stream of medical charts: it’s no use operating, since everyone is well aware that when the organ in question is attacked, it almost always means a fatal outcome. With what remains of his will to banter, he says of the Institut Gustave-Roussy that it’s not looking all that rosy. He dies a few weeks later, after submitting without much conviction to the proposed care plan.

  Several years ago, when he was not yet twenty, his father had suddenly vanished after taking his small boat out onto a lake. The boat had been found, as had the oars, but missing was any other evidence of his survival or death. For years it remained an unresolved tragedy: the man’s wife and children, abandoned and faced with the incomprehensible, would never know what had happened. They’d make vague attempts at carrying out an investigation; they’d imagine a thousand scenarios and continue, all their lives, to wonder if the man had been kidnapped and why, or if he’d run away to begin a new life on the other side of the planet, perhaps marrying a foreigner, someone with whom he might have started a second family.

  SHE’S THE SAME AGE AS my sister. Since childhood, she’s taken horseback riding lessons several times a week and participated in cross-country races and obstacle courses on the weekends. The parents who accompany their children know that there are sometimes accidents; they’re all too aware of the dangerousness of certain courses, and shudder before the impressive size of the fords and stone walls. Yet every Sunday, rain or shine, they wake at 5:00 or 6:00 a.m. and come in numbers to the small suburban towns, wearing raincoats and carrying cameras. She continues to practice the sport now that she’s in college and, it would seem, recently engaged. During an especially arduous course, on a day when the soil is soaking wet, a poorly fixed bar falls
to the ground and her horse panics: she is thrown backward into a ditch as her mount tramples her stomach, trying to escape.

  SHE WAS GIVING HER BABY a bath when the landline rang; she went to answer it, leaving the child alone for a brief instant, and on returning found him lifeless, face down in the few centimeters of water that had been enough to drown him.

  I DON’T KNOW IF SHE would care to hear that, years later, I met a woman with mousy gray hair, my boss, in a sense, during an internship. This woman had the ability to perfectly formulate her responses to the shoddier work we did—to correct us rigorously, but not harshly—while also possessing a kind of exuberant imagination that fascinated me and put everyone else in a carefree, jaunty mood that sometimes almost gave way to hysteria. One day, a postcard maker stopped by to sit in one of our meetings. He’d known the staff a long time and printed a whole series of cards for us to send as holiday greetings or to use as correspondence with our partners. I remember him as being in his early forties, completely independent and more or less settled in his personal and professional life, though none of this had kept him, some time earlier, from asking my boss to “adopt” him—and even before she’d had a chance to respond, he’d taken to calling her maman. This joke brought even more merriment to the already lighthearted office atmosphere, and in no time it was as though this new bond of parentage had been validated by the entire staff, who wouldn’t miss out on a laugh for anything. I was terribly jealous of his original idea, which he’d quite simply stolen from me before I’d known to have it. I too would’ve liked to ask this of her, but it was too late now, and besides, my boss already had, in addition to this interloper, two children of her own.

  * * *

  THEY REAPPEARED AT ARBITRARY MOMENTS, according to their own capricious calendar, springing up by chance from one thought or another, or awaiting us at the end of a long digression; they resurfaced after a few years or remained ever present in our minds. They peopled daily life. They hovered above our heads and warned us against certain dangers, for in thinking of a tragedy or a fatal accident that had befallen someone we knew, we were forced to pay attention. Some stories would come back to us with all the catchiness of a pop song chorus, a few overheard notes enough to set it playing, and then we’d find ourselves humming it over and over all day long without choosing or wanting to. Most of the stories were somehow linked to those who’d told them, and the details surrounding their telling, too, remained bizarrely present. This was how the death of the motorcyclist who was enamored with speed—he’d worked at a café where the narrator of his crash was a regular—became strangely associated with the perfectly bland decor of the restaurant sous-sol where his violent end was described: with the images of a soccer match projected on the giant screen before a group of increasingly drunk Koreans, the embossed patterns on a recycled paper napkin stained with smudges of noodle broth, and the slightly forced smile of the waitress whose tight red suit and black stilettos were curiously chic for the place.

