A Parisian family, the Villeneuves
I didn’t live in Paris yet. But Fernand, my uncle, ran a shop in the Porte de Saint-Ouen Flea Market. It was not a boutique, more like a stand in an open market. La Ceinture, the immediate outskirts of Paris had become trendy for up-and-coming Parisians, who would venture out of their elegant neighborhoods on Sunday morning to bum around a sea of stalls peopled by all walks of life and shades of characters. Fernand employed me on weekends to cut and sell la mousse, expanded polystyrene, to the measurements of our customers.
For a while, on Saturdays, I’d slept at his house in the northern suburbs. Fernand was a bachelor in his late thirties, reeling from one heartache to the next because of young women and sometimes men who took advantage of him. He did very little in terms of work, preferring to chat with the pretty people who passed on the boulevard, and there were many interesting creatures decked out minimally in summer. We’d arrive at 9:30 am and already at 11:15 Fernand would undo the black satchel overflowing with banknotes and put it around my waist. Banknotes, checks, and coins. Fernand was going for an aperitif and would eat at the brasserie on the corner while letting me run the shop until he’d be back at 3 in the afternoon.
He was jovial, fun to be around, hardly a few years older than me. But I didn’t think highly of him as a man, and I needed male models, male figures, men in any way successful whom I could learn from, yes, I needed that consciously. They’d gone missing around me. Never been around. However, as a businessman, I have to admit that Fernand watched over his interests when eating with other owners of “boutiques” in Les Puces, important men, some controlling entire streets. Neighborhood politeness is essential, I now realize, when you manage to pay little tax while selling large quantities.
From the United States where he had gone on vacation, Fernand had brought back one idea, la mousse. The product was not yet commonplace in France and, having few charges, he could cut prices, people jostled on the sidewalk, they formed a line to the Périphérique to buy our armchairs, poufs, mattresses of all sizes, thicknesses, firmness. We’d turn away customers when it was getting late, our mousse was gone, or because we were tired. I tired almost as quickly as my uncle.
Guillaume Villeneuve, his wife and the two young people accompanying them wanted to cover the floor of their vast double living room with the thickest and firmest mousse available. I put layer on top of layer and started to cut. As the five of us stood around the synthetic expanse, there was instantaneous complicity between us. I can’t judge my own physical appearance, though I must have been pleasant to look at in my twentieth year—not dressed like a nerd or the provincial that I was but wearing cool sandals, fashionable jeans, long hair. Moreover, I must have been interesting to listen to because of my readings… I was curious about all kinds of relationships, open to far-fetched ideas and new social experiments (we were in the 1970s, still full of optimism). Trust me to cram a conversation with dazzling references.
The Villeneuves and their retinue loved la haute culture. While thinking they were on the side of common folks, standing with “the workers” and defending poor French people, it was easy to detect that the Villeneuves were snobs. As I bent over a fine electric blade that ran effortlessly over the mousse, clients were allowed to sink their fists, cross their arms and rest their heads on the mattress. That made for a friendly talk. Given my conversation, they were surprised that I was not studying at a renowned university. I was, I answered, but in my own way. No credits, no exams for me. Pure intellectual studies. The man and the woman, who were in their thirties, both attractive and intelligent-looking, found it great that a solo student like me financed his studies by cutting mousse at Les Puces on Sunday.
I didn’t mention that on weekdays I retreated to my mother’s, deep in the provinces.
As I was not against showing off a little, I made it clear that I was not only the cutter and salesperson but also the boss’s nephew. The two young people accompanying the couple asked to walk on the mousse after taking their shoes off. The stall was deep and there was a corner where we piled up layers of mattresses horizontally instead of vertically, allowing one of us to lie down and take a siesta between sales. We were in the middle of summer; it was hot noon, Fernand wouldn’t be back anytime soon, and at the moment there weren’t many people promenading on the pavement. I put the “temporarily closed” sign on a chair and invited my group to the back. We began to hop barefoot or in socks, listening to Jimmy Hendrix blaring out of a cassette player. We sank and bounced on the soft, yet stubborn, dense, elastic material. The two young people, Martine and Hervé, gesticulated as if they were in a wild party. I don’t know who took out a pipe and passed around the hashish, but it was a normal thing to do in Les Puces. Virtually no supervision, and no authority in charge back then.
