...more

Nothing can make sense of how senseless unhappiness is. Grown used to this need we have to understand everything we too quickly forget—because of all the breaking up, breaking down, breaking hearts when things come to an end—that there were moments of sharing and selflessness, moments of—for want of a better word—happiness. These moments are irreplaceable.


I’m forty years old. I live in Paris. I’m gay. I teach French literature. And I am all too familiar with literary tricks not to be on guard, from the word go, against a too self-conscious virtuosity: all I want is to tell what happened in the plainest, most straightforward way, to head straight for my goal—this boy. Because I loved him. Too much, too perfectly, too imperfectly you’ll see for yourself. And because I still love him. But did I ever really know him?


And if I speak to you directly as if you were here, listening to me, I have a reason: within the mystery of these pages, the silence of these signs, the twists and turns of these lines, I am hoping that you will love as I have loved, that you will live as I have lived, that you will examine your life the way I am examining mine. Literature has produced too much literature for itself and by itself, defining its own structures and styles, its objectives, fashioning and refining its arcane rhetoric. Matters for literary cliques. Literature has forgotten how to live. This is my first novel.


Of course, this is autobiographical. But I’m not dictating it into a tape recorder and I won’t make it smell sweet like a bar of soap. Where does the story end, where does the novel begin? This is the tale of my outburst. Had we forgotten how good the struggle felt, how rough it was? How senseless? How happy I am: I am not alone anymore. And everything is beginning again.


I have an apartment in the Batignolles section of Paris, on the third floor, no elevator, with an unblocked view of the courtyard on one side, and on the open trench of the Gare Saint-Lazare train yards on the other. Yes, I did say trench because when I first visited the place seventeen years ago (I had just passed my examination and had been appointed to the high school of Butte, where I’m still teaching)—when I leaned out of the window of my room-to-be and looked down, my head began to spin. Suddenly, the ground dropped away twice the height of the building; and then there were those rails in perfect rows. Those days were still a few steam engines, and steams of smoke crawling along, tattering and fading away, passing obstructions: the lines of the tracks reappeared all the more straight and gleaming. Sometimes I saw the slanting rays of the noonday sun strike the bottom of this trench and make the metal sing like a sword’s.


In this neighborhood there’s a church where once a year you can still see girls making their first communion in white lace dresses. The church stands on a square where men used to pick each other up at night by a pissoir. There were police raids. Roving thugs and muggings. You really couldn’t tell after a while who was defending whom, and from whom. Those were times when tender nights could end up in tragedy. Toward the end of the sixties, a body was found one morning, stabbed to death, completely disfigured. Without any pants on. The pissoir was torn down. Like all the pissoirs in Paris. They planted trees in their place. During the day on the square around the church mothers gather with their children, baby carriages, babies, and there are old people on the benches who don’t say a word, to anyone. In this neighborhood pastry shops are open with a passion on Sundays, the bread is as crusty as the bakers themselves. The grocery stores belong to Algerians and are as cluttered as open markets. Home delivery. Across from my building, there is a bar, The Lizard. The owner has a white Ford Capri convertible. My name is Pierre. I almost forgot about the shoemaker. In the window of his shop he put up a sign: “Only Real Leather.”


The façade of the building was cleaned. The staircase is spotless. You have to wipe off your feet twice. Once before going through the lobby, so you don’t leave footprints on the tile floor. And again, after crossing the courtyard, because every step of the staircase is waxed. I never put up my name on my apartment door. Courtyard staircase, third floor, that says all you need. I rent the place.


Four small rooms. A dining room and a living room on the courtyard side, a bedroom and my study on the train-yard side, and a hallway in between. Off to the side, near the front door, there’s a bathroom where you can easily get black and blue, and a kitchen where you have no choice but to stand up straight and without really moving turn your whole body around to fix meals. A year and a half ago I had the wall between the dinging room and the living room torn down: this new room became my study. And my former study, a spare bedroom. Why, for whom? I was hoping someone would arrive. At last. To stay a while. I’m formally declaring my identity, or at least, the identity of the story to come. A year and a half ago, for my thirty-ninth birthday, I realized that I did not fit into my apartment very well. To work in, I presented myself with the largest room. For the days ahead, I created a guest room. For my friends. Although I was making ready only just for one. Quite a chance to take. The same chance I would take at night heading for the square. Not knowing what to expect. That time of my life when encounters were abrupt, abrasive.