  YOU MIGHT ON OCCASION DRAW a momentary blank, forgetting people with whom, for instance, you’d gone to school, then quite suddenly recall having learned a few weeks earlier—with no further details—that that tall fellow, one of the most memorable students at Beaux-Arts, was also dead. And all at once you’d remember the giant, stooping beanpole with his straw-colored hair hanging down to his shoulders and that long nose flanked by dark creases (in your sketchbook of classmates-as-animals, he’d been the Afghan hound), who played the clown between classes, often mimicking the peculiar laugh of one of your instructors, his deep, booming voice launching into a TSSSSSS that echoed throughout the studios and made you shudder and smile at once. On immense rolls of paper that he spread out and tacked to the wall, this boy made huge charcoal drawings—portraits of his mother in which she resembled a witch or a prostitute, wrinkled and decrepit, lying naked on a bed or with a small white dog in her lap. And then there was that other classmate, stocky and dark haired, with thick eyebrows, silky lashes and eyes black as obsidian, who seemed to already be seriously engaged in artistic thought. He could often be spotted in film class on Fridays, one of a group of loyal aficionados who gathered in a lecture hall where there was always some problem with cables and connections, and the professor, a former Cahiers du Cinema critic who dreamed of directing films, took half an hour to track down the remote control and make the first image appear on the tiny monitor. At the end of the morning, everyone would join him for lunch at one of the three charmless cafes in the newly built town, and they’d draw out the discussion over a frugal croque monsieur that seemed a product of the same radical mentality they cultivated at the school, one that apparently reached as far as the brasserie’s kitchen: a refusal to charm, a fear of being tricked by prettiness, and a penchant for minimalism. Then the whole group would return to the lecture hall and huddle in the dark, with stomachs tied in knots from an overly strong and bitter espresso, to watch a second or third film and discuss some more. One day, the former students learned that their dark-haired classmate with the velvety gaze had killed himself in his studio after draining a bottle of whiskey.

  Not long before that, they’d found out while reading the newspaper from back to front that their old professor, who must have been lonely and deeply depressed, had also put an end to his life, that he’d made the same final gesture as a filmmaker he admired and to whom he had devoted a book.

  SOMETIMES, AFTER RUNNING INTO PEOPLE you hadn’t seen in ages, you might find yourself on a street corner or at a bus stop, taking a hasty inventory of all the friends you’d kept track of or who were now absent. You’d slip into a roll call of shared acquaintances, only the details you’d gathered about their lives were spotty at best, and in the end you rarely ever knew what had happened to this person or that. Having stumbled into the neatly coiffed bob an old school friend’s mother had sported for years—she hadn’t changed much aside from her hair which, thick as ever, was now streaked with gray—you learned (at once touched by this reunion and unnerved by all the things it suddenly brought to mind; a bit impatient, too, with the slowness of her speech, which had clearly worsened with age) that one of the twins, whose identical appearance had so impressed everyone at school in those days, had prematurely left this world.

  CLASS PHOTOS TOLD MUCH THE same story: pictures of generations of schoolchildren—lined up by height, either seated or standing, by a photographer who could gauge their dimensions with a quick glance but who also, according to certain students who resented being stuck with the little kids when they were just as tall as the others, sometimes flubbed it—told the story of how their paths would diverge and lead off in unknown directions. Those smiling, glum-eyed or grimacing children who waited somewhat dubiously for a bird to pop out of the camera, who posed in front of chestnut trees and brick facades with identical windows, all those perfectly aligned faces told you, one by one, that they would have totally disparate and unrelated destinies; that some would lead calm, uneventful lives, while others would suffer terrible fates, fall seriously ill, mourn several loved ones, or, on the contrary, would find themselves blessed with luck and opportunity, would settle abroad, move to the countryside, take over the apartments and businesses of their parents in the neighborhoods where they grew up. Seeing all those eyes looking straight ahead, the contours of faces brought together for a moment by an accident of geography and the fact that they were about the same age; seeing the silhouettes of children who played together for now but would lose touch far sooner than they imagined, you could be quite certain that in just a few years it would be impossible to reassemble the exact same group. You’d wonder, too, how they might have changed in appearance or manner, which ones you would still recognize, and which would have become other people entirely.

  Every so often, you’d catch yourself thinking of all the people whose lives were now far removed from yours yet whose names kept coming back to mind, always just as familiar. You never got very far, though, in the exercise of imagining what they’d done
in life, whether for lack of concrete details or of the desire to seek them out, and besides, it was better not to learn too much, not to hope for a reunion, in order to spare you both the pain of having to endure those awkward attempts to fill the silence once you sat down together, or your mutual helplessness when faced with the almost inevitable, utterly depressing collapse of all complicity.

  ONE DAY, AFTER OPENING THE newspaper on the terrace of a café, your eye landed on a portrait of him at the center of a black and white page. At first it was surprising to see a photo of this face that had grown familiar to you after multiple sightings at the Cinémathèque without knowing the occasion for this special recognition, and, weirdly, your first impulse was to say his name out loud as if you wanted to identify him before any of the other readers, or at least before the people sitting next to you at the table, their newspapers still folded up in front of them. This momentary elation quickly gave way to a terrible shock when your gaze fell on the headline announcing he’d died two days before. Was he being described as a director or a filmmaker? He had himself written an essay on the question, in which he sought to define precisely what distinguished the two: in short, the director-cum-filmmaker had developed a body of work, a particular universe whose existence added a new stone to the edifice of cinema, and more often than not, it wasn’t up to them, but to history, to decide. As you flipped through the newspaper on the café terrace before an espresso whose thin layer of foam—for the moment, intact—hid the blackness beneath, your eye distracted by the dance of an amnesiac pigeon that kept pecking at the same old cigarette butt twenty times in a row, you experienced the discouraging sensation that things came too quickly to an end, always cut short at the wrong moment (but how could it be otherwise?), while a ray of morning sun warmed the air and lines of cars waited, engines revving, at the crossroads.