There was a way to close the entrance to the cube with another mattress. I found myself among these strangers in a kind of closed room, on a bare bed, bouncing like a child between four movable walls, our faces lit by the whitish light emanating from the mousse. It didn’t last long. Guillaume and Anne-Marie congratulated me on my kindness and hospitality and asked me to finish the cut.
They could have ordered delivery, but their car was badly parked at Porte de Clignancourt. The Villeneuves decided to go get it, then drive back to Porte Saint-Ouen, and take the mattresses away. It took the four of them the rest of the afternoon. Their car came in step with the slow-moving crowd occupying the pavement just as my uncle came back. We tied five layers of mousse on the roof and stuffed the trunk and the seats with it. Blocks of mousse stuck out of the windows. The four sank into it and managed to leave in slow motion. Everyone was laughing out loud. My uncle not being stupid, only heavy-handed, could see that these Villeneuves were a strange family. He also realized that everyone was laughing too hard, including me. But he liked me, Fernand, we were more pals than family, I didn’t tell anyone about the shortcomings of his private life and his laziness. The Villeneuves were good customers. Without thinking he was being rude, Fernand rolled his eyes, his hairy hands caressed the mousse he was selling them. Looking in turn at Guillaume and his girlfriend Martine, who was my age and very cute, then Anne-Marie and her young blue-eyed and blond boyfriend Hervé, who was from a very good family, you could tell, Fernand blinked and said he understood their haste to take his mattresses, their eagerness to try them…
We laughed even harder. I was to discover that, his thesis still unfinished, Guillaume Villeneuve practiced medicine on a freelance basis and in the northern suburbs. Like me, he had played the piano as a child then given up, and like me, he loved classical and black American music, jazz, tango argentino, world music. His (future) specialty was psychiatry, and soon enough, before the Saturday evening party at their home, we would have long discussions on Freud and the theories of Jacques Lacan, all the rage among Parisian intellectuals at the moment. The big advantage with Lacan was that, since no one understood his ideas, even less the professionals, he allowed the ones who wanted to sound more intelligent than the rest to say the most paradoxical, contrived, and sibylline things about life, death, man, woman, sex, desire…
Guillaume was a man of average height (my height), with chestnut hair, pleasant features, and a pair of keen eyes behind his thin frameless glasses. There was this innate nonchalance about him, this assurance—even though his situation didn’t seem that secure to me. His lightness of spirit, and his politeness of manners came from a good education. The second Saturday evening in their home, I learned that Guillaume was the scion of a great family of doctors and that his father, George Villeneuve, was an internationally known biology researcher. In the past, there had been a little “de” in front of Villeneuve. But that had seemed too old France to the more recent ancestors, who were modern people, politically committed, Dreyfusards—résistants during WWII, communists until the last atrocities in Russia, Yugoslavia, or China; then only sympathizers. The Villeneuves had put more and more water in their wine until Guillaume Villeneuve tried to swim upstream and purify the situation by joining the Fourth International.
I have never seen him militate, get active, or defend a Trotskyist or other cause outside his apartment, but Guillaume claimed that he belonged with his wife to a radical group. I was trying to figure out without questioning him too sarcastically the splits that had occurred since the original Workers’ International. When did the Trotskyists begin to split among themselves? Probably as soon as Trotsky split from Stalin, who had gotten rid of all the Bolsheviks before that, who had done the same to the Mensheviks, who…
Don’t ask me how the couple managed to occupy an apartment in the 5th Arrondissement—garage in the inner courtyard for Guillaume’s car and his motorbike, elevators, concierge, balcony, double living room, old wooden floors, high ceilings, stuccos, moldings, rosettes, chambre de bonne (maid’s room) under the roof of the building... all this rue Monge, a hundred meters from the most picturesque rue de la Contrescarpe. Anne-Marie was a substitute primary school teacher and Guillaume was a temp psychiatrist finishing his thesis.
Anyway, Anne-Marie was a beautiful French woman with short hair, slim and shapely thanks to a careful diet and a nervous temperament. She came from a less upscale milieu than his, less exposed to “culture.” Anne-Marie allowed herself vulgar gestures that surprised me at first and then interested me because they didn’t clash with her kind of beauty, the angular side of her face, the mischievous darkness of her eyes, or the restless halo of her jet-black hair. She always seemed to wear a derogatory and self-critical smirk on her face. A smile that turned into a grimace when, at the height of an evening, Anne-Marie made fun of her husband for not having finished his medicine at an age when his father, his grandfather, and all the Villeneuve uncles were already heads of clinics.
They had a five-year-old girl whom I only saw once, sitting with her mother on the big bed. Fortunately, she was entrusted to a grandmother living somewhere in Paris when I was invited. She was precious that little girl; when she turned to me laughing her face radiated Villeneuve intelligence. Her childish mirth carried a dash of her mother’s malice. That baby had lustrous black hair like a grown woman. It shocked me when I learned that this product of their marriage was in difficulty, that the little girl was deaf.
Like all people of modest origins, I was a victim of the prejudice that everything must come easier to those who have. She was playing, clapping her hands, she was happy, this little one, and looking at her the idea came to me that hearing does not procure an advantage when people around babble and keep silent on the essential. What did I know about the soundproof world of this little girl? Maybe she did not feel surrounded by silence. We were talking around her, and she was listening to her mom with a tense face, her eyebrows furrowed in thought. Even though she couldn’t hear, she read lips and deciphered vibrations.
We didn’t speak about it during our Freudian incursions (I didn’t dare), but Guillaume must have wondered deaf to what? What is it that this baby Villeneuve didn’t want to hear? What could Guillaume do about it? Why expect a soon-to-be psychiatrist to be in a better position than others to spare his child?
This condition of their little girl became more evidence of the difficulties accumulating between Anne-Marie and Guillaume. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to say “Les Villeneuves” or to think of them as a regular family. They were a new kind of family. There was the unusual core of four and then the constellation of people you met in their apartment. First of all, you were not introduced when entering their double living room strewn with large and thick mousse mattresses wrapped in fabrics of various colors and covered by comfortable cushions. After passing through a bourgeois lobby—armchairs in crimson velvet, mirrors, candelabra hanging from the ceiling—I’d open the glass door to find myself in the middle of a thick cloud of smoke, among people seated on the mat and others lying on the mousse not so much in pairs, more in clusters. The acrid smoke was going to my head; what with the windows covered in Indian draperies and the moving lights casting psychedelic reflections on the walls, it’d take me a minute to orient myself, then distinguish Guillaume among his friends in his corner and Anne-Marie with hers in hers. As long as they didn’t give me a clear “Hi! Mon vieux, make yourself at home, huh?” better wait until they were done with what they were doing.
I’d sit cross-legged on the mattress. On the carpet operated the dealer, a smiling, funny, and well-informed young Arab who came from the northern suburbs with his “pebble” big as a fist, his concentrated oils, “candies” and “biscuits.” While continuously rolling joints worthy of Bob Marley, his eyes full of merriment, he’d tell you about concerts that had unhinged the Parisian crowd during the week, and the “orgies” to which he had been invited... He was touring the 5th Arr, a good neighborhood for his business, full of generous and nice customers, he said laughing. We didn’t talk about money at the Villeneuves’, so I don't know how much they paid for his services. What is certain is that he remained seated on the carpet, this Arab, did not lie down with us and left once his provisions had been consumed to the last crumb.
Guillaume’s colleagues, Anne-Marie’s friends came, sat for a while, tasted, and left. Handsome young men dressed as casually as me, but relaxed because they belonged, locals, childhood friends, old acquaintances of Guillaume since his passage through the Lycée Henri IV, then the School of Medicine rue Racine. I tried not to show my desire to be like them. Hard not to envy the ease of mind, the comfort that must come with being born in one of the stately Parisian buildings around and knowing that your family has lived here for generations.
Among Guillaume’s old friends, there were “militants,” not all of them from the Fourth International, Maoists or preferring Bakunin, the Che, or even the young Marx—most of them in the process of establishing themselves in a good career (psychiatric nurses, doctors, architects, lawyers for the homeless, the undocumented, etc.), everyone in casual bordering on rebellious attire: khakis, proletarian overalls dotted with call-to-arms badges, Bolshevik casquettes bought on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, hippy bracelets from the Latin Quarter. Anarchists from excellent families, well-mannered, words of taste on the lips.
I was so dumb I wanted to tell them something concerning them, their political stance. The little I did say sounded odd at best, depressing and disturbing, and it wouldn’t have crossed their minds to appreciate my contribution. An example? “Look,” I said to a brunette quietly seated in lotus next to me, “look at the bankruptcy, the misdirection of ‘proletarian’ revolutions all over the world and for the last two centuries. Can we explain this failure beyond the circumstances of each disaster? What would be the theory that would account for the disaster of any proletarian revolution? Who will explain to us the patent failure of any revolutionary project?” She looked at me to see if I was for real, then passed me the joint, hoping that it would occupy me enough to bring me down to more immediate considerations. It did. But then it also stirred me to gallop faster on my high horse, insisting on the urgency of a balance sheet, of an acknowledgment of the total historic fiasco, of a mea culpa and a “deep introspection” for all those who prided themselves on sharing the idea of a political Revolution, les gauchistes.
Again, she looked at me to see if I was serious and asked me which university I was attending. When I told her that I was not going to any university in particular and all of them, “Ah!” she said, looked at me for the weirdo that I was, hastened to take a “candy” from the jar the Arab was handing her and, politely, looked elsewhere for a conversation better suited to a joyful moment.
Another time I began by digressing on the behavior of the Bolsheviks who, in October 1917, had seized the Russian state apparatus, “it must be recognized same as gangsters attacking a bank to confiscate the State’sresources, starve the populations, rob the rich, massacre the Potemkin Anarchists, sailors, and officers, without forgetting to liquidate the Mensheviks, their allies of yesterday—and all this to only see themselves accused, judged, condemned and liquidated all without exception. Wait, I am wrong actually. One Bolshevik survived: Joseph Stalin, Lenin had died of illness and Trotsky escaped to the Americas by then…”
I was about to give another striking example, that of the failure of all the nineteenth-century revolutions in France—when I heard Anne-Marie’s laughter above my head and felt Guillaume’s hand drop on my shoulder. “Relax, mate! Stop ! Are you okay?” Anne-Marie sighed, “You’re not at the Sorbonne here!” “So he’s really crazy!” added Guillaume, “I’ll give him a tranquilizer. Too bad there’s no opium… You need to relax, buddy! It’s Saturday night!” Anne-Marie was taking me by the hand. I lay down and pulled once more on the joint...
But I didn’t lie down among them, I faced them. Anne-Marie and Hervé, Guillaume and Martine were making fun of me kindly. I couldn’t help but stare at Martine lying down, her perfect legs, her skirt lifted by the mousse, and letting the fleshy curves appear, the lace of her panties. And she could see that I was looking. Incidentally, a good ten years younger than Guillaume—vivacious, intelligent. Very informed.
Martine leaned towards me to ask me: “And how many were they in the first Supreme Soviet? 12 like the apostles, 13 with Stalin? There is confusion, it’s not clear, comrade, you’ll have to dig further…” Hervé, without looking at me: “And on the Potemkin, your Anarchist sailors with their Anarchist officers, what did they look like? Just sailors and officers—or Anarchists? The pompoms, the stripes, did they wear all that or did away with decorations inherited from a bygone era? We don’t have a clear picture, comrade. Could you specify?”
Then Guillaume, speaking with compunction: “One might be surprised that you, of all people, left unsaid how, out of all the Bolsheviks at the time of their capturing power, only one was not a Jew, Stalin—”
He knew his stuff, Guillaume. I took in the irony.
Martine had wanted to do medicine but as her family could not support her, she had to retreat to medical secretary at the hospital where Guillaume gave freelance work during the week. I envied him terribly because, in addition to her age, she was from my social background and to my taste. But Martine was under the spell of her “doctor Guillaume.” For her, it was a chance, a leap forward in society to be received at the Villeneuves. She loved their foursome, which allowed everyone to have fun without excessive guilt, and she cast an amused eye on me. My parasitical presence in no way changed their arrangement. Guillaume didn’t seem to have fallen in love with me; she had nothing to fear. One time, Martine told me that she understood what in me had attracted Guillaume: I was a sort of learned dog, a curious object, the mismatched tomes of a walking encyclopedia.
I took it in.
As for Hervé Étiemble—a name that sounded so “old France” to my ears, a perfect name—he was studying History at Jussieu. He did not give me the impression of ever opening a book. Hervé didn’t have to because he lived, according to Anne-Marie, in a whirlwind of activities, each one more pleasant than the other. Hervé was part of the organizing committee of the student strikes at Jussieu, strikes which went on year-round, except, of course, during vacations. On Sunday, he helped his older sister and their mother in a soup kitchen off Place de la Bastille. His father, a businessman sharing advanced ideas, had no problem with their apartment on Boulevard Haussmann serving as a meeting place for comrades of any persuasion, including psychoanalysts who, like the Lacanians, were kicked out of Freudian institutes and lacked premises.
At twenty-three, Hervé Étiemble was almost famous. He edited the people page of the newspaper Le Quartier Latin. This drove the women crazy, especially Anne-Marie, who had a hard time keeping him to herself. He was handsome, Hervé. It was striking for anyone who like me knows how to look at men. I don’t desire men like I do women but I can appreciate masculine presence and elegance. Hervé was of a French kind of masculine beauty all in the proportions, discreet. Everything about him was regular: the waist, the shoulders, the chin, the cheekbones, the nose, even the ears… Grey-blue eyes like Alain Delon, long childish eyelashes, well-defined eyebrows, thick and wavy blond hair. Nothing incisive, imposing, or rough in his movements; nothing effeminate either. Hervé spoke softly, calmly, and only when asked questions and to joke.
On the mousse late in the night, some forgot their manners. Even while he was in Anne-Marie’s arms, some would take advantage of Free Jazz music or a fierce tango from the Cuarteto Cedrón to roll to his side, embrace him, kiss him on the neck, on the forehead. Straddling groups, one woman would stagger, fall on him, pour out the contents of her glass, and get down on all fours to clean him. She’d apologize profusely afterward, blush and accuse “that damn hashish” but the damage was done in the eyes of Anne-Marie, who did not let go of Hervé under any pretext. She’d accompany him to the toilet, her back to the door until he came out.
From his corner of the mousse, Guillaume enjoyed the mayhem. He found it funny, he liked to see Anne-Marie suffer, and as for her, she never missed an opportunity to diminish him in our eyes. When next to each other, they showed no jealousy or disagreement. She didn’t look at him, didn’t converse, as if he didn’t exist. It didn’t matter what he did with Martine (on the mousse or elsewhere). What he said, when we happened to talk—Sunday morning, the five of us at breakfast around the kitchen table—she didn’t hear. It passed through her. And there came a time when you realized that for all their politeness, kindness, intelligence, and aptness, not only did the Villeneuves not speak to each other but they had never spoken to each other. I wondered whether they had not had a child to fill that silence, and it didn’t work or worked too well.
Sitting next to her husband, Anne-Marie admired Hervé speechless, then flattered me and prized my very few achievements. My superficial knowledge in areas where I had no qualifications, she called “sharp,” brilliant, and all the more amazing in a kid “educated with the cows!” She laughed at her own snobbism. On the contrary, the slightest mistake on Guillaume’s part—if he forgot to give everyone a fork; if he’d scrambled the eggs unevenly—was a pretext for strong reproaches. She disparaged him exaggeratedly, saying that he “never knew how to even fuck anything correctly.” He’d been at Henri IV, selected at the School of Medicine rue Racine from among the nation’s elite. One could wonder how he’d gotten in if one did not know that he had been helped by tutors since early childhood. Good for nothing, Guillaume, neither as a doctor, nor as a cook, nor as… husband was implied and father unpronounceable.
This was all said sarcastically, not to be taken literally. But it was heavy and my heart hurt for Guillaume. I wondered how he resisted jumping on her and shutting her up. Since women had claimed a voice they were supposed to never have had, it was fashionable to allow them everything. I said to myself: his good education is playing tricks on him. He’s too refined to raise his voice, Mr. Guillaume de Villeneuve. I’d look at Hervé and Martine, who were silent while waiting for it to pass. It was not the first time they had heard Anne-Marie lose her mind in reproaches.
It was supposed to be a lot of fun, these nights in the rue Monge; but I wasn’t always having fun. Sometimes I didn’t have fun at all. Hashish made me even more obsessive, isolated, and self-absorbed than usual. Add alcohol in quantity, and I was frankly anxious.
I had to get up when saliva filled my mouth. I’d turn pale, sweating… The last thing I wanted was to throw up on their mousse! Taking advantage of the fact that my hosts had other fish to fry, I’d quickly leave, tumble down the stairs, and walk alone in the night on the sidewalk of rue Monge, then circle the block several times, wondering when the anguish would let go of me. I counted backward from 100, then forward. I moved without moving under the trees of the square at the foot of rue de la Contrescarpe. The benches were black and wet, the trees disheveled in the yellowish light of the street lamps. It was too late to take the subway. The risk of vomiting having passed, I’d go back up to the Villeneuves’, sneaking through the crowd to curl up in a corner of mousse and sleep in a ball like a dog.
Why did I continue to spend Saturday nights at the Villeneuves’? Maybe it was time to go back to my uncle’s? I thought no one had seen me leave and come back. That these anxious moments did not concern my hosts, too occupied with their pleasures to think about me. I underestimated Guillaume’s gift for observation, his medical talents. And I disregarded his affection for me.
He made a point of talking to me alone. As though it were a theoretical argument, he first told me about a category of patients common at the hospital. “These are young men who think they are a little more than everyone else. Always men, very rarely women, it’s funny. Women have other issues… let’s stay with these young men. For example, they believe that they are more beautiful than others without anyone noticing. Or more intelligent, more gifted. It can be playing a musical instrument, understanding the causes of the next economic crisis that no one has yet grasped, or specializing in Hegelian dialectics like no apprentice philosopher before. Writing novels that no one has ever written, that they haven’t written yet but will write one day.” Guillaume could be sharp and caustic. “Now, the fact that no one realizes their exceptional qualities is what sets up the delirium. They will begin to observe others without their knowledge, including the people closest to them, colleagues, friends, also their mother, father, wife, children... and they will conclude that these people are hiding their game, doing their best to admire them in secret… You see the point?”
“Yes.”
“But that can go very far. It isolates the patient. It leads our man to surround himself with a thick network of interpretations concerning the behavior of others. He constructs arguments and counter-arguments, endless rationalizations that he will hide, living in the middle of this web like a spider in an obscure corner of the ceiling. Can you imagine?”
”Yes, I can. “
“And all of this is release a lot of anguish.”
Here we are. It was me the anxious young man he was talking about. And I had to admit that he was right: I had long fallen prey to a sweet delusion of grandeur. Didn’t I think that I was smarter than the members of my family at five and therefore was born from much more accomplished if not famous and heroic parents? More beautiful than my classmates when twelve? Better dressed than the overgrown and overdressed kids with whom I went out skimming the periphery at fifteen? Though not matriculated, more able to grasp the subtleties in Proust than my friends officially enrolled in the Faculté des Lettres? Hadn’t I thought in Guillaume’s presence that he didn’t understand the Name of the Father or the Function of the Phallus according to Jacques Lacan and that he was lucky to cut his teeth on Freud with someone like me?
This aside from Guillaume made me discover something else. Maybe he had trouble finishing his thesis because of a way of life that was too easygoing; maybe he spoke to me like a textbook in psychiatry. But he understood, behind the cases under study, the individual in the grip of these “intellectual delusions,” the young man lost and suffering in his head. I had been the victim of his wife’s gossip—she’d pushed him down while elevating me.
Whereupon Guillaume offered me a practical solution to all of my problems, both psychological and financial. A solution that would have presented a way out for the first time in my life. It was clear that I was looking to settle in Paris without, if possible, depending on anyone. As though the idea came to him suddenly, Guillaume asked me if I had thought of taking advantage of the psychiatric care facilities crisscrossing the Parisian region. “You would only have to take the RER and half an hour later you’re on the Boul’mich... and it’s free since financed, you’re fed and housed at the expense of the French State. The best teams of cool and serious people as you like them, that, I guarantee you, you could spend your time reading Deleuze, Foucault, Lacan, whatever you want… and talk about them at meetings. They’re all keen on philosophy, the sick as much as the doctors...”
There, he bit his lip, regretting to have used the words “sick” and “doctors.” He made up for it by marking a difference between “closed services” with compulsory treatment and “open services,” which are of a short duration and with optional treatment. “You sign the roadmap, you decide. After a week you can say enough is enough. And regarding medication, it’s the same, you choose knowingly, we are no longer in Charcot’s time. They are not going to chain you to the walls of the building and electroshock you. The doors are open whether you want to enter or to exit. And it’s nice, flowery parks, forests, you can read all day long in your room, and we eat well. Here, if you want, I’ll show you a leaflet.”
The leaflet he had put aside did not mention the word “Psychiatry” or “Hospital.” Located inside a loop of the Seine River, it had an evocative and poetic name: A La Source Vive. It read: “The geographical location of the site, as well as its layout (three ultra-modern pavilions in a very beautiful park), allow optimal care for patients requiring a certain distance from their ordinary environment. It is the perfect place to regain physical wellness and psychic stability with the discreet help of the best well-being professionals.”
I spent the week rereading this description and daydreaming in my room back in the provinces. Instead of a rickety window overlooking the backs of low-rent housing buildings, I’d have a panoramic window sliding over gravel paths and gardens groomed like in Versailles, only smaller and less ostentatious. A lawn where I could relax after the stabilization meetings and flowerbeds to help me see better in myself. And I won’t even have to ever go back and ask my maman for pocket money. My bed would be made every day, clothes washed, the collective table serving me copiously without my having to thank anyone since it was the French State that paid. Deep confessions with attentive specialists, personal issues never addressed before now liberating me because in the open. But mostly, days of solitude nourished by the reading of old masters in a natural landscape à la Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
I dreamed about this early retirement, and yet, the following Saturday I did not return to the Villeneuves’. I didn't go back to the Villeneuves’ for three weeks. I can’t explain why, it was a decision that consisted of taking no decision. Something blocked, bothered me at the prospect of being assisted and supervised day and night by cool, relaxed, and oversmart employees of the State. Once assisted, it’s hard to come out of it, I feared. From one dependence to another, that’s no liberation.
To be branded crazy in whatever sophisticated language they might use didn’t bother me. I didn’t want institutional supervision.
I was being paranoid, precisely. But I’d also read in Freud that the paranoid is not altogether and not always wrong. He may have reasons to fear…
So I waited. And when I went back—why did I make the mistake of ever going back to the Villeneuves’?—unpleasant things happened, some of them regrettable.
I expected to have to give a minimum of an explanation for my disappearance. But the atmosphere was no longer about explanations. Guillaume received me not only without greeting me but without paying the least attention to me. He half-opened the door and turned aside to hide his annoyance. He was alone with Martine and I arrived too early, an hour before Anne-Marie, Hervé, the dealer, and the regulars. They went to the bedroom, and since I was there prowling according to my habits, they did it under a blanket. What envy prompted me to enter and stay in the room? They were hidden, but they could see me through the cover. I heard Martine giggle, hesitant; Guillaume tickled her and excited her. They were laughing. No doubt they were laughing at me.
I stayed there, standing next to them for I don’t know how long. What a clumsy! I feel ashamed to this day for this. Long are the seconds when you’re like them about to cum and some jerk holds you back. And then, when they got dressed while I finally snuck out of the room—after Martine went to the bathroom—I again found a way to remark to Guillaume that they could have been more discreet.
“I’m not your father,” Guillaume replied. “If you’re dumb enough to stand there, what do you want me to do?”
I still feel the sting.
Anyone in my place would have left without asking for more. But I could no longer return to my uncle without disturbing him as he had fallen in love with a young woman in need who now lived with him. At the time I saw myself taking the metro, hours of train, going back to my mother. So, out of cowardice and denial, thinking, let’s pretend nothing happened and our friendship will resume, I stayed at the Villeneuves’. No one found fault with it or paid much attention to me. Martine left and Hervé was not there. The atmosphere between Guillaume and Anne-Marie was tense. And when Anne-Marie approached me smiling her most enticing smile, I perceived in him a mixture of unpleasant feelings, contempt, cold hatred towards me. The three of us drank non-stop, and Anne-Marie, who usually fell asleep as soon as she smoked, did not rest until she’d finished the joints that circulated on the mousse with blind determination.
I don’t remember how we ended up in their bed. At dawn on that Sunday, the three of us woke up in our underpants. Immediately Anne-Marie came closer, took my sex in her hands, and started rubbing it and salivating between her fists. Then she straddled me. I was inside her without having had the time to touch her, to look at her, to want her... I need forms, perspective, angles to desire, and warmth to sustain this desire once aroused… and Guillaume was right next to us who wasn’t sleeping. I tried hard to answer her urge, to take her breasts, her waist in my hands. But it was difficult without desiring them first. And she was my friend's wife.
As I’ve said, she was pleasant to look at while the acidity of her spirit and the pout on her lips made her sexy; but I respected her body. I mean, she was one of the untouchables, not because she was owned. Marriage didn’t mean much in my ideology, even less in their case. I wanted to respect my friendship with Guillaume.
Concretely speaking, it was difficult for me to stay in her, impossible to find pleasure. She then began to growl, swore without embarrassment, still tried to force things, then withdrew abruptly.
As soon as she headed for the toilet and slammed the door in annoyance, I rolled over on my stomach and pretended to sleep as if nothing had happened. It was without counting on Guillaume who, continuing an interrupted conversation between them, emitted between his teeth: “It’s not with me you’d have similar whims!” Whereupon, from the bathroom, she bluntly told him to fuck off.
Later, I felt Guillaume against my skin, then he climbed on me. He patted me and caressed me to give himself more potency. Soon, I only felt the pain, and his breath, his loud respiration in my ears. I twisted and resisted, but not really. Because the more he insisted and buried himself in me, the more I let him do it. I was without strength, abandoned on a rocky shore, shipwrecked on the edge of a promontory. As it lasted. I went limp, a rag, a mollusk at the bottom of a swamp, and after a while, Guillaume realized it. With a whimper of frustration and a disgusted grunt that I interpreted as saying, if you can’t even fuck, what are you good for then? he rolled over to the other end of the bed and didn’t open his lips